He had Jude’s face—the harsh, angular lines, the bland beauty we all shared sharpened by raking cheekbones, hooded eyes, full lips built to smirk. But he wasn’t smirking, and his eyes—slate gray, not Jude’s flashing amber—darted from Quinn to me to the ground and back again. His flesh was an unbroken plane of creamy peach without any of Jude’s swooping silver circuitry, and his long, muscled arms looked like org arms, without the transparent panel Jude wore on his left bicep, showing off his internal wiring like a badge of honor.
This guy, this Seth, looked normal, in a way all of us on Quinn’s estate had accepted we would never be. But he also looked like Jude.
“Don’t zone on me, Lia,” Quinn warned. “It’s only weird for a minute. You get over it.”
Easy for Quinn to say. She had a custom-made body and face, tailored to her exact specifications. Unlike Jude, who’d been plucked from life in the gritty city to serve as one of BioMax’s first experimental subjects—it was strictly off-the-rack for him, a body and face the corporation now kept in reserve for emergency procedures, the downloads that no one saw coming. Downloads like mine. It was one thing to know the doubles were out there—somebody else’s brain behind your face, some random’s words coming out of your mouth—it was something else to see one.
“What’s the point?” I VM’d to Quinn, knowing no newbie would have access to the illicit tech. “You track him down just to freak me out?”
“First of all, Seth found me,” Quinn said aloud. “He wanted to take your little tour, but I figured he’d get a better impression one-on-one. He just woke up a few weeks ago. Still figuring out how everything works, right, Seth?”
He smiled with that awkward grimace of a newbie mech trying to fake something that used to come automatically. “It’s kind of weird at home these days,” he said, slow and steady. I remembered that too. It was hard work, figuring out how to control the air flow and the self-lubricating tongue and the artificial larynx to produce something approximating human speech. From his nervous smile as the words stumbled out, I figured he was fresh out of rehab, still expecting his gold star.
“And second of all?” I prompted Quinn.
“I knew you’d like him,” she said.
“And I thought you could use him,” she added.
“For what?”
Seth looked cluelessly back and forth between us. It must have looked like we were frozen in a staring contest or some equally inane battle of silent will.
“Look at him,” Quinn shot back. “Everything you want, without all the complications.”
“I don’t want him,” I said, disgusted. “Either of them.”
Quinn pulled a dreamer from her pocket, tossing it from hand to hand. “Seth can’t wait to try it,” she said aloud. “Can you, Seth?”
“She won’t tell me what ‘it’ is,” he said. “But…” He trailed off, spreading his arms wide like he was helpless not to put himself at Quinn’s mercy.
“I get it,” I said. It wasn’t my job to keep some random out of dreamerville. “Have fun.”
“It’s linked,” Quinn told me, “so we can all play.”
“Forget it.”
“Not even tempted?” Quinn grinned. “You’re tempted.”
“I’m leaving.” I forced a smile at the newbie. “Nice to meet you, Seth. You’ll be welcome if you decide to stay. This is a home for every mech who needs it.”
He shook his head, hard. “I was just curious. Just visiting, you know?” he said. With Jude’s voice. “I’m not like—I mean…”
“Not like us,” I said, biting back the If you say so. “That’s okay. I really do get it. Been there, done that.” I traced my fingers along the silvery streaks rimming my neck. I hadn’t embraced the freak-chic thing as much as the others. But to the newbie, I knew it was irrelevant. I was one of them; he wasn’t—he thought. “Maybe you’ll make it work.”
Maybe you’ll be back.
Absolute control, Jude always said.
If I’d had that, I could have stopped thinking. About Jude’s double. About my double. Out there somewhere with the same body I’d have until I got up the credit and the nerve to trade it in for a new one, custom-made. About whether Jude’s double was right: if it was different for him and if that meant it could have been different for me. Which inevitably led where everything always led, straight back home to the damage I’d done just by being me—or, more accurately, not being me: perfect daughter, perfect sister, perfect girlfriend, perfectly breakable. The crash broke me; I broke everyone else.
Control meant never looking back, never questioning why I had walked away. Wiping out the memory of their faces: My father, pretending he didn’t look at me and see a corpse. Auden, bandaged and pale, his eyes willing me away—first from the room, then preferably from the planet. And Zo’s face the last time I saw her. That was the one I kept coming back to. Tell me I’m your sister, I’d begged that last day. I kept seeing it: Zo’s face when she didn’t answer. And I kept wondering: What if I had waited? What if I had stayed?
But that would have been selfish. I had accepted that. Forcing myself into my old org life, into my old org family—it would have ruined all of us. If I’d understood that earlier, Auden would have been safe. And if I’d ignored it, if I’d stayed, given Zo a chance… she might have been next.
So don’t think about it, I told myself every day, all day. Forget.
I had control, I thought, imagining Seth and Quinn writhing in the pool, locked in the shared dream that would give them a few hours of escape. I had control but not enough of it.
My room was nearly bare: just a chest of drawers, a flatscreen ViM striping the wall, and a bed. The latter was unnecessary; I could shut down just as easily with my back against the wooden floor. All it took was an internal command, and the world went away. For a while, I’d experimented—shutting down while standing up, hanging upside down, dangling out the window. In the end, I preferred the bed.
I lay down and took out the dreamer Jude had given me. The dreamers were nothing more than code, bits of data that overrode our neural homeostasis and threw our systems into a chaos that simulated physical and emotional response. Almost like jumping out of a plane, but more effective. Because they were just programs, they should have been reusable, but for whatever reason, no dreamer ever had much of an effect after the first few uses. Just one of the things no one, including Jude, understood about what they did to us. We all had our theories, but in the end, we just crossed our fingers and flicked the switch.
I hadn’t had a fresh one in weeks. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t, not anymore. It was too easy—and it made waking life too gray. Like nothing was as real as the world inside your head.
I flicked the switch.
When I was alive, I dreamed in stories.
They weren’t real, of course. Org dreams are nothing but random neural firings, spurts of color and unprompted emotion. The story comes later, in that instant before waking, your muddled mind making sense of the chaos by stringing the randomness into a narrative.
Mech dreams were different. There was no once-upon-a-time. No faces, no nightmares. No flying.
There was:
Rage.
Soft.
Wild.
Scared.
Bliss.
Raw jolts of emotion as if there was no body, no bed, no Lia Kahn, only the roiling froth of joy grief terror pain joy.