Skinned. - Skinned. Part 17
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Skinned. Part 17

There are some moments you'd rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it's mostly those moments in which it's smarter-safer-to stay awake.

Don't.

"Sweet dreams," the man said.

Please don't.

Lights out.

"Don't," I said, and I said it out loud, in a different place, a familiar cramped white room, a too-bright light in my eyes, call-me-Ben's face inches from mine. I was back on floor thirteen.

"There you go," he said. "All better."

"What happened?" I remembered the car, I remembered the man's hands on my body, under my shirt, I remembered his sour smile, and then...I was here, awake, with call-me-Ben. As if no time had passed.

"I'd suspect someone hasn't been taking very good care of herself," he said. "And your system...Well, think of it like this: In an organic body, too much wear and tear, overexhaustion, and malnutrition weaken you, make you susceptible to bugs. This body, when mistreated, can fall prey to the same problem. Not germs, of course." He laughed fakely. "But every system can be crashed by the right bug-under the right circumstances. A temporary disconnect between your body and your neural network. Shouldn't be a problem again if you take care of yourself."

But that wasn't what I needed to know. "How did I get here? Who was that guy?"

"The man who brought you in? Just one of our techs."

"He knocked me out."

"He initiated a shutdown," said call-me-Ben. "Standard protocol. I'm sure it couldn't have been very pleasant, frozen like that. We didn't want to cause you any more discomfort than necessary."

"He just brought me here?"

Ben nodded. "Straight here, and we fixed you right up. We'll run a few more diagnostic tests, and then you should be able to go home."

"How long?"

"Shouldn't take more than-"

"No. How long was I out?"

Call-me-Ben checked the time. "About five hours, I believe. But they didn't start working on you until I got down here. So it only took an hour or so to fix you right up. Just a minor problem, nothing to worry about."

Five hours gone. Turned off.

And four of those hours lying in a heap somewhere, limp and malleable, like a doll, while the man, or anyone else, carted me around, did whatever he wanted. Or maybe did nothing. Maybe dumped me on a table somewhere, like spare parts in storage, and walked away.

If you can't remember something, did it really happen?

No, I decided.

Or even if it did, it didn't matter. The body wasn't me, not when the brain was shut down. They treated it like a bunch of spare parts, because that's all it was. It wasn't me.

Which meant whatever happened, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

"You have to start taking care of yourself," Ben said. And there was something about the way he said it that made it seem like he knew what I'd been doing, all of it. It was the same tone Sascha had used when she mentioned my boyfriend. A little too knowing, like he had to restrain himself from winking. "Will you promise me you'll do that?"

"Can you guarantee this won't happen to me again?" I asked.

"If you stop pushing yourself so hard? Yes, I can guarantee it. So can you guarantee me this won't happen again?"

"Yes."

I didn't care what I had to do: I would never be that helpless again.

TERMINATED.

"Computers think; humans feel."

When I finally got home, there was a message from Auden waiting at my zone. His av was weird, like him, a creature with frog legs and black beetle wings. It chirped its message in Auden's voice. "Are you okay?"

I ignored it.

But the next day at school, when he found me eating lunch behind the low stone wall, I let him sit down.

"You're not supposed to be here," I said.

"Neither are you."

"But they can't catch me." I nodded toward the biosensors. "No bio, ergo, no sensing."

Auden shrugged. "And they don't care about catching me. No one's paying attention."

"How do you know?"

He unwrapped a slim sandwich with some suspiciously greenish filling. "Where do you think I used to eat? Before you took over my territory, so to speak."

"Oh."

"*Oh' is right."

"So I guess I should thank you or something," I said. "For yesterday."

"I guess you should." There was a pause. "But I can't help noticing that you didn't."

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or shove the sandwich in his face. I certainly wasn't saying thank you.

"So what's in the bag, anyway?" I asked instead.

"What bag?"

I rolled my eyes. "That bag." I pointed to the green sack he always toted around. "Or is it just your security blanket?"

Auden flushed. "Stuff. Nothing important."

"Really?" I doubted it and reached for the bag. "Let me-"

"Don't!" he snapped, snatching it away. His fists balled around the straps.

"Okay, whatever. Sorry." I held up my arms in surrender. "Forget I asked."

