Shattered (25 page)

“People do that?” I asked, only half kidding.

“These last few weeks . . .” Ani shook her head. “I don't know. Maybe she's just getting tired of all the . . .”

Screwing everything that moved?
“Experimenting,” I suggested, experimenting myself with a little tact.

“Right.”

“Or maybe she finally figured out who she wanted to be with,” I said. Not sure whether I believed it.

“Maybe,” Ani said, sounding like she wasn't convinced either. “But I think it's more than that. She never really had a chance to
be
anybody before, you know? She was living on the
network—it wasn't real. So after the download, it was like she had to start all over again. Figure herself out. Maybe she's finally doing it.” She gave her wrist two sharp taps, and the glowing green numerals of a skintimer appeared. “We should go, or we'll be late,” she said. “You sure about this? Seeing Auden like that, it could be—”

“Who knows if we'll even get there,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could dredge up. “Could get stopped a mile from the house.” The penalty for driving without a human in the car was just a fee, for now, along with confiscation of the vehicle. But our funds were limited. Thanks to some creative accounting, we still had access to plenty of credit under a variety of fronts and assumed names, but the bulk of it had been seized—losing a car was a less than desirable eventuality. And I'd had enough of the secops for one lifetime.

“We'll be fine,” Ani said. “They're not enforcing the restrictions. It's just a scare tactic.”

“Then let's go,” I told her. “Find out if there's anything to be scared about.”

Find out what's going on with Auden,
I thought.

If he means everything he says about us.

About me.

No, nothing to be scared of at all.

The Temple of Man wasn't a building. It was hundreds of acres of buildings, sprawling, flat concrete blocks spiderwebbed together by tunnels and skyways. Within a mile of the Temple,
the countryside gave way to an unbroken stretch of asphalt in every direction. No trees, no grass, no relief from the gray cement, the same color as the dingy sky. Only one structure violated the horizontal skyline, a narrow white tower shooting three hundred feet into the air, widening at the top for a story-high globe of windows. It reminded me of the pics I'd seen of the Middle East, after the war started but before the bombs dropped, ending the war and all the warriors in a flash of atomic fire. In the pics, tall spires had jutted from domed temples, strange, ornate lighthouses dotting the horizon, and as a kid I'd often imagined the bored but devoted keepers who might have lived up there in the sky, tending to their god. I wondered if they'd been the first to see the bombs, fire streaking through the night, and whether they'd had time to wonder or panic—or jump—before the sky exploded.

“It's where they used to track the planes taking off,” Ani said, following my gaze.

“Seriously?” Maybe it was a good thing the energy crisis had destroyed the airline industry. A million planes flying around and the only thing keeping them from crashing into one another was a few guys looking out the window? “How many you think used to fly in and out of here a day?”

Ani shrugged, taking in the miles of paved runway stretching to the horizon. “Twenty?” she guessed. “Maybe thirty?”

It was impossible to imagine. Sure, once they'd figured out how to build hybrid biofuel planes, they'd gotten them back in the air, but most were corp-owned cargo flights. If you had enough credit, you could always track down a plane to get you where
you needed to go. But if you were unlucky enough to count as “most people”—and most people were—cost and restrictions forced you to go by ground. Or stay home. Just as there weren't enough roads to go around, it had turned out there wasn't enough sky. Which meant the majority gave up their wings so a minority could fly.

“Not much of a temple,” I said as we headed toward one of the largest of the concrete block buildings, falling into step with a bedraggled crowd. I kept my head down and my voice low. “I thought these things were supposed to look like fairy tale castles or something. High ceilings, stained glass.
Pretty
.”

“The old ones did,” Ani said. “And some of the Faither ones still do. But Rai Savona's not a Faither anymore, remember? Now he says that all those churches and stuff are bad for you, that they make you feel small and unworthy. He likes this building because it's low and unimpressive. The most impressive part of any temple should be the humans inside it, he says.
We're
sacred, he says. Because God dwells inside of us.”

“Them,” I said.

