The Body Electric - Special Edition (5 page)

My knees jerk up toward my chest as my muscles spasm and tighten. It’s like a cramp for my whole body. Pain slices through me, shredding my muscles. I gag on bile, then gasp for air, and I’m deeply aware of the heavy thump of my heart, ricocheting in my chest.

And then—nothing.

Nothing at all. I cannot hear the sound of my beating heart. I cannot feel the warmth of life within me.

I’m dead.

nine

I hear music. I almost recognize the tune, something soft, played on a guitar, but then the world bursts into being. Light explodes from a pinpoint in the distance, and with the light, everything else—scents, warmth, the feel of air on my skin.

In the distance, I can see a house.

I know that house.

It’s where we lived when I was a kid, before everything bad happened, a narrow two-level building in Rabat, a dusty, limestone-drenched suburb of New Venice.

I step toward the house, and in that one step I cross kilometers. The house moves from the background to right in front of me, so close that I can touch it.

Singing.

I creep around the edge of the house. It’s perfect in every detail, from the stone walls to the clay tiled roof with aggressively green, stubborn ivy crawling up the wall toward the kitchen window. A potted chinotto tree standing by the doorway wafts in the warm breeze.

The window in front of the kitchen sink is open. I stand on my tiptoes, peering inside. My mother—younger than normal—dances around the kitchen, laughing, covered in flour. And Dad’s behind her, pulling out a huge bouquet of yellow roses for her. I can hear childlike laughter—
my
laughter, I realize, when I was a little kid—weaving in and out of the sounds of my parents’ chatter and over the whirr of the electric mixer, but my mother’s reverie isn’t focused on me as a little girl.

It’s focused on Dad.

If my mother looked through the window over the sink, she could see me as I am now—eighteen years old with dark brown hair hanging just past my chin, my gold-flecked brown eyes staring straight at her. But I don’t think Mom will do that. Her body is aware that this is a reverie and not real, but her subconscious is letting her relive the memory. I could probably stand nose-to-nose with her and she wouldn’t see me. Her brain wants to live in the reverie and will do anything to protect itself from leaving it.

From becoming aware that this isn’t real.

Looking at Mom and Dad now, I wish this was real. I would trade anything to be able to let my mother live this life.

But it’s past. This is long ago, well before her disease ate her from the inside out. Before I grew up. Before Mom developed the technology that even makes reverie possible. Before Dad died, giving her the reason to invent the process of reveries so she could live with him in her mind.

Mom’s memory falters. The house flickers.

I duck under the window, just in case this was enough disturbance to push Mom out of the reverie. Crouching against the house, I cup my hands and blow air into them, thinking
cinnamon
.

A warm, overwhelming scent of the spice wraps around me. I throw my hands up, envisioning the smell permeating every corner of Mom’s dream.

“The cookies!” I hear Mom say, her voice a trill of laughter. She’s fully back in the reverie now, the flicker gone.

But just in case, I do everything else I can think of to make Mom’s memory even more real. I hum the opening strands of Dad’s favorite song, “Moon River,” the song I heard at the start of the reverie. The sound continues long after I quit humming—Mom’s memory has picked it up, adding depth to her reverie. I add my memories of the old house to hers, and the kitchen grows in sharper details, like a blurry image coming into focus.

I think everything’s going well. Maybe I can leave the reverie, let Mom’s mind fill in everything else.

But then I hear her voice. It is so strained that I stand up and lean closer, despite the already-weakened state of the reverie.

“Philip,” Mom says, her voice heavy with unshed tears. “Philip, I don’t think this is real. I wish it was… but I’m in a reverie, aren’t I? You’re not real. You’re just a memory.”

I act on instinct as I swing my arm, and the wall separating me from the kitchen and my mother disappears. The laws of physics do not apply in reverie. My mother starts to turn, but I lunge forward and grab the sides of her head, keeping her facing Dad.

I can feel, deep within me, power. Control. I can control my mother’s reverie, like a puppet master pulling strings. I concentrate with all my strength on the idea of this memory.

But then I hear my mother whimper, and I know that now she’s remembering the pain of her disease, and all around me the kitchen flickers, and even the memory of my father flickers.

No
. I reach deep within me, to a core of power I didn’t know was there, and tap into every happy thought and memory I have of my parents like this and I imagine them all pouring out of me, engulfing my mother.

warmth love heart-full joy love chaos kissing the taste of his lips the feel of his body love the child the soft sleeping noises tiny fingers tiny toes clear brown eyes open wide love love love

I rip my hands away. My mother’s reverie body sags and relaxes. I reached inside her and pulled out the deepest memories in her body, the memories that words can’t describe, the memories that are as much a piece of her as her arms and legs. Those are the ones she’s filled with now.

Mom’s face looks up to Dad’s, and I know now she truly is in the reverie, and this feeling of peace and joy will stay with her long after she wakes up.

It worked.

I turn to leave. It’s safe for me to go now; Mom’s reverie is definitely connected.

But I glance back. I can’t help it.

I miss Dad, too. I miss the way he looks. My own dreams are nowhere near as vivid as Mom’s. And even though he’s younger here than I remember him, and he has a scruffy bit of facial hair that makes him look reckless, and he’s missing his glasses, and there’s more hair on top of his head, it’s still Dad.

And then he looks at me.

