Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  NOTHING

  “I was a ghost in the machine.”

  T he lips, I thought. Focus on the lips.

  Because they were normal. Pale pink, washed out. Curved into a half pout. A glimpse of white teeth barely visible, straight and whole. It was a mouth, a normal mouth.

  Just not my mouth.

  The nose, too. It was a nose. Narrow, nearly sharp but not unpleasantly so, no bumps or hooks, delicate nostrils, a gentle slope up the face toward the—

  No, not the eyes.

  Don’t look at the eyes.

  No scars. No burns. It wasn’t the Halloween fright mask I’d imagined. It was…perfect. The skin was unmarked, stretched taut and smooth across the face. A stranger’s face.

  And the eyes. The eyes that weren’t my eyes. Pale, watery blue, unspeckled iris; black, motionless pupil; and at the center, a pinprick circle of amber. Unblinking. Dead.

  But when I closed one eye, the eye in the mirror closed, too. Brown lashes brushed against a too-smooth cheek. I opened the eye, and the mirror eye opened. It was dead. It was mine.

  Which meant that what lay above it was mine, too. Blondish brows with a high, perfectly plucked arch, like they’d been penciled in. A wrinkle-free forehead. And above that?

  The machine.

  Scalp flayed back. A mess of circuitry, like when Zo was five and cracked open my new ViM because I wouldn’t let her use it. Wires spooling out of my head. Wires feeding into my head. Silvery filament crisscrossing a waxy, flesh-colored base.

  It wasn’t until the computer fell silent that I realized I was still screaming. But now the screams were just inside my head.

  What else was inside my head?

  “Try to calm down,” said the first doctor, the ugly one. The mirror was gone, but I couldn’t stop seeing the face. “I’ll turn the speaker back on, but you have to stay calm, for your own good. Let us explain. Can you do that?”

  As if I had any choice.

  One blink.

  I forced the screams back inside myself.

  “This is why I didn’t want you to see at this stage,” the doctor said irritably. “Cranial exposure is only necessary until we confirm neurological stability. Once the skullcap is attached and the hair—”

  “What did you do to me?”

  Dr. Handsome shot the uglier guy a look that made me realize who was really in charge. And he was the one who finally answered. “We saved your life.”

  “What did you do?”

  No one spoke.

  My mother lifted her head from my father’s shoulder. She looked me in the eye. Not the forehead, the eye. She wasn’t crying anymore. “You know about BioMax,” she said. “You remember.”

  I knew just about as much as I cared. Which was very little. BioMax, some biotech subsidiary of my father’s corporation, hyped on the vids the year before with some freaky new tech that—

  “No.”

  I knew.

  “We had to,” my mother pleaded. “We didn’t have any other choice.”

  “No.”

  “Honey, you heard the doctors, you were going to die. This was the only way.”

  “No.”

  “Lia.” My father balled up his fists, shoved them into his pockets. “Yes.”

  “We held off for as long as we could,” the pretty doctor said. I felt like he was leering at me, like I was some mechanical puzzle he was desperate to take apart, then try to put back together. Except he’d already done so. “Dr. Dreyson”—he jerked his head toward his troll-like partner—“had you on the table for seventeen hours before we made the decision.”

  “Before you gave up.”

  “We would never give up on you,” my mother said.

  My father frowned. “That’s why you’re still here.”

  But I wasn’t.

  I was a ghost in the machine.

  A mech-head.

  A Frankenstein.

  A skinner.

  “The download process was a complete success,” Dr. Handsome said. “Your brain came through the accident completely intact, and we were able to make a full transfer. The body is, I’m afraid, not the customized unit you might have selected under less critical circumstances, but we did our best to choose a model that would emulate your baseline specs, height, weight, coloring.”

  He was talking like I was a new car.

  Everyone knew about the download freaks, or at least, we knew they were out there, computer brains stuffed into homemade bodies, walking around looking like real, live people. Sort of. The first few were all over the vids for a while, until they got boring and people moved on to something else just as irrelevant, like betting on how long it would be before the president went AWOL from rehab again.

