Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  “Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

  I was linked in. I could have sent for help. But I didn’t particularly want any. His arm bore down harder against my throat.

  “That’s you,” he spat out. “A graven image. A machine. Programmed to think you’re a real person. Pathetic.”

  Enough. “Yeah, I’m pathetic,” I snapped back. “You’re hiding behind a tree, trespassing on private property, and about five minutes away from being picked up by the cops and probably shipped off to a city, and I’m pathetic.”

  “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” he whispered, grinning like the nonsense words harbored some secret power. I shuddered.

  “Righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue.” He reached up his other hand and stroked my cheek. “God says be righteous to your fellow man. But he doesn’t say anything about what to do with things like you.” The fingers traced the curve of my ear. I jerked my head away, but he grabbed a chunk of hair and tugged, hard. “Guess I’m on my own, figuring out what to do. Got any ideas?”

  He laughed, and that’s when the fear came, fast and hard, like a needle of terror jabbed into my skull. “Anything,” that was the word that echoed. He could do anything. I grabbed his hand, the hand that was crawling down my neck, along my spine, grabbed his fingers and bent them back until I heard the joints crunch and the arm at my throat reared back, struck me across the face, snapped my head back into the tree but my leg had already swung into motion, had connected with his groin. He doubled over and I ran, and I could hear him behind me, cursing and grunting, crashing through the brush, closing in as I pushed faster and pulled away and I could almost imagine a beating heart and heaving lungs, because the panic was so real. But he fell behind, and I made it through the electronic gate in plenty of time, locking him out, locking me in. The fear faded almost immediately, and as it leaked out of me, I had one last, terrifying thought.

  I should go back.

  To slip through the gate again, to face the man, to fight the man—or not to fight, to let him do whatever he wanted, to choose to meet him and his consequences, to turn back, because behind me, where the man glowered from the treeline, was something real. Something human.

  The stronger the emotion, Sascha had promised, the more real it would seem.

  I’d felt it. I was hooked.

  Back in my room, safe and alone. The man, whoever he was, long gone. And with him, the fear.

  I stripped off the sweat-free tracksuit. Uploaded the day’s neural changes, ensuring—with nothing more than a few keystrokes and an encrypted transmission to the server—that if anything happened to this body, a Lia Kahn with fully up-to-date memories would remain in storage, ready and waiting to be dumped into a new one. Would it be me or a copy of me? And if it was a copy, did that make me a copy too, of some other, realer Lia? Was she dead? Was the man right that I was just a machine duped into believing I was human? And if I had been duped, then how could I be a machine? How could any thoughtless, soulless, consciousness-free thing believe in a lie, believe in anything, want to believe?

  And did I consider those questions while I was dealing with my brand-new bedtime ritual? Did I follow the primrose path of logical deduction all the way to its logical endpoint, to the essential question?

  I did not.

  I dumped the tracksuit; I uploaded; I pulled on pajamas; I twisted the blond hair back into a loose, low ponytail; I dumped psycho Susskind into the hall. I did it all mechanically. Mechanically, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatically, involuntarily. Mechanically, as in like-a-machine.

  And I did not think about that, either.

  Instead of turning out the lights and climbing into bed, I mechanically—always mechanically—entered the purple-and-blue tiled bathroom for the first time. The stranger’s face watched me from the mirror, impassive. Blank.

  I pulled up the network query I’d made earlier, the one I hadn’t had the nerve to read. The words scrolled across my left eye, glowing letters superimposed on my reflected face.

  I froze the parade of definitions and expanded the one that seemed to matter. The guy’s name was William James, and he was way too old to be right. Two hundred years ago, no one knew anything; it’s why they all died young and wrinkled with bad hair. Two hundred years ago, they thought light could go as fast as it wanted, they thought the atom was indivisible and possibly imaginary, they thought “computers” were servant girls who added numbers for their bosses when they weren’t busy doing the laundry. They knew nothing. But I read it anyway.

  If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.

  The face didn’t move; the eyes didn’t blink. Cold and neutral, I thought. It wasn’t true. I had felt anger; I had felt fear. But fear of what? The man couldn’t have hurt me, not really. At least, he couldn’t hurt me forever. Whatever he did to the body, I would remain. I couldn’t die. What was to fear in the face of that?

  What kind of emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heartbeats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of shallow weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present…?

  Even now, in my pajamas, in my bathroom, I felt. The tile beneath my feet. The sink against my palms. I felt absence: the silence that should have been punctuated by steady breathing, in and out. Fingers against my chest, I felt the stillness beneath them. I felt loss.

  In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.

  Nothing more.

  THE BODY

  “Aren’t you going to kiss her good-bye?”

