The Body Electric - Special Edition (34 page)

I hear a voice. A voice I know, a voice I love.

“Mom,” I whisper.

And there’s something within me, some indefinable knowledge that I cannot explain, but when the light answers me, saying my name, I know that it’s my mother’s voice. My mom. My
real
mom—not the thing that looked like Mom, the thing that wore her face and sounded and smelled and seemed like her.

This is my mother’s voice.

“Ella,” she says again, the word resounding through my soul.

And then I realize: something’s wrong.

“Mom?” I ask. My voice crackles with fear and electricity.

“I held on as long as I could,” my mother says. “But you have to let me go now. Let all of me go. Because there’s nothing left. Not here. Not anymore.”

My eyes snap open. Jack stands over me, concern etched on his face. “Ella?” he says, and I know he’s saying my name to see if I can respond, to see if I’ll answer him with screaming or a buzzing sound.

“I’m fine,” I say, even though I’m really not.

fifty-nine

Mom used to say that the thoughts in our heads were nothing more than electrical impulses. I remember Dad and her talking about this over dinner. It frustrated Dad that the human brain can fire electrical sparks and
think
, but that the electricity he’d pump into an android brain would never give it independent thought. The body isn’t that different from a machine. Humans and androids both run on electricity.

That lightning spark of energy I saw in the reverie.

That was my mother’s last thought, an echo of electricity, something that sparked when I entered her dreamscape.

That spark is gone now. Her life is gone now. Everything that made her, her, is gone now. Faded into nothing. “Ella, we have to go,” Jack says. He speaks as if he’s afraid his words will break me, but I cannot process his gentle tone. He looks down on the burner cuff on his arm. “We have to go,” he repeats. “I stationed someone to watch the security system. People are heading toward this lab. We have to go.”

When I don’t move, Jack bends over, whips the black tarp on the floor up, and re-covers my mother’s body. “Ella.
Ella
. We have to go.”

But then we hear the sounds of footsteps. It’s already too late.

“Shit!” Jack says softly. His eyes dance around the room—there’s nowhere to hide, no exit except through the door we entered, the one that leads to the entry lab.

“Here,” I say. I feel as if I’m finally waking up from a long, long sleep, one where I dreamed about crazy things and my mother died and my father rotted before me.

I cross the room, careful to avoid any contact with the black tarp, and approach the labeled doors, the little ones that look like they belong in a morgue. They each have a neat label on them. One is slightly open. The label reads:
Shepherd, Rose, Vers. 12.

My mother’s name. I swing the door open, and a blast of cold air hits me. Inside, the little room shows a narrow, flat tray that easily extends out. Jack scrambles onto the table, then scoots to one side. There’s a sliver of room left.

“Come on,” he says.

“I’ll open another one—”

“What are the chances they’re all empty? Come
on.
”

I jump up on the table. It’s impossible to lie on the tray and not touch Jack. Jack reaches both arms over our heads, straining to scoot the tray, now bearing the weight of both our bodies, back into the refrigerated section. I catch the door with my foot and swing it closed behind us—but not fully shut. I dare not click the door closed—what if it locks? We’d die in here.

Die. Like my mother.

I choke down a sob, and Jack wraps his arms around me, pulling me even closer. “Shh,” he murmurs in my hair. His breath comes out in a puff of steam. Goose bumps prickle my arms, and I start to shiver. Jack holds me even tighter, so tight I can barely breathe, but warmth rises between us. I close my eyes, breathe in the scent of him.

“The lights are on.” A gruff voice I don’t recognize fills the room. I clutch Jack’s arms, hanging on to him as if he can save me just with his presence. He has one arm around my head, pressing me to his chest, one arm around my waist and back. I feel his arms go rock hard, his breath catch in his throat. I glance up at him, and see, for the first time, fear in his eyes.

“This lab is spooky,” a second voice says. “The stuff they do down here… ain’t natural.”

“You think anything that requires thought ‘ain’t natural,’” the first voice mocks. “Nothing about this lab is scary, man.”

“Yeah. Because that dead body right there is perfectly ‘natural.’”

My mother’s body.

“They say this lab’s haunted. By those women.”

My mother? And another woman? Maybe Akilah?

“Don’t be stupid.”

Footsteps as the two men walk around the lab. “Looks messy. Like someone trashed the place.”

“It’s always like this, after a transfer.”

The footsteps come closer. Jack’s eyes are wide and staring, his grip on me viselike, his muscles tense. I don’t even feel the cold any more, just the fear.

“This door’s open a crack,” one of the guards says. He’s close. He’s right outside the morgue chamber we’re hiding in. He could pull the door open, drag our cold bodies off the slab, kill us like my mother’s dead.

I hear the metallic sound of the latch.

Or he could slam the door shut, and we’d freeze to death.

“Don’t mess with it, man,” the first guard says. “They hate it if anything is disturbed. Just leave everything like you find it.”

“What are you doing here?” a female voice I almost recognize says. I scramble up, sliding closer to the door, craning to see.

“There was an alert—”

“These labs are off-limits, even to security.” I peer out of the crack at the door and strain my eyes to see who’s talking.

I gasp, and Jack’s arms tense around me. His eyes widen, and he shakes his head slightly. But I ignore him. Because I’ve finally recognized the woman. She’s the plump nurse, the one Ms. White hired to take over care of my mom after Rosie the android exploded. Except she’s not a nurse. She’s a scientist, one of the ones here. Not a nurse at all.

