Crashed (18 page)

"So you didn't become one." I wasn't sure whether I was asking or telling.

"Believe in some invisible, all-powerful guy who was going to fix everything as long as I was a good girl? Or in the fact that, in the end, bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good ones?" She shook her head, then stretched her arms wide, fingers splayed. "I believe in this," she said. "This body. And it didn't happen because I was good. It happened because I was lucky."

I hesitated. If she rarely talked about her childhood, she
never
talked about how she'd ended up as a candidate for the download. "Do you know why they picked you?" I asked. We stepped through the doors into an enormous space, thick pillars stretching up to ceilings so high, I felt almost like we were still outside. It seemed to be some kind of clearing zone, with clumps of orgs scurrying back and forth, directed by officious-looking Brothers in iridescent robes. LED screens lined the walls, announcing service times and meal times and scrolling name after name of Brothers and Sisters new to the cause. There were hundreds of them.

"They picked all of us," she said. "The ten of us who slept in my room, at least. We went to bed in the Craphole--and when we woke up, we were in the hospital. All in the same room together that first day, I guess so we didn't freak out. They wouldn't tell us what we were doing there. Just did a bunch of tests. Then started taking us away one by one."

"Do you still talk to them?" I asked, wondering why I'd never met any of them. "Are there any at Quinn's place?"

"I never saw them again," Ani said flatly as we followed the orgs through a series of metal detectors and bioscanners and were loaded onto a narrow moving sidewalk. Fortunately, most of the crowd had rushed ahead of us, and the stragglers barely glanced at us as we passed.

"But I thought you said you spent a few weeks in the hospital before the download and that you could pretty much do whatever you wanted." I knew that was when she, Jude, and Riley had gotten close. The way Ani talked about them, I figured they had sort of adopted her, for whatever reason taken her under their protection. A hospital where a bunch of city kids could do whatever they wanted--even city kids rife with missing limbs and congenital diseases--could be a dangerous place.

"Yeah, I did. And I asked around. The kids I came in with weren't there anymore."

"BioMax sent them back?" I asked, surprised.

Ani shook her head.

"Then what?"

She rolled her eyes, her mouth set in a grim line. The moving sidewalk had carried us through a shimmering silver tunnel and dumped us in some kind of anteroom. Huge golden doors--ridiculously new and shiny compared to the rest of the dump--marked this as the entry to the inner sanctum. It was unsettling the way Ani had guided us here, so smooth and sure, as if she belonged. "Jude and I weren't the first downloads," she said, patience and pedantry mixing in her tone like she was a teacher dealing with a particularly remedial student. "Just the first successes."

"Oh."

Volunteers for the advancement of science, BioMax had called them. Heroes. Submitting themselves to an experiment for the benefit of the greater good.

"I'm sorry," I said lamely.

"It's not like they were my friends. Just people I knew." Ani tugged her camo hood tighter over her head, dropping her face into shadow. "Come on. Let's go in."

BODY TO BODY

"It took a kiss from a princess to wake me up."

By the time we slipped into the auditorium, Savona and Auden had already taken the stage. Several hundred people crowded into the wide, windowless space, crushed against one another in their desperation to get closer to their heroes. Auden's face beamed down at us from giant screens lining the walls. His face, ten feet high, every scar magnified. It was easy, it was nothing, to have a scar brushed away, but Auden had left his intact, thick, pale worms of white crawling across his cracked lips and crooked nose. He looked different than before--not just paler and thinner but almost like a stranger, his nose jutting at a sharper angle, his chin flatter, and I remembered the patchwork of bandages across his face the last time I'd seen him in person and wondered how much of him had been rewired and rebuilt.

His eyes sparkled, pools of black at their center flooding out the green, as if he stared out at a darkened room. Or as if he was zoned. It felt like he was watching me.

But when I turned away from the screens, forced myself to look at the real Auden, a tiny figure on the distant stage, it was obvious he couldn't have seen me in the crowd. From where I stood, I could barely pick out the familiar features of his face or the cane he leaned on for balance--there was no way he could look into the sea of bobbing heads and pick out my hood-rimmed face in the crowd.

"They don't understand," he was saying, alone under a spotlight. Savona stood off to the side, hands folded, nodding with approval. They wore identical iridescent suits that rippled in shimmering rainbow, like light on an oil slick. "Those who stay comfortably at home, watching us on the vids. They think it's all the same. But is it the same?"

"No!" the crowd shouted, barely waiting for the question. They were well-rehearsed.

"No," Auden said again, as quiet and calm as the crowd was manic. "We meet here, we come together in person,
body to body,
to affirm our own humanity. To remind ourselves that being human is about more than the ability to watch a vid, to make a speech, to communicate, to
think
. Are we just minds, disconnected islands of cognition, connected only by an electronic web?"

"No!" came the enthusiastic response.

