Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  He leaned against his desk, arms crossed, face unreadable. Auden stood next to him, leaning on nothing, legs quivering with the effort of staying upright. His eyes were pinned on the floor.

  Savona cleared his throat. “Since you’ve intruded on our sanctuary here, Lia, Auden thought you might as well get what you came for.”

  “Funny how you call me Lia when you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t think that’s who I am,” I said, grateful for a voice that didn’t shake. “Or do you call your toaster by name too?”

  “Consider it a courtesy,” Savona said. “An undeserved one.”

  “You look better than you look on the vids,” I told Auden. His face was less pale, his eyes less watery, his hands steadier. I’d said it in relief; he took it as an accusation.

  “Some things are necessary,” he said.

  It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. “You make yourself look weaker?” I asked incredulously. “For effect?”

  Auden pulled himself up straighter, his expression grimly proud. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Savona bared his teeth in a mirthless smile. “He’s not as weak as he was the day you abandoned him,” he said, placing a supportive hand on Auden’s shoulder. Auden shrugged him off. “But the damage you caused is permanent. Damage to his spine, his organs, his life expectancy—”

  “It was an accident,” Ani said.

  I said nothing.

  “But you made him stronger too,” Savona said. “You showed him the way.”

  “Then why can’t he speak for himself?” I snapped. “Or is he too drugged up and brainwashed to even know I’m here?”

  Auden raised his head. His eyes were paler in person, his pupils still too large. “The only drugs I’m on are for the pain.”

  He raised a hand to his face, then abruptly dropped it, as if trying to adjust glasses that he’d just remembered were no longer there. Suddenly the last six months dropped away and I was back in his hospital room, standing by his bed, begging him to forgive me, because if he did—if he had—none of it would have happened, I would be home and we would be together, whole and healed, and everything else would be background noise. Something to watch on the vids, and then shut off when it got old.

  “What do you want?” he asked flatly.

  “Just to talk. You and me. Can’t we just go somewhere? Away from . . .” I glanced at Savona.

  Auden shook his head.

  “Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” Savona murmured in honeyed tones.

  “No,” Auden said sharply. “Not going to happen.” Savona nodded. I recognized that nod. It was the same one that Jude got from his mechs when he issued one of his edicts. It was a pledge of obedience. Savona was letting Auden believe he was in charge.

  Or Auden really was.

  As Auden took a few steps, it became clear that the weakened martyr onstage was less of an illusion than he would have liked to think. Slowly, with one foot dragging slightly behind the other, he lurched around the side of the desk. His gait was awkward and spasmodic, almost like mine when I’d first learned to walk in the new body. I tried not to imagine the electrical impulses shooting through his spinal cord, stimulating dead nerves to life, one painful step at a time. He sank into the desk chair with a soft sigh of relief and rested his arms on a stack of papers. It took me until that moment to realize this was his office not Savona’s. Whatever Auden was, he wasn’t zoned and he wasn’t a puppet.

  “I don’t know your name,” he said, looking at Ani for the first time.

  She looked at me, like I was supposed to give her the answer. Or maybe just permission. “Ani,” she finally said.

  He nodded. “Ani. You’ve been visiting us for the last few weeks.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  Auden held up a hand to stop her. “It’s fine. But there’s no need for all this sneaking around. The Temple of Man is a public space. We’re here to help anyone who needs us.”

  “Really?” I snarled. “Even us world-destroying soulless monsters? Tell me something—if your God’s so impressive and all-powerful, how come he can’t give a soul to a machine? He can do anything, just not that?”

  “He’s not my God,” Auden said, and I felt at least a shadow of relief that however far gone he was, he hadn’t plunged all the way off the cliff. But then he kept going. “He’s just God.” He shot a quick glance at Savona, who nodded in approval.

  “He can do anything He so chooses, as you astutely point out,” Savona put in. “He could have created a universe where gravity is repulsive or men walk on their hands or giant lizards rule the Earth. But he didn’t. He created this universe and does honor to us by His choice. He chose to endow humans—only humans—with a soul, to make us rulers in His earthly kingdom. And much as you might enjoy indulging your what-ifs and could-have-beens, this is our reality, yours as much as mine. The sooner you face that, the easier it will be for you.”

  Shades of Jude, I thought. Funny how eager some people were to accuse you of denying the truth—especially when “the truth” was one they’d invented.

  “You really believe this crap?” I asked Auden. “What happened to science? Logic? The power of empiricism, all that?”

  “Logic and empiricism dictate that the ability to mimic self-awareness doesn’t establish the existence of an inner life. Human consciousness transcends computation.” He didn’t even look at me. “You’re not to blame for what you are,” he told Ani. “You don’t understand, which must be difficult. And when you’re ready, we’re here to help. Bring your friends, if you’d like. We have nothing to hide.”

  “What makes you think we need your help?” I asked. “Or anyone’s?”

  “Not we,” Auden said. “Just her. She’s welcome here whenever she likes. You’re not. Ever.”

  “Because I know who you really are,” I told him. “And it’s not this.”

