The Body Electric - Special Edition (33 page)

On the far wall of this lab are a series of small, square doors, each neatly labeled with a few words I cannot read from here. The little doors are made of heavy steel, with a locking metal handle. They stack one on top of the other, like morgue doors. This room is cooler, and I think, judging by the condensation near the wall, the little rooms behind the little doors must be refrigerated.

In the center of the room is a reverie chair—a pair of them, connected by wires, much like the two reverie chairs in Reverie are connected, although our second chair is hidden in a different room. These reverie chairs look old and uncomfortable, none of the plush lining or little comforts we have for our clients.

One chair is empty and shiny, newly polished. The only flaw in it is a small, misshapen hole in the center of the chair back that looks a bit like a bullet hole.

The other chair is not empty. A body is slung across it, arms and legs dangling lifelessly. The head is tilted back, almost falling off the back of the chair. But there’s not a full head, not on this body. There’s a gaping hole, and through the flesh and metal, I can still see the whisper of a spark in my mother’s mechanical brain.

fifty-seven

I hear a buzzing in the back of my head.

Jack looks around for something to cover my mother’s doppelganger body with, but there’s nothing there, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen it. And it’s not my mother. But I’ve still seen it.

I can smell it now. A sort of sweet scent, with a rancid edge.

Rotting meat.

“We should go,” Jack says immediately. He’s speaking so fast. I can barely keep up with his words.

“Why are there two chairs together like that?” I ask. Connected reveries are rare; Mom only theorized about them. I thought the mental spa was the only place to have some. Everything feels slow, like I’m sloshing through water. There is something… something important. I just… I can’t seem to
think
.

I feel like I’m missing something.

“Your father was working on a theory of your mother’s—at least, he was before he fired me. Using reveries on androids, trying to find a way to make them really think. Judging from this and the vat of brains, it looks like the UC has continued his research.”

I start, then look guiltily at Jack. I only understood half of what he said. “Do you hear that?” I ask, craning my head, listening.

Jack stares at me. The lab is eerily silent.

“Never mind,” I say. “It was nothing.”

“Anyway,” Jack says slowly, still staring at me oddly, “your father thought
zzz
that it might be po
zz
ible to tran
z
fer thought through something like reverie
z
. He’d
z
ometimes experiment, putting an android
zzz
in one chair and a per
z
on in the other. Put them both in reverie
zzz
, and
z
ee if any intelligence could be tran
z
ferred. Ella?” Jack snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Are you
zzz
listening?”

“The buzzing,” I say softly.

“What?” Jack asks. But I can barely hear him.

The buzzing is so loud.

I clamp my hands over my ears.

It’s still.
Zzz
. So.
Zzz
. Loud.

“Ella?” Jack asks. Or, at least, I think that’s what he asks. I can’t hear him. I can only see his mouth open and close around the syllables of my name.

“Where are the bees?” I ask loudly. Jack clamps a hand over my mouth—I don’t know why he thinks
I
am too loud. I could barely hear my own voice, the buzzing is so deafening.

Jack mouths something else, but I can’t hear it. Ju
zzz
t bu
zzzzzz
ing.

I whirl around. How can there be this much buzzing, and no sign of bees? They must be everywhere… but I can’t see them at all.

Jack grabs my shoulders and spins me about. He opens his mouth.

Bees pour from it. They swarm in front of his face. They knock against his teeth. They crawl up his nose, over his eyeballs.

I scream and fall back. The bees follow me. I swat at them, waving my arms about and taking the lab coat off, trying to beat them away. They ignore me entirely. I can feel their heavy bodies against the bare skin of my arms. Their pointy, sticky feet prick my clothes, snagging in the threads. Their slightly fuzzy bodies leave goose bumps on my shoulders.

They crawl over me, their wings beating against my skin. They crawl through my hair. I bend over, scratching my head with both hands, trying to get the damn things out, but there are more bees than I have hair, bees, bees, everywhere
beezzzzz
.

Jack grabs my wrist, crushing the bodies of bees between our skin, and jerks me forward. It does no good—the bees follow. I squirm, twisting around, swatting at the bees everywhere.

Jack throws me into the reverie chair—the empty one, not the one with a body in it.

He lowers his face in front of mine. He speaks—I cannot hear his words, not through the sound of the bees, but I can see his lips form my name.

A bee lands on his lower lip. I watch, eerily fascinated, as the stinger punctures the pink skin. The bee jerks, leaving the stinger in Jack’s lip. The bee falls against Jack’s teeth, drops from his lips to the ground, where its body is swallowed up by the thousands of bees swarming on the cold tile floor. The floor used to be white, but now it is black-and-yellow, swirling, whirling, massive bodies of bees writhing along the ground, crushed under Jack’s feet, smeared into the tile as more bees swarm over the dead ones.

Hands grip my chin, turn my face.

Jack’s mouth is open so wide that I think he’s shouting, but there’s no point. Can’t hear anything, not over the buzzing, buzzing,
buzzbuzzbuzzbuzzing
.

