Crashed (15 page)

"Oh, please." He rolled his eyes. "I see the time away hasn't cured you of your inclination to melodrama. 'Saved myself '? From what? As if they'll be able to wring any dirty little secrets out of your location." He shook his head. "Trust me, you're not that interesting." He rubbed his hands across his face, a neat little simulation of org exhaustion. "Yes, I can jam the tracking. And
no
, I'm not about to do it for everyone. It doesn't occur to you that there may come a time when we can make the trackers work to our advantage? We don't want them knowing we can screw with the data. Didn't anyone ever teach you that you don't put your cards on the table until you have to?"

I hated to admit it, but he was making sense. That was the problem with Jude--he always made sense. He was too good at rationalizing, turning his whims into logical inevitabilities.

"All I know is you pretended we were all in this together," I said. "And then you did this, on your own."

He's not your friend
. But that was Ben's voice in my head. And beneath my anger, there was something else--maybe it was the fact that Jude had voluntarily revealed one of his precious secrets, one guaranteed to make me hate him. Or maybe it was the moment when, for just one second, the mask had fallen away, exposing his need. He
needed
me to believe him innocent. And I almost did.

"You think I don't care about you? Them?" He swept his arms out to encompass the estate. Inexplicably, he was angry too--as if
I
was the one who'd done something wrong. "I'm doing this
all
for you!"

"Excuse me if I can't quite see how you selling us out to BioMax is
helping
."

"Because I'm taking care of it!" he shouted. "I make sure they don't see anything they shouldn't see. I know everything they know.
Everything.
"

There was a long silence as I processed what he'd said. And he realized what he'd revealed.

If it were anyone else, I would have said he looked almost afraid.

"You get the GPS feed?" This wasn't anger. I'd moved beyond anger. The thought of Jude sitting in front of a screen, watching us drift through our lives, watching
over
us like the Faithers' god, probably delusional enough to believe that he was sitting in judgment rather than violation? That was sickening.

"You'd rather they knew everything, and we know nothing?" he said defensively, his voice rising. "Someone has to watch our backs."

"And you love it, don't you?" I said coldly. "Watching."

It was one thing to know that strangers at BioMax were watching over my shoulder--even call-me-Ben was nothing more than a pretty face with a boring name attached, paid to pretend he cared about where I went and what I did. As for my father, he'd always been a watcher, keeping tabs on everything, from the hours I put in at the track to the experimental error rate in my biotech homework. That's what fathers did. They paid attention, even when they weren't supposed to.

But Jude was supposed to be one of
us.

I felt like he'd stripped off my clothes, exposed my naked body.

Except it was even worse. Because the body was just an object. Eventually it would break or break down, and so what? It would be interchangeable with whatever came next. Only our minds were inviolate--that's what Jude had taught us, wasn't it? The thing that separated us from the orgs, the thing that made us mechs, that made us
special
. We lived in our heads. Unlike the orgs, we didn't fool ourselves into believing that our bodies mattered. Only our minds were alive, and they belonged to
us
.

But now Jude had reached his long fingers inside my head and carved out a space for himself. He'd crawled inside me, without my permission, without my knowledge.

And he'd watched.

There was nothing personal in a location, I reminded myself. GPS coordinates weren't diary entries. They only told him where I was, not who, not why.

But it was my choice whether or not to tell him anything.

And he'd taken that away.

I didn't run. I didn't turn around, skid down the hill of green, back to the road to nowhere.

"You can't tell anyone," Jude said. Nearly pleaded.

"Oh, I'm pretty sure I can."
Even if it means mass panic?
I thought.
Even if Jude's right and we might need this later, when it really counts?

"I'm not going to try to convince you I'm right--"

"Good."

"I'm going to bribe you," he said, regaining a little of his composure. "You keep your mouth shut, and I'll jam your tracker too. I'll feed BioMax a false stream--no one will know where you go, not BioMax. Not me."

Not my father. Not anyone.

"And let everyone else keep getting spied on?" I asked. "Turn myself into as big a liar as you are?"

"That's right," he said. "That's the plan. Or tell whoever the hell you want and spend the rest of your life with the fine folks of BioMax crawling up your ass, watching your every move."

I wasn't the same self-centered bitch I'd been before the download. But I guess I was close enough. "Okay," I said finally. Hating myself.

At least he didn't smile.

"You really think you'll be able to keep this to yourself?" he said.

I nodded.

He rolled his eyes. "You'll last five minutes. Tops. So here's the deal: You've got such a burning need to spill your guts, spill to Riley. You two are so tight now, so into your little secrets. I'm sure he won't mind keeping another one. Especially for me."

"You're so sure he'll just do whatever you tell him?"

Jude didn't answer; he didn't have to.

"All that time we were in the city, you knew," I realized. "And when those orgs grabbed me, you--" I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to ground myself in the present, to shut out the sickening sensation that I was still tied to a chair, waiting, just imagining that I'd escaped. "You claim we should have called for help, but you knew where we were the whole time-- and you did nothing."

Jude stood up, brushing the grime off his jeans, starting into the house. "Not all of us do everything we want, whenever we want."

I recognized the insult. But there was something else buried in there too. I just didn't get it. If he'd wanted to rescue me, what had stopped him?

What's the difference?
I thought, disgusted with myself for even entertaining the idea of Jude
rescuing
me like I was some helpless maiden waiting for her noble prince.

He is not your friend.

"What are we really doing here, Jude?" I asked. "What's the point of all this? What do you
want
?"