  “Tell yourself whatever you want.” It was like nothing I said touched him. No emotion, no hesitation, nothing. “But you’re leaving and you’re not coming back.” He pressed a button on his desk console and spoke past us to an unseen minion. “Can you please escort our visitors out of the building?”

  “And what if we don’t want to go?” I asked.

  I wanted to go.

  “This will be easier on everyone if you just go quietly,” Savona said. “Especially you, Lia.”

  The door opened behind us. “Let’s go,” said Auden’s faithful minion, her voice sickeningly familiar.

  I curled my hands into fists, grinding my nails into the synflesh of my palms, a helpful reminder. I am a machine. I am in control. Nothing can hurt me.

  Then I turned around to face my sister.

  We didn’t speak. Not as she led us out of Auden’s office and through the corridors bustling with robed ex-Faithers, or Brothers, or whatever they called themselves, and not when she took us on an unnecessary detour through a wide hangar in which orderly lines of city poor waited patiently for handouts of bread and plankton soup, all in the shadow of a rusted airplane, its windows shattered and its fuselage layered with years of graffiti and rust.

  Not until we passed through the final door and were released into open air. I stopped, staring down Zo in her shimmering robe, her blond hair nearly as short as Ani’s and just as spiky, her face painted not with the retro makeup she used to favor but with a delicate silver temp tattoo on her left cheek, the same stylized double helix that the Brotherhood of Man had emblazoned across its zone, its Temple, and apparently, its servants. “What the hell, Zo?”

  “Hello to you too, sis.” She smiled, and not her patented screw-you smile. Not even the fake, brittle grimace that she’d shot in my direction for the first few weeks after the download, before we’d declared open war. This was something different, the same creepily serene look as on the faces of all the robed figures we’d passed in the halls. “Long time, no see.”

  “So I’m your sister again all of a sudden?” What would she need with a sister, now
that she had her Brothers?

  Her face melted into a sympathetic frown, equally unsettling. “You believe you are,” she said. “The Brotherhood has helped me see that’s not your fault. You can’t be blamed for the delusions of your programming.”

  “Delusions. Right.”

  Ani clamped a hand over my forearm. “Let’s just go.”

  I shook my head. “What if I said you’re right?” I asked Zo. “That I’m not the same person?”

  “You’re not a person at all,” Zo said calmly. “I can’t fault you for believing you are. But I can help you see the truth.”

  “How, by sleeping with my boyfriend?”

  “He wasn’t your boyfriend!” she snapped. Then she took a deep breath. When she spoke again, the calm was back. “That was wrong,” she said. “I thought I was protecting Lia. But—” She swallowed hard. “Lia’s dead. I can’t protect her anymore. I see that now.”

  Lia’s dead. The words didn’t sting like they once had. But it wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it—blank. Impersonal. Like she really believed I was nothing to her.

  “So you don’t hate me anymore.”

  “I don’t feel anything about you,” Zo said. “You’re a machine.”

  “Right. You don’t hate me. You’ve just decided to devote your life to the Brotherhood, which, big coincidence, wants to wipe mechs off the face of the Earth.”

  “You never bother to listen to anyone but yourself, do you?” she said with a flash of the old Zo. “No one wants to do anything to you. We just want them to stop making more of you. So that no more families get destroyed.”

  Like ours, she didn’t say. Because she didn’t have to.

  “We broke up, you know,” Zo said suddenly. “Me and Walker.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Well we did.” A giggle slipped out. “He’s insanely boring.”

  She had a point.

  “I really don’t care, Zo. I’m over it.”

  “I heard,” she snapped. “Mechs are too superior to worry about us pathetic little orgs, right? Too special ? You must be a natural.”

  “I think this is pathetic, Zo,” I said, not sure whether I meant the Brotherhood or our conversation. “But not because I’m a mech.”

  She twisted the fabric of the robe around her index finger, a nervous habit left over from when we were kids. “So you’re not even going to ask about them?” Zo said, a little of the old bitterness bleeding through around her edges.

  “Who?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Mom. Dad.”

  Your mom and dad, I would have said. Except I wanted to know. “How are they?”

  “Like you care,” she said.

  “I do.”

  “That’s why it’s been six months and no one’s heard from you.”

  So she didn’t know I’d seen our father.

  A herd of Brothers swept past us, piling onto a blue bus marked ELIXIR CORP-TOWN. There was a fleet of buses just like it, each bus with a different corp logo on it, each presumably awaiting a shipment of corp-towners returning home with full stomachs and plenty of ammunition for their antiskinner campaign.

  “Just tell me,” I snapped.

  “How do you think they are? Their precious little baby disappeared.”

  “So? Now they can lavish all their attention on their other precious baby.”

  She snorted. “Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of love to go around these days.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Right. None of my business. Not my family. I forgot.”

  “What family?” she asked. “Mom’s so zoned out that half the time she barely remembers her own name, much less that she has a kid and husband. Not that her husband’s ever home. Or speaks to either of us when he is.” She smeared her hand across her forehead, like she was rubbing away thoughts the Brotherhood didn’t permit. “It’s too late for us,” she said with a new lilt to her voice. “But at least I can help others.”

