“I want you to come play with me,” she whined.
“Ask Ani.”
“Ani’s busy.”
Hard to believe. Quinn’s attention span was half the size of Jude’s—out of sight, out of mind was a way of life. And Ani knew it. “I guess Ani and I have that in common.”
“Somehow, I think the vidlifes can get by without you for a few minutes,” Quinn drawled.
“You know, I do have a life outside the network,” I lied. Living on my own with no parents, no school, and no obligations was a freedom the old Lia Kahn would have killed for. Freedom to hook up with Walker, to party all night dosed up on Xers and zone the days away on a cloud of chillers and chocolate, to dance in the moonlight with Cass and Terra while the randoms watched our flickering shadows, wishing they could steal our lives.
Now Walker was hooking up with the sister I hadn’t spoken to in half a year, and b-mods modded nothing. Music was just noise to me, the same way Cass and Terra were just names of people I used to know. My own life had taken a permanent trip to the department of dull. Who could blame me for preferring someone else’s?
It’s not that I’d become a total vid-head. I wasn’t one of the wastoids who spent all day and night whispering directions into the ears of the vidlifers and watching a bunch of strangers act out my wildest fantasies. I didn’t need to pull any strings to watch my dark and shameful fantasy unspool across the screen. Because it was there for me at any hour of the day, in infinite variations: the vidlifers themselves, head cases who had given up their identities, their wills, their lives to the masses. They spoke no words that weren’t piped into their ears, made no choices that weren’t chosen for them by randoms spread across the network. They’d erased themselves.
“Come on,” Quinn wheedled. “You don’t want to miss this.”
I gave in. “Fine.” The only thing more embarrassing than watching vidlifes was envying the vidlifers. I wasn’t about to put myself at Quinn’s lack of mercy. “Where are you?”
“Everywhere,” she hissed in a deliberately spooky whisper. Then cackled. “But right now? Down by the pool.”
I groaned. “No swimming, Quinn, you know that.” She just didn’t know why. No one did, except for Jude. And he was keeping his mouth shut; it was the one thing I’d let myself ask him for.
“Who goes down there to swim?”
“Not that either,” I snapped. But the small black cube was still in my pocket. Just for emergencies, I told myself. Like I always told myself.
“You’re just endless amounts of fun,” she complained.
“Feel free to go bother someone else. It’ll be hard, but I’ll get over it.”
There was a pause. “Just get your ass down here,” she said. “Oh and, Lia?”
“Yeah?”
“Seriously. Lose the shirt.”
Like Quinn said, swimming wasn’t exactly the only reason, or even the main reason, to trek across the grounds to the neo-mod steel-and-glass erector set that housed the pool. Nor was it the only reason I stayed away. The solar panels along the ceiling served double duty as net-linked screens, so you could fine-tune your zone and your backstroke at the same time. Or, as was mostly the case these days, so you could project a dizzying strobe show of light, color, and sound that made the perfect cooldown for anyone coming off a dreamer.
That’s what we called them.
Of course, usually when you dreamed—or should I say when orgs dreamed—they dreamed alone. Even cradled in each other’s arms, they were alone in the dark inside their own heads. For orgs, sleep was the ultimate isolation. Dreamers, on the other hand, didn’t require sleep. They required nothing but a tiny black cube, an ocular uplink, and the will to disappear into madness for anywhere from five minutes to forever. Thanks to the dreamers, mechs could, in their own way, regain their dreams. And thanks to the dreamer links—yet another of Jude’s “unofficial” updates—they didn’t have to dream alone. Hence the mechs sprawled across the pool deck, twitching and keening, and the bodies lining the pool floor, amorphous shapes wrapped together in the rippling water, their brains melting into a shared madness.
You didn’t have to touch to have a linked dream, but I heard it helped. Water too made things more intense. At least, that’s what I heard. I’d never tried it myself. These days water made things a little too intense—and the idea of dropping a dreamer in public repulsed me.
