Music pumped and a few mechs twirled in the center of the observatory, their rhythmic movements mirroring the wild gyrations of the dreamers projected above them. Several others were playing at slam, a mech riff on rugby that forewent the ball and the scoring in favor of mass tackles, often propelled by sneaker jets. Points were awarded for style and speed of collision; losers were often required to relinquish an article of clothing. Judging from the flesh on display, they’d been playing for a while.
“Should we congratulate the death-day boy?” I asked, scanning the crowd for Brahm.
“I think he’s busy,” Ani said sourly, jerking her head at the wide metal stump at the center of the room, which Quinn claimed had once held a massive telescope, before the cloud cover rendered it useless. Only the base had been left behind, a vestigial artifact, its metal skin glowing in the flickering lights, an altar to the party gods. And perched on top, two bodies in their death-day suits, swaying in time to a music none of us could hear—the divine offering.
“You want to get out of here?” I asked Ani, as Quinn stuck her tongue down Brahm’s throat.
Ani shrugged. “Everyone deserves a d-day kiss, right?”
“You want me to go up there and drag her off him?” I said, only half-joking. “Because I will.”
Ani shook her head, her face a rictus of pleasant disinterest. I dragged her across the room, dodging the slam players and positioning us against the windows, hoping she’d have a strong enough self-preservation instinct to turn her back on the room and look out at the night.
When she didn’t, I put my hands on her shoulders and did it for her.
“Tell me this doesn’t bother you,” I challenged her.
Ani met my eyes without flinching. “She does what she wants.”
“And that’s okay with you?”
“Jude says—”
I pressed my palm flat against the window, blotting out a hand-shaped chunk of the orchard spread beneath us. The window was ice against my synflesh—Brahm liked his temperatures extreme. “Forget what Jude says.”
“But he’s right,” Ani said quietly. “Monogamy’s an org thing. We shouldn’t be trying to make it work for us. We’re better than that.”
“Fine, let’s say you’re right. So who else is on your list?” I turned my back on the window and peered into the crowd, trying to pick out faces in the murk. But the only person I recognized was Jude, leaning against a wall, arms crossed, eyes on me. Even from this distance, even in the dim light, I saw him see me, smile—and turn away.
“I don’t have a list,” Ani said.
I shook my head and faced the window again. “Exactly. So why does Quinn get to have one?”
“It’s not like that,” Ani insisted. “She missed a lot. She’s just . . . enjoying herself.”
“So what’s Jude’s excuse?” I muttered under my breath.
Too loud—she heard me.
“He missed a lot too,” Ani said very quietly. She refused to ever speak about Jude’s past, or Riley’s. It was the only thing she wouldn’t back down on. They’d been there when she needed them, protectors, Jude especially. Like the big brothers she saw in vid-lifes, she’d once confessed, the kind of no-questions-asked reliability that she’d always assumed was imaginary, and beyond even the realm of imagination for someone like her. She would, and did, talk about this unseen aspect of Jude ad nauseum. You don’t know him like I know him—it was her go-to explanation for everything. “But I don’t think it’s about that for him. I think he’s just—”
“A man whore?” I suggested.
She laughed, looking around guiltily as if he could hear us. “He’s trying to prove something,” Ani said.
“Whatever. As long as he doesn’t try to prove it to me.” Apparently mech guys were as disgusting as org ones. You’d think BioMax could have improved on the defective male brain, but if you believed what they said, they wouldn’t know how to even if they wanted to. Apparently, replicating was easier than altering. It was hard, getting people to change.
Ani looked surprised. “You mean you two haven’t . . . ?”
“Are you kidding?” I shuddered. Resisting the urge to turn again, check to see if he was watching me. “Not. Interested.”
“If you say so.”
“Look, I realize you all worship him or something, but—”
“Not worship,” Ani cut in. “Admire.”
Right. Admire. That’s why they all followed him around like groupies, doing and saying anything to weasel further into his favor.
They?
