The ground was hidden beneath a thick layer of fog, and it was tempting to imagine it had disappeared. “Flying’s getting old,” I said, keeping my back to Jude.
“For you maybe.”
“We need to find something better.” More dangerous, I meant. Wilder, faster, steeper. Bigger.
“You want better?” He slipped a small, hard cube into my palm. “For later.”
“You know I don’t do that crap.” But I closed my fingers around it.
“For later,” he said again. So smug.
I just kept staring out the window, wondering what it would feel like if the plane crashed. How long would we stay conscious, our mangled bodies melting into the burnt fuselage? Would we be aware as fuel leaked from the wreckage, lit by a stray spark? What would it feel like at the moment of explosion, our brains and bodies blasted into a million pieces?
I would never know. The moment this brain burst into fire, someone at BioMax would set to work retrieving my stored memories, downloading them into a newly made body, waking me to yet another new life. That “me” would remember everything up to my last backup and nothing more. No flying, no crashing, no explosion.
For the best, I decided. Maybe when it came to dying, once was enough.
DREAMERS
“Natural is hell.”
Orgs prefer not to think about it, but machines come to life all the time. Always have, always will. A machine’s not a machine without an engine, a power source, an on switch, something to turn screws and bolts and gears and whatever into purposeful motion. Mechanical life—it’s the difference between sculpture and machine. Coming to life is just what we do.
But some of us do it better than others.
In 1738, French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson built a life-size mechanical duck that could, supposedly, consume and digest food. The copper fowl crapped on command for admiring crowds all over Europe. But Vaucanson cheated. If anyone had bothered to look inside the defecating duck before its performance, they would have discovered that the duck—like its creator—was already full of shit.
Forty years later a mechanical wooden chess player known as the Turk faced off against Frederick the Great, Ben Franklin, and Napoleon. Checkmate, times three. The Turk wore a turban, puffed on a clay pipe, and was a suspected repository of mystical forces. It turned out to be the repository of a contorted chess-playing human, curled up in a wooden cabinet beneath the board, magnetically guiding the Turk’s every move.
The past is irrelevant—that was Jude’s law, and we lived by it. But he meant our past as living, breathing humans, the kind that were born from a womb and would end up rotting in the ground. There was no rule against exploring our other past, the toasters and steam engines and microchips strung up on our family tree.
There were the karakuri ningyŌ, eighteenth-century Japanese mechanical serving girls. “Dr. P’s fornicatory dolls”— mute and anatomically correct, just the way his nineteenth-century customers liked them. ELIZA, the twentieth-century computer that could analyze your dreams, and Deep Blue, not as good a conversationalist as the Turk, but better at chess. Forty years ago there were Spot and Patch, animatronic dog and cat, all the fuss without the muss; then came the Nanabots, mechanical nursemaids equipped to administer a feeding and change a diaper, popular with the weak and infirm on both ends of the aging spectrum. Two thousand years ago, there were mechanical birds that chirped, mechanical snakes that slithered, mechanical men that spoke and smiled. All of them an illusion of life— all of them hiding gears or cogs or wires or shit beneath their artificial skin.
And now there’s me.
There’s us.
“Organic isn’t better, it’s just different,” I told the meek little group of mechs traipsing after me. Hard to believe I’d ever been like them, clueless enough to imagine I had a choice. “Orgs are weak in body and mind. Your new life may feel like a punishment, but it’s not. It’s a gift.”
The speech, like everything else, was getting old. I’d shown them the guest houses, the orchards, and the manor itself—steering clear of only the pool, full of zoned-out mechs tripping on digital hallucinations. I’d played the good little tour guide, a live-action pop-up for Jude’s estate. (True, it was Quinn’s fortune, Quinn’s property, but after all these months, none of us thought of it as anything but Jude’s.) They were intrigued, I could tell. Tempted, even if it meant giving up the last, desperate hold on their old lives. They just needed that one final push.
