Skinned (5 page)

It occurs to me now that if Bear Bear existed in the real world, he’d probably sound a lot like me.

Every day, since I was three, life on the network shadowed life off the network, and sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes it was the network that seemed more real. Every text, every pic, every vid got posted in my zone, every fight and every make up was reflected in the zone. My first boyfriend gave me my first kiss in the zone, his av a red-haired ninja, mine a black-winged pixie with purple hair and knife-spiked heels. The zone was how I knew who I was, how I knew
that
I was, except now there’s a gap, starting with the accident and stretching on as if, for all those weeks, Lia Kahn ceased to exist.

There are flowers waiting for me, flowers from everyone—not just Cass and Terra and even Bliss, but from all the randoms who wish they counted enough to get a niche in my zone, the ones whose names I don’t know and won’t remember, all of them leaving messages and pink-frosted cupcakes and pixilated teddies that remind me of Bear Bear. My zone is a shrine.

Walker’s messages are behind the priv-wall, where no one can see them but me. There are only two, both voice-talk, and I play them four times, eyes closed, listening to his warbling tenor, wishing I had more of him than my least-favorite part.

“Please don’t die,”
the first one says. He sent it the night of the accident, when I was still alive, when, according to call-me-Ben, I was hemorrhaging and suffocating and seizing, all at the same time.

The next one came weeks later, when I was lying in the bed, eyes closed, listening to footsteps and waiting to die.

“The turtle is hungry,”
it says.
“The turtle is starving.”

Code. Left over from our first few months, when Zo wouldn’t go away. She was always snooping in my room and hacking my zone, all big ears and a bigger mouth, so Walker and I talked in riddles and nonsense until eventually she left and we stopped talking altogether.

“The turtle is hungry.”

Meant
“I love you.”

I want to see him. I want to touch him. I want to at least voice him back. But what would I say?

Ahhh ovvvvv ooooooo.

We speak in different codes now.

I stay in stealth mode. They are all linked in and to one another, Cass to Terra to Walker to Zo, all in priv-mode, and I wonder if they are talking about me, but I can’t find out without showing myself, and I can’t do that, not today.

There are 7,346 new pub-pics and texts, and there will be more behind their priv-walls, and I know I should catch up, but I can’t do that, either.

There’s no point.

I try my favorite vidlife, technically a realistic one because there are no vampires or superheroes, but there’s nothing particularly realistic about the number of people Aileen manages to screw—and screw over—each night. Since the last time I watched, Aileen has already forgotten about Case, and is screwing some new guy and, secretly, the new guy’s sister, who’s engaged to Aileen’s former best friend’s cousin, and I can’t keep up with all the new names and bodies, and I don’t understand how so much can happen in six weeks.

I used to feel sorry for the woman who lives as Aileen, and for Case and for all of them. I used to think it was pathetic, arranging your life around someone else’s script, letting some random text the words you were forced to speak. So they got rich on it, so they got famous, so I watched all night sometimes because I didn’t want to miss anything, so what? It wasn’t their life they were living, it wasn’t anyone’s.

But now I don’t know.

If someone gave me a script, if someone whispered in my ear and told me how to act, what to say, what to do, if I could be their puppet and they could pull the strings, that would be easier. That would, maybe, be okay. But I have no script and no off-screen directions, and I sit frozen, watching the screen, waiting to know what to do.

Whatever else has changed, at least my av is still the same.

There was a time when I changed it every day—new eyes, new hair, bunny whiskers one day, cat ears the next—but that was before. That was kid stuff. Now my av is me, the virtual Lia, the better Lia, the Lia that would exist in a world without limits. Purple hair so dark it looks black, until you see it shimmer in the light. Violet eyes; wide, long lashes pooling across half the head, like in the animevids. Pouty blue lips. The morning of the accident, I gave her a pink boa and spray-on mini, like the one I’d just seen a pop-up for but knew I probably wouldn’t have enough credit to buy, because that’s another of my father’s favorite lines: “
We’re
not rich.
I’m
rich.” The credit is mine to ask for; his, depending on his mood, to deny. Now I wonder whether
I
am the virtual Lia, while my av is real. There is nothing left of what I used to be.

But she is exactly the same.

I didn’t get in touch with Walker, not that night or any of the nights that followed. Even after I got my voice back—
a
voice, at least, although it would never sound like
mine
—I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what I would say. I didn’t want to know what he would.

“I still think it might be good for you to meet with one of our other clients,” Sascha said. “She’s your age.”

That meant nothing. All the skinners were my age. The procedure wouldn’t work on adults—something about how their neural pathways weren’t malleable, couldn’t adjust to an artificial environment—and it hadn’t been approved for anyone younger than sixteen. If I’d had the accident a year earlier, I’d be dead right now. All dead, instead of…whatever this was.

“So what?”

“So I think you two have a lot in common,” Sascha said. “It might help to share your experiences, get her perspective on things. Plus she’s eager to meet you.”

“All we have in common is
this
.” I looked down at the body. My body. “And you keep telling me that
this
doesn’t mean anything.”

“You don’t want to meet her.”

Sascha’s brilliant intuitive powers never ceased to amaze. “No.”

“Maybe we should talk about why.”

“Maybe not.”

Sascha crossed her arms. I wondered if I’d finally managed to break through the professional placidness, if Sascha was about to prove she had an actual personality, one that could get irritated when a bitchy “client” pressed hard enough.

Not a chance.

“Let’s try something new,” she said with an I-have-a-secret-plan smile. “Why don’t you tell me what
you
want to talk about.”

“Anything?”

“Anything. As long as it’s something.”

I
didn’t
want to talk. That was the point. Now that I had my voice back, I had nothing to say.

