Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  I don’t tell them that I miss it.

  Move! I think, and I know I am angry, at myself and at Asa. I am angry all the time now. But the voice in my head sounds nearly as calm as the computer I still use to talk, and will use until I can make more than grunts and groans with the artificial larynx. That may take the most time of all, they warn me. But most people master it eventually. Most.

  The arms jerk away from the body, and the ball dribbles out of the hands, then drops, rolling under the bed.

  “Good!” Asa exclaims, looking like he wants to applaud.

  And then the session is over, and Asa hoists me out of the chair, like I’m a giant baby, his thick arm cradling my knees, another digging into my armpit. I forget to hold up my head, and it flops backward against his shoulder. This is life now.

  From the bed, to the chair, to the bed again.

  They turn me off at night—I’m supposed to call it “sleep,” but why bother?—and turn me on in the morning. Soon, they tell me, I will learn how to do it myself. Just like I will learn to monitor my status, to will the system diagnostics to scroll across my eyes. I will learn how to upload my memories for safekeeping. I will learn to speak. But that’s all later. Now, life is lived for me. Asa monitors me, Asa dresses me, Asa turns me off and on, and off again. It’s how I know one day has passed. And another. I play catch with Asa and I stare at the ceiling and I wait and I try not to wonder whether I would rather be dead or whether I already am.

  I hated to picture myself like that. Helpless. I tried to forget, but Sascha kept forcing me to remember. Like I was supposed to be proud or something. Like I was supposed to be happy. Even when I tuned her out, which was often, I couldn’t escape the memories. The frustration. The humiliation. As long as I was stuck in this place, part of me was still stuck back at the beginning, a patient—a victim.

  I guess remembering those early days in rehab was better than remembering what came before: the crash, the fire, the long hours frozen in the dark.

  Better, but not by much.

  “Are you worried that if you see them, you might find that you’ve changed?” Sascha asked. “That your family might think you’re different now?”

  “I am different now.” I wondered how much they paid her to force me to state the obvious.

  I could tell from her smile that I’d said the right thing, which meant I’d said the wrong thing, because it meant she thought we were about to make progress. Sascha was big on progress.

  I, on the other hand, was big on reality. A concept with which Sascha didn’t seem to be acquainted.

  “I’m not talking about physical differences, Lia. I’m talking about you.” She leaned forward, tapping me on the chest where my heart would have been. “About what’s going on in here, and”—she tapped the thick blond weave that covered the titanium plates—“up here. You’ve been through a serious trauma. That would be enough to change anyone.”

  “I guess.”

  “But I’m thinking it might be more than that.”

  Big surprise.

  “Many clients in your position worry about what the download process means for them. Whether they lost something of themselves in the procedure or if they’ll ever be the person they were before. They worry a lot about who they are now. Do these concerns sound familiar?”

  Sooner or later, wherever our conversations began—if you wanted to call them conversations rather than verbal dodgeball games where Sascha pelted and I ducked and weaved until, inevitably, she managed to slam me square in the face—we ended up in the same place.

  “I know who I am,” I said. Again. “Lia Kahn.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. I could see the beads of white frothy saliva forming in the corners of her mouth. I didn’t have any saliva. The tongue was self-lubricating. “Yes. You are Lia Kahn. But surely some of the things you’ve been seeing and hearing on the vids about…people like you…They don’t trouble you at all?”

  I was still practicing my emotional responses: when to raise the eyebrows and how far. What to do with the nose when the mouth was stretched into a smile. When to bare teeth, when to press lips together, how often to pretend to blink. It was all a lot of trouble, so most of the time, I just left my face as it was, blank and impassive. Sometimes that came in handy.

  “I’ve never seen any vids about ‘people like me,’” I lied. They didn’t go for concrete nouns here, nouns like “skinner” or “mech-head.” Or “machine.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of newfound terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter?

  Lesser of two evils, apparently: “Lia, you should be aware that you’re going to encounter some people who don’t yet understand the download process. You’re going to have to help them make peace with what’s happened to you. But I assure you that with time, those who know and love you will accept it.”

  But that was a lie. I knew what I was; I knew what the people who loved me could handle. They couldn’t handle this.

  You’d think I would at least get some superpowers as part of the deal. Legs that could run a hundred miles an hour. Arms that could lift a fridge. Supersight, superhearing, super something. But no. I get skin that washes itself and is impervious to paper cuts. Legs that have barely learned how to walk. A tongue that lies in my mouth like a dying fish flopping and thrusting and scraping against heavily fortified porcelain teeth, mangling every burst of sound I manage to choke out of the voice box.

  No lungs, just an intake hose feeding into the larynx, so I can shoot air through when necessary, make the artificial cartilage vibrate at the right frequency, funnel the sound waves up the throat, into the mouth. That was the first step. “A big one!” Asa says, clapping as I grunt and groan. I can do all the animal noises now. Monkey hoots. Cow moos. Dolphin squeals. And, as of this morning, sheep. “Baa! Baa!”

  “Your first word,” Asa cheers. “Almost.”

