Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (44 page)

“Alice.”

There is a tone in Marika’s voice that Alice has never heard before. Despair.

“I don’t know if . . .”

Alice grabs Marika’s hands and shakes her head again and again. This cannot be happening. Not now. Not now that they’re so close. All that stands between them is one flimsy layer of bandages. If Marika just waits, if she can just see the naked devotion on Alice’s soon-to-be-revealed face, if—

Marika sniffs wetly and gasps, “I’m sorry,” before pulling her hands away and running out of the room.

Alice shakes so hard that she can barely find the call button.

Footsteps thunder toward her, and Dr. Metz shouts, “She’s seizing!”

Alice thrusts out her hand, her entire arm rigid, and when Dr. Metz touches it, she clasps it tightly and writes, “Put me back.”

“What?”

“Put me back. In the chair. In the mask.”

She hears other people racing into the room, and Dr. Metz says, “No, it’s all right. She’s fine.” As the others walk back out, he says, “Alice, you’ve just barely begun your transformation. I understand that it’s scary, but—”

“Put me back now.”

“I can’t do that. The program’s been shut down.”

“It’s my body. I decide what to do with it.”

“But why—”

“I want my life back.”

But they don’t listen to her. They call in psychiatrists to talk to her, but she refuses to answer their questions. When they take off her bandages and turn on her eyes, she refuses to open them. When they activate her vocal cords, she refuses to speak. The only things in her life that matter are the job and Marika. The job is gone. So that just leaves Marika.

And Marika doesn’t want her. Not like this.

Dr. Qureshi comes by to visit several days later and says, “This just proves why it was a bad idea to get involved with her.”

With her eyes still closed, Alice faces away from her.

“She only loved you because you were broken. She liked taking care of you, having power over you. You had to know that, Alice. You’re not a stupid woman. You can do so much better than that now.”

She feels tears welling up in her new eyes, and chokes back a gasp as she wipes them away. The skin on her face is still extremely sensitive. She’s having trouble adjusting to that.

“Alice, I know you’re terrified. But you have to try. Just open your eyes. Just see what you’re missing. Please, Alice. Please.”

“No,” she murmurs, and claps a hand over her mouth, horrified at how automatically speech has come after ten years of silence.

“Well, that’s a start.”

“I want . . .” Her mouth is sluggish, her words slurred. “I want her back.”

“Forget Dr. DeVeaux.”

“But—”

“I’m here because I need you back on the project. And to do that, I need you to finish your recovery.”

Alice lets her eyelids flutter open, and is hit with a cacophony of shapes and colors that she can barely make sense of. She blinks hard, but it doesn’t help. “What?”

“I’m over here.”

Alice turns toward the sound, and sees a brown blur surrounded by jagged black spikes. There is red somewhere on the blur, and a couple of splotches of white. Light twinkles around its outline like sunlight off a weather satellite. She squeezes her eyes closed, rubs them, then opens them again. The image is the same, only fuzzier.

“The security computers are online and working perfectly,” the blur that is Dr. Qureshi says, “but we need to have people on the team who are specially trained to interpret any anomalous data. I can’t think of anyone better qualified than you and Jayna.”

“What about Selene?”

The blur shimmies, making Alice’s head swim. “She’s got a long road to recovery ahead of her. We need a team in place within the month. I’ve spoken to your doctors, and they feel that’s a highly aggressive schedule, but they say you could meet that deadline if you really work at it.”

“Will . . . will Marika be on the project?”

Another shimmy. “No. Her specialty was the brain/sensor uplink, and of course, caretaking. She had nothing to do with interpreting the data you three collected.” Alice hears a small sigh. “What we did to you girls was inexcusable.”

“No, we volunteered.”

“I don’t think little girls can really give that kind of consent.”

“But the ships—”

“Almost destroyed the entire colony. I know. They killed my family, too.” The white splotches vanish from the brown blur, then reappear. “Look, I know how important this project is to you. I want you back on the team. I owe you that, at the very least. No one has more experience interpreting surveillance data than you. No one.”

