Frozen

12. TERMINATED

When I finally got home, there was a message from Auden waiting at my zone. His av was weird, like him, a creature with frog legs and black beetle wings. It chirped its message in Auden’s voice. “Are you okay?”

I ignored it.

But the next day at school, when he found me eating lunch behind the low stone wall, I let him sit down.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said.

“Neither are you.”

“But they can’t catch me.” I nodded toward the biosensors. “No bio, ergo, no sensing.”

Auden shrugged. “And they don’t care about catching me. No one’s paying attention.”

“How do you know?”

He unwrapped a slim sandwich with some suspiciously greenish filling. “Where do you think I used to eat? Before you took over my territory, so to speak.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’ is right.”

“So I guess I should thank you or something,” I said. “For yesterday.”

“I guess you should.” There was a pause. “But I can’t help noticing that you didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or shove the sandwich in his face. I certainly wasn’t saying thank you.

“So what’s in the bag, anyway?” I asked instead.

“What bag?”

I rolled my eyes. “That bag.” I pointed to the green sack he always toted around. “Or is it just your security blanket?”

Auden flushed. “Stuff. Nothing important.”

“Really?” I doubted it and reached for the bag. “Let me—”

“Don’t!” he snapped, snatching it away. His fists balled around the straps.

“Okay, whatever. Sorry.” I held up my arms in surrender. “Forget I asked.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but…”

“I mean it. Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

I wasn’t sure if I was mad at him or he was mad at me. Or if neither of us was mad. There was an uncertain silence between us, like we were deciding whether to settle in and get comfortable or to leave.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“What makes you think I want something?”

“We don’t even know each other, and you keep—you know, sticking up for me. Being nice. And now you show up here. What is it?”

“So you think if someone’s nice to you, it means they want something?” he asked. “Interesting.”

“What’s so interesting about that?”

“If I were a shrink, I might wonder what it means for your relationships with other people and what you expect to get out of them,” he said.

He was so deeply weird. “What the hell is a shrink?”

“They were like doctors, for your moods. Someone you talked to when you were feeling screwed up.”

“Why would you talk to some random when you could just take a b-mod to feel better?”

“This was before b-mods, I think,” he said. “Or maybe for people who didn’t want them.”

“Sounds kind of stupid, if you ask me.” Who wouldn’t want to mod their mood, if they could? Something to make you happy when you wanted to be happy, numb when you wanted to be numb? I missed them more than chocolate. And what did I get in exchange? Eternal life, for one thing.

And to help with the feeling-screwed-up part? I supposed there was always Sascha.

I missed the drugs.

“And, by the way, my relationships are just fine,” I said. “At least I have relationships, unlike some people.”

“Oh, excuse me,” he said with exaggerated contrition. “I forgot—You’re popular.”

For some reason, maybe because it was so far from reality, maybe because he made being popular sound like a fatal condition, maybe just because there was nothing else to do but cry and I was a few tear ducts short, I laughed. So did he.

“People are idiots,” he said when he caught his breath.

“You don’t have to say that.”

“I’m not just saying it. Those girls you used to hang out with? Superficial bitches. And the guys—”

“Stop,” I said.

“They’re not your friends,” he said. Like I needed a reminder. “They dropped you.”

“I noticed. Thanks. But they’re still…” I shook my head. “So is that what you think of me, too? Superficial bitch?”

“I think…” For the first time he seemed not quite sure what to say. “You’re different now. And that interests me.”

It wasn’t an answer.

“So that’s why you helped yesterday? I’m, like, some kind of scientific study for you?” I said bitterly. “Something neat to play with?”

“Why do you have to do that?” he asked.

“What?”

“Turn everything into something small like that. Mean.”

“Are you trying to be my shrunk again?” I said.

“Shrink.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I just want to know what it’s like,” he said. “Being…”

“Different?” I suggested. “It sucks.”

“No. I know what it’s like to be different.” He wound the strap of his bag around his fingers. “I want to know what it’s like to be you. To be downloaded. To have this mind that’s totally under your control, to know you’re never going to age, never going to die, this body that’s perfect in every way…” He looked up at me, blushing. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, I just…”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “No one’s meant it like that. Not since… before.”

He blushed a deeper pink. “You do, though,” he mumbled. “Lookgoodlikethis.” It took me a second to decipher what he’d said. “Better than before. I think, at least.”

