The Erratic

The instructors tell them to masturbate before their drills. Focus is crucial, hard-ons a distraction. They do it together, facing away from each other, looking at the porn they’re given. Sleek teenage girls spreading themselves. Older women with thick hips and heavy breasts looking wide-eyed over their shoulders as though surprised while changing. The fat boy, sitting hatefully naked on his bunk, opens his printout like the others, but he doesn’t look at it. The women inside make him angry. They flood his body with obscure poisons that cloud his thoughts and deaden his senses, and if he comes to them he’ll cry, and the other boys will make him pay for it. So he looks at the boy in the next bunk, who is thin and beautiful with high, sharp cheekbones and thick red hair, and he makes himself come with the revolted detachment of a laborer hauling rotten garbage up a set of stairs. His thoughts drip from his shaking fingers. They follow his lifeline across the valley of his palm and cascade white and sticky into nothing.

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In the dormitory’s courtyard the fat boy, dressed now in his order’s coarse black robe, practices stacking coins. Discs of metal glint and spin in empty air. Blood slicks his upper lip and falls in thick, dark droplets from his chin and the tip of his nose onto the paving stones. His eyes are glazed. He is outside himself. The other boys ignore him. He wishes the beautiful boy would look at him. He hopes no one ever looks at him again. It’s a sin, he thinks. A smeary, washed-out thought absorbed not from a single source; a thought that has seeped into him, like groundwater. He sets another coin atop his shining tower with a clink of perfectly matched machining he thinks might please the instructor.

The older psion stands in silence a few yards behind him. He can sense the quiet, watchful presence, the ebb and flow of power enough to level cities caged in aging flesh. It seems silly, gods letting themselves age and die, but the first thing a psion is taught is that to tamper with a living body can lead only to calamity. It is a thought that sharpens the fat boy’s focus, that instills in him a cold, peculiar rage which burrows deep into the pit of his soft stomach. Blood pools on the stones as he sets another coin down on his tower, his mind’s hands strong and steady. He is master of the world; why should he not be master of his flesh? 

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He’s deployed for the first time on his fifteenth birthday. He doesn’t know. There are no records of his birth. He doesn’t remember the robed and death-masked psions who took him from his mother’s arms, the monks who dragged her still bleeding and half-awake out into the rain where a cutter waited, rotors washing the cracked pavement with their downdraft. He was taken to another craft, and then to one of the orbital elevators that rise like great black stalks into the void. A ship is waiting. It bears his screams of newborn heartbreak far away from the world of his birth. A small tragedy, this theft, but it echoes for a long, long time.

A ship. A slab gliding through silence. First the fat boy drinks nearly a gallon of nauseating blue tracer fluid. After this, his stomach churning, he floats in a Decanter tank for most of a day, toes and fingers wrinkling, respirator hissing as he watches the other boys bob in their own silent tubes of glass. Their robes swirl around them. They are not yet masked, and won’t be until they reach eighteen years of age and swear their oaths before the thousand emperors. Technicians inspect the Decanters. The subtle, dampened pressure of the ship’s inertia lessens as they near the planet. A senior psion counts down for them, lowering fingers.

The howling, terrifying freedom of discorporation. He feels weightless. Overjoyed and frightened. Then he is meat again, thrust back into himself, senses exploding from a molten pool of firing nerves, and despair breaks over him like a wave of gray sludge. It must be a side effect, he tells himself. The plateau where he finds himself is whipped by scouring winds. One by one the other boys materialize, knots of flesh and bone unfolding from thin air, stray fluids splattering the rocks. He thinks how beautiful they look inside, how delicate they are. He wishes they could show him that same tenderness in their infrequent, angry lovemaking.

They walk together to the cliff’s edge and step into nothingness.  

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The city is overrun. Not by one of the empire’s countless enemies, but by sedition. The fat boy and his classmates have been dispatched to mete out decimation on the colony. This is not a euphemism for “significant destruction”. One in ten will die before the psions leave this arid, windswept place. The emperors’ armies will come after, to make sure the lesson sticks.

