Incriminator—Matthew Wollin

In the future, Perso Tech allows anyone, including criminals, to change their personality through chemical dosing. Now, in order to be convicted of a crime, a person must have not only criminal intent, but a criminal personality: a personality capable of committing the crime for which a person is being prosecuted. The role of incriminator arose as a way for law enforcement to get convictions by ensuring a suspect’s personality was sufficiently criminal.

 

It was beautiful and I hated it. Sitting on my porch and watching the endless sway of the night-shrouded grass, feeling the wind caress my naked torso, the stars dazzling overhead—disgusting. Too empty, outside and inside. I never liked being able to see all the way to the horizon. What kind of person wakes up every day eager to be themselves?

The problem is that even after three years my mind is frustratingly resilient. I suppose I should have seen that coming; it was why they got me so young, after all. Now my memory is either riddled with gaps or overfull, teeming with the detritus of too many personalities. I’ve learned to live with both. I have become a virtuoso of avoidance.

But lately I’ve sensed a new danger in myself, a thirst I haven’t felt since my self-imposed exile began. It started months ago with the rumors trickling out of the Capitols about a new kind of dosing, something that would make the old perso tech seem like child’s play. It got worse once the remaining free states started to mobilize, and consensus became that the so-called Cool War couldn’t stay cool for much longer. They would need people like me, a little voice whispered: real incriminators. Malleables. People who could bend others into the stories the agencies wanted to tell. And just think how good it would feel, like letting loose a flood that should have never been dammed-

NO. Stop.

Stop doing what you were trained to do. Stop trying to do anything. Trying makes everything worse. Trying leads to a black hole in the shape of whatever you loved.

Concentrate on the glass slick with sweat in your hand. Lift it; hear the dying ice stutter against the side; taste the rim, that nothing taste, that hard clear emptiness; then the cool liquid, astringent, the faint spray of herbs that follows. Barely a burn as it slides down your throat, which is a shame. You like the burn.

Lean back in the rickety chair, wrap your leg around the wood, feel the delicious bite of a splinter sliding into the thick meat of your calf; feel the sweat soaking through your briefs and the fabric sticking to your ass, the humid air pressing against your bare skin like a sponge, preventing anything inside you from evaporating, only simmering, agitating instead.

Think about these things only and nothing else. Think nothing about the things you wish you could forget. And even less about the ones you hope you never remember.

***

By the time I shambled into the precinct, the sun was high in the sky and I reeked of alcohol sweat from having walked the three miles to town. My skin was a broiled mess. You’d think after this long I’d start tanning, but my skin stayed a checkerboard of red and lily-white no matter how I tried to train it.

Inside, weak fans swirled stale air around my sweating, suited colleagues and a new indignity awaited me at my desk: someone had scratched SLUT into the back of my chair. I heard the sniggering behind me and sighed. You’d think they’d tire of the joke after three years but their commitment was impressive, even affectionate, in a backwards sort of way. I scrabbled in my desk for a penknife and then used it to scratch FAG below the SLUT, then considered and added WHORE and looked back.

The sniggering stopped pretty quickly. One of my colleagues snorted. I winked at him and he blushed. I smiled. The biggest-seeming bigots were always the best ones in bed.

My ostensible boss, Gary, a big hairy bear of a man who had fueled entirely too many fantasies, walked over as I chugged burnt coffee in the kitchen. “You’re late,” he growled an octave lower than usual. I looked at him, bemused. He puffed up his chest with an air of self-importance, but puffed a little too far and was overtaken by a fit of coughing.

I watched him hack fondly. I always had a soft spot for authority figures. Even unconvincing ones. “I’m always late,” I said when he had recovered his breath.

In a more normal voice, sounding chastened, he said, “Nick is waiting for you.”

He looked at me expectantly and suddenly I remembered. Fuck. Today was an operation. Their first, after doing everything I could to delay it. It was why I had drunk myself into a stupor last night.

I downed the last of my coffee and spat the acrid grounds out in the sink. “Call him One. Never use an incriminator’s real name while they’re on a job.”

Gary looked curious. “Why not?”

I turned away. “Keeps you from thinking of them as people.”

Nick was pacing in the locker room. When he saw me, his expression moved through relief and apprehension in quick succession. “It’s the big day,” I said, “You ready?” He nodded without saying anything, which was unusual; normally he wouldn’t shut up. “It was a family thing, right?”

He nodded again. “Her husband.”

