The Body Electric - Special Edition (22 page)

I can’t really comprehend what I’m seeing.

I… I had no idea that I’d ever even met Jack. But the first time he saw me, he saw nothing
but
me. And the me through his eyes—it was the me I wanted to be. He saw me better than I even saw myself.

I watch, barely breathing, as the memory-me chats idly with Jack. The world springs up around Jack and his memory of me slowly, but the edge is gone. The lights are dim now, barely visible. The sounds are muted. The scent of lemons and lavender—like my shampoo—is stronger than the smells of the food sold by street vendors, the ever-present saltiness in the air.

I changed the way Jack experienced the world.

His memories speed up—as he follows the memory-me into Reverie, he meets Ms. White. They talk—an interview. My eyes dance over a tableau of Jack’s memories in the first days of his job working at Reverie as an assistant to Ms. White. She never let him do anything serious, but he maintained the charts and data, helped her with clients—spa clients, not reveries.

And, in the background, he watched me.

It’s weird, now, with me watching him watch me in a memory. Voyeuristic. But I can’t help but see the way Jack thinks of me in his memories. Wherever memory-me is, the world is brighter, sweeter. It’s dim and shadowy outside my glow.

Jack’s memories slow down soon—probably a month or so after he started working at Reverie. He catches me crying. I remember that night. Not Jack—but I remember crying, on the bench at the roof of our apartment. That was the night Mom’s doctors started talking about end-of-life care, and their treatments were all about making Mom comfortable, not trying to find a cure.

That was the night the doctors gave up on her.

I shut my eyes, recalling my own memory of that night. I climbed the ladder to Mom’s garden—woefully neglected at that point, nearly everything was dead and there was algae in the hydroponics system. I sat on the bench. And I wept. I didn’t hold anything back. Even though I was outside in one of the biggest cities in the world, it felt like the most private place I could be—out of earshot from everyone else, in a place Mom couldn’t get to any more.

When I think of that time, I remember how very, very alone I felt.

But in Jack’s memory, he’s there. He’d heard me from the street, and he climbed the fire escape ladder. And found me.

In Jack’s memory, he’s there. In mine, I’m alone.

Every detail is right. I wore those clothes that day. There was a mustard stain on my pants, right there. That was the summer of my unfortunate bangs, and there they are, flopping in memory-me’s face.

But Jack isn’t in my memory of that night.

In this memory, his memory, the one I’m watching, Jack puts his arms around me, and he holds me until I’m done sobbing, and then memory-me looks up into his eyes, and then we kiss.

I remember crying myself sick that night, then going to bed alone.

But my lips feel bruised. I touch them now, as I watch Jack and memory-me kiss. I shut my eyes.

I think I can remember the feel of his lips against mine. The pressure, the taste of him.

No.

I open my eyes. This isn’t real. We’re going to wake up from Jack’s reverie, and the screens will tell me this is all in his imagination.

But a part of me wishes it was real. The part of me that remembers crying, alone. I wish there had been someone there that night, someone to kiss away the pain.

Jack’s memories progress. In his mind, we became close—closer than I’ve ever been with anyone else in my life, even Akilah. Months pass. I tell him my darkest fears and he whispers his to me. We kiss. We do more than kiss. My cheeks grow warm and my eyes grow wide as I see Jack and memory-me stripping our clothes off, our hands and eyes and lips hungry for more, more, more. I cannot tear my eyes away; I watch it all. I watch him. I watch the way he looks at me, the love in his eyes. The gentle touches. The hungry touches. The way he holds me, the way he lets me soar.

I swallow hard. I have never… I’ve never done that. Not with him. Not with anyone.

Lies. This is all lies.

This is Jack’s sick imagination. His obsession. None of this happened.

I would
know
.

I turn away. I try to build a wall between Jack’s memories and me. No, not his memories, his hallucinations—but either way, I can’t tear myself away.

The weather gets colder. I can feel it in my bones, even though I’m not really here, it’s not really winter, all of this is happening in Jack’s mind.

I see Akilah, and I gasp aloud. I’d forgotten the way her tightly-curled hair bounces when she walks, her penchant for too-slick bright red lip gloss. Jack hangs in the background as Akilah tells me she’s leaving for the military.

I remember this, too. The moment when I realized my friend, my last friend, my very best friend, was going away. I had been so upset that I didn’t eat for days.

But in this memory, Jack’s there. He cheers memory-me up with stories and jokes, distractions to pull me out of my funk.

Winter Festa. I remember going out, alone, and coming quickly back home. A festa is no fun without people to share it with.

Jack remembers it differently. He remembers going with me, sharing a honey ring and warm, sweet-roasted walnuts and fizzy spiced cider. We watched the parade together; he gave me the luminescent plastic snowflake he caught from one of the floats. We watch the fireworks, and we gasp in awe as the memory tree is lit in the center of Central Gardens.

I choke back a sob. I can’t take much more of this. This… this is a life I wish I could have had. This is a life without the loneliness, the aching longing for someone, anyone to understand me.

This is a life I’ve never had, that I’ve always wanted, and it’s painted so vividly here that I could almost believe in it. That’s what hurts. Seeing it, and knowing it isn’t true.

Something changes.

A different sort of cold.

Darkness. The blackness of void.