The academy says to kill by severing the spinal cord. The fat boy does this. As he drifts down the city’s streets, toes just brushing the hard-packed earth, he picks from among those who flee him. They flop boneless into the dust like marionettes whose strings have been cut. He catches sight of himself in a window, face a pale moon against the black of his robes, belly swaying, sides androgynously piled with rolls, and breaks the glass in a convulsion of self-loathing. On the third day he is getting bored and the stimulants he chews to stay awake begin to lose their edge, so he starts killing each person differently. Catch them up in his mind’s fist and smash them flat against a wall. Burn their nervous system to its roots in a white-hot conflagration. Flick them away like insects, bodies broken, tumbling boneless through the smoke and flying cinders. It’s easy.

They try to blind him with smoke, to lure him into minefields, to disrupt his powers with sharp blatts of experimental infrasound. It has all been tried against his kind before. By the seventh day they have effectively disarmed the planet. The Imperial Navy, safe from surface-to-air fire, appears in the sky at the edge of visibility. The fat boy, alone atop a broken tower, watches the ships glide into the upper atmosphere and wonders what life in this dead place will be like after he goes.

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He is seventeen when he faces his first Erratic on the battlefield on an over-developed core world caught in the throes of corporate war. An unschooled psion, born outside his order’s notice. She has, he knows at once, transgressed the single mandate of their kind. She has reshaped herself. He hates her in a way he does not fully understand, in a way that reduces his thoughts to fizzing static. He hates her so much that at first he cannot crush her, cannot bring himself to touch her with his mind. His soft face with its delicate pink mouth and double chin flushes the color of old brick. He tears the facades from nearby buildings. The pavement cracks. Rainwater sizzles into steam. 

The pitted ruin of her throat and cheeks, her jaw crushed narrow, teeth crowded in a twisted mouth. Her hairline a mass of tiny scars. She claws the air behind one shoulder and drags a crackling, fulminating spear of bleach-white fire out of nothing. Three long, loping steps toward him. She hurls it like a javelin. He wishes he could let it pierce him, let it rip through his body and burn everything out of him in one swift, caustic wildfire. Instead he deflects it with a thought and doesn’t watch it gut a massive tenement tower a block away. He is shaking. His heart beats madly in his chest. 

She isn’t trained. She knows nothing. A few dirty tricks bound up in the convulsing, mislaid cables of her musculature. He despises her child’s idea of what a woman’s body looks like, her fantasy of reinvention. He tears her arms off and incinerates them. Crushes her hips into a fistful of oozing meat and broken bone. Rips her teeth out one by one and breaks her mandible at its pretty little point, smashing it flat against the choking, drooling ruin of her face. Yank her skin off tear her hair out prise her shoulder blades apart and make her be what she is, not what she imitates. Except he cannot stand to look at it. He hates himself with a trembling black depth of misery he’s never known before. He wants to die.

He finds the thing between her legs. The soft, wet bivalve, lovingly sculpted.

He burns her so hot that he has to look away. Flesh collapses into raw blue light. A fissile point growing hotter as it shrinks. He can feel its heat between his legs.

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The next year passes in a blur. He grows fatter. His body swells and bulges. Overlaps itself. His diet is strictly monitored. He undergoes a surgery to make him vomit when he overeats, although he never does. They take his blood and stool and piss and jab him with a hundred obscure instruments. On a nameless border world he crushes a rebel tank and plucks the crew out of the burning wreck, then dips them one by one in the jellied fire of its ruptured fuel tank. Their screams make him feel strong, but only for a little while.

The other psions tease him less. There is no more lovemaking, angry or otherwise. The oblique femininity of his body has become unsettling to them. It is no longer plausibly deniable. Broad, flat breasts and flaring hips. He wants them more than ever, though he never speaks to them. They could destroy him with a touch. He dreams of being fucked, of cocks in his asshole and his mouth and in his deep, sweat-smelling navel. He dreams of things he tells himself fade with the light of day. There is a terrible emptiness inside him. He thinks of the Erratic. Of her crudely resculpted flesh. 

Not she, he tells himself, not for the first time, remembering the cut and rewired muscles of her dripping un-cunt. 

