A Canvas for Their Brand

2017/12/12

It was dark.

There was no moon in the sky, no stars. He could vaguely make out the shape of buildings around him, had the sense that he was in the middle of a street in a middle of the city. None of the street lights were on, none of the windows were lit. The road was big and empty and quiet, not a single car buzzing through it. He knew the streets, he realised. He had gone through it a hundred times in his life, and yet nothing was familiar. Not in the dark.

And then, in a corner, near an alley he’d never minded, he saw a spark.

Half a head peeked out of the dark, blue light humming from the gaps in its exoskeleton, a shining corporate logo emblazoned on its half a forehead. It tilted forward, the half-head, and he saw the rotting mess that was its other half, eyes bulging out of the socket that couldn’t contain it, pieces of its nerves falling out of its skin. It fell on its feet, but still it lurched forward, carried by its hand that was half-prosthetic, half a polished metal arm alighted by a colourful logo, while its other half a was rotten mess, flesh torn out with each movement.

Its metal leg righted itself, and it stood again, and it fell again as its other foot broke, bones sticking out of the rotting skin. But it moved forward regardless. It lifted its head and stared at him, his single organic eye going in all direction while his other eye, the good one, the horrible one, shone its blue prosthetic light on him. He knew it was looking at him, accusing him, blaming him for its half-existence.

And then, from all direction in the dark, from alleys and opened doors and windows, from manholes in the streets and the sky itself, other half-heads came alight, and their half-hands reached out to him, the putrid flesh and carved metal both.

A hand, somebody’s hand, touched him, and when he turned around to ward it off, he saw his mother’s face staring back at him.

The world shook around him, and Jared woke up.

He was sweating, despite the air conditioner. The young man who called himself Jared shook his head, straightened himself in his seat, tried to keep his mind together as afterimages from his dream came and went in his head. In front of him the wheel was steady, and he could tell from his surrounding that the car’s automated system had taken him far.

“What time is it, Selene? And where are we?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and taking hold of the wheel.

“It is nine-twenty AM.” the car answered. “We are in the edge of the Dieng Plateau.”

Dieng, the name rang through memories in his head. “So we’re close?”

“You’ll arrive at your destination, Home, in twenty minutes.”

Home. The name felt like a punch to his gut. He hadn’t been there in years. He should have renamed that location a long time ago.

The scenery outside was moving more slowly that the speed he was used to in the city, no doubt because the road hadn’t followed the same standards. The car was riding at the edge of the cliff, the left side opening to a view of the entire village. Small rustic houses, stone temples, and rice fields spread out underneath him, a far cry from the neatly arranged blocks of his city.

The sight did not inspire as much nostalgia as he had expected. If anything, it all looked greatly inefficient. Dieng, he remembered reading before he took the trip, was one of the few places that refused help after the Seven Days War. If they accepted, the big corporations would have upgraded their rudimentary agriculture.

Along with everything else, he mused unhappily.

But even the proud village couldn’t escape the blue dome over all their heads. Above the other edge of the plateau, he could see the familiar, corporate logo hologrammed in the sky. It shone brightly for a moment, before changing place with a tagline, Empowering You. A second afterward that too was replaced by another logo.

Jared felt a shudder down his spine. He’d seen those logos a million times, in the legs and arms and prosthetic brains he’d installed on countless people. He probably had one somewhere on the metal leg that replaced the one he’d lost in the War. He couldn’t tell why seeing them was making him uncomfortable.

Mother. The logo was on his mother’s half a forehead, in his dream. He shivered, felt tears welling up in his eyes for reasons he couldn’t fathom. He hadn’t seen his mother in a long time. Would he be able to save her, if only he came earlier? Would she let him, even?

“Selene,” he called, trying to distract himself from those thoughts. “Any updates?”

“There are twenty new messages,” the car automated system replied. “Would you like to read them.”

“Sure,” he said, without thinking, and immediately regretted it

“Rian said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Madeline said, ‘Condolences, Jared.’, Nathan said, ‘I just heard from Rian. I’m so sorry man. I’ll treat you next time.’ Kuro said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. You can skip this week’s meeting.’ Ali said 'Inalillahi-”

“Alright, alright. Selene, just, stop. Be quiet.” Jared leaned back and tried to stop thinking of it, of his mother, of anything, but something nagged at his mind anyway. “Wait, Selene? What was it that Ali sent?”

