The Body Market

by Donna Freitas

  I thought about the one Zeera had shown me last night. The Keeper was right about the devices being enticing. “So what’s the problem, then?”

  “That’s why they’re dangerous,” she said, opening her eyes again. “They become so addictive, and the escape to the virtual so appealing, that people are willing to abandon the Real World, even their own bodies.” She shook her head. “How do you think we got to this place? Even though people’s brains weren’t plugged in to the tablets, their minds and the technology became fused anyway. Some people became like zombies. I remember my own mother . . .” The Keeper’s stare traveled somewhere else, far away. Then she pulled herself back from that other place. “For better or worse, the split between worlds saved us. Those who favored technology could live a permanent virtual life, and those who wanted to wipe the scourge of technology from this earth got our wish. If you unleash it again, and on those who have little sense of history before our time now . . .” She sighed. “None of you truly understand what it was like, but I am old enough to remember.”

  I shook my head. “You make it sound so fatalistic.”

  Her eyes were storm clouds. “They were like viruses that infected the mind, Skylar.”

  Everything about me grew cold at the Keeper’s words. Had Zeera and I been wrong to talk of viruses as potentially good? “But using technology could save people from getting hurt. It could help us end the Body Market.”

  “Skylar, be careful—I beg you,” the Keeper said. “Technology changes us. Not just our behaviors, but our brain chemistry, without us even realizing it. So it makes sense that being plugged in would change it even more dramatically. You, of all people, should already know this. But trust me, if you reintroduce the old kind of technology, it will make its mark on our minds once again. The human brain is very malleable and that makes it vulnerable. Just because we can’t see it happening, like we would see a bruise on our skin, or feel a bone break in our limb, doesn’t mean that the brain isn’t affected. Or that the technology isn’t hurting us.”

  I picked up my tea, sipping it, wanting to chase away the chill that had settled over me. Was the Keeper right? Could those tiny slivers of pretty metal and circuitry really turn us into something resembling a zombie? And then, what would be the difference between being plugged in and living unplugged? It sounded like different versions of the same thing: living for the virtual and using the body as a way to do it, or transcending the body altogether for the identical result.

  But there was another way to look at things.

  “You said that this kind of technology acts like a virus of the mind,” I began. “But what if that’s how we need it to act—like a virus, but a good one. Zeera and I talked about exactly this. I think it’s how we’re going to free the bodies from the market.” I swallowed. “From Jude.”

  “Skylar, don’t kid yourself.” The Keeper’s face turned even darker. “Just because the technology might exist to do something like this, doesn’t mean you should use it to.” She was shaking and spilled her tea onto the table. She began sopping it up with a napkin.

  I placed a hand on her arm. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  The Keeper crumpled the stained napkin into her fist, the tea wetting her skin. Her eyes softened as she regarded me. “I know I must sound harsh, but if you go forward with this, I want you to understand the possible consequences.”

  I hesitated before speaking again. An image of Kit flashed before my eyes. “I have another favor to ask.” I took a deep breath and went on. “Take me back with you to New Port City.”

  The tired lines on the Keeper’s face deepened. “What could you need to do in New Port City? It’s dangerous for you.”

  I shook my head. “There’s something important I need to do. Someone I need to find.”

  “Skylar—”

  “Please. Please take me. Just trust me. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  The Keeper sighed. “All right. But I was planning on leaving tonight and you barely just got back.”

  “The sooner the better,” I said, letting out the air from my lungs, relieved she’d agreed. “Thank you.”

  The Keeper took my hand into hers. She looked at me a bit pleadingly. “Rain was so worried about you during the storm.”

  “Rain has other things on his mind these days,” I said quickly.

  “Don’t let appearances fool you,” the Keeper said. “You are number one on it.”

  I didn’t go to see Rain that morning. Not at first.

  I lingered in my room, in the shower, as I chose what clothes to wear for when the Keeper and I left, her warnings about technology and its unforeseen consequences still fresh and lingering. Eventually I found myself shutting the door of my room behind me, and descending the series of ramps that led to the cavern below the mansion. The faint rush of the surf along the rocks sounded louder as I got closer. The damp air made me shiver as the change in temperature passed over me.

  I went toward the spot where I knew that I’d find him.

  I could sense his presence, without even having to see him. In this way, Rain and I always seemed connected. He was kneeling on the ground, his head bent over a single long glass box.

  Bent over his father.

  I kneeled down next to him. He didn’t look at me. “Do you ever talk to him?” I asked.

  “He can’t hear me.”

  I stared into the face of Jonathan Holt, saw the resemblance between him and his son. “Just because he can’t hear you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say what you need to.” I turned my head, taking in Rain’s profile. “Besides, he might be able to hear you. When I was in the App World, I heard you sometimes,” I reminded him.

  Rain’s forehead came to rest against the glass. “I know. But you’re different.”

  I pressed my lips into a tight line. I was glad not to be anything like Jonathan Holt. He was the man who set me up to die. I knew Rain loved his father, but it was a terrible and complicated love. Maybe it was similar to the love I still felt for my sister. “Do you visit him here every day?”

