Skinned (14 page)

“As I say, M. Kahn, his actions were in no way endorsed by the party, and he has been disciplined. A well-intentioned but sorely misguided soul. I take full responsibility for his trespassing and any damage he may have inflicted on”—he glanced at me—“your property.”

“Are you talking about me?” I asked.

“Lia,” my father snapped. “Manners.”

“Because I’m fine, thanks for asking.”

My father glared. “I appreciate your coming,” he told the man. “And I trust you’ll be keeping your followers off the grounds from now on? And away from my daughter?”

“There will be no more trespassing incidents,” the man said. His voice was slow and rich, like honey poured out of a jar, the words pooling into a puddle of sickening sweetness. Except not so sweet. “And we’ll maintain a respectful distance from…the recipient of the download process.”

“By which you mean me,” I said. “His daughter.”

He took the challenge, finally turning to face me. “I’m sorry,” he said, and, to his credit—or maybe to his acting teacher’s credit—he sounded it. More than sorry. Heartbroken. “I bear you no ill will.”

“No, you just don’t think I’m a real person.”

“I think looks can be deceiving,” he said. “My reflection in the mirror may
look
exactly like me. Talk like me. Move like me. But that doesn’t make it anything more than a copy. Nothing beneath the surface.”

“Your reflection can’t think for itself. It can’t do anything you don’t do.”

“Just like you can’t do anything your programmers didn’t program you to do.”

“No!” He was wrong. He had to be wrong. “I’m not a copy. I’m not a computer. I’m a
person.
”

“A person is created by God,” he said. “Gifted with a natural body, a divine soul. A person thinks and feels, is born and dies. A
person
has free will. You, on the other hand, are a machine. Built by man.
Programmed
by man. You may look like a person and act like a person; you may even, in your own way, believe you’re a person. But, no, I don’t think you are.”

“I have free will.” I was, for instance, willing myself not to walk across the room and punch him in the face.

“You have a computer inside your head, a computer designed to operate within a set of man-made parameters. To react a certain way to one set of stimuli, a different way to another.”

“If I’m just a computer, reacting mindlessly to
stimuli
, how come I’m free to make any decision I want?” I picked up one of my mother’s glass miniatures, a crystal pig that was sitting on the coffee table, watching the argument play out. “I can decide to throw this at the wall or to put it back on the table. No one programmed me one way or another.
I
decide.”

“You’re arguing you have free will because you feel like you have free will?”

“Yes. Which proves my point. If I were just some mindless computer, how could I feel anything?”

“And how do I know you do?” he asked. “How do I know you’re not just programmed to act like you do, to act like you have thoughts and beliefs—the belief in your identity, the belief in your free will, the belief in your humanity?”

“Because I’m telling you, I
do
have those beliefs.”

“And that’s exactly what you’d say if you were programmed to behave as if you were human. You would be programmed to respond to questions such as mine with the assertion that you made your own choices. Even when logic dictates that it’s not true.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I hope not,” he said. “Because if you really
can
think in some way, feel in some way that I can’t fathom, my heart goes out to you. Nothing is more tragic than believing yourself to be something you’re not.” He turned to my father. “I apologize if I’m speaking out of turn, but this
thing
is not your daughter. It has your daughter’s memories, it emulates your daughter’s personality, it may actually believe itself to be your daughter. But, much as you want it to be so, it’s not. Your daughter is gone.”

“Get out of my house,” my father said quietly. You’d have to know him to recognize the tone as thinly masked fury.

“M. Kahn, I speak not to offend, but to help guide you to the truth about—”

“Out!”
He grabbed the glass pig out of my hand and flung it against the wall, just over the Honored Rai Savona’s head. “
Now!”

The Honored Rai Savona didn’t bother to duck. But he made a speedy exit, brushing glittering flakes of glass out of his hair as he left. Once he was gone, my father and I sat in silence.

