Skinned

by Robin Wasserman

  “When I get angry, my stomach clenches,” Sascha said. “I feel sick. When I’m upset, my hands tremble. Sometimes I cry. What happens when you’re upset?”

  I said nothing.

  Which was pretty accurate.

  “Without a somatic response, it’s natural that the emotions will seem weaker to you,” she said. “More distant. But the stronger the emotion, the more ‘real’ it may feel, partly because you’ll be too consumed with the powerful emotion—or sensation—to analyze all the things you’re not feeling. And as your mind relaxes into old patterns and finds new ones, as it will—”

  “I’ll be my old self again. Right.”

  “Lia, haven’t you been able to find any advantages to your new body?”

  That had been my “homework” from the other day: design a pop-up for the download process, complete with catchy slogan, and a list of fabulous advantages available to every download recipient. Sascha thought it would tap into my creativity skills.

  It turned out I didn’t have any.

  “I can link in whenever I want,” I muttered. But that wasn’t new. For my sixteenth birthday, I’d finally gotten a net-lens, which meant that once I got used to jamming a finger in my eye, I could link with a blink, just like the pop-ups said. Could superimpose my zone and my av over blah reality, type on a holographic keyboard that only I could see. But the pop-ups didn’t mention how it made you nauseated and made your head burn. Now I had a built-in net-lens, and migraines weren’t an issue.

  Hooray for me.

  “Good,” Sascha said, nodding. “Anything else?”

  “I guess no more getting sick.” Not that anyone got sick much these days, anyway. Not if you could afford the med-tech, and if you couldn’t, well, you had bigger problems than the flu. “And if I get hurt, it won’t, you know. Hurt. Much.” There would be pain, they’d told me that. Of all the sensations, the neurochemistry of pain was the easiest to mimic, the best understood—and the most necessary. Pain alerts the brain that something is wrong, call-me-Ben had said. An alarm you can’t ignore. So there would be pain, they had promised, and I knew it was possible, because I’d felt it when I was still trapped in the bed, when it seemed to crawl out from inside my head. But out of the bed, back in the world, pain was just as distant as everything else.

  “You’re beautiful,” Sascha said. “That’s something.”

  I was beautiful before.

  “And then there’s the big thing,” Sascha prompted. “A lot of people would envy you for that. If the government allowed it, a lot of people might even download voluntarily.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “To never age…” Sascha looked dreamy, and her hand flickered to the corner of her left eye, where the skin was pulled taut. “Some might call that lucky. Miraculous, even.” She couldn’t be more than seventy, I decided, since after that even the best doctors left behind a few stretch marks—and no younger than thirty, because you can always tell when someone’s had their first lift-tuck, and she definitely had. First, second, and probably eighth, I guessed. No one so lame could be any younger than that.

  Call-me-Ben was the one who’d taught me how to back up my memories each night, preserving that day’s neural adjustments and accretions in digital storage—“just in case.” He’d had the same dreamy look as Sascha. They all did, when the subject came up.

  “The body ages,” I countered. “They say it’ll only last fifty years.”

  “The body,” Sascha said. “But now you know bodies can be replaced.”

  The body would last fifty years. But brain scans could be backed up and stored securely, and bodies could be replaced. And replaced again.

  I had died more than a month ago; I could live forever. Exactly like this.

  Lucky me.

  VISITING DAY

  “Kahns don’t lie.”

  They were late. Only by ten minutes, but that was weird enough. Kahn family policy: never be late. It meant an immediate disadvantage, a forfeit of the moral high ground. Still, at 10:10 a.m., I was alone in the “social lounge,” which, if the building-block architecture, hard-backed benches, and spartan white walls were any indication, was clearly intended to preclude any socializing whatsoever. I didn’t want them to come. Any of them. I hadn’t invited them, hadn’t agreed to see them…hadn’t been given a choice.

  10:13 a.m.: Waiting, my back to the door, staring at the wall-length window without seeing anything but my reflection, ghosted into the glass.

  10:17 a.m.: Three more ghosts assembled behind me, milky and translucent on the spotted pane. Three, not four.

