“It’s nice,” he said, like he was trying to convince himself. “I like it.”
I hated it. Someone else’s voice, husky and atonal, coming out of the mouth.
My mouth, I reminded myself. My voice. But I could only believe that when I was alone. With Walker finally standing there, watching me, I was forced to admit it: The voice belonged to the thing, to the body, not to me.
“It’s been a while,” I said, even though I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to bring it up. He hadn’t voiced me back on Thursday night or on Friday. And then Saturday came, and he was here. That should have been enough.
Walker shrugged. He rubbed his chin, which was shadowed with brown scruff. Without me around to remind him to shave, he’d grown a beard. “I was going to text you, but…”
“Yeah. But.” I stood up. He was still in the doorway. If he wouldn’t come to me, I would go to him. It can be difficult at the beginning, Sascha had said. But the people who know you, the people who love you, they’ll see beneath the surface. They’ll get that it’s really you under there. You just have to give them some time.
No one knew me better than Walker. But when I curled the hand around his wrist, he jerked away. “Sorry, I—”
I stepped back. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t. “I shouldn’t have.” He shouldn’t have.
“No, really. I just…” Walker finally stepped into the room, edging around me as he passed, careful not to touch the body. He sat in my desk chair, back straight, feet flat on the floor. Arms crossed, hugging his chest.
I dropped back down on the bed and waited.
“I’m very glad you’re all right,” he said finally, like he was passing along a message from his mother to some old lady who’d broken her hip. Like he’d been rehearsing.
I risked a smile. I’d been rehearsing too. “I missed you.”
“You, too.” He stared down at the floor. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost to his shoulders, like one of Zo’s retros. I wanted to smooth it back. I wanted to stand behind him and bury my face in it, resting my cheek against the back of his head, wrapping my arms around his shoulders, letting him grip my hands in his. But I stayed where I was. “It’s, uh, it’s pretty,” he said. “I mean—you’re pretty. Now. Like this.”
“You don’t have to lie.”
He shifted in the seat. “No—It’s just, I guess, I just thought you’d look a little more like… I mean, on the vids, and you looked… But now… I thought you’d look more…”
“Like me?” But as soon as I said it, I knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. I didn’t look like me, not anymore, not with the hair that was the wrong color and texture and wasn’t even hair, just a synthetic weave that was grafted on and would never grow. The nose was too small, the eyes too wide, the fingers the wrong thickness, the wrong length, the teeth too straight and too bright, the mouth bigger, the ears smaller, the body taller and too symmetrical, too well proportioned, too perfect. But it wasn’t that. I knew what he’d wanted to say; I knew him too well.
I thought you’d look more… human.
And I saw the body again like I’d seen it for the first time, like he was seeing it. The skin, smooth and waxy, an even peachy tone stretched out over the frame without sag or blemish. The way it moved, with awkward jerks, always too slow or too fast. The stranger’s face with dead eyes, pale blue irises encircling the false pupils, and in the center of the black, pin-pricks of light, flashing and dimming as the lens sucked up images. The eyes that didn’t blink unless I remembered to blink them. The chest that neither rose nor fell unless I pretended to breathe. The body that wasn’t a body.
His girlfriend, the machine.
“It’s just weird,” he admitted. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “It is weird. It’s weird for me too.”
“I mean, I know it’s you, I get that, but you sound different, and you look different, and…”
“It’s because it was an emergency. They had to give me a generic model. My dad picked it out. He says it’s the one that looked the most like me. Not that it looks like me, I know, but it was the best he could do.” Too much detail, I told myself. Stop talking. But I couldn’t. Once I stopped, he would have to start again. Or he wouldn’t. And then we’d just sit there, and he would try not to stare at me, and I would try not to look away. “Some people get these custom faces designed to look just like them, the way they were—or like anything they want, I guess. It’s totally crazy what they can do. The voice, too. You just make a recording and they match it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, I know, but it’s… closer. Easier. But you’ve got to place the order in advance. You’ve got to give them time, and if there’s an accident or something, well…” I tried another smile. “There’s nothing I can do about it now. The artificial nerves and receptors are already fused to the neural pathways or whatever, and they say structural changes would screw with the graft, but next time, I’ll do it in advance, so I’ll be able to order whatever I want. Then I’ll look more like…”
“Lia,” he said.
I am Lia.
But I said it in my head, where there was no one to hear.
“I’ll look more like me,” I said out loud. Calmly. “Next time.”
“Wait, what do you mean, next time?”
“When the, uh, body wears out or—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to block out the echo of the crash, the scream of metal that refused to die—“if something happens to it, they’ll download the, uh…” Data? Program? Brain? Soul? There was no right word. There was only me, looking out through some thing’s dead eyes. “They’ll do it again. When they need to.”
“So you just get a new body when the old one runs out?” he asked. “And they keep doing it… forever?”
“That’s the plan.” As the words came out of the mouth, I finally saw it, what it meant. I saw the day he found the first tuft of hair stuck in the shower drain or woke up to a gray strand on his pillow. His first wrinkle in the bathroom mirror. The day he blew out his knee in his last football game. The day his potbelly bulged as he stopped playing and kept eating. Any of the days, all of the days, starting with tomorrow, when he’d be one day older than today; and then the next, two days older, and the next and the next, as he grew, as he aged, as he declined… as I stayed the same. Shunted from one unchanging husk of metal and plastic to the next.
I got there a moment before he did, but only a moment, and then he got there too. I saw it on his face.
“Forever.” Walker grimaced. “You’ll be like… this. Forever.” He stood up.
Don’t leave, I thought. Not yet. But I wasn’t about to say it out loud. Even if he couldn’t see it, I was still Lia Kahn. I didn’t beg.
“So, what’s it like?” he asked, crossing the room. To the bed—to me. He sat down on the edge, leaving a space between us. “Can you, like, feel stuff?”
“Yeah. Of course.” If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.
I held out a hand, palm up. “Do you want to…? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want.”
He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.