I told myself that it wasn’t any different from what I’d been doing for the last six months as BioMax’s poster child for the happy, healthy mech, doing what they told me to do, saying what they told me to say, bowing and scraping for board meetings and press conferences and legislative committees, dangling on their strings. I’d started because my father had asked me to, and I was still playing nice, honoring the letter of our bargain—I got all the credit I needed to help Riley, and my father got his daughter back. Or at least a reasonable simulacrum thereof. But once I’d made the obligatory appearances he’d asked of me, I stuck around. I’d always been good at acting the part, and at least this time the act would be for a good cause.
Baby steps, that was the plan. Persuade the orgs that the mechs offered no threat, meant no harm. That we were just like them. That we were young and foolish—yet also mature. Carefree, yet responsible. Predictable, yet prone to petty spats and parties like the orgs our age. It meant walking a fine line, and singing different songs to different audiences. Kiri customized the sober lectures I delivered to boardrooms, the grinning idiot I made myself into for pop-up ads, each persona carefully crafted to suit its circumstances—irrelevant, apparently, that none of them suited me.
The vidlife took the act one step further. We would offer them proof—24/7, in living color—that I was no more harmless and no less vapid than your average rich-bitch wild child. We would sucker them into caring about my fights and flings, sacred pacts and romantic treasons, and without realizing it, they would come to believe that I cared, that I felt. That I was, in my petty melodramas of daily life, no different from them. Or at least no different from the other people they watched on the vids. There were those at BioMax who couldn’t understand how acting a part would convince anyone of anything about the “real” me—but they were the ones who didn’t watch vidlifes. Those of us who did knew the shameful truth: No matter how much you knew you were watching live-action puppets play out the fantasies of the masses, the more you watched the vidlifers, the more you believed in them. That was, after all, the whole point of the vidlife: to forget the fantasy and accept the reality. To ignore the distinction between “reality” and “real.”
“Ready?” call-me-Ben asked.
I nodded, and he exchanged a cryptic set of gestures with the vidlife rep, then gave me a thumbs-up. That was it. This was it.
Nothing seemed different. Nothing felt different. The buzzing of the micro-cam hovering over my shoulder could have been a fly.
Just make them love you, I reminded myself, waiting for something to happen. Preparing myself to be bright and sparkly, harmless and irresistible, to be the old Lia Kahn, the one who didn’t run on rechargeable batteries. We’re the same people we used to be, I’d said at meeting after meeting, lying through my porcelain teeth. We’re perfect copies of our old selves. We’re exactly like you.
The voice, when it finally spoke, was inflectionless and personality-free.
There’s a party at the Wilding, the voice said. From what I’d heard, there was always a party at the Wilding. The club ran full speed from dusk till dawn and round to dusk again, the dancers and dosers locking themselves in a nonstop fantasy. Find something to wear and check it out.
“You know what?” I said brightly. “I feel like dancing. Maybe I’ll go find myself a party.”
And without waiting for a response, I skipped out of the bunkered office, already mentally running through my wardrobe, wondering what would be suitable for the Wilding, wondering what the voice would make me do once I got in.
Wondering who would be watching.
Day three.
Mechs don’t get tired. We don’t, technically, need to sleep. And obviously there’s no need to eat or drink or rest our legs from hour after hour of whirling beneath spinning neon lights, arms twirling, head thrown back, bass-pumping music shaking the walls, floor undulating beneath our feet, bodies on bodies pressed together, sticky, sweaty, salty flesh grinding against flesh, and in the center, me. Seventy-two hours at the Wilding, watching dancers flow in and out, like jellyfish washing up on the beach, then dragged out again by the rising tide, ragged and desiccated by their hours in the sun. Except here in the Wilding there was no sun, no hint of anything that might mark the time passing, or the daylight world beyond its midnight walls.
It turned out the Wilding had only one rule, anything goes, which was good for me since I’d heard one too many stories about mechs trying to slip into org-only clubs and getting the shit pounded out of them. But here the wasted masses were too lost in their dancing, their shockers, their threesomes and foursomes, their licking and tonguing and whipping, to notice what I really was, or to care.
“You need a guy,” Felicity shouted in my ear, with a giggle that sounded almost sincere. Everything she said sounded almost sincere—the same went for Pria and Cally, the other two vidlife regulars who’d swept me into their circle as soon as I stepped into the club. The fly cams buzzing over our heads glowed as they came within range of one another, and on cue the lifers laughed and shrieked, stroked my hair, whipped me in wild loops across the packed dance floor, and didn’t seem to care that I was a mech—which of course only meant that their characters didn’t care, and they were playing their parts.
Cally grabbed my shoulders and kneaded her thumbs into the synflesh. “Definitely need a guy,” she agreed. “You’re way too tense.”
“I’m just tired,” I shouted back, my body still rippling in time with the music, arms, legs, hips on autopilot as we bobbed on the synthmetal waves. “Don’t you ever get… tired?” I didn’t mean tired of dancing. And they knew it.
“Never,” Felicity said, twirling in place. Her red hair furled around her head like a cloud of fire.
“But don’t you ever…” I chose my words carefully. No mention of cameras or privacy, nothing that would burst the delicate vidlife bubble. “… feel like a break?”
“Break from what? This is life.” Pria giggled. She threw her arms in the air, where they flickered and whorled like ribbons in the wind. She’d been vidlifing for two years without a day off, and I wondered if she even knew the difference anymore. What would she do if the voice in her head went silent and left her on her own?
“Come on, pick someone,” Pria urged me. She twisted me in a slow circle, her pointed finger hopping from a weeper with huge biceps and teary hangdog eyes to an albino blond to an artfully scruffed guy, bare from the waist up and dosed out on Xers, who happened to be a dead ringer for Walker, my org ex. Not going to happen.
“Look, I already have—” I stopped, reminding myself that for these fifteen days Riley—or, more specifically, Riley-and-me—did not exist. No one wanted their vidlifers tied down, at least not with an outsider, and certainly not with another mech, a random from a city who’d never been to a club and, if he had, would have spent the night sitting in a corner, still and silent as his chair. It would be different if Riley had agreed to go on the vidlife with me. It might have been an appealing novelty act, he-and-she mechs, a matched set ready and willing to show off how anatomically correct—how lustful, how passionate, how human—the walking dead could be. But Riley never would have agreed to something like that, so I hadn’t asked.