Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  Or maybe he was both at once; maybe he was neither.

  “See something you like?” Jude suddenly asked, taking the VR mask off his face, staring at me like he’d known I was there the whole time. I suddenly felt like I’d been spying on more than just a game. Riley jerked around toward the doorway and pulled off his own mask, wearing that bleary-eyed expression of someone yanked into reality before he was ready.

  “I’m just, uh, looking for Ani,” I stammered, backing away.

  “She’s out,” Riley said. “Another rally, I think.”

  Jude glared at him.

  “What rally?” I asked.

  Riley opened his mouth, then, with a wary glance at Jude, closed it again.

  Obedient like a dog, I thought in disgust. Not attractive.

  It wasn’t the kind of thought I wanted to be having about Riley, or any of the mechs. Attractive, not attractive—not my problem, either way. Not that I was oblivious to his broad shoulders or sinewy muscles. And not that he wasn’t exactly my type, not just the tall, dark, and monosyllabic thing, but the way he could say all he needed to with a touch or a look or—even though I didn’t technically have proof of this, I had no doubt—his biceps tightening around you, curling you into his chest, into that body-shaped hollow created by his open embrace—

  No. That was exactly the kind of thinking I didn’t need. One disastrous night with Walker had been enough to prove that when it came to mechs, anatomically correct was necessary but not sufficient. I could do anything I wanted—it was the wanting that was the problem. There was a reason we had to jump out of planes and dive off cliffs to get a high, to break through the wall separating us from the ability to experience something real. I’d wanted Walker all right, just as much as before the download—but when I had him, his body tangled up in mine, it had been cold and awkward and empty. It had been—why not just say it?—mechanical.

  Walker wasn’t the only one. That was the renegade voice in my mind, the one that insisted on reminding me of everything I’d prefer to forget, like that afternoon by the waterfall with Jude. But that didn’t count. That hadn’t been real. Just a moment of desperation. It didn’t prove anything other than the fact that I was right about staying away.

  “What rally?” I asked again, determined to stop thinking about things there was no point in thinking about.

  “See for yourself,” Jude said, flipping on the nearest screen and calling up a live vid.

  Savona had upped his production values while I was dreaming. What had once been a bare stage with a plywood podium was now an elaborately dressed proscenium, framed by dark velvet curtains that perfectly set off the glowbars lining the stage. The eerie golden glow encircled a central dais, coated with iridescent paint that shimmered under the stage lights. Savona stood at its center, the glowbars showering him in a golden aura. And sitting by his side, as always, his most loyal disciple.

  He looks stronger than he did before, I told myself.

  An audience of hundreds cheered them on. “Do you want to live in fear?” Savona shouted at his Brotherhood. “Is that the country you want for yourselves, for your children?”

  “No!” the crowd roared back.

  “Are their rights more important than our lives?” he shouted. The camera zoomed in on his flushed face. Despite the frenzy in his voice, his black-eyed gaze was ice. “More important than our souls?”

  “No!” the crowd faithfully called back.

  “Friends, we once were lost, but now we are found,” Savona intoned. He raised a finger: Wait. At his command, they fell silent. Auden planted his hands on the arms of the chair and heaved himself into a standing position. He leaned against Savona for a moment, steadying himself, then stood upright, unassisted. “Our message has been heard,” Savona said. He grasped Auden’s hand. “Our sacrifices have not been in vain.”

  They raised their clasped hands. “We are in the right,” Auden said, his raspy voice projected over the crowd. “Will we do whatever is necessary?”

  “We will!” the crowd thundered.

  “Will you?” Auden asked, and when the camera zoomed in on him, his gaze was anything but steady. His eyes were wild, unfocused, and at odds with his strangely placid smile. I wondered if Savona had drugged him up before wheeling him out onstage.

  “I will!” the crowd shouted as one.

  “I will!” Auden shouted back. He and Savona raised their hands again. “We will!” they cried in unison. The applause drowned out whatever they said next. The vidroom’s sound system was designed to be louder and clearer than life; the cheering erupted all around us.