Alice closes her eyes. It’s too hard to think when she’s trying to puzzle out what her eyes are sending to her brain.

The project needs her. She needs Marika. The project will not help her get Marika back, but it will help keep the colony safe.

Ten years ago, lying in another hospital bed, she was offered that same job. She sacrificed so much for it then.

This time, no sacrifice is required.

When she looks at it that way, the answer is clear.

She reopens her eyes, looks at the twinkling blur, and says, “I’m in.”

 

From that point on, she makes good progress, adjusting about as well as the doctors expect. Her vision is jumpy and often confusing, and many of her muscles are severely atrophied, but soon she’s able to use a motorized wheelchair, and go to the bathroom on her own, and use her new eye controls to filter out confusing input so she can focus on a task.

The day they finally let her go out for the first time, she heads straight for the park. There is warmth on her too-pale skin, a riot of color in all directions, the cries of children playing, and scents that threaten to overwhelm her senses after a decade of smelling only metal.

She steers her wheelchair off the path and onto the grass.

“Hey!” her nurse calls, but Alice ignores her and keeps going until she reaches a shady patch under one of the few trees that looks old enough to date from before the bombardment. She eases herself onto the ground, ignoring the protests of her feeble muscles, and lies on the cool, tickly grass, staring up into beautiful, beautiful green.

And laughs.

She hears a motorized whine, and looks up to see Jayna peering down at her. “There’s a bug in your hair.”

She pats the grass next to her. “Come on down. I’m sure there’s plenty to go around.”

Soon, they are released from the hospital and are given their own apartment, where Alice thrills over being able to do little things like prepare her own food, sleep in a bed, bathe herself, walk. And every day, she and Jayna analyze unusual data from the surveillance computers, doing their part to keep the colony safe. It is so much more than she’s ever had. It should be enough.

But she is lonely.

No one touches her anymore. No one whispers endearments in her ear speakers. No one makes her tremble, makes her head heavy with desire, makes her feel flush and warm all the way down and fluttery in the middle.

No one calls her beautiful.

In fact, from the sidelong glances she gets whenever she goes out, she knows she’s lucky that no one bothers to comment on her looks at all.

“Well, that was new,” Jayna says as they wheel into their shared apartment. “I don’t think we’ve made a little kid cry before.”

“Maybe the chairs scared him.”

Jayna shoots her a glare. “Face it, we’re hideous. Freaks of science. It’s a life of spinsterhood for us. At least for a while you had . . . well, whatever it was you had.”

“She won’t talk to me,” Alice murmurs.

“You don’t fit her fetish anymore.”

“It wasn’t a fetish.”

“I’m not saying that fetishes are bad things. Hell, I’d love to find someone whose kink I fit. There’s got to be someone out there into scar tissue and wheelchairs.” She wrinkles her mashed nose. “Then again, maybe I should just put in for plastic surgery. Maybe they’ll give me dating lessons too. ‘Hi, I just learned to pee all by myself again. Wanna go out?’ ”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” Alice says. She levers herself out of her wheelchair and grabs her crutches. She is determined to be walking unaided as soon as possible.

“You’re probably right. I could try, though. I mean, what would it hurt?”

With a smile, Alice says, “You never know. You could get lucky.”

Jayna laughs. “Yeah. I guess I need to find just the right fetishist of my own—”

Alice whirls around, nearly losing her delicate balance. “Will you stop calling her that?”

“What do you care what I call her? It’s not like she stuck by you or anything.”

Alice looks down at her feet. “I know. But I still miss her.”

“So do something about it already.”

“But she won’t see me.”

“She’s fine with seeing you. She just doesn’t want you to see her back.”

Alice’s head snaps up, her eyes focusing beyond the room. That’s it. Why didn’t she see it sooner?

“Thanks,” she whispers, and clops down the hall on her crutches.

“For what?” Jayna asks.

But Alice doesn’t answer. She hobbles into her room, sits down heavily at the computer, and types out a message.

