Shattered

11. ZONED

Things got back to normal.

Nothing got back to normal.

Normal: Long days without much to fill them. Watching Ani hang all over Quinn, watching Quinn hang all over everyone else. Talking about nothing. Scaling buildings and jumping off cliffs, trying to feel.

Not normal: Ariana Croft, a girl with a stranger’s name and my face, arrested for the corp-town attack. My face all over the vids, panic evident in wide-eyed protestations of innocence. The looks I was getting from the other mechs, the same kind of peripheral gaping I’d endured at school right after the downloads, randoms passing me in the hall, pretending to fix their eyes on the ground when really they were soaking me in, absorbing every inch of the freakitude so they could report back to their friends. Now Jude and Riley were the only ones who didn’t watch me like they were half expecting me to strike again. Jude because he never looked at me at all unless he had to. Riley because his look was different. Waiting for me to break, I thought more than once, catching his eye just before he turned away. Not going to happen.

In the not-normal column: not backing up my memories, not once since the attack. Because backing them up would make them permanent—as permanent as I was, at least, which was extremely. If I kept them where they were, trapped in my head, no backup, no record anywhere but in me, then there was always a chance they could disappear. One day, I would wake up in a fresh body, with a fresh mind, one that didn’t know how blank eyes could get, or how quickly skin paled when blood pooled, still and lifeless in the veins.

It was a game I’d played before, toying with the idea of forgetting, wiping out a moment like it didn’t exist.

Normal: I still wasn’t going to do it. My body—Lia Kahn’s body—was gone, which meant the only thing left of her, of me, was my mind. And sometimes it seemed like that was nothing more than a long skein of memories. I wasn’t about to start unraveling the thread, throwing pieces of myself in the trash. I didn’t know where the memories ended and I—whatever I existed without all the things that had happened to me—began.

Normal: I was still afraid.

I couldn’t stop watching the vids of the attack.

I did it alone, in my room, staring at the screen on the wall, playing and replaying the same shots. I saw it from every angle, in color, in infrared, in black and white. Over and over again, I watched myself in the center of the atrium, standing still, bodies dropping all around me. I watched the girl who looked like me pump the Naxophedrine into the air-circulation system. And smile.

And then, when that got old, the images so familiar that they left me numb, I moved on. I pumped Ariana Croft’s zone, just before they slapped a priv-lock on it. I dipped into her friends’ zones, but none of them had spoken to her since the download, so they only had stories about a girl who didn’t exist anymore. There were plenty of pics showing what she’d looked like before, curly brown hair, violet lenses in her deep-set eyes, a little chunky but in such a way that you knew she was doing it on purpose to seem voluptuous. Totally artificial—a girl with that kind of credit and those kinds of friends wouldn’t leave anything to chance. She’d go in for lipo once a week and make sure they left just enough fat behind to seem authentic. An extremely noncasual casual oversight, like a carefully tousled mess of hair or a faceful of haven’t-bothered-to-shave scruff. But it wasn’t sexy, just sad, like a wispy moustache that looked more like a smudge of dirt than a handlebar of hair.

Not that it would have mattered, once she got sick. I even looked up the disease, some kind of bizarre immune-system disorder that couldn’t be screened out and couldn’t be treated. None of the zones had any pics of that. But I knew it would have made her sick and fragile and, even without the weekly lipos, skinny. Without the download, it would have made her dead.

None of it told me anything, except that this girl wasn’t me.

But maybe that was the one thing I needed to know.

There was no chance that BioMax had illegally downloaded a copy of my brain into another body, that the second, secret Lia Kahn had gone insane, taken on a new name, a new persona, and decided to kill a bunch of people she’d never met before. No chance whatsoever.

But it didn’t hurt to confirm that Ariana Croft was a real person. A damaged whackjob, maybe, but not me. Even if she looked like me.

Our bodies were just things, right? My body was one thing. Her body, despite the choppy haircut and bad dye job (violet with green streaks), was another. Sometimes I ripped my eyes from the vids and stared down at myself, feeling as disconnected as I had those first few days after the download, untethered from legs, arms, skin, fingers, all of it seeming to belong to someone else. Sometimes I reminded myself that even if there had been no Ariana Croft (which there was), if someone at BioMax had figured out a way around all the safeguards (which they couldn’t), and for some nefarious purpose had created another Lia Kahn in body and mind, it still wouldn’t be me. It would have just been a copy, and by definition, a copy wasn’t the same as the original.

Except that I wasn’t the original either.