  I forced myself not to lunge for the controls and blot it out. No more dreams, I told myself. Eyes open. So I watched. I listened. Until I couldn’t take it anymore, and as if he somehow knew exactly when I would break, Jude shut it off.

  “They’ve been throwing one of these every week,” Jude said. “Your little boyfriend’s gotten pretty popular.”

  “It’s not Auden,” I insisted.

  “Sure looks like him,” Jude retorted. “So unless you’re not the only one with a convenient double floating around—”

  “Enough!” Riley held up a hand to each of us, palms out. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter that she’s denying reality to believe whatever the hell she wants to believe?” Jude asked, voice soaked in sarcasm. “Maybe she should go join her boyfriend onstage. She’d fit right in.”

  “This isn’t helpful,” Riley said. He and Jude looked at each other for a long moment. Then Jude nodded.

  “Fine,” he said. “Here’s the deal. While you were . . . sleeping, Savona and his Brotherhood ramped it up. It’s not just these ridiculous rallies. They’re bussing people in from the cities, feeding them, giving them free med-tech, and sending them home with plenty of antimech crap to spread around to their friends.”

  “That’s the part I don’t get,” I said. “Why would anyone in a city want to team up with Savona? He’s got everything, and they’re—”

  “Nothing?” Jude asked dryly.

  For a long time, I’d believed my father when he said that the people who lived in cities deserved to be there—maybe even wanted to be there, because they couldn’t hack the rules of the real world. I’d thought Auden was crazy, going off on all the ways that the government and the corps treated the slum-mers like nonpeople. “I’m just saying that they should know what it’s like. To be told you don’t count.”

  “They do,” Riley said quietly. “That’s the problem.”

  “Auden’s smart,” Jude added. “He’s going to the cities, the corp-towns, showing them all the ways their lives suck. They aren’t allowed to hate the people who put them there. But they can hate us. Average city lifespan is thirty-seven years. We live forever. You do the math.”

  I didn’t have to. I’d seen the look on Sari’s face when she saw Riley and me standing together. Heard the catch in her voice when she’d asked what it was like knowing I’d never grow old. Everything else about her might have been part of the show, but that was real. And they’d all looked at us that way. It wasn’t like in the corp-town, all those people staring at us, curious or disgusted or afraid. In the city, there’d been all those things, but there’d also been something else. “They really hate us.”

  “Why not? Why should they die and we get to live?” Riley asked. But he wasn’t looking at me—he’d turned to Jude, like he honestly wanted an answer.

  Jude quieted him with a nearly imperceptible shake of the head. “Your boyfriend’s smart,” he said, returning his attention to me. “He feeds the idiot masses all this Faither bullshit about our immortal souls or lack thereof. But he’s working both ends—drowning the network in op-vids and pop-ups about how we’re a security risk.”

  “Because of the corp-town attack,” I mumbled, feeling guilty, even though there was nothing to feel guilty about. “But they arrested her.”

  “It’s not just Ariana whatever her name is,” Jude said. �
�It’s the fact that she was able to get into the ventilation ducts—no fingerprints, no biometrics. Someone finally woke up to the fact that mechs can be anyone, do anything. Savona’s riding it as far as he can. The Faithers—or whatever they’re calling themselves now—may be crazy. But Savona’s not. He’s good.”

  But Savona was crazy. Crazy enough to do . . . anything? “You don’t think— Could the Brotherhood have had something to do with the attack?”

  “Someone deserves a gold star,” Jude said with a sneer. “You’re a little late to the party, but better late than never, I suppose.”

  Auden would never be a part of something like that, I thought.

  But maybe he didn’t know.

  “So what are we doing about it?” I asked.

  Jude raised an eyebrow. “We?”

  I ignored him. “If they’re involved, there must be some kind of proof. We should—”

  “Start sniffing around?” Jude suggested. “Attend some rallies? Maybe get someone on the inside to find out what’s really going on?” He clapped his hands together with a sharp crack. “Brilliant idea. Too bad you were busy napping, or it could have been you.”