The body couldn’t blush. Not that I would have blushed, anyway, just because Auden Heller gave me a compliment. The Auden Hellers of the world were always giving compliments to the Lia Kahns of the world. It’s what they were there for.

But it was the first time in too long that I’d really felt like a Lia Kahn.

“Thank you,” I said. “For yesterday, I mean.”

“So what does it feel like?” he asked eagerly.

“Like… not much.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to explain it to him. I did, that was the strange part. But I didn’t know how. “Everything’s almost the same, but not quite. It’s all a little wrong, you know? It sounds different, it looks different, and when it comes to feeling…”

“I read that every square inch of the artificial flesh has more than a million receptors woven into it, to simulate organic sensation,” he said.

“If you say so.” I hadn’t read anything; I didn’t want to know how the body worked. I just wanted it to work better. “But maybe a million isn’t enough. I can feel stuff, but it doesn’t feel…” I brushed my hand across the surface of his bag. This time he didn’t pull it away. “It’s like if I close my eyes and touch the bag, I know it’s there. I know it’s a rough surface, a little scratchy. I know all that, but I can’t… It’s just not the same. It’s like I’m living in my head, you know? Like I’m operating the body by remote control. I’m not inside it, somehow.”

Auden nodded. “The sensation of disembodiment, an alienated dissociation common to the early phase of readjustment. I read about that, too.”

“That doesn’t mean you understand,” I snapped. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I know I don’t,” he said. “But I want to, believe me.”

I almost did.

The final note, a fever-pitched, keening whine, seemed to stretch on forever. It didn’t fade, didn’t swell, just sliced through us, a single, unending tone until, without warning, it ended. For a second everything froze—and then the applause crashed through the silence. A thunder of cheers and screams. The band went nuts, jumping up and down, smashing instruments against the stage, waving their arms in an obvious signal to the fans: more applause, more shouting, more, more, more. Only the lead singer stayed frozen, her mouth open like she was still spooling out that final note, this time in a register too high for us to hear. I felt like she was looking at me.

“Nothing?” Auden asked, stripping off his gear.

“Nothing.” I dumped the earplugs and goggles on the pile of crap next to his bed. “But that’s what I figured.”

Auden had thought that maybe some live music—or at least, as live as it gets these days—would penetrate in a way the recorded stuff couldn’t. That maybe it would get my heart pounding, even though I didn’t have a heart; my breath caught in my throat, even though I didn’t have any lungs; my eyes tearing up, even though I didn’t have any ducts… You get the idea.

We both knew it was a long shot.

But I’d been willing to give it a try. And even though it hadn’t worked—even though the music made me feel cold and dead inside, just like always—it was better, having Auden there. This time it didn’t feel like a disappointment, or like I’d lost yet another piece of myself. It just felt like an experimental result—not even a failure, because when you’re experimenting, every new piece of information is a success.

That’s what Auden said, at least.

And that’s what he called them: experiments. At least going to a virtual concert was more fun than sticking my head in a bucket of ice water to see how long I could stand the cold. (Result: longer than Auden could stand waiting for me to give up.) We’d spent the week “experimenting,” trying to see what I couldn’t do—and what I could. It wasn’t like before, on my own, when I’d pushed the body until it broke. This wasn’t about testing limits, Auden said. This was about getting to know myself again. Because maybe that would lead to liking myself. Just a little.

I laughed at him for saying that—it was a little too Sascha-like for my taste. But I went along with the experiments. Partly because I didn’t have anything else to do—or anyone else to talk to. Partly because I wasn’t sure he was wrong.

“What’s it like?” he asked now. “Linking in with your mind?”

“I don’t know.” He was always asking me that: “What’s it like?” And I never had a good answer. What’s it like to breathe? I could have asked, and stumped him just as easily. What’s it feel like to dream, to swallow, to age?

“I mean, how do you do it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just think about linking in, and the network pops up on my eye screen.”

“But how?”

“Same way I do anything, I guess. How do I shut down at night? How do I stand up when I want to?” I asked, wishing we could change the subject. “How do you?”

Auden looked thoughtful. “I just do it, I guess. I want to, and it happens.”

“Well, same thing,” I said, even though we both knew it wasn’t.

“So how come you can’t do more?”