Except that if my brain and body were destroyed, my backed-up memories would be downloaded into a new brain. Another copy. And it would feel like me. It would be me. That was the whole secret to mech immortality, right? When is a copy not a copy? Not much of a riddle, because the answer is obvious: when it’s identical to the original.

Maybe. But I didn’t trust the logic enough to test it. I could ditch this body for a new one with a new face. This me could die, and an identical copy would live. Same difference, right? Except I was afraid it wasn’t.

I was afraid.

These were the kinds of things I tried not to think about when I wasn’t busy trying not to think about dead people. Or trying not to think about my father. Or call-me-Ben’s daily, and increasingly threatening, reminders of our “deal,” which for all I knew was moot now that I was no longer under suspicion—but to believe that would have meant ignoring the fact that there were more shadowy, faceless mechs in that vid, attackers still to be caught. Thanks to the corp-town attack, we were all under suspicion, every mech. All of us with no fingerprints and no biostats—and according to Rai Savona and his little puppet Auden, no souls, which meant no moral compass or internal censor and thus nothing to stop us from wreaking havoc, sowing chaos by some kind of infernally programmed design, or just destroying everything around us by virtue of our very nature. I tried not to think about Auden too, telling myself that it could have been worse, whatever he’d turned into—whatever bitter, twisted dupe I’d turned him into—at least he’d lived. But that thought brought me right back to dead people and sent me straight back to the vids, and the whole thing started all over again.

It was like a cut on my lip that I couldn’t help worrying with my tongue. Knowing that I should let it alone, knowing better, but so hyperaware of it every time I spoke, every time I moistened my lips, every time I was sitting around and my mind wandered, just for a moment, away from the constant litany of Don’t do that, and without intent or even awareness, my tongue slipped back into place, exploring the crevices of the wound until the pain woke me up.

I could have stopped myself. Every morning and every night I looked at the small pile of dreamers I’d hoarded, sitting just beside my bed. I’d gotten them from Sloane, and I knew she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. I’d met Sloane before either of us came to live at Jude’s estate—in fact, I was the one who’d brought her here, who’d convinced her that this, not another boyfriend, not another pointless suicide attempt, was the answer she’d been seeking. She’d spent the last several years, before and after her download, researching methods of escape.

Thanks to Jude—which meant thanks to me—she’d discovered a new one.

These weren’t the puny hour-long dreamers that barely topped the buzz of an intense b-mod. These were industrial-strength dreamers, good for days, even weeks, of blissful mental absence. A nice long vacation from everything.

I kept them by my bed as a test. Every time I passed them by I knew I was stronger than that. I wasn’t that kind of mech. They sat there for days, one week, two, and I kept passing the test, passing them by.

Until one day, I didn’t.

I wasn’t prepared.

Heavy dreamers weren’t anything like the lightweight version I’d sampled.

They dragged you down.

Deeper than I’d ever been.

Trapped in a dream inside a dream.

Blind in a white fog.

Existence and nonexistence in one.

Being and non. Here and not. Pleasure and pain.

That was all there was. All I was.

And I was nothing.

Waking up was like breaking through the surface of a deep, black pool of water, emerging from silent depths into the too-bright, too-noisy open air. Everything was sharp edges; everything was off-key. I just wanted to slip back under.

“I thought you hated these things,” Ani said, standing over me.

“How’d you get in here?” I mumbled. It felt like the dreamer had blown my body into a million pieces, drifting on the wind, hidden in the crevices of the walls and floorboards, dissipated. I was everywhere and nowhere at once. “I locked the door.”

“Quinn had the house open it for me.”

Right. Artificially intelligent locks could be fooled. That was the beauty of dumb, mute technology: You couldn’t reprogram steel.

I reached for the next dreamer. It was set to last a week. “Have her lock it again when you go.”

Ani glanced at the dreamer in my hand. “Or I could stay. We could talk.”

I shrugged. The world was getting too sharp, the fog fading away. The longer I was awake, the easier it became to think. And I wasn’t in the mood to think.

“I’m just worried,” Ani said. “After what happened—”

“Get out.” I didn’t want to remember what happened. That was the whole point.

She flinched.

“Please,” I added. But I didn’t say it nicely.

“If you stay under too long…”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “The dreamers are safe.”

“Right. Tell that to the empties.”

It was what we called the mechs who dreamed away their lives, twitching and shuddering for weeks on end. Empties because they were nothing without the dreamers; because they were hollow. Bodies whose minds were on permanent vacation.

These days, I only felt empty when I was awake.

I was the center of a storm.