  “You turned me into a skinner.”

  Dr. Troll wrinkled his big nose. “We prefer not to use that word.”

  But that’s what they were called, because that’s what they did.

  Skinners. Computers—machines—that hijacked human identities, clothing themselves in human skin. Except the flesh was just as artificial as what lay beneath. A skinner was nothing more than a computer that wore a human mask, hiding wiring and circuitry underneath a costume of synthetic flesh. A mechanical brain, duped into thinking it was real.

  Or, in this case: a mechanical brain duped into thinking it was Lia Kahn.

  “You are Lia,” the repulsively handsome one said. “All your memories, all your experiences, everything you are was simply transferred to a more durable casing. Just like copying a file. Nothing more mysterious than that.”

  “Put me back.”

  “Lia…” My mother pressed her eyes closed with her left hand, massaging the lids.

  “Once we train the neural network to accommodate itself to its new physical surroundings, you should be able to pick things up right where you left off.” Dr. Handsome was unstoppable. “You’ll see we’ve done remarkable things with sensation, motion…Of course there are things to get used to, but many of our clients have found life postdownload nearly indistinguishable from their experiences before the procedure. And quality of life will certainly be far superior to anything you would have experienced with your degree of injuries—”

  “Put me back the way I was. I don’t care about the injuries. I don’t care. Put me back.”

  One leg, one arm, no skin, I didn’t care. As long as I was human. As long as I was me.

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Anything’s possible if you want it enough.”

  Another of my father’s favorite slogans.

  The doctor’s voice was cold. “There’s nothing to put back. There’s no body to go back to. The body of Lia Kahn is dead. Be grateful you didn’t die with it.”

  And when I wouldn’t believe him, he offered to prove it. Wires were detached. Machines wheeled away. Two men—not doctors; the doctors never touched me—grabbed my sides. They hoisted me into a sitting position. My head lolled forward on my neck, and I saw my hands for the first time. They hung limp in my lap, fingers half curled, nails round and smooth; useless. Somebody else’s hands, resting on somebody else’s legs. The flesh was unnaturally smooth, just like the skin on the face. There were no creases and whorls, no subtle shifts of color or thready blue veins beneath the surface. I wondered if there were fingerprints.

  One of the men grabbed me under the armpits and hoisted me off the bed. He looked like the type of guy who would have bad breath, and for a moment his mouth was close enough to mine that I could have smelled it, if I could have smelled anything. I was wearing a sleeveless paper-thin blue gown, loose around the armholes. His hands pressed bare skin, or whatever it was. He could probably see down the front of it if he’d wanted to. I didn’t care. It wasn’t my body under there. It was a thing. A thing I couldn’t feel and couldn’t move, a thing I was trapped inside. It wasn’t me.

  He didn’t peek. Instead he dumped me into a high-backed wheelchair and fastened a belt around my waist. Then another around my forehead, pressing my
head against the seat and fixing my eyes straight ahead. Through it all, he never looked at my face.

  The pretty doctor, who got less attractive every time he spoke, told me to call him Ben. He wasn’t actually a doctor, he said. Which made sense. Doctors took care of people, right? Sick people, injured people. People. I wasn’t one of those, not anymore. Thanks to Ben. My mechanic.

  Call-me-Ben wheeled me down a long corridor. I couldn’t feel the body, couldn’t feel the seat. It felt like I was floating through the hall, just a set of eyes, just a mind, just a ghost. My parents stayed behind. My mother said she couldn’t see it again. It, she said. My father didn’t say anything, but he stayed with her.

  “We’ve kept it in cold storage for you,” Ben said from behind me. “Most clients request a viewing.”

  It.

  We wheeled into a narrow room, its white tiled walls lined by silver plates. Ben pressed his palm to one, and it slid out of the wall, revealing a long, metal panel bearing a sheet-covered lump. A body-shaped lump. “You sure?” Ben asked, guiding the wheelchair into position. “This can be difficult.”

  I couldn’t stand to hear the computer speak for me, not here. Not now.

  I blinked once.

  He began with the feet. Foot.