  “Yes.” Rain leaned back on his heels, as though suddenly repelled by the sight of his father’s body. He moved across the aisle and sat with his back against one of the empty glass boxes. I joined him, our legs outstretched. “So you’re talking to me again?”

  “I never stopped talking to you,” I said.

  “You did.”

  “No. I stopped telling you everything. There’s a difference.”

  “Why are you here then?” Rain’s voice had grown cold.

  I lowered my eyes. I nearly wished Lacy would show her face, interrupting the awkwardness that kept settling between Rain and me. “I have an idea about how to put an end to the Body Market and I wanted to discuss it with you.”

  “I thought we agreed. We’re going to steal the bodies.”

  I shook my head. “I think there’s another way.”

  Rain stared directly ahead, the slope of his father’s body glowing across from us. “I’m listening,” he said, without inflection.

  “I’ve been thinking about the boy you mentioned, the one who woke up.”

  “And?” In this one word, a lilt returned to Rain’s tone. A slight curiosity.

  I inched closer, until my arms were nearly touching his. “What if we could wake up everyone?”

  Rain turned toward me. Curiosity gripped him fully now. “How would we do that?”

  “When you told me about that boy, it made me think of Trader, how he moves between worlds, and how maybe he could help . . . us.” I hesitated on that last word, hesitated to include myself with Rain once again.

  “Trader?” Rain scoffed, as though the very name was disgusting in his mouth. “But Trader betrayed you.”

  I locked eyes with him. Stopped short of reminding Rain that he betrayed me, too. “I’m not so sure if he did. I think it’s more complicated than we once thought.” I inhaled deeply. “Also, I want to find Trader because I think he and I might be
brother and sister,” I blurted, finally saying aloud this thing I’d been keeping to myself for so many months.

  Rain seemed prepared for many different explanations from me, minus this one. He worked his jaw, but it was like rubber that refused to take the right shape. Finally, five words emerged from his mouth. “But that would make you . . .”

  “Emory Specter’s daughter,” I said. I drew my knees to my chest to protect my stomach. I nearly wanted to retch.

  “Skylar,” Rain said, my name an astonished, quivering thing in the air between us. “Why would you think that?”

  I pulled my knees tighter, pressed them into my chest and rib cage. My bones felt thin and brittle, like those of a bird. “I’ve never known anything about my father. My mother never spoke about him. It was like she’d made me out of nothing. But the night of the party at Jude’s, Specter was there and he and Jude were talking. She addressed him as ‘Daddy.’” I buried my chin in the tops of my knees. Little by little I was making myself smaller.

  “But if Emory Specter is your father, that would mean . . .” Rain trailed off. He couldn’t seem to continue his sentence.

  “So many things,” I finished for him. “Including that not only is my sister willing to sacrifice me for the New Capitalists’ cause, but so is my father.” I shook my head. “Half my family. More than half if you don’t count Trader.”

  “All this time and you’ve never said a word.” Rain’s tone had softened.

  I turned my head so my cheek rested on my knees. “It’s not something I would be proud to admit. If it were true.” I blinked up at Rain.

  His eyes darted away—down the aisle, toward the floor, the ceiling. Everywhere but me. Eventually they settled. “Skylar, if it’s true, what you’re saying, it means other things, too. Not all of them bad.”

  “Oh yeah?” I couldn’t restrain the sarcasm. “Tell me one good thing.”

  Rain reached out his hand. It hung in the air, waiting for my hand to meet it. I didn’t reach back and after a moment he let it drop to the floor. “It would mean you and I have something very particular in common, that few others could understand.” His voice held an urgency. “We’d both be children of rulers from the App World.”

  I lifted my head and stared across the aisle at Jonathan Holt. “I don’t think it’s a good thing to be a child of a ruler, Rain.”

  “The good part,” Rain clarified, “is that we’d share something in common.”

  “There’s something else,” I said quickly, wanting to change the topic away from Rain and me, change it back to the issue at hand. “Something my sister said that I can’t get out of my head, about people waking up of their own volition. Of me waking up of my own volition.”

  “Go on,” Rain said.

  I took a deep breath. “The weeks Jude had me captive, she claimed I wouldn’t ‘stay under,’ that it’s as though my body kept wanting to ‘shift’ between worlds—those were her words. I’d always assumed she’d been drugging me at the mansion, but what if she’d been trying to plug me in and my brain simply refused? What if I can shift? What if there’s something in my mind that might allow me to move back and forth? What if it’s possible to develop the skill to resist the plugs, kind of like all those skills we’ve developed from gaming? Last night Zeera and I were talking about creating an App that could wake all the bodies, but she said that she needed to code it somehow, and it’s made me wonder . . .” I touched a finger to my temple. “If maybe the information we need has been right here all along.” I got up and went to one of the empty boxes, staring into all of that gleaming barren glass, staring at the headrest along the bottom and the contoured cradle for the body, with places for the legs, the arms, the hands and feet. The “plugs” were tiny wireless sensors along the cradle that tapped into the body’s nerve pathways. That was Marcus Holt’s genius. I flipped the latch and opened the top—it rose up so easily, like it was made of nothing. I put one foot over the side.

  “Skylar, don’t,” Rain said.

