Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  “I should plow right through you!” he shouted at the windshield. “You want something to protest? I’ll give you something to really protest!”

  They crowded around the car, pressing in tight, although not too tight. The legally required foot of space remained between us and them at all times. They planted themselves in front of the car, behind it, all around it, blocking us in, so we had no choice but to sit there, twenty yards from the entrance to our property, waiting for security to arrive and, in the meantime, reading their signs.

  “I’m sorry, Lee Lee,” my mother said, twisting around in her seat and reaching for me. I pulled away. “I don’t know how they found out you were coming home today.”

  Their signs were hoisted over their shoulders, streaming in red-letter LED across their chests, pulsing on their foreheads. Jamming the network so we couldn’t call in reinforcements.

  GOD MADE MAN. WHO MADE YOU?

  FRANKENSTEIN ALWAYS BURNS

  BREATH, NOT BATTERIES

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  My father cursed quietly, then loudly.

  “Just close your eyes,” my mother suggested. “Ignore them.”

  “I am,” I said, eyes open.

  My favorite sign depicted a giant extended middle finger, with a neon caption:

  SKIN THIS!

  It didn’t even make sense. But it got the point across.

  My father fumed. “Goddamned Faithers.”

  “Apparently we’re the damned ones,” I pointed out. “Or I am.”

  “Don’t you listen to them.” My mother flicked her hand across her console and my window darkened, blotting out the signs. But it wasn’t the signs I’d been watching, it was the faces. I’d never seen a Faither, not up close. Before the accident, I hadn’t even seen much of them on the network. But after…Somehow my name had ended up on a Faither hit list. Until I fixed my blockers, they’d flooded my zone with all the same crap about how I was a godless perversion, I was Satan’s work, I didn’t deserve to exist. But I hadn’t expected them to come after me in person.

  Religion went out of style right after the Middle East went out in a blaze of nuclear glory. Not that some people, maybe lots of people, didn’t keep privately believing in some invisible old man who gave them promotions when they were good and syphilis when they were bad. If you had the credit, you could even snag enough drugs for a one-on-one chat. You sometimes heard rumors about people—especially in the cities, where it’s not like there was much else to do—actually gathering together for their God fix, but as far as most people were willing to admit in public, God was dead. The Faith party was for all those leftover believers who—even after the nukes and the Long Winter and the Water Wars of the western drought and the quake that ate California and the wave that drowned DC—refused to give up the ghost. They were for life, for morality, for order, for gratitude, and, until recently, not against much of anything. Except reason, my father was always quick to point out. Then BioMax unrolled its download process, and the Faithers found their cause.

  Now they’d found me.

  My window was still blocked, but I could see them through the front windshield, silent now, all of them pointing.

  “That’s it, we’ll go manual,” my father said, gunning the engine. “I’m going through them.”

  My mother shook her head. “It won’t let you.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  She didn’t.

  “Come on, Ana, we’re listening.”

  She sighed.

  He put his hands on the wheel, switched to manual. “I’ll find a way.”

  “Wait.” I leaned forward, touching his shoulder without thinking. He didn’t flinch. I glanced out the windshield, and he followed my eyes, saw the man at the center of the crowd, the one with close-cropped blond hair and black-brown eyes, who had his hands in the air. It was a signal, and his followers—for it was obvious who was leading and who was following—fell back, clearing a path for the car. The man bowed low, but kept his face raised toward the car, his eyes fixed on me. He swept his arm out, his meaning clear. You may go. For now. And then it was our turn to follow.

  It was Thursday, and Thursday meant Kahn family dinner. Even if one-fourth of the family no longer ate. They probably would have let me out of it, just this once let me sneak off to the room I hadn’t seen in nearly three months, close the door, start my new-life-same-as-the-old-life on my own, but that would have meant asking, and I didn’t. The food arrived before we did, and Zo, who usually showed up to family dinner an hour or two late, if at all, waited at the table, playing the good girl. “I got steak,” she said instead of “hello” or “welcome home” or “I missed you.” “And chocolate soufflé. All your favorites.”