  Not that I’d expected Walker to show up, to pester my parents until he got an invitation to come along, to perch nervously in the backseat, his long legs curled up nearly to his chest, his back turned to Zo as he stared out the window, watching the miles roll by, suffering the Kahn family as a means to an end—to me. If he’d wanted to visit, he wouldn’t have any need to tag along with them.

  If he’d wanted to visit, he already would have.

  “Lia,” my father said from the doorway.

  “Honey,” my mother said, in the tight, shivery voice she used when she was trying not to cry.

  Zo said nothing.

  I turned around.

  They stood stiff and packed together, like a family portrait. One where everyone in the family hated one another but hated the photographer more. The huddle broke as they moved from the doorway, my mother and father a glued unit veering toward me, Zo’s vector angling off to a bench far enough from mine that, if she kept her head in the right position, would keep me out of her sight line altogether.

  My mother held out her arms as if to hug me, then dropped them as she got within reach. They rose again a moment later; I stepped backward just in time. My father shook my hand. We sat.

  My mother tried to smile. “You look good, Lee Lee.”

  “This brain hates that nickname just as much as the last one.”

  She flinched. “Sorry. Lia. You look…so much better. Than before.”

  “That’s me. Clean, shiny, and in perfect working order.” I raised my arms over my head, clasped them together like a champ. “You’d think I was fresh off the assembly line.” I told myself I was just trying to help them relax. My mother wiped her hand across her nose, quick, like no one would notice the violation of snot-dripping protocol.

  “Lia—” My father hesitated. I waited for him to snap. The unspoken rule was, we could—and should—mock our mother for her every flaky, flighty word until he deemed (and you could never tell when the decision would come down) that we had gone too far. “The doctors tell us you’re nearly ready to come home. We’re looking forward to it.”

  That was it. His tone was civil. The one he used for strangers.

  You did this, I thought, willing him to look at me. Not over me, not through me. And he did, but only in stolen glances that flashed to my face, then, before I could catch him, darted back to the floor, the ceiling, the window. Whatever I am now, you chose it for me.

  “Zo, don’t you have something for your sister?” my mother asked.

  Zo shifted her weight, then rolled her eyes. “Whatever.” She dug through her bag and pulled out a long, thin rod, tossing it in my direction. “Catch.” I knocked it away before it could hit me in the face, but the body’s fingers weren’t fast enough to curl around it. The stick clattered to the floor.

  “Zo!” my mother snapped.

  “What? I said ‘catch.’”

  I picked up the stick, turning it over and over in my hands. It was a track baton.

  “We won the meet last week,” Zo muttered. “Coach wanted me to give it to you. I don’t know why.”

  “We?”

  My father smiled for the first time. At Zo. “Your sister’s finally discovered a work ethic.” He beamed. “She joined the track team. Already third in her division, and moving up every week, right?”

  Zo ducked her head; the better to skip the fakely modest smile.


  “You hate running,” I reminded her.

  She shrugged. “Things change.”

  “Tell us about your life here,” my mother said. “How do you spend your days? You’re not working too hard, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “And you’re getting enough to—” She cut herself off, and her face turned white before she could finish her default question: You’re getting enough to eat?

  “Ample power supply around here,” I said, tapping my chest and noting the way her smile tightened around the corners. “My energy converter and I are just soaking it in.”

  I wish I could say I wasn’t trying to be mean.

  She didn’t ask any more questions. Instead she talked. Aunt Clair was helping design a new virtual-museum zone with a focus on early twenty-first-century digital photography. Great-uncle Jordan had come through his latest all-body lift-tuck without a scratch, literally, since the procedure had worn away that nasty scar he’d gotten skateboarding in the exquisitely lame Anti-Grav Games, which, it turned out, were actually full-grav, anti-knee-pad. Our twin cousins, Mox and Dix, were outsourcing themselves to Chindia—Mox had snagged an internship at some Beijing engineering firm and Dix would do biotech research for a gen-corp in Bombay. Last I’d seen them, Dix had “accidentally” broken Zo’s wrist in a full-contact iceball fight, and Mox had tried to make out with me. Second cousins, he argued, so it was okay. Bon voyage, boys.