Raised voices.

My
voice.

I can’t hear the words. Just the tones, the sounds.

And they are
furious
.

And then, in the foreground, I see two long, rectangular shapes emerge. Everything is darkness now, but the black of those rectangular boxes is like a black hole, sucking away light and turning everything into nothingness.

With a sickened twist in my stomach, I realize what those black, rectangular boxes are.

Coffins.

There are no lids. I creep forward in Jack’s memory, and peer down at the faces of his parents. I remember the obituary I found before, the one that lists his parents, both workers in the UC, killed in a car crash in Gozo. They are bloody and mangled here, barely recognizable, with a sheet covering everything below their chests. This is the last image he had of his parents, when he identified their bodies in the morgue, mingled with the day of the funeral, when their coffins must surely have been closed.

I look up and see memory-me and Jack, both dressed for the funeral. He wears a black suit and black shirt; I wear a dress I do not recognize, one made of black and silver.

“We are
done
,” memory-me says. “I never want to see you again.” Any doubt that remains that this could be real is gone now. I would
never
have done anything so callous as to break up with someone at his own parents’ funeral.

“What—why? Ella, why?” Jack’s voice is a plea, and it quivers. With fear, I think. Or sorrow.

The next words mumble and fade. Jack doesn’t remember the exact things we said, just the fight.

Then one sentence rises from the chaos of sound.

“They deserved to die, and so do you!”

And then.

Silence.

It’s over.

thirty-nine

I wake up.

My eyelids feel heavy, and when I touch my cheeks, my fingers come away damp from tears.

I stand, my body still shaking.

What
was
that?

That last memory, when everything went black.

If all of Jack’s memories of me are false, why would he create something so horrible?

I rip the electrodes off my skin. I feel wobbly on my feet, but I cross the chamber quickly. I have to see it for myself, confirm the truth I know. The door slides open and I push past it, dropping into the chair in front of the control panel. I swipe my hands along the monitor recording Jack’s brain scans.

My world bottoms out.

Jack’s memories came from the place of truth.

None of it was his imagination.

The memories are real.

“Impossible,” I whisper. None of that happened, none of it. And especially not the end. I would never do something like that. I know what it’s like to lose a parent. I wouldn’t… I couldn’t…

But his memories were real.

But
my
memories are real.

I close my eyes, my fists curled up under my chin, pressing into my chest. I feel hollow inside, as if there’s a black hole where my heart was, as if I am caving in around myself.

“What’s impossible?” Jack stands in the doorway of the sensory chamber, watching me. His face is somber; he just woke up from that last, horrid memory too.

I look at him, and I find I’m unable to hold anything back. “You… you have memories of me.
Real
memories. But… I never met you before this week. How is that possible?”

Jack spins the other control room chair around and plops down into it. “Told you so,” he says, but his voice is sad.

“It’s not like my memory can just be wiped. Memories don’t work that way. You can’t just erase a person from your past.”

Jack looks at the monitors and brain scans. “Maybe you can.”

I roll my eyes. “The mind can lose memories—amnesia is a scientific possibility. But it’s not selective. I mean, it can be, but not like this. I
have
memories of the past few years. They’re just… different from yours. The brain doesn’t function that neatly. Real science is messy. This isn’t a sci fi novel.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. “We’re doing brain scans in a mental spa, love.”

“So? And don’t call me ‘love.’”

Jack runs his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know,” he says. “Xavier’s brilliant, and I’m no idiot, and we’ve not been able to figure out how this is happening. We just know what it’s not—it’s not cloning, it’s not being replaced by an android. The people who come back—”

“Like Akilah,” I interrupt.
Like me?
I want to ask.

“Like Akilah. Those people are still
people
. They’re just… missing parts. In their brain—like memories, but also other emotions.”

“I have emotions,” I whisper. I am nothing but a black hole of emotions.

Jack shakes his head. “I don’t understand it,” is all he says.

“The reverie drug is designed to enhance memories you have, but there’s not a drug that can just erase them, rewrite them.”

“But I knew you,” he says gently.

And—as impossible as it is—I cannot deny it.

forty

The next morning, I wake to the smell of bacon.

I stretch and throw my comforter back. I stare at the blue-and-brown damask pattern. Jack knew this comforter. Jack knew this bed.

I shudder, heat rising in my cheeks.

Jack
knew
me.

After the reverie, Jack left, telling me that, should I need to find him, I could go to the lower city and hire the black-and-yellow auto-boat again. I had thought that I would uncover the secrets of the Zunzana, and that I could hand them straight to Ms. White and the UC… but I no longer know what’s right or wrong, what’s true or not.

And I no longer know who—
what
—I am. I’m still me, of course. But those missing memories bother me, nagging at the edge of my mind like a buzzing bee in my ear. Has something happened to me to make me…
other
? Is that where my memories went?

The bacon is burning. I taste bile on the back of my

tongue as I remember the last time I smelled burning, the explosion of the androids in Triumph Plaza, that one stump of a foot of the man I’d spoken to moments before. The explosion in my own home, the gaping hole, now covered with tarp, where our interface room used to be. I can’t let myself get distracted by whatever Jack is, or what I am, or what we used to be. I have to focus on finding whoever is attacking my nation—and my family.