“Obsession,” Jude spit out.
“Which is why I’m pleased to announce to you the formation of the Brotherhood of Man. Providing social services to the needy, a place of peace and solace for lost souls, and dedicated, above all, to defending the unique glory of God’s creation over those who seek to encroach upon it.”
Jude scowled. “Translation: Even my crazy Faither friends aren’t crazy enough to declare war on download tech, so I’m going it alone. Because I’m going to prove I’m the biggest crackbrain of all, if it’s the last thing I do.”
It wasn’t a surprise; in fact, now that it had happened, it seemed inevitable. After the religious wars a few decades ago, the whole God thing became a serious fashion don’t. Some people just couldn’t let it go—but that didn’t mean they were spoiling for a fight. The Middle East was a crater and Italy was toxic; the world was running out of places to blow up. Smart move for the Faithers to ditch Savona once he started waving his pitchfork.
“We will destroy the technology robbing our nation’s youth of their very lives and souls, deceiving heartsick parents across the country with the illusion that their departed children have come back to them, seducing the whole and healthy into throwing away everything, and for what? A false promise of immortality! Hell on Earth, trapped forever in the purgatory of iron and steel.”
In person, Savona’s stare was magnetic. I’d found it impossible to turn away even when he was telling me I shouldn’t—and by his standards didn’t—exist. But the advantage of watching him on-screen was that we could turn him off. “Tell me again why we’re watching this crap?”
Jude frowned. “Wait for it.”
Ani shot me an odd look, equal parts pity and concern, then turned away the moment I caught her eye.
“I have seen the truth,” Savona said, peering into the camera. “And I have seen the danger. Not just to our souls, to the very fabric of human society, but to ourselves, to yourselves. The danger is real, and it is imminent, and this is why we must act. Self-protection is a moral imperative.” He hung his head. “But words are empty. Words are meaningless. I offer you more than words. I offer you evidence of the danger. A young man who’s faced the abyss and barely lived to tell the tale. This brave young man’s story called to me, as it will call to you. As the Brotherhood moves forward, we will all look to him as a beacon. A light in the darkness, a reminder of what we stand to lose if we fail.”
I knew. Before the camera panned across the stage, settling on a thin figure emerging from behind the curtain, tracking him as he hobbled toward the podium, I knew. He shook hands with Savona, then looked out over the audience, his eyes finding the camera. Finding me. They were a brighter green than I remembered—then I realized he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He’d been the only person I knew who wore glasses, because no one in their right mind would turn down the simple med-tech to fix myopia. But then, no one in their right mind would allow that kind of defect to slip into their child’s genetic code in the first place, not when they had the credit to fix it. As I understood it, his mother hadn’t been in her right mind, not with all the talk of preserving God’s natural plan. When she died, he’d kept the glasses, a tribute to the woman, I thought, not an embrace of her insanity.
Except here he was, embracing the Honored Rai Savona. No glasses.
“I’m Auden Heller,” he said, his voice raspy and hoarse. “And this is the story of how I almost died.”
I could feel them all staring at me, waiting for me to react. But I kept my face blank. That was the serious advantage to mech life—when you were disconnected from your body, it couldn’t give you away.
They’ve already watched this, I thought. They all know.
Which meant it would be useless to run away or shut it off. I would only look weak. I would stay; I would listen. It was no more than I deserved.
And I wanted to see him. Even like this.
Auden eased himself into a chair next to the podium. His movements were slow and careful, as if to protect brittle bones. “I hope you don’t mind if I sit,” he said, his voice amplified by a hidden microphone. “I get tired so easily now. Rai wanted to do this over the network, so I could speak from my home, but I told him no.” His voice rose, some of the color bleeding back into his pale face. “It’s important that we be here together, in person, celebrating one another’s humanity. Without electronic barriers, without machines, keeping us apart.”
“Impressive ventriloquism, isn’t it?” Jude murmured. “You can barely see Savona’s lips move.”