“What?”

“You said ‘us.' But God doesn't dwell in mechs, not according to Savona. Right?”

Ani ducked her head. “Right. Them. Anyway, that's what he says.”

“And people actually buy that?” Thinking,
Sounds almost like
you
buy it.

She shrugged. “Faithers are used to it. Most of them just meet where they can. Basements, cafeterias. Dead buildings are
good—libraries, those old vid theaters. And in the cities, they're lucky if they can squat in one of the tower rooms for a few months, before—” She finally noticed how I was looking at her. “What?”

“You know a lot about this,” I said. “Faithers.”

Ani looked away, pinning her eyes back on the tower. “There are a lot of them in the city. Especially in the Craphole.” She rarely talked about it, the place she'd grown up, a dumping ground for children whose parents couldn't be found or, like Ani's, couldn't be bothered. I'd never heard her refer to it as anything but the Craphole. “The government made sure we didn't starve,” she said. “But that was it. The Faithers were the only ones who remembered we were alive. They showed up every once in a while with clothes, sometimes even med-tech.” She shrugged. “I don't know, I guess they thought God told them to do it or something. Crazies.”

“So you didn't become one.” I wasn't sure whether I was asking or telling.

“Believe in some invisible, all-powerful guy who was going to fix everything as long as I was a good girl? Or in the fact that, in the end, bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good ones?” She shook her head, then stretched her arms wide, fingers splayed. “I believe in this,” she said. “This body. And it didn't happen because I was good. It happened because I was lucky.”

I hesitated. If she rarely talked about her childhood, she
never
talked about how she'd ended up as a candidate for the download. “Do you know why they picked you?”
I asked. We stepped through the doors into an enormous space, thick pillars stretching up to ceilings so high, I felt almost like we were still outside. It seemed to be some kind of clearing zone, with clumps of orgs scurrying back and forth, directed by officious-looking Brothers in iridescent robes. LED screens lined the walls, announcing service times and meal times and scrolling name after name of Brothers and Sisters new to the cause. There were hundreds of them.

“They picked all of us,” she said. “The ten of us who slept in my room, at least. We went to bed in the Craphole—and when we woke up, we were in the hospital. All in the same room together that first day, I guess so we didn't freak out. They wouldn't tell us what we were doing there. Just did a bunch of tests. Then started taking us away one by one.”

“Do you still talk to them?” I asked, wondering why I'd never met any of them. “Are there any at Quinn's place?”

“I never saw them again,” Ani said flatly as we followed the orgs through a series of metal detectors and bioscanners and were loaded onto a narrow moving sidewalk. Fortunately, most of the crowd had rushed ahead of us, and the stragglers barely glanced at us as we passed.

“But I thought you said you spent a few weeks in the hospital before the download and that you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.” I knew that was when she, Jude, and Riley had gotten close. The way Ani talked about them, I figured they had sort of adopted her, for whatever reason taken her under their protection. A hospital where a bunch of city kids could do
whatever they wanted—even city kids rife with missing limbs and congenital diseases—could be a dangerous place.

“Yeah, I did. And I asked around. The kids I came in with weren't there anymore.”

“BioMax sent them back?” I asked, surprised.

Ani shook her head.

“Then what?”

She rolled her eyes, her mouth set in a grim line. The moving sidewalk had carried us through a shimmering silver tunnel and dumped us in some kind of anteroom. Huge golden doors—ridiculously new and shiny compared to the rest of the dump—marked this as the entry to the inner sanctum. It was unsettling the way Ani had guided us here, so smooth and sure, as if she belonged. “Jude and I weren't the first downloads,” she said, patience and pedantry mixing in her tone like she was a teacher dealing with a particularly remedial student. “Just the first successes.”

“Oh.”

Volunteers for the advancement of science, BioMax had called them. Heroes. Submitting themselves to an experiment for the benefit of the greater good.

“I'm sorry,” I said lamely.