I told the voice in my head to shut up. It was different with me. I understood what Jude was trying to do, and I believed in it. That was different than believing in him. Believing in people was nearly as useless as believing in some invisible all-powerful guy who lived in a cloud. People were unreliable, even the mechanical ones.
“So.” I leaned forward. “Since you think he’s so great, does that mean you—?”
“No!” Ani recoiled at the idea.
“At the rate he’s been going, I guess that makes us the only two left.”
“Three.”
“Doubtful.”
“Not Quinn,” she said. “He promised.”
“Promised that he hasn’t? Or that he wouldn’t?” I asked, glancing up at the pedestal out of the corner of my eye. Quinn and Brahm were still going at it. I wondered what she would do if she knew Ani had come to the party. Or if she’d expected nothing less.
“Hasn’t and wouldn’t,” Ani insisted. “Won’t.”
“If you say so.”
“He says so,” Ani said. “That’s good enough.” She tipped her head forward and pressed it to the glass. Just for a moment. And when she looked up, she was smiling. “I’m in the mood to slam something,” she said, jerking a thumb at the idiots barreling into each other at full force, their skulls knocking with audible cracks. “You in?”
I’d played once before. It required no skill, unless you counted a total lack of restraint and a willingness to eventually find yourself crushed beneath a wriggling mass of sharp elbows and flailing feet. It was, when played right, like becoming a human pinball, ricocheting from body to wall to body again, limbs twisting and tangling. Hurling yourself into a stranger, hearing their bones crack against your head or their surprised grunt as your weight smashed down on their shoulders and sent you both toppling to the ground, left little room for rational thought. The world became pure matter in motion, action and reaction. It was brainless and stupid. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the night.
ALL FALL DOWN
“Everyone was happy.”
The days had no shape. They passed, which was good enough. It was a Friday when Jude sent me to the corp-town, not that it mattered, because when you didn’t have school or a job or contact with the world beyond the bounds of the estate, when the seasons only shifted from cold and gray to colder and grayer, when you didn’t age and the sentence of your life had no foreseeable period, marking time became a formality.
But I remember it was a Friday.
He was in the vidroom, pumping the Brotherhood’s zone. It was all he ever did anymore, scanning the texts and vids they posted, Savona testifying before congressional subcommittees, Auden meeting and greeting fellow victims who’d suffered at the mechanical hands of the skinners, testimonials from new members, rigged debates with purported supporters of BioMax, who mumbled and stumbled their way through a halfhearted defense of the download technology before bowing to the inevitable, conceding that Savona was right and vowing to do everything in their power to take down the tech from within.
That was the party line: Eliminate the download, not its recipients. Hate the sin, not the skinner. Savona didn’t want to destroy us, he just wanted to strip us of our credit accounts, our citizenship, our identities, ourselves. He wanted it known that we were machines, and just as machines had their place, so did we.
It was beginning to rain when I got summoned. Riley was alread
y there, slouched on a couch, his legs kicked up on one of its arms. Quinn and Ani were there too, not much of a surprise since Quinn had been hanging around Jude more than ever lately, and where Quinn went, Ani was sure to follow.
“I need you and Riley to run an errand for me,” Jude said, barely lifting his eyes from the screen. “He’ll fill you in. If you leave now, you should make it back by tonight.”
A road trip with Riley, the wordless wonder? No thanks. “Did I miss a memo? Since when do I take orders from you?”
Jude turned to me, miming surprise. But he knew exactly how much I hated the glorious dictator act. “Let me rephrase: Dearest, most valued, exceedingly busy Lia, can you do me this minor favor? Pretty please, with a cherry-flavored dreamer on top?”
“Forget it,” Quinn said, standing up. “I’ll go.”
Jude shook his head once, sharply. “Lia’s going.”
“Why?” Quinn and I said together. She glared at me.
Jude looked back and forth between the two of us, a smile playing on his lips. “Because I trust her.”
“And not me, right?” Quinn slumped back down on the couch. “Very nice.”