  Their whispers slithered through the crack beneath my bedroom door, and I fought the temptation to press myself against it, to find out what Zo and Walker, who had for years shared a mutual, if mostly unspoken, oath of eternal dislike, could possibly need to discuss. Not that the topic was in doubt.

  The topic was me.

  The whispers stopped. I struck my best casual pose, legs dangling off the side of the bed, elbows digging into the mattress, ankles crossed, head tipped back to the ceiling as if the track of solar panels had proven so engrossing as to make me forget what was about to happen. The door opened, and I held my position, letting Walker see me before I saw him.

  Giving him time to erase his reaction before I could see it on his face.

  Not enough time. When I sat up, he was still in the door way, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping the frame, holding himself steady.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He didn’t move. “Your voice…”

  “Weird, right? I hear myself talk and I’m like, wait, who said that?” I forced a laugh, but stopped as soon as I saw him wince. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t very good at the laughing thing yet. Especially when I was faking it.

  “It’s nice,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself. “I like it.”

  I hated it. Someone else’s voice, husky and atonal, coming out of the mouth.

  My mouth, I reminded myself. My voice. But I could only believe that when I was alone. With Walker finally standing there, watching me, I was forced to admit it: The voice belonged to the thing, to the body, not to me.

  “It’s been a while,” I said, even though I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. He hadn’t voiced me back on Thursday night or on Friday. And then Saturday came, and he was here. That should have been enough.

  Walker shrugged. He rubbed his chin, which was shadowed with brown sc
ruff. Without me around to remind him to shave, he’d grown a beard. “I was going to text you, but…”

  “Yeah. But.” I stood up. He was still in the doorway. If he wouldn’t come to me, I would go to him. It can be difficult at the beginning, Sascha had said. But the people who know you, the people who love you, they’ll see beneath the surface. They’ll get that it’s really you under there. You just have to give them some time.

  No one knew me better than Walker. But when I curled the hand around his wrist, he jerked away. “Sorry, I—”

  I stepped back. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have.” He shouldn’t have.

  “No, really. I just…” Walker finally stepped into the room, edging around me as he passed, careful not to touch the body. He sat in my desk chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. Arms crossed, hugging his chest.

  I dropped back down on the bed and waited.

  “I’m very glad you’re all right,” he said finally, like he was passing along a message from his mother to some old lady who’d broken her hip. Like he’d been rehearsing.

  I risked a smile. I’d been rehearsing too. “I missed you.”

  “You, too.” He stared down at the floor. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost to his shoulders, like one of Zo’s retros. I wanted to smooth it back. I wanted to stand behind him and bury my face in it, resting my cheek against the back of his head, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, letting him grip my hands in his. But I stayed where I was. “It’s, uh, it’s pretty,” he said. “I mean—you’re pretty. Now. Like this.”

  “You don’t have to lie.”

  He shifted in the seat. “No—It’s just, I guess, I just thought you’d look a little more like…I mean, on the vids, and you looked…But now…I thought you’d look more…”

  “Like me?” But as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. I didn’t look like me, not anymore, not with the hair that was the wrong color and texture and wasn’t even hair, just a synthetic weave that was grafted on and would never grow. The nose was too small, the eyes too wide, the fingers the wrong thickness, the wrong length, the teeth too straight and too bright, the mouth bigger, the ears smaller, the body taller and too symmetrical, too well proportioned, too perfect. But it wasn’t that. I knew what he’d wanted to say; I knew him too well.

  I thought you’d look more…human.

  And I saw the body again like I’d seen it for the first time, like he was seeing it. The skin, smooth and waxy, an even peachy tone stretched out over the frame without sag or blemish. The way it moved, with awkward jerks, always too slow or too fast. The stranger’s face with dead eyes, pale blue irises encircling the false pupils, and in the center of the black, pinpricks of light, flashing and dimming as the lens sucked up images. The eyes that didn’t blink unless I remembered to blink them. The chest that neither rose nor fell unless I pretended to breathe. The body that wasn’t a body.

  His girlfriend, the machine.

  “It’s just weird,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—”

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “It is weird. It’s weird for me too.”

  “I mean, I know it’s you, I get that, but you sound different, and you look different, and…”

  “It’s because it was an emergency. They had to give me a generic model. My dad picked it out. He says it’s the one that looked the most like me. Not that it looks like me, I know, but it was the best he could do.” Too much detail, I told myself. Stop talking. But I couldn’t. Once I stopped, he would have to start again. Or he wouldn’t. And then we’d just sit there, and he would try not to stare at me, and I would try not to look away. “Some people get these custom faces designed to look just like them, the way they were—or like anything they want, I guess. It’s totally crazy what they can do. The voice, too. You just make a recording and they match it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, I know, but it’s…closer. Easier. But you’ve got to place the order in advance. You’ve got to give them time, and if there’s an accident or something, well…” I tried another smile. “There’s nothing I can do about it now. The artificial nerves and receptors are already fused to the neural pathways or whatever, and they say structural changes would screw with the graft, but next time, I’ll do it in advance, so I’ll be able to order whatever I want. Then I’ll look more like…”

  “Lia,” he said.