Quinn was waiting outside, and she wasn’t alone. I scowled at Jude. Typical of Quinn to drag him along. “What’s he—” I stopped.
It was Jude, but also . . . not Jude.
“Seth, this is the girl I was telling you about.” Quinn shot me a wicked smile. “Seth’s not interested in staying, but . . .” She raised her eyebrows. “I figured you could change his mind.”
He had Jude’s face—the harsh, angular lines, the bland beauty we all shared sharpened by raking cheekbones, hooded eyes, full lips built to smirk. But he wasn’t smirking, and his eyes—slate gray, not Jude’s flashing amber—darted from Quinn to me to the ground and back again. His flesh was an unbroken plane of creamy peach without any of Jude’s swooping silver circuitry, and his long, muscled arms looked like org arms, without the transparent panel Jude wore on his left bicep, showing off his internal wiring like a badge of honor.
This guy, this Seth, looked normal, in a way all of us on Quinn’s estate had accepted we would never be. But he also looked like Jude.
“Don’t zone on me, Lia,” Quinn warned. “It’s only weird for a minute. You get over it.”
Easy for Quinn to say. She had a custom-made body and face, tailored to her exact specifications. Unlike Jude, who’d been plucked from life in the gritty city to serve as one of BioMax’s first experimental subjects—it was strictly off-the-rack for him, a body and face the corporation now kept in reserve for emergency procedures, the downloads that no one saw coming. Downloads like mine. It was one thing to know the doubles were out there—somebody else’s brain behind your face, some random’s words coming out of your mouth—it was something else to see one.
“What’s the point?” I VM’d to Quinn, knowing no newbie would have access to the illicit tech. “You track him down just to freak me out?”
“First of all, Seth found me,” Quinn said aloud. “He wanted to take your little tour, but I figured he’d get a better impression one-on-one. He just woke up a few weeks ago. Still figuring out how everything works, right, Seth?”
He smiled with that awkward grimace of a newbie mech trying to fake something that used to come automatically. “It’s kind of weird at home these days,” he said, slow and steady. I remembered that too. It was hard work, figuring out how to control the air flow and the self-lubricating tongue and the artificial larynx to produce something approximating human speech. From his nervous smile as the words stumbled out, I figured he was fresh out of rehab, still expecting his gold star.
“And second of all?” I prompted Quinn.
“I knew you’d like him,” she said.
“And I thought you could use him,” she added.
“For what?”
Seth looked cluelessly back and forth between us. It must have looked like we were frozen in a staring contest or some equally inane battle of silent will.
“Look at him,” Quinn shot back. “Everything you want, without all the complications.”
“I don’t want him,” I said, disgusted. “Either of them.”
Quinn pulled a dreamer from her pocket, tossing it from hand to hand. “Seth can’t wait to try it,” she said aloud. “Can you, Seth?”
“She won’t tell me what ‘it’ is,” he said. “But . . .” He trailed off, spreading his arms wide like he was helpless not to put himself at Quinn’s mercy.
“I get it,” I said. It wasn’t my job to keep some random out of dreamerville. “Have fun.”
“It’s linked,” Quinn told me, “so we can all play.”
“Forget it.”
“Not even tempted?” Quinn grinned.
“You’re tempted.”
“I’m leaving.” I forced a smile at the newbie. “Nice to meet you, Seth. You’ll be welcome if you decide to stay. This is a home for every mech who needs it.”
He shook his head, hard. “I was just curious. Just visiting, you know?” he said. With Jude’s voice. “I’m not like—I mean . . .”
“Not like us,” I said, biting back the If you say so. “That’s okay. I really do get it. Been there, done that.” I traced my fingers along the silvery streaks rimming my neck. I hadn’t embraced the freak-chic thing as much as the others. But to the newbie, I knew it was irrelevant. I was one of them; he wasn’t—he thought. “Maybe you’ll make it work.”
Maybe you’ll be back.
Absolute control, Jude always said.