Ani rested a hand on her back, rubbing slow, wide arcs along her spine. “I trust you,” she murmured. Quinn shrugged her off.
I wasn’t sure which would be worse: leaving with Riley and enduring endless hours of his sulky scowl, or staying to bask in the stench of Ani’s desperation.
“How about you go yourself?” I suggested.
“Busy,” Jude said, turning back to the vidscreen.
“So send Riley alone,” I said. “Or are we working on the buddy system now?”
“One to pick up the package,” Jude said. “The other to watch the drop.”
Much as I hated it when Jude pulled the need-to-know spy crap on us, I couldn’t help it; I was intrigued. “The package of . . . ?”
Jude shrugged. “Could be dreamers, could be new tech. Hell, for I know, they’re giving us wings. Ours is not to ask, but to receive and enjoy.”
Quinn, Ani, and I all gaped at Jude. For months he’d been producing new, easily installed tech for our mech bodies— nothing major, a VM hookup here, nanojected titanium bone-knitters there, a microplayer that piped music inside your head. All untested, all unlicensed by BioMax, whose technicians—on the rare occasions when one of us showed up for a scheduled monthly tune-up or the more frequent emergency trips post-collision, crash, or other such self-inflicted catastrophe—eyed the tech with badly disguised suspicion and fear. The suspicion I got. Jude didn’t have to spell it out: He obviously had a connection at BioMax, some employee or former employee who’d decided to field-test the newest toys. But I never understood the fear. Especially since they didn’t even know the whole story. They saw the tech, because that was impossible to hide. But they didn’t know anything about the dreamers.
Of course, neither did the rest of us, if “anything” included where they came from, why they existed, or how they did what they did. Letting Jude believe he could order me around seemed like a small price to pay to find out.
Riley spoke six words on the drive.
One and two: You’ll see.
Three: Yes.
Four: No.
I asked my first two questions—Where are we going? Have you been there before?—as the car sped past the fields bordering the estate, spotted free-range cows grazing in a sea of genetically engineered green. I figured Riley would insist on driving manually, since he seemed the type, but he left the car in automatic, keyed in the mystery destination, and settled into the driver’s seat, apparently content to silently watch the road stream by.
“You ever learn how to drive manual?” I asked after half an hour had passed. That earned me word number four, a quiet “No.” Paired with a cool gaze that efficiently transmitted the message: You’re dumber than I thought.
Asshole, I thought. But I was the asshole. As if anyone learned to drive growing up in a city. Like there were any working cars in a place where energy was rationed so carefully that no one got more than a couple hours’ of electricity to spread out over a day. And what would he have needed a car for, anyway? Anywhere you needed to go in a city, you could get to on foot—not that there was anywhere to go except for the central distribution facility for the occasional ration of food. I’d heard sometimes they even handed out meds, mostly the experimental ones, but sometimes there was a surplus of something useful but defunct. When it came to disposing of unwanted waste, better the city than the garbage.
“The government could afford to supply med-tech to the cities,” Auden had once told me. Another of his conspiracy theories. Back then they’d seemed almost charming. “They just don’t want to. They figure people who are sick and starving don’t have time to be angry.”
“But wouldn’t being sick and starving give them more reason to be angry?” I’d pointed out.
“You just don’t get it,” he’d said that time, like he’d said whenever I called him on one of his elaborate plots. It was why—aside from the fact that it bored the hell out of me—we usually tried not to talk politics. I couldn’t help feeling like Auden, who usually listened to me more intently and less judgmentally than anyone I’d ever known, was dismissing everything I had to say under the basic theory of: You don’t get it and you never will.
I had to admit that had been one of the benefits of dating a brainburner like Walker. However much care his parents had put into selecting the genes destined to give him that perfect smile, those eminently strokable biceps, the scruffy brown hair, the square jaw and the cleft chin, they’d overlooked certain other aspects of his development. Which is to say, if you’re going to be dumb but pretty, you’d better be really pretty—and willing to let your girlfriend take the lead. Walker was both. Of course, dumb had its drawbacks too. It made it harder to understand the subtleties of situations like your girlfriend getting her brain dumped into a machine—and easier to fall into bed with her sister.