“Ali said, ‘Inalillahi wa inalillahi rojiun, I heard about your mother. My condolences.’”

Inalillahi? Is that what we used to say? He’d forgotten all about the old customs. He’d stopped caring a long time ago, but looking down at the village of his birth, he felt overwhelmed. There were yellow flags about, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was for. Another custom he’d forgotten. He had a feeling it was important.

“Selene, what does a yellow flag means?” he asked.

“Yellow flag,” the car repeated, “On a ship it is an obsolete sign of disease. In ancient tradition it-”

“No, Selene. What does it mean if I’m seeing one here? In this village?”

There was a moment of pause. “In Indonesia, a yellow flag denotes that somebody has died, or that a funeral is being held, although this custom has lately fallen out of use.”

“Of course, a funeral.” Jared sighed. His mother’s face came up again in his head. “Selene, can you play me the entirety of my Anatomy textbook again?”

“‘my anatomy textbook’ file found. Starting reading, 'With advances in the field of prosthetic and robotics, the field of anatomy is now considered one of the more important aspects of the medical world…”

Jared let the words flood into his head for the rest of the trip.

There were too many people that he could fix.

When Jared climbed down from his car, he saw that he was the only one with all his body parts running. He saw more than a couple of people without an arm or a leg, he saw eyepatches and broken heads. Some appeared intact, but with an emptiness to their stomach. Some had charred skin. Few of them had metal strapped to their bone, as Jared had, as Jared was used to giving. The war had scarred the town and none of them bothered to fix it.

The others looked at him suspiciously as he walked into the crowd. A man wearing a black suit, fresh from the city, his body intact. No one could tell that his leg wasn’t made of flesh anymore. Jared shrugged, tried to shrug, and scanned the crowd for someone he recognised. Over there, as tall as he’d remembered, as strong-looking. Only his eyes were different. There was a black patch where his left eye used to be. So the war took an eye from him. That didn’t seem so bad.

“Jaya!” he called, and waved.

His brother didn’t smile when Jared approached, only nodded “Datang juga kamu. Apa kabar?”

The question took him by surprise. The words sounded familiar, but Jared had no idea what they meant. “Sorry?”

His brother snorted, then continued in fluent English, “You’ve forgotten how to speak? Does no one in the city speak our language anymore?”

“I… Well.” Jared looked up to the trees and the grass, at the people around him with their brown patterned clothes instead of the black mourning suit he had, speaking in hushed voice the language that he couldn’t fathom anymore. He felt the morning breeze on his cheeck, cool, clean, and utterly unfamiliar, as everything in this place. “Everybody speaks English in the city,” he said defensively. “And Father never taught us otherwise.”

Jaya snorted. “Maybe you won’t forget how to speak if you give us visits.” He turned to the small building where people were congregating and gestured at this brother to follow him. “Mother’s waiting.”

Half her face was broken.

Jared shivered.

It wasn’t as bad as in his dream. The skin was blackened and looked like boiled mortar, but it was clean. The smell was strange, but there were none of the rot he had imagined. Jared knew exactly what kind of surgery it would take to fix it, which brand of artificial skin would make her look like new again. Even the wrinkles on the half that wasn’t broken could be taken out. He could make her twenty again, as he remembered her last, if she had just let him.

It was the brain he was worried about. Those who had their head hurt by the war tended to have complications underneath the skull.

“How did she die?” Jared asked his brother.

Jaya shrugged. “We can’t figure it out. She just fell one day and-” For a second Jared thought he heard him withholding tears, but then his brother’s voice hardened again. “Anyway, I know you’re a doctor, but we can’t let you… examine her body, or whatever.”

Jared nodded understandingly. It was a interesting idea, but he realised he couldn’t do it. Not to his mother, not in front of her people, not like this.

“Iya? Oh, sebentar.” His brother tugged at his hand. “We gotta go. They’re going to… get her buried.”