Thus: the speech. I gave it the way I gave the tour, mechanically, out of habit, the words dribbling out without my help. Sometimes it felt like this was all I did: tow new recruits across the estate, schooling them in life according to Jude. It seemed so quaint and retro now, the old way, infiltrating BioMax support groups to find the few and far between who weren’t interested in being normal. There were more of them, a lot more, now that the download had been reclassified as a voluntary procedure, easy to qualify for as a genetic tweak or a lift-tuck. At least, as long as you were between sixteen and twenty-one—above the age of consent, below the age when the download would fry your neural circuits and leave you a mess of frozen limbs and scrambled brains.
“The orgs demand that we imitate humanity, they designed us to do so—and then they attack us for claiming an identity that’s not our own. They call us skinners, mech-heads, Frankensteins.” The words bored me, but I kept going, because I was good at it, and because Jude trusted me enough to let me speak for him, and that gave me power.
And because the more I delivered the speech, the more I believed it.
“They tell us we’ve stolen the lives of the dead—that we’re nothing but a mechanical copy of the people we used to be. People who died so that we could live. Or whatever it is we do. And you know what? They’re right.”
There weren’t any gasps this time around. But of the six mechs following me through the grounds, four looked ready to bolt. The other two were calm; voluntaries always were. It’s easy to be calm when you don’t care. They were curiosity seekers, probably fame whores beaming back to their favorite stalker zones. Let them try. Jammers locked the whole estate behind an impenetrable priv-wall. We’d been burned by voluntaries before. Now, we let them in, we let them listen, but we never expected them to stay.
“You can tell yourself you’re the same person you always were. But you know that’s a lie. You know nothing feels the same. Sometimes it probably seems you barely feel at all.”
Feel. Such a ridiculously imprecise verb. What was a feeling? The scratch of something rough against your skin? The sensation of a toe dipping into water, the deep, wordless truth of this feels cold this feels wet. Then there were the feelings that happened inside your head, the whirring hamster wheel of happy sad angry bitter jealous bored scared happy.
Whatever orgs chose to believe about us, mechs had both types. We felt wet—or, at least, we processed wet, the artificial nerve endings in our synflesh sending a coded impulse to our neural networks. We processed all environmental conditions with precision. Much as we processed everything else: Wrecking the car, burning alive, waking in an alien body that wasn’t a body equaled bad. Angry.
Sad.
But there was something else, wasn’t there? The connection between the two types of feelings, the thing that bonded the feeling inside your head to the feeling inside your body. The thing that made your palms sweat when you were nervous, your stomach clench when you were afraid, your lungs heave and your eyes drip when you thought too long and too hard about what you used to have.
Mech bodies functioned perfectly no matter what was going on beneath the titanium skull. Heaving and dripping would indicate a malfunction. And when that happened, we just returned to BioMax and got ourselves fixed.
“The orgs set us up to fail. They punish us for imitating humanity; they punish us for rebelling against the illusion. Too bad. You can lie to yourself and pretend they don’t hate you—”
“My parents don’t hate me,” one of them argued,
a blandly pretty mech with long brown hair and a high-pitched voice. “They love me. That’s why they brought me back.”
This was an easy one. “They don’t love you.” Harsh, but better now, before the damage had been done. “They love their daughter. Who’s dead. What do you think happens to you when they figure that out?”
She didn’t look convinced; I hadn’t been either. Sometimes they had to figure it out for themselves. Then they came back.
I had.
I led them down the shallow, grassy slope toward the greenhouse. When I’d first come here, it had been a decaying wreck, scabby with rust and shattered glass, much like the rest of the estate. With Quinn’s parents long dead and Quinn herself an amputated, bedridden lump living only on the network, there hadn’t been much call for home repairs. Once Quinn had downloaded, she’d been too busy smelling the roses and screwing everything in sight to deal with clogged plumbing.
Things were different now.