Light swirled around me. Through me. Wind blew in waves of red and purple and black. Color had sound and sound had color. There was no body, but there was pain.

And noise, like metal on metal, like a scream.

And need, and memory, and flesh on flesh, and lips, and the weight of a body on my body.

And weightlessness. And nothingness.

The storm raged, but I was its center, and I was still.

Quiet.

It was getting harder to come back.

When the dreamer died, there was a moment in between. Like the dazed limbo between org sleep and waking when the dream dies away and reality strays just out of reach. It was like falling—but falling so far and so fast, through a darkness without a bottom, that it felt like flying.

When I came back to myself, Jude was there.

“Sweet dreams?” He leaned against the doorframe, arms laced across his chest.

“Very.” But there was nothing to remember about what these deep dreamers were doing to me; I didn’t have the words to describe it to myself. It was like becoming another person; an unperson.

“Then you must have been dreaming of me.” The words rang hollow, a force of habit. Or maybe it was just that the dreamer made the world seem tired, Jude’s words dull and empty.

“Worried about me?” I asked.

“Why would I be?” His eyes strayed to the single remaining dreamer. No matter—once they were gone, Sloane would supply more, as many as I needed. She understood escape.

He slung a scuffed red backpack over his shoulder and crossed the room, perching on the edge of the bed. With a cool smile, he swung his legs onto the mattress. I slapped them away. “This came for you.” He dropped the backpack on the bed. I reached for it—then jerked my hand away as the bag twitched toward me with a low mewing noise.

Jude shoved a slip of paper at me. “This too.”

He misses you, the note said. Typed, so I had no way of knowing who it was from.

But when the bag mewed again, I had a pretty good guess. I groaned and unzipped the bag. A flabby gray cat poked his head through the opening and nuzzled into the back of my hand. “Great. Just great.”

“You know her, I presume?” Jude stroked his hand along the cat’s head. It purred, arching its back. That was a sign. In a few moments, the cat would get freaked out by all the affection and lash out a claw. I kept quiet—let Jude figure it out for himself.

“It’s a him,” I said. “Psycho Susskind.”

“Doesn’t look very psycho to me,” Jude said, scratching his knuckle against the scruff of Susskind’s neck.

“He loves machines,” I said. “Thought the toaster was his best friend. People, not so much.”

“She dropped it off in person,” Jude said. She. There was only one she it could be. “Middle of the night. So does she look like you used to look?” he added. “Before?”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about the past,” I reminded him.

“I’m just saying, she’s hot.”

“You would think so.” Jude was exactly Zo’s type, I realized suddenly. Not on the surface, maybe—there was nothing about him that resembled the creepy, greasy retros my sister used to bring home, their eyes red from a late-night dozer session or wide and twitchy from too many hours locked in a virtual reality circuit, fingers grasping at imaginary demons. Losers, and she knew it. Choices guaranteed to spite our father, sending him into one of his silent, pale-faced rages. But Jude could match Zo smirk for smirk, shoot down her snide crap with crap of his own. Throw in the gaunt, angular features, sharp and chiseled where the rest of us seemed waxy and soft, and he was the complete package. Either her soul mate or her double.

“You like the cat so much, you take it,” I said. “He’ll love you.”

Who was less human than Jude?

“She brought it for you,” he said.

“So?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, pretending to concentrate all his attention on the cat. But I could see his eyes flashing, watching me from beneath heavy lids. “So nothing.” He stood up, scooped the cat into his arms. “You got that from Sloane, didn’t you?” he said, nodding at the final dreamer on the nightstand. I reached for it, but I was still moving in slow motion. He swept it away with ease. Jude nestled the small black cube into his palm, rubbing his fingers along its smooth surface. Most dreamers had a series of lines etched into their sides, indicating their duration. This one, which Sloane had been hesitant to pass along, was unmarked. “It’s a new one,” she’d said. “Something about a neural feedback loop? I didn’t really get it. But I guess somehow it works different on different brains.”

“You control how long it lasts?” I’d asked.

She had hesitated, then shaken her head. “I don’t think ‘control’ is the word for it.”

“What do you care who I got it from?” I asked Jude now.

He smiled thinly. “I’d just suggest that you consider the source.”

“Aren’t you her source?” I said.

“That was for Sloane,” he said. “Maybe I got tired of listening to her whine about how much she wants to die.”

“She’s over that now,” I told him. A year ago Sloane had jumped out a window in some pathetic attempt to end whatever Great Pain she imagined was consuming her. She’d passed out in a puddle of her own blood and woken up with a mechanical body and a promise from her parents that no matter how many times she tried to break herself, they’d always Humpty Dumpty her back together. And they did, more than once. You had an accident, they’d say when she woke up, and she’d smile and nod and pretend to believe them and then try it all over again. Until eventually she gave up; she joined us.