"Look, I'm sorry, but..."

"I mean it. Forget it. I don't want to know."

I wasn't sure if I was mad at him or he was mad at me. Or if neither of us was mad. There was an uncertain silence between us, like we were deciding whether to settle in and get comfortable or to leave.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

"What makes you think I want something?"

"We don't even know each other, and you keep-you know, sticking up for me. Being nice. And now you show up here. What is it?"

"So you think if someone's nice to you, it means they want something?" he asked. "Interesting."

"What's so interesting about that?"

"If I were a shrink, I might wonder what it means for your relationships with other people and what you expect to get out of them," he said.

He was so deeply weird. "What the hell is a shrink?"

"They were like doctors, for your moods. Someone you talked to when you were feeling screwed up."

"Why would you talk to some random when you could just take a b-mod to feel better?"

"This was before b-mods, I think," he said. "Or maybe for people who didn't want them."

"Sounds kind of stupid, if you ask me." Who wouldn't want to mod their mood, if they could? Something to make you happy when you wanted to be happy, numb when you wanted to be numb? I missed them more than chocolate. And what did I get in exchange? Eternal life, for one thing.

And to help with the feeling-screwed-up part? I supposed there was always Sascha.

I missed the drugs.

"And, by the way, my relationships are just fine," I said. "At least I have relationships, unlike some people."

"Oh, excuse me," he said with exaggerated contrition. "I forgot-You're popular."

For some reason, maybe because it was so far from reality, maybe because he made being popular sound like a fatal condition, maybe just because there was nothing else to do but cry and I was a few tear ducts short, I laughed. So did he.

"People are idiots," he said when he caught his breath.

"You don't have to say that."

"I'm not just saying it. Those girls you used to hang out with? Superficial bitches. And the guys-"

"Stop," I said.

"They're not your friends," he said. Like I needed a reminder. "They dropped you."

"I noticed. Thanks. But they're still..." I shook my head. "So is that what you think of me, too? Superficial bitch?"

"I think..." For the first time he seemed not quite sure what to say. "You're different now. And that interests me."

It wasn't an answer.

"So that's why you helped yesterday? I'm, like, some kind of scientific study for you?" I said bitterly. "Something neat to play with?"

"Why do you have to do that?" he asked.

"What?"

"Turn everything into something small like that. Mean."

"Are you trying to be my shrunk again?" I said.

"Shrink."

"That's what I said."

"I just want to know what it's like," he said. "Being..."

"Different?" I suggested. "It sucks."

"No. I know what it's like to be different." He wound the strap of his bag around his fingers. "I want to know what it's like to be you. To be downloaded. To have this mind that's totally under your control, to know you're never going to age, never going to die, this body that's perfect in every way..." He looked up at me, blushing. "I didn't mean it like that. I mean, I just..."

"Don't worry," I said. "No one's meant it like that. Not since...before."

He blushed a deeper pink. "You do, though," he mumbled. "Lookgoodlikethis." It took me a second to decipher what he'd said. "Better than before. I think, at least."

The body couldn't blush. Not that I would have blushed, anyway, just because Auden Heller gave me a compliment. The Auden Hellers of the world were always giving compliments to the Lia Kahns of the world. It's what they were there for.

But it was the first time in too long that I'd really felt like a Lia Kahn.

"Thank you," I said. "For yesterday, I mean."

"So what does it feel like?" he asked eagerly.

"Like...not much." It wasn't that I didn't want to explain it to him. I did, that was the strange part. But I didn't know how. "Everything's almost the same, but not quite. It's all a little wrong, you know? It sounds different, it looks different, and when it comes to feeling..."

"I read that every square inch of the artificial flesh has more than a million receptors woven into it, to simulate organic sensation," he said.

"If you say so." I hadn't read anything; I didn't want to know how the body worked. I just wanted it to work better. "But maybe a million isn't enough. I can feel stuff, but it doesn't feel..." I brushed my hand across the surface of his bag. This time he didn't pull it away. "It's like if I close my eyes and touch the bag, I know it's there. I know it's a rough surface, a little scratchy. I know all that, but I can't...It's just not the same. It's like I'm living in my head, you know? Like I'm operating the body by remote control. I'm not inside it, somehow."