“So, why do you think he calls himself that?” I asked. “‘The Honored.’” Not because I cared, but because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I didn’t want to leave. This was the first time we’d been alone together since the accident. My father had already turned back to his screen. If I didn’t fill the silence soon, the moment would end.

“He says it’s a sign of respect for his ‘flock,’” my father said, without looking up from his work. “Nondenominational, all-inclusive.” He snorted. “And, of course, a handy way to get respect in name if you can’t get it in deed.”

It was confirmation that father didn’t respect the man who’d called me inhuman. Confirmation I shouldn’t have needed.

“We won’t tell your mother about this,” he said, like it should be obvious. Which it was.

“Of course.”

More silence.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked, thinking of the support group, of Sloane, the fabric of her skirt clenched in her fists. Sloane, who had wanted to die.

My father nodded.

“What if, hypothetically, something happened to me?”

He still didn’t look up. “What would happen?”

“I’m just saying, what if,” I said. “If I got…hurt.”

“Then they’d fix you,” he said brusquely. “I thought they explained all that to you. Nothing to worry about.”

I had to edge toward it slowly, to give myself time to back away if I lost my nerve. “But what if it was bad? What if it was something they couldn’t fix?”

“Then we’d get you a new body,” he said, like it was nothing. Something I’d done before; something everyone did. “If you’re worried about the expense, don’t. It’s all included in what we paid for the initial procedure.”

“No. No, it’s not that. I’m just…What if I didn’t want it? A new body?”

He looked up. “What does that mean?”

“Well, what if, when something happened—I mean, if something happened, I just wanted…”
Not that I would want that. I wouldn’t,
I told myself. It was the principle of the thing; it was knowing I had the choice. “What if I’d told you ahead of time. No new body. What if I just wanted this one to be it?”

“Then we’d get you a new body,” he said, with the same matter-of-fact inflection he’d used the first time.

“No, you don’t understand, I mean—”

“No, Lia. I
do
understand.” With my father it was always hard to tell the difference between disinterest and rage. Both were delivered in the same rigidly controlled voice, his lips thin, his face expressionless. “You’re underage. Which gives me legal control over your medical condition. And I would prefer said condition remain ‘alive.’ So, in your hypothetical scenario, you’d be overruled.”

It
was
just hypothetical. But he didn’t ask for reassurance on that front. “Until next year,” I said instead.

“Because?”

“I turn eighteen,” I reminded him. “Then it’s my call. Legally.”

He gave me a thin smile. “Legally. Yes. If one were to play by the rules.”

“You taught us to always play by the rules.”

He nodded. “Necessary. Until you’re in a position to make the rules. Which I am.”

“So you’re saying—”

“Lia, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to work.” He tapped the screen. “Which means I don’t have time for your ridiculous hypotheticals.”

“Sorry. Yeah, of course.” I stood up. Backed out of the room. “Later, maybe. Or, whatever.” So he didn’t want to talk to me. Even about this. So what?

But then he spoke again. Without looking at me. Barely loud enough for me to hear. “I’m saying I won’t let you die. Will
not
. Not again.”

Upstairs, I sat on the edge of my bed, alone again. I didn’t want to be dead, I knew that. Even living like this…It was living. It was
something.
I couldn’t imagine the other option. I tried, sometimes, lying in bed, thinking about what it would be like: nothingness. The end. Sometimes I almost caught it, or at least, the edge of it. A nonexistence that stretched on forever, no more of me, no more of anything. The part I couldn’t grip was all the stuff I’d leave behind, the stuff that would stay here and keep going when I was gone.

When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment. Other times I used to wonder if other people thought—I mean
really
thought—the way I did. They said they did, and they acted like they did, but how was I supposed to know if it was true? It was like colors. I knew what red looked like to me, but for all I knew, it looked different to everyone else. Maybe to everyone else, red looked like blue, and blue looked like red. It was, I had to admit, just like the Honored Savona had said. How could you ever know what was really going on in someone else’s head?