The main house gleamed, its stone face polished to a shine, its grounds lush with well-trimmed gardens and fruited trees, the greenhouse a crystalline temple exploding with purple and green. I stopped the group just outside the glass door, pulling a pressed purple flower from my pocket. “This is a Quinn,” I said, then paused just for the pleasure of watching them wait. Sometimes it was a snooze mouthing the same thing to an unending stream of rebels without a clue. But sometimes, posing under their unblinking stares, it was a power trip.
“Quinn’s parents had the flower designed for her on the day she was born—it’s part orchid, part hyacinth, impervious to extreme temperatures, and capable of going three weeks without water. Man-made. Org-made. We know it’s alive because it can die.” I crumbled the flower to dust. “But it’s not natural. There is no natural anymore.” I paused again, this time to let them see it for themselves, the clouds thick with microscopic toxin scrubbers and ozone patchers, the grass designed to suck moisture out of even the driest desert air and stand tall against frost and drought, buzzing and rippling with new populations of genetically modified bumblebees and squirrels. Let the mechs who were still missing Mommy and Daddy flash on Mommy’s lineless lift-tucked face or Daddy’s anabolically enhanced biceps and the roid martinis that shot his testosterone through the roof. “Natural is hell.”
Hell as in the miles of dead zone, underwater or under quarantine, as in the death of summer and the permanent cloud masking stars most of us didn’t believe were there. As in the ruined bodies littering the cities, bodies without gen-tech or med-tech, all scabbed and lumpy and rotting.
“Natural is weak, like orgs are weak,” I told them, opening my hand and letting the purple dust drift to the ground. A little drama queeny? No doubt. But effective. I could see it— not in their blank faces but in the way they stood, frozen and silent, forgetting to put on the little “aren’t I human?” show we all used to play at, pretending to fidget and flop and blink. I fixed on one of the girls, Ty, her fuchsia hair pulled into a knot behind her right ear. She’d made it clear that she hadn’t wanted to come, that her friend had dragged her along. And that she knew I was full of crap.
This was the one we’d get. I would have Jude invite her on our next cliff dive, and even if she said no at first, she’d eventually give in. Join his movement. Whatever it was moving toward.
“You want to talk natural?” I said as the girl stared me down. “It’s the job of civilization to improve on nature. To perfect it. Which makes us inevitable—perfected bodies, perfected brains, without defects or weaknesses, without an expiration date. We’re the natural end of the line.”
“Impressive. I think you’re even starting to sound like him.”
I swatted my ear. Mosquitoes might have been extinct, but there were plenty of other pests still going strong.
“You were watching?” I asked silently, knowing my voice would find Quinn wherever she was hiding. I’d gotten the VM chip—illicit tech courtesy of Jude’s illicit sources— installed only a week before but I already hated the way the computerized voice wormed into my head. Implanted in the access node at the base of my skull, the Voice/Mind Integrator intercepted the signals sent from our brains to our artificial larynxes, digitized them into a robotic monotone before we could make a sound, and sent them out to anyone within a three-mile radius, as long as they were tuned into the right frequency. I couldn’t have been the only one who cringed at the way the v-mod replaced the rise and fall of familiar voices with flat computerized tones, the same disembodied voice we’d all spoken with in rehab before learning how to use our new mouths and tongues.
But then, that was the problem with the “improvements” Jude served up, doling them out at sporadic intervals, crediting only vague sources and underground suppliers. Few of them were an improvement on anything, and I would have been happy enough to go without. But I wasn’t about to get left behind. I might have renounced my past and embraced a new and improved me and all the other empowering soul-song crap that, true or not, still sounded like bullshit when we spewed it out to the newbie mechs, but I had enough in common with the old Lia Kahn to know where I stood on the concept of loops. That’s loop as in do whatever’s necessary to stay in the. So the majority ruled. If the majority wanted infrared vision or internal GPS or strangers’ voices crawling through their brains, then I wanted them too. So what if every addition carried us further away from normal?
“Normal” was just one more thing better left to orgs; one more thing we’d left behind.
