The Adoration of Jenna Fox (22 page)

I stop midway down the hallway. I
see Father's eyes. Mother's desperate glance. A dark locked closet and hidden
key.
Upload. 

We cracked the code, Jenna.

The screwdriver slips from my fingers.

Nanobots
the size of blood cells are
injected, sometimes even without a person's knowledge.

My feet stumble forward.

Think of a glass ball twirling on
your fingertip. . . .

The walls sway. Mother's door looms.

The mind is an energy that the brain
produces. . . .

I grip the frame of the closet door to steady
myself.

You have to keep it spinning or it
falls and shatters. . . .

I stare at the three humming boxes.

. . .
we upload those bits of information
into an environment that allows that energy to keep spinning. . . .

Correction. Environment. I stare at three
humming black environments. Hell.

Hurry, Jenna. Come.

I can't.

I back away.

Backups. Of course.

And I run.

Shared Thoughts

The floor of the forest is damp. The blanket of
eucalyptus leaves rustles beneath me. I have been lying here for hours,
listening to the sounds. There are few. The leaves swishing beneath me when I
turn my head or move a leg. The sighing creak of branches and limbs when the
breeze pushes them farther than they want to go. The occasional hollow caw of
one raven to another. The faint desperate cry of Claire calling
"Jenna!" wondering where I have gone.

I hold my hands above me, my fingers fanning
out in a delicate performance, my palms coming together, warm and smooth. It is
real skin. Real movement. The structure listens to my
neurochips
.
When I think
clap,
my hands obey, and the frenzied claps echo through
the forest. My brain.
I do have ten percent.
The butterfly, Mother
called it. My winged bit of humanity.
A few ounces at most.
If I believe
in such a thing as a soul, did it take flight with a glistening handful of
tissue? Does the soul cling to the last vestige of humanity until there is no
more? If a soul can reside in a fistful of embryo, why not in a fistful of
white matter?

I cup my palm, imagining a butterfly landing in
it, feeling the flutter and life, and I go to a sleeping, remembering,
dreamworld
. I dream of golden-winged butterflies, red
skirts, lopsided cakes, and Ethan's mouth on my own.

When I wake, the rickrack of sky visible above
the canopy has gone from cerulean to black. The tops of the trees are barely
visible, only a sliver of moon to light their edges.

"Jenna!" Mother's distant searching
voice is pitiful.

I have to go back. Eventually. But
not until I understand one thing. Which is the real me? The one in the closet
or the one here on the forest floor?

Backup

They are sitting on the veranda as I emerge
from the forest. Leaving the back door open as I ran out must have given them a
clue to my direction. In another time, Mother would have called the police by
now, but that is not an option anymore. Mother is the first to see me. She
begins to stand, but Father reaches out and she sits again. Lily sips a glass
of wine.

Walking toward them, I feel like I am
interrupting a candlelit dinner party instead of a frightened vigil. Lily
passes Mother a platter of stuffed mushrooms. I feel an annoyed ruffle run
through me.

"It's a little late, don't you
think?" Father says casually. He takes a bite of cheese and then
nonchalantly washes it down with a swig of wine. His eyes are angry, glassy,
but his movements are practiced restraint.

"Not too late," I answer.

"We can't keep living this way,
Jenna," Mother blurts out.

Father shoots her a glance. Lily rolls her
eyes.

"Welcome home, Father," I say. I
reach out for a mushroom and before anyone can stop me, I pop it in my mouth.

All three stare at me, the impervious Jenna
Fox, at the center of attention once again. Where are the cameras? I play the
scene with an exaggerated bow.

"
Dammit
,
Jenna!" Father slams his hand down on the glass tabletop, rattling the
dishes. "You're not the first person in the world to have to deal with a
disabling accident!"

"I know, Father." I sit down in the
chair opposite him.

"There's those three people in the closet,
too. The ones in the black boxes? Now
that's
what I call a
disability."

Lily grunts. "Touché." And she downs
the rest of her wine.

"Jenna, we have to talk about these
things," Mother says. "You can't just run off and worry us every time
you hit a bump."

"I didn't hit a bump. You both hid it from
me."

"They aren't people," Father says.

"Have another," Lily offers, holding
out the platter of mushrooms to me.

"We didn't hide it from you," Mother
says.

"Did you hear me?"

"Behind a locked door
is
hidden."

"Shall I open another bottle?"

"What do you expect when you're acting
like this?"

"Stop!" I yell. I can't keep up with
the tangled conversation.

"I'll open another," Lily says. She
shuffles off to the house while we sit at the table, using the silence to
regroup. Mother lifts her hair off her shoulders and blows at the wisps on her
forehead. The shifting Santa Ana winds have made it unseasonably warm for
March. Father turns his glass, suddenly so interested in his wine, his brows
creasing, his concentration holding his emotions back. I see his lips pull
tight, like a seam within him is splitting.

"Let's start at the beginning,"
Mother says softly. :"What were you doing in my closet?"

"Let's start
more
at the
beginning," I say. "Why is there a computer in your closet with my
name on it?"

"It's a backup, Jenna," Father says,
in his usual cut-the-crap voice. "We had to save the original
upload."

I can hardly see Father as he continues to
explain. I can only remember a place with no dimension, no depth, no heat, no
cold, but immeasurable amounts of darkness and solitude. Another Jenna is still
there.