“Running,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head. Maybe because I thought about it all the time. How it would feel to run in the new body. Whether I would be slower or faster, whether I would find a new rhythm. What it would mean to run without getting out of breath; whether I could run forever. They told me the body would simulate exhaustion before it had reached its limits, a gauge to prevent total system failure, but no one knew exactly what those limits would be.

“You’re a runner?” Sascha asked, faux clueless. It was her default mode; at least when she wasn’t acting the all-knowing wisdom dispenser. She knew I was a runner, because she had a file that told her everything I was. Everything she thought mattered, anyway.

Was
a runner.

I nodded.

“Do you miss it?”

I shrugged.

“You run on an indoor track or…”

“Outside,” I said immediately.

Sascha leaned forward, as she always did when she thought she was about to crack my code. “That’s unusual,” she said. “Someone your age, spending so much time outside.”

“It’s required.” But that wasn’t true, not really. Yes, we were all forced to spend a few hours a week outdoors, but for most people, that was the end of it. Five whiny hours shivering in the grayish cold, then back inside. It was one way I’d always been different. The only way.

“What do you like about it?” Sascha asked. “Running.”

“I don’t know.” I paused. She waited. “It felt good. You know. Especially a long run. You get an adrenaline high. Or whatever.”

“Have you tried it? Since the procedure?”

I shook my head. There was supposedly a track somewhere in the building, but I hadn’t bothered to find it.

“Why not?”

I looked down. The hands were sitting in my lap. I stretched one of them out along my thigh. It felt good to be able to move again. After almost a month of rehab, I didn’t even need to think about it most of the time; the hands clenched themselves into fists when I wanted them to, the fingers closed around balls and hairbrushes and tapped at keyboards just like real fingers. They registered the fabric on my legs—standard issue, hideously ugly BioMax thermo-sweats. Not that I needed thermo-regulation now, not when I had it built in, but that’s what they had, so that’s what I wore, because it was easier than buying all new clothes, and my old clothes no longer fit.

“What would be the point?” I said finally.

“The point would be to feel good.”

In my head I laughed. The mouth spit out something harsh and scratchy. Laughing was tricky.

“You disagree?” Sascha asked.

“I guess it depends on your definition of ‘feel.’”

“You’re processing emotional and physical sensation differently now; that’s natural,” Sascha said, oozing understanding. Not that she could ever actually understand. “But your programming is designed to emulate the neurotransmitters that stimulate emotional response. Your emotions
are
the same, even if they don’t feel that way.”

“I feel the same, even if I feel different? Is that supposed to make sense?”

My father would kill me if he ever knew I was talking to an authority figure like this, even a figure with such questionable authority as Sascha.

“When I get angry, my stomach clenches,” Sascha said. “I feel sick. When I’m upset, my hands tremble. Sometimes I cry. What happens when you’re upset?”

I said nothing.

Which was pretty accurate.

“Without a somatic response, it’s natural that the emotions will seem weaker to you,” she said. “More distant. But the stronger the emotion, the more ‘real’ it may feel, partly because you’ll be too consumed with the powerful emotion—or sensation—to analyze all the things you’re
not
feeling. And as your mind relaxes into old patterns and finds new ones, as it
will
—”

“I’ll be my old self again. Right.”

“Lia, haven’t you been able to find
any
advantages to your new body?”

That had been my “homework” from the other day: design a pop-up for the download process, complete with catchy slogan, and a list of fabulous advantages available to every download recipient. Sascha thought it would tap into my creativity skills.

It turned out I didn’t have any.

“I can link in whenever I want,” I muttered. But that wasn’t new. For my sixteenth birthday, I’d finally gotten a net-lens, which meant that once I got used to jamming a finger in my eye, I could link with a blink, just like the pop-ups said. Could superimpose my zone and my av over blah reality, type on a holographic keyboard that only I could see. But the pop-ups didn’t mention how it made you nauseated and made your head burn. Now I had a built-in net-lens, and migraines weren’t an issue.

Hooray for me.

“Good,” Sascha said, nodding. “Anything else?”

“I guess no more getting sick.” Not that anyone got sick much these days, anyway. Not if you could afford the med-tech, and if you couldn’t, well, you had bigger problems than the flu. “And if I get hurt, it won’t, you know. Hurt. Much.” There would be pain, they’d told me that. Of all the sensations, the neurochemistry of pain was the easiest to mimic, the best understood—and the most necessary.
Pain alerts the brain that something is wrong,
call-me-Ben had said.
An alarm you can’t ignore
. So there would be pain, they had promised, and I knew it was possible, because I’d felt it when I was still trapped in the bed, when it seemed to crawl out from inside my head. But out of the bed, back in the world, pain was just as distant as everything else.

“You’re beautiful,” Sascha said. “That’s something.”

I was beautiful before.

“And then there’s the big thing,” Sascha prompted. “A lot of people would envy you for that. If the government allowed it, a lot of people might even download voluntarily.”

“Doubtful.”

“To never age…” Sascha looked dreamy, and her hand flickered to the corner of her left eye, where the skin was pulled taut. “Some might call that lucky. Miraculous, even.” She couldn’t be more than seventy, I decided, since after that even the best doctors left behind a few stretch marks—and no younger than thirty, because you can always tell when someone’s had their first lift-tuck, and she definitely had. First, second, and probably eighth, I guessed. No one so lame could be any younger than that.

Call-me-Ben was the one who’d taught me how to back up my memories each night, preserving that day’s neural adjustments and accretions in digital storage—“just in case.” He’d had the same dreamy look as Sascha. They all did, when the subject came up.

“The body ages,” I countered. “They say it’ll only last fifty years.”