The Body Electric - Special Edition

by Beth Revis

  “I recognized her picture from your profile,” I lie. “The one we had for your reverie.”

  The representative grabs my elbow and steers me further away from the crowd. “A reverie,” he says, light filling his empty eyes. “Could I see her again in a reverie?”

  “Er…” I hesitate. Going into a reverie now would probably be easy for him, and the perfect cover for me to sneak into his mind and see what he’s been hiding from PA Young.

  But it feels… so wrong. So very wrong, to use this man’s grief at the loss of his wife and daughter so I can spy on him.

  “Please,” he says, and I notice the haggardness of his face, the dark circles under his eyes.

  My spine stiffens. Regardless of who the terrorists killed in the android attack—of who the terrorists truly are—the guilt of what he’s done lies at his feet, just like that teddy bear with pink bows and the wilting flowers littered with flickering candles. I can’t let pity blind me to the fact that he got himself tied up with treasonous plots and terrorists, and that his family paid the price. He’s the one who played with fire, who considered joining the terrorists. I can’t think in terms of the Zunzana or the terrorists or the government—I just need to find the murderers.

  It’s my job to stop them.

  That is something I can do.

  “Come with me,” I say. “We can give you a reverie session now.”

  When we reach the Reverie Mental Spa, I breathe a sigh of relief that Ms. White is there. To her credit, she immediately engulfs the representative in sympathy as she leads him to the reverie chamber—giving me time to slip away and enter the hidden chamber.

  My hands shake as I prepare the reverie chair for my entry into Representative Belles’s mind. I swallow down the lump rising in my throat. I can’t let myself slip into nightmares like before. I can’t afford a hallucination, not here, not now.

  A faint hum fills my ears as the sonic hood warms up. It reminds me of the sound the androids made, just before they blew up.

  I lower the sonic hood over my head, and then I’m gone.

  There is a storm inside Representative Belles’s mind. As soon as I enter his dream, I can sense it. The air is heavy with the scent of warm, wet earth, and I can hear—though I cannot see—crashing waves and distant cries of fear.

  It’s all dark. This is a big storm, the kind that floods the streets and drowns the boats. At first, because of the darkness, I fear it’s what the old people call xita tal-ħamrija—a storm where sands from the deserts to the south are carried in clouds and dumped upon Malta. Slowly, the world brightens. The light is eerie, almost green. The city is abandoned—I don’t even see Representative Belles here.

  A giant raindrop falls on my shoulder. I wipe my hand on my skin, and it comes away red. Definitely a soil storm, then—sometimes people call it “blood rain” because the earth is reddish and leaves everything—windows, cars, clothes—stained a dusty, deep pink.

  More rain falls. It falls in sheets, like an avalanche of water, and it’s sticky, viscous—not grainy like xita tal-ħamrija. And then I realize: this isn’t dirty water falling from the sky.

  It is—literally—blood.

  I look up, and a droplet of blood splashes directly into my eye. I curse, rubbing my face, trying to get the blood out, but it’s everywhere, it’s like trying to dry off in the middle of the ocean. Shielding my face as best I can, I stare up into the sky.

  I am in the center of a cyclone.

  Giant white clouds swirl like a spiraling galaxy above me, the eye a tiny dark speck. The storm rages, throwing out bloody rain like punches, the wind so vicious it tears my clothes and cuts my skin.

  Representative Belles’s mind is swirling with dark thoughts—bloody thoughts—and they have created the biggest storm I have ever seen.

  I shut my eyes as thunder rolls overhead, lightning fizzling and cracking so close to me that the hairs on my arm stand up. Representative Belles is here, somewhere in this storm. I have to find him. I have to stop the cyclone. I have to get him into a peaceful reverie, something that he can hold on to while I root around his brain, looking for answers.

  I focus all of my concentration on stopping the bloody rain. The drops come slower and slower. I take a deep breath, imagining the clouds breaking up, spinning into fluffy bits of cotton-candy like clouds. I don’t open my eyes until the sounds of beating rain disappear and I can feel the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on my face.

