The Adoration of Jenna Fox (14 page)

"To keep
thinking.
"

He nods.

That environment was my hell. My black void I
didn't understand. My endless vacuum where I suffocated, screamed, cried, but
no one came to help me.

My own father put me there.

I lay my face in my hands. The hands that are
not really mine. I suck in a ragged breath. Do I even have lungs, or is this
just a remembered action? I shudder, repulsed at everything that I may or may
not be, wanting to escape but trapped again. By what? Myself? I don't know who
or what I am anymore.

I feel Father's arms around me. His stubble
scratching my cheek. Whispering in my ear, "Jenna. Jenna. It will be all
right. I promise." He is my father again, not the doctor. The confidence
is gone. I hear the fear in his voice. He is not sure things will be all right.

I push him away. "I need to know.
Everything."

"You will. But even that ten percent needs
rest. Let's both get some sleep. We'll talk more in the morning."

I am tired. Drained. I nod and I lie back on my
pillow.

Just before he reaches the door, I stop him.
"Is it true?"

"True?"

"Is there really a most important ten
percent?"

"Yes," he says. "I truly believe
there is."

Day One / New Jenna

Father staples my skin together. I feel a quick
pinch.

"It's deeper than I thought it was last
night," Father says. "How did you do this?"

"It happened when I
—"
Careful, Jenna. They hid your computer from you.

 
"It
happened when I went for a walk. I stumbled and came down on a rock."

"A rock did
this?"

"It had a sharp
edge to it."

"Oh." I am not sure he believes me,
but then again, I am not sure how much to believe of what he says either. I
guess that makes us even. He swabs the now-stapled cut with gel and begins
wrapping it with gauze. We sit at the kitchen table, Claire, too. She is still
in the clothes she had on yesterday, rum-pled now. Her usually neat hair is
uncombed. She is tired, her face looking numb, like she has no energy to
express anything, but still I can tell she is restraining herself from talking;
she is letting Father do most of it. He holds nothing back, and I see Claire
wince at some of the information.

"If I only have ten percent of my original
brain, what is the rest?"

"It's not exactly correct that you don't
have your brain. You do. You just don't have the same material it was housed
in. Now it's in the Bio Gel."

"Then explain Bio Gel." I ask my
questions flatly. Not committing to emotion. Not angry. Not sad. Not committing
to acceptance or forgiveness. I can't give them that.

"Bio Gel is an artificial neural network
built on a biological model. It's a condensed, oxygenated gel that is filled
with neural chips. These chips are as small as human neurons, and the wonderful
thing is, they communicate and pass messages in the same way human neurons do,
through chemical neurotransmitters. The typical human brain, Jenna, is composed
of a hundred billion neurons. You
have five
times that. Every inch of
you is packed with Bio Gel."

I sense that Father thinks I should be
impressed. Maybe even grateful. But what about my missing heart? My liver? I
don't want five hundred billion neural chips. I want guts.

He continues to describe his handiwork.
"We uploaded all the information from your brain to a central sphere
around your saved brain tissue
—the
pons
—or the butterfly as it's sometimes called. But
eventually all the information will be shared with the whole network."

"If it's all there, why am I having a hard
time remembering?" I don't share that there are some things I am
remembering that I shouldn't. Like my baptism at two weeks old. I want to
believe that Father has it all under control, but memories like these tell me
he may be as lost as I am. He's tampered with the unknown. What door has he
opened? Will he change his mind and want to close it?

"Your memory lapses aren't unlike someone
who's had a stroke and is slowly recovering," he says. "The brain has
to find new pathways to access and store information. That's what you're doing
now. The neural chips are building pathways."

"Are you sure it's all there?"

Mother and Father share a quick glance. Do they
think I am blind?

 "Reasonably sure," Father says.

Reasonably.
Like that is enough.

Father is done with my hand and I stand.
"So if this is all so groundbreaking and wonderful, why are we here?"
I know the answer, but I want to push them
—like
a child on a playground shoving at someone's shoulder. It feels good. I answer
my own question before they can put their spin on it. "I'm illegal, aren't
I? That's why we live here. We're hiding out."

Mother stands, coming around the table toward
me. "Jenna, the laws will change
—"

Father jumps in. "You've done nothing
wrong. What
we've
done is illegal. So, yes, that's one of the reasons
we're here."

Mother is about to reach me, and I put my hand
out like a stop sign to halt her.
"One
of the reasons?" I ask.

Father hesitates. Another shared glance between
him and Mother. "The Bio Gel has its limitations. We know the shelf life
—the oxygenation—is reduced with extreme temperature changes, especially cold.
This location was chosen because it has the most constant temperate climate in
the country."

I begin laughing.
Shelf life?
My God, I
have a shelf life!

"It's not that unusual
—"

"Stop! I have a shelf life, for God's
sake! That
is
unusual!"

"Call it whatever you want, but what
living thing doesn't have a shelf life of some sort? We all do. You're twisting
this out of
—"

"I can't believe this!" I circle
around, my arms flailing over my head, but just as quickly I'm disgusted that
I'm mimicking Claire's nervous gestures. I stop cold and face Father. "How
long does it last?"

"In this environment, we think it may have
a good two hundred years. The problem is, there is no data yet
—"

"And if I were to go to a cold climate?
Boston?"

"Again, we don't have definitive data, but
it could be reduced to just a couple of years or maybe even less."

