Mona Lisa Overdrive

23 - Mirror Mirror

She came out of it like somebody had thrown a switch.

Didn't open her eyes. She could hear them talking in another room. Hurt lots of places but not any worse than the wiz had. The bad crash, that was gone, or maybe muted by whatever they'd given her, that spray.

Paper smock coarse against her nipples; they felt big and tender and her breasts felt full. Little lines of pain tweaking across her face, twin dull aches in her eyesockets, sore rough feeling in her mouth and a taste of blood.

"I'm not trying to tell you your business," Gerald was saying, above a running tap and a rattle of metal, like he was washing pans or something, "but you're kidding yourself if you think she'd fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled. It's really a very superficial job." Prior said something she couldn't make out. "I said superficial, not shoddy. That's quality work, all of it. Twenty-four hours on a dermal stimulator and you won't know she's been here. Keep her on the antibiotics and off stimulants; her immune system isn't all it could be." Then Prior again, but she still couldn't catch it.

Opened her eyes but there was only the ceiling, white squares of acoustic tile. Turned her head to the left. White plastic wall with one of those fake windows, hi-rez animation of a beach with palm trees and waves; watch the water long enough and you'd see the same waves rolling in, looped, forever. Except the thing was broken or worn out, a kind of hesitation in the waves, and the red of the sunset pulsed like a bad fluorescent tube.

Try right. Turning again, feeling the sweaty paper cover on the hard foam pillow against her neck ...

And the face with bruised eyes looking at her from the other bed, nose braced with clear plastic and micropore tape, some kind of brown jelly stuff smeared back across the cheekbones ...

Angie. It was Angie's face, framed by the reflected sunset stutter of the defective window.

"There was no bonework," Gerald said, carefully loosening the tape that held the little plastic brace in place along the bridge of her nose. "That was the beauty of it. We planed some cartilage in the nose, working in through the nostrils, then went on to the teeth. Smile. Beautiful. We did the breast augmentation, built up the nipples with vat-grown erectile tissue, then did the eye coloration ... " He removed the brace. "You mustn't touch this for another twenty-four hours."

"That how I got the bruises?"

"No. That's secondary trauma from the cartilage job." Gerald's fingers were cool on her face, precise. "That should clear up by tomorrow."

Gerald was okay. He'd given her three derms, two blue and a pink, smooth and comfortable. Prior definitely wasn't okay, but he was gone or anyway out of sight. And it was just nice, listening to Gerald explain things in his calm voice. And look what he could do.

"Freckles," she said, because they were gone.

"Abrasion and more vat tissue. They'll come back, faster if you get too much sun ... "

"She's so beautiful ... " She turned her head.

"You, Mona. That's you."

She looked at the face in the mirror and tried on that famous smile.

Maybe Gerald wasn't okay.

Back in the narrow white bed again, where he'd put her to rest, she raised her arm and looked at the three derms. Trank. Floating.

She worked a fingernail under the pink derm and peeled it off, stuck it on the white wall, and pushed hard with her thumb. A single bead of straw-colored fluid ran down. She carefully peeled it back and replaced it on her arm. The stuff in the blue ones was milky white. She put them back on too. Maybe he'd notice, but she wanted to know what was happening.

She looked in the mirror. Gerald said he could put it back the way it was, someday, if she wanted him to, but then she wondered how he'd remember what she'd looked like. Maybe he'd taken a picture or something. Now that she thought about it, maybe there wasn't anybody who'd remember how she'd looked before. She guessed Michael's stim deck was probably the closest bet, but she didn't know his address or even his last name. It gave her a funny feeling, like who she'd been had wandered away down the street for a minute and never come back. But then she closed her eyes and knew she was Mona, always had been, and that nothing much had changed, anyway not behind her eyelids.

Lanette said it didn't matter, how you got yourself changed. Lanette told her once that she didn't have 10 percent of her own face left, the one she'd been born with. Not that you'd guess, except for the black around her lids so she never had to mess with mascara. Mona had thought maybe Lanette hadn't got such good work done, and it must have shown once in Mona's eyes, because then Lanette said: You shoulda seen me before, honey.