“Marika. I have a proposal. I think we can make this work. Please come visit me. Bring a mask.”

She gets an answer within moments. “I’ll be there.”

 

Marika arrives the next day. Alice has asked Jayna to answer the door for her and bring Alice the mask. It is a white full-faced hood, and the eyes, ears, and mouth are taped over. Sitting in her mechanized wheelchair, Alice pulls a keypad onto her lap, tugs the mask over her head, lining up the nostril holes so she can breathe, and freezes in sudden panic.

She is crippled again.

This won’t work. It can’t work. She can’t go back to this. At least last time, it was for selfless reasons, but now—

The muffled sound of approaching footsteps snaps her mind out of its panicked spiral. Through the plastic and the tape, she hears the bedroom door close, a body sink into a chair.

She lets out a long breath. No. She has to try. Besides, she can stop it at any time. She has that power now.

Alice carefully positions her hands over the keypad and types, “Can you look at me this way?”

There is a long pause, then through the tape, she faintly hears Marika answer, “Yes . . . I . . . I think so.”

The panic screams at her from the animal parts of her brain, but after ten years strapped helplessly into a chair, she’s gotten good at ignoring her flight response. “Do you think you can love me this way?” she asks.

She feels a shaking hand touch the plastic over her face, then jerk away. “I don’t know. It’s not . . . it doesn’t look like you.”

“We can have a new mask built. It can look just like the old one.”

“But you . . .” The hand flutters to her chest. “The tubes are gone.”

“I know.”

“And . . . the walker . . .”

“I can stay in the wheelchair for you.”

“It’s not the same. You’re . . . I know you’re whole under there. I know you can get out of that chair, pull off that hood. You’re not my captive girl any longer.”

“I know. But I’m willing to pretend. Isn’t that enough?”

She hears a sigh. “I don’t know.”

“Well let’s find out.”

“Alice, I . . . I’ve never felt this way about anyone else. Never.”

“I haven’t either.”

“What if it’s because of the mask? What if I can’t love you out of the chair? I’m terrified that we’ll try and . . .”

Alice nods. “I know.”

“At least if I walk away, I can’t be disappointed.”

“But it’ll still hurt.”

There’s silence, and she hopes she’s struck a nerve.

Finally, Marika says, “This isn’t normal. You deserve normal.”

Alice laughs behind the plastic. “Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to do with normal. Not after . . .” Not after her senses were hijacked. Not after she spent over half her life crippled and strapped to a walker. Not after she sacrificed her childhood so that other children wouldn’t have to. She lifts her fingers from the keypad and clenches them into fists.

Gentle hands clasp her fists and massage them until they relax.

“You deserve someone who loves you for what you are,” Marika says. “Not for what we made you.”

Alice lays her hands back on the keypad and types, “It’s too late for that. I am what you made me. And now I need you to love me again. You can put me in the old mask, and the old chair. I’ll be the old me for you, and the new me when you’re not around.”

Marika clasps the mask and rests her forehead on Alice’s. “God, I missed you.”

“We’ll make this work,” Alice types. “We have to.”

 

Marika’s doorbell rings four times. That’s the signal.

Alice logs off of the work database and closes her eyes, letting a deep breath out through her nose.

This is never easy. But these are the rules.

She grabs her canes and limps over to the walker. It’s a terrifying contraption—one that she’d never seen with her own eyes for all the years she spent in it. Dull metal, faded padding, straps and buckles, and that rail circling the entire thing, trapping the occupant inside.

Trapping her inside.

But she doesn’t need to look at it for long.

She pulls off her clothes, straddles the chair, and carefully connects the seat/body interface until it is just right. Then she pulls on the thin cotton gown, tying only the very top tie, letting the rest hang loosely off of her still-thin frame.

And then there’s the mask.

This is the hardest part.

It takes several deep breaths for her to work up the courage. But she finally closes her eyes and pulls it over her face, making sure the breathing tubes and earplugs are perfectly aligned before tightening the straps around her shaved scalp, sealing her inside the sound- and light-proof prison.