  When I look up, though, the swirling cyclone is still there—it’s just bright white clouds, no rain. It hangs over us, a reminder that the representative’s mind cannot be entirely cleared of his pressing thoughts. But since it’s no longer raining down blood, thunder, and lightning, I leave it.

  Sunlight beams from the clouds, perfectly illuminating the representative. He’s crouched on the ground, covered in blood.

  At first I think he’s injured—a rare thing to see in any reverie, whether it be happy or not. But then he blinks, the whites of his eyes standing out impossibly bright against his dark-red stained face, and I realize—he’s not soaked in his own blood. This storm was the chaos of his mind; the blood was that of his wife and daughter, lying dead on the ground before him.

  “I’m sorry!” he screams at their bodies. “I’m sorry!”

  The representative wanted a chance to see his wife and daughter again in a reverie, but it wasn’t to relive a happy memory. It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true. I have to make him slip into a different reverie, one where he can forget.

  I shut my eyes, focusing on my concentration—

  “What are you doing, boy?” a gruff voice asks.

  The representative looks up at his grandfather. As he stares at him, the city fades away into an orange grove, and Representative Belles’s sorrow melts away to a time before he was a father, before he had responsibilities, before he became guilty of not fulfilling them.

  But the bodies are still there. He almost trips on them as he approaches his grandfather.

  “They’re gone,” Representative Belles says hollowly.

  “Family is never really gone,” his grandfather says.

  Before my eyes, the blood slowly fades, and with it, the last of Representative Belles’s fears and worries. For just this moment, he’s caught up in the reverie. He’s reliving his childhood. There are dark clouds on the horizon—he’s not quite forgotten everything—but it’s enough.

  I can get to work.

  thirty-five

  Last time, I was searching blindly, hoping to stumble upon something I can use. But this time, as I mold Representative Belles’s dreamscape, I know exactly what I’m looking for.

  I turn a corner of Representative Belles’s mind into an office filled with filing cabinets. In each cabinet, there’s a folder. In each folder, there’s a memory. I crack my knuckles and start rifling through his mind.

  Music wafts through the air. I… I know this song. “Moon River,” Dad’s favorite tune.

  I turn slowly.

  Far away, almost out of sight, the representative is speaking with the memory of his grandfather. But here, close to me, is…

  “Dad?” I ask.

  But no one’s there. Just the music, and a feeling like I’m being watched.

  I shrug it off, turning again to the files of Representative Belles’s mind. Then I see exactly what I was looking for. A filing cabinet with a label across the top. The label is hand-written in green ink the same color as the reverie drug.

  JACK TYLER

  Locked. My fingers strain against the metal, tugging at the drawer, but it’s impossible. I can’t open it.

  “Now, why do you suppose that is?” a voice calls.

  I spin around, my heart racing.

  Far away, almost out of sight, the representative is speaking with the memory of his grandfather. But here, close to me, is…

  “Dad?” I call out to
him.

  Dad doesn’t stop as he twirls Mom—young Mom, healthy Mom—around in tune to the music. They sway together, swirling and laughing and ignoring me.

  The dream stutters. Their movements jerk left-right-left-left. The image of my parents dancing pauses and restarts, a few seconds off-time, like a scratched digi file.

  They’re not real.

  I mean, I know they’re not real. Nothing’s real here in the dreamscape. But they’re not even a real part of the dreamscape.

  Of course not.

  They’re not a part of Representative Belles’s dreams.

  They’re part of mine.

  “Go away,” I say as firmly as I can.

  I hear a low buzzing in the back of my mind.

  “Can’t!” Dad calls over Mom’s shoulder. She leans against him, as if she hasn’t noticed me, or even that Dad is speaking. ”This is your reverie. You control us.”

  “This isn’t my reverie!” I march closer to Mom and Dad, but every step I take puts them another step further away from me. It’s an elegant movement, a part of the dance, but they are always out of reach from me.

