“When you want me, you’ll know where to find me,” he whispered. And let go. He melted into the crowd before I could stop him. Not that I would have tried. I told myself I wanted him gone, for good this time.
I almost believed it.
2. HAPPY TOGETHER
The party raged till sunrise. The glass dome had come equipped with an artificial dawn, orange-yellow light creeping over the dragging dancers and silvery fish—technology that was, for the most part, wasted on the unconscious. I spent the final hours of the vidlife pretending to sleep, my legs slung over one snoring ogre’s brawny shoulder, my head in a voluptuous jellyfish’s lap. The last holdouts had dropped of exhaustion one by one, bodies tangled where they fell. Once the society olds had slipped off to sleep, the stilted elegance of the early evening had given way to a b-mod-induced ecstasy, bodies floating on Xers, blissed-out orgs bamboozled by the artificial undersea and imagining they were dancing with the fish. I couldn’t take behavior modifiers any more than I could drink the putrescent pink Aqua Ambrosia or eat the dolphin-shaped canapés, and I didn’t get tired. But I’d learned that orgs don’t trust people—or things—that don’t sleep. So for the vidlife audience I’d closed my eyes and waited for day.
By the time the cleanup crew woke everyone up, it was nearly mid-afternoon. Fifteen days, twelve hours, forty-two minutes since the game had started. Which meant I was done.
The elevators whooshed us out of the deep; a waiting car sped me back to BioMax headquarters; then security checks and more elevators and I was in the boardroom, the vidlife officially finished, the cameras shut down for good.
“Yes, I think it was productive,” I told Kiri, and call-me-Ben, and my father, and the room full of BioMax suits who ambushed me as soon as the mics went dead. Viewer stats and zone feedback danced across the screens lining the conference room, alongside hundreds of network debates raging about my performance. But all eyes were on me.
“No, I didn’t encounter more than the usual amount of antidownload sentiment.
“No, it wasn’t an undue strain.
“No, I wouldn’t recommend a repeat attempt; I’d argue our energies could be better spent elsewhere.”
The inane questions went on for more than an hour, but finally, call-me-Ben stood up and extended his hand. I didn’t hesitate, or roll my eyes. I’d learned.
“Thank you again for all your help, Lia,” Ben said, and I smiled at him, sweetly.
His hand dropped to his side. He’d learned too.
Kiri skipped the handshake. She swept me into a brusque embrace. Normally, she wasn’t a hugger, any more than I was, but desperate times, right? It lasted only a second, long enough for a hasty whisper: “It was worth it.” And because Kiri had proved she was the only member of the corp who actually understood people, I believed her.
“Are we done here?” I asked.
“The vidlife techs are waiting next door to remove the implant and give you a once-over,” call-me-Ben said. “Under my supervision, of course.”
“And then—”
“And then, yes, you’re free to go.”
“I’ll wait for you at the car?” my father said.
It was new, this habit of asking instead of telling—or rather, an unconvincing hybrid of the two.
I shook my head. “I’m meeting Riley.”
“Oh. Of course.” No amateur would pick up on the disapproval behind the curt response, because all of my father’s responses were curt. But when it came to deciphering the stormy moods of M. Kahn, I was a pro.
“Don’t forget it’s Thursday,” he added.
“I won’t,” I said, though I had. “But maybe this once…”
Someone else’s father might have brushed it off with a smile and given her a free pass out of the weekly family dinner, just this once. My father, in the old days, would have shaken his head and forbidden it. Now? The worst of both worlds: “It’s entirely up to you whether you choose to keep your word.”
Checkmate. “I’ll see you tonight.”
One last door between me and freedom, between the bowels of BioMax and the great outdoors. But I stopped before pushing through it, preparing myself.
He won’t be there, I thought. He saw everything I did, and he won’t care that it was fake.
Or he’ll believe that it was real. He’ll think that was me.
Or Jude got to him first.
If he wasn’t out there, I would deal. Riley wouldn’t be the first thing I’d lost. If I could survive without my friends, without my sister, without my body, I could certainly survive without him. That’s what I told myself.
Please, I thought.
And I stepped through the door.
Here’s the thing about perfect kisses.
They’re worth crap.
Fun, maybe. But it’s not like they mean anything. All that melting into another person, lips fusing, souls meeting, romantic garbage? Trust me, your soul is not sitting in your tongue, waiting to take an all-expenses-paid vacation into some loser’s mouth.
You want a metric that matters, a way to measure exactly how much of a person belongs to you?
Try the perfect hug.
Riley’s arms were around me before my feet hit pavement. He lifted me off the ground, his arms strong and steady at my waist. I locked mine around his neck and lodged my face in the hollow of his neck and shoulder. For the first time since the vidlife began, I relaxed, went limp in body and brain, and let someone hold me up.
“Miss me?” he whispered, and just like that, Jude’s words in Riley’s mouth, it was over.
I stiffened; he let go.
I searched his face for some sign that he was playing me, that he’d talked to Jude. But there was nothing lurking in his expression. Which maybe meant he was asking if I’d missed him because he honestly wanted to know.
“You have no idea.” It sounded like a lie. So I kissed him. Kissing Riley was rarely electric or breathless or heart-stopping or any of the criteria I’d used to catalog kisses back in my org days. It didn’t make me forget myself. But it helped me remember him, and all the ways his body curved to fit against mine. Kissing Riley wasn’t just about the mechanics of it, the probing and nibbling and sucking—it was about building a wall between us and the world. It was proof that we still made sense.
But it couldn’t last.
“It’s Thursday night,” I said, flicking my eyes at the ViM temp-tattooed to my left forearm. My newest toy, the razor-thin virtual machine could access the network three times faster than any of my other ViM interfaces, but so far it had mostly proved useful for surreptitiously telling the time. “If I don’t go soon, I’ll be late.”
Riley dropped my hand. “I thought we were going to hang out?”
“I can’t skip dinner. You know that’s part of the deal.”
I could have broken my word, run away. Riley had his new body, and my father couldn’t take it away. Riley had—only once—suggested I could come live with him, in the former servants’ quarters he was renting. (The owner was hemorrhaging enough credit to be willing to sacrifice the abandoned hovel at the fringe of his property, at least on a month-by-month basis.) He thought I said no because the apartment was beneath me. I couldn’t convince him otherwise, because I couldn’t tell him the truth. It was too fragile to say out loud.
Truth: My father would only have blackmailed me into coming home if he wanted me back.
My mother could barely look at me without crying, and Zo was Zo. But my father wanted me. Even though I was the machine that had replaced his dead daughter, even though he’d once dropped to his knees and begged a god he didn’t believe in to give him another chance, to go back in time and let me die.