"Mind is inseparable from body," Auden said. "When one hurts . . ." He paused, and the giant screens overhead showed him brushing two fingers against a jagged scar on his neck. "The other screams in pain." He shook his head. "We don't live in our minds. We live in our bodies. There is no mind without body, no body without mind.
Life
is born in their merger. A mind shoved into a machine is--"

"Still a machine!" the crowd screamed. "Still a machine!" I glanced at Ani, who was dutifully mouthing the words. But I couldn't fit my lips around them.

"Dead," Auden said. "Dead thoughts in a dead body, imitating life. But
we
know life," he said. "Life infuses the heart, the liver, the arms and . . ." He paused again, looking down at the cane. "Legs." Auden limped forward to the edge of the stage, peering intently out at the audience. The room fell silent. "The skinners wear a mask," he said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. "They hide among us. They clothe themselves as human--clothe themselves in human skin, identities stripped from the dead. They prey on the confusion of the grieving." He clapped a fist over his chest in an unmistakable gesture of self-flagellation. "They prey on the sympathies of the weak."

"You're not weak!" someone behind us shouted.

"This is new," Ani whispered to me. "Usually it's just the same old stuff--I've never heard this before."

Auden shook his head. "But I was weak, friend."

Friend?
It wasn't just what he was saying, it was the words themselves--it didn't even sound like Auden, not the one I'd known.
What did they do to you?
I thought.

What did
I
do to you?

"I believed that because it spoke like something human, because it appeared to act like something human, it
was
some-thing human. And why not? In that life, before, I lived a life of the mind. I worshipped at the altar of rational thought. I told myself I believed only in what I could see, what I could touch--all the while
ignoring
the reality of what my senses were telling me. What did I really believe in? An imaginary entity, the
mind,
the
self,
as if that was something that could exist outside of the
brain
. As if it was possible to distill an identity from electrical impulses, suck them out of a skull, dump them into a computer. I told myself I was a rationalist, that the Faithers believed in a fairy tale."

There was a bit of uncomfortable mumbling in the crowd, as if they weren't sure whether they were supposed to cheer or boo.

"But I was the one trapped in the fairy tale," Auden continued. "I was under a spell. And just like in a fairy tale, it took a kiss from a princess to wake me up."

I couldn't shake the feeling that his eyes were resting on me.

"The skinner breathed its dead breath into my body. It gave me life, though it had none of its own to give. And despite everything else, I'm grateful to it for that."

Now the crowd didn't hesitate. The booing and cursing drowned him out for several moments. But then Auden raised his hand, and they fell silent.

"I
am
grateful," he said. "Because when I opened my eyes, when I
felt
the pain of being trapped forever in this broken body, I knew the truth. That humanity doesn't live in the mind. That I am my mind
and
my body. And no matter what the skinner says, no matter how good a show it puts on, this is the one truth the skinner cannot hide. They can lie--their bodies can't."

Savona joined Auden at center stage, basking in the applause. It was easier when he began to speak. I could ignore his words, the same old Faither bullshit about how only God could create life, about how skinners were abominations, how creating more of them would drive society to its knees, and on and on--it didn't penetrate. I'd heard it all before, empty logic resting on the existence of some ludicrous invisible eye in the sky. It was easier because it wasn't Auden.

At Savona's command the screens overhead began streaming images from the corp-town attack, but even that was easier than listening to Auden. Ani was rapt, but I just looked away. Into the crowd, careful not to meet anyone's eye but helpless not to search their faces, wondering what had drawn them here. What it was about their lives that hating me would remedy.

I didn't find answers. Instead I found too much to recognize, fuel for paranoid imagination. A dusty blond head peeking over the crowd became Zo; a squarish face covered in brown scruff glanced at me with eyes I could imagine bleeding on the floor of Synapsis Corp-Town; a dead girl with pink hair clutched her dead mother's hand. They couldn't be here; none of them could. I wouldn't give in to the delusion. But as if gripped by some disease--the aftereffects of heavy dreamers or heavy guilt--I couldn't erase their impossible faces.

So I shut my lids and shut them out.

"We can't forget!" Savona was shouting. "We can't be lulled into a false sense of security by their assurances that this will never happen again. This
will
happen again! And again! And again! Unless we stop them. Unless we send the message, loud and clear, to each and every skinner. That
you are not one of us
!"

Ani nudged me, and I opened my eyes again, fixing on Savona, ignoring the crowd.

"Today, together, we forge a new beginning!" he ranted. "Your presence here is a promise. Standing here today we enter into a bond with our neighbors, with our Brothers. We celebrate our humanity!"

Auden leaned forward to whisper something in Savona's ear. He nodded. "This is no metaphor, friends. No empty words. We are more than words, remember. More than mind. We are
alive
, mind and body, and we embrace that fact, as we embrace one another. So go ahead!" he shouted. "Embrace your Brother, embrace your Sister, celebrate the bond we forge together!"

The people around us shifted uncomfortably.

"What's he talking about?" I murmured to Ani.