“Ella,” he says, his voice cutting through the soft sounds of memory in sharp, precise tones. “Ella. You have to wake up.”

ten

I jerk so hard that I crack my skull against the sonic hood. I throw it back, ripping the electrodes off my skin, nearly breaking the chain of my necklace in the process. My skin vibrates. I stare at it, awed and scared, as my flesh ripples like an earthquake. The vibrations seep past my skin, into my bones, and I feel as if I’m hearing
something
, the buzzing of my soul within the confines of my flesh.

And then I blink, and everything is silent and still.

I cover my eyes with a shaking hand, trying to regroup. A hallucination. My body is reacting to the extra nanobots I injected myself with. That last image was… disturbing. And it shouldn’t have been possible. Reveries aren’t real. I wasn’t really there in Mom’s head. Memories are nothing more than electrical impulses shooting across the brain’s synapses. There is no way Dad—it wasn’t Dad, it was just a dream of him—there’s no
way
that could have seen me. Could have
spoken
to me.

I gasp, and check Mom’s stats, worried that the last image of Dad being so weird and creepy affected her. But she’s blissfully asleep, still in her dreamworld, her health stats calm and far better than they were before we started.

The door slides open and Ms. White bursts in, her eyes wide and panicked. “Ella!” she screeches. “What did you do?” She rushes to my side, noting the cold sweat prickling my skin.

“I did it,” I say, fully realizing what just happened.

“Are you okay?” Ms. White ignores me, checking the health stats on my cuff. “Where’s your mother?”

I jerk my wrist free and grab her hand, forcing Ms. White to look at me. “I did it,” I repeat, a smile breaking out on my face. “I did it!”

“Did… what?” Her voice is hesitant and wary.

A quiet beeping starts from the control panel, followed by a flash of red. “Mom’s almost out,” I say, jumping from the chair and pushing past Ms. White. Her head turns between me and the secondary reverie chair, and I almost wish I’d been looking at her face when she noticed the empty nanobot vial.

“Ella!” She gasps, chasing after me.

I race into Mom’s reverie chamber just as her eyelids flutter open. “Good reverie?” I ask, beaming at her. My smile falters. What if she remembers when it almost broke? What if she remembers Dad being so strange?

But then I see her expression, and my heart melts in relief. “The best,” she says.

I help her get up out of the reverie chair. “What did you remember?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

Mom squeezes my hand. “My last good day.”

She moves forward to talk to Ms. White, but I’m paralyzed. Her last good day. Every day since then has paled in comparison to that one day, years and years ago.

Mom’s new nursing android, Rosie, stands at attention by the door and Mom leans against her as she heads to the lift.

“Coming?” Mom asks, the happy glow of her reverie around her so palpable that I can almost see it.

“No—I need to talk to Ella about her internship,” Ms. White says before I can reply. She shoots me a look, and I wave Mom on. After we hear the lift doors close behind Mom and the android, Ms. White turns on me, her face a mix of pride and anger.

“Ella!” she says, her voice already rising. “That was really,
really
dangerous!”

I shudder, my body remembering that moment when it seized, and then it became nothing. I’d thought I’d died.

“I was fine,” I say to her dismissively. “And more importantly, it
worked
.”

Ms. White sucks in a breath. “What was it like?” she asks eagerly, the familiar sparkle of scientific discovery in her eye.

“It was amazing!” I shout, spinning around her. “I was
in
her reverie! I could
control
it!”

Ms. White’s eyes widen.

“It was just like I was there,” I continue. I start to tell her everything, but she raises her hand to stop me, a grim look replacing her excitement.

“How many bots did you take?” she asks.

“Just one vial.”

“One…
vial
?”

“Is that too much?”

“I… uh… you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I feel fine.” At least, I do now. If I took too many, maybe that’s why my body reacted so violently.

“Ella, that was very irresponsible. And dangerous. You could have overdosed.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t.”

“But you could have.”

“But I
didn’t
.” I glare at Ms. White. What I do is not her business, especially when what I do, I do for Mom.

Ms. White sinks into the reverie chair Mom just left. Her shoulders slouch forward, the ends of her hair obscuring her face. “You’re going to have to let go one day,” she says.

“Excuse me?” The words sound harsh in my own mouth.

“This internship year was supposed to prepare you for college, not prepare you for becoming a nurse to your mother. The year’s almost up, and look at what you’re doing. You’re killing yourself, just to let your mother dream for a half hour.”

“It’s worth it,” I mutter.

Ms. White grabs my chin and forces me to look up at her. “It’s not,” she says.

I jerk free. “What do you want me to do?” I ask, practically shouting. “Just let my mother die?”

Ms. White’s gaze doesn’t waver from mine. “Yes,” she says simply.

I reel back violently, as if she’d struck me across the face.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ms. White says. “I just need you to understand that you’re going to have to let your mother go one day. Maybe one day soon. And it’s not worth risking the rest of your life to scrabble together a few more minutes for her.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I say, my jaw tensing.

“El—”

“I do
not
want to talk about this.”

We glare at each other. It’s so rare for us to disagree. Since Dad’s death and Akilah’s service year on the lunar base, it’s just been me and Ms. White against the world.

Ms. White sighs and pushes up against her knees. “I didn’t come down here to fight,” she says. “I came here because there’s someone to meet you.”