Skinned (4 page)

I
don’t want to talk about it.” Translation: “I don’t want to think about it.”

It didn’t matter how much crap they spewed about adjustment pains and emotional connection and statistically probable results of repression, there was no way in hell some random middle-aged loser was milking me for intimate details of my daily life in hell, aka rehab. No matter how many times she asked.

“It’s okay if you don’t feel ready.” Sascha leaned back in her chair, her head almost touching the window. “You may never
feel
ready. Sometimes we need to just take a risk, have faith in our own strength.”

She had a corner office on the thirteenth floor, which meant a 180-degree view of the woods surrounding the BioMax building. I’d only seen one other floor: the ninth. That was where they stored the bodies until it was time to destroy them. Mine wasn’t there anymore. I knew, because I’d asked Sascha. They burn the bodies. They don’t bury them—You only bury people who are dead. The bodies are just medical waste. I told Sascha, no, I didn’t want the ashes. She said it was a positive sign.

“I don’t need faith,” I said. “I know my own strength. I do fifty push-ups every morning. Sit-ups, too. It’s in your report.” It was easier to talk than to sit there for an hour in silence, although I’d tried that, too. I’d probably try it again. One thing about my new life, or whatever I was supposed to call it: I had plenty of time.

She frowned, then templed her fingers and rested her chin on her fingertips. “I think you know I’m not talking about that kind of strength.”

I shrugged.

“It’s natural to be concerned about how your family will react to the new you,” she said.

“They’ve seen the new me.”

“It’s been a month, Lia. You’ve made remarkable progress since then. Don’t you want to show off a little?”

“Show off what? That I learned how to take a few steps without falling on my face? That I figured out how to make actual
words
with this thing in my throat?” I gave her one of the smiles I’d been working on, knowing—from the hours I’d spent practicing in the mirror—that it looked more like a grimace. “Yay, me. I’m finally better off than a two-year-old.”

Sascha hated sarcasm. Probably because she didn’t get it. After all, if she’d had an acceptable IQ, she would have been on some other floor, building new people like me, rather than stuck on lucky thirteen, upping my self-esteem. Her parents had obviously opted to dump more EQ than IQ in their chromosomal shopping cart. Not that she was much good when it came to emotions. At least, not emotions like mine. “You can’t undervalue yourself like that,” she said. “I know how hard you’ve worked to get to where you are.”

She knew nothing.

The benefit of artificial skin constructed from self-cleaning polymer: No one has to sponge the dirt off my naked body while I’m lying in bed like a frozen lump of metal and plastic.

No, not
like
that.

I
am
that.

The benefit of an artificial body with no lungs, no stomach, no bladder, and a wi-fi energy converter where the heart should be: No machine has to breathe for me while my brain tries to remember how to pump in the air. No one has to spoon food into my frozen mouth. No one has to thread in a bunch of tubes to suck the waste out of my body; no one has to wipe my ass.

No one has to do much of anything. Except for me.

“I can’t.”

“You
can.”
Asa is terminally perky. Even when my spasming leg kicks him in the groin.

An accident, I swear.

“You’re just not trying hard enough.”

I hate him.

He puts the ball between the hands lying uselessly in my lap. I can finally hold up my own head, and I do, so I don’t have to see them—mechanical digits covered with layers of fake skin, threaded with fake nerves.

I can feel them now, sometimes.

“Feel” them, at least. Know when someone is squeezing them. Know, even with my eyes closed, when Asa dips them in boiling water, when he presses them to ice. I know, the way I know my name, as a fact.
This is cold. This is hot.
I know, but that doesn’t mean I feel. It’s not the same.

Nothing is.

“Try to throw the ball to me,” Asa chirps. He’s all blond hair and brawny muscles, like a twelve-year-old’s av, the virtual face you choose for yourself before you realize that pretty and perfect is perfectly boring. “You can do it. I know you can.”

Move,
I tell my arms.
Just do it.

It would be easier if they hurt. If there was pain to push through, to guide me back to where I started. If I knew that the more it hurt, the closer I was getting. But there hasn’t been any pain since that first day with call-me-Ben. The brain was exploring its new environment, they say. All that is behind me now.

I don’t tell them that I miss it.

Move!
I think, and I know I am angry, at myself and at Asa. I am angry all the time now. But the voice in my head sounds nearly as calm as the computer I still use to talk, and will use until I can make more than grunts and groans with the artificial larynx. That may take the most time of all, they warn me. But most people master it eventually. Most.

The arms jerk away from the body, and the ball dribbles out of the hands, then drops, rolling under the bed.

“Good!” Asa exclaims, looking like he wants to applaud.

And then the session is over, and Asa hoists me out of the chair, like I’m a giant baby, his thick arm cradling my knees, another digging into my armpit. I forget to hold up my head, and it flops backward against his shoulder. This is life now.

From the bed, to the chair, to the bed again.

They turn me off at night—I’m supposed to call it “sleep,” but why bother?—and turn me on in the morning. Soon, they tell me, I will learn how to do it myself. Just like I will learn to monitor my status, to will the system diagnostics to scroll across my eyes. I will learn how to upload my memories for safekeeping. I will learn to speak. But that’s all later.
Now,
life is lived for me. Asa monitors me, Asa dresses me, Asa turns me off and on, and off again. It’s how I know one day has passed. And another. I play catch with Asa and I stare at the ceiling and I wait and I try not to wonder whether I would rather be dead or whether I already am.