  “Savona tell you that?” I asked sourly.

  “Actually, it was Brother Auden.”

  “So I’m not your sister, but suddenly he’s your brother?”

  “He’s my friend,” she said.

  “And you just love stealing my friends, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t have to steal him,” Zo said. “He came to me. Said you ran away from him, just like you ran away from us. Explained how we’re better off.”

  “We should go,” Ani urged again, tugging at my arm.

  “Thanks for the cat,” I told Zo as a good-bye.

  She flinched. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Whatever.”

  Ani caught my eye with a silent question—Stay or go? I didn’t hesitate.

  Go.

  We walked away—but Zo’s voice stopped us after a few steps.

  “Is he doing okay?” Zo asked. “You know. The cat.” “He’s fine,” I told her.

  She paused. Then, so softly I almost didn’t hear:

  “He missed you.”

  “Yeah.” I kept my back to her. “I missed him too.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Ani on the ride home, before she could say anything.

  Her smile contained far more pity than I would have liked. “I wasn’t even going to try.”

  I pretended to link in to the net, just so I wouldn’t have to look at her. But really I was staring past the screen, out the window, counting the mile markers as they streamed by.

  Mile by mile, the car brought us home.

  The entryway was one of the oldest parts of the mansion and came outfitted with two elaborate crystal chandeliers whose bulbs had apparently been burned out for several decades. Despite the high ceilings and ten-foot windows, the place always felt oppressive to me. Maybe it was the dark mahogany walls or the pillars that sprouted every few feet or the velvet couch inset into the fireplace that inevitably housed some mech or another in the throes of a dreamer fit—but even on a good day, something about the room screamed, Get out while you still can. And this had not been a good day.

  “Don’t,” Ani said when I began to head upstairs to my room, to blissful, silent solitude.

  “I’m not going back to the dreamers,” I said, like it was any of her business if I did.

  “It’s not that,” she said, even though it obviously was. “Just . . . don’t you think we should find Jude? Tell him what happened while it’s still fresh?”

  “If this is your attempt to keep me from crawling off to sulk, it’s a pretty pathetic one,” I said.

  She grinned. “I have no shame. Not if it works. . . . So?”

  “So . . .” I sighed. “Someone should get what they want today. Why not you?”

  We found Jude the first place we looked. The vidroom. The door was half open. We both heard the moans and sighs at the same moment. Ani shot me an unusually mischievous glance. “We should probably let him have his privacy, but . . . who knows what’s going on in there. He could be hurt or something.”

  “It does sound pretty dire,” I said, grinning. She was going above and beyond to perk me up. Mission accomplished. “What if it’s an emergency?”

  “Excellent point,” Ani said. “We’re just doing what any good friends would do.”

  She swung open the door.

  Jude lay on the couch, his chest bare, on top of a girl with long, black hair, her shirt tangled in her arms as she tried to wriggle out of it. He pulled the fabric out of her hands and yanked it over her head, laughing as it caught briefly on her earring and she smacked his hand away. She was facing away from the door, so we saw only her long, slender neck, exposed when she leaned forward to press her lips to Jude’s chest. He wrapped his arms around her narrow waist, mechanical muscles bulging beneath synthetic skin.

  I couldn’t look away.

  I no longer hated the sight of my own body, not the way I once had, but I couldn’t imagine reveling in it, not like the two of them, muc
h less exposing it to someone else, pressing skin against skin. The memory of that night with Walker was too fresh—I would never let anyone else look at me the way he had, touch me like I was diseased.

  I couldn’t see her face, but I could see Jude’s, his closed eyes, his faint smile as her hair tickled his cheek. And then his eyes opened—and met mine. He grabbed her roughly and flipped her off the sofa, and I recognized her cry of complaint at the same time I recognized her face. At the same time I heard the small, sad sound escape Ani. It was the whimper of a wounded animal who’d given up the fight.

  “You promised,” she whispered. Her hand closed over the pendant around her neck. The warm blue glow lit up her pale skin.

  Jude leaped off the couch, nearly landing on Quinn. She just glared at him and proceeded to slowly, calmly pull her shirt back on. “I changed my mind,” she said.

  Jude rushed the doorway, chest still bare, hair rumpled, eyes wild. “Ani, look—”

  Ani slammed the door in his face.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she told me.

  “I wasn’t even going to try,” I said with a small, hopeful smile. But she just turned away from me and walked briskly down the hall, neck stiff, head erect, arms tight against her sides.

  I didn’t try to follow her. I didn’t try anything.

  But I should have.

  SKIN TO SKIN

  “It was almost like being alive.”

  When you don’t eat, you don’t exercise, you don’t work, and you don’t have to slog through school, there’s no obvious start to the morning. Sometimes, especially when you can go back to “sleep” simply by instructing your brain and body to shut down, there’s no obvious reason to start at all.

  Which is why I figured I might not see Ani for another day or two. But instead she showed up at my door just as the sky was pinking up.