The Body Electric - Special Edition (2 page)

“Mom!” I say, dropping the plate on the counter and rushing to her. She looks down at her hand and curses, tossing the knife into the sink.

“Damn, damn, damn,” she says. “It’s ruined, isn’t it?” She looks past me at the plate of tomatoes. “All ruined. Damn!”

“I don’t care about the tomatoes,” I say, wrapping a tea towel around her finger as Mom reaches past me, grabbing the plate and sliding the tomato slices into the rubbish bin. “Be still,” I order, but she doesn’t listen. She tries to shake me off.

“Forget about the damn tomatoes!” I shout, snatching her hand again and pressing the towel into the cut. Mom stares down at it dispassionately, watching the red blood soak through the white cloth.

I slowly raise my eyes from Mom’s hand to her face. There’s no emotion on her face. No pain.

“You didn’t feel it, did you?” I whisper.

“Of course I did,” Mom says.

I squeeze the cut finger, just a little, just enough pressure that she should feel a spike of pain. But Mom doesn’t notice.

I drop her hand, and Mom peels away the tea towel. It’s ruined—but Mom’s finger isn’t. As we watch, the raw, bleeding flesh slowly knits back up, and the skin starts to regrow.

Mom snorts. “At least the bots are good for something.”

“You’re getting worse,” I say. It’s not a question.

“Ella—” Mom starts to reach for me, but I wrap my arms around myself. The back of my tongue aches as burning tears fill my eyes. “Ella, it’s not that bad.”

“It
is
!” I shout, staring at her. Mom’s eyes plead with me to forget what I saw, to pretend that everything is okay. But it’s not. It’s not.

It’s the beginning of the end.

This is the way things are:

Almost two years ago, Mom was diagnosed with Hebb’s Disease. It’s rare, and it’s fatal. Some people think it comes from the universal cancer vaccination since it was developed a short time before the first case of the disease, but no one’s sure. All we know is that, for some reason, the space between neurons starts to grow wider. Your brain is
yelling
at you to move, but your nervous system can’t hear it.

Most people don’t last more than half a year with Hebb’s, but Mom’s survived two whole years thanks to the research on nanobots Dad did. He was close to finding a cure, I know he was. He used nanobots to help alleviate the symptoms, using the tiny, microscopic robots to communicate the messages between Mom’s brain and nervous system. The bots have the additional advantage to heal other areas where Mom’s been hurt, like the cut on her finger. Medical nanobots are no new thing—everyone has vaccination bots when they’re born—but the way Dad used them on Mom’s illness… it seemed like a miracle.

But then Dad died.

And now Mom’s…

Not being able to feel anything is the first warning sign. If a knife nearly sliced off her finger, and she didn’t even freaking
notice
, that means Dad’s temporary fix for Mom is failing. The bots aren’t working. The disease is taking over. The disease that eventually kills every single one of its victims is winning.

“Mom,” I say, my voice eerily calm. “How long have you had trouble feeling things?”

“It’s not been long, Ella, please, don’t worry about
—
”

“How long.” It doesn’t even sound like a question any more, just a demand.

Mom sighs. “A few months. It’s… been getting steadily worse.”

My hands are shaking so violently that I curl them into fists and hold them behind my back so Mom doesn’t see. I can’t be weak, not in front of her, not when she needs my strength.

When Mom was first diagnosed, I practiced saying “My mother is dead,” until I could say it without crying.

And then Mom didn’t die. Dad found a way to stave off the disease, and she lived.

But he didn’t.

Dad’s death was sudden, and violent, and it gutted me like knife guts a fish. An explosion in the lab where he worked, about a year ago, killing him and several other scientists. No one expected it—no one except the terrorists who planned it. I was so
angry
. He left me with a sick mother and no hope. And when I woke up the next morning, and every morning after, there would be a moment, a brief moment, where I’d forgotten Dad was dead. And every morning, I relived every ounce of pain when I remembered again that he wasn’t here with us. With me.

“Ella.” My mother speaks loudly, drawing me back to the here and now. “I don’t want you to worry about it, really. Jadis is taking me to a new doctor, one of the ones in the lab that gave us the grant money, and well—don’t give up hope on me, okay?”

I jerk my head up, staring at her fiercely. “Never,” I say, and I mean it more than anything else I’ve ever sworn.

I’m not ready to be an orphan.

three

I watch Mom like a hawk, every nerve in my body strung out. How could I not have noticed her condition worsening before? She moves slower than normal. When I stare at her face, I notice that the skin just under her jaw is a little looser, as if she’s shriveling from the inside.

When the buzzer at the door sounds, I nearly fall out of my chair. I tap my fingers across the cuff at my wrist quickly. My cuffLINK is connected to our apartment, and my commands for the door are received immediately. It slides open noiselessly and Ms. White steps inside.

“How is everyone?” she asks cheerfully. Then, seeing my grim look, she asks again in a lower voice, “Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s
fine
,” Mom says, crossing the room. She picks up her brown purse from the bench by the door, but weighs it in her hand, as if the small bag was too heavy. She drops it back down; all her information is contained in her cuff, and she doesn’t really need anything in her purse, but I can’t help but think this is another sign that she’s growing weaker.