  And so we sat in our usual spots, and I watched them eat all my favorites.

  “But what happens if you do?” Zo asked, stuffing the meat into her mouth. She didn’t even like steak. “Does it screw up the wiring? Or would it just sit there and, you know, rot? Like you’re walking around with chewed-up bits of moldy bread and rotten meat inside you?”

  “Zoie!” My mother’s fork clattered to her plate.

  “She’s just curious,” my father said. “It’s only natural.”

  “It’s rude. And it’s not appropriate at the dinner table. Not while we’re eating.”

  “We’re not all eating,” Zo pointed out.

  I did not ask to be excused.

  “There’d be nowhere for the food to go,” I said. “There’s a grating over the vocal cavity. Air goes out when I talk. Nothing goes in. Want to see?” I opened my mouth wide.

  Zo shirked away. “Ew, gross. Dad!”

  “Not at the table, please,” he said mildly.

  To me, not to Zo.

  “We thought you might want to take tomorrow off, dear,” my mother said. “Maybe do some shopping, spruce up your wardrobe?” Unspoken: Because my old clothes, custom-tailored for my old measurements, wouldn’t fit my new body. Another factoid she’d neglected to mention: I hadn’t shopped with my mother since I was nine years old. Now, for Cass, Terra, and me, it was a tradition—or, as Cass called it, a fetish—first the full-body scan, then the designer zones, ignoring the pop-ups for crap we would never wear, sending our virtual selves on fashion model struts down virtual runways, knowing that whatever we selected would, automatically and immediately, become the new cool, the new it, and savoring the responsibility.

  “I’m just doing a reorder,” I said. Same look, new size. It’s what you did after an all-body lift-tuck or a binge vacation, when you didn’t want anyone to notice your new stats. It was ill-advised—no, that was too mild; it was potentially disastrous—to do a reorder with an all-new body. New hair, new face, new coloring. Fashion logic demanded a new look, especially for a fashion leader. But I preferred the old one. The masses would deal.

  “Express it,” my father said. “So you’re ready for Monday.”

  “Monday?”

  “School. You’ve missed enough.”

  “I thought…” I didn’t know what I had thought. I had, in fact, tried not to think. I still hadn’t peeked out from behind the priv-wall on my zone. As far as anyone knew, I was still missing in action. Although obviously, they’d seen me on the vids. They knew what I’d become. “Sascha, the counselor, said maybe I should take things slow.”

  “Things?”

  “Readjustment…things. Like, school. I figured, maybe I could link in for a while, and then—”

  “You know how your father feels about that,” my mother said.

  I knew.

  School was the “crucible of socialization.” School was where we would be molded and learn to mold others. Meet—and impress and influence and conquer—our future colleagues. We were, after all, preparing to take our place behind the reins of society. There’d be time enough for linked ed when we finished high school and started specialization. And when we did we’d beat out all the asocial losers who’d spent
their formative years staring at a ViM. So he’d said when I was six, desperate to escape day one and all the days that followed; so he’d said when Zo got caught cutting, when Zo got caught dosing, when Zo got caught scamming a biotech lab for one of her zoned-out friends and almost got kicked out for good. I didn’t want to make him say it again.

  Zo stared down at my empty plate. “If she’s too scared to go to school, I don’t think you should make her.”

  Thanks a lot, Zo.

  “I’m not scared.”

  Zo rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then you’re an idiot.”

  “Zoie!” That was our mother again, trying, always trying, to keep the peace.

  “What? I’m just saying, if it were me, I’d be afraid people would think I was, you know.”

  Say it.

  “You’ve been gone for a long time,” Zo said, like a warning.

  I looked at my father. “Long enough. So, fine. Monday.”

  I was ready.

  Or I would be.