I jabbed an elbow into his side. “Shut. Up.”
“I used to think this was my fault,” Auden said, gesturing down at his ruined body. His cheeks were hollow, his face etched with scars that he must have had the doctors leave intact for effect. He was thinner than he’d been before, and, bent by a twisted spine, his left shoulder dipped below his right. He wore short sleeves, and the skin on one arm was markedly darker than on the other, the telltale sign of a transplanted limb. His hand lay in his lap, its fingers half-curled, and I flashed on the last time I’d seen him, when I rested my hand in his and he hadn’t even realized it. The nerves transmitting the sensation had dead-ended at his severed spine. “I was naive,” he continued. “When I met the skinner, I believed its disguise. I thought it was my friend. It’s very good at simulating human emotion—they all are. And emotional exhibition stimulates emotional response. That’s how we’re built. If someone smiles at you, you instinctually smile back. Even if that someone is a machine. You forget.” He broke off coughing, his whole body spasming. Savona took a step toward him, but Auden got himself under control. And he told the story.
Our story.
I couldn’t look at him while he spoke. Telling the world how he’d befriended me after the download. Telling thousands of strangers how he’d assured me I was human, I was still me. Telling Ani and Quinn and Riley about the day I’d leaped off the edge of the waterfall. How he’d nearly died trying to save me, the mech who would never need saving.
My fault, for letting both of us forget what I really was. Jude had helped me see that. I couldn’t blame Auden for seeing it too.
“I believe it didn’t mean to hurt me,” Auden said. I wondered if he knew I was watching. If he thought about me at all—but then I realized he must think about me every day, every time he collapsed after walking up a flight of stairs, every time the nerve implants jolted his muscles into action with a painful blast of electricity or his transplanted liver failed. I’d spent a lot of time pumping the network these past few months. I knew what doctors could fix and what they couldn’t. “Just as I believe the skinners don’t want to damage society. They honestly believe they’re harmless. But I learned that motives don’t matter.” He raised one arm and used it to lift the other one, the limp, discolored one. “The skinner I took as my friend didn’t chop off my arm. But I still lost my arm because of the skinner. I nearly lost everything.” He left out the part where he’d wanted the download for himself and been denied, thanks to a genetic tendency for mental instability that might never manifest itself—unless it already had. Believing that, at least, would have made it easier for me to watch.
Auden began coughing, his face going red and flushed with the effort to suck in enough air. When he spoke again, his voice was ragged. “It doesn’t matter that the skinners mean us no harm. Some things create danger just by existing. But our eyes are open. Our spirits are willing.” The crowd began to cheer. “Together, we will face the threat!” he shouted over the roars. “And together we will defeat it!”
Jude muted the applause.
“He doesn’t mean it,” I said, though even I was aware how lame it sounded. “He’s been brainwashed by that lunatic.”
“Or he’s just trying to hurt you,” Riley said quietly. “The way he thinks you hurt him.” He was the only one not looking at me. His eyes were still fixed on the screen, where Savona was helping Auden off the stage.
“You don’t know anything ab
out it,” I snapped, but of course he did. They all did now.
“He’s an arrogant little bastard,” Jude said. “Always was.”
“Shut up,” Ani and I said together. She brushed Quinn’s hand off her leg and stood up. I backed away. Ani was into hugging, and I didn’t want anyone touching me.
“I’m going to my room.”
Jude raised his eyebrows. “Twice in one day?”
I shrugged. He thought he knew everything. Let him.
“Stay,” Jude said. “This is going to get ugly, fast. We need to be ready.”
“You be ready. I’ll be in my room.”
Jude ran a hand through his shock of dark hair. “Why can’t you just—”
“Let her go,” Riley said. He still wouldn’t look at me.
“She shouldn’t be alone,” Jude said in a low voice.
“Let her go,” Riley said again.
I went.
Alone was easier said than done.
