Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  I nodded.

  “And things got carried away?”

  “It was like, I just wanted to take a pic and post it on my zone, you know?” I babbled, as if I was too nervous to filter my words. “Because last time I snuck into the city, Cass and Terra didn’t believe me, like I’d just make something up, and okay, it’s not like I actually went into the city, but I think it should count if you just, you know, get close enough to see. And smell it, if you know what I mean.”

  “I thought you mechs couldn’t smell,” Ayer said thinly.

  “Right. Um. I mean, that was before. But I’m a . . . skinner now, right? So I figured I could do it, and I just asked this guy if I could take a pic of us together, and he totally freaked out and went all crazy on me, like he was on some kind of schizo shocker trip, and then I’m, like, tied to a chair.”

  “Must have been pretty scary,” Ayer said.

  I nodded again, eagerly—maybe too eagerly. “So can I go now?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t want those city guys to know I got them in trouble or anything, so . . .”

  “Just to be clear, you went sightseeing in the city by yourself. To play at slumming for a few hours. For fun,” the detective said, standing up again. The sympathy was draining from her voice. Fine. As long as she thought I was a repulsively self-absorbed rich bitch and not a mass murderer. Let her hate me all she wanted. “And you’re certain you went nowhere near Synapsis Corp-Town?”

  I forced myself to laugh, hoping it didn’t sound as artificial as most of my attempts in that direction. “Who’s going to be impressed if I go to a corp-town?” I scoffed. “I mean, the city, that’s one thing. That’s slamming. But a corp-town?” I wrinkled my nose. “That’s just, like, where they grind fish crap into food or something. What would I do in a place like that?”

  “I can think of a few things,” the detective said in an icy voice. She stroked a finger across her ViM. The gray wall lit up with images of the corp town attack. I looked away—then abruptly looked back, confused. How would an innocent person react? Was I supposed to be so horrified I couldn’t stand it? Or should I act fascinated, like someone who hadn’t seen it in person, who hadn’t stepped over bodies while trying to escape?

  I am innocent, I reminded myself. I shouldn’t have to act.

  Somehow, the more time that passed, the less I believed it.

  “Don’t I get a lawyer or something?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Have you done something that would require a lawyer?”

  I wondered how many noobs actually fell for that one. “Do you know who my father is?”

  “We know a great deal about you, Lia.”

  “Then you know I’m not some idiot city slummer you can bully into giving up my rights.”

  Detective Ayer raised her eyebrows. “What kind of rights do you think you have?”

  “Same as everyone else.”

  “Same as every org, you mean?”

  I kept my face blank.

  “‘Org.’ That’s the term you and your friends like to use, am I right?” she asked, too pleased with herself. “And you skinners prefer to call yourselves ‘mechs.’”

  I shrugged. “So?”

  “Seems rather hostile,” she said mildly. “Inventing a slur for everyone who’s not like you?”

  “More hostile than ‘skinner’?” I shot back. “Or how about ‘Frankenstein’? That one never gets old.”

  “Call yourself whatever you want. But ‘org’ . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know, I hear that word, and it sounds to me like you’re trying to denigrate humanity. Convince yourself that you’re somehow superior.”

  “That’s a lot to get from one syllable,” I said.

  “Context counts,” the detective said, swiping her ViM again. The mech vid popped up on the wall screen, my face smiling into the camera, delivering her succinct manifesto. You orgs want a war?

  Detective Ayer froze the frame. “Do you want a war, Lia?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Is that you in the vid?”

  “I already told you it’s not! I’ve never been to that corp-town or anywhere near there.” No DNA, I reminded myself. No fingerprints, no biomatter, no nothing that could connect me to the corp-town.

  “It must be strange, sharing a face with a murderer,” she said casually. “Or maybe it doesn’t bother you, the murder of forty-two orgs?”

  “It bothers me.”

  “But maybe the ends justify the means?” she suggested.

  “What ends could justify that?”