  Then there was our parents’ best friend, Kyung Lee, who was having trouble with his corp-town, the workers who lived there rioting for better med-tech, something about a biotoxin that had slipped through the sensors. Kyung was afraid if things didn’t calm down soon, he might have to ship them all back to a city and hire a whole new crop, although the threat of that, according to my mother, should be enough to settle anyone.

  As the half-hour mark passed, I tuned out. After another twenty minutes my father stood up, giving his pants a surreptitious brush, like he wanted to shed himself of the rehab dirt lest it soil the seat of his car. A new car, according to my mother. After all, I’d ruined the last one.

  “This has been a lot of excitement for you today, Lia,” he said politely. “You must be tired.”

  I didn’t get tired anymore. I only shut down at night because it was on the schedule, and I only followed the schedule because I didn’t have anything better to do.

  I nodded. They filed toward the doorway, and I followed, half-wishing I could leave with them and half-wishing they would go and never come back. This time my mother forced herself to hug me, and I let her, although I kept my arms at my sides. It was strange to have her so close without breathing in the familiar scent of rosemary. But then, it was probably strange for her, with our chests pressed together and her arms around my shoulders, that I wasn’t breathing at all. I thought about faking it for a few seconds, just to make things easier for her. But I didn’t.

  “We’re so proud of you,” she whispered, as if I had done anything other than what I was told—turn off, turn on, survive. I felt something brush my cheek as she pulled away, but I couldn’t tell what. Maybe a stray hair. Maybe a tear. Maybe I was just wanting to feel something so badly that I’d imagined it.

  My father squeezed my shoulder. The new body was taller than mine, I realized. He and I were the same height. He didn’t say he was proud of me.

  Another family policy: Kahns don’t lie.

  Zo was last, and I stopped her before she could slip out the door. Her hair was looking better than usual. Not so greasy. And cut shorter, so that it bounced around her shoulders, the way mine used to when it was real.

  “Zo, people at school…” I kept my voice low, so our parents wouldn’t hear. “Are people asking about me? Or, you know. Talking about me?”

  She gave me a funny half smile. “Aren’t they always?”

  “No, I mean…” I didn’t know what I meant. “Have you seen, I mean, have you talked to any of my friends? You know, Terra or Cass or…”

  “Walker knows I’m here, if that’s what you’re asking.” Zo leaned against the doorway and kept scratching at the bridge of her nose, which, unless she’d developed a rash, seemed mostly like a convenient way to stare at her hand rather than at me.

  “Did he—” But if he’d sent along a message, she would have said so already. And if he hadn’t, I didn’t want to ask. Besides, he would never reach for me that way, through Zo. “Is he doing okay?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but the world is managing to revolve on its axis even without your daily presence,” Zo snapped.

  “Rotate.”

  “What?”

  “The world rotates on its axis,” I corrected her, because it was all I could think of to say.

  “Right. It revolves around you. How could I forget?”

  I grabbed her arm. She yanked it away, like I’d burned her. Her face twisted, just for a second, and then the apathetic funk was back so quickly, I almost thought I’d imagined the change. “Why are you acting like such a bitch?” I asked.

  “Who says I’m acting?”

  I hadn’t necessarily expected her to burst into tears and sweep me into her arms when she first saw me, just like I hadn’t expected her to tell me how much she loved me and missed me or to gush about how scary it had been when she thought I was going to die. I guess, knowing Zo, I hadn’t even expected her to be particularly nice. But we were sisters.

  And she was the reason I had been in the car.

  I’d expected…something.

  “Come on, Zo. This isn’t you.”

  She gave me a weird look. “How would you know?”

  “I’m your sister,” I pointed out, aiming for nasty but landing uncomfortably close to needy.

  She shrugged. “So I’m told.”

  After she left, I sat down again on one of the uncomfortable benches and stared out the window, imagining them piling into the car, one big happy Lia-free family, driving away, driving home. Then I went back to my room, climbed into bed, and shut myself down.