If I’d had that, I could have stopped thinking. About Jude’s double. About my double. Out there somewhere with the same body I’d have until I got up the credit and the nerve to trade it in for a new one, custom-made. About whether Jude’s double was right: if it was different for him and if that meant it could have been different for me. Which inevitably led where everything always led, straight back home to the damage I’d done just by being me—or, more accurately, not being me: perfect daughter, perfect sister, perfect girlfriend, perfectly breakable. The crash broke me; I broke everyone else.
Control meant never looking back, never questioning why I had walked away. Wiping out the memory of their faces: My father, pretending he didn’t look at me and see a corpse. Auden, bandaged and pale, his eyes willing me away—first from the room, then preferably from the planet. And Zo’s face the last time I saw her. That was the one I kept coming back to. Tell me I’m your sister, I’d begged that last day. I kept seeing it: Zo’s face when she didn’t answer. And I kept wondering: What if I had waited? What if I had stayed?
But that would have been selfish. I had accepted that. Forcing myself into my old org life, into my old org family—it would have ruined all of us. If I’d understood that earlier, Auden would have been safe. And if I’d ignored it, if I’d stayed, given Zo a chance . . . she might have been next.
So don’t think about it, I told myself every day, all day. Forget.
I had control, I thought, imagining Seth and Quinn writhing in the pool, locked in the shared dream that would give them a few hours of escape. I had control but not enough of it.
My room was nearly bare: just a chest of drawers, a flatscreen ViM striping the wall, and a bed. The latter was unnecessary; I could shut down just as easily with my back against the wooden floor. All it took was an internal command, and the world went away. For a while, I’d experimented—shutting down while standing up, hanging upside down, dangling out the window. In the end, I preferred the bed.
I lay down and took out the dreamer Jude had given me. The dreamers were nothing more than code, bits of data that overrode our neural homeostasis and threw our systems into a chaos that simulated physical and emotional response. Almost like jumping out of a plane, but more effective. Because they were just programs, they should have been reusable, but for whatever reason, no dreamer ever had much of an effect after the first few uses. Just one of the things no one, including Jude, understood about what they did to us. We all had our theories, but in the end, we just crossed our fingers and flicked the switch.
I hadn’t had a fresh one in weeks. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t, not anymore. It was too easy—and it made waking life too gray. Like nothing was as real as the world inside your head.
I flicked the switch.
When I was alive, I dreamed in stories.
They weren’t real, of course. Org dreams are nothing but random neural firings, spurts of color and unprompted emotion. The story comes later, in that instant before waking, your muddled mind making sense of the chaos by stringing the randomness into a narrative.
Mech dreams were different. There was no once-upon-a-time. No faces, no nightmares. No flying.
There was:
Rage.
Soft.
Wild.
Scared.
Bliss.
Raw jolts of emotion as if there was no body, no bed, no Lia Kahn, only the roiling froth of joy grief terror pain joy.
There was no “I.”
“I” was an illusion, evanescent, a null spot at the eye of the hurricane, an emptiness that drew its reality from the storm swirling around it.
There was want. A surge of need, pain and pleasure welded together, craving, and the sweet excruciation of denial, giving way, finally, inevitably, to satisfaction.
There were no stories and no faces, but then I saw his face, amber eyes flashing, spiraling silver making his flesh shimmer in the light, lips curled, knowing.
Lips.
I reached out. I wanted. I needed.
“Sweet dreams, I take it?” he said, catching my wrist just as my fingers grazed his cheek.
I was awake.
DAMAGE
“I have seen the truth.”
I yanked my hand away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I should be asking you that,” Jude shot back. “I just wanted to see if you were in here—no one asked you to molest me.”
I sat up, trying to shake off the effects of the dreamer. After, everything felt hollow. Shadows flickered in corners, like the dream was lurking out there somewhere, waiting to reclaim me.
“As you can see, I’m here,” I snapped. “Now you can get out.”