I stare at them both. Just when I thought it
couldn't get worse, it does. I have a life expectancy between two and two
hundred years. What's next? I back toward the door. "How could you do this
to me?"

"We did what any parent would do. We saved
you."

"Saved what? I'm a freak! You saved an
uploaded artificial freak!"

Mother steps closer and in an instant her hand
shoots up ready to slam across my face, but she catches herself, her hand
frozen in midair. She deliberately lowers it to her side. Even in her rage, she
cannot harm one cell on her treasured Jenna's face. "Don't you dare call
yourself that! And don't you dare judge us! Until you've been in our shoes,
you'll never understand!" She turns abruptly and leaves the room.

Father and I stare at each other. Her exit
leaves a hole, an imbalance to our already teetering triangle.

"It's been very difficult for her,
Jenna," he finally says, his voice soft and uneven. Is he unraveling, too?
They're both disintegrating before my eyes. I need out.
Get away, Jenna.
I
open the kitchen door to the backyard and step halfway out
—
like it hasn't been hard for me?
I turn and look at Father
again.

"I'm illegal. No matter how you play with
the words . . .
I'm illegal.
I don't even know if I'm human."

Father collapses into a chair. He leans
forward, his fingers digging across his face and scalp. "I do know. You
are one hundred percent human."

"How can you be sure?"

"I'm a doctor, Jenna. And a
scientist."

"Does that make you an authority on everything?
What about a soul, Father? When you were so busy implanting all your neural
chips, did you think about that? Did you snip my soul from my old body, too?
Where did you put it? Show me! Where? Where in all this groundbreaking
technology did you insert my soul?"

I turn and leave before I can hear his answer.
If he had one.

Lily

I was always bright. I always got A's. But I
wasn't smart like Kara and Locke. They were truly brilliant. More than just
book smart. It wouldn't have taken them this long to catch on.

I sit on the large flat rock that just
yesterday Ethan and I kissed on. Yesterday when I was only a girl with a shaky
memory. Yesterday is a world away now.

I was going to run into the woods, out of view,
but I know they would panic. Maybe even follow me. What might happen to their
precious Jenna? They're probably watching me now. From a window. Wondering.
Ready to pounce. Second-guessing every thought I might have. Wondering if they
could have done something differently. Wondering what they should do next. I
can almost feel their eyes on my back. I whip around, but all I see is a cold,
silent house. Bricks sit in pallets, waiting to repair the veranda. Scaffolding
for painters stands empty. All workers have been turned away today. Restoration
is on hold.

I haven't seen Lily at all. We all need space.

I stare at the pond. It is mostly still. A coot
hen on Mr. Bender's side disturbs the water every few minutes, diving for
something on the bottom. The ripples don't even reach our side of the pond.
They disappear somewhere in the middle. I concentrate on that short expanse,
where something becomes nothing. Exactly when does it disappear? And where does
it go?

I pull my sneaker off and throw it as far as I
can. It splashes into the middle of the pond, and the coot hen is startled into
the reeds. Ripples fan out. They reach both shores, but within a minute the
surface is glass again, the sneaker's splashy entrance forgotten, and I am
minus a shoe. It is the least of my worries, and now I am back to that. Me. Or
whatever I am.

My own question to Father has caught me by
surprise. There is no going back. Where did the question come from? Were my
artificial neural chips begging me to recognize what was left behind? Was it?
It burrows into me, like a foxtail inching into flesh.

My soul.

I pull my sock from my
sneakerless
foot. It looks like real
flesh.
Real toes. Ally's prosthetics are well
made, but they are clearly not like this. These are real. They feel. I skim my
foot out along the rock, feeling the cold surface, the uneven granite. Bits of
grit.

I stare at the once again glassy surface of the
pond. I curl my toes against the rock. I listen to my toenails scratching the
stone. Digging. Chipping. The questions circle back.
Is there such a thing?
Was mine left behind?

I look at my hand curled in my lap, the bandage
now covering the secret. The sick feeling of when I first saw it returns. In
one moment, one brief glance, reality can flip. Whatever we believe can vanish.
Believing in something doesn't make it so.

There were so many things Mother and Father
always wanted me to be. But wanting didn't make it so, either. Now they want me
to be just who I was before. I'm not. No matter how much they want it, or how
much I want it, I can't make that happen. The feeling of failure is familiar. I
always tried so h
ard
to be everything they wanted. Everything three
babies could be. Their miracle child. Me. Now I am a different kind of miracle.
The artificial freak kind.

"The world has sure changed, hasn't
it?"

I startle and turn around. It is Lily. I didn't
hear her come up behind me. I turn back without answering.

"Mind if I sit down?"

I stare out at the pond, silent, and hug my
knees to my chest. She sits down, uninvited.

The rock is large. The distance between us
small. I feel every inch of it. The lack of conversation doesn't seem to bother
her. It suffocates me. She is here for a reason. What is she waiting for? She
finally breaches the wall of quiet between us. "I'll be honest. I don't
really know what to make of you."

I smirk. It is close to a laugh. She never lets
up. But somehow I can accept her bluntness easier than lying. "You don't
tiptoe, do you?"

"What would be the point?"

"Right," I say, still staring
straight ahead. "Why spare any feelings when the feelings belong to a
freak?"

"Your words. Not mine."

"Some things don't have to be said out
loud."

"Eighteen months ago, I let go of my
granddaughter," she says. "I said good-bye. I grieved. Then a few
hours later, your parents told me what they had done."