  “So you sent Ani? By herself ?” I asked. Unbelievable.

  “She can handle it,” Jude said. “Wears a camo hoodie that hides her face. They have no idea what she really is.”

  “You didn’t think to ask me?” I said. “I’m the one who knows Auden. How much more inside track can you get?”

  “You haven’t quite been available,” Jude pointed out.

  “You could have—”

  “And even if you were,” he said over me, “you’re not objective. You’re obviously in denial about your twisted friend.”

  “And you’re objective? You’ve hated him from the beginning. You’re probably thrilled to finally have a good reason.”

  “But you admit I have a good reason,” he snapped. “That’s the point.”

  “The point is Ani shouldn’t be doing something like this by herself. Next time I’m going with her.”

  “Well, isn’t she lucky to have such a noble protector,” Jude drawled, like he knew exactly why I was so determined to go to the Temple, and that it had nothing to do with Ani.

  For once I almost wished he’d give me one of his tedious lectures about what was really going on inside my head, because I had no idea. I believed what I’d said about Ani: This wasn’t the kind of thing she could handle on her own. After seeing those vids, I wasn’t sure any of us could. But she was a big girl, and I didn’t owe her anything. So what was it, then? Was I just so desperate to see Auden and—what? Prove that he didn’t really hate me? Convince him that we could go back to the way things were?

  Could I be that delusional?

  “Someone set me up at that corp-town,” I said, keeping my eyes on Jude, watching—always watching—for some kind of tell-tale reaction. But there was nothing. “If it was the Brotherhood, I have to know. I’m not going to let Ani do all the hard work.”

  And maybe that was it: the idea of doing something. Anything. Even if it meant facing what Auden had become; what I made him. If he and his Brothers wanted to take everything— my credit, my identity, my personhood—away from me, let them try. But this time, they’d have to do it to my face.

  “It’s not a good idea,” Riley said.

  Like it was his decision. “Don’t think I can handle it?”

  “Can you?” Jude asked.

  “I guess we’ll find out.” I glared at both of them, daring them to try to forbid me.

  Instead, Jude raised his hands over his head, imitating Auden’s motion of victory. “We will!” he shouted in a raspy voice, sounding eerily like Auden. “You will!”

  I would.

  The Brotherhood of Man held a rally every Sunday.

  “I still don’t see why you have to go.” Ani pulled a camo hoodie over her head. She tossed a second one to me.

  “Maybe I’m curious,” I said, checking myself out in Ani’s mirror. This was less a fashion don’t than a burn-before-wearing situation. Sensors in the hoodie detected ambient color and reflected it, allowing the wearer to fade into any background, an imperfect invisibility. The thick, baggy hood cast enough of a shadow over my face that I could have been any age, any gender, I could have been some gap-toothed, pockmarked med-head from the city. I could have been alive.

  The camo tech had been a military innovation before we were born, had filtered into the fashion zone when we were kids, and had quickly drifted into obscurity when it became obvious that fading away defeated the point of style. Now they were cheap novelties, just the kind of thing a tech-deprived city rat might rescue from the trash with a scavenger’s glee. We’d fit right in.

  Ani strung a thin silver pendant around her neck and fumbled with the chain. Then she held the necklace out to me. “Can you?”

  A glowing orb of blue lazulate dangled from the silver chain, a perfect match to the silver blue streaks that trickled down her neck and spine. I’d seen this kind of stone before— Bliss Tanzen had had one that she loved showing off, at least until it became clear she’d lied about receiving it from a dashing young heir to the SunFire fortune. It turned out that after a shocker-fueled all-night encounter, the solar energy baron had blocked her from his zone; the necklace came from Daddy. But I knew from Bliss’s incessant boasting before her secret emerged and the necklace got recycled that something like this was worth almost as much as a car. A small, cheap car with a submoronic nav-system that restricted it to preprogrammed routes and major highways, but a car nonetheless. Lazulate was almost as rare as it was useless, which meant its harmless radioactive glow had become a totem of wealth. “Pretty,” I said, fastening the chain at the nape of her neck. “New?”