Right. It was coming back to me. Husband probably deserved it; hard to say for sure and she certainly wasn’t going to tell us, because after she had killed him, she panicked and got a new personality like so many of them did. And also like so many, all she could afford was one of the low-rent, semi-legal perso shops that proliferated like weeds out here in the vassal states. Which meant that what she got was a hack job: a re-print of her current personality with all the violence taken out. “No more criminal intent,” I’m sure she was told. “Zero chance of conviction.” And down the hatch the dose went.

But unfortunately for her, hack jobs don’t stick. People who don’t understand perso tech—there were a lot of those out here—think that changing who you are is easy, like choosing a shirt: pick the right color and size, slip it on, and you’re good. But personalities aren’t like that. They are intricate and endlessly evolving machines, and if you want to change even the tiniest piece you’ve got to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up or it’ll all come crashing down under pressure.

Which, to be fair, is why I had a job.

I put a hand on One’s shoulder. He looked at me curiously. I took my hand back and he snorted. “Remember it won’t take much,” I said, my face burning. “Just seduce her a little. You’re a good-looking guy, it shouldn’t be hard. Keep asking questions. And soon enough she’ll revert and you’ll have her.”

He chewed on his lip and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Spit it out,” I said.

Nick avoided my eyes. “I think I need a counter,” he said.

My heart shuddered like it was trying to escape. “No.”

“But-”

“NO!” It came out as a shriek and Nick stared. I forced myself to take deep breaths. The rank smell of the locker room was comforting somehow. Reassuringly real. I lowered myself to the bench and looked at the floor. “Becoming another person is not something you do lightly.” Each word was a struggle. “There’s a reason incriminators go through years of training first. Why they test for adaptability and resilience, and malleability most of all.” He didn’t seem convinced. I decided to try a different tack. “And we don’t have the right setup. You’ve got to have your own cast, you’ve got to have a model of the counter, and you’ve got to have a facilitator ready with enough materiel to deal with unexpected contingencies. We don’t have any of that. Okay?” I caught his gaze. I needed him to get it; he reminded me of me. “Okay?”

He looked like he was about to fight back, but I gave him my best thousand-yard stare—ice-blue eyes still good for that much, at least—and he let out a long breath and nodded slowly. “Okay.”

A few minutes later the rest of the squad barged in and shouted and slapped him on the back and generally bro’d it up. I left them to it and made my way back to my desk as they geared up and headed out.

He would be fine, I told myself hopefully as I leaned back in my chair. Not every story ends like your own.

***

I should have known better than to hope. Hope is just pain waiting for the right time to come in.

I was still dozing at my desk when the door smashed open and a mass of people burst in shouting. Gary hurdled out of the scrum toward me, white shirt so drenched with sweat it was nearly transparent. “He killed her,” he gasped in between breaths.

I blinked in confusion and tried not to stare at his torso. “Who killed who?”

“Nick. I mean One. I mean Nick,” he stammered.

“But why-” Then my brain caught up with the scene and I got it. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I stood and felt dizzy. “You let him use a counterpersonality.” I put a hand on my desk to steady myself.

He squirmed. “He said he needed it.” His expression was desperate. Of course it was. His luscious ass was on the line. “Can you fix it?”

I tried to wipe the sweat from my face but just ended up smearing it around. I looked around and saw a wall of faces staring back. They didn’t have any idea what to do. “Put him in the interrogation room. I need to see what he’s done to himself.”

While they got him ready, I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and collect myself. I looked in the mirror: too-pretty twenty-five-year-old features gone prematurely to seed; a slight body swallowed beneath a dingy t-shirt and jeans; blond hair hanging lank past my chin and matted against the sides of my face. Not exactly a knight in shining armor. But it was on me to help these idiots hold on to their innocence a little while longer.

I did my best to ignore the nervousness in my eyes. Not about my ability to do the job; I could do that in my sleep. But about breaking my promise to never to do it again. And about how much I wanted to do it.

The crowd’s muttering died as I walked up and looked at One through the mirror. He was just sitting there, but already I could tell something was different: a certain set to his jaw, a gleam in his eye. Not to mention the blood coating his hands like glossy red gloves. I turned to the crowd. “This is going to be an involuntary,” I said. “If the Capitol finds out, everyone who stays will be an accomplice.”

A few of them blanched and started looking for the exit. Others looked confused, but the rest would explain; then they would leave too. The penalty for altering a personality without consent was capitolization: wiping away the perpetrator’s personality and installing a generic one in its place. It was the Capitols’ humane replacement for the “barbaric” capital punishment still used by the free states. Clean and modern and bloodless. And utterly horrifying, to anyone who had come face to face with one of the capitolized, wandering complacently through the world like some bureaucrat’s wet dream. Made you wonder if death was really so bad.