After a few more moments, the footsteps walk away from us as the scientist escorts the security away.

Jack breathes a sigh of relief, forming a cloud around our heads. He doesn’t release me, but his muscles go slack.

I shift when I hear the door zip closed behind the guards, but Jack shakes his head. Of course—stupid me—they’re examining the other labs, too.

“One… two… three…” Jack whispers, counting, his voice barely making a sound. I focus on his mouth, watching numbers spill from his lips, disappearing as the condensation from his breath evaporates.

When he reaches two hundred and fifty, I feel as if my eyelashes are made of ice, my lungs are filled with snow. Jack slides down, kicking the little door fully open, and pushes the tray and our two frozen bodies back into the warm lab. I stand there, shivering, but it’s not because of the refrigerated air that’s followed us into the lab. It’s because of how bereft I am without him holding me against his body.

sixty

“We should go,” I say. Now that we’ve come so close to being caught, all I want to do is escape. There’s so much we’ve not examined yet—only this one tiny section of the lab—and I may never have another chance to see the place where my father worked and died (and my mother, her body is there, it’s right there), but I cannot get over the feeling of wrongness this place gives me.

“We have time,” Jack says, checking his cuff. “The guards marked these labs as clear.”

“We should still go,” I say, looking at my mother’s body.

“Transfer,” Jack says. He waits until I meet his eyes. “This lab is labeled ‘Reverie Transfer.’ That must mean something. And the guards—they mentioned transfers.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” I say, moving toward the door.

Jack reaches for me, but I sidle away. “Do you know what a reverie transfer is?” he asks, searching my eyes. “Do you know why the two reverie chairs are connected? I’ve never seen that before.”

I heave a sigh. “Yes, you have. You just didn’t know it. The chairs at Reverie are connected.”

Jack’s eyebrows furrow in concentration. “Chairs?” he asks. “There’s more than one?”

I nod. “There’s a second chamber behind the control room. And a chair there that’s connected to the first.”

“What’s it used for?” When I don’t answer, he asks it again, his voice urgent.

“My mother had a theory,” I say finally. “That some people can enter others’ reveries.”

Jack snorts. “That’s impossible. You can’t just go into someone else’s mind. Right? Ella?” He stares at me. “You… you can, can’t you?” He speaks the words slowly, not believing them even as he says them. “Can you enter other people’s minds? Is that a transfer?”

I look down. There’s no reason to be ashamed of this, but I am. “It’s how I knew what to say to Representative Belles.”

“
You’d been in his mind?
” Jack sounds disgusted, horrified.

I nod. “I call it the dreamscape. It’s not like I break into other people’s heads; if they’re in a reverie, I can plug myself up to a connected chair and enter their reverie.”

“Do they know you’re there?” Jack asks, and then, before I can answer, I see the horror filling his eyes. He looks at me, disgusted. “You’ve been in my reverie, haven’t you? When you plugged me up before. You said you could tell if I was telling the truth about knowing you, and you could—because you entered my mind and rooted around in my memories!” There’s accusation in his voice, as if I’ve done something vile.

Because I have.

“What did you see?” he asks, his voice suddenly hollow. “When you were
spying
on my brain, what did you see?”

“Memories,” I say simply. “Memories I don’t have. Because someone’s done it to me, too—someone’s entered my mind and erased my memories.”

“Who?” Jack demands.

“I don’t know. It’s the only answer, though.” That, or I’m just a machine with missing bits, erased data.

Jack runs his fingers through his hair, his blue eyes glittering. He starts to pace. “I don’t understand this, any of this. This… this stuff should be impossible.”

“It’s not.”

“Can anyone else do it?”

“I didn’t even know the UC labs had a reverie chair—maybe they’ve figured out how.” Maybe that’s what happened to my memories of Jack.

Jack starts pacing again. “But this room—it’s labeled ‘Reverie Transfer.’ Not ‘Reverie Spying.’”

I flinch.

“Transfer implies moving something from one vessel to another, not just a temporary observance,” Jack continues. I’m reminded that he’s a scientist, like Dad, brilliant enough to be considered as a replacement.

He freezes, and I can tell that he’s realized something. His eyes dart to the wall of morgue doors.

“What?” I ask.

Jack strides over to the doors. “Those brains in the vat—in the other lab. Your dad. You can’t make brains think for themselves.” His words rush together, confused. When he sees I’m not following his train of thought, he swings open the little door we hid behind and stares into the cold abyss.

“Your father tried everything he could to make an android brain that could think for itself. But it never worked.” Jack slams the door shut and runs his fingers over the little label, the one with my mother’s name. “He worked for years on developing a true android brain—a brain in a robot that thought for itself. But he
couldn’t
—because it
can’t
be done.”

I examine the other nearby doors, and for the first time, I read the other labels on each door. The door we hid behind was
Shepherd, Rose, Vers. 12.
Above it is
Shepherd, Rose, Vers. 11.
And then
Shepherd, Rose, Vers. 10.
The column beside that was labeled
Shepherd, Rose, Vers. 1
all the way to
Shepherd, Rose, Vers. 9.

“‘Vers.’ means ‘version.’” I say slowly. I’m not processing the words I’m saying.

Jack opens the 11th door.

On the metal slab is a perfect copy of my mother. It lays motionless, as if sleeping, but there’s no life in her. She looks like a mannequin.