Frozen

11. ONE OF US

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 across 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.

Maybe, I thought, I was being punished. Maybe the Faithers were right, and I wasn’t supposed to exist at all. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but if He or She or It or Whatever was pissed off to see me wandering around all soulless and abominable, this seemed like a pretty effective start to the divine retribution.

“You think she’s stuck like this forever?”

I thought so. The absence of body felt absolute. I was pure mind. I was floating. I was wishing I could float away, when the crowd parted, and Auden Heller came barreling through.

“Get away,” he hissed at them. No one moved. “Get the fuck out of the way!”

Auden wasn’t big enough to take on a hostile crowd; he was barely big enough to take on a hostile individual, and he was facing plenty of them. But they were facing Auden, half-crazed behind his thick black glasses. Maybe they saw something worth avoiding or maybe they’d just gotten tired of laughing at the frozen freak. Maybe their markers had run dry. For whatever reason, they got out of his way.

Auden wrapped his arms around my waist.

I don’t need you to save me, I thought furiously.

“I hope this doesn’t hurt you,” he murmured.

Nothing hurts me, I thought.

I didn’t expect he’d be strong enough to pick me up. He was. He carried me, my body stiff, my feet a few inches off the ground, my face staring blankly over his shoulder, watching the crowd, still laughing, recede into the distance.

“You’ll be okay,” Auden said quietly as we crossed the quad. “They’ll know how to fix you.”

I wondered what made him think I could hear. Or that I cared.

I wondered why he was bothering to help.

He brought me to the school’s med-tech, but of course, that was useless. I didn’t need first aid; I needed a tune-up. The tech voiced my parents, who must have voiced BioMax. Maybe they even went straight to call-me-Ben. And I waited, propped up in a corner, still frozen. Auden waited too, sitting in a chair next to my body, holding my hand.

“I’m coming with you,” he said when the man arrived to take me away.

The man shook his head.

“Yes,” Auden insisted.

The world flipped upside down as the man hoisted me over his shoulder. My face slammed into his back, and I was stuck staring at his ass.

“How do I even know you’re legit?” Auden asked. “You could be trying to kidnap her or something. It’s not like she can stop you.”

“It’s not like you can either, kid.” The man, large enough to multitask, shoved Auden out of the way, using the arm that wasn’t holding me.

“Let them go,” the school tech told Auden. “He knows how to help her.”

No one knows that, I thought.

The man carried me outside, out to the parking lot, past another crowd of jeering wannabes probably already posting shots to their favorite stalker zones. He carried me to a car and loaded me inside.

“Kid’s right,” the man muttered, folding me into the back. “I could do anything. Who’d know?”

His hand lingered on my leg, which he’d had to twist to fit into the narrow space. My limbs were rigid, but not as frozen as they’d seemed. With a little effort, they moved when he moved them. He rubbed his finger in a slow circle along the skin of my calf.

I can’t even feel it, I told myself. So it’s not really happening. It’s not really my body.

“Almost forgot,” he said, chuckling. He raised up my shirt, reached underneath. I watched the fabric undulate as his hands crept up my torso. I couldn’t feel him massaging the patch of skin just below my armpit or carefully peeling it back to reveal the fail-safe, an input port that functioned only with BioMax tech and a well-protected access code; an emergency shutdown. But I knew what he was doing. And no matter how much I willed myself to stay awake, I knew it wouldn’t work.

Don’t, I thought uselessly.

There are some moments you’d rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it’s mostly those moments in which it’s smarter—safer—to stay awake.

Don’t.

“Sweet dreams,” the man said.

Please don’t.

Lights out.

“Don’t,” I said, and I said it out loud, in a different place, a familiar cramped white room, a too-bright light in my eyes, call-me-Ben’s face inches from mine. I was back on floor thirteen.

“There you go,” he said. “All better.”

“What happened?” I remembered the car, I remembered the man’s hands on my body, under my shirt, I remembered his sour smile, and then… I was here, awake, with call-me-Ben. As if no time had passed.

“I’d suspect someone hasn’t been taking very good care of herself,” he said. “And your system… Well, think of it like this: In an organic body, too much wear and tear, overexhaustion, and malnutrition weaken you, make you susceptible to bugs. This body, when mistreated, can fall prey to the same problem. Not germs, of course.” He laughed fakely. “But every system can be crashed by the right bug—under the right circumstances. A temporary disconnect between your body and your neural network. Shouldn’t be a problem again if you take care of yourself.”

But that wasn’t what I needed to know. “How did I get here? Who was that guy?”

“The man who brought you in? Just one of our techs.”

“He knocked me out.”

“He initiated a shutdown,” said call-me-Ben. “Standard protocol. I’m sure it couldn’t have been very pleasant, frozen like that. We didn’t want to cause you any more discomfort than necessary.”

“He just brought me here?”

Ben nodded. “Straight here, and we fixed you right up. We’ll run a few more diagnostic tests, and then you should be able to go home.”

“How long?”

“Shouldn’t take more than—”

“No. How long was I out?”

Call-me-Ben checked the time. “About five hours, I believe. But they didn’t start working on you until I got down here. So it only took an hour or so to fix you right up. Just a minor problem, nothing to worry about.”

Five hours gone. Turned off.

And four of those hours lying in a heap somewhere, limp and malleable, like a doll, while the man, or anyone else, carted me around, did whatever he wanted. Or maybe did nothing. Maybe dumped me on a table somewhere, like spare parts in storage, and walked away.

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

No, I decided.

Or even if it did, it didn’t matter. The body wasn’t me, not when the brain was shut down. They treated it like a bunch of spare parts, because that’s all it was. It wasn’t me.

Which meant whatever happened, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

“You have to start taking care of yourself,” Ben said. And there was something about the way he said it that made it seem like he knew what I’d been doing, all of it. It was the same tone Sascha had used when she mentioned my boyfriend. A little too knowing, like he had to restrain himself from winking. “Will you promise me you’ll do that?”

“Can you guarantee this won’t happen to me again?” I asked.

“If you stop pushing yourself so hard? Yes, I can guarantee it. So can you guarantee me this won’t happen again?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t care what I had to do: I would never be that helpless again.