“Go away!” I shouted. The knocking stopped. But then the door eased open, enough for me to glimpse a patch of blue-black hair through the crack. “Unwanted visitor,” I told the room. “Terminate.”
The room didn’t respond, nor did it deploy countermeasures to keep Ani out. Apparently the new smartchip tech had its limits. Quinn had had the house fully equipped the month before, moments after the AI chips hit the market, promising us it would change all our lives. Like the automated plane, it was a perk of excess credit, a luxury the rest of the world would enjoy only through vids. So far it had been less than earth-shattering, learning who liked what when it came to lighting, temperature, noise level, all the little things that can make life so irritating. When you were walking around with a computer in your head, it was hard to be impressed by an artificially intelligent doorbell. Especially one not intelligent enough to keep out unwanted visitors.
Ani paused in the doorway, as if waiting for the termination order to be carried out. “Since I’m still alive—”
“Don’t let Jude hear you say that.”
“Since I’m still intact,” she clarified. “Can I come in?”
“Would it stop you if I said no?”
“Not really. But you might hurt my feelings.” She flashed me that strangely shy smile, the one that always made me wonder how she’d hooked up with Jude and Riley in the first place, much less how she’d managed to score even a minimal quotient of Quinn’s attention. Not that she wasn’t pleasant enough, even sweet. She was just there—but she was always there, and somehow that made the difference. She was a little like a fungus, I’d decided. She grew on you.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I warned her. “The past is irrelevant and all that, remember?”
She stepped into the room and sat down on the floor, her back against the wall. “No talking. Got it.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and latched her arms around them. “So what do you want to do?”
I wanted to know what she thought of me, now that she knew what I was running from.
No, I thought. Not running. Running away was for cowards. I’d run toward. I’d chosen a new life. And I’d done it to protect everyone else, not myself. I knew that—and not just because Jude told me so.
“Whatever.” I flicked on the ViM screen, calling up my zone. Strange to think there was more raw computing power in my head than in the ViM, but then, that was the beauty of Virtual Machines—no one needed a computer anymore, not with your whole life stored on the network. All you needed was a screen and a password, and you were good to go.
My zone was pretty bare these days—a few pics, a couple texts from randoms I’d never met who didn’t realize I’d pretty much dropped off the network. In the old days, I’d basically lived my life on the zone, along with everyone else. Now it was just another reminder of all the crap I’d decided to forget. “What should we do?” I asked.
“You’re asking me?”
“I was asking the room, actually, but you’ll do.”
Ani pulled herself up and wandered over to the room’s AI port, tracing her fingers along its outer rim. “You think it can understand us?”
I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “I was joking.”
“No, seriously,” she said. “Artificial intelligence, right? So what if it really is intelligent? Maybe it has, like, a personality in there. I mean, if they shoved our brains into a house somehow, we’d still be us, right?”
“Would we? How do you know?” The idea creeped me out enough that I didn’t want to think about it. “Anyway, it’s not the same thing. AI computers are fast, and they’re—I don’t know, clever, but they can never be smart. You know they can’t build consciousness from scratch. It’s why they’re stuck with us—exact copies of the real thing.”
“The real thing,” Ani echoed quietly, still examining the port. “Yeah. As opposed to us fakes.”
“You know what I mean,” I said, starting to get seriously annoyed. “Anyway, wasn’t the whole point to be focusing on something that wasn’t insanely depressing?”
“Right.” Ani turned to face me again, her game face on. She grinned. “So what’ll it be?”
“Something normal,” I suggested. “Something . . .” I didn’t want to say, Something that lets us forget for five seconds that we’re the trailblazers to a new and brighter technological future, or whatever it is we’re supposed to be calling ourselves instead of chip-brained freaks. That was the sort of thing we weren’t supposed to think, much less say. Besides, which of the “normal” activities—shopping, gaming, zone pumping and dumping—on the agenda would be up to the challenge? Even if, and it was a big if, I could picture Ani and me pumping the network for the latest trend killers the way I used to do with Cass and Terra, or even just sitting around and playing Akira, the way Walker and I wasted time when we were too tired or too lazy for our preferred way of passing an afternoon, none of it would be the distraction I needed. There was a reason I spent so much time blanked out in front of the screen watching vidlifes. There was a reason for the dreamers.
