Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  “But the rest of it? About me being just a machine, fooling myself into believing…You think he could be right?”

  She hesitated. Too long. Great—another answer I didn’t want to hear.

  “Forget I asked,” I said. “Of course he’s not right. I’m just—”

  “I don’t think you’re fooling yourself,” Zo said slowly. “And I don’t think…I don’t think it’s true what he said. About it not being natural. What’s natural anymore? Besides…” She glanced toward the window. The fog—or smog or haze or whatever it was—was bad today, so thick you couldn’t even see the trees. “Nature sucks.”

  I laughed. She flinched.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” Zo shifted her weight. “I’m just not used to it yet.”

  “My laugh.”

  “Your whole…Yeah. Your laugh.”

  “Remember when Mom decided she wanted to be a singer, and she made us sit through her rehearsal?” I didn’t know what had made me think of it.

  A smile slipped onto Zo’s face, like she couldn’t help it. “And we just had to sit there while she butchered that stupid song over and over again. What the hell was it called?”

  We both paused. Then—

  “‘Flowers in the Springtime’!” Together.

  She giggled. “Everything was going fine until you made me laugh—”

  “I made you laugh?”

  “You made that face!” she said accusingly. “With your cheeks all puffed up and your eyebrows scrunched….”

  “Yeah, because I was holding my breath, trying not to laugh at you, looking like you were having some kind of seizure.”

  “Okay, but how could you not laugh, when she kept singing that stupid song—”

  “‘Flowers in the springtime, apples in the trees,’” I warbled in a falsetto. “‘Your hand in my hand, gone weak in my knees.’”

  “She sounded like a sick cat,” Zo sputtered.

  “Like psycho Susskind, that night we left him outside in the thunderstorm.”

  Zo shook her head. “Like psycho Susskind, if we threw him out the window. Howling for his life.”

  “And when you started laughing—”

  “When you started laughing—”

  “I thought she was going to kill us both.”

  Zo grinned. “At least that was the end of her singing career.”

  “Career,” I said. “Yeah, right. A bright future in breaking glasses and shattering eardrums.” I shook my head. “And remember when Walker showed up that night, I had to explain why I was grounded, but that just started me off laughing again, and then you started again, and we couldn’t get the story out? I wonder if I ever did tell him what that was about.”

  “You did,” Zo said flatly. She’d stopped laughing. “You texted him later and told him.”

  “Oh. Right, okay. How do you even remember that?”

  “I have to go,” Zo said. It was like the last few minutes hadn’t happened. “I’m late.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “What do you care?” she snapped.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She sagged against the doorframe, just a little, not enough so most people would notice, but I was her sister. I noticed. “I’m going out with Cass, okay? Is that a problem?” But she didn’t ask like she really wanted to know.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “She’s your friend now, right? Go.”

  “I wasn’t asking for permission.”

  “Fine,” I said again, even though it wasn’t.

  “Fine,” she said. And she left.

  I wanted to get into bed and shut down, forget the day had ever happened. But there were two messages waiting for me. That was bizarre enough, since pretty much no one was speaking to me anymore, not unless you counted the randoms I only knew from the network, and even if I did count them, they’d mostly faded away, since I wasn’t doing much zone-hopping these days. When you ignored the randoms for long enough, they tended to get a clue.

  The most recent text was from Quinn.

  I’m going. And so are you.

  It didn’t make sense. Not until I saw the one that had arrived just before it, addressed to both of us. From an anonymous sender.

  Congratulations, you passed the first test.

  Then there was a time, a date, and an address.

  Ready for phase two?

  ONE OF US

  “If you can’t remember something, did it really happen?”

  The car took an unfamiliar route, depositing me at some smallish house a little too close to the city for my comfort. There was a security field around the property, which lifted as I drove through. No one was waiting outside for me. I wondered if Quinn had already arrived. Or changed her mind about coming in the first place. It was, after all, slightly insane, showing up at a random spot in the middle of nowhere just because some anonymous message told me to. It was more than slightly insane to do so without telling anyone where I was going. But I had come this far; I was going in.

  After all, what was the worst that could happen? It’s not like I could die.

  I knocked. When the door opened, the blue-haired girl from the support group stood behind it. “You?” I asked, surprised. The girl—Ani, I remembered—had spoken even less than I had at the session, revealing only that, aside from the technicolored hair, she was kind of blah.

  “Sort of me,” she said softly. “But not just me. Come in.” She stepped aside.

  The place was crawling with them. Mech-heads. Skinners. Freaks. And I mean, crawling, literally, since a few of them were on the floor, writhing against the cheap carpeting—or against one another—their eyes rolled back, their fingers spasming. It was as if they were tripping on Xers, but I knew they couldn’t be, because they were like me.

  No, I thought, trying not to stare, although they wouldn’t have noticed. Not like me.