  I still hate him.

  You don’t need a tongue to sound like a sheep. But if you want to sound human, that’s another story.

  I wonder if Asa goes home at night and imitates me for his girlfriend; someone like him must have a girlfriend. Does he tell her how he’s spent all day with his hands on my body, prodding and pulling and stretching? Does he tell her how he dressed me until I learned to dress myself or about the day he opened the door without knocking and discovered me checking to make sure the body was—fully—anatomically correct? Is she jealous, I wonder, of the girl with the perfectly symmetrical synthetic breasts, the living doll that Asa molds into whomever he wants her to be? Or does she think of him as a handyman, spending his days tuning up a machine that just happens to look like a person and grunt like a chimpanzee?

  “Good night, Lia,” he says as he goes wherever it is he goes when he leaves the thirteenth floor and rejoins his life.

  “Unnnh,” I “say” in response. I am not allowed to use the voice synthesizer, not while I’m speech training, not—Asa says, and his boss, call-me-Ben, agrees—unless I want to be one of those clients who has to use it indefinitely, speaking with closed lips and a computerized monotone for the rest of my so-called life. “Omph. Aaaaap.”

  “You too, Lia. See ya.”

  “Baaa, baaa.”

  Bye, bye.

  I have fingers again, fingers that can barely feel but can mostly type. Which means it’s time to link in to the network. I will not speak, not with the computer voice and not with the animal groans, but I will type, I will face them, I will.

  I tell myself that every night.

  Tonight I do it.

  There is a six-week dead hole in my zone. I have never been off the network for that long, not since I was three and got my first account, my first ViM, and my first avatar, a purple bear with an elephant snout and a lion’s tail. I dressed him in a top hat and called him Bear Bear, which, at the time, I thought was clever.
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  It occurs to me now that if Bear Bear existed in the real world, he’d probably sound a lot like me.

  Every day, since I was three, life on the network shadowed life off the network, and sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes it was the network that seemed more real. Every text, every pic, every vid got posted in my zone, every fight and every make up was reflected in the zone. My first boyfriend gave me my first kiss in the zone, his av a red-haired ninja, mine a black-winged pixie with purple hair and knife-spiked heels. The zone was how I knew who I was, how I knew that I was, except now there’s a gap, starting with the accident and stretching on as if, for all those weeks, Lia Kahn ceased to exist.

  There are flowers waiting for me, flowers from everyone—not just Cass and Terra and even Bliss, but from all the randoms who wish they counted enough to get a niche in my zone, the ones whose names I don’t know and won’t remember, all of them leaving messages and pink-frosted cupcakes and pixilated teddies that remind me of Bear Bear. My zone is a shrine.

  Walker’s messages are behind the priv-wall, where no one can see them but me. There are only two, both voice-talk, and I play them four times, eyes closed, listening to his warbling tenor, wishing I had more of him than my least-favorite part.

  “Please don’t die,” the first one says. He sent it the night of the accident, when I was still alive, when, according to call-me-Ben, I was hemorrhaging and suffocating and seizing, all at the same time.

  The next one came weeks later, when I was lying in the bed, eyes closed, listening to footsteps and waiting to die.

  “The turtle is hungry,” it says. “The turtle is starving.”

  Code. Left over from our first few months, when Zo wouldn’t go away. She was always snooping in my room and hacking my zone, all big ears and a bigger mouth, so Walker and I talked in riddles and nonsense until eventually she left and we stopped talking altogether.

  “The turtle is hungry.”

  Meant “I love you.”

  I want to see him. I want to touch him. I want to at least voice him back. But what would I say?

  Ahhh ovvvvv ooooooo.

  We speak in different codes now.

  I stay in stealth mode. They are all linked in and to one another, Cass to Terra to Walker to Zo, all in priv-mode, and I wonder if they are talking about me, but I can’t find out without showing myself, and I can’t do that, not today.

  There are 7,346 new pub-pics and texts, and there will be more behind their priv-walls, and I know I should catch up, but I can’t do that, either.

  There’s no point.

  I try my favorite vidlife, technically a realistic one because there are no vampires or superheroes, but there’s nothing particularly realistic about the number of people Aileen manages to screw—and screw over—each night. Since the last time I watched, Aileen has already forgotten about Case, and is screwing some new guy and, secretly, the new guy’s sister, who’s engaged to Aileen’s former best friend’s cousin, and I can’t keep up with all the new names and bodies, and I don’t understand how so much can happen in six weeks.

  I used to feel sorry for the woman who lives as Aileen, and for Case and for all of them. I used to think it was pathetic, arranging your life around someone else’s script, letting some random text the words you were forced to speak. So they got rich on it, so they got famous, so I watched all night sometimes because I didn’t want to miss anything, so what? It wasn’t their life they were living, it wasn’t anyone’s.

  But now I don’t know.

  If someone gave me a script, if someone whispered in my ear and told me how to act, what to say, what to do, if I could be their puppet and they could pull the strings, that would be easier. That would, maybe, be okay. But I have no script and no off-screen directions, and I sit frozen, watching the screen, waiting to know what to do.

