Skinned (16 page)

Maybe, I thought, I was being punished. Maybe the Faithers were right, and I wasn’t supposed to exist at all. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but if He or She or It or Whatever was pissed off to see me wandering around all soulless and abominable, this seemed like a pretty effective start to the divine retribution.

“You think she’s stuck like this forever?”

I
thought so. The absence of body felt absolute. I was pure mind. I was floating. I was wishing I could float away, when the crowd parted, and Auden Heller came barreling through.

“Get away,” he hissed at them. No one moved. “Get the fuck out of the way!”

Auden wasn’t big enough to take on a hostile crowd; he was barely big enough to take on a hostile individual, and he was facing plenty of them. But they were facing Auden, half-crazed behind his thick black glasses. Maybe they saw something worth avoiding or maybe they’d just gotten tired of laughing at the frozen freak. Maybe their markers had run dry. For whatever reason, they got out of his way.

Auden wrapped his arms around my waist.

I don’t need
you
to save me,
I thought furiously.

“I hope this doesn’t hurt you,” he murmured.

Nothing hurts me,
I thought.

I didn’t expect he’d be strong enough to pick me up. He was. He carried me, my body stiff, my feet a few inches off the ground, my face staring blankly over his shoulder, watching the crowd, still laughing, recede into the distance.

“You’ll be okay,” Auden said quietly as we crossed the quad. “They’ll know how to fix you.”

I wondered what made him think I could hear. Or that I cared.

I wondered why he was bothering to help.

He brought me to the school’s med-tech, but of course, that was useless. I didn’t need first aid; I needed a tune-up. The tech voiced my parents, who must have voiced BioMax. Maybe they even went straight to call-me-Ben. And I waited, propped up in a corner, still frozen. Auden waited too, sitting in a chair next to my body, holding my hand.

“I’m coming with you,” he said when the man arrived to take me away.

The man shook his head.

“Yes,” Auden insisted.

The world flipped upside down as the man hoisted me over his shoulder. My face slammed into his back, and I was stuck staring at his ass.

“How do I even know you’re legit?” Auden asked. “You could be trying to kidnap her or something. It’s not like she can stop you.”

“It’s not like you can either, kid.” The man, large enough to multitask, shoved Auden out of the way, using the arm that wasn’t holding me.

“Let them go,” the school tech told Auden. “He knows how to help her.”

No one knows that,
I thought.

The man carried me outside, out to the parking lot, past another crowd of jeering wannabes probably already posting shots to their favorite stalker zones. He carried me to a car and loaded me inside.

“Kid’s right,” the man muttered, folding me into the back. “I could do anything. Who’d know?”

His hand lingered on my leg, which he’d had to twist to fit into the narrow space. My limbs were rigid, but not as frozen as they’d seemed. With a little effort, they moved when he moved them. He rubbed his finger in a slow circle along the skin of my calf.

I can’t even feel it,
I told myself.
So it’s not really happening. It’s not really my body.

“Almost forgot,” he said, chuckling. He raised up my shirt, reached underneath. I watched the fabric undulate as his hands crept up my torso. I couldn’t feel him massaging the patch of skin just below my armpit or carefully peeling it back to reveal the fail-safe, an input port that functioned only with BioMax tech and a well-protected access code; an emergency shutdown. But I knew what he was doing. And no matter how much I willed myself to stay awake, I knew it wouldn’t work.

Don’t,
I thought uselessly.

There are some moments you’d rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it’s mostly those moments in which it’s smarter—safer—to stay awake.

Don’t.

“Sweet dreams,” the man said.

Please don’t.

Lights out.

“Don’t,” I said, and I said it out loud, in a different place, a familiar cramped white room, a too-bright light in my eyes, call-me-Ben’s face inches from mine. I was back on floor thirteen.

“There you go,” he said. “All better.”

“What happened?” I remembered the car, I remembered the man’s hands on my body, under my shirt, I remembered his sour smile, and then…I was here, awake, with call-me-Ben. As if no time had passed.

“I’d suspect someone hasn’t been taking very good care of herself,” he said. “And your system…Well, think of it like this: In an organic body, too much wear and tear, overexhaustion, and malnutrition weaken you, make you susceptible to bugs. This body, when mistreated, can fall prey to the same problem. Not germs, of course.” He laughed fakely. “But every system can be crashed by the right bug—under the right circumstances. A temporary disconnect between your body and your neural network. Shouldn’t be a problem again if you take care of yourself.”