“It's not like they were my friends. Just people I knew.” Ani tugged her camo hood tighter over her head, dropping her face into shadow. “Come on. Let's go in.”

“It took a kiss from a princess to wake me up.”

B
y the time we slipped into the auditorium, Savona and Auden had already taken the stage. Several hundred people crowded into the wide, windowless space, crushed against one another in their desperation to get closer to their heroes. Auden's face beamed down at us from giant screens lining the walls. His face, ten feet high, every scar magnified. It was easy, it was nothing, to have a scar brushed away, but Auden had left his intact, thick, pale worms of white crawling across his cracked lips and crooked nose. He looked different than before—not just paler and thinner but almost like a stranger, his nose jutting at a sharper angle, his chin flatter, and I remembered the patchwork of bandages across his face the last time I'd seen him in person and wondered how much of him had been rewired and rebuilt.

His eyes sparkled, pools of black at their center flooding out the green, as if he stared out at a darkened room. Or as if he was zoned. It felt like he was watching me.

But when I turned away from the screens, forced myself to look at the real Auden, a tiny figure on the distant stage, it was obvious he couldn't have seen me in the crowd. From where I stood, I could barely pick out the familiar features of his face or the cane he leaned on for balance—there was no way he could look into the sea of bobbing heads and pick out my hood-rimmed face in the crowd.

“They don't understand,” he was saying, alone under a spotlight. Savona stood off to the side, hands folded, nodding with approval. They wore identical iridescent suits that rippled in shimmering rainbow, like light on an oil slick. “Those who stay comfortably at home, watching us on the vids. They think it's all the same. But is it the same?”

“No!” the crowd shouted, barely waiting for the question. They were well-rehearsed.

“No,” Auden said again, as quiet and calm as the crowd was manic. “We meet here, we come together in person,
body to body,
to affirm our own humanity. To remind ourselves that being human is about more than the ability to watch a vid, to make a speech, to communicate, to
think
. Are we just minds, disconnected islands of cognition, connected only by an electronic web?”

“No!” came the enthusiastic response.

“Mind is inseparable from body,” Auden said. “When one hurts . . .” He paused, and the giant screens overhead showed him brushing two fingers against a jagged scar on his neck. “The other screams in pain.” He shook his head. “We don't live in our minds. We live in our bodies. There is no mind without body, no body without mind.
Life
is born in their merger. A mind shoved into a machine is—”

“Still a machine!” the crowd screamed. “Still a machine!” I glanced at Ani, who was dutifully mouthing the words. But I couldn't fit my lips around them.

“Dead,” Auden said. “Dead thoughts in a dead body, imitating life. But
we
know life,” he said. “Life infuses the heart, the liver, the arms and . . .” He paused again, looking down at the cane. “Legs.” Auden limped forward to the edge of the stage, peering intently out at the audience. The room fell silent. “The skinners wear a mask,” he said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. “They hide among us. They clothe themselves as human—clothe themselves in human skin, identities stripped from the dead. They prey on the confusion of the grieving.” He clapped a fist over his chest in an unmistakable gesture of self-flagellation. “They prey on the sympathies of the weak.”

“You're not weak!” someone behind us shouted.

“This is new,” Ani whispered to me. “Usually it's just the same old stuff—I've never heard this before.”

Auden shook his head. “But I was weak, friend.”

Friend?
It wasn't just what he was saying, it was the words themselves—it didn't even sound like Auden, not the one I'd known.
What did they do to you?
I thought.

What did
I
do to you?

“I believed that because it spoke like something human, because it appeared to act like something human, it
was
something human. And why not? In that life, before, I lived a life of the mind. I worshipped at the altar of rational thought. I told myself I believed only in what I could see, what I could touch—all the while
ignoring
the reality of what my senses were telling me. What did I really believe in? An imaginary entity, the
mind
, the
self,
as if that was something that could exist outside of the
brain
. As if it was possible to distill an identity from electrical impulses, suck them out of a skull, dump them into a computer. I told myself I was a rationalist, that the Faithers believed in a fairy tale.”