  Quickly, before I could decide otherwise, I slipped inside and lay down, placing my arms and legs and back in the right places. Then I reached up and pulled the top shut. At first I held my eyes closed, but when I was ready, I let them flutter open. When I’d plugged in as a child, I was asleep. Being unconscious was supposed to ease the transition between worlds.

  Could I really just . . . shift myself into the App World?

  Could anyone?

  Rain’s face appeared above me. “You shouldn’t be in there.”

  I turned my head from his worried eyes and saw Rain’s feet through the glass. His ankles, his calves, his knees, all the way to the middle of his thighs. The glass was crystal clear. I pressed the pads of my fingers into the gleam. When I pulled them away I saw the imprints they left. They marred the antiseptic quality of the chamber.

  “Skylar,” Rain urged.

  I ignored his pleas. I was still taking in the cold hardness at my back, the way it hit every bone, every vertebra. Rain opened the top of the case and cool air rushed inside. I gazed up at him. “I wanted to know what it was like.”

  Rain got down on his knees and hooked his fingers over the side of the case. His knuckles were white. “You wanted to know what it’s like to be plugged in?”

  I shook my head. “I wanted to know what it would be like to wake up inside a coffin. Like that boy.” I changed position so I was sitting cross-legged, my body penned inside the glass but my head above it, so Rain and I were face-to-face. I clasped my hands in my lap. “I’m thinking of all the bodies in the market, and what they might feel if we found a way to wake them up. The first things they would see. The first things they would fear. They would be disoriented. We would need to be there to help them. It would be a heist, but of a different sort.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “There would be so many bodies waking at once, it would be chaos. But the kind that could serve us.”

  Rain was studying me. Understanding had dawned on his face, followed by a sense of urgency. “The App you mentioned before . . . it would need to be a kind of . . . Shifting App, but of the Real World variety.”

  “Yes,” I said, jumping up and stepping outside the box.

  Rain started nodding. “I like it, Skylar. And I like even more how we’d be using the New Capitalists’ own technology against them.”

  I smiled at him—I couldn’t help myself. It was nice to be understood so completely. “Exactly!” I gestured at the edge of the tablet sticking up from the pocket of Rain’s jeans. “And on that note, it’s time we started training people how to use weapons other than knives.” I blinked, hope surging even higher in me. “What do you think?”

  Rain was still nodding, and now he smiled back at me. “All right, Skylar. I’m in. Let’s give it a try.”

  20

  Skylar

  zombies

  “SOME OF THE work may involve testing someone’s brain,” I explained. “We think there might be coding in certain minds—a kind of skill, like with gaming—that allows a person to plug in and unplug at will. It’s just a theory, but if it’s right, the implications are significant. It could allow us to take control of the New Capitalists’ network of plugs in the Body Market.”

  Zeera, Rain, Adam, Parvda, and I were standing in a circle by the endless rows of empty glass cases. The ocean shhh’d and sighed in the distance. We were discussing liberating the bodies at the market, going back for Sylvia, and saving Inara, too.

  Adam seemed horrified. “I thought we had a plan. I thought the plan was to go in and steal the bodies, and plug them back in here.”

  I wanted Adam’s support. “That’s one possibility, but this is an alternative.”

  Adam was shaking his head. “You want to wake people up? Just . . . unplug them?”

  “Yes. And no,” I said, trying to think of how to better explain. “I don’t want to do anything against anyone’s will. What I want is to give people a choice to unplug and reclaim their bodies.” I glanced at Rain. Thin
gs had begun to thaw between us. “It occurred to me that we could use the emergency broadcast system to announce that we were about to upload an App through the Body Market. Then people would have a chance to decide their futures for themselves. They could allow the App to override the plugs, or deny the download.”

  Rain was nodding. “I think I can help make the emergency broadcast happen.”

  “Explain to me again where this App will come from?” Adam still didn’t sound convinced.

  I eyed Rain again. It was true, he was excited about this plan, but he still didn’t like the part that was coming next. “Like I said, someone on this side would have to code what happens to the brain if a person is able to move between worlds at will, so we can create the App. To my brain, I mean,” I added quickly. “I’m volunteering. My brain might have the skill. That’s why I need to find Trader. He coded the Apps that got us here, once the borders closed. And if he’s willing to help us, then he and Zeera can work together.”

  Adam was staring at Rain, openmouthed. “You agreed to this?”

  Rain was still watching me. “It’s a good idea Adam.”

  “A dangerous idea,” Adam corrected. “We’re talking about playing around with Skylar’s brain.”

  Parvda’s hand crept toward mine from my left.

  I wove my fingers through hers. “Nothing bad is going to happen to me. I’ll be all right,” I said, though my heart was pounding in my chest. I thought about the day I woke up on the cliff, and those weeks my sister held me captive and unconscious, her scientists poking and prodding me while I dreamed. “I’m used to people studying me. Or at least, I should be by now.”

  Adam was shaking his head. “As to the rest of it, it sounds like you’re planning some sort of zombie apocalypse. These people are going to wake up and be disoriented. They’re not going to know what happened. Most of them probably won’t even be able to walk!”