I’m screaming. When did I start screaming? Opening my mouth left space for the bees to get in. They dive-bomb down my throat, scratching the sensitive flesh of my mouth with their stingers, their thin little legs getting stuck between my teeth. I claw at my mouth, trying to get them out, and then firm hands pull my arms away from my face, and they’re strapped down, held against the metal arms of a reverie chair—
how did I get in a reverie chair?
—and I turn my head, and there’s the other reverie chair, the one with the dead body of the thing that looks like my mother, and I can’t get away because I’m strapped down, and the bees are too heavy anyway, their bodies piling over mine, pressing me down, and I can’t breathe.

And then one of them stings me.

A giant one, with poisonous green venom.

No.

Not a bee.

A needle.

Not venom. Reverie drug.

The bees melt like candle wax into the shape of a man. Jack stands before me, holding a needle. I look down at my arm.

He drugged me.

I slip into a reverie.

fifty-eight

The buzzing bees are softer now, in the background, like music.

“Ella.”

I am still strapped down in the reverie chair, but there’s nothing in the dreamscape except the darkness and my father.

“Where am I?” I ask.

Dad bends over the chair and starts to loosen the straps. I rub my wrists. My mouth is sore. I touch it gently and can feel the raised skin of my own clawing.

“You are in a reverie chair,” Dad says.

“No, I mean… where am I now?” I look around me. I’m in a reverie; this is a dreamscape. This isn’t the lab. Jack’s not here. Just me and the chair and Dad.

“Where do you go when you enter someone’s reverie?” Dad asks idly, as if the question were rhetorical.

“I enter their mind.”

Dad looks off into the blackness of the dreamscape.
“You enter someone else’s mind. Someone else’s memories, someone else’s dreams
.” His eyes turn to focus on mine.
“I suppose you’re in someone else’s mind right now.”
He giggles.
“Which means you’re not in your right mind.”

I stand up—not only is the reverie chair hard and uncomfortable, but I want to get some distance between myself and this dream of Dad.

And then what he’s said hits me. I’m not in my mind at the moment—I’m in a reverie, dreaming someone else’s dream. But the person—the thing—the thing that looks like my mother—in the other chair isn’t alive. All that was left was a few electrical sparks in a rotting body.

“Is this what death looks like?” I mutter to myself.

“Depends on what you think death is.”
Dad sounds cheerful now, like the man I remember before we moved to the city, before he started working with the government.

“I don’t understand you.”

“You—your thoughts, your being, your self—are right here, correct?”
Dad waves his hands in front of me. Of course I am not really here—I’m in a chair in a lab with Jack. But I am also here, in a dreamscape with Dad.
“Which part of you is you—that body you left behind, or the girl in front of me now?”
Dad asks.

I think about it a moment, then say, “I guess me. Here. Now. A body isn’t a person. A person is…” I struggle to answer him. It’s hard to put it in a definition. But I think about the digi file Jack showed me, of Akilah’s death. Even on a screen, I could tell the difference between Akilah alive and Akilah dead. Dead, she was empty. She was nothing. She was like she was in the tunnel. A shadow of herself. She wasn’t her body.

Dad grips my shoulders, his fingers pressing into my skin.
“Remember that, Ella. That part is important.”

“What part…?” I ask, but Dad releases me so suddenly that I’m left breathless.

He spins away from me, and I hear his voice, heavy and sad.
“Ella, you have to wake up.”

I march over to him. “You keep saying that!” I scream at him. “But what do you mean? What am I supposed to wake up from? What do you
really
mean?”

Dad takes my former place in the reverie chair. He looks up at me.

He looks so tired. Wan.

His cheeks are sunken. His eyes are red-rimmed. His lips are cracked.

He looks dead. Almost.

“You were my key. I hid the truth in you.”
As he talks, the flesh falls away from his face, until there are gaping holes where his cheeks should be, his clacking teeth visible.

I start to cry. The tears are hot and burn my cheeks as they fall. They remind me of the bee-stings.

“When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t cry.”

The buzzing grows louder. It’s not background music any more. It’s the sound of me losing my mind.

“I’m going crazy, aren’t I?” I whisper. The fear of it dawns on me like a horrific revelation. Before, in the lab. There were no bees. I realize that now. There were no bees. Just me. Crazy me.

Or… maybe I’m not going crazy. Maybe I’m some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I’m just breaking down.

I’m not sure which way is worse.

Dad laughs. As he does, the rest of his skin and flesh cracks and falls away from his head, exposing his grinning skull. His eyes roll in their sockets, then fall, dangling from a string of red vein. The veins snap and his eyes splatter on the ground.

“You’re not in your right mind, dear,”
he says.
“No, no, no, you’re not.”

And he still laughs. He laughs until there’s nothing but the noise of his teeth clacking together and the never-ending sound of a million bees buzzing in my ears.

And then—

—Silence.

Dad fades away. The reverie chair disappears.

There’s just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead.

And, just as I’m starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn’t soft; it’s not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark.

I don’t know why—it makes no sense, the way dreams often don’t—but I want to touch the light.

So I do.

The light arcs from the corner of the dreamscape, connecting with my fingertips. It burns me up inside, lightning bouncing around my organs, pinging through my blood.