“More like what?”

“Like, you still need a keyboard,” he said. “Why can’t you just think commands at the network and make stuff happen? Like you did with the language hookup.”

I’d told him all about the computer that had spoken for me, how horrible it had been. Except he didn’t get the horrible part; he thought it sounded cool.

“I just can’t,” I said. “It’s not the same thing.”

“It should be,” he argued. “If they have the tech to do it in the hospital, that means they have it, period. They could have wired your brain right into the network. It’d be like telepathy or something.”

“It’d be weird, is what it would be,” I said. “And they were trying to make us normal.”

It had been call-me-Ben’s favorite word, Sascha’s too. You are normal. Or at least, as normal as we can make you.

“You’ve got to get over that,” Auden said.

“What?”

“The normal thing.”

Because I wasn’t. “Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“But you’ve got something so much better,” Auden said, and I knew where he was going. He had the same dreamy look in his eyes that adults always got when they talked about how I would never age.

“I wasn’t afraid of getting old,” I said.

“What about not getting old?” Auden asked. “What about dying? You always act like it’s nothing, Lia, but it’s everything. You can’t die. What about that is not amazing?”

“I don’t know. I never really thought about it much. Before, I mean.” I’d never known anyone who had died. At least not anyone who mattered. Everyone dies, I got that. But I’d never quite believed it would happen to me. And now it wouldn’t. That didn’t seem amazing. Weirdly enough, it just seemed like the natural order of things. “I guess I’ve never really been too afraid of it. Death.”

He paused and looked away. “Maybe you should be.”

Somewhere below us, a door slammed.

Auden flinched. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Almost six. Why?”

“Nothing. Forget it. You should go.”

I’d come to his house every day after school for a week, but I’d always left by sunset—until today.

Footsteps tramped up the stairs.

I put my hand on the door, but before I could open it, Auden grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he whispered.

I shrugged him off. “What? I thought you wanted me to go.”

“Yeah, but not…” He shot a panicked glance at the window, like he was trying to decide whether to push me through it. Anything to get me out of the house before whoever was out in the hallway came into the room. Before they saw me.

“Are you hiding me?” I asked loudly. “Embarrassed or something?”

He put his finger to his lips, silently begging. I couldn’t believe it. At school he acted like he didn’t care what anyone thought. He kept telling me that I was better off being different, if my only other option was being the same. I didn’t believe him, but I’d believed that he believed it. At least, until now.

“Auden, you actually got a girl in there with you?” a man’s voice called from the hallway. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“Just me,” Auden called back weakly.

Screw him.

I twisted the knob. Opened the door.

The man in the hallway didn’t look anything like Auden. He was blond and handsome, his features perfectly symmetrical, green eyes, rosy cheeks, square chin. He could have starred in a pop-up for a gen-tech lab. And the two little girls clutching his hands were just as picture-perfect. Their blond hair was tied back into pigtails; green eyes sparkled; identical dimples dotted their identical cheeks.

Auden had never mentioned having sisters.

He’d never mentioned much of anything about his family, and I’d never thought to ask.

The man shook his head, looking disgusted. “I should have known.”

“Don’t,” Auden said quietly.

“Girls, go to your room,” the man said. But the girls didn’t move. They were staring at me. “Now.”

Their giggles drifted down the hallway, then disappeared behind a door.

“Get it out of here,” he said, glaring at me.

I bared my teeth. “Nice to meet you, too, M. Heller.”

“This is disgusting,” he said to Auden. “Even for you.”

“We weren’t—”

“You bring this on yourself, you know,” the man said. I couldn’t think of him as Auden’s father. Not with the ice in his eyes. “If you would just try a little harder, you wouldn’t have to resort to… that.”

“We’re leaving.” Auden grabbed my wrist and tugged me into the hall, past his father.

“Didn’t you learn anything from what happened to your mother?”

Auden froze. “Don’t.” His voice had gotten dangerous.

“You’re just like her, you know.”

Auden stood up straighter. “Thank you.”

His father snorted. “Take that out of here,” he said, and even though he was no longer glaring at me, I knew what—who—he meant. “And you can take your time coming back. Tara’s cooking a special dinner for me and the girls.”

“Family bonding,” Auden said bitterly. “How sweet. And I’m not invited?”

“Can you be civil?”