  “It’s your filing cabinet, too,” Dad adds, nodding his head to where I was working. I spin on my heel, just in time to see the locked cabinet labeled with Jack’s name disappear in a puff of green smoke.

  “It wasn’t mine,” I say. “I’m in Representative Belles’s reverie.”

  “You, Ella, you are the one who dreams in filing cabinets.” Dad twirls Mom on her heel, and she giggles. “It’s because filing systems are the way computers are organized. A long time ago, when computers were first invented, the developers organized the systems like filing cabinets, because that’s what they used to categorize and keep records. We don’t use filing cabinets any more, but the computers still do. It’s an efficient way to organize.”

  “Gee, thanks, Dad,” I say, moving past him. “Way to make me sound like an android with a computer for a brain.”

  “That was what my research was focused on. Android brains and nanobots, nanobots and android brains.”

  “I. Know.” I try to back away from Mom and Dad, but, just as before they swirled outside of my reach, now their dance steps bring them closer and closer to me.

  “Go away,” I say again, but this time the words come out desperate. “P-p-p-please.” Stutter-jerk-jerk. My body twitches.

  I’m wavering in and out of existence.

  Oh, God. I stare up into the bright white, swirling clouds of the cyclone overshadowing this whole reverie. What if I wake up while I’m still in Representative Belles’s mind? What would happen to him?

  What would happen to me?

  “Ellllla!” Dad calls as he twirls Mom around. Her dress swishes around her ankles, black and red and beaded, twirling into poofy white, a wedding gown that evaporates before my eyes, leaving behind nothing but a salt-water soaked sarong that falls off her hips, exposing a slinky silk number.

  “Da-ah-ad?” I stu-stu-stutter.

  I clutch my head. “What’s hap-hap-happening?”

  The music stops. My parents are gone.

  Silence. What the hell was that?

  I take a deep breath. I don’t have time to go crazy. I have work to do, and the representative will wake up any minute.

  I turn to the filing cabinets again. There’s no longer a drawer labeled with Jack’s name, but I throw open the one labeled “Z.”

  A misplaced file folder—a misplaced memory—flops out onto the floor as if it were moving of its own volition. I pick it up and read the label.

  Nanorobotics and Cyborg Control in Android Theory: The Tie Between Biology and Technology

  Something like a raindrop falls on the back of my neck. I rub it, looking up. The cyclone is darker overhead—is Representative Belles falling out of his reverie and into a nightmare? But when I look past my workstation, I see him, still talking to his grandfather, completely ignorant of the darkening sky.

  And then I see what’s made the sky so dark.

  A swarm of bees swoop down in a funnel cloud. The cyclone is not made of clouds, no, it’s made of bees. They are a swirling mass of black and yellow and stinging. They buzz so loudly that my entire body thrums with it.

  I scream, cover my head, drop to the ground.

  The bees roll over me like boiling water. I scream again, and the bees fill my mouth, the musty-fuzzy bodies pushing against the inside of my cheeks, the stingers clacking against my teeth. They spill down my throat, and I am choking on bees, swallowing them, their stingers scraping my esophagus, their buzzing filling my belly. The bees chew—they chew and sting my cheek-flesh, they are chewing a hole in me, a stinging, chewing hole, and they spill out of the empty recesses of where my face is. Pus and blood drip off me of me so profusely that it feels as if I am melting.

  The bees burrow into my flesh, under my skin. They crawl up my sinuses, their little feet tugging at my nose hairs. They ram their fat bodies into my ear canals, filling my brain with buzzing, scraping their stingers along the sensitive skin of my ear.

  They spill from my eyes like tears.

  The bees, the bees, the bees are everywhere, and they are eating me alive.

  I scream, but the sound comes out as bzznnznznnnnzbznnzbzz.

  “Ella?” My father’s voice. “Ella, get up. What are you doing on the floor?”

  I open my eyes.