"We already told you that this is
uncharted territory. We don't think anything will go wrong, but if it does, we
have a backup just in case. But it can't be a part of any Network. It's too
risky. So we keep the
bioenvironment
completely
independent of all Networks and power sources."

I stand, holding my arms, walking in circles,
shaking my head.

"Jenna
—"

"What are you doing?
You have another me trapped in that
environment! And Kara and Locke!"

Father shifts in his seat. His shoulders hunch
awkwardly. "It's not another you or them, and
trapped
isn't a good
word to use. It's only bits of
infor
—"

"It's a mind. You said so yourself."

"But it's a mind without any sensory
input. It's like limbo or a
dreamworld
."

"Trust me, it's not a
dreamworld
.
Not by a long shot. It's more like a nightmare." I collapse back into my
chair and close my eyes.

"Jenna, it's only been a few months,"
Claire says. "Give us some time to work this out. We're still trying to
think it through ourselves. That's all we ask. Just give us some time."

She is not listening. Neither of them are. They
don't want to believe that the place I occupied for eighteen months was
anything less than a dreamy waiting room. And time is all I've given them.
Time. Months. Years. A lifetime of being theirs. Will a time come when I can
ever say no? Do I even have time? I need a backup because something could go
wrong? I am suddenly aware of my quivering hands and the tremor in my leg.

"What could go wrong?" I ask. It
hadn't occurred to me that I could suddenly blink into nothingness like a
crashed computer with not even two years used up on my shelf life. That two
years seems so precious now
—a lifetime. I don't
want to be . . . gone. My insides tighten and I feel breathless.
Breathless
from
someone who has no lungs. Should I laugh or cry?

I feel Father grab my hands in his, and I open
my eyes. "We don't think anything will go wrong, Angel. But we don't have
any long-term data for a project of this magnitude. The Bio Gel has only been
in use for eight years and then it's only been used for isolated organ
transplants, not as an entire nervous system. The problem might be if there are
conflicts between your original brain tissue and the Bio Gel, signals that
might create almost an antibody effect, with one trying to override the other.
We haven't seen it yet and we don't expect to, but scenarios like that are why
we have backups. Just in case."

Blink. Gone.

I don't want to blink out of existence. Images
flash through me. Ethan's stormy eyes. Mr. Bender's sparrows.
Allys
smiling. Claire holding her arms out to me. The
forest and sky that mesmerized me for hours. New images from my new life.
Images that are not in my backup. That's a different Jenna. I want to keep the
Jenna I am now.

"Here we go." Lily plops another
bottle of wine down on the table and places an extra glass in front of me.

"Have you lost your mind, Lily?"
Father says.

"It's not like she can get drunk."

"But it still
—"

"Leave it, Matt," Mother says.

"Pour up, Lily," I say, lifting my
glass.

She does, and Father doesn't say another word.

I don't
get
drunk, but I do feel it warm
my insides. However primitive my digestive system may be, it seems to
appreciate Lily's effort, even if the wine is tasteless.

"Why are there backups for Kara and
Locke?" I ask.

"It was me," Mother says as she rubs
her temple. She takes another sip of her wine and looks out across the pond.
"We had already scanned you. We had hope. But a few days after we had
moved you, I had to go back to the hospital to retrieve some of your belongings
and I saw Kara's and Locke's parents and the agony they were going through. I
begged your father to scan them, too, in case they didn't make it." She
sighs and looks back at me. "So he did."

I'm ashamed as I look at the pain etched on
Mother's face, and yet angry, too, because of a missing scar on my chin and two
lost inches and a perspective I will never see from again. The angry me
overrides the shamed one. I am entitled, after all, the entitled Jenna. I mix
in some sarcasm, too, so I get the full value I have coming to me. "And
where are their new-and-improved bodies?"

"There are none," Father says.
"Right after I scanned them, the police report on the accident came back
and their parents wouldn't even talk to us, much less let us get close to Kara
and Locke. Locke died a few days later, and we couldn't even get something as
simple as a skin sample. They cremated his body. Same thing with Kara. She was
moved to another facility, and we weren't allowed access. We don't even have
any original DNA. Nothing to build from. They will never have new bodies."

I feel sharpness, like a razor is slicing
through me, cutting one part away from another, a part that can never be
stitched or put back together. Kara and Locke, forever not here or gone.
"How long do you plan on keeping them?"

"We don't know."

"As long as we can."

"As long as charges
—"

"Indefinitely."

"At least until
—"

"There may come a time when we can use
their scans."

"For the accident. Something they know
might help. We have to keep them as long as there is a possibility
—"

"Witnesses?" I say. "You're
keeping them as
witnesses?"

"Not
them,
Jenna. It's only
uploaded information."

Is that all I was? All those months, my
thoughts crammed into a formless world? Only bits of information? And if that's
all I was then, am I any more than that now? I just have better packaging. Does
the ten percent of original brain really matter? My whole brain was scanned and
uploaded. The fleshy human handful seems more like a sentimental token. Or does
it really communicate my humanity to the neural chips in mysterious ways even
Father doesn't understand?

Only uploaded information.
Kara and Locke in that dark world
forever. Can I live with that?

"Something they know might hurt me,
too," I say. No one comments. We all know that opportunity would never
transpire. Anything bad Kara and Locke might have to say about Jenna would
never be heard. They are being saved only in case they could help me. I reach
out to refill my glass, and Lily stops me.