One looked at me when I walked in. I had known it would hurt to see a stranger looking out through those eyes but goddamn it still hurt. And Nick had a wife and kid too, I remembered unhelpfully.

I sat down. “You need to tell me what you did.”

“You know what I did.” The grin stayed plastered on One’s face.

“But I don’t know how you did it.” I leaned in. “Did you use one of the precasts?” No reaction. “Or did you make something new?”

One tried to keep the glimmer of satisfaction from passing across his features, but it was as clear as day. Goddamnit; of course he had done something custom. I had been hoping to avoid involving more agency people but there was nothing to be done for it now.

I went back to the door and opened it, expecting the room to be deserted; but the crowd was still there. I didn’t understand. They were risking everything to stay with Nick. And me. “I need a facilitator,” I said, my throat suddenly thick. “It is a part of your covenant with the Capitol that an agency facilitator has to be riding circuit nearby.” It was like looking after toddlers. “Find them.”

I didn’t stay to see them work out the details, but went back and sat down across from One again. He smiled at me. It was time to figure out exactly who Nick had made himself into. And because there was no other option, I was going to have to do it the hard way. We were going to have to talk.

I smiled back.

***

It took all night and all day and into the night again until I had talked enough to understand the person Nick had become. Just barely. But that was enough.

I nearly fell from exhaustion when I left the interrogation room, but a hand steadied me. It was Gary. “The facilitator,” I croaked, my throat raw. I wanted so badly to sleep.

“She’s in the perso room,” he said nervously. He had changed his shirt. I turned and went.

The perso room barely deserved the title. No caster, no simulator. Just a few boxes of materiel, a doser ten years out of date, and a cot in the corner. But it was all I had for the most delicate of operations: casting a counterpersonality for One—from memory, no less—so that the midpoint between them would be Nick. And I had one shot. Because once I had dosed him he would become someone else entirely, and there wasn’t enough materiel to try again. Not without talking to the Capitol, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

The facilitator was waiting, sitting in front of the translator, legs crossed. Gray t-shirt, faded jeans, hair short and sensible; deep-set eyes that didn’t give much away; sharp, experienced. A pro. I sighed in relief. It was always a crapshoot with the ones riding circuit, but thankfully she seemed like one of the ones who did it out of principle instead of incompetence.

She heard my sigh and turned. Then squinted. “You’re the incriminator?”

“Guilty.” I did my best to smile but she didn’t seem particularly inclined to be charmed. Best to get straight to it then. “Did they tell you this is an involuntary?”

To her credit, she didn’t flinch. “I suspected as much. He’s training to be an incriminator?”

I nodded. “So, he’ll vouch once he’s back.”

She looked at me coolly, and I thought I had lost her; but then she gestured to the casting setup and stepped aside. I saw that she had prepped it as immaculately as possible with the tools she had available. Materiel on the translating plate, the doser warming up, precise as could be. I was impressed. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said, and busied herself with the facilitation equipment. She had clearly worked with enough incriminators to know how intimate the sculpting process was, how vulnerable. How like sex. I thought about telling her that I liked being watched, but decided it wouldn’t endear me to her any.

Then I moved closer to the setup and was distracted from any thought of her by the proximity of the materiel. I had avoided being close to it since I left the Capitols, and its faint, metallic odor and plasticine silver sheen answered an always-present yearning in my heart that had now increased to a roar. I sat, doing my best to move slowly, deliberately, and then reached for it, trembling. I stopped just before my hands touched; I felt like I was on a precipice. I could feel the facilitator watching, ready to call it off. That couldn’t happen. I closed my eyes.

It’s time, that voice in me whispered; time to acknowledge you’ve failed. You’ve tried to change what you are, but you are a knife. And a knife needs to cut.

I sank my fingers in. I thought of One and Nick and the yet-to-be person that would bring the two of them together. That person made their way from me into the materiel until I stopped being myself and became a conduit only. Time began to slide by like it was greased. I was dimly aware of the facilitator clearing away excess materiel as I sculpted, storing it carefully for repairs, but those moments of lucidity never lasted long, because I would soon notice some flaw in the cast and feel a compulsion to reach out and fix it again.

Was this what I was so afraid of, I marveled? It wasn’t emptiness inside me but space. And that space was my home.

