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Cort reached up and pushed the breathing tube back in his mouth, biting down on it hard. He concentrated on the words, forcing them into the computer. “Nice see you,” he said.

He shook his head, his forehead breaking out in a clammy sweat, and tried again. “Nice to you,” it came out.

The girl looked away, through the glass partition and across the gym’s pit. Her hair—that close—it was like staring at liquid gold. Cort wanted to reach out and touch it, or smell it. He felt dizzy.

“Talk with your mouth,” the girl said through her computer. She looked around to make sure they were alone. “I want to see.”

Cort felt like he was going to wet his pants, he was so flustered and anxious. He looked side to side before pulling the tube out, allowing it to hang from his pack. He turned his head away while he wiped his mouth dry.

“My name’s Cort,” he said, looking back at her. It was all he could think to say.

“Riley,” she said. She stared at his lips. The computer made her voice ring with a sonorous and pleasing tone. Cort wanted to be able to speak like that. But with a boy’s voice.

He smiled at her.

“Did it hurt?” she asked.

“Did what hurt?” Cort glanced up at the balcony above. Some of the kids were returning to their seats, holding colorful refreshment canisters up to their breathing tubes.

“Your first breath,” Riley said. “They say it hurts real bad, and that all Earth kids have to go through it. They say it makes you scream.”

“I don’t remember,” Cort said. He licked his lips, self-conscious of doing the opposite of what his mom had told him.

“It was that bad?” Riley asked. “Have you blocked it out?”

Cort shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I actually don’t remember much before I was five.”

Riley brushed some of her golden hair back. Cort saw one of her ears poking through, white and smooth. It made her look like an elf princess or something equally mysterious and regal.

“And it doesn’t burn? The air?” She leaned forward, staring at Cort’s mouth.

It made him want to cover his mouth with both hands. Or open it up and let her look inside. Or both, somehow.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t burn at all.” He watched the fluid circulating through her breathing tube. “How does that feel?” He pointed shyly toward her mouth. “Is it like drowning?”

Riley’s computer laughed for her. “No, silly, this is how we are even before we’re born. I can’t imagine my lungs empty, the way yours must be.”

The corners of her mouth turned up around a little, a dimple forming in one cheek. Cort recognized it as a smile. And pretty.

He started to say something about her hair, but she cut him off.

“You should put it back in,” Riley said, pointing to her own tube.

Cort looked around and saw the kids coming back from intermission. He put his tube back in and turned to compose something for Riley, concentrating on the words as hard as he could.

“Like our talking,” it came out, the computer voice stilted and awkward.

The corners of her mouth tightened again; she spun out of the chair with a wave of golden locks, then went running around the balcony, back to the stairs.

Cort looked sheepishly down at his controls, which were counting down the resumption of the games.

Time being the only numbers the system kept track of.

“How was school?” Melanie asked.

Cort jumped in the passenger seat, spitting out his tube and trying to get comfortable with his pack pressing into the seat.

“Don’t you know?” he asked.

“I didn’t look at any of the reports.” She put the car into gear and merged with the flow of heavy traffic moving past the school. “I wanted to wait and hear it from you.”

Cort thought about telling her all about Riley, and that first intermission, and how he was going to use the same pod tomorrow, and hoped she’d do the same, except he’d try and walk with her to recess next time, and maybe they’d be on the same team, and she could talk about what it was like to breathe amniotic fluids, and he could blow air through her hair, and let her see what that was like—

“It was okay,” he said, his mind reeling. “I got busted down to fourth grade,” he added, figuring she might as well hear it from him.

His mom reached over and tousled his hair. “I’m sure you’ll be back before you know it,” she said. “Did you practice your talking?”

Cort nodded. “Yeah. A little.”

And he vowed to practice some more that night. Really, this time.

While (u > i) i- -;

WHILE (u > i) i- -;

{

The scalpel made a sharp hiss as it slid across the small stone. Daniel flipped the blade over and repeated the process on the other side. Each run removed a microscopic layer of stainless steel, turning the surgical edge into something coarse and sloppy. He referred to the simple rock as his “Dulling Stone.” It had become a crucial part of this once-a-week ritual. The problem with sharp blades, he’d discovered, was that they hardly left a scar.

He leaned close to the mirror and brought the scalpel up to his face. Several years ago, when he’d made his first wrinkle, he could have performed this procedure from across the room. The focusing and magnifying lenses in his then-perfect eyes could tease galaxies from fuzzy stars—but those mechanisms were no more. They’d been mangled with a surgeon’s precision. Now he needed to be within a specific range to make sure his cutting was perfectly sloppy.

He chose a nubile stretch of untouched skin and pressed the instrument to his forehead; the blade sank easily into his very-real flesh, releasing a trickle of red. Daniel kept the blade deep and began dragging it toward his other brow, careful to follow the other ridges in their waves of worry.

As always, the parallel scars reminded him of Christie, Melanie’s young niece. When her parents discovered she was cutting herself, they’d asked Melanie for help. And Melanie had asked Daniel, as if he would understand such a sickness. Cutting to relieve anxiety? He’d had no answer for once. And he was so smart back then. If they asked him now, of course, he’d be able to tell them— Ah, but nearly everyone involved was dead now, and—

He was making too many connections; recalling too many links with his past. His mental acuity was out of control; the blade hadn’t traveled a centimeter, and he was thinking about a dozen other things. Parallel processing. It wouldn’t do. He assigned another twenty percent of his CPU cycles to the factoring of large primes. The world sped up around him as his mind slowed to a crawl. Now it was moving too fast, not him.

As his logic gates were overwhelmed with new computations, instructions meant for fine-motor servos became delayed. His hand slipped and parallel lines touched. An old scar was torn open. Blood leaked out in a stream as Daniel fumbled for a tissue. He noted the shakiness in his hand, the difficulty he had turning spatial commands into physical motion.

Better, he thought.

He dabbed clumsily at his forehead to wick away the mess he was making. The new wrinkle was outlined in oozing red—but it wasn’t complete. He picked up a small blue vial, the perfume it once contained lingering, triggering olfactory sensors just acute enough to register the floating molecules. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t seize it. The failure was another sign of progress.

He tapped out a small pyramid of coarse sand into his palm, pinched some of the powdered stone between two fingers, and pressed it into his new wound. He was careful to grind the fine shards deep enough to trigger his tear ducts. Past the pain that warned him of the permanent damage being caused.