Four months later on an overcrowded agri-fungal world he brings a tenement hive crashing in upon itself. Afterwards he said it was an accident, that he only meant to punish the inhabitants of its topmost floors. He says this to himself so often that a month afterward he starts to believe it. Concrete and twisted metal opening beneath him like the mouth of some primordial leviathan. Parting like lips. That night he masturbates in bed and wishes he could push the fingers of his mind beneath his skin, that he could take hold of the secret, glistening things that lurk there and reshape them, pull them out, incinerate them and let the dead ash fall from his flesh. He shaves too hard every time. Afterward his skin glistens like raw chicken, pale and slick and shining.

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The death mask’s bronze rim cuts into his cheeks and the soft flesh of his throat. By the time the ceremony ends and the delegation of emperors, beautiful blond clone-brothers kissing the new psions on their armored brows, has departed, he has a splitting headache. One more ill-fitting skin. Afterward he stays behind while the others join a grand procession leading from the chapel’s doors to the faraway Abbey of the Golden Mystery where he and his brothers will now take their place. The idea of waving at a cheering crowd from atop a black-draped float makes him feel terror in a way no warzone ever has. 

And besides, he has made a decision. The consequences of this choice begin where his mask digs hard into the suet of his face. Skin ripples. Bones tightening. He scoops deposits of thick, jellied fat out through his pores. His robe parts, cut up the front in a single perfect stroke. Its heavy, ornate belt falls to the floor. His body is vomiting. He knows he could be killed for this, his skull cracked open by his brothers and his brain impaled on a lance of white fire like the one he still wishes had killed him. Years ago.

He knows that it’s not thinness he is digging for inside his disintegrating body. This is not why he unpicks the muscles layered thin over his ribs. It is not why he succumbs to the compulsion to peel narrow slivers of yellow-white ivory from his jawbone. It is not why he flails and claws but cannot connect with the deeper, more arcane tissues of his body where his thoughts stretch and snap in flashes of bright chemical fire. A thought has weight, he tells himself as he pulls his skin tighter around his shrinking frame, as he reshapes his silhouette with vicious desperation, the last rags of his denial falling away from the truth of his desire. I could hold one in my hand. 

He reaches between his legs with the inexorable hand of his power. Blood pours from his nostrils. It hurts. It hurts more than he could have imagined. He is, he realizes dimly, lying on the floor in a puddle of his own dark filth, his legs thrashing and his body bent double by a convulsion he has triggered somehow. The tip of his tongue is gone. His teeth are locked together. He pushes in, past the skin, tracing muscles back through his groin and around the fretwork of his pelvis. And when he has it, he tightens his grip and pulls it from himself like the roots of a stubborn weed. There is blood, then, and noise outside the chapel doors. He reaches up with trembling fingers to claw at his mask, now wrong in a different way, and fling it clattering over the stones. 

He knows, even as he tries with faltering will to crush and cut and beat himself into a shape that eludes him continually, that flits laughing away from his cold fingers and imploring mouth, even as the soft rush of his brothers running toward him in their slippered feet echoes in his bleeding ears, that it is over. He knows that soon he’ll slip away and the torn paper of his body will soak through and fall to pieces. He looks at the shadows gathering around him. He feels the heat of the killing lance as one of them drags it haft-first into being, yanking on thin air. He pushes himself up onto his hands and knees, clotted strings of blood and mucous hanging from his scraped-raw nostrils. His innards are liquid fire. His skin hangs loose. He slits it up his back, pulls it taut, and cauterizes, snipping off the excess. 

His executioners come forward. He feels their will take shape around the crown of his skull, nails of force positioned at his temples and behind his ears. The lance’s point fizzes before him. He reaches between his legs, probing with two fingers at the ragged hole, at the nothing he has made. He slips them inside. Raw nerves sing. Flesh twitches. His jaw unsticks, bruises blossoming over his skin like dying stars. He licks his lips with what remains of his tongue and thinks, in the moment before his skull opens like a crocus bursting from the snow and the lance’s white blade slides without resistance through his brain, of a name.