But that wasn’t what I needed to know. “How did I get here? Who was that guy?”

“The man who brought you in? Just one of our techs.”

“He knocked me out.”

“He initiated a shutdown,” said call-me-Ben. “Standard protocol. I’m sure it couldn’t have been very pleasant, frozen like that. We didn’t want to cause you any more discomfort than necessary.”

“He just brought me here?”

Ben nodded. “Straight here, and we fixed you right up. We’ll run a few more diagnostic tests, and then you should be able to go home.”

“How long?”

“Shouldn’t take more than—”

“No. How long was I out?”

Call-me-Ben checked the time. “About five hours, I believe. But they didn’t start working on you until I got down here. So it only took an hour or so to fix you right up. Just a minor problem, nothing to worry about.”

Five hours gone. Turned off.

And four of those hours lying in a heap somewhere, limp and malleable, like a
doll
, while the man, or anyone else, carted me around, did whatever he wanted. Or maybe did nothing. Maybe dumped me on a table somewhere, like spare parts in storage, and walked away.

If you can’t remember something, did it really happen?

No, I decided.

Or even if it did, it didn’t matter. The body wasn’t
me
, not when the brain was shut down. They treated it like a bunch of spare parts, because that’s all it was. It wasn’t me.

Which meant whatever happened, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

“You have to start taking care of yourself,” Ben said. And there was something about the way he said it that made it seem like he knew what I’d been doing, all of it. It was the same tone Sascha had used when she mentioned my boyfriend. A little too knowing, like he had to restrain himself from winking. “Will you promise me you’ll do that?”

“Can you guarantee this won’t happen to me again?” I asked.

“If you stop pushing yourself so hard? Yes, I can guarantee it. So can
you
guarantee
me
this won’t happen again?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t care what I had to do: I would never be that helpless again.

W
hen I finally got home, there was a message from Auden waiting at my zone. His av was weird, like him, a creature with frog legs and black beetle wings. It chirped its message in Auden’s voice. “Are you okay?”

I ignored it.

But the next day at school, when he found me eating lunch behind the low stone wall, I let him sit down.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said.

“Neither are you.”

“But they can’t catch
me
.” I nodded toward the biosensors. “No bio, ergo, no sensing.”

Auden shrugged. “And they don’t care about catching me. No one’s paying attention.”

“How do you know?”

He unwrapped a slim sandwich with some suspiciously greenish filling. “Where do you think I used to eat? Before you took over my territory, so to speak.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’ is right.”

“So I guess I should thank you or something,” I said. “For yesterday.”

“I guess you should.” There was a pause. “But I can’t help noticing that you didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or shove the sandwich in his face. I certainly wasn’t saying thank you.

“So what’s in the bag, anyway?” I asked instead.

“What bag?”

I rolled my eyes. “That bag.” I pointed to the green sack he always toted around. “Or is it just your security blanket?”

Auden flushed. “Stuff. Nothing important.”

“Really?” I doubted it and reached for the bag. “Let me—”

“Don’t!” he snapped, snatching it away. His fists balled around the straps.

“Okay, whatever. Sorry.” I held up my arms in surrender. “Forget I asked.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but…”

“I mean it. Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

I wasn’t sure if I was mad at him or he was mad at me. Or if neither of us was mad. There was an uncertain silence between us, like we were deciding whether to settle in and get comfortable or to leave.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“What makes you think I want something?”

“We don’t even know each other, and you keep—you know, sticking up for me. Being
nice.
And now you show up here. What is it?”

“So you think if someone’s nice to you, it means they want something?” he asked. “Interesting.”

“What’s so interesting about that?”

“If I were a shrink, I might wonder what it means for your relationships with other people and what you expect to get out of them,” he said.

He was so deeply weird. “What the hell is a shrink?”

“They were like doctors, for your moods. Someone you talked to when you were feeling screwed up.”

“Why would you
talk
to some random when you could just take a b-mod to feel better?”

“This was before b-mods, I think,” he said. “Or maybe for people who didn’t want them.”

“Sounds kind of stupid, if you ask me.” Who wouldn’t want to mod their mood, if they could? Something to make you happy when you wanted to be happy, numb when you wanted to be numb? I missed them more than chocolate. And what did I get in exchange? Eternal life, for one thing.

And to help with the feeling-screwed-up part? I supposed there was always Sascha.

I missed the drugs.

“And, by the way, my relationships are just fine,” I said. “At least I
have
relationships, unlike some people.”