  The flesh was red and ruined, gouged. Mottled with deep, black scabs. There were thick streaks of pearl white, as if the skin had calcified. Or maybe the flesh had been flayed and I was looking at bone. The knee was bent at the wrong angle; the other leg was gone, ending just below the thigh, swirls of dried blood and charred flesh winding around one another, like the rings of a severed tree stump.

  The sheet drew farther back.

  I wish I could say I didn’t recognize it, that it was some monstrous mound of skin and bones, broken and unidentifiable.

  It was. But it was also me.

  I recognized the hips jutting out below my waist, always a little bonier than I would have liked. The dark freckles along my collarbone, still visible on a patch of skin the fire had spared. My crooked ring finger, on the arm that remained intact, a family quirk my parents had chosen not to screen out, the genetic calling card of the Kahns.

  My face.

  The burns were worse there. Pockets of pus bubbled beneath the skin. One side had caved in, like my face had been modeled from clay, then crushed by an iron fist. The left eye sagged into a deep hollow. My lips were gone.

  There was a gray surgical cap stretched over my head.

  “The brain?”

  I felt as dead inside as the voice sounded.

  Call-me-Ben sighed. “You don’t want to know the technical details.”

  “Try me.”

  He did.

  He told me how the brain—my brain—was removed.

  Frozen.

  Sliced into razor-thin sections.

  Scanned.

  Functionally mapped onto a three-dimensional model, axons and dendrites replaced by the vector space of a quantum computer, woven through with artificial nerves, conduits that would carry impulses back and forth from an artificial body, simulating all the pains and pleasures of life. In theory.

  He told me how the frozen leftovers were discarded. Because that’s what you do with medical waste.

  Now I understood: Skinner was the wrong word after all. I wasn’t the thief. I hadn’t stolen an identity; I hadn’t stolen anything. They were the ones who stole from me. They flayed back my skin, reached inside and dug up whatever secret, essential quality made me who I was.

  Then they ripped it out.

  They ripped it out—ripped me out—and left me exposed, a naked brain, a mind without a body. Because this thing they’d stuck me in, it wasn’t a body—a sculpted face, dead eyes, and synthetic flesh couldn’t make it anything but a hollow shell. Maybe I hadn’t lost the essential thing that made me Lia Kahn, but I’d lost everything else, everything that made me human.

  I wasn’t a skinner.

  I was the one who’d been skinned.

  When we were kids, Zo and I used to fight. Not argue. Fight. Hair-pulling, skin-pinching, wrist-burning, arm-twisting, squealing, spitting, punching, shrieking fight. And once—it wasn’t our worst fight or our last one—after she kneed me in the stomach, I punched her in the face. Her nose spurted blood all over both of us. She threw up. I passed out. It’s the one thing we’d always had in common: Fear of blood. Fear of doctors. Fear of hospitals. Fear of anything that stinks of sick.

  But here I was, inches from a dead body. My dead body. Inches from flesh that looked like raw meat, a crumpled face, an empty skull cavity. Listening to a stranger describe, in detail, all the ways he’d torn me to pieces. And I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t feel anything.

  I don’t just mean on the outside, like the chair under my ass or my ass or the straps digging into my waist and forehead or call-me-Ben’s hand on my shoulder, the same hand he’d used to pull back the body’s sheet. It was that, but it wasn’t just that. I couldn’t feel anything on the inside, either. I wasn’t nauseated; I wasn’t dizzy. My stomach wasn’t clenched; there was no hollowness at the base of my throat, warning me I was about to explode into tears. I wasn’t breathing quickly. I wasn’t breathing at all. I wasn’t trembling, although even if I had been, I wouldn’t have known.

  My brain—or whatever was up there—told me I was horrified. And furious. And terrified. And disgusted. I knew I was all of those things. But I couldn’t feel it. They were just words. Adjectives pertaining to emotional affect that modified nouns pertaining to organic life-forms.

  I no longer qualified.

  MOUTH CLOSED

  “You don’t need a tongue to sound like a sheep.”