What I’m saying is, when I was a kid, I knew I was real. I just wasn’t sure anyone else was. And even if I didn’t think that way anymore, I still wasn’t convinced that the world could go on without me.

I didn’t want to die.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was now I
couldn’t.
My father wouldn’t let me.

Zo peeked into the room, hesitating in the doorway. “I heard,” she said.

Big surprise. “That’s what happens when you eavesdrop.”

Zo scowled. “I wasn’t—whatever. Forget it.”

“I’m sorry.” Not that I was, not really. But I didn’t want her to go. “This day just sucks.”

“Yeah.” She looked like she didn’t know what to say. Neither did I. Zo and I had never talked much before, and now we didn’t talk at all.

“You think he’s right?” I finally asked.

“What, Dad?” She shrugged. “What’s the difference? You planning on another accident? Or should I say”—she curled her fingers into exaggerated quotation marks—“
accident
?”

I wondered, again, why she seemed to hate me so much. But I couldn’t ask.

She might answer.

“Not Dad,” I said. “The Faith guy. About—you know. All of it.”

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” Zo said. “So I kind of doubt you have one.”

“But the rest of it? About me being just a machine, fooling myself into believing…You think he could be right?”

She hesitated. Too long. Great—another answer I didn’t want to hear.

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Of course he’s not right. I’m just—”

“I don’t think you’re fooling yourself,” Zo said slowly. “And I don’t think…I don’t think it’s true what he said. About it not being natural. What’s natural anymore? Besides…” She glanced toward the window. The fog—or smog or haze or whatever it was—was bad today, so thick you couldn’t even see the trees. “Nature sucks.”

I laughed. She flinched.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Zo shifted her weight. “I’m just not used to it yet.”

“My laugh.”

“Your whole…Yeah. Your laugh.”

“Remember when Mom decided she wanted to be a singer, and she made us sit through her rehearsal?” I didn’t know what had made me think of it.

A smile slipped onto Zo’s face, like she couldn’t help it. “And we just had to sit there while she butchered that stupid song over and over again. What the hell was it called?”

We both paused. Then—

“‘Flowers in the Springtime’!” Together.

She giggled. “Everything was going fine until you made me laugh—”

“
I
made
you
laugh?”

“You made that
face
!” she said accusingly. “With your cheeks all puffed up and your eyebrows scrunched….”

“Yeah, because I was holding my breath, trying not to laugh at
you
, looking like you were having some kind of seizure.”

“Okay, but how could you not laugh, when she kept singing that stupid song—”

“‘Flowers in the springtime, apples in the trees,’” I warbled in a falsetto. “‘Your hand in my hand, gone weak in my knees.’”

“She sounded like a sick cat,” Zo sputtered.

“Like psycho Susskind, that night we left him outside in the thunderstorm.”

Zo shook her head. “Like psycho Susskind, if we threw him out the window. Howling for his life.”

“And when you started laughing—”

“When
you
started laughing—”

“I thought she was going to kill us both.”

Zo grinned. “At least that was the end of her singing career.”

“Career,” I said. “Yeah, right. A bright future in breaking glasses and shattering eardrums.” I shook my head. “And remember when Walker showed up that night, I had to explain why I was grounded, but that just started me off laughing again, and then
you
started again, and we couldn’t get the story out? I wonder if I ever did tell him what that was about.”

“You did,” Zo said flatly. She’d stopped laughing. “You texted him later and told him.”

“Oh. Right, okay. How do you even remember that?”

“I have to go,” Zo said. It was like the last few minutes hadn’t happened. “I’m late.”

“Where are you going?”

“What do you care?” she snapped.

I didn’t say anything.

She sagged against the doorframe, just a little, not enough so most people would notice, but I was her sister. I noticed. “I’m going out with Cass, okay? Is that a problem?” But she didn’t ask like she really wanted to know.