“Oh, excuse me,” he said with exaggerated contrition. “I forgot—You’re
popular
.”

For some reason, maybe because it was so far from reality, maybe because he made being popular sound like a fatal condition, maybe just because there was nothing else to do but cry and I was a few tear ducts short, I laughed. So did he.

“People are idiots,” he said when he caught his breath.

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I’m not just saying it. Those girls you used to hang out with? Superficial bitches. And the guys—”

“Stop,” I said.

“They’re not your
friends
,” he said. Like I needed a reminder. “They dropped you.”

“I noticed. Thanks. But they’re still…” I shook my head. “So is that what you think of me, too? Superficial bitch?”

“I think…” For the first time he seemed not quite sure what to say. “You’re different now. And that interests me.”

It wasn’t an answer.

“So that’s why you helped yesterday? I’m, like, some kind of scientific study for you?” I said bitterly. “Something neat to play with?”

“Why do you have to do that?” he asked.

“What?”

“Turn everything into something small like that. Mean.”

“Are you trying to be my shrunk again?” I said.

“Shrink.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I just want to know what it’s like,” he said. “Being…”

“Different?” I suggested. “It sucks.”

“No. I know what it’s like to be different.” He wound the strap of his bag around his fingers. “I want to know what it’s like to be
you
. To be downloaded. To have this mind that’s totally under your control, to know you’re never going to age, never going to die, this body that’s perfect in every way…” He looked up at me, blushing. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I just…”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “No one’s meant it like that. Not since…before.”

He blushed a deeper pink. “You do, though,” he mumbled. “Lookgoodlikethis.” It took me a second to decipher what he’d said. “Better than before. I think, at least.”

The body couldn’t blush. Not that I would have blushed, anyway, just because Auden Heller gave me a compliment. The Auden Hellers of the world were always giving compliments to the Lia Kahns of the world. It’s what they were there for.

But it was the first time in too long that I’d really felt like a Lia Kahn.

“Thank you,” I said. “For yesterday, I mean.”

“So what
does
it feel like?” he asked eagerly.

“Like…not much.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to explain it to him. I
did
, that was the strange part. But I didn’t know how. “Everything’s almost the same, but not quite. It’s all a little wrong, you know? It sounds different, it looks different, and when it comes to feeling…”

“I read that every square inch of the artificial flesh has more than a million receptors woven into it, to simulate organic sensation,” he said.

“If you say so.” I hadn’t read anything; I didn’t want to know how the body worked. I just wanted it to work better. “But maybe a million isn’t enough. I can feel stuff, but it doesn’t feel…” I brushed my hand across the surface of his bag. This time he didn’t pull it away. “It’s like if I close my eyes and touch the bag, I know it’s there. I know it’s a rough surface, a little scratchy. I
know
all that, but I can’t…It’s just not the same. It’s like I’m living in my head, you know? Like I’m operating the body by remote control. I’m not
inside
it, somehow.”

Auden nodded. “The sensation of disembodiment, an alienated dissociation common to the early phase of readjustment. I read about that, too.”

“That doesn’t mean you understand,” I snapped. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I know I don’t,” he said. “But I want to, believe me.”

I almost did.

The final note, a fever-pitched, keening whine, seemed to stretch on forever. It didn’t fade, didn’t swell, just sliced through us, a single, unending tone until, without warning, it ended. For a second everything froze—and then the applause crashed through the silence. A thunder of cheers and screams. The band went nuts, jumping up and down, smashing instruments against the stage, waving their arms in an obvious signal to the fans: more applause, more shouting, more, more, more. Only the lead singer stayed frozen, her mouth open like she was still spooling out that final note, this time in a register too high for us to hear. I felt like she was looking at me.

“Nothing?” Auden asked, stripping off his gear.

“Nothing.” I dumped the earplugs and goggles on the pile of crap next to his bed. “But that’s what I figured.”

Auden had thought that maybe some live music—or at least, as live as it gets these days—would penetrate in a way the recorded stuff couldn’t. That maybe it would get my heart pounding, even though I didn’t have a heart; my breath caught in my throat, even though I didn’t have any lungs; my eyes tearing up, even though I didn’t have any ducts…You get the idea.

We both knew it was a long shot.

But I’d been willing to give it a try. And even though it hadn’t worked—even though the music made me feel cold and dead inside, just like always—it was better, having Auden there. This time it didn’t feel like a disappointment, or like I’d lost yet another piece of myself. It just felt like an experimental result—not even a failure, because when you’re experimenting, every new piece of information is a success.