Jude smiled and perched on the edge of my bed. I hopped to my feet, keeping the bed between us.
“If you really hate me as much as you like to pretend, why move in with me?” he asked.
“You and twenty other mechs,” I pointed out. “It’s not like we’re playing house.”
“We’re playing something.” He shook his head. “At least you are.”
“That’s exactly your problem. You think this is all just a game.”
Something flashed across his face, gone too quickly for me to interpret. “If I thought you were stupid enough to believe that, you wouldn’t be here. Or at least, I wouldn’t be here with you.”
“So being stupid is the key to getting you out of here? I could give it a try.”
He stood up and headed for the door. “Don’t start shaving IQ points on my account. There was just something I thought you’d want to see.”
“I’m sure it can wait.”
“Not quite an it,” Jude said. “More like a he.”
“I’ve had enough new people today,” I said, wondering how much time had passed, if Seth and Quinn were still down at the pool together. Wondering whether the dreamer had somehow known what I was thinking—or was I only thinking it now because of the dreamer?
“Not quite new either,” Jude said. “But if it makes you feel better, I doubt he’d want to see you either.”
“Who?”
“Auden.”
The vidroom wasn’t off-limits to the randoms, not exactly, but it was known who belonged there and who didn’t. When Jude and I arrived, Riley was sitting on one of the two red couches, stiffly upright and awkward with the usual black cloud hovering over him. It made a certain perverse sense that he and Jude claimed some kind of no-holds-barred, for-richer, for-poorer, in-sickness-and-in-health, not-even-death-did-part-them friendship: One never bothered to speak for himself, while the other couldn’t shut up.
Quinn and Ani were sprawled on the other couch, Quinn’s hand casually resting on Ani’s knee as if to say, This is mine.
When I feel like it, that is.
I wondered if she’d told Ani about Seth, or invited her to join in. I doubted it.
If you’re planning to live forever, monogamy is an impractical standard, Jude liked to say. How convenient for him.
“Where is he?” I peered around the room as if he’d be hiding behind the furniture.
“He who?” Jude asked.
“You know who.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Auden.” I’d bar
ely spoken his name since it happened.
“Did I say he was here?” Jude gave me the wide-eyed innocent act.
I wanted to punch him.
“I’m out of here.”
“Wait.” Jude’s smile vanished. “You really do need to see this.” He nodded at Riley. “Play it back.”
Each wall of the vidroom was covered with a ViM screen, flickering with a constant stream of images that the Virtual Machine interface yanked from the network. Most defaulted to random, but one wall was programmed to pull up any vid that mentioned the words “mech-head,” “download,” “Frankenstein,” or “skinner.”
It seemed important to know who was talking about us.
Usually it meant a haphazard collage of muted video: Faither protests, fame-whore newbie mechs selling whatever was left of their souls for a shot on a vidlife, the latest ruling on what we could do, where we could go, what we could own, how human we were. The usual. But when Riley swept his finger across the console, the jumble of images gave way to one large, familiar face, paler than I remembered, his dark eyes like black voids in his flesh.
“It posted about half an hour ago,” Jude said. “While you were . . . sleeping. The ‘Honored’ Rai Savona has found his calling.” His mouth twisted around the word “honored.” Understandable. I could have thought of a few choice adjectives that would have better suited the sanctimonious nutjob. “Honored” was the one he’d chosen for himself.
Savona was standing at a podium, and when the camera panned back, it was clear he’d assembled an audience of hundreds to hear whatever it was he had to say. “Honored friends,” he began, smiling out at the crowd. “Today marks both an ending and a bright beginning as I say farewell to the cause I have served willingly for the last ten years and turn the page to a shining future. As of this morning I am stepping down as the leader of the Faith Party.” Mumbles percolated in the crowd. “It’s with great sadness that I leave behind such a loving community—”
“I’d be sad too if I got fired,” Quinn muttered.
“But I’m unable to turn a deaf ear to my true calling—”
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