  There are no bees. Beyond us, Representative Belles is completely undisturbed in his own reverie.

  My father stands over me, looking disappointed.

  “Really, Ella,” Dad says, his voice dripping with derision. “You’re going to have to zzz wake up. Zzz. Or elzzze.”

  Tears and snot stream down my face. “Or else what?” I whisper, my voice cracking, swollen from a hundred bee-stings.

  “Or elzzze,” he says, sneering at me as a single bee crawls over his face, its pointy feet pricking the skin under his left eye, “you’ll zzz go mad.”

  thirty-six

  I wake with a jerk and throw back the sonic hood. My chest is heaving, and my heart is racing. My eyes are wide, looking at nothing.

  I have to consider the very real possibility that I am literally going insane.

  I curl up onto my side, drawing my knees to my chest, painfully pressing them against the mechanics of the reverie chair. It’s getting worse. Longer hallucinations, more vivid horrors. More uncontrollable. Like a storm, a cyclone. Maybe it wasn’t Representative Belles’s mind that was so chaotic and violent. Maybe I was the one who was tainting his mind.

  What happens when I lose control? What happens when I can’t pull the storms back, when I can’t escape the nightmare?

  I stare down at the reverie chair in horror. What if I get stuck in a reverie? I cannot imagine a more perfect hell than being trapped inside my own mind.

  “I’m so glad your experience this time was peaceful and calming!” Ms. White’s voice trills through the secondary chamber room. I freeze. I’d been so anxious to just get out that I forgot how important this session was.

  Representative Belles’s answer is too low for me to make out, but he seems fairly positive about the reverie. I turn on the video feed and see Ms. White is scheduling more appointments for him. I’m seized with anxiety—more appointments means more times for me to go into his reverie, which means more chances for me to get stuck in my nightmares. My skin crawls with the feeling of imaginary bees roiling over my body.

  I’m still in the reverie chamber when Ms. White slides open the door. “Ella!” she exclaims. “Oh, you darling girl! What did you discover?”

  I dodge the question. “Did Belles have a good reverie?”

  Ms. White’s smile falters. “Is there a reason why he shouldn’t have?”

  “I had trouble getting into his mind,” I say.

  Ms. White sits down heavily beside me. “Nothing unusual on the scans,” she says. “I did notice that during the reverie, the representative moved his hands a lot, like he was trying to swat away
bugs.”

  Or bees, I think.

  “He was outside with his grandfather in the dreamscape,” I say. “There were bugs there.”

  And a hundred million bees.

  “Did you discover anything useful?” Ms. White asks. “I think the grandfather reveries are coming from his thoughts on family—understandable, given the circumstances.”

  Understandable—but he had a reverie about his grandfather before his family was attacked. Were they threatened prior to the android explosion?

  “Ms. White?” I ask, searching her eyes. “Are you… are you worried?”

  “Worried?”

  “That what we’re doing… is it right?”

  Ms. White sits down slowly. “I… I’m not sure,” she confesses. “I want to protect our nation, our family, to make sure the Secessionary War never happens again, but…”

  But.

  She rubs her arm, her cyborg arm, replaced after she lost it in the war. “It was terrible,” she says, her gaze dropping from mine. “The war. I didn’t even see any battles, not really, but I was there when Valetta was bombed, I saw the city sink into the sea.” Her voice cracks, and I see unshed tears in her eyes. “Yes—yes, this is worth it. If we can ensure that a war like that never happens again…”

  I bite my lip. “I’m not sure. Maybe some wars are worth fighting.”

  Ms. White drops her hand to my knee. “These are the terrorists that killed your father, Ella,” she says. “What greater war could there be but to fight them?”

  I nod, but I don’t meet her eyes again. This feels wrong. Jack didn’t seem like a terrorist, and I don’t think he was involved in Dad’s murder.

  “Anyway, the reverie,” Ms. White adds, “Remember, reveries can often be symbolic, like dreams. If he had a pressing thought about something, it should show up in the reverie.”