  “You tell me.”

  We glared at each other. There was no way I’d look away first.

  “Let me lay it out for you, Lia,” the detective said finally. “It might not be you in that vid. But I think it is. I can read people—”

  “I’m not people,” I said sourly. “I’m a skinner, remember?”

  “A skinner who was picked up in a city. Tied to a chair by a bunch of city rats? Now tell me, what’s a sweet little girl like you do to get the slummers so angry?”

  “You’ll have to ask them,” I said.

  Her lips quirked. “I’m afraid they’re unavailable for questioning.”

  I didn’t let myself dwell on that one.

  “Some people—some orgs—don’t need a reason to hate me,” I said, the “you should know” clear in my voice. “It’s enough that I’m a mech.”

  “Just to be clear: You’re refusing to explain your activities of the last three days?” she asked. “You’re aware how that looks?”

  “Like I care. What I do is my business, not yours.”

  “Maybe.” She sighed, tugging at the cheap material of her corp-provided suit, the wrong cut and a size too small. I could have told her that shoving herself into the beige sausage casing wasn’t working and that she should go back to pinching her pennies to save up for her next lipo—lift-tucks and the like were rarer in corp-towns, more of an occasional splurge than a fact of daily life, but no amount was too much to pay to stave off age and fat. Too bad for her, I wasn’t really in the fashion-favor-granting mood. And for all I knew, pleasantly plump was the latest trend in her corp-town, the better to make clear you weren’t an underfed city rat. Besides, at least she still got to eat. Let her deal with the consequences.

  “But here’s your problem,” she continued. “It’s my job to decide what’s my business. And right now, I say it’s you.”

  “I want a lawyer,” I said.

  “Tough.”

  “I have rights,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, really?” She smirked. “What are they?”

  I hesitated. The ins and outs of the criminal justice system weren’t exactly a hot topic of study at the Helmsley School. “I know you can’t just lock me up here when I haven’t done anything wrong. If you won’t let me voice a lawyer, at least let me tell someone I’m here.”

  “And who would that be?” she asked.

  “None of your business,” I said. Thinking: No one. I hadn’t talked to my parents in months. So who did I know that could fix this kind of problem. Jude?

  Riley, I thought. But that was idiotic. How was he supposed to help? Even if it turned out he wasn’t the reason I was here?

  “Since you seem a little murky on the facts, let me explain them to you,” Detective Ayer said. “One: There has been a major attack on a civilian population. Two: There are indications that this may be part of an ongoing threat. Three: I’m empowered to do anything within my means to ensure another such attack doesn’t take place. Four: You’re a skinner. Not a person. Just a person-shaped box with a computer inside. Boxes don’t get lawyers.”

  “The government considers me a person,” I said. “Look it up.”

  “Five,” she continued, like I hadn’t said anything. We both knew that the government had outsourced all security matters to the corps. Everyone had agreed it was safer that way: The government couldn’t be trusted with unlimited power, they’d made that obvious time and time ag
ain. But the corps were, in principle, regulated by the exigencies of the market. They thrived when the customer thrived, and mutual self-interest was the ultimate satisfaction guarantee. So now corporate boards made the rules, and the corporate secops carried them out. No questions asked. “No one knows you’re here. And until you cooperate with me, no one will.”

  I crossed my arms. “Is this where I’m supposed to cry?”

  I am a machine, I told myself. You can’t threaten a machine.

  “You can do whatever you’d like,” the detective said. “As long as you tell me the truth. Let’s start with Friday morning. Why don’t you tell me everything you did from the moment you woke up.”

  “And if I say no?” I asked. “What then?” Even if I could formulate a convincing enough lie about the last several days, how would I remember all of the details on the inevitable second or third time she walked me through it? Why hadn’t I spent the last couple days planning what I would do when I got caught? What had I expected, Riley and I would just go on the run forever, playing house in some urine-stained room on the thirtieth floor of west tower, scavenging for spare power and poking around the network once a year to see whether it was safe to come home?

