“I’ve never seen any vids about ‘people like me,’” I lied. They didn’t go for concrete nouns here, nouns like “skinner” or “mech-head.” Or “machine.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of new-found terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter?
Lesser of two evils, apparently: “Lia, you should be aware that you’re going to encounter some people who don’t yet understand the download process. You’re going to have to help them make peace with what’s happened to you. But I assure you that with time, those who know and love you will accept it.”
But that was a lie. I knew what I was; I knew what the people who loved me could handle. They couldn’t handle this.
You’d think I would at least get some superpowers as part of the deal. Legs that could run a hundred miles an hour. Arms that could lift a fridge. Supersight, superhearing, super something. But no. I get skin that washes itself and is impervious to paper cuts. Legs that have barely learned how to walk. A tongue that lies in my mouth like a dying fish flopping and thrusting and scraping against heavily fortified porcelain teeth, mangling every burst of sound I manage to choke out of the voice box.
No lungs, just an intake hose feeding into the larynx, so I can shoot air through when necessary, make the artificial cartilage vibrate at the right frequency, funnel the sound waves up the throat, into the mouth. That was the first step. “A big one!” Asa says, clapping as I grunt and groan. I can do all the animal noises now. Monkey hoots. Cow moos. Dolphin squeals. And, as of this morning, sheep. “Baa! Baa!”
“Your first word,” Asa cheers. “Almost.”
I still hate him.
You don’t need a tongue to sound like a sheep. But if you want to sound human, that’s another story.
I wonder if Asa goes home at night and imitates me for his girlfriend; someone like him must have a girlfriend. Does he tell her how he’s spent all day with his hands on my body, prodding and pulling and stretching? Does he tell her how he dressed me until I learned to dress myself or about the day he opened the door without knocking and discovered me checking to make sure the body was—fully—anatomically correct? Is she jealous, I wonder, of the girl with the perfectly symmetrical synthetic breasts, the living doll that Asa molds into whomever he wants her to be? Or does she think of him as a handyman, spending his days tuning up a machine that just happens to look like a person and grunt like a chimpanzee?
“Good night, Lia,” he says as he goes wherever it is he goes when he leaves the thirteenth floor and rejoins his life.
“Unnnh,” I “say” in response. I am not allowed to use the voice synthesizer, not while I’m speech training, not—Asa says, and his boss, call-me-Ben, agrees—unless I want to be one of those clients who has to use it indefinitely, speaking with closed lips and a computerized monotone for the rest of my so-called life. “Omph. Aaaaap.”
“You too, Lia. See ya.”
“Baaa, baaa.”
Bye, bye.
I have fingers again, fingers that can barely feel but can mostly type. Which means it’s time to link in to the network. I will not speak, not with the computer voice and not with the animal groans, but I will type, I will face them, I will.
I tell myself that every night.
Tonight I do it.
There is a six-week dead hole in my zone. I have never been off the network for that long, not since I was three and got my first account, my first ViM, and my first avatar, a purple bear with an elephant snout and a lion’s tail. I dressed him in a top hat and called him Bear Bear, which, at the time, I thought was clever.
It occurs to me now that if Bear Bear existed in the real world, he’d probably sound a lot like me.
Every day, since I was three, life on the network shadowed life off the network, and sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes it was the network that seemed more real. Every text, every pic, every vid got posted in my zone, every fight and every make up was reflected in the zone. My first boyfriend gave me my first kiss in the zone, his av a red-haired ninja, mine a black-winged pixie with purple hair and knife-spiked heels. The zone was how I knew who I was, how I knew that I was, except now there’s a gap, starting with the accident and stretching on as if, for all those weeks, Lia Kahn ceased to exist.
There are flowers waiting for me, flowers from everyone—not just Cass and Terra and even Bliss, but from all the randoms who wish they counted enough to get a niche in my zone, the ones whose names I don’t know and won’t remember, all of them leaving messages and pink-frosted cupcakes and pixilated teddies that remind me of Bear Bear. My zone is a shrine.
Walker’s messages are behind the priv-wall, where no one can see them but me. There are only two, both voice-talk, and I play them four times, eyes closed, listening to his warbling tenor, wishing I had more of him than my least-favorite part.
“Please don’t die,” the first one says. He sent it the night of the accident, when I was still alive, when, according to call-me-Ben, I was hemorrhaging and suffocating and seizing, all at the same time.
The next one came weeks later, when I was lying in the bed, eyes closed, listening to footsteps and waiting to die.
“The turtle is hungry,” it says. “The turtle is starving.”
Code. Left over from our first few months, when Zo wouldn’t go away. She was always snooping in my room and hacking my zone, all big ears and a bigger mouth, so Walker and I talked in riddles and nonsense until eventually she left and we stopped talking altogether.
“The turtle is hungry.”
Meant “I love you.”
I want to see him. I want to touch him. I want to at least voice him back. But what would I say?
Ahhh ovvvvv ooooooo.
We speak in different codes now.
I stay in stealth mode. They are all linked in and to one another, Cass to Terra to Walker to Zo, all in priv-mode, and I wonder if they are talking about me, but I can’t find out without showing myself, and I can’t do that, not today.
There are 7,346 new pub-pics and texts, and there will be more behind their priv-walls, and I know I should catch up, but I can’t do that, either.
There’s no point.
I try my favorite vidlife, technically a realistic one because there are no vampires or superheroes, but there’s nothing particularly realistic about the number of people Aileen manages to screw—and screw over—each night. Since the last time I watched, Aileen has already forgotten about Case, and is screwing some new guy and, secretly, the new guy’s sister, who’s engaged to Aileen’s former best friend’s cousin, and I can’t keep up with all the new names and bodies, and I don’t understand how so much can happen in six weeks.
I used to feel sorry for the woman who lives as Aileen, and for Case and for all of them. I used to think it was pathetic, arranging your life around someone else’s script, letting some random text the words you were forced to speak. So they got rich on it, so they got famous, so I watched all night sometimes because I didn’t want to miss anything, so what? It wasn’t their life they were living, it wasn’t anyone’s.