“Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
I was linked in. I could have sent for help. But I didn’t particularly want any. His arm bore down harder against my throat.
“That’s you,” he spat out. “A graven image. A machine. Programmed to think you’re a real person. Pathetic.”
Enough. “Yeah, I’m pathetic,” I snapped back. “You’re hiding behind a tree, trespassing on private property, and about five minutes away from being picked up by the cops and probably shipped off to a city, and I’m pathetic.”
“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” he whispered, grinning like the nonsense words harbored some secret power. I shuddered.
“Righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue.” He reached up his other hand and stroked my cheek. “God says be righteous to your fellow man. But he doesn’t say anything about what to do with things like you.” The fingers traced the curve of my ear. I jerked my head away, but he grabbed a chunk of hair and tugged, hard. “Guess I’m on my own, figuring out what to do. Got any ideas?”
He laughed, and that’s when the fear came, fast and hard, like a needle of terror jabbed into my skull. “Anything,” that was the word that echoed. He could do anything. I grabbed his hand, the hand that was crawling down my neck, along my spine, grabbed his fingers and bent them back until I heard the joints crunch and the arm at my throat reared back, struck me across the face, snapped my head back into the tree but my leg had already swung into motion, had connected with his groin. He doubled over and I ran, and I could hear him behind me, cursing and grunting, crashing through the brush, closing in as I pushed faster and pulled away and I could almost imagine a beating heart and heaving lungs, because the panic was so real. But he fell behind, and I made it through the electronic gate in plenty of time, locking him out, locking me in. The fear faded almost immediately, and as it leaked out of me, I had one last, terrifying thought.
I should go back.
To slip through the gate again, to face the man, to fight the man—or not to fight, to let him do whatever he wanted, to choose to meet him and his consequences, to turn back, because behind me, where the man glowered from the treeline, was something real. Something human.
The stronger the emotion, Sascha had promised, the more real it would seem.
I’d felt it. I was hooked.
Back in my room, safe and alone. The man, whoever he was, long gone. And with him, the fear.
I stripped off the sweat-free tracksuit. Uploaded the day’s neural changes, ensuring—with nothing more than a few keystrokes and an encrypted transmission to the server—that if anything happened to this body, a Lia Kahn with fully up-to-date memories would remain in storage, ready and waiting to be dumped into a new one. Would it be me or a copy of me? And if it was a copy, did that make me a copy too, of some other, realer Lia? Was she dead? Was the man right that I was just a machine duped into believing I was human? And if I had been duped, then how could I be a machine? How could any thoughtless, soulless, consciousness-free thing believe in a lie, believe in anything, want to believe?
And did I consider those questions while I was dealing with my brand-new bedtime ritual? Did I follow the primrose path of logical deduction all the way to its logical endpoint, to the essential question?
I did not.
I dumped the tracksuit; I uploaded; I pulled on pajamas; I twisted the blond hair back into a loose, low ponytail; I dumped psycho Susskind into the hall. I did it all mechanically. Mechanically, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatically, involuntarily. Mechanically, as in like-a-machine.
And I did not think about that, either.
Instead of turning out the lights and climbing into bed, I mechanically—always mechanically—entered the purple-and-blue tiled bathroom for the first time. The stranger’s face watched me from the mirror, impassive. Blank.
I pulled up the network query I’d made earlier, the one I hadn’t had the nerve to read. The words scrolled across my left eye, glowing letters superimposed on my reflected face.
I froze the parade of definitions and expanded the one that seemed to matter. The guy’s name was William James, and he was way too old to be right. Two hundred years ago, no one knew anything; it’s why they all died young and wrinkled with bad hair. Two hundred years ago, they thought light could go as fast as it wanted, they thought the atom was indivisible and possibly imaginary, they thought “computers” were servant girls who added numbers for their bosses when they weren’t busy doing the laundry. They knew nothing. But I read it anyway.
If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.
The face didn’t move; the eyes didn’t blink. Cold and neutral, I thought. It wasn’t true. I had felt anger; I had felt fear. But fear of what? The man couldn’t have hurt me, not really. At least, he couldn’t hurt me forever. Whatever he did to the body, I would remain. I couldn’t die. What was to fear in the face of that?
What kind of emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heartbeats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of shallow weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present…?
Even now, in my pajamas, in my bathroom, I felt. The tile beneath my feet. The sink against my palms. I felt absence: the silence that should have been punctuated by steady breathing, in and out. Fingers against my chest, I felt the stillness beneath them. I felt loss.
In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.
Nothing more.
7. THE BODY
Their whispers slithered through the crack beneath my bedroom door, and I fought the temptation to press myself against it, to find out what Zo and Walker, who had for years shared a mutual, if mostly unspoken, oath of eternal dislike, could possibly need to discuss. Not that the topic was in doubt.
The topic was me.
The whispers stopped. I struck my best casual pose, legs dangling off the side of the bed, elbows digging into the mattress, ankles crossed, head tipped back to the ceiling as if the track of solar panels had proven so engrossing as to make me forget what was about to happen. The door opened, and I held my position, letting Walker see me before I saw him.
Giving him time to erase his reaction before I could see it on his face.
Not enough time. When I sat up, he was still in the doorway, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping the frame, holding himself steady.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t move. “Your voice…”
“Weird, right? I hear myself talk and I’m like, wait, who said that?” I forced a laugh, but stopped as soon as I saw him wince. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t very good at the laughing thing yet. Especially when I was faking it.