Skinned -1 (10 page)

“How can you not know?” I’d asked. “You built the…brain. Computer. Whatever you want to cal it. You should know how it works.”

“The download procedure
copies
the brain into a computer,” Sascha had said. “But each brain is composed of bil ions of cognitive processes. We can model the complete structure without understanding each of its individual parts. Which is why, for example, we don’t have the capacity to create new brains from scratch. Only nature can do that. For now.”

“So al you know how to do is make copies,” I’d said. “Except you can’t even get that right. Not exactly.” When we were talking about my brain, the things I loved and hated, when we were talking about
me
, “close enough” didn’t real y get the job done.

“It can be disconcerting at first, but you’l learn to embrace the exciting possibilities. One client even emerged from the procedure with a newfound artistic passion. He’s already so successful that he’s linked on the
president’s
zone!” Saying it like that was some kind of achievement. Like the president wasn’t too doped up to notice who stuck what on her zone; judging from the vids, she’d barely even noticed being re-elected.

I didn’t have any new passions, certainly none that would make me famous. And I’d thought maybe the music thing was just temporary, that once I got off the thirteenth floor and back to the real world, things would return to normal.

I shut down the music. What was the point?

Susskind, our psychotic cat, sashayed into the room and leaped up onto the bed. And maybe he had the right idea. Except that going to bed would mean facing al the other things that hadn’t gone back to normal. Al the prebed rituals that had been made obsolete.

I had my own bathroom, tiled in purple and blue. My own shower, where I washed off the grime every night and washed on the UV block every morning, now no longer necessary. My own toilet with a med-chip that analyzed every deposit for bio-irregularities—no longer required. My own sink, where I would have hydroscrubbed my teeth if they weren’t already made of some gleaming white al oy impervious to microbes. Not like they came into contact with any, what with the whole no-food thing. My own medicine cabinet, with al the behavior modifiers I could ever need, uppers for perk, downers for sleep, Xers for parties, stims for work, and blissers for play, but no b-mod could help me now. On the face of the cabinet, my own mirror. I stayed away from mirrors.

Psycho Susskind crawled into my lap.

“Great.” I rested my hand on his back, letting it rise and fal with each breath. “Of course you like me now.” Sussie was afraid of people, even the people who housed and fed him; maybe—judging from his standard pattern of hissing and clawing—especial y us. Or make that, them. Because apparently Sussie and I were now best friends.

I didn’t dump him off my lap.

“I smel good to you now, Sussie?” I whispered, scratching him behind his ears. He purred. “Like your other best friend?” That would be the dishwasher, which Sussie worshipped like he was a Faither and the dishwasher had a white beard and fistful of lightning bolts.

It’s not like I had no way to fil the time. Showers and music weren’t general y the bulk of my standard evening activities. There was always a game going on the network. Or I could tweak my av, update my zone, chat with the net-friends who’d never seen my flesh-and-blood body and so wouldn’t notice it was gone. I could even hit the local stalker sites and read al about myself, wealthy scion of the Kahn dynasty stuffed into a mech-head and body. What wil she do next, now that she’s home, where wil she go, who wil she see, what wil she wear?

Instead I pumped the network for information on emotion, for why people feel what they feel and how. But I couldn’t make myself read through the results, facts and theories and long, dense explanations that had nothing to do with me.

Walker stil hadn’t texted back.

I cut the link.

My tracksuit didn’t fit me any better than the rest of my clothes. The pants and sleeves were too short and too baggy, the thermo-lining, cued to body temp, was superfluous, and the biostats read zero across the board. But they would do, as would the shoes I got from BioMax, which didn’t cushion my feet like the sneakers that no longer fit, but stil registered body weight and regulated shock absorption, which was al I needed. Zo was out somewhere; my parents were in bed. There was no one to notice I was gone.

It was a cold night, but that didn’t matter, not to me. There was a path behind the house that wove through the woods, a path I’d run every morning for the last several years, layered in thermo-gear, panting and sweating and cursing and loving it. The gravel sounded the same as always, crunching beneath my soles.

I need this,
I said silently, to someone, maybe to myself or maybe to the body that locked me in and denied everything I asked of it.
Please. Let this work.

It didn’t.

I ran for an hour. Legs pumping. Feet pounding. Arms swinging. Face turned up to the wind. The body worked perfectly. I didn’t sweat. I didn’t cramp up. I didn’t wheeze, gulping in desperate mouthfuls of oxygen, because I didn’t breathe at al . I pushed faster, pushed harder, until something in my head told me I was tired, that it was time to slow down, time to stop, but my muscles didn’t ache, my chest didn’t tighten, my feet didn’t drag, I didn’t
feel
ready to stop. I just knew I was, and so I did.

There was no rush, no natural upper coasting me through the last couple miles. There was never that sense of letting go and losing myself in my body, of
existing
in my body, arms, legs, muscles, tendons, pulsing and pumping in sync, the world narrowing to a pinprick tunnel of ground skimming beneath my feet. None of the pure pleasure of absence, of leaving Lia Kahn behind and existing in the moment—al body, no mind.

The body stil felt like someone else’s; the mind was stil al I had left.

I walked the rest of the way back to the house, navigating the path in darkness. The heavy clouds hid even the pale glow of the moon, and so I didn’t see the shadows melt into a figure, a man, not until he was close enough to touch.

Fingers wrapped around my arm. Thick, strong fingers. A hand, twisting, and my arm fol owed the unspoken command, my body tugged after it. He pinned me against a tree, his forearm shoved against my throat.

Lucky I didn’t need to breathe.

His face so close to mine that our noses nearly touched, I recognized him. It was the face I’d seen through the car window that morning, the hol ow face howling at me through the glass.