They covered her nostrils with cotton balls, took off her clothes then covered her in a thin white sheet. After everything was ready, they hoisted her up and, followed by the crowd, carried her to the burial ground not far from there. Jared only watched from afar, not knowing what to do, too self-conscious to open his phone and had his questions answered. The burial custom was unfamiliar to him, and there was no one he could ask. His brother Jaya was right in the middle of the crowd, one of the people carrying his mother’s body.

Jared supposed he should had been one of them too, if he was at all a part of them. It made him feel guilty, somewhat.

Afterwards, after the prayers were spoken and the mourners had their say on the deceased, after they had put her body in and covered her with mounds of earth, after everyone had left and it was just him and his brother and their mother buried in the ground, Jared crouched down and slid his finger across the polished, temporary nameplate on her grave. The name, which no longer has any connection to his, stirred no emotion on him. He wasn’t sure if it was something he should be worried about.

“She’s only sixty,” he said, doing the math on the dates on the plate. “That’s young. That’s too young.”

“I didn’t think you’d care.” Jaya said, and the spite in it surprised him.

“If… If she was sick you could have called earlier.”

“I told you, she wasn’t sick. She just…” His voice was quivering. Jared did not expect that. “She just fell one day. That’s all. Nothing to it.”

There was silence afterwards. Jared took a deep breath, let the mood trailed over for a while, before asking the question that was on his mind, “She wasn’t right in her head though, was she?”

“What?”

“The war broke her face, right? It could have gone into her brain.” When his brother said nothing, he went on, “Most who got hit in the head does. Was she acting a bit strange? Just, as if he couldn’t put things together or did he become angry often or-”

The punch came with no warning. Within a second he was just lying on the ground, his mouth on the dirt, his face burning. He looked up and saw Jaya standing over him, his hand a fist.

“Don’t you…” Jaya started to yell, but then he stopped himself. He took a breath, and when he next spoke it was no less angry but much more controlled. “Don’t you dare say that.”

“What…?”

“You didn’t know her. If you had, if you had just come over and visit, if you’d just leave your damn city for a while and see how we’re doing… You would have known.”

Jared tried to sit up, but found that he couldn’t. Something in his mechanical leg was unscrewed after the sudden movement. He looked up to his brother and asked, “Known… what?”

Jaya shook his head and looked away. He tapped absent-mindedly at the black patch over his eye. “The war took everything from us. And when they come back they thought they could buy our forgiveness by corralling us. Those bastards.”

“The war took something from everyone,” Jared said. “It took your eye. Why didn’t you get it fixed?”

“Ha! Fixed!” Jaya boomed. “Do we look like that to you lot? Machines in need of fixing? And then we’ll be forever under your eyes. No, Brother, we’d rather live than sell our soul. Mother knows that best of all.” He closed his eye as a breeze flew by. Nothing moved for a while, then he opened his eyes and realised that his brother was still on the ground. “What’s wrong?”

“My leg, it’s… I need to get it fixed.” Jared smiled wryly, tasting the irony. “Can you help me up?”"

Whatever spite Jaya had then seemed to have disappeared. He pulled his brother up to stand on his one foot, let his arm go around his strong shoulder.

“Thank you. Can you get me to my car? I should have enough parts to fix it there.”

Jaya said nothing more on their way.

“Selene, can you get my surgical tools ready?”

“Right away, Sir.”

Jaya’s eyes widened as the car’s inside moved on its own, folding chairs and pulling screens, cables, and strange mechanical instruments out of seemingly nowhere. After a second the car looked less like a luxury drive and more a roboticist’s workshop.

Jared pulled himself inside and the floor under him rose an inch, shaping itself to a makeshift lounge chair. He rolled his left trouser up, revealing a leg that looked like any other leg. Then he picked up an instrument from the arrays on the wall, something resembling a long needle with electricity sparkling at its tip, and carefully jabbed it into his leg. Only then did Jaya see the strange sheen on the skin, and only when it had been peeled off, revealing an array of cables and blinking lights, did he understand it was no skin at all.

“You lost a leg.” He said, looking as his brother pulled another instrument, turned it about and put it into the machine that was his leg.

“Yeah,” Jared replied, taking the instrument back and pulling another.

“And then you let them into your body.” He gestured at the room and its many glistening metal.