I shrugged. Let Ani figure it out. She was the one supposedly determined to cheer me up. I was ready for some cheering. “What kind of stuff did you do with your friends? Before?” I asked.
Mechs don’t have lungs, and we don’t have capillaries or pulses, which means our skin doesn’t change color when we get upset, nor does our breath speed up and slow down. We don’t blink or shiver or do any of the other things that an org body does when it’s giving away a secret that its owner would prefer to keep shut up inside. Our secrets belong to us.
But once you know what you’re looking for, there are things you can see. An awkward jerk in a step that should have been smooth. A blank expression, because the mind behind it is suddenly too busy to remember to infuse the lips and eyes with some simulacrum of life. Sometimes just a stillness.
Ani went still.
“Sorry,” I said. “Forgot.” Hard to do stuff with friends, or do much of anything, when you’re a genetic malfunction, abandoned by parents who realized nine months too late that they shouldn’t have had you in the first place, warehoused in some kind of “facility” that was basically a loading zone on the curb of death. Ani was lucky that she’d been carried away not by starvation or infection or madness, like everyone else she knew, but by the helpful hand of the BioMax research team, seeking test subjects for the download technology and eager to recruit anyone with the right biospecs who was desperate enough to volunteer.
Or, as Ani put it, with the requisite air quotes, “volunteer.”
Ani had shown me a pic of her with Jude and Riley, who she’d met in the hospital before they got the procedure. In the pic, their teeth were crooked and cracked, their cheeks sunken and sallow, Ani’s malformed torso and Jude’s withered legs giving Riley’s malnourished but intact body a glow of health. In the pic, their skin flowed the spectrum from coffee to choco-late, warm browns—as opposed to the pale synflesh they’d been poured into, flesh white by default, read
y for the majority of customers who had come calling once the “volunteer” stage was over and the download went on sale.
“Race is an extraneous category when it comes to us,” Jude liked to say. “What’s race when your skin is synthetic and your bodies disposable? What are you but mind and mech?”
What he meant: It was easier just to forget.
Add it to the list of things we weren’t supposed to talk about.
“Brahm’s party,” Ani said finally, looking like she regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. “Want to?”
“Do you want to?” I asked, skeptical. It’s not that I had anything against Brahm, a mech who’d joined up about the same time I did. Brahm was the former heir to the largest wind-farm fortune in the midwest, one of the first to download as a paying customer. Blind since he was a year old, he now walked around with a perpetual squint, as if afraid of seeing too much, too soon. His parents had tossed him out the day he committed to the procedure. Like me, he now had nowhere else to go; unlike me, he wasn’t shy about sharing the details to anyone and everyone who’d listen. “Talking” to Brahm meant listening to him rant—about his parents and the Faithers who’d convinced them to disown their apostate mechanical son, about the weather, about the lack of closet space in his first bedroom, and then the lack of southern exposure in the room he’d replaced it with. But ranting or not, he’d come to us with a sincere desire for refuge and plenty of credit to contribute to the cause.
This was the point never included in our newbie speeches, never raised at all, not explicitly at least, but always effectively communicated by Jude to each and every new recruit: Contributions weren’t required—but they were always welcome.
“I wasn’t invited,” I said, stalling.
Ani whacked me lightly on the shoulder. “Come on.”
Okay, so everyone knew d-day parties were open to all. And I’d long since gotten over my aversion to celebrating download anniversaries, at least when it came to other mechs. I planned to let my own slip by without the streamers and linked dreamers and rousing choruses of “Happy Death-day to You.”
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