But now here she was, Mona, stretched out straight in this skinny bed in Baltimore, and all she knew about Baltimore was the sound of a siren from down in the street and the motor running on Gerald's air-conditioner.

And somehow that turned into sleep, she didn't know for how long, and then Prior was there with his hand on her arm, asking her if she was hungry.

She watched Prior shave his beard. He did it at the stainless surgical sink, trimming it back with a pair of chrome scissors. Then he switched to a white plastic throw-away razor from a box of them that Gerald had. It was strange watching his face come out. It wasn't a face she'd have expected: it was younger. But the mouth was the same.

"We gonna be here much longer, Prior?"

He had his shirt off for the shave; he had tattoos across his shoulders and down his upper arms, dragons with lion-heads. "Don't worry about it," he said.

"It's boring."

"We'll get you some stims." He was shaving under his chin.

"What's Baltimore like?"

"Bloody awful. Like the rest of it."

"So what's England like?"

"Bloody awful." He wiped his face with a thick wad of blue absorbent paper.

"Maybe we could go out, get some of those crabs. Gerald says they got crabs."

"They do," he said. "I'll get some in."

"How about you take me out?"

He tossed the blue wad into a steel waste canister. "No, you might try to run away."

She slid her hand between the bed and the wall and found the torn foam air cell where she'd hidden the shockrod. She'd found her clothes in a white plastic bag. Gerald came in every couple of hours with fresh derms; she'd wring them out as soon as he'd gone. She'd figured if she could get Prior to take her out to eat, she could make a move in the restaurant. But he wasn't having any.

In a restaurant she might even be able to get a cop, because now she figured she knew what the deal was.

Snuff. Lanette had told her about that. How there were men who'd pay to have girls fixed up to look like other people, then kill them. Had to be rich, really rich. Not Prior, but somebody he worked for. Lanette said these guys had girls fixed to look like their wives sometimes. Mona hadn't really believed it, back then; sometimes Lanette told her scary stuff because it was fun to be scared when you knew you were pretty safe, and anyway Lanette had a lot of stories about weird kinks. She said suits were the weirdest of all, the big suits way up in big companies, because they couldn't afford to lose control when they were working. But when they weren't working, Lanette said, they could afford to lose it any way they wanted. So why not a big suit somewhere who wanted Angie that way? Well, there were lots of girls got themselves worked over to look like her, but they were mostly pathetic. Wannabes -- and she hadn't ever seen one who really looked much like Angie, anyway not enough to fool anybody who cared. But maybe there was somebody who'd pay for all this just to get a girl who did look like Angie. Anyway, if it wasn't snuff, what was it?

Now Prior was buttoning his blue shirt. He came over to the bed and pulled the sheet down to look at her breasts. Like he was looking at a car or something.

She yanked the sheet back up.

"I'll get some crabs." He put his jacket on and went out. She could hear him saying something to Gerald.

Gerald stuck his head in. "How are you, Mona?"

"Hungry."

"Feeling relaxed?"

"Yeah ... "

When she was alone again, she rolled over and studied her face, Angie's face, in the mirrored wall. The bruising was almost gone. Gerald taped things like miniature trodes to her face and hooked them to a machine. Said they made it heal real fast.

It didn't make her jump, now, Angie's face in the mirror. The teeth were nice; the teeth you'd wanna keep anyway. She wasn't sure about the rest, not yet.

Maybe she should just get up now, get her clothes on, head for the door. If Gerald tried to stop her, she could use the rod. Then she remembered how Prior had turned up at Michael's, like he'd had somebody watching her, all night, following her. Maybe somebody watching now, outside. Gerald's place didn't seem to have any windows, not real ones, so she'd have to go out the door.

And she was starting to want her wiz bad, too, but if she did even a little, Gerald would notice. She knew her kit was there, in her bag under the bed. Maybe if she did some, she thought, she'd just do something. But maybe it wouldn't be the right thing; she had to admit that what she did on wiz didn't always work out, even though it made you feel like you couldn't make a mistake if you tried.

Anyway, she was hungry, and too bad Gerald didn't have some kind of music or something, so maybe she'd just wait for that crab ...