She shook her head. "Don't know. He's never done this before."

"I mean it!" Savona cried. "The network has torn us so far from one another, turning us into a sterile community of words and thoughts. Fight back. Here, now, fight back. Affirm your existence, the fact that you are here, not just in spirit, not just in mind, but in body. You are alive, you are human, as are we all. Embrace it!"

Tentatively at first, then enthusiastically, the audience turned in on itself, stranger greeting stranger, shaking hands, hugging, as Ani and I shrank toward each other, searching for an escape before someone could touch us. But there was no safe path through the crowd. The orgs closed in.

"Don't be shy, honey." A woman with a round, pockmarked face opened her bulging arms and swept me into them.

I felt her muscles stiffen.

Her body pull away.

Saw her eyes sweep me up and down.

Heard her scream.

"Skinner!"

And then it was chaos. A hand yanked the hood off my face. More hands tore at my shirt, pulled me away from Ani, into a teeming mass of writhing limbs, twisted faces. And the chant,
Skinner! Skinner! Skinner!
shaking the room. Gobs of spit splattered against my face.

"You're lucky you're a girl," a man snarled, his fingers clamped down on the back of my neck, his thick, calloused lips peeled back from rotting teeth.

"It's not a girl," the woman beside him snapped. And to prove the point, she drove her fist into my stomach. It didn't hurt, but I doubled over with the impact. Someone grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me down to my knees. Behind me, someone grabbed my shoulders, held me down. I could fight back against one, against three, but not against hundreds, and I imagined myself on the ground, trampled by the herd, feet grinding my body into the floor, like my feet had stomped the corp-town bodies, and wondered if it was what I deserved.

"Stop." Auden's voice, amplified and quiet at the same time, somehow cutting through the storm.

At his command, the grip on my shoulders relaxed. I shrugged it off and stumbled to my feet as the crowd dropped back a few steps. A circle of empty space formed around us. Ani sat on the ground, looking dazed, her hoodie torn. Someone had ripped a small patch of blue hair out of her head. Up onstage, Auden nodded with approval. I wondered what would have happened if he'd been closer. If he'd known it was me down here, probably he'd have been happy enough to watch the crowd tear me apart.

"Let them through," Auden commanded, and his followers fell back, opening a pathway between us and the door. Several of them spit as we passed.

Just outside the auditorium, a man greeted us, draped in an iridescent robe that shimmered like Auden's suit. He took my arm, like a gentleman, only his grip was steel. His other hand clamped down on Ani's bicep. "I think it's best that you come with me," he said.

I wrenched my arm away. "Best for who?"

"Maybe we should just go with him," Ani said, shooting a nervous glance at the door separating us from the angry crowd.

"What do you want?" I asked the man. "We weren't doing anything wrong. It's a public event, right?"

"I want nothing," he said with a weirdly serene smile. "I'm just a messenger."

"Oh yeah? For who?"

But even as I was asking, I knew. Who else?

]"For Brother Auden and Brother Savona," he said, face lighting up at their names. "They would like to speak with you."

"Then they can come to us," I said, though of course they couldn't, because that's not how this kind of game was played.

"Brother Auden has a message for you," the man said. His hair was blonder than mine, almost white against his ruddy face. It fell in long, wispy strands across his eyes, which had a strange, faraway look, like he was peering through me into the distance at his divine reward. "He says, 'It's time we talk. Unless you want to run away again, Lia.'"

"He said that?" I asked. Stalling.
"Lia?"
So he knew it was me. Not just some anonymous skinner.

Lia Kahn. The one responsible.

The man nodded. "Ready?"

No.

The office was sparse, with little more than a desk and an oversize ViM screen plastered on one wall. The opposite wall was a touch screen, scattered with notes and scrawlings--but it went blank a moment after we stepped into the room. The desk looked almost antique, left over from the days when they installed screens and network links into the surface of dead wood rather than just building the whole desk as an integrated ViM that knew what you wanted nearly before you'd figured it out yourself. My father had one just like it--he claimed the solidity appealed to him, the permanence, but I think it was just that he didn't like his desk talking back to him. I shouldn't have been surprised that Rai Savona felt the same way.

He leaned against his desk, arms crossed, face unreadable. Auden stood next to him, leaning on nothing, legs quivering with the effort of staying upright. His eyes were pinned on the floor.

Savona cleared his throat. "Since you've intruded on our sanctuary here, Lia, Auden thought you might as well get what you came for."

"Funny how you call me Lia when you've made it pretty clear you don't think that's who I am," I said, grateful for a voice that didn't shake. "Or do you call your toaster by name too?"

"Consider it a courtesy," Savona said. "An undeserved one."

"You look better than you look on the vids," I told Auden. His face was less pale, his eyes less watery, his hands steadier. I'd said it in relief; he took it as an accusation.

"Some things are necessary," he said.

It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. "You make yourself look
weaker
?" I asked incredulously. "For effect?"