“Unlikely.”

“Then enjoy your evening,” the man said. “Somewhere else.”

We didn’t talk until we were out of the house.

And then we didn’t talk some more.

Auden walked me to my car. I got in, then left the door open, waiting. After a moment, he climbed in too. His hands clenched into fists.

“You don’t embarrass me,” he said finally. “He does.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Parents are just…”

“It’s not parents,” Auden said furiously. “Just him. Parent. Singular.”

“Your mother… left?”

“Died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? You didn’t kill her.”

I looked away.

“I’m sorry.” He touched my shoulder, hesitated, then drew his hand away. I didn’t move. “It’s been a long time, but I still…”

“Yeah. I get it.” I didn’t, not really. My mother wasn’t dead; my father wasn’t evil. I couldn’t get it, any more than he could get what it was like to be me.

It was weird, how many different ways there were for life to suck.

“I’m sorry for what he said. He shouldn’t have treated you like that.”

I shrugged. “I’m getting used to it.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

True. But there were a lot of things I shouldn’t have to get used to, and if I started making a list, I might never stop.

“So Tara’s your stepmother?” I asked.

“She’s the new wife.”

“And the girls…?”

“Tess and Tami. The perfect little daughters my father always wanted.”

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to keep asking questions, but I didn’t know what else to do. “Your mother was the one who wanted a son?”

He snorted and, for the first time, he sounded like his father. “No one wanted a son.”

“I don’t get it.” Everyone got what they wanted these days, even if you barely had any credit. Looks, skills, personality, that was all more expensive, but sex was basic. Check box number one for a girl, box number two for a boy, and that was it. Case closed.

“My mother…” Auden squirmed in his seat. “It’s going to sound weird.”

“Since when do you care about that?”

“My mother was sort of old-fashioned,” Auden said. “She didn’t… Well, she thought genetic screening was, uh, tampering with God’s work.” He paused, waiting for me to react. For once I was glad that my face’s default expression was blank.

Because what kind of lunatic fringe freak didn’t believe in gen-tech?

“I mean, she let them do the basics,” he said quickly. “Screen out diseases, mutations, all that stuff, but as for everything else…”

“You’re a natural?” I asked, incredulous. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d even wondered a few times, back when Auden was just another weirdo to avoid, when it seemed like no one would choose to have a kid like him. It would explain the crooked nose, the slightly lumpy body, and all the rest of it. But it was still hard to believe. Families like ours just didn’t do things like that.

He blushed. “Pretty much.” He turned his head toward the window, looking back up at the house. “Tara doesn’t even know, although I’m sure she suspects. When she decided to get pregnant, my father made sure he got everything he wanted. I always kind of thought that’s why he went for twins.” He laughed bitterly. “So he’d have an extra, like a replacement for the kid he should have had, when he got stuck with me instead.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t—”

“Yeah. He does.”

“So your mom… She was a Faither?”

“No!” he said hotly. “Not all believers are Faithers. Just the crazy ones.”

“Yeah, but how do you tell the difference?” I muttered.

It just slipped out.

Auden glared. “It’s not crazy to believe in something.”

“My father says—” I stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Lia.” His expression hadn’t changed, but there was something new in his eyes. Something fierce. “What?”

I sighed. “My father says that believing in something without any proof is, at best, sloppy thinking and, at worst, clinically delusional.”

“Well, my mother said that in the end, all we have is belief,” he countered. “That you can’t know what’s out there, or who. And that denying the possibility of something bigger just means you’ve got a small mind, and you’re choosing to live a small life.”

“So I’ve got a small mind?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, your mother did,” I snapped.

His face was red. “Well, I guess if she were here, you could ask her yourself. Too bad she’s not!”

There was a long, angry pause.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. And I was, although I wasn’t sure for what.

“This is why she wasn’t a Faither,” he said, his voice quiet. “She didn’t think it was her business to tell other people what to believe. She was just happy believing herself. She said it made her feel like…” He looked down. “Like she was never alone.”

I was almost jealous.

“Do you?”

“What? Feel like I’m never alone?” He barked out a laugh. “Not quite.”

“No. I mean, believe.”