“Whatever you say.”

“This is none of your business,” I told him.

“What? Sloane’s death wish, or yours?”

I pulled my knees to my chest. “Don’t talk to me about death.” I knew I sounded like a child. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, the attack played out in reverse. The bodies climbed to their feet, alive again. But their bloody eyes were still dead.

“I don’t know? Right.” Jude flung the dreamer at the bed. “I don’t know why I even bother trying.”

“That was trying?” I asked. “That’s just sad, Jude.”

“Don’t worry, it stops now.” He left the room. Psycho Susskind climbed on top of me, his claws bearing down on my chest, and waited for me to do something. When I didn’t, he padded out of the room after Jude. A new acolyte for the great leader.

Apparently Susskind didn’t miss me any more than Zo did.

I don’t want to think about that, I thought, like a child.

But unlike a child, I had control over my life. I had control over everything—that’s what being a mech was all about. I picked up the dreamer from where it had landed beside my pillow.

I didn’t want to think about Zo or dead people’s dead eyes or anything else.

And I didn’t have to.

Time passed—or it didn’t.

Thoughts glittered and fluttered. Words flickered bright and sputtered out, diamond sharp and meaningless.

Sweet in the brash and senseless blue and down and down and deep.

The silence of noise, waves made visible, shimmering green and gold. A universe of infinite vibration, quantum strands quivering and shivering.

Bare peculiar lands of majesty in six of purple plasma gray and I am lost.

And I am lost.

And I am.

I am.

Lost.

The world bobbing up and down, that was the first thing.

No, not the world, my head. Shaking, flopping back and forth on my neck.

Then: his hands on my shoulders, fingers gouging flesh.

His eyes, black in the dim light, wide. Scared.

I could feel the dreamer tugging me down. I was in the water again, the deep, black pool, the surface too far, the world through its murky window a soup of distorted shape and color.

“Lia!” His face in my face. My body still in his hands as he dragged me upright, as he pushed me against the wall, shouting, incomprehensible. And then the one sound that wasn’t noise.

Lia.

The name like a slap, like breaking through the water into the pain of winter air.

Kicking toward the surface, reaching up toward dry land, toward him.

I could let go, I thought. Stop fighting. Drift away.

Maybe this was what happened when you overloaded on dreamers—maybe at some point you didn’t need the dreamer anymore, and the brain made its own dreams. Maybe after the dreamer ate away everything else, the dream was all you had left.

But I didn’t let go. I held on. To the light and noise. To Riley, my face in his hands, my hands on his chest.

I woke up.

“How long?” I asked.

He let go of my face, eased me to the floor, one hand in my hand, the other at my waist. We sat cross-legged, facing each other. He didn’t let go of my hand.

“How long?” I said again.

“Since Jude was here?”

I nodded.

“Twenty-two days.” He winced like he was expecting me to freak out.

Three weeks. Plus the weeklong dreamer before that and the three days I’d dreamed away before that. One month below. In the dark. One month gone.

But if you were going to live forever, what was one month? Infinity minus one is still infinity.

“You know, I get it,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine.

“What?” But I knew what.

“Wanting it all to go away.” He brushed his hands along his thighs, then placed them flat on his knees. It was like he didn’t know what to do with them now that he was no longer holding on. “Forget.”

Normally there was nothing I hated more than someone pretending to understand what was going on in my head. But this time, it didn’t bother me.

“I keep thinking that someone should have screamed, you know?” Riley said. “It would have made it seem more like a vid. Unreal. But…”

“Yeah. No screaming,” I said, letting myself remember. For the first time not fighting back against the images. The dreamers had left an empty space behind them. And the memories rushed in to fill the vacuum.

“There was a girl,” I said. “A kid. I saw her before it all happened. She had this hot pink hair and—”

“Yeah.” He stretched his arms behind him, leaning his weight back on them. “I saw her.”

“She was probably eight or nine,” I said, picturing Zo at that age. She’d been experimenting with different hair colors, showing up with purple streaks one morning, rainbow the next. It was before she’d settled on the retro thing, and instead she was obsessed with av-wear—a phase that we all went through, when instead of modeling your avatar to look like you, you turned yourself into a live-action av, complete with neon hair, net-linked morphtattoos, and the occasional glitter wings.

But Zo had gotten a chance to grow out of it.