  The house was sparsely furnished: white walls, gray floor, a couple of cheap couches set at haphazard angles to the walls and each other, and not much more. Ani took a seat on one of them, settling back against Quinn’s arm. Quinn looked like she was home. There was an empty space next to them. I didn’t sit. On the other couch slumped a tall, lanky mech-head with brown eyes, brown hair, and a sour look on his waxy face. And next to him, staring at me with flickering orange eyes, someone familiar. Jude something, one of the earliest skinners. A year ago he’d been everywhere on the vids, hitting parties, crashing vidlifes, popping up on all the stalker zones. And then, a month or two later, people had gotten bored—or he had—and he’d disappeared. A month was longer than most insta-fame lasted; he’d been lucky.

  He’d also been a brunet. But now he was…something else. His hair gleamed silver, and the color bled down his face, streaking his forehead and cheeks with a metallic sheen. His bare left arm was etched with the snaking black lines of a circuit diagram. But his right arm, that was the worst of it. The pseudoflesh had been stripped away, replaced by a transparent coating that glowed with the pulse and flicker of the circuitry underneath.

  He wasn’t the only one. The writhing freaks were all streaked with silver, their skin painted with whirling diagrams or stripped away, wiring exposed. One had even decorated his bare skull with an intricate vision of the cerebral matrix that whirred beneath the surface. As Ani leaned forward on the couch, her shirt rose on her back, exposing a patch of bare, silvery skin.

  “Stare all you want,” Jude said. “It’s important to know what you are.”

  “What you are. A bunch of freaks,” I muttered. “What did you do to yourselves?”

  “Not freaks. Machines,” Jude corrected me. “And we didn’t do it. We’re just embracing it.”

  “You think this is funny?” I asked, disgusted. “You want to turn us all into a joke?”

  “Not a joke,” Jude said. “A machine.”

  “I’m no machine!”

  Jude glared at Ani. “I thought you said she was okay.”

  “She is,
” Ani said, glancing at Quinn. “When her friend—”

  “We’re not friends,” Quinn and I said at the same time. Only Quinn laughed.

  “She sounded like she got it,” Ani said. “And she walked out on the session. Seemed like a good sign.”

  “What is this?” I asked. “Some kind of stupid spy game? You go to those meetings and what, report back? To him?”

  “Well, she’s not stupid,” Jude said. “There’s that.”

  I stood up. “She’s out of here.”

  “Stay,” Ani said. “You belong here.”

  I shuddered. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s better than Sascha’s crap,” Quinn said, stroking the silver streak on Ani’s arm. “They know what they are. What we are.”

  “This isn’t who I am,” I said, backing away.

  “It’s who we all are.” The guy next to Jude spoke for the first time. “Like it or not.”

  “Let her go, Riley.” Jude flicked a lazy hand toward the door. “This is a place for people who want to look forward, not back. She’s obviously not ready to do that. Not if she’s still whining about what she was and denying what she is.”

  “I’m not denying anything.”

  “Your sentence is a logical impossibility,” Jude said. “Not to mention inaccurate. Come back when you’ve figured things out. We’ll wait.”

  “I hope you can wait forever.”

  Jude laughed. “What, you think you’ll make it out there? With the orgs?”

  “The what?”

  “Orgs—organics. Nasty little piles of blood and guts. Humans. You know, the ones who hate you.”

  “No one hates me,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’re not in denial at all.” Jude shook his head. “Come back when you’ve grown up a little.” He looked younger than me. But he was a skinner—looks meant nothing. “Well? What are you waiting for? Be a good little mech and get out.”

  “You’re throwing me out?” Unbelievable.

  Sorry, Quinn mouthed. But she stayed where she was.

  “Have fun with your orgs,” he said with fake cheer. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Take care of your mental problems,” I advised him.

  And left.

  There was a mech-head sitting on the edge of the front porch. I winced as the door slammed behind me, afraid it would catch his attention. I’d talked to enough skinners for one day. Maybe for life.

  But the mech-head didn’t look up. He was hunched over, his fist wrapped around a switchblade, and he was carving something into the porch’s rotting wood, except—

  I gasped.

  He wasn’t carving the wood. He was carving his arm. The knife flashed as the point dug in again, slicing a gash from his wrist to his elbow. He shivered.

  And then he finally looked at me, his lips drawing back in a sickening smile. His teeth were coated in silver.

  “Feels good.” His voice was a sigh. “I mean, feels bad. But that feels good, too. You know?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know.

  But…

  Pain, I thought. I miss pain.

  I shook my head harder.

  He tossed the knife and caught it neatly, gripping the blade. Then, like a knight making an offering to his queen, extended it to me. “You’ll like.” His teeth gleamed. Not like the knife handle. It was inky black, sucking in light. “You’ll see.”

  “You’re crazy,” I whispered. I couldn’t get my voice to work right. Just like I couldn’t make myself walk away. “You’re all crazy.”

  He just nodded.

  And the knife was still there, waiting.

  I didn’t want it.

  I did not.

  “I’m not one of you,” I said louder. Backing away. “I don’t belong here.”

  The mech-head just shrugged and started carving again.

  They were all psycho, I told myself. Freaks. Nothing to do with me. Nothing like me.

  I’d been wrong to come; I’d been stupid.

  I’d been stupid a lot, lately. But that was over. And smart decision number one? Leaving this place, these…people.

  Leaving—and never coming back.

  One month passed.

