It’s not a lie, I thought, telling him a story of what should have happened, where he was a hero and Jude was still his friend and happily ever after was still in reach for someone, someday. It’s a gift.
I would be his memory.
“It seems like a long time ago,” he said as we stood at the edge of the water, clothes in two neat piles on the ground, feet bare. “Since we were here.”
“It was,” I said to the stranger who wasn’t a stranger, with a hand that looked so wrong in my own.
We stood with our backs to the hill and everything it led to. Somewhere up there, beyond the horizon: the Brotherhood regrouping, Savona lying in wait, orgs hating us, orgs fearing us, BioMax holding us under absolute control, pretending we walked free, Auden knowing I’d saved him all over again and knowing I was the reason he’d needed to be saved. Somewhere up there: a home, my father asking God to forgive him for creating me, expecting me to be someone long dead, my sister, wanting to be anyone but my sister, not wanting me to die. Somewhere up there: Jude, who knew the truth.
All behind us. And ahead of us, nothing but a stretch of murky blue. We couldn’t run away. Or hide, like children, behind wishes and lies. We wouldn’t fight like Jude—but we would fight.
We would, but only when we climbed the hill, trekked to the road, returned to the world, where we were mechs and they were orgs and nothing made sense. Here, now, alone, we joined hands, and it didn’t matter what we were or what was waiting for us. We stepped forward, water lapping at our ankles, our knees, our thighs, our waists. We stepped forward together and let ourselves drift, the muddy seabed dropping out beneath our feet, the water carrying us toward a buried ruin, carrying us away from the noise and chaos waiting for us onshore, and together, we dipped below the surface and let our bodies sink into the silent deep.
LOOK FOR THE STUNNING CONCLUSION TO LIA’S STORY:
TORN
This is not real.
“This is real,” I said, because the voice in my head ordered me to say it.
Because machines follow orders, and I am a machine.
This is not me.
“This is me,” I said. Because I was programmed to lie.
You see everything, but you get nothing.
“What you see is what you get,” I said, and I smiled.
You see: Perfect lips drawn back in a perfect smile. Perfect skin pulled taut over a perfect body.
You see: Hands that grasp, legs that stretch, eyes that understand.
You see a machine that plays the part she was built to play. You see a dead girl walking. You see a freak, a transgression, a sin, a hero. You see a mech; you see a skinner. You see what you want to see.
You don’t see me.
“So it doesn’t bother you, millions of people watching your every move?” the interviewer asked. She was sweating under the camera lights. I wasn’t. Machines neither sweat nor shiver; we endure. This interviewer had a reputation for wringing tears from all her interview subjects, but in my case it would be easier to get a toaster to cry. So something else was needed. Extra feeling from her, to make up for my lack. Shining eyes welling with liquid, rosy cheeks at opportune moments for anger or passion, a shudder for effect when we passed through the really gory parts: the aftermath of the accident, the uploading of spongy brain matter into sterile hardware, the death and reawakening. I had to admit her act was better than mine. But then, pretending to be human is easier when you actually are.
“You don’t feel like you need to put on an act for us? Keep something private, something only for you?”
Artificial neural synapses fired, and electrical impulses shot through artificial conduits, zapped artificial nerves. My perfect shoulders shrugged. My perfect forehead wrinkled in the perfect approximation of human emotion.
“Why would I?” I said.
It had been fifteen days. Fifteen days of posing and preening under their cameras, mouthing their words, following their orders. Burrowing deeper into my own head, desperate for some hidden refuge that their cameras couldn’t penetrate, somewhere dark and empty and safe that belonged only to me.
Widen eyes.
Tilt head.
Smile.
“After all, I have nothing to hide.”
Day one.
“The commands will feed directly into your auditory system, and it’ll sound like the voice is coming from inside your head,” Ben said, giving the equipment one final check like the perpetual employee-of-the-week I knew him to be. BioMax’s best mender of broken mechs—mender, fixer, occasionally builder, but, as he was always careful to clarify, not doctor. Doctors tended to real, live orgs, and Ben fixed broken-down machines who only looked human. These last six months, every single thing in my life had changed and changed again, everything except for Ben, who was a constant: same tacky flash suits, same waxy hair, same plastic good looks. Same fake-modesty shtick, as in Aw, shucks, I’m no one important, no one to be afraid of, certainly no one who’d keep secrets from you and manipulate you and blackmail you and hold the power of life and death over your remarkably lifelike head; I’m just a guy, like any other, so you can call me Ben. “Some people get disoriented by the voice—”
“I’ll be fine,” I said flatly. I’d had voices in my head before. One of the many perks of being a machine: the potential for “improvements.” Like a neural implant that would let me speak silently to other mechs, and hear their voices in my head. Like infrared vision and internal GPS and all the other inhuman modifications I’d had stripped away when I moved back in with my org parents and my org sister and pretended to return to my org life. Like I could close my eyes, make a wish, and suddenly be organic again, suddenly be the living, breathing Lia Kahn that had gotten into that car a year ago, pulled onto the highway, slammed into a shipping truck, and been blown into a million burned, bloody pieces.
“I want to make sure you understand how everything’s going to work,” call-me-Ben said, always pushing. “Once things start, we’re not going to have a chance to talk like this.”
“What a shame.”
He ignored me. “So if you have any questions, it’s best to ask—”
“If Lia says she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine.” That was Kiri Napoor, director of public relations and my own personal liaison to the BioMax powers that be. She caught my eye and winked, Kiri-speak for I know he’s lame; just go with it.
Kiri was my watchdog, assigned to make sure I kept both feet on the company line. When they’d first told me about her, I’d imagined a female version of call-me-Ben, some puffbag of hot air with a tacky weave and skin pulled watertight from one too many lift-tucks, a nag who would follow me around all day, tattling back to her BioMax overlords every time I opened my mouth. Instead she turned out to be Kiri, with her sleek purple hair, perma-smirk, impeccable taste (retroslum shift dress paired with networked boots flashing mangarock vids, that first time I saw her), and enough of a punk twist to make her look cool without even trying.