“I… It’s what I do. And people need it to be done. Wants it to be done.” He rearranged the dozen chips in his left leg, taking out the loose screw and putting it back together.

Jaya said nothing for a bit, then he pointed to one of the small pieces he had taken out. “That’s the logo for Alveron Industry. We can see it in the sky sometimes, in the morning, from the hill when we were picking tea leaves. Do you know how much we hated it? Sometimes we couldn’t see the sunrise because it was so bright.”

“I…. Yes, it is.” How many brands had he put nto his leg? Alveron. Microworks. Parasynthetic. He’d put them into countless other legs as well. “Does it matter?”

“Do you know they came here, once, a long time ago? Those Alveron people. Dressed all nicely. Came in fancy planes. Planes. Told us they’d replace the body parts we’d lost for free.”

“You turned them down.” Jared said, putting the final pieces together. He picked up the first needle again, flicked a switch and it dazzled a different colour now.

“Of course we did. They might have said they were going to do it for free, but Mother saw through their tiny print. Something about monthly training or whatever. They were going to come here and tell us what to do and like hell we’re going to do that.”

“The Training Initiative. Yeah. They do that sometimes. To test some new tech.” He closed the prosthetic skin over the rest of the leg, hiding the metal and the lights underneath.

“You know they do this? Then you do know that once we agree, we wouldn’t be able to take it back? They’d install shit on us so we wouldn’t refuse. It was Mother who figured it out.”

Jared run the needle down on the edges of his silicon skin, stitching them together so closely it looked like they were never parted. “A lot of people in the city get drafted into it too.”

“And, what, you just let them do that? Take control of your entire life?” Jaya shook his head. “That wasn’t even the worst of it. Do you know how many times a year we got offers like that? People from the city, trying to take over our town, take over our people. Improve our orchards, my ass. Then they’ll take all we made and leave us nothing.”

“What choice do you have, though?” Jared moved his leg about. It was working again, good as a human leg that had never touched a machine. He pushed himself up and sat at the edge of his car, looking up at his brother. His brother and his one eye, the black eyepatch over the other. He remembered his mother again, and the countless other people from the funeral with something missing in their body. An eye, an arm, a leg, a piece of their brain. There was anger bubbling up inside him. He knew this now.

“What choice do you think you have?” he repeated the question. “Have you seen this town? Didn’t you think about what happened to Mother? And Mother wasn’t the first, was she? You could have saved them. We could have saved them.”

For a second Jaya seemed to be taken aback, then his expression hardened. “You don’t know this town. Don’t you dare say things like you do. You’re no better than the businessmen who came and offered to steal our land.”

Jared shook his head. “I’m not a businessman. I’m a doctor! I save people. Just let me save you.”

“Save me?” Jaya snorted. He looked about the inside of the car and its many polished instruments. “That’s rich. Look at this place. Do you know where they come from? Do you know how they could pay you?”

Another piece of his anger was coming yet, but then something popped into his mind. Half a face, a glowing logo on its forehead, a monster from his dream. His mother, too. He was the one who made them, was he? Put some corporation’s machines into other people’s body with no telling what they were going to do. If something went wrong, a crash, a hacking, or if somebody from up there decided they’ve had enough of other people’s existence, wouldn’t he be the first to blame? Wouldn’t it, in fact, be all his fault?

He looked at his brother’s one eye again. He remembered the broken heads he’d seen today. His mother wasn’t the only one. “I can’t just leave you all be.”

“Then find another way than… that.” Jaya was gesturing at the sky. Jared had to strain his head to see what he saw.

A large holographic logo, a distinct and unforgettable shape, a color scheme that must mean something once, before everyone has gotten so used to have it around and inside of them. It shone more brightly than any advertisement he’d seen before, followed by a small armada of planes.

“They’re doing that more often lately. Taking over the sky, as if you can own the sky,” Jaya was saying.

If it wasn’t for the owner of the giant logo in the sky, he wouldn’t have the life he had. Or would he? He’d been a prosthetic surgeon his whole life, he knew all the ins and outs of those machines. There might be something he could do.

“Jaya?”

“Yeah?”

“I’d still want you to get your eye fixed.”

“Figure it out then.” His brother sighed, looking up. “For now I’ve just got to see what else they want to steal.”