He shrugged, still looking away. “I don’t know. I used to try. When I was a kid, you know? I wanted to be like her. But… I guess you can’t make yourself believe in something. Sometimes I think I do, I think I can feel it deep down, that certainty… but then it just disappears. That never happened to her. She was so sure.” Auden shook his head. “I’ve never been that sure of anything.”

“Maybe she wasn’t either,” I suggested, “and she just made it seem that way. Maybe that’s what believing is—pretending to be sure, even when you’re not. Ignoring your doubt until it disappears.”

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Too bad I can’t just ask her, right?” He tried to laugh again. It didn’t work.

“You miss her.”

His answer was more of a sigh than a word. “Yeah.”

And maybe I could understand a little, after all. I’d never lost a parent—but I’d lost plenty. I knew about missing things.

“Auden, can I—can I ask you something?”

He nodded.

“All that stuff your mother believed in, about tampering with God’s will and… all that. You don’t… I mean, everything they did to me, you don’t think…?”

“No!” He shook his head, hard. “I know that was—I mean, I know she wasn’t…” He pressed his lips together. He doesn’t want to insult her, I thought. Even now. Like he thought she could still hear him.

But maybe I got it wrong. Because that really would be crazy.

“I don’t agree with her,” he said finally. Firmly. “I think it’s incredible, what they can do. And what they did. For you. But…” He rubbed the rim of his glasses. “You want to hear something weird?”

I smiled. “Always.”

“You know how I wear glasses?”

“Yes, Auden, I’ve noticed that you wear glasses,” I said, hoping to tease him out of the mood.

“Ever wonder why?”

“I just figured…” I didn’t want to tell him I’d figured he was a pretentious loser trying to look cool. “That you liked old things. All that stuff you’re always talking about. The way things used to be.”

“That’s part of it, I guess. I do like that stuff.”

“Because of your mother?”

“Well, sort of. But also because—I don’t know. It was all different back then. There was more… room.”

“More room?” I echoed. “Are you kidding? I thought you were supposed to be good at history. No one had any room back then, when they thought they had to live all crammed into the same place, all those people stuck in the cities….” I shuddered. It freaked me out just thinking about it. Made me feel like the walls were closing in.

“No, I don’t mean more room for people. I just mean more room to do something. Change the way things worked. You could be important. Now… I don’t know. No one’s important.”

“Everyone’s important,” I said. “At least if you’ve got enough credit.”

“And if you’ve got no credit, you might as well not exist?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, but you thought it,” he said. “Everyone does. And so all those credit-free people just end up in a corp-town or a city, and no one really cares, because that’s just the way it is.”

“But that is the way it is,” I said, confused. “And they don’t care, so why should you?”

“How do you know they don’t care? Do you actually know anyone who lives in a corp-town? Have you ever been to a city?”

“Have you?” I countered.

I could tell from the look on his face that he hadn’t.

“I don’t want to fight,” he said instead of answering.

“Then stop insulting me!”

“I wasn’t—Look, I’m just saying, things weren’t always the way they are now. But people act like they were. Like the past doesn’t matter, because everything’s always been the same. And like it should always be the same.”

I didn’t want to fight either. “So that’s why you wear glasses? To change the world.”

He took them off. His eyes were bright green, like his father’s. “No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t just wear them because I like old stuff. I actually… I need them.”

“No one needs glasses anymore.”

“Trust me.” He squinted at me. “Without them, I can barely tell whether your eyes are open or shut.”

“I don’t get it. Why not get your eyes fixed?”

“I don’t know. I guess wearing them reminds me of my mom. Like it’s what she would have wanted.”

That was… I didn’t want to think it, but that was sick. “What if you got sick or something?” I asked. “Would you not do anything about that? Would your mother want you to—” Die, I was going to say. But I didn’t. Because for all I knew, that’s what had happened to her. “—just stay sick?”

“Of course not! I’m not crazy. It’s just this one thing. Just the eyes,” he said. “So, I guess you think it’s pretty weird.”

“Well…” I had the feeling he didn’t want me to lie. “Yeah. Very. But maybe I get it. A little.”

“I should go,” he said, opening the car door.

“Where? Your father said…”

“Yeah. I know what he said. But it’s my house, too. And”—he shrugged—“not like I have anywhere else to be.”

I probably should have stayed—or invited him to come with me. But I was supposed to be home for dinner, and I couldn’t picture bringing him along. Meals were bad enough without a stranger at the table, watching us not speak to one another.