  Whatever else has changed, at least my av is still the same.

  There was a time when I changed it every day—new eyes, new hair, bunny whiskers one day, cat ears the next—but that was before. That was kid stuff. Now my av is me, the virtual Lia, the better Lia, the Lia that would exist in a world without limits. Purple hair so dark it looks black, until you see it shimmer in the light. Violet eyes; wide, long lashes pooling across half the head, like in the animevids. Pouty blue lips. The morning of the accident, I gave her a pink boa and spray-on mini, like the one I’d just seen a pop-up for but knew I probably wouldn’t have enough credit to buy, because that’s another of my father’s favorite lines: “ We’re not rich. I’m rich.” The credit is mine to ask for; his, depending on his mood, to deny. Now I wonder whether I am the virtual Lia, while my av is real. There is nothing left of what I used to be.

  But she is exactly the same.

  I didn’t get in touch with Walker, not that night or any of the nights that followed. Even after I got my voice back—a voice, at least, although it would never sound like mine—I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what I would say. I didn’t want to know what he would.

  “I still think it might be good for you to meet with one of our other clients,” Sascha said. “She’s your age.”

  That meant nothing. All the skinners were my age. The procedure wouldn’t work on adults—something about how their neural pathways weren’t malleable, couldn’t adjust to an artificial environment—and it hadn’t been approved for anyone younger than sixteen. If I’d had the accident a year earlier, I’d be dead right now. All dead, instead of…whatever this was.

  “So what?”

  “So I think you two have a lot in common,” Sascha said. “It might help to share your experiences, get her perspective on things. Plus she’s eager to meet you.”

  “All we have in common is this.” I looked down at the body. My body. “And you keep telling me that this doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You don’t want to meet her.”

  Sascha’s brilliant intuitive powers never ceased to amaze. “No.”

  “Maybe we should talk about why.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Sascha crossed her arms. I wondered if I’d finally managed to break through the professional placidness, if Sascha was about to prove she had an actual personality, one that could get irritated when a bitchy “client” pressed hard enough.

  Not a chance.

  “Let’s try something new,” she said with an I-have-a-secret-plan smile. “Why don’t you tell me what you want to talk about.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything. As long as it’s something.”

  I didn’t want to talk. That was the point. Now that I had my voice back, I had nothing to say.

  “Running,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head. Maybe because I thought about it all the time. How it would feel to run in the new body. Whether I would be slower or faster, whether I would find a new rhythm. What it would mean to run without getting out of breath; whether I could run forever. They told me the body would simulate exhaustion before it had reached its limits, a gauge to prevent total system failure, but no one knew exactly what those limits would be.

  “You’re a runner?” Sascha asked, faux clueless. It was her default mode; at least when she wasn’t acting the all-knowing wisdom dispenser. She knew I was a runner, because she had a file that told her everything I was. Everything she thought mattered, anyway.

  Was a runner.

  I nodded.

  “Do you miss it?”

  I shrugged.

  “You run on an indoor track or…”

  “Outside,” I said immediately.

  Sascha leaned forward, as she always did when she thought she was about to crack my code. “That’s unusual,” she said. “Someone your age, spending so much time outside.”

  “It’s required.” But that wasn’t true, not really. Yes, we were all forced to spend a few hours a week outdoors, but for most people, that was the end of it. Five whiny hours shivering in the grayish cold, then back inside. It was one way I’d always been different. The only way.r />
  “What do you like about it?” Sascha asked. “Running.”

  “I don’t know.” I paused. She waited. “It felt good. You know. Especially a long run. You get an adrenaline high. Or whatever.”

  “Have you tried it? Since the procedure?”

  I shook my head. There was supposedly a track somewhere in the building, but I hadn’t bothered to find it.

  “Why not?”

  I looked down. The hands were sitting in my lap. I stretched one of them out along my thigh. It felt good to be able to move again. After almost a month of rehab, I didn’t even need to think about it most of the time; the hands clenched themselves into fists when I wanted them to, the fingers closed around balls and hairbrushes and tapped at keyboards just like real fingers. They registered the fabric on my legs—standard issue, hideously ugly BioMax thermo-sweats. Not that I needed thermo-regulation now, not when I had it built in, but that’s what they had, so that’s what I wore, because it was easier than buying all new clothes, and my old clothes no longer fit.

  “What would be the point?” I said finally.

  “The point would be to feel good.”

  In my head I laughed. The mouth spit out something harsh and scratchy. Laughing was tricky.

  “You disagree?” Sascha asked.

  “I guess it depends on your definition of ‘feel.’”

  “You’re processing emotional and physical sensation differently now; that’s natural,” Sascha said, oozing understanding. Not that she could ever actually understand. “But your programming is designed to emulate the neurotransmitters that stimulate emotional response. Your emotions are the same, even if they don’t feel that way.”

  “I feel the same, even if I feel different? Is that supposed to make sense?”

  My father would kill me if he ever knew I was talking to an authority figure like this, even a figure with such questionable authority as Sascha.