It wasn’t a download thing, Sascha said. It was a me thing. Plenty of mech-heads still got music. I just wasn’t one of them. “There are some things about the brain even we don’t understand,” Sascha had admitted. “Your postprocedure brain is functionally identical to the organic model, but many clients encounter minor—and I can’t emphasize that enough, minor—differences in the way they process experiences. Finding themselves indifferent to things they used to love. Loving things they used to hate. We don’t know why.”
“How can you not know?” I’d asked. “You built the… brain. Computer. Whatever you want to call it. You should know how it works.”
“The download procedure copies the brain into a computer,” Sascha had said. “But each brain is composed of billions of cognitive processes. We can model the complete structure without understanding each of its individual parts. Which is why, for example, we don’t have the capacity to create new brains from scratch. Only nature can do that. For now.”
“So all you know how to do is make copies,” I’d said. “Except you can’t even get that right. Not exactly.” When we were talking about my brain, the things I loved and hated, when we were talking about me, “close enough” didn’t really get the job done.
“It can be disconcerting at first, but you’ll learn to embrace the exciting possibilities. One client even emerged from the procedure with a newfound artistic passion. He’s already so successful that he’s linked on the president’s zone!” Saying it like that was some kind of achievement. Like the president wasn’t too doped up to notice who stuck what on her zone; judging from the vids, she’d barely even noticed being re-elected.
I didn’t have any new passions, certainly none that would make me famous. And I’d thought maybe the music thing was just temporary, that once I got off the thirteenth floor and back to the real world, things would return to normal.
I shut down the music. What was the point?
Susskind, our psychotic cat, sashayed into the room and leaped up onto the bed. And maybe he had the right idea. Except that going to bed would mean facing all the other things that hadn’t gone back to normal. All the prebed rituals that had been made obsolete.
I had my own bathroom, tiled in purple and blue. My own shower, where I washed off the grime every night and washed on the UV block every morning, now no longer necessary. My own toilet with a med-chip that analyzed every deposit for bio-irregularities—no longer required. My own sink, where I would have hydro-scrubbed my teeth if they weren’t already made of some gleaming white alloy impervious to microbes. Not like they came into contact with any, what with the whole no-food thing. My own medicine cabinet, with all the behavior modifiers I could ever need, uppers for perk, downers for sleep, Xers for parties, stims for work, and blissers for play, but no b-mod could help me now. On the face of the cabinet, my own mirror. I stayed away from mirrors.
Psycho Susskind crawled into my lap.
“Great.” I rested my hand on his back, letting it rise and fall with each breath. “Of course you like me now.” Sussie was afraid of people, even the people who housed and fed him; maybe—judging from his standard pattern of hissing and clawing—especially us. Or make that, them. Because apparently Sussie and I were now best friends.
I didn’t dump him off my lap.
“I smell good to you now, Sussie?” I whispered, scratching him behind his ears. He purred. “Like your other best friend?” That would be the dishwasher, which Sussie worshipped like he was a Faither and the dishwasher had a white beard and fistful of lightning bolts.
It’s not like I had no way to fill the time. Showers and music weren’t generally the bulk of my standard evening activities. There was always a game going on the network. Or I could tweak my av, update my zone, chat with the net-friends who’d never seen my flesh-and-blood body and so wouldn’t notice it was gone. I could even hit the local stalker sites and read all about myself, wealthy scion of the Kahn dynasty stuffed into a mech-head and body. What will she do next, now that she’s home, where will she go, who will she see, what will she wear?
Instead I pumped the network for information on emotion, for why people feel what they feel and how. But I couldn’t make myself read through the results, facts and theories and long, dense explanations that had nothing to do with me.
Walker still hadn’t texted back.
I cut the link.
My tracksuit didn’t fit me any better than the rest of my clothes. The pants and sleeves were too short and too baggy, the thermo-lining, cued to body temp, was superfluous, and the biostats read zero across the board. But they would do, as would the shoes I got from BioMax, which didn’t cushion my feet like the sneakers that no longer fit, but still registered body weight and regulated shock absorption, which was all I needed. Zo was out somewhere; my parents were in bed. There was no one to notice I was gone.
It was a cold night, but that didn’t matter, not to me. There was a path behind the house that wove through the woods, a path I’d run every morning for the last several years, layered in thermo-gear, panting and sweating and cursing and loving it. The gravel sounded the same as always, crunching beneath my soles.
I need this, I said silently, to someone, maybe to myself or maybe to the body that locked me in and denied everything I asked of it. Please. Let this work.
It didn’t.
I ran for an hour. Legs pumping. Feet pounding. Arms swinging. Face turned up to the wind. The body worked perfectly. I didn’t sweat. I didn’t cramp up. I didn’t wheeze, gulping in desperate mouthfuls of oxygen, because I didn’t breathe at all. I pushed faster, pushed harder, until something in my head told me I was tired, that it was time to slow down, time to stop, but my muscles didn’t ache, my chest didn’t tighten, my feet didn’t drag, I didn’t feel ready to stop. I just knew I was, and so I did.
There was no rush, no natural upper coasting me through the last couple miles. There was never that sense of letting go and losing myself in my body, of existing in my body, arms, legs, muscles, tendons, pulsing and pumping in sync, the world narrowing to a pinprick tunnel of ground skimming beneath my feet. None of the pure pleasure of absence, of leaving Lia Kahn behind and existing in the moment—all body, no mind.
The body still felt like someone else’s; the mind was still all I had left.
I walked the rest of the way back to the house, navigating the path in darkness. The heavy clouds hid even the pale glow of the moon, and so I didn’t see the shadows melt into a figure, a man, not until he was close enough to touch.
Fingers wrapped around my arm. Thick, strong fingers. A hand, twisting, and my arm followed the unspoken command, my body tugged after it. He pinned me against a tree, his forearm shoved against my throat.
Lucky I didn’t need to breathe.
His face so close to mine that our noses nearly touched, I recognized him. It was the face I’d seen through the car window that morning, the hollow face howling at me through the glass.
I should run away, I thought. I should scream. But the ideas seemed distant, almost silly.
“It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” the man hissed. “We are His people, and the sheep of his pasture.” His breath caressed my face. I wondered what it smelled like.
I wondered if his boss knew he was still here, lurking. I wondered who his boss was. The man with the too-pale skin and the too-dark eyes? Or did he report directly to the big boss, the eye in the sky? I wondered what he would do to me if I asked.