***

I was woken abruptly by the sound of raised voices and started to clamber up in a panic when a hand pushed me back down. “You did it,” the facilitator said, sounding tired. I listened again and realized the voices were laughing. “He vouched for us. Just like you said he would.”

I finally took in my surroundings and realized I was on the cot in the corner. On the table were the remnants of a cast; I must have finished it, though I didn’t remember doing it.

The facilitator was watching me with a curious mix of gentleness and suspicion. Like she was rethinking her assessment. “It’s all over,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

I was too exhausted to argue. I closed my eyes again.

***

I came back to consciousness slowly the next time. The facilitator was leaning back in her chair and scrolling on her phone, wearing a fresh gray t-shirt and jeans. I admired her consistency. “What time is it?”

She flinched and nearly spilled her coffee. “Jesus, you scared me. You slept through the day. Coffee?” She handed me a mug and I sipped. I tried to relax but she kept looking at me when she thought I wasn’t looking.

“What is it?” I finally said.

She hesitated and then said, “You’re him, aren’t you?” Then added, as though I didn’t know, “Zero.” I debated denying it but there didn’t seem to be much point, so I nodded and she let out a long sigh. “I wondered at first,” she said. “And then when you sculpted that from memory in a single session, without any print...”

We sat in silence. I knew what was coming. It was always the same with agency people. They wanted to know what had happened. What terrible thing I had done. Everyone always liked hearing that they had it better.

But she surprised me. “What was it like being an incriminator before?” Her gaze was cautious, her voice soft. “Before the regs?”

I was flabbergasted. I didn’t think Capitol-contracted facilitators were allowed to ask questions like that. Maybe more had changed than I realized. “It was...” It had been so long since I had let myself remember that when I tried, nothing came back to me at first and I was bereft and relieved; but then all at once the part of me that had been primed by the last day and a half, the part I had tried to bury forever, roared back to life so completely it was like it had never been gone. “It was heaven,” I said, my voice breaking. “It was absolute heaven.”

She looked surprised as I stood. She had expected me to lie, I’m sure. To toe the party line and say things were better now, more civilized. But the thing people never understand about being a real malleable is that you never lie about anything.

I found Nick at his desk. As soon as he saw me he stood and came over and hugged me. I looked at yesterday’s remnants over his shoulder. They had done a pretty good job, I thought; there was only a little blood on the floor.

He let me go and started apologizing profusely. He was nervous about the fallout but I reassured him. His coworkers and friends might look at him strangely for a minute, but I knew from experience how quickly you could overlook a little thing like murder. Such a nice boy, they would think; he could never do that again. And they would be right, because I had made him that way.

But I had done more than that, I realized, as I heard his voice tremble and felt his hand linger. I knew immediately: it was an old self-protective reflex, an insurance policy of sorts from all those years ago; one of the things I had tried to lose in the gaps inside myself. It was too much to take, and I told Nick goodbye and ran out into the last of the sun mid-sentence. His look after me was so desperate that I began to cry as I walked.

Because from this point on, I knew Nick would love me forever. He would love me as though he had always loved me; he would hand me the keys to his life if I asked him and never question why. Because his love for me wasn’t real. It was perfect.

I wasn’t crying out of guilt, though. I was so used to guilt I hardly felt it anymore. No, what made the tears stream down my face as I walked home in the warm dust was the overwhelming sense of relief: relief from my ocean of thirst; from trying to hold myself back; from the lonely life I had forced myself into and to which I was as suited as a fish to the sky.

But more than anything else, I cried because, even though the feeling was fake, it felt so, so good to be loved.

***

My face was nearly dry by the time my house appeared on the horizon. I was surprised to see the bare bulb on my porch was on, the white glow bright beneath the dying yellow of the sky; then I saw the polished black car parked in the dirt, stretching the bulb’s light into long lines that sliced through the dusk like a knife. A man was leaning against the driver's side door. I didn’t know what to make of it until I saw her waiting on the porch and stopped dead in my tracks.

She sat beneath the bare bulb, light shadowing every feature. I knew them so well: the stocky shoulders, the rigid spine jammed upright like a stake in the ground, the intensely cropped hair that tread the dangerously thin line between chic and disastrous. The head of the agency I had run away from. My real boss. She hadn’t changed at all, the butch bitch.

I did my best to reintroduce something of my old strut as I got close. Not that it would convince her; it didn’t even convince me. But it made it easier to deal with people when you gave them a little bit of what they expected. “Hi Boss.”