I should run away,
I thought,
I should scream
. But the ideas seemed distant, almost sil y.

“It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” the man hissed. “We are His people, and the sheep of his pasture.” His breath caressed my face. I wondered what it smel ed like.

I wondered if his boss knew he was stil here, lurking. I wondered who his boss was. The man with the too-pale skin and the too-dark eyes? Or did he report directly to the big boss, the eye in the sky? I wondered what he would do to me if I asked.

“Thou shal not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” I was linked in. I could have sent for help. But I didn’t particularly want any. His arm bore down harder against my throat.

“That’s you,” he spat out. “A graven image. A
machine
. Programmed to think you’re a real person. Pathetic.” Enough. “Yeah,
I’m
pathetic,” I snapped back. “You’re hiding behind a tree, trespassing on private property, and about five minutes away from being picked up by the cops and probably shipped off to a city, and
I’m
pathetic.”

“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,”
he whispered, grinning like the nonsense words harbored some secret power. I shuddered.

“Righteousness, righteousness shal you pursue.” He reached up his other hand and stroked my cheek. “God says be righteous to your fel ow man. But he doesn’t say
anything
about what to do with things like you.” The fingers traced the curve of my ear. I jerked my head away, but he grabbed a chunk of hair and tugged, hard. “Guess I’m on my own, figuring out what to do. Got any ideas?”

He laughed, and that’s when the fear came, fast and hard, like a needle of terror jabbed into my skul . “Anything,” that was the word that echoed. He could do anything. I grabbed his hand, the hand that was crawling down my neck, along my spine, grabbed his fingers and bent them back until I heard the joints crunch and the arm at my throat reared back, struck me across the face, snapped my head back into the tree but my leg had already swung into motion, had connected with his groin. He doubled over and I ran, and I could hear him behind me, cursing and grunting, crashing through the brush, closing in as I pushed faster and pul ed away and I could almost imagine a beating heart and heaving lungs, because the panic was so real. But he fel behind, and I made it through the electronic gate in plenty of time, locking him out, locking me in. The fear faded almost immediately, and as it leaked out of me, I had one last, terrifying thought.

I should go back.

To slip through the gate again, to face the man, to
fight
the man—or not to fight, to let him do whatever he wanted, to choose to meet him and his consequences, to turn back, because behind me, where the man glowered from the treeline, was something real. Something human.

The stronger the emotion, Sascha had promised, the more real it would seem.

I’d felt it. I was hooked.

Back in my room, safe and alone. The man, whoever he was, long gone. And with him, the fear.

I stripped off the sweat-free tracksuit. Uploaded the day’s neural changes, ensuring—with nothing more than a few keystrokes and an encrypted transmission to the server—

that if anything happened to this body, a Lia Kahn with ful y up-to-date memories would remain in storage, ready and waiting to be dumped into a new one. Would it be me or a copy of me? And if it was a copy, did that make
me
a copy too, of some other, realer Lia? Was she dead? Was the man right that I was just a machine duped into believing I was human? And if I had been duped, then how could I be a machine? How could any thoughtless, soul ess, consciousness-free thing believe in a lie, believe in anything,
want
to believe?

And did I consider those questions while I was dealing with my brand-new bedtime ritual? Did I fol ow the primrose path of logical deduction al the way to its logical endpoint, to the essential question?

I did not.

I dumped the tracksuit; I uploaded; I pul ed on pajamas; I twisted the blond hair back into a loose, low ponytail; I dumped psycho Susskind into the hal . I did it al mechanical y.

Mechanical y, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatical y, involuntarily. Mechanical y, as in like-a-machine.

And I did not think about that, either.

Instead of turning out the lights and climbing into bed, I mechanical y—always mechanical y—entered the purple-and-blue tiled bathroom for the first time. The stranger’s face watched me from the mirror, impassive. Blank.

I pul ed up the network query I’d made earlier, the one I hadn’t had the nerve to read. The words scrol ed across my left eye, glowing letters superimposed on my reflected face.

I froze the parade of definitions and expanded the one that seemed to matter. The guy’s name was Wil iam James, and he was way too old to be right. Two hundred years ago, no one knew anything; it’s why they al died young and wrinkled with bad hair. Two hundred years ago, they thought light could go as fast as it wanted, they thought the atom was indivisible and possibly imaginary, they thought “computers” were servant girls who added numbers for their bosses when they weren’t busy doing the laundry. They knew nothing. But I read it anyway.

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left
behind, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.

The face didn’t move; the eyes didn’t blink.
Cold and neutral
, I thought. It wasn’t true. I had felt anger; I had felt fear. But fear of what? The man couldn’t have hurt me, not real y.

At least, he couldn’t hurt me forever. Whatever he did to the body, I would remain. I couldn’t die. What was to fear in the face of that?

What kind of emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heartbeats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of shallow weakened limbs,
neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present…?

Even now, in my pajamas, in my bathroom, I felt. The tile beneath my feet. The sink against my palms. I felt absence: the silence that should have been punctuated by steady breathing, in and out. Fingers against my chest, I felt the stil ness beneath them. I felt loss.

In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances
are deplorable, and nothing more.

Nothing more.

“Aren’t you going to kiss her good-bye?”

T
heir whispers slithered through the crack beneath my bedroom door, and I fought the temptation to press myself against it, to find out what Zo and Walker, who had for years shared a mutual, if mostly unspoken, oath of eternal dislike, could possibly need to discuss. Not that the topic was in doubt.

The topic was me.

The whispers stopped. I struck my best casual pose, legs dangling off the side of the bed, elbows digging into the mattress, ankles crossed, head tipped back to the ceiling as if the track of solar panels had proven so engrossing as to make me forget what was about to happen. The door opened, and I held my position, letting Walker see me before I saw him.