  No one was linked in, no one but Becca Mai, who didn’t count, not even in an emergency, which this wasn’t, not yet. Of course no one was there. It was Thursday night, and Thursday night meant Cass’s house—not her parents’ neo-mod manor of glass and steel, but the guesthouse they’d built by the lake, even though they had no guests and never would.

  I voiced Walker, who never went anywhere without a flexiViM wrapped around his wrist, set to vibrate with incoming texts and to heat up when I voiced. But he wasn’t there, and I pussed out. I couldn’t let him hear the new voice for the first time in a message. So instead I texted:

  I’m home.

  I flicked on the mood player, but no music played.

  Right. Because the selection was keyed to biometrics, body temp, heart rate, and all the other signs of life I didn’t have anymore. So I skimmed through the playlist, chose at random, a soulsong from one of those interchangeable weepers we’d all worshipped a couple years before, when they’d first engineered the musical algorithm that would make you cry.

  It didn’t.

  But it was more than a lack of tear ducts. Or tears. It just wasn’t music for me, not anymore, not in the same way. I’d tried it a few times back in rehab, putting on a favorite track, something guaranteed to sweep me out of myself, and it had just been rhythmic noise. Song after song, and I heard every note, I tracked the melodies, I mouthed the lyrics—but it didn’t mean anything. It was noise. It was vibrating air, hitting the artificial eardrum with a certain frequency, a certain wavelength, resolving into patterns. Meaningless patterns.

  It wasn’t a download thing, Sascha said. It was a me thing. Plenty of mech-heads still got music. I just wasn’t one of them. “There are some things about the brain even we don’t understand,” Sascha had admitted. “Your postprocedure brain is functionally identical to the organic model, but many clients encounter minor—and I can’t emphasize that enough, minor—differences in the way they process experiences. Finding themselves indifferent to things they used to love. Loving things they used to hate. We don’t know why.”

  “How can you not know?” I’d asked. “You built the…brain. Computer. Whatever you want to call it. You should know how it works.”

  “The download procedure copies the brain into a computer,” Sascha had said. “But each brain is composed of billions of cognitive processes. We can model the complete structure without understanding each of its individual parts. Which is why, for example, we don’t have the capacity to create new brains from scratch. Only nature can do that. For now.”

  “So all you know how to do is make copies,” I’d said. “Except you can’t even get that right. Not exactly.” When we were talking about my brain, the things I loved and hated, when we were talking about me, “close enough” didn’t really get the job done.

  “It can be disconcerting at first, but you’ll learn to embrace the exciting possibilities. One client even emerged from the procedure with a newfound artistic passion. He’s already so successful that he’s linked on the president’s zone!” Saying it like that was some kind of achievement. Like the president wasn’t too doped up to notice who stuck what on her zone; judging from the vids, she’d barely even noticed being re-elected.

  I didn’t have any new passions, certainly none that would make me famous. And I’d thought maybe the music thing was just temporary, that once I got off the thirteenth floor and back to the real world, things would return to normal.

  I shut down the music. What was the point?

  Susskind, our psychotic cat, sashayed into the room and leaped up onto the bed. And maybe he had the right idea. Except that going to bed would mean facing all the other things that hadn’t gone back to normal. All the prebed rituals that had been made obsolete.

  I had my own bathroom, tiled in purple and blue. My own shower, where I washed off the grime every night and washed on the UV block every morning, now no longer necessary. My own toilet with a med-chip that analyzed every deposit for bio-irregularities—no longer required. My own sink, where I would have hydroscrubbed my teeth if they weren’t already made of some gleaming white alloy impervious to microbes. Not like they came into contact with any, what with the whole no-food thing. My own medicine cabinet, with all the behavior modifiers I could ever need, uppers for perk, downers for sleep, Xers for parties, stims for work, and blissers for play, but no b-mod could help me now. On the face of the cabinet, my own mirror. I stayed away from mirrors.

  Psycho Susskind crawled into my lap.