He leaned forward, his hands uncertain again, on his lap, then on the floor, then cradled, one in the other. “I stepped on someone. When we were running away. I wasn’t looking, and then—”

“We both did,” I said. I wanted him to stop talking. I wanted to go back to the dream. But it was like we were flying. Like we’d jumped out of the plane, and nothing was going to stop us now, except the ground. “We couldn’t help it.”

He shook his head. “I looked down,” he said. “When I felt it. Something—I don’t know. Soft and hard at the same time. You know?”

Soft and hard. The feel of a foot sinking into a chest.

“She was still alive,” he said. “Mouth wide open.”

“Like she was screaming.”

“It sounds stupid,” he said. “I know. She was just trying to breathe, but…”

“It looked like she was screaming.”

“I stepped on her,” he said. “And I didn’t stop.”

“We couldn’t have helped her.”

“You wanted to stop,” he said.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I reminded him. “I froze. You got us out of there.”

“And straight into hell,” he said.

I rested my hand on top of his hands. He stiffened.

“Thank you for waking me up,” I said.

He pulled his hands out from under mine. Stood up. “You would’ve woken up if I was here or not. Just good timing.”

“Probably.”

There was a loud scratching sound at the door. “Psycho Susskind,” he said. “You want me to let him in?”

“What’d you call him?”

“Isn’t that his name?” he asked.

Yes, but it was my name for him, mine and Zo’s. Weird to hear it come out of Riley’s mouth.

“He doesn’t seem too crazy to me,” Riley said. “Maybe you weren’t feeding him enough.”

“Have you seen him?” I laughed. “The last thing that cat needs is more food.”

Riley grinned. “He never turned me down.”

“You were feeding him?”

“Didn’t think you’d want him to starve,” Riley said.

“Sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to take care of my cat.”

So I had a cat again. I hadn’t even wanted one the first time around. Zo and I had begged for a puppy. But when our father showed up with psycho Sussie, we knew better than to do anything but smile and say thank you. And then pretend not to be disappointed when we tried to pet him and he hissed and ran away.

“Someone had to. But I think he misses you,” Riley said.

“Doubtful. But you can let him in.”

Riley obviously couldn’t wait to get away from me, and I couldn’t blame him. I reminded him of everything we both wanted to forget.

He opened the door and the cat slipped in. A moment later, nodding a silent good-bye, Riley slipped out.

Susskind was gray with thin black raccoon stripes streaking his fur and a long strip of black trickling down his spine and tail, a reverse skunk. If you looked closely, you could see the gray was speckled with white, like a permanent dusting of dandruff. His eyes were a pale, watery green, the color of wilted celery. All of which made for one extremely ugly cat.

He curled up against me, butting his head into my arm. Pet me, in catspeak. Love me. But every time I gave in and stroked his fur, Susskind would stiffen and creep away. It was only when I gave up that he would return, nuzzling my hand, digging his claws into my leg, giving me those cat eyes, which, unlike a pitiful puppy-dog gaze, bore no neediness or desperation, just a pale green watchfulness. We repeated the cycle a few times, head butt, purr, escape, return, until he judged me worthy and lowered his bulk onto my lap. Now he gave me a different look. I’m ready, it said. I deserve it.

What are you waiting for?

So I rested my hand on his soft coat, rubbing slow circles into his warm, ample belly. When I was a kid, Susskind’s fur had looked irresistibly soft. I’d longed to run my hands through it—but he always ran away before I got the chance. Now the fur barely made an impression. The synflesh wasn’t designed to appreciate that kind of subtle sensation.

He let out a guttural purr and clawed my arm. That felt good.

“Did you really miss me, you psycho?” I whispered.

He rested his paws on my knee, then lowered his head onto them. His eyes narrowed to slits. Naptime.

“I think I’ve slept enough,” I told him. But I sat there with him, my hand on his back, rising and falling with the even breaths.

I hadn’t been a cat person back when I was a person. But then, Susskind hadn’t been a person cat. Orgs were as repulsive to him as they were to Jude. Whatever I was now, he approved. No questions asked. Even in catspeak.

“I missed you too.”

Something to remember about cats: They’re not your friend. If you ever came across a giant dog, some kind of mutant puppy towering twenty feet off the ground, the dumb thing might knock over a few trees while it was doing its yippee-yay-a-new-friend happy dance, but the worst thing it would do is lap at you with its giant tongue and maybe drown you in dog slobber.

A giant cat would bat you around for a while between its giant paws.

And then eat you.

You can’t blame them; it’s just the way they’re built.