  I am Lia.

  But I said it in my head, where there was no one to hear.

  “I’ll look more like me,” I said out loud. Calmly. “Next time.”

  “Wait, what do you mean, next time?”

  “When the, uh, body wears out or—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to block out the echo of the crash, the scream of metal that refused to die—“if something happens to it, they’ll download the, uh…” Data? Program? Brain? Soul? There was no right word. There was only me, looking out through some thing’s dead eyes. “They’ll do it again. When they need to.”

  “So you just get a new body when the old one runs out?” he asked. “And they keep doing it…forever?”

  “That’s the plan.” As the words came out of the mouth, I finally saw it, what it meant. I saw the day he found the first tuft of hair stuck in the shower drain or woke up to a gray strand on his pillow. His first wrinkle in the bathroom mirror. The day he blew out his knee in his last football game. The day his potbelly bulged as he stopped playing and kept eating. Any of the days, all of the days, starting with tomorrow, when he’d be one day older than today; and then the next, two days older, and the next and the next, as he grew, as he aged, as he declined…as I stayed the same. Shunted from one unchanging husk of metal and plastic to the next.

  I got there a moment before he did, but only a moment, and then he got there too. I saw it on his face.

  “Forever.” Walker grimaced. “You’ll be like…this. Forever.” He stood up.

  Don’t leave, I thought. Not yet. But I wasn’t about to say it out loud. Even if he couldn’t see it, I was still Lia Kahn. I didn’t beg.

  “So, what’s it like?” he asked, crossing the room. To the bed—to me. He sat down on the edge, leaving a space between us. “Can you, like, feel stuff?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.

  I held out a hand, palm up. “Do you want to…? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want.”

  He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.

  He touched it. Me.

  Shuddered. Snatched his hand away.

  Then touched me again. Palm to palm. He curled his fingers around the hand. Around my hand.

  “You can really feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s it feel like?”

  “Like it always does.” A lie. Artificial nerves, artificial conduits, artificial receptors, registering the fact of a touch. Reporting back to a central processor the fact of a hand, five fingers, flesh bearing down. Measuring the temperature, the pressure per square inch, the duration, and all of it translated, somehow, into something resembling a sensation. “It feels good.” I paused. “What does it feel like to you?”

  “You mean…?”

  “The skin.”

  “It’s…” He scrunched his eyebrows together. “Not the same as before. But not…weird. It feels like skin.” He let go.

  I brushed the back of my hand across his cheek. This time he didn’t move away. “You need to shave.”

  “I like it like this,” he said, giving me a half smile. It was the same thing he always said.

  “You’re the only one.” That was the standard response. We’d had the fight that wasn’t a fight so often it was like we were following a script, one that always ended the same way. And if I acted like everything was the same, maybe…

  “It looks good,”
he argued, the half smile widening into a full grin.

  “It doesn’t feel good. So unless you want to scratch half my face off when—” I stopped.

  Nothing was the same.

  The coarse bristles sprinkling his face wouldn’t hurt when he kissed me.

  If he kissed me.

  “Lia, when you were gone all that time, I…”

  “What?”

  A pause.

  “Nothing. I’m just…I’m glad you didn’t, you know. Die.”

  It was what he had to say, and I gave him the answer I had to give. “Me too.” For the first time, sitting there with him, I could almost believe it was true.

  Another pause, longer this time.

  “When you were in that place…I should have come to visit.”

  “You were busy,” I said.

  “I should have come.”

  “Yeah.”

  Not that I would have let him see me like that, spasmodic limbs jerking without warning, muscles clenching and unclenching at random, the mouth spitting out those strangled animal noises, the tinny speaker speaking for me until I could control the tongue, moderate the airflow, train the mechanism to impersonate human speech. If he’d seen me like that, he would never have been able to see me any other way. He would never see that I was Lia.

  “I should go,” he said. “You must be…Do you get tired?”

  I shook the head. “I sleep, but it’s not…I don’t dream or anything. I just…” There was no other way to say it. “Shut down.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said suddenly.

  “What?” He scrunched his eyebrows together again. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” There were no mechanical tear ducts embedded in the dead eyes. No saltwater deposits hidden behind the unblinking lids. Add it to the list of things I wouldn’t do again: cry. “I just am. I’m sorry that I’m…like this.”

  I admit it. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me. I wanted him to tell me that he wasn’t sorry. That I was beautiful. That the hair felt like real hair and the skin felt like real skin and the body felt like a real body and he wasn’t weirded out by the thought of touching it. That he saw me.