  I don’t want to talk about it.” Translation: “I don’t want to think about it.”

  It didn’t matter how much crap they spewed about adjustment pains and emotional connection and statistically probable results of repression, there was no way in hell some random middle-aged loser was milking me for intimate details of my daily life in hell, aka rehab. No matter how many times she asked.

  “It’s okay if you don’t feel ready.” Sascha leaned back in her chair, her head almost touching the window. “You may never feel ready. Sometimes we need to just take a risk, have faith in our own strength.”

  She had a corner office on the thirteenth floor, which meant a 180-degree view of the woods surrounding the BioMax building. I’d only seen one other floor: the ninth. That was where they stored the bodies until it was time to destroy them. Mine wasn’t there anymore. I knew, because I’d asked Sascha. They burn the bodies. They don’t bury them—You only bury people who are dead. The bodies are just medical waste. I told Sascha, no, I didn’t want the ashes. She said it was a positive sign.

  “I don’t need faith,” I said. “I know my own strength. I do fifty push-ups every morning. Sit-ups, too. It’s in your report.” It was easier to talk than to sit there for an hour in silence, although I’d tried that, too. I’d probably try it again. One thing about my new life, or whatever I was supposed to call it: I had plenty of time.

  She frowned, then templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips. “I think you know I’m not talking about that kind of strength.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s natural to be concerned about how your family will react to the new you,” she said.

  “They’ve seen the new me.”

  “It’s been a month, Lia. You’ve made remarkable progress since then. Don’t you want to show off a little?”

  “Show off what? That I learned how to take a few steps without falling on my face? That I figured out how to make actual words with this thing in my throat?” I gave her one of the smiles I’d been working on, knowing—from the hours I’d spent practicing in the mirror—that it looked more like a grimace. “Yay, me. I’m finally better off than a two-year-old.”

  Sascha hated sarcasm. Probably because she didn’t get it. After all, if she’d had an acceptable IQ, she would have been on some other floor, bu
ilding new people like me, rather than stuck on lucky thirteen, upping my self-esteem. Her parents had obviously opted to dump more EQ than IQ in their chromosomal shopping cart. Not that she was much good when it came to emotions. At least, not emotions like mine. “You can’t undervalue yourself like that,” she said. “I know how hard you’ve worked to get to where you are.”

  She knew nothing.

  The benefit of artificial skin constructed from self-cleaning polymer: No one has to sponge the dirt off my naked body while I’m lying in bed like a frozen lump of metal and plastic.

  No, not like that.

  I am that.

  The benefit of an artificial body with no lungs, no stomach, no bladder, and a wi-fi energy converter where the heart should be: No machine has to breathe for me while my brain tries to remember how to pump in the air. No one has to spoon food into my frozen mouth. No one has to thread in a bunch of tubes to suck the waste out of my body; no one has to wipe my ass.

  No one has to do much of anything. Except for me.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.” Asa is terminally perky. Even when my spasming leg kicks him in the groin.

  An accident, I swear.

  “You’re just not trying hard enough.”

  I hate him.

  He puts the ball between the hands lying uselessly in my lap. I can finally hold up my own head, and I do, so I don’t have to see them—mechanical digits covered with layers of fake skin, threaded with fake nerves.

  I can feel them now, sometimes.

  “Feel” them, at least. Know when someone is squeezing them. Know, even with my eyes closed, when Asa dips them in boiling water, when he presses them to ice. I know, the way I know my name, as a fact. This is cold. This is hot. I know, but that doesn’t mean I feel. It’s not the same.

  Nothing is.

  “Try to throw the ball to me,” Asa chirps. He’s all blond hair and brawny muscles, like a twelve-year-old’s av, the virtual face you choose for yourself before you realize that pretty and perfect is perfectly boring. “You can do it. I know you can.”

  Move, I tell my arms. Just do it.

  It would be easier if they hurt. If there was pain to push through, to guide me back to where I started. If I knew that the more it hurt, the closer I was getting. But there hasn’t been any pain since that first day with call-me-Ben. The brain was exploring its new environment, they say. All that is behind me now.