Though even brain-bulging Auden hadn’t been smart enough not to follow me to that waterfall. Lose a liver, gain a new conspiracy theory. The most successful one yet, so maybe it had all worked out for him in the end. Maybe he should be thanking me.
Just when you think you can’t hate yourself any more, a thought like that slithers through your brain.
But before I could look around for a helpful self-impalement tool, the car stopped, and Riley spat out words number five and six.
“We’re here.”
Synapsis Corp-Town was twice the size of the only other one I’d visited, my godfather’s corp-town about a hundred miles south. I was nine when my father decided it was time for me to see how the other nine-tenths of the country lived. “This is why I make you work so hard,” he’d told me, resting a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Take your eye off the prize, just for a second, and you could end up in a place like this.” But even then I knew it would never happen. I was young not stupid: Even if I morphed into a zoned-out, brainburned loser, my father would never let me sell myself to a corp-town. Imagine the humiliation—the public humiliation—were a Kahn to end up working a line twelve hours a day, administering gen-mods to soy crops or keying data for the credit crunchers, then going home to corp-supplied housing, feeding her family with corp-supplied food, staying healthy with corp-supplied med-tech, voting for the corp-supplied candidates, obeying each and every corp-supplied rule lest she have it all stripped away from her and end up in a city. My brain may have been a computer, but the corp-towners were the ones who ran on a program, their lives prescribed, their every word and move coordinated by a central processing unit. The corps were machines, and the corp-towners were just the cogs, the gears, the fuel that made them run.
The corp-town stretched across more than fifteen square miles, but most of that was taken up by manufacturing and agricultural concerns. According to the schematic that greeted us at the entry gate, the eastern half of the compound was reserved for farmland, acres of modified corn and soy c
rops that would eventually be ground into the tasteless nutri-grain that formed the bulk of nearly all corp-town food. We’d all gotten a taste of it in elementary school—one full day of nutri-pops, nutri-shakes, nutri-burgers. It had been enough to last a lifetime. They say corp-towners develop a taste for the stuff, that they’d prefer it to real-world food if they ever got a choice. But no corp-town had ever tested the theory.
Riley swiped an ID card across the scanner at the gate, and our faces popped up on the screen with two unfamiliar names scrolling beneath them. He shot me a quick look, like I’d be dumb enough to protest where the corp authorities might be listening. But I kept my mouth shut, resolving later to find out where Jude had gotten his hands on such ridiculously good fakes. Add it to the list of things I’d probably never know.
A light flashed green and the gate swung open.
“End of the line,” Riley said, hopping out of the car. I followed. Corp-towns were car-free zones—ours would presumably find its way to a nearby lot, while we tooled around on the blue solar-powered cart that was already waiting for us. We climbed into the narrow vehicle, which noticeably shuddered when it took on our weight. The rusty thing looked like it hadn’t been replaced—or even retooled—since the corp-town was first built.
“Destination?” its nav-system requested.
“Residential, A-three,” Riley said.
I felt like a child—or, worse, like a pet, towed around on a leash. Following obediently and unquestioningly after my master.
“Ever been to one of these before?” Riley asked as we sputtered into slow, lurching motion.
I grunted something that could have been a yes or a no. Just because he was suddenly and inexplicably in the mood for conversation didn’t mean I had to oblige. Despite the leash, I was no puppy.
The corp-town wasn’t quite pretty—it was too manicured for that, its stacked cubes of productivity too regimented and too concrete—but it wasn’t quite the wasteland I remembered from my childhood. The large pool of waste water dotted by mirrored solar-collecting lily pads was nearly beautiful, especially with the reflection of purple-tinged clouds unfurling across its still surface. Of course, I was lucky—being a mech, I didn’t have to deal with the smell.
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