  I’d set my handy internal alarm to wake me nine hours later. But the brain was programmed to wake in the event of a loud noise. A survival strategy. The footsteps weren’t loud, but in the midnight quiet of floor thirteen they were loud enough.

  “Sleeping Beauty arises.” A girl stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the hallway fluorescents, a cutout shadow with billowing black hair, slender arms, and just the right amount of curves. “I guess I don’t get to wake you with a kiss.” She stroked her fingers across the wall and the room came to light. I sat up in bed.

  It wasn’t a girl. It was a skinner.

  I knew it must be the one Sascha had told me about, the one I was supposed to be so eager to bond with. I was mostly eager for her to get out and leave me to the dark. She didn’t.

  “You’re her,” I said. “Quinn. The other one.”

  She crossed the room and, uninvited, sat down on the edge of the bed. “And here I thought I was the one and you were the other one.” She held out her hand.

  I didn’t shake.

  Instead I stared—I couldn’t help it. I’d never seen another mech-head, unless you counted the vids. Or the mirror. So this was what my parents saw when they looked at me. Something not quite machine and not quite human, something that was definitely a thing, even if it could lift its hand and tip its head and smile. It was better at smiling than I was, I noticed. If you focused on the mouth and looked away from the dead eyes, it almost looked real.

  “You’re Lia,” Quinn said, dropping her hand after realizing I wasn’t going to take it. “And yes, it is nice to meet me. Thanks for saying so.”

  I didn’t speak, figuring I could wait her out until she got bored and left. But the silence stretched out; I got bored first.

  “Quinn what?” I asked.

  “Lia who?” she said. “Or Lia when? Lia why? If you want to play a game, you have to fill me in on the rules. But fair warning: I play to win.”

  So did I. At least, when I
was in the mood. Which I wasn’t.

  “What’s your last name?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t ask if it mattered, I just asked what it was.”

  “It was something,” she said. “But now it’s irrelevant.”

  I didn’t get her, and suspected that was the idea, like she thought I’d be so intrigued by her ridiculous air of mystery that I wouldn’t kick her out. I wondered if Sascha had put her up to it. If so, they were both seriously overestimating my level of curiosity. “What do you want?” I knew I sounded like a sulky kid. I didn’t care.

  “Heard your parents finally showed. Figured I would see how it went.”

  They’d driven two hours for a fifty-minute visit, then gotten the hell out.

  “Great,” I said sourly. “Heartfelt family reunion. You know how it is.”

  She raised her eyebrows. It was a nice trick, one I resolved to master myself. “Not really. My family’s not an issue.”

  “Too perfect for ‘readjustment pains’?” I used Sascha’s favorite phrase for anything and everything that could possibly go wrong.

  “Too dead.”

  “Oh.”

  I refused to feel guilty. Not when she’d so blatantly manipulated the conversation to reach this point. “Sorry.” I lay back down again and turned over on my side, my back to her; universal code for “go away.”

  “Don’t you want the details?” Quinn asked, sounding disappointed. “The whole poor little orphan saga, from tragic start to triumphant finish?”

  If I’d still had lungs, I would have sighed. Or faked a yawn. “Look, if Sascha sent you in here to give me the whole ‘you should be grateful for what you have’ guilt trip, I’m not interested. Yeah, it sucks that your parents are dead, but that doesn’t make mine any easier to deal with.”

  Silence.

  I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.

  “I’m sorry.” I twisted in bed, risking a glance at her face.

  She raised just one eyebrow this time, which was even more impressive. “Yeah. You are.” She turned away, revealing a broad swath of artificial flesh exposed by her backless shirt. I didn’t know how she could stand it. Even at night I tried to cover up as much as possible. The more of me I could hide under the clothes, the less there was for others—for me—to see. Beneath the clothes I could imagine myself normal. Quinn, on the other hand, left very little to the imagination. She stalked out of the room, but paused in the doorway, tapping her fingers against the wall console. Lights off, lights on. Lights off. “You coming?”