  “You don’t want to test me, Lia.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s say I do.” Nothing like a good offense, right? Especially when your defense is nonexistent. “What next, you torture me or something? Violate the HRC?” Even at Helmsley, they’d made sure to teach us about the Human Rights Covenant, supposedly some kind of guarantee that the government would never go psycho again, rounding up people by the hundreds and abandoning them to darkness and pain until they vomited out details of nefarious plots they may—or in most cases, may not—have known anything about. All that trouble, and they hadn’t managed to prevent Chicago or St. Louis or the Disneypocalypse. It turned out that bio-sensors and facial recognition screeners were more efficient than torture.

  The government had signed the HRC back when they still ran security, but the secops were all bound by it.

  “There you go again, talking about your rights,” the detective said. “Human Rights Covenant. What makes you imagine you qualify?”

  I could tell her the truth, I thought. Not because she scared me, with her sausage suit and empty threats. But because I was tired, and if I could make her believe me, this could all be over.

  She would never believe me. That I’d been in the corp-town while, in a stunning coincidence, another mech, one who just happened to have my face, enacted an insane plan I knew nothing about? Odds like that hovered somewhere around absolute zero.

  “Do whatever you want,” I said. “I’m a machine, right? Machines don’t hurt.”

  “I’m told that’s not quite true,” she said, smiling. Like she was enjoying herself. “But I’m afraid you misunderstand. I’m not threatening you. And certainly—given you have no need to eat or sleep—I’m not going to waste my time by waiting you out.”

  “So we’re done here?” Like I had any real hope of that.

  “I’m starting to think you’re misunderstanding me on purpose,” Detective Ayer said. A new image popped up on the screen. My sister, Zo. “You don’t care about what happens to you, that’s obvious,” she said. “And frankly, I can’t blame you.” She swept her eyes up and down my body, then shuddered. “Probably just waiting for someone to put you out of your misery.” Another image popped up next to Zo. My mother. “But what if you weren’t the only person at stake?” My father. One big, happy, Lia-less Kahn family. “What if your actions actually had consequences?”

  I forced myself to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “People are dead,” she snapped. “Living, breathing, organic humans are dead. Thanks to you and your friends. Is that a joke to you? Because it’s not to me.” Leaving the screen lit, she retreated to the door. “Your coconspirators are still out there. Which means people could die. And I’m willing to do pretty much anything to stop that. So why don’t you sit here for a while and think about whether you really have nothing left to lose.”

  She closed the door behind her. I heard the lock catch. Now they’ll watch me, I thought. Hoping they’ll catch me—but that was where my imagination failed. Catch me what? Monologuing about all my evil plans? Smearing my finger across the layer of dust on the table, letter by letter spelling out my confession? Or did they just hope to catch the exact moment I broke, staring at the faces of my family, imagining what might happen to them if I didn’t give Ayer what she wanted? Strange, the way orgs clung so desperately to this idea that we weren’t human, then ditched it as soon as it was no longer convenient. If I was just a machine, then why would I care what they did to a family that, by their standards, wasn’t mine? And if I did care, didn’t that mean I was human after all?

  Apparently not.

  It was an empty threat. It had to be. This just wasn’t how things worked. Not anymore.

  I stayed in my seat as one hour passed, then another, waiting for Ayer to return. I knew how to wait. Hadn’t I been doing it for days now? Hadn’t I been doing it for months, waiting for something to happen that would change everything? That would fix everything, turn back the clock to the time before I left home, before Auden, before the download? If you’re waiting for something that’s never going to happen—that you know is never going to happen—it shouldn’t count as waiting. But that’s how it felt.

  Almost twelve hours passed. When the door opened, Ayer was wearing another, even frumpier suit, blue this time, with the Synapsis label emblazoned in a garish red. New clothes for a new day. And she wasn’t the only one. She set a neatly pressed pile of clean clothes down on the table beside me, complete with a pair of shoes. And not just any shoes I realized suddenly, confused—these were mine.

