Free Bones of my Father by J.A. Pitts

BONES of my FATHER

    My goggles cut the harsh glare of the plasma torch as the titanium joint succumbed to the flame. A thick white smoke poured from the metal, filling the cutting shed faster than the air-transfer pumps could manage. The nitrogen mix was holding steady in the workshop and I had ample time left in my tanks.
    “Careful there, sonny boy,” Gramps said over my comm-link. “Don’t let any of those shavings clip your air hose.”
    “I’ve done this before,” I growled into the helmet. “I had to recycle Mom, if you recall.”
    “How can I forget,” Gramps said. “She reminds me every day.”
    He’d pout now. Blamed my mother for stealing his precious son from him. “Dad volunteered for the cyborg-thing before he met Mom, you know that.”
    “She’s a witch, I tell you. A siren, that’s what she is.”
    “Shut it, old man.” The dulcet tones of my sainted mother echoed through the line. The woman had been a wicked geneticist, but a controlling shrew nonetheless.
    Now he’d gone and waked her. “Go back to sleep, Mom.” I said. “Please?”
    “Don’t you start with me, young man. If you knew the lengths I went to extend your life. Children are so ungrateful.”
    I pressed my thumbs against my temples with my fingers covering my goggles. That woman could bring on a headache faster than anything I’d known. “Nightingale.” The use of her code word shut her down again. Ever since she’d uploaded into the central network, she and Gramps had been fighting like schoolgirls.
    “Can you get to the memory core?” Gramps asked.
    I turned off the torch, and dropped the titanium femur into the pile of dismantled limbs. Primary memory core is housed in the groin area. Some gear-head humor there.
    Now that I’d removed the dangly bits, I could carry the pelvic housing into the lab and see about retrieving what was left of Dad.
    “You gonna get those sonsabitches, ain’t ya, lad?”
    “Sure, Gramps. As soon as I figure who or what slagged the old man.”
    I didn’t comment on the brains and blood that caked the ruined titanium limbs. That and the queer way he’d been posed, like Rodin’s The Thinker, only, you know, without his head. Nothing but short-term memory there, at least.
    “What the hell were you doing, old man?” I asked the remains of my father.
    “He was screaming nursery rhymes into the network, before he crashed into giggles, then shrieks. Finally he just went dark. Full signal black-out,” Gramps said.
    “I know.”
    “Don’t make any sense. It’s like he went crazy or something.”
    “Let it go, Gramps.”
    “Yeah, but it doesn’t add up.”
    I hit the control panel, exhausting the room’s atmospherics in one long, loud exhale. My ears popped with the roar, but at least I could be alone for a few seconds. There were no low-grade radioactives left in Pasco. What was his real mission?
    The atmo-sensor flashed green and the door to the decon chamber slid open. I crossed inside, leaving the bones of my father strewn across the shop floor. I’d deal with them later. I could always reuse the titanium for something.
    Once the door slid shut behind me, I stripped out of the coveralls and dropped them into the laundry hatch for purification. The welding kit, helmet, tanks, gloves, each went into their own alcove which sealed with a hiss. Dad’s pelvic remains I set on the floor at my feet. It could withstand the corrosion.
    I closed my eyes and said, “Rapture.” The room was bathed in a disinfecting mist, while a bank of lights flashed across the spectrum. My skin would itch for hours after this. Always hated cleaning up after exposure to the outside. Not only did I lose the top layer of skin in the decontamination spray, but the lights gave me a minor sunburn.
    One of these days I’d have to do something about all that, but not today. Today I remain a meat-puppet. The last of my clan. Stupid bastards—the lot of us. O’Malleys one and all had taken up the way of the