That’s what Auden said, at least.

And that’s what he called them: experiments. At least going to a virtual concert was more fun than sticking my head in a bucket of ice water to see how long I could stand the cold. (Result: longer than Auden could stand waiting for me to give up.) We’d spent the week “experimenting,” trying to see what I couldn’t do—and what I could. It wasn’t like before, on my own, when I’d pushed the body until it broke. This wasn’t about testing limits, Auden said. This was about getting to know myself again. Because maybe that would lead to liking myself. Just a little.

I laughed at him for saying that—it was a little too Sascha-like for my taste. But I went along with the experiments. Partly because I didn’t have anything else to do—or anyone else to talk to. Partly because I wasn’t sure he was wrong.

“What’s it like?” he asked now. “Linking in with your mind?”

“I don’t know.” He was always asking me that: “What’s it like?” And I never had a good answer.
What’s it like to breathe?
I could have asked, and stumped him just as easily.
What’s it feel like to dream, to swallow, to age?

“I mean, how do you do it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just think about linking in, and the network pops up on my eye screen.”

“But
how
?”

“Same way I do anything, I guess. How do I shut down at night? How do I stand up when I want to?” I asked, wishing we could change the subject. “How do
you
?”

Auden looked thoughtful. “I just do it, I guess. I want to, and it happens.”

“Well, same thing,” I said, even though we both knew it wasn’t.

“So how come you can’t do more?”

“More like what?”

“Like, you still need a keyboard,” he said. “Why can’t you just
think
commands at the network and make stuff happen? Like you did with the language hookup.”

I’d told him all about the computer that had spoken for me, how horrible it had been. Except he didn’t get the horrible part; he thought it sounded cool.

“I just can’t,” I said. “It’s not the same thing.”

“It should be,” he argued. “If they have the tech to do it in the hospital, that means they have it, period. They could have wired your brain right into the network. It’d be like telepathy or something.”

“It’d be weird, is what it would be,” I said. “And they were trying to make us normal.”

It had been call-me-Ben’s favorite word, Sascha’s too.
You are normal.
Or at least,
as normal as we can make you.

“You’ve got to get over that,” Auden said.

“What?”

“The normal thing.”

Because I wasn’t. “Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“But you’ve got something so much better,” Auden said, and I knew where he was going. He had the same dreamy look in his eyes that adults always got when they talked about how I would never age.

“I wasn’t afraid of getting old,” I said.

“What about
not
getting old?” Auden asked. “What about dying? You always act like it’s nothing, Lia, but it’s everything.
You can’t die
. What about that is not amazing?”

“I don’t know. I never really thought about it much. Before, I mean.” I’d never known anyone who had died. At least not anyone who mattered. Everyone dies, I got that. But I’d never quite believed it would happen to me. And now it wouldn’t. That didn’t seem amazing. Weirdly enough, it just seemed like the natural order of things. “I guess I’ve never really been too afraid of it. Death.”

He paused and looked away. “Maybe you should be.”

Somewhere below us, a door slammed.

Auden flinched. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Almost six. Why?”

“Nothing. Forget it. You should go.”

I’d come to his house every day after school for a week, but I’d always left by sunset—until today.

Footsteps tramped up the stairs.

I put my hand on the door, but before I could open it, Auden grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he whispered.

I shrugged him off. “What? I thought you wanted me to go.”

“Yeah, but not…” He shot a panicked glance at the window, like he was trying to decide whether to push me through it. Anything to get me out of the house before whoever was out in the hallway came into the room. Before they saw me.

“Are you
hiding
me?” I asked loudly. “Embarrassed or something?”

He put his finger to his lips, silently begging. I couldn’t believe it. At school he acted like he didn’t care what anyone thought. He kept telling me that I was better off being different, if my only other option was being the same. I didn’t believe him, but I’d believed that
he
believed it. At least, until now.

“Auden, you actually got a girl in there with you?” a man’s voice called from the hallway. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“Just me,” Auden called back weakly.

Screw him.

I twisted the knob. Opened the door.

The man in the hallway didn’t look anything like Auden. He was blond and handsome, his features perfectly symmetrical, green eyes, rosy cheeks, square chin. He could have starred in a pop-up for a gen-tech lab. And the two little girls clutching his hands were just as picture-perfect. Their blond hair was tied back into pigtails; green eyes sparkled; identical dimples dotted their identical cheeks.