  See how easy that was? From point A to point B in three little words, skimming over everything that happened in between. As if it were possible to do that in real life, as if you could just shut your eyes and open them a moment later only to find: One month passed.

  It’s not. Days pass slowly; minutes pass slowly. And I had to live through them all. I went to school, most days, at least. I lingered in empty classrooms after the bell, then hustled to the next class at the last minute so I could slip in the door just before the teacher started droning. And again for the next class, and again. I ate lunch outside, alone, in a spot behind the lower school building where no one was supposed to go. No one ever knew I was there, because the biosensors deployed to catch students wandering astray couldn’t catch me. I went directly home at the end of every day, taking the long way around to the parking lot so I wouldn’t have to pass by the western edge of the track and see Zo and the others running heats across the field.

  It got colder.

  I didn’t notice. Some afternoons I shut myself in my room, linking in and sending my av on missions across the network, avoiding the zones of anyone I used to know, racking up kills on Akira, thrashing players who lived on the other side of the globe and had no idea they were playing against a machine.

  I skipped dinner. Even when my mother begged; even when my father ordered. And neither tried very hard. They didn’t want me there either, stiff and still at the table, watching the mouthfuls of risotto or filet or chocolate mousse disappear. Then there were the nights when I slipped down to the kitchen, snagged a brownie or a cookie or anything chocolate, mashed it up with a fork, and tried to swallow it, washing it down with a swig of water in hopes of forcing something past the grate at the base of my throat. Not because I wanted to taste any of it—not that I could taste any of it—but just to see what would happen. Nothing happened.

  I didn’t upload, not anymore. It was supposed to be a daily routine; it was supposed to be my protection against the finality of death, every experience stored, every memory preserved, so that when the next accident came along, I—the essential I, the mysterious sum of seventeen years of days and nights and the best quantum computing credit could buy—would remain intact. But what was the point? If the worst happened, and I had to start over again, what would I need to remember? Waiting out the minutes behind the school until it was time to slog through yet another vapid class? Or maybe the moment Walker saw me, froze, then turned abruptly and zagged off in the opposite direction? Not quite treasured memories. So I let them slip away.

  Nights, I ran. Factory specifications recommended that I stop running when the body reported its fatigue; that I “sleep” when the normal people slept. But I couldn’t stand the way it felt. It would be one thing if I dreamed, but there were no dreams. It would have been okay even if there was just darkness. I had spent plenty of time in the dark. But shutting down meant surrendering to a blank; closing my eyes and opening them again, immediately, only to discover that hours had passed. When you sleep, your body marks the time. Yesterday dies in the dark; tomorrow wakes. Eyes open, you know. The body ages, the hourglass empties, death approaches, time is devoured but not lost. It wasn’t like that for me, not anymore. I couldn’t shut down without feeling like I was losing myself all over again, night after night. So instead I ran.

  I ran through the woods in the dark, full out, without fear that I would stumble over the uneven ground or the broken branches blown across the path, running faster, maybe hoping I would fall, just to see if it would hurt, and if it did, maybe that would be all right, because feeling something was better than nothing. But I never fell. And I never stopped when I was tired. The body told me it was wearing down, but I didn’t ache, I didn’t cramp, I didn’t wheeze. The body’s monitoring system flashed red warnings ac
ross my eyes; I ignored them. The coach, before she’d thrown me off the team, had always said that running was 90 percent mental. That was for humans, I decided. (Orgs. The word popped into my head, but I ignored it, because that was Jude’s word, Jude and his freaks, not mine.) For me it was all mental; the body, and whatever it wanted, was irrelevant. So I ran for hours, for miles, until I got bored, and then I ran farther until eventually I retreated to the house to wait out the dawn.

  One month passed.

  It happened on a Tuesday.

  I was crossing the quad, the grassy, open-aired corridor between two wings of the school. There was an enclosed hallway too, and most people used that, not wanting to spend any more time outdoors than necessary. I preferred the cold.

  I didn’t feel strange before it happened. I didn’t feel much of anything, which was the new normal.

  Everything was normal. One foot in front of the other. One step, then another. And another. And then—

  Not.

  I was still. Left foot forward, flat on the ground. Right foot a step behind, rising up on its toe, about to take flight. Arms swung, one forward, one back. Head down, as always.

  Move, I thought furiously. Walk!

  The body ignored me. The body had gone on strike.

  Being a human statue didn’t hurt. It didn’t wear me out. It felt like nothing. I felt like nothing. Like a pair of eyes, floating in space.

  I couldn’t speak.

  And, like most statues, I drew a crowd.

  “What the fuck!” more than one person exclaimed, laughing.

  A couple people poked me. One almost knocked me over before another grabbed my side and steadied me on frozen feet. Laughing, all the time. Several of the guys helped themselves to a peek down my shirt.

  Walker and Bliss passed by, hesitated, then kept walking. She’s the one who paused. He pulled her away.

  I stayed where I was.

  “You think she can hear us?”

  “Who broke her?”

  “Don’t you mean who broke it?”

  Someone balanced a banana peel on my head. Someone else approached my face with a thick red marker. I couldn’t feel it scrape across my forehead. But I could see his satisfied smirk as he capped the marker and stepped away.