Quinn was the only one who used the VM with any regularity. Maybe it reminded her of the voice she’d spoken with since childhood, each word selected by the flicker of an eye, one of the few body parts left intact after her accident. We all held on to a few things it would have been easier to forget.
“I’m always watching.” There were micro-cams all over the estate, left over from Quinn’s predownload years. “By the way, that shirt makes you look like a whale.”
I smirked, forcing myself not to seek out the camera. It would be hidden in a branch or a gutter, likely invisible and definitely out of my reach, which meant there was no point in tipping her off about how much the eye-in-the-sky act creeped me out. “It’s Ani’s shirt,” I said, plucking at the skin-tight mesh rippling with bucolic scenes yanked from the network. At the moment, there was some kind of galactic nebula unfurling across my chest.
“Was her shirt. Who do you think made her get rid of it?”Quinn’s low chuckle sounded almost authentic. Even after all these months in the mech body, I still hadn’t gotten a handle on laughter. Ani told me I was imagining things, but I was convinced my spastic barking made me sound like a wounded seal. Quinn had mastered it back when we were still in rehab. And she loved rubbing it in. “If I were you, I’d ditch it immediately.”
“As in strip down right here while you’re watching?”
“Now or later,”
Quinn said with a soft giggle.
“Remember what I said.”
I’m always watching.
I started heading back to the house.
“Wrong way,” Quinn said. “I have something for you.”
“What?”
“Just a little treat. Trust me.”
“Busy,” I said.
“Don’t you think Jude’s ass could use a break from all that kissing?”
I stopped walking.
“You don’t want to give him a rash,” Quinn added.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning back when you thought we were all freaks, Jude was enemy number one, and now you prance around here like his trained monkey.”
Thanks to the VM, I could answer even with gritted teeth.
“Jealous?”
“Of you?”
Jude liked his toys new and shiny, that much I’d figured out. I suspected that Quinn had started to look a little rusty by the time I showed up. Besides, he may have been a mech, but he was still a guy—and when it came to guys, no toy was shinier than the one they weren’t allowed to play w
ith.
“It’s not sucking up if I actually agree with him,” I reminded Quinn. “We all want the same thing, right?”
“I know what I want,”she said. “What about you?”
“You first.” Not that I was avoiding the question. The question was irrelevant. What I wanted I couldn’t have, so I’d decided to stop wanting it.
“I want you to come play with me,”she whined.
“Ask Ani.”
“Ani’s busy.”
Hard to believe. Quinn’s attention span was half the size of Jude’s—out of sight, out of mind was a way of life. And Ani knew it. “I guess Ani and I have that in common.”
“Somehow, I think the vidlifes can get bywithout you for a few minutes,”Quinn drawled.
“You know, I do have a life outside the network,”I lied. Living on my own with no parents, no school, and no obligations was a freedom the old Lia Kahn would have killed for. Freedom to hook up with Walker, to party all night dosed up on Xers and zone the days away on a cloud of chillers and chocolate, to dance in the moonlight with Cass and Terra while the randoms watched our flickering shadows, wishing they could steal our lives.
Now Walker was hooking up with the sister I hadn’t spoken to in half a year, and b-mods modded nothing. Music was just noise to me, the same way Cass and Terra were just names of people I used to know. My own life had taken a permanent trip to the department of dull. Who could blame me for preferring someone else’s?
It’s not that I’d become a total vid-head. I wasn’t one of the wastoids who spent all day and night whispering directions into the ears of the vidlifers and watching a bunch of strangers act out my wildest fantasies. I didn’t need to pull any strings to watch my dark and shameful fantasy unspool across the screen. Because it was there for me at any hour of the day, in infinite variations: the vidlifers themselves, head cases who had given up their identities, their wills, their lives to the masses. They spoke no words that weren’t piped into their ears, made no choices that weren’t chosen for them by randoms spread across the network. They’d erased themselves.