She looked down at me from shadowed sockets as I creaked up the steps. “It’s been too long,” she rumbled, voice like a piece of heavy machinery.

“Has it?”

I watched that razor smile slide wider. She beckoned to the driver, who rummaged in the car and then emerged from the dark carrying a crystal tumbler and a dark bottle with a white label. “A peace offering,” she said. I took the Hendrick’s and checked out the driver. Clean-cut, dark hair, light eyes. “Thanks, stud.” I did my best to sound lascivious. He nodded politely and turned and went back to the car and I watched him go. She always did have a knack. “Where on earth did you find him?”

“Princeton.” I couldn’t help but laugh. God it felt good to laugh. “Well? I assume you didn’t come all this way just to say hi.”

She guffawed like it was the best joke she had ever heard. I waited, bemused, for her to finish. She wiped a tear from her eye, still smiling, then turned to me, suddenly serious. “I need your help with a job,” she said.

I felt a surge of something: panic or excitement, I couldn’t tell which. She watched me closely. “Give me one good reason,” I finally managed to get out.

She looked at me like a morsel of food. “We found him,” she said, clearly savoring the words. “We can give him back to you.” Her voice was almost taunting.

“That’s impossible.”

“We’ve made a lot of advances since you left.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and lit it. She inhaled and then blew smoke through the light. I watched it vanish in the dark, “And besides, didn’t fixing that kid today feel incredible?”

“How did you…” She raised an eyebrow. I looked at her planted in that chair like a statue on a plinth, face a pitch-perfect portrait of self-satisfaction. And all at once, I understood. They had my old cast. It would have been easy for her to dose me without me knowing. And now here I was, the old me again at just the right time, eager for action and loving it.

Then the gears began to turn again in my head: on second thought, maybe she wouldn’t have risked doing an involuntary, even with the protections of her office. She had always been by the book. Maybe it was scenario design like Nick had been supposed to do, and she had just created the right set of circumstances for me to snap back to the person I had been, in spite of the doses I hid in my gin; maybe they had even arranged for Nick’s little mishap. Maybe he was a seed she had planted years ago that was just now bearing fruit.

Or maybe she had planted the seed, but known I would see the attempt for what it was, I reflected. Perhaps it was all just a gesture: an elaborate effort to convince me she cared. For people like us, there was no line between manipulation and love.

And there was another possibility, it occurred to me: maybe she hadn’t done anything at all; maybe she had just shown up on my doorstep and known I would do the rest of the work on my own. Because what she understood about me and what almost no one else did was that for most people faith is fragile but for me it’s the opposite. Give me any half-assed reason to believe and I will be down on my knees before you finish your breath.

“Why me?” I said at last. “You must have a stable of pretty young things at this point. Next-gen incriminators just chomping at the bit to prove themselves.”

She took a drag on her cigarette and then looked at me like I hadn’t been looked at in a long time; like she was trying to see inside me. She exhaled. “Let’s just say that this target is special.” She spoke slowly, deliberately. “That she poses a challenge. A challenge that requires a real incriminator. A malleable.”

She watched me carefully. I could tell she was hiding something, but that was a given. I would have been surprised if she weren’t. But she was hiding something behind that too; something personal. I watched her smoke and wait like she had all the time in the world, her ease so perfect it seemed studied, and at last realized what it was: she was nervous. And I wanted to know why.

She saw my face and nodded. “You’ll leave in the morning.” She stood and walked back down the steps and the driver opened the door for her; then she paused and turned. “For every crime, a criminal,” she said in a low and level voice in the dark. The words came at me like an arrow and hit some part of me that was still raw, that would never not be raw.

“For every crime, a criminal,” I whispered back. The sound was swallowed by the wind and the cicadas, but she saw my lips and smiled; the smile of a predator that had brought down its prey. Then she disappeared inside the car and it slid away into the dark. And I was alone with the gin.

And maybe more, I realized, looking down at the bottle; who knew what dose she had left for me in there?

I considered and then took a long swallow. It was good gin, after all. And god was I thirsty.

 

 

Matthew Wollin is a writer and filmmaker, as well as a practicing lawyer. His 2019 debut feature as writer/director, The Skin of the Teeth, was described by critics as both "Get Out meets Grindr" and "David Lynch directs an episode of Law & Order: SVU.” His writing has been published at Lammergeier, Juked, and Pop Matters, among others, and his legal work focuses on issues of antidiscrimination and constitutional law. Find him on Instagram @matthewwollin.