I let him out of the car. “Good luck,” I said, even though he was just going home.

“You too.” Even though I was doing the same.

I saw Auden at school after that, but we didn’t talk much, not like before. Not that I was avoiding him or anything. We just… didn’t. Talk. And there were no more “experiments.”

Then a few nights later, I came home, linked in, and: ACCOUNT TERMINATED.

That was it. Two words flashing red across a blank screen. They linked to a text from Connexion, the corp that carried my zone.

It was gone. All of it. My pics, my vids, my music, every voice and text I’d ever received or sent, every mood I’d recorded, everything I’d bought, read, watched, heard, played, all gone. Any evidence of the friends I’d had or the relationship I’d walked away from. Gone. The av I’d hidden behind since before I was old enough to pronounce the word. Gone. Proof that Lia Kahn had ever lived—still lived. Gone.

Terminated.

I panicked.

Which I guess is why I didn’t scream for my father, who could probably have voiced someone at Connexion and bullied them into giving back what they’d stolen from me. I just linked into a public zone, I voiced Auden, and I told him I needed him.

Then I sat on the edge of my bed, waiting, wondering what I’d been thinking, and whether he would come and what good it would do if he did, and whether I should voice him again and tell him to forget it. And I tried not to think about how my entire life had been deleted.

Psycho Susskind nudged his head against my thigh, then started licking my hand. He rolled over, and I rubbed my fingers along his belly, knowing he would pretend to enjoy it for a minute, then twist around and snap at me, tiny fangs closing down on the heel of my hand. He did, and I let him. “Think I liked it better when you hated me, Sussie.” But I scratched him behind his ears, and I let him curl up on my lap.

Auden showed up. Zo let him in, which was lucky, because it meant no explaining. She didn’t talk to me any more than she had to, which worked for me. So Auden was alone when he stepped into my room, hesitantly, with that look on his face that guys get when they think you’re going to cry.

Even though he knew I couldn’t cry.

“It’s all gone,” I said, even though I’d already told him. “They wiped me.”

“It’s just your zone.” He stayed in the doorway, his eyes darting around the room, like he was trying to memorize everything in case the lights suddenly failed—or in case he never got to come back.

“It’s my life. And you know it.”

If I could cry, that’s when I would have done it. But instead I hunched over and covered my face with my hands. He sat down next to me, his hands clasped in his lap, like he was afraid of touching me. He’d done it before, but maybe that was why he didn’t want to do it again. Who wanted to touch the dead girl?

“It could be worse, Lia.”

“Is that supposed to be helpful?”

“No, I just mean…” He turned red. “I meant that this is bigger than just losing your zone, and maybe you’re lucky that’s all it was. Connexion’s not the only corp that’s trying this. I read there was this one guy who almost lost all his credit when—”

“I don’t give a shit about some guy!” I exploded. “This is about me!”

Even I knew how hateful that sounded. But I couldn’t take it back.

“What’s going on?” he asked quietly.

“I’m pretty sure I just told you.”

“There’s something else, right? More than just the zone?”

“Like that’s not enough?”

And here’s the thing. That was enough. Maybe it was a little shallow to feel like my whole life was wrapped up in my zone, but that’s how I felt. The network was the only place where I could pretend I was normal. Hidden behind my av, no one would guess what I really was. Losing it all like that, without warning? It was enough to be upset about.

Except that maybe he was right. There was more.

“Come on,” he said. “What?”

“It’s just… They said they terminated the account because I was dead. I mean, because Lia Kahn was dead, and I was… something else.” I held my hand up in front of my face. It was so strange, the way I could hold it like that, without trembling, for hours. And I knew I could: We’d done an experiment. “I didn’t tell you”—I hadn’t told anyone—“but this guy was here. A while ago. This guy named Rai Savona.”

“Such an asshole.”

I should have known Auden would recognize the name. He knew everyone in politics; he actually cared. Yet another weirdness.

“He was here to—Well, it doesn’t matter. But he said…” I didn’t know why it was so hard to talk about. Maybe because the guy had made a pretty good argument. And maybe once Auden heard it, he wouldn’t disagree.

“Everything that guy says is a joke,” Auden said. “You should ignore it on principle.”

“Is that what your mother would have done?” As soon as it was out I wanted to take it back.