Ms. White’s eyes shoot to me for a more truthful answer about Mom’s condition. Ms. White is Mom’s best friend and my godmother, as well as manager of the Reverie Mental Spa—the business Mom developed before she got sick and where I intern. When I was younger, I tried calling her Aunt Jadis, even though we’re not related, but it was weird, like calling a teacher by her first name. She’s just always been Ms. White to me, even now, when she’s one of the few still standing beside me after Mom got so sick.

As I fill Ms. White in on this morning’s tomato episode, her mouth narrows to a thin line and her skin pales even more. Ms. White is originally from Germany, and her pale skin and platinum blond hair has always stood in contrast to Mom’s and my Mediterranean darkness. As Ms. White listens to me, I can’t help but compare her to Mom. In many ways, Ms. White looks like everything a responsible adult should be: she dresses in immaculate, designer linen suits, her hair is always razor-edge straight, and she just has the appearance of someone who gets things
done
. She looks exactly like what she is: a business manager. Beside her, Mom looks like an adult dressing up as a disheveled teenager, but it’s Mom who’s a literal genius and scientist.

“I’ll take her to Dr. Simpa, and let him know,” Ms. White tells me as we all head to the lift across from the apartment.

“I can do it,” I say immediately.

Ms. White smiles at me kindly. “Let me. It’s no trouble. And you look like you could use a break.”

The lift doors open to the lobby of the building. Mom bought this building specifically for the development of the Reverie Mental Spa—we only moved into the apartment upstairs after Dad died.

“Don’t you need me to work today?” I ask Ms. White as we move across the lobby floor.

Ms. White pauses. “I cancelled our appointments,” she says.

I stare at her, surprised. She didn’t know Mom was ill; how could she have known to clear the schedule?

“Something’s come up,” Ms. White says, lowering her voice. She drops back, letting Mom walk to the door on her own as she draws me to the side. “I’ll tell you more about it later, but we have a very special… er… client coming in tonight. You don’t have plans?”

I snort. I never have plans. All I do is work.

“We’ll meet back here, then. But for now—you should go out. Try not to worry.”

Ha. The only thing I do more than work is worry.

Ms. White leads Mom to the door, where she has a private transport waiting to whisk them to her doctor. I stand in the empty lobby, considering my options. With no clients, the spa is empty, and there’s really no point in my staying here.

The lobby is all glass and chrome, and immaculately appointed. The front wall is made entirely of glass, and is illuminated with our logo: a giant neon sheep. The sheep bounces over the letters of
REVERIE
, making them melt into our slogan:
RELIVE
your fondest memories with Reverie Mental Spa
.

People from all over the world come here for Mom’s invention—a process that allows people to lucidly dream in a state of utter relaxation. It’s expensive, but worth it: Having a reverie is like reliving the best day of your life in perfect clarity.

I briefly consider ignoring Ms. White’s advice about going out. I could go to the basement level of the building, where Mom’s reverie chairs are set up. I could give myself a reverie and get lost in the past, forget about this morning, and Mom’s blood, and Mom’s disease, and everything else.

I could relive a day when Dad was still alive, and Mom wasn’t sick.

But then I remember the image of Dad’s flesh melting from his skin in my nightmare.

Maybe I should go out.

four

When I step outside, the glass doors of the Reverie Mental Spa closing behind me, I allow myself a moment to get lost in the chaos of the city. Our building is on one of the busiest streets in the city. The autotaxis and magnatram zip by the road in front of the spa, with dozens of e-scooters weaving in and around the traffic. A crowd of people gather in front of the Reverie Mental spa—tourists, snapping pics with their cuffs of the elaborate iron gates that lead into Central Gardens, just across the street from us.

New Venice was one of the first good things to come of the Secessionary War. After more than a decade of violence, the war ended a year before I was born with the formation of the Unified Countries, a republic designed to govern global issues. It took a while for the new government to decide on a city to be its seat of operations, and ultimately, it decided that a new government deserved a brand new city.

Originally, the island nation of Malta consisted of two landmasses, but New Venice was built as a giant, ten-kilometer square bridge connecting the two large islands. Right now, if I were to blast through the walkway, I’d land in the Mediterranean Sea.

“Excuse me,” I say, squeezing past a tour group. It’s easy to spot the tourists, even if they didn’t have a red band across the tops of their cuffLINKs. The tourists are the ones who stop in the middle of the street to stare at simple things like street androids. They’re the ones who lift their feet and stare at them as they walk on the rubberized cement of the kinetic energy generator sidewalks. They’re the ones who are
always
dressed in shorts and tank tops, no matter what the weather, because they cannot imagine this Mediterranean island being anything but warm and sunny.

They also tend to look at the city through tourist programs. Most of their pupils flash silver, a sure sign they’ve connected their eye nanobots to some sort of program—history walks through the city, or news, or chats with their friends back home, or just recording everything they see.

I slip around the tourists gathered at the gates of Central Gardens. A street android stands at attention just on the other side, and I go to him before the tourists spot him.

“A pastizza please,” I say, pointing to a pastry filled with cheese. When I touch my cuff to the scanner attached to the street android’s cart, my credits go down and my caloric counter goes up. I consider buying two pastizzi, but if I go over my daily calorie count, I’ll have to add at least an hour of exercise to my day.

I idly wonder how much trouble I’d get in for cutting off my cuff. One more pastizza wouldn’t hurt anything. But, of course, if the cuff comes off, all the links to my health status go offline and an alert is sent out.