  Ani closed her hand around the pendant. “Quinn gave it to me.”

  “Quinn Sharpe?”

  She glared at me. “Surprised? What, that she’d bother? Or that she’d bother for me?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I said quickly. “I just— Quinn doesn’t seem like the type to—”

  Ani burst into laughter. “Joking.” She brushed her thumb across the glowing face of the lazulate. “You’re right, I guess. But Quinn’s changing.”

  “People do that?” I asked, only half kidding.

  “These last few weeks . . .” Ani shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s just getting tired of all the . . .”

  Screwing everything that moved? “Experimenting,” I suggested, experimenting myself with a little tact.

  “Right.”

  “Or maybe she finally figured out who she wanted to be with,” I said. Not sure whether I believed it.

  “Maybe,” Ani said, sounding like she wasn’t convinced either. “But I think it’s more than that. She never really had a chance to be anybody before, you know? She was living on the network—it wasn’t real. So after the download, it was like she had to start all over again. Figure herself out. Maybe she’s finally doing it.” She gave her wrist two sharp taps, and the glowing green numerals of a skintimer appeared. “We should go, or we’ll be late,” she said. “You sure about this? Seeing Auden like that, it could be—”

  “Who knows if we’ll even get there,” I said with as much nonchalance as I could dredge up. “Could get stopped a mile from the house.” The penalty for driving without a human in the car was just a fee, for now, along with confiscation of the vehicle. But our funds were limited. Thanks to some creative accounting, we still had access to plenty of credit under a variety of fronts and assumed names, but the bulk of it had been seized—losing a car was a less than desirable eventuality. And I’d had enough of the secops for one lifetime.

  “We’ll be fine,” Ani said. “They’re not enforcing the restrictions. It’s just a scare tactic.”

  “Then let’s go,” I told her. “Find out if there’s anything to be scared about.”

  Find out what’s going on with Auden, I thought.

  If he means everything
he says about us.

  About me.

  No, nothing to be scared of at all.

  The Temple of Man wasn’t a building. It was hundreds of acres of buildings, sprawling, flat concrete blocks spiderwebbed together by tunnels and skyways. Within a mile of the Temple, the countryside gave way to an unbroken stretch of asphalt in every direction. No trees, no grass, no relief from the gray cement, the same color as the dingy sky. Only one structure violated the horizontal skyline, a narrow white tower shooting three hundred feet into the air, widening at the top for a story-high globe of windows. It reminded me of the pics I’d seen of the Middle East, after the war started but before the bombs dropped, ending the war and all the warriors in a flash of atomic fire. In the pics, tall spires had jutted from domed temples, strange, ornate lighthouses dotting the horizon, and as a kid I’d often imagined the bored but devoted keepers who might have lived up there in the sky, tending to their god. I wondered if they’d been the first to see the bombs, fire streaking through the night, and whether they’d had time to wonder or panic—or jump—before the sky exploded.

  “It’s where they used to track the planes taking off,” Ani said, following my gaze.

  “Seriously?” Maybe it was a good thing the energy crisis had destroyed the airline industry. A million planes flying around and the only thing keeping them from crashing into one another was a few guys looking out the window? “How many you think used to fly in and out of here a day?”

  Ani shrugged, taking in the miles of paved runway stretching to the horizon. “Twenty?” she guessed. “Maybe thirty?”

  It was impossible to imagine. Sure, once they’d figured out how to build hybrid biofuel planes, they’d gotten them back in the air, but most were corp-owned cargo flights. If you had enough credit, you could always track down a plane to get you where you needed to go. But if you were unlucky enough to count as “most people”—and most people were—cost and restrictions forced you to go by ground. Or stay home. Just as there weren’t enough roads to go around, it had turned out there wasn’t enough sky. Which meant the majority gave up their wings so a minority could fly.