  “Great.” I rested my hand on his back, letting it rise and fall with each breath. “Of course you like me now.” Sussie was afraid of people, even the people who housed and fed him; maybe—judging from his standard pattern of hissing and clawing—especially us. Or make that, them. Because apparently Sussie and I were now best friends.

  I didn’t dump him off my lap.

  “I smell good to you now, Sussie?” I whispered, scratching him behind his ears. He purred. “Like your other best friend?” That would be the dishwasher, which Sussie worshipped like he was a Faither and the dishwasher had a white beard and fistful of lightning bolts.

  It’s not like I had no way to fill the time. Showers and music weren’t generally the bulk of my standard evening activities. There was always a game going on the network. Or I could tweak my av, update my zone, chat with the net-friends who’d never seen my flesh-and-blood body and so wouldn’t notice it was gone. I could even hit the local stalker sites and read all about myself, wealthy scion of the Kahn dynasty stuffed into a mech-head and body. What will she do next, now that she’s home, where will she go, who will she see, what will she wear?

  Instead I pumped the network for information on emotion, for why people feel what they feel and how. But I couldn’t make myself read through the results, facts and theories and long, dense explanations that had nothing to do with me.

  Walker still hadn’t texted back.

  I cut the link.

  My tracksuit didn’t fit me any better than the rest of my clothes. The pants and sleeves were too short and too baggy, the thermo-lining, cued to body temp, was superfluous, and the biostats read zero across the board. But they would do, as would the shoes I got from BioMax, which didn’t cushion my feet like the sneakers that no longer fit, but still registered body weight and regulated shock absorption, which was all I needed. Zo was out somewhere; my parents were in bed. There was no one to notice I was gone.

  It was a cold night, but that didn’t matter, not to me. There was a path behind the house that wove through the woods, a path I’d run every morning for the last several years, layered in thermo-gear, panting and sweating and cursing and loving it. The gravel sounded the same as always, crunching beneath my soles.

  I need this, I said silently, to someone, maybe to myself or maybe to the body that locked me in and denied everything I asked of it. Please. Let this work.

  It didn’t.

  I r
an for an hour. Legs pumping. Feet pounding. Arms swinging. Face turned up to the wind. The body worked perfectly. I didn’t sweat. I didn’t cramp up. I didn’t wheeze, gulping in desperate mouthfuls of oxygen, because I didn’t breathe at all. I pushed faster, pushed harder, until something in my head told me I was tired, that it was time to slow down, time to stop, but my muscles didn’t ache, my chest didn’t tighten, my feet didn’t drag, I didn’t feel ready to stop. I just knew I was, and so I did.

  There was no rush, no natural upper coasting me through the last couple miles. There was never that sense of letting go and losing myself in my body, of existing in my body, arms, legs, muscles, tendons, pulsing and pumping in sync, the world narrowing to a pinprick tunnel of ground skimming beneath my feet. None of the pure pleasure of absence, of leaving Lia Kahn behind and existing in the moment—all body, no mind.

  The body still felt like someone else’s; the mind was still all I had left.

  I walked the rest of the way back to the house, navigating the path in darkness. The heavy clouds hid even the pale glow of the moon, and so I didn’t see the shadows melt into a figure, a man, not until he was close enough to touch.

  Fingers wrapped around my arm. Thick, strong fingers. A hand, twisting, and my arm followed the unspoken command, my body tugged after it. He pinned me against a tree, his forearm shoved against my throat.

  Lucky I didn’t need to breathe.

  His face so close to mine that our noses nearly touched, I recognized him. It was the face I’d seen through the car window that morning, the hollow face howling at me through the glass.

  I should run away, I thought, I should scream. But the ideas seemed distant, almost silly.

  “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” the man hissed. “We are His people, and the sheep of his pasture.” His breath caressed my face. I wondered what it smelled like.

  I wondered if his boss knew he was still here, lurking. I wondered who his boss was. The man with the too-pale skin and the too-dark eyes? Or did he report directly to the big boss, the eye in the sky? I wondered what he would do to me if I asked.