  “You have a visitor,” she said, as the door swung open again.

  For a moment I thought I was imagining him. That the pressure and confusion had plunged me into a dreamer flashback, or maybe some kind of wish-fulfillment mechanism had overwhelmed my neural system.

  And then the hallucination spoke. “Hello, Lia,” he said, stiff and proper as always. Unreadable. I couldn’t look at him. Not without picturing him the way I’d seen him last, when I’d thought I wouldn’t see him again.

  I forced myself not to get up. He wouldn’t want to touch me. But he crossed the room and rested his hands on my shoulders, and his lips brushed the top of my head, and I hugged my chin to my chest and closed my eyes and was sorry and grateful that I couldn’t cry. “Hi, Dad.”

  UNSAID

  “That’s what happens when your whole life is an oxymoron.”

  This is over,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

  I glanced at Detective Ayer.

  “Don’t look at her,” he snapped. “She’s got no power here.”

  “Lia, when was the last time you saw your father?” the detective asked.

  “I—” I stopped. Trick question, obviously. But knowing she was trying to trick me into telling the truth wouldn’t help me come up with the correct lie.

  “She’s not answering any more of your questions,” my father informed her. “And she’s leaving here with me. Now.”

  The detective flushed. “M. Kahn, you understand, there’s paperwork to be completed, and even if everything you say checks out—”

  “If ?” My father wasn’t the kind to explode. If anything, he did the opposite—as his anger built, he contracted. He fell silent, his face scary white, his voice low, his eyes riveted on the target of his scorn, as if willing his gaze into a face-melting beam. Some people were too dense to notice the shift; true idiots mistook his stillness for passivity. But like Ayer had said before, she could read people, and she read my father. Or maybe she’d read enough of my file to know that a man like him—on the board of several corps, including hers—could get her kicked so far down the ladder that by the end of the week she’d be shipped off to the nearest wind farm to spend her days trolling for power pirat
es.

  “I didn’t mean to question your integrity, M. Kahn,” she said tightly, each word clipped and precise.

  “Much as I appreciate that heartfelt sentiment, your superiors aren’t relying on my word,” he said. “They’re acting on the records of BioMax Corp.”

  “Just a coincidence that you sit on the board,” she mumbled.

  “What’s that?” my father snapped. “Speak up.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “Nothing.”

  “Fortunately for all of us, I suppose, the decision is out of your hands,” my father said. “Your superiors haven’t seen fit to question the material supplied by BioMax, so unless there’s something else . . . ?”

  Detective Ayer turned to me, and her defeated expression regained a little of its spark. “You didn’t know, did you?” she asked.

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That your alibi was out there, ready and waiting. That you could have ended this farce before it started.”

  “Maybe I just enjoyed your company,” I said, pride overcoming curiosity.

  She shook her head. I could see from her expression that she knew she’d be crazy to push the issue—and she was going to do it anyway. Her last stand. “I don’t think so. You asked how we tracked you down. Don’t you want to know?”

  “Lia, we’re leaving,” my father said. Like I was still his perfect, darling daughter, who lived in the bedroom down the hall, said please and thank you and of course, yes, whatever you want, Daddy, like I hadn’t seen him on his knees praying to a God he’d never believed in, wishing that he’d had the strength to let me die.

  He’d done me a favor, convincing me once and for all that I wasn’t the same person anymore, no matter how much we both might have wanted it. I’d done him a favor in return: I left.

  “No. I want to hear this.” Knowing that he was my only option, that if he changed his mind about rescuing me and left me here, here is where I’d rot. Knowing that if I said one more yes and walked out the door with him, I’d keep walking, straight to the car, then to the house, to the old bedroom and the old life, the one that didn’t fit me any better than all the old clothes in Lia Kahn’s closet, custom-tailored to a body that was now a pile of ashes in some biowaste landfill.