I hated to picture myself like that. Helpless. I tried to forget, but Sascha kept forcing me to remember. Like I was supposed to be proud or something. Like I was supposed to be happy. Even when I tuned her out, which was often, I couldn’t escape the memories. The frustration. The
humiliation.
As long as I was stuck in this place, part of me was still stuck back at the beginning, a patient—a
victim.

I guess remembering those early days in rehab was better than remembering what came before: the crash, the fire, the long hours frozen in the dark.

Better, but not by much.

“Are you worried that if you see them, you might find that you’ve changed?” Sascha asked. “That your family might think you’re different now?”

“I
am
different now.” I wondered how much they paid her to force me to state the obvious.

I could tell from her smile that I’d said the right thing, which meant I’d said the wrong thing, because it meant she thought we were about to make
progress
. Sascha was big on progress.

I, on the other hand, was big on reality. A concept with which Sascha didn’t seem to be acquainted.

“I’m not talking about physical differences, Lia. I’m talking about
you
.” She leaned forward, tapping me on the chest where my heart would have been. “About what’s going on in here, and”—she tapped the thick blond weave that covered the titanium plates—“up here. You’ve been through a serious trauma. That would be enough to change anyone.”

“I guess.”

“But I’m thinking it might be more than that.”

Big surprise.

“Many clients in your position worry about what the download process
means
for them. Whether they lost something of themselves in the procedure or if they’ll ever be the person they were before. They worry a lot about who they are now. Do these concerns sound familiar?”

Sooner or later, wherever our conversations began—if you wanted to call them conversations rather than verbal dodgeball games where Sascha pelted and I ducked and weaved until, inevitably, she managed to slam me square in the face—we ended up in the same place.

“I know who I am,” I said. Again. “Lia Kahn.”

“Yes.” She smiled. I could see the beads of white frothy saliva forming in the corners of her mouth. I didn’t have any saliva. The tongue was self-lubricating. “
Yes
. You
are
Lia Kahn. But surely some of the things you’ve been seeing and hearing on the vids about…people like you…They don’t trouble you at all?”

I was still practicing my emotional responses: when to raise the eyebrows and how far. What to do with the nose when the mouth was stretched into a smile. When to bare teeth, when to press lips together, how often to pretend to blink. It was all a lot of trouble, so most of the time, I just left my face as it was, blank and impassive. Sometimes that came in handy.

“I’ve never seen any vids about ‘people like me,’” I lied. They didn’t go for concrete nouns here, nouns like “skinner” or “mech-head.” Or “machine.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of newfound terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter?

Lesser of two evils, apparently: “Lia, you should be aware that you’re going to encounter some people who don’t yet understand the download process. You’re going to have to help them make peace with what’s happened to you. But I assure you that with time, those who know and love you will accept it.”

But that was a lie. I knew what I was; I knew what the people who loved me could handle. They couldn’t handle this.

You’d think I would at least get some superpowers as part of the deal. Legs that could run a hundred miles an hour. Arms that could lift a fridge. Supersight, superhearing, super something. But no. I get skin that washes itself and is impervious to paper cuts. Legs that have barely learned how to walk. A tongue that lies in my mouth like a dying fish flopping and thrusting and scraping against heavily fortified porcelain teeth, mangling every burst of sound I manage to choke out of the voice box.

No lungs, just an intake hose feeding into the larynx, so I can shoot air through when necessary, make the artificial cartilage vibrate at the right frequency, funnel the sound waves up the throat, into the mouth. That was the first step. “A big one!” Asa says, clapping as I grunt and groan. I can do all the animal noises now. Monkey hoots. Cow moos. Dolphin squeals. And, as of this morning, sheep. “Baa! Baa!”

“Your first word,” Asa cheers. “Almost.”

I still hate him.

You don’t need a tongue to sound like a sheep. But if you want to sound human, that’s another story.

I wonder if Asa goes home at night and imitates me for his girlfriend; someone like him must have a girlfriend. Does he tell her how he’s spent all day with his hands on my body, prodding and pulling and stretching? Does he tell her how he dressed me until I learned to dress myself or about the day he opened the door without knocking and discovered me checking to make sure the body was—fully—anatomically correct? Is she jealous, I wonder, of the girl with the perfectly symmetrical synthetic breasts, the living doll that Asa molds into whomever he wants her to be? Or does she think of him as a handyman, spending his days tuning up a machine that just happens to look like a person and grunt like a chimpanzee?

“Good night, Lia,” he says as he goes wherever it is he goes when he leaves the thirteenth floor and rejoins his life.

“Unnnh,” I “say” in response. I am not allowed to use the voice synthesizer, not while I’m speech training, not—Asa says, and his boss, call-me-Ben, agrees—unless I want to be one of those clients who has to use it indefinitely, speaking with closed lips and a computerized monotone for the rest of my so-called life. “Omph. Aaaaap.”

“You too, Lia. See ya.”

“Baaa, baaa.”

Bye, bye.

I have fingers again, fingers that can barely feel but can mostly type. Which means it’s time to link in to the network. I will not speak, not with the computer voice and not with the animal groans, but I will type, I will face them, I will.

I tell myself that every night.

Tonight I do it.

There is a six-week dead hole in my zone. I have never been off the network for that long, not since I was three and got my first account, my first ViM, and my first avatar, a purple bear with an elephant snout and a lion’s tail. I dressed him in a top hat and called him Bear Bear, which, at the time, I thought was clever.