I almost broke.
But I remembered that Riley wasn’t my friend. That I didn’t have those anymore.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Because if you’re not—”
“I’m fine.” I was intact and unharmed; I wasn’t going to jail. I wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ll be fine.”
“That’s good,” he said, like he meant it.
“What about you?” I suddenly thought to ask.
“Fine,” he said.
And hope springs eternal, right? Maybe we would be.
11. ZONED
Things got back to normal.
Nothing got back to normal.
Normaclass="underline" Long days without much to fill them. Watching Ani hang all over Quinn, watching Quinn hang all over everyone else. Talking about nothing. Scaling buildings and jumping off cliffs, trying to feel.
Not normaclass="underline" Ariana Croft, a girl with a stranger’s name and my face, arrested for the corp-town attack. My face all over the vids, panic evident in wide-eyed protestations of innocence. The looks I was getting from the other mechs, the same kind of peripheral gaping I’d endured at school right after the downloads, randoms passing me in the hall, pretending to fix their eyes on the ground when really they were soaking me in, absorbing every inch of the freakitude so they could report back to their friends. Now Jude and Riley were the only ones who didn’t watch me like they were half expecting me to strike again. Jude because he never looked at me at all unless he had to. Riley because his look was different. Waiting for me to break, I thought more than once, catching his eye just before he turned away. Not going to happen.
In the not-normal column: not backing up my memories, not once since the attack. Because backing them up would make them permanent—as permanent as I was, at least, which was extremely. If I kept them where they were, trapped in my head, no backup, no record anywhere but in me, then there was always a chance they could disappear. One day, I would wake up in a fresh body, with a fresh mind, one that didn’t know how blank eyes could get, or how quickly skin paled when blood pooled, still and lifeless in the veins.
It was a game I’d played before, toying with the idea of forgetting, wiping out a moment like it didn’t exist.
Normaclass="underline" I still wasn’t going to do it. My body—Lia Kahn’s body—was gone, which meant the only thing left of her, of me, was my mind. And sometimes it seemed like that was nothing more than a long skein of memories. I wasn’t about to start unraveling the thread, throwing pieces of myself in the trash. I didn’t know where the memories ended and I—whatever I existed without all the things that had happened to me—began.
Normaclass="underline" I was still afraid.
I couldn’t stop watching the vids of the attack.
I did it alone, in my room, staring at the screen on the wall, playing and replaying the same shots. I saw it from every angle, in color, in infrared, in black and white. Over and over again, I watched myself in the center of the atrium, standing still, bodies dropping all around me. I watched the girl who looked like me pump the Naxophedrine into the air-circulation system. And smile.
And then, when that got old, the images so familiar that they left me numb, I moved on. I pumped Ariana Croft’s zone, just before they slapped a priv-lock on it. I dipped into her friends’ zones, but none of them had spoken to her since the download, so they only had stories about a girl who didn’t exist anymore. There were plenty of pics showing what she’d looked like before, curly brown hair, violet lenses in her deep-set eyes, a little chunky but in such a way that you knew she was doing it on purpose to seem voluptuous. Totally artificial—a girl with that kind of credit and those kinds of friends wouldn’t leave anything to chance. She’d go in for lipo once a week and make sure they left just enough fat behind to seem authentic. An extremely noncasual casual oversight, like a carefully tousled mess of hair or a faceful of haven’t-bothered-to-shave scruff. But it wasn’t sexy, just sad, like a wispy moustache that looked more like a smudge of dirt than a handlebar of hair.
Not that it would have mattered, once she got sick. I even looked up the disease, some kind of bizarre immune-system disorder that couldn’t be screened out and couldn’t be treated. None of the zones had any pics of that. But I knew it would have made her sick and fragile and, even without the weekly lipos, skinny. Without the download, it would have made her dead.
None of it told me anything, except that this girl wasn’t me.
But maybe that was the one thing I needed to know.
There was no chance that BioMax had illegally downloaded a copy of my brain into another body, that the second, secret Lia Kahn had gone insane, taken on a new name, a new persona, and decided to kill a bunch of people she’d never met before. No chance whatsoever.
But it didn’t hurt to confirm that Ariana Croft was a real person. A damaged whackjob, maybe, but not me. Even if she looked like me.
Our bodies were just things, right? My body was one thing. Her body, despite the choppy haircut and bad dye job (violet with green streaks), was another. Sometimes I ripped my eyes from the vids and stared down at myself, feeling as disconnected as I had those first few days after the download, untethered from legs, arms, skin, fingers, all of it seeming to belong to someone else. Sometimes I reminded myself that even if there had been no Ariana Croft (which there was), if someone at BioMax had figured out a way around all the safeguards (which they couldn’t), and for some nefarious purpose had created another Lia Kahn in body and mind, it still wouldn’t be me. It would have just been a copy, and by definition, a copy wasn’t the same as the original.
Except that I wasn’t the original either.
Except that if my brain and body were destroyed, my backed-up memories would be downloaded into a new brain. Another copy. And it would feel like me. It would be me. That was the whole secret to mech immortality, right? When is a copy not a copy? Not much of a riddle, because the answer is obvious: when it’s identical to the original.
Maybe. But I didn’t trust the logic enough to test it. I could ditch this body for a new one with a new face. This me could die, and an identical copy would live. Same difference, right? Except I was afraid it wasn’t.
I was afraid.
These were the kinds of things I tried not to think about when I wasn’t busy trying not to think about dead people. Or trying not to think about my father. Or call-me-Ben’s daily, and increasingly threatening, reminders of our “deal,” which for all I knew was moot now that I was no longer under suspicion—but to believe that would have meant ignoring the fact that there were more shadowy, faceless mechs in that vid, attackers still to be caught. Thanks to the corp-town attack, we were all under suspicion, every mech. All of us with no fingerprints and no biostats—and according to Rai Savona and his little puppet Auden, no souls, which meant no moral compass or internal censor and thus nothing to stop us from wreaking havoc, sowing chaos by some kind of infernally programmed design, or just destroying everything around us by virtue of our very nature. I tried not to think about Auden too, telling myself that it could have been worse, whatever he’d turned into—whatever bitter, twisted dupe I’d turned him into—at least he’d lived. But that thought brought me right back to dead people and sent me straight back to the vids, and the whole thing started all over again.
It was like a cut on my lip that I couldn’t help worrying with my tongue. Knowing that I should let it alone, knowing better, but so hyperaware of it every time I spoke, every time I moistened my lips, every time I was sitting around and my mind wandered, just for a moment, away from the constant litany of Don’t do that, and without intent or even awareness, my tongue slipped back into place, exploring the crevices of the wound until the pain woke me up.