“She believed, but she wasn’t a Faither,” he said in a monotone. “And I’m not her.”

“He said I wasn’t human, okay? He said I was just programmed to think I was human, but humans had free will, and all I had was programming.” It sounded even worse out loud than it had echoing in my head.

Auden raised his eyebrows and tilted his head, like, Is that all? “So what?”

“So… what if he’s right?”

“Do you feel like you’re programmed to act in a certain way?”

“Well… no,” I admitted. “But he said that didn’t matter. That I could be fooled into thinking I was free, but really I’m not.”

“He’s right.”

I’d thought I had prepared myself for the worst, but when it happened, I knew I’d been wrong. Auden kept going.

“But it’s true for him too. And for me. How do you know that I have free will? How do I know that I have it? Yeah, I feel like I make my own decisions, but who knows? He’s the one who thinks God is in charge. How does he know God isn’t jerking him around like a puppet? How does he know we aren’t all just machines made out of blood and guts and stuff?”

“It’s not the same.” I knocked the side of my head. “There’s no blood in here. No guts. Just a computer. It’s not the same.”

“No, it’s not the same,” Auden agreed. “But maybe it’s better.”

“Yeah, how?”

“You mean aside from the whole immortality thing?”

“Aside from that.” Why did no one seem to get that living forever was only a good thing if life didn’t suck?

Except you uploaded last night, an annoying voice in my head pointed out. And the night before that. No matter how crappy my life got, it was still my life. And sometime in the last couple weeks—sometime after meeting Auden, I tried not to think—life had become worth preserving again. Maybe even worth living. Too bad I still wasn’t sure I could call it that.

If even I wasn’t sure this counted as life, how could I expect anyone else to be?

“All that stuff you complain about,” he said slowly. “Not feeling things the same way? Maybe it’s a good thing. You don’t have to get so screwed up by how you feel, like the rest of us do.”

“‘Us’ humans, you mean?”

“I mean, maybe it’s not a bad thing to have some control over your emotions. To be able to think once in a while instead of just act on animal instinct.”

Human instinct, I thought but didn’t say. Computers think; humans feel.

But he was trying to help.

“You think I don’t get it,” he said. When I was actually thinking how weird it was that he got me so well. “So maybe you should talk to someone who does.”

“I am not going back to that so-called support group.” I’d told him all about Sascha and her little losers club. “No way.”

“I wasn’t talking about the support group. Not the official one, at least.”

“Oh.” I’d told him about the rest of it too. The girl with the blue hair and the boy with the orange eyes. The silver skin. The house filled with living machines who wanted me to be just like them. But I hadn’t told him everything. I hadn’t told him about the knife. “Not there, either.”

“You have to go back sometime,” he said.

“Why?”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“Not really.”

“Okay.” But I could tell he knew I was lying. “But I don’t think that’s why you’re staying away.”

“Tell me you’re not shrinking me again.”

“I think you’re scared.”

“Am not,” I said like a little kid.

“Are so,” he said, playing along.

“Am not.”

“If you say so.” He shrugged, and then turned to the screen. “You want to get started?”

“What?”

“Signing up for a new account with a different corp. Creating a new zone. Building a new av. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

I flopped back on the bed. “What’s the point? They’ll probably just come up with some excuse to take it away from me again.”

“You know what av stands for?” Auden asked weirdly.

“Avatar. I’m not stupid.”

“Yes, but do you know why it’s called that?”

“I’m guessing you’re going to tell me,” I said. More old stuff. Like the past ever helped anyone make it in the future.

“It’s Sanskrit for—”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“A dead language,” he said. “Really, really old. And ‘avatar’ is Sanskrit for ‘God’s embodiment on Earth.’”

“So?”

“So maybe, if you think about it, you’re kind of like an avatar,” he stammered. “Like, the ultimate avatar. You know? This incredible body that’s been created as a vessel for Lia Kahn. Your embodiment on Earth.”

“So you think my body’s incredible?” I asked, smirking. Sometimes I went on autoflirt. Force of habit.

He blushed so hard I thought his blood vessels might actually burst. “That’s not—”

“I know,” I said quickly. “It was just…” Tempting to imagine that someone could still think of me that way. Even if it was only Auden. “Let’s do it,” I said. “New zone. New av. New everything.”