"At least you're finally starting to ask the right questions." And he turned his back on me and went inside.

I told Riley that night. We sat in my bedroom with the door closed, both of us on the floor, our backs propped against the wall, our knees drawn to our chests, a foot of space between us.

He didn't react when I told him what had happened to Mika and Sari, at least what little I knew. And he didn't react when I told him about the trackers. He didn't say anything until I told him that Jude had known all along.

"He must have a good reason," he said then.

I almost laughed. "Why? Because he's
Jude
, giver of all knowledge and wisdom, keeper of the peace?"

"Because he's Jude," Riley said, and he wasn't joking. "I trust him. I wish you did. Maybe then we wouldn't have . . ."

"You blame me." I shouldn't have been surprised. And I shouldn't have cared so much. "I made you take me to the city. I didn't let you voice Jude. I screwed everything up. Is that about right?"

Riley looked down. He crushed his hands into fists, then brought them together, knuckle to knuckle. "I screwed up," he growled. "I shouldn't have taken you there."

"You didn't have a choice."

"They wanted a trade," he said. "You for Jude. And for me."

"I know that," I said. "You want to tell me why?"

"Wynn thinks we owe him something."

"What?" I figured I deserved to know.

"A life," he said. "Among other things. It doesn't matter. I'm sorry you got involved."

"And when they took me, you went to Jude."

He nodded. "Jude freaked. He swore we'd find you. But by the time we did . . ."

"Secops showed up," I said.

"Yeah."

"Except it was all a lie," I pointed out. Couldn't he see? "If he's tracking us, he knew where I was the whole time. Just like always."

Riley didn't answer. He tilted his head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. "Never thought I'd be living in a place like this," he said.

"Did you hear what I said? Jude
lied
to you." I wanted to shake him. "He was probably going to let me rot there."

Riley shook his head. "We were going to get you out. He would have done anything."

"So he told you."

"And I trust him."

"Even though he sent us to that corp-town? Come on, you're telling me that you don't even suspect, just a little, that--"

Riley stood up. "Jude wouldn't do that. Not to me."

"And not to the orgs," I prompted him. "You know, the ones who died. You forgot to say he wouldn't have hurt them. Doesn't have it in him or something like that."

"Why are you here?" Riley asked.

"What? I live here."

"But why? If you think Jude could do something like that."

"I'm not here because of him," I snapped. And maybe, deep down, I didn't believe Jude was capable of something so terrible; maybe I wanted to believe in him as much as anyone else. Or I just needed an excuse to stay, because I had nowhere else to go. "He's watching all of us," I said finally. "Maybe I just think someone should be watching him."

"You don't know him," Riley said, and he was already at the door, leaving me. "I do."

"Are you sure?" But I said it under my breath. Quietly, so it belonged to me.

Riley hesitated in the doorway, drumming his fingers against the frame. It was strange--I wouldn't have thought him the type to emulate org shifts and twitches, pretending that his body was anything other than what it was. But there he was, playing out a pantomime of org fidgeting. Jude had encouraged us to embrace our body's natural stillness, its dissociation from feverish thoughts, yet another way to maintain control, another point scored in our game against the orgs. I'd bought it; Riley apparently hadn't. "You okay?" he finally asked.

I thought about my father then, the tightened line of his lips holding back a tidal wave. I'd never thought about what it must have been like to live behind his colorless expression. Caged by self-control, and in that cage, with him, my body after the accident, ravaged first by fire then by BioMax, my body now, the one he'd purchased, the one he'd willed into existence, the mistake.

In that cage, with me: my reflection in his eyes. And their eyes, the eyes of the dead, bloody and sightless. Auden's eyes, staring into a camera, staring out at me, believing I could do anything after what I'd done to him. Mika's eyes, shut tight, as we stepped over him, another body in another hall.

I could lock it all away. Even if it meant locking myself in with it.

I almost broke.

But I remembered that Riley wasn't my friend. That I didn't have those anymore.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Because if you're not--"

"I'm fine." I was intact and unharmed; I wasn't going to jail. I wasn't going anywhere. "I'll be fine."

"That's good," he said, like he meant it.

"What about you?" I suddenly thought to ask.

"Fine," he said.

And hope springs eternal, right? Maybe we would be.

ZONED

"And I was nothing."

Things got back to normal.

Nothing got back to normal.

Normal: Long days without much to fill them. Watching Ani hang all over Quinn, watching Quinn hang all over everyone else. Talking about nothing. Scaling buildings and jumping off cliffs, trying to feel.

Not normal: Ariana Croft, a girl with a stranger's name and my face, arrested for the corp-town attack. My face all over the vids, panic evident in wide-eyed protestations of innocence. The looks I was getting from the other mechs, the same kind of peripheral gaping I'd endured at school right after the downloads, randoms passing me in the hall, pretending to fix their eyes on the ground when really they were soaking me in, absorbing every inch of the freakitude so they could report back to their friends. Now, Jude and Riley were the only ones who didn't watch me like they were half expecting me to strike again. Jude because he never looked at me at all unless he had to. Riley because his look was different.
Waiting for me to break,
I thought more than once, catching his eye just before he turned away.
Not going to happen.

In the not-normal column: not backing up my memories, not once since the attack. Because backing them up would make them permanent--as permanent as I was, at least, which was extremely. If I kept them where they were, trapped in my head, no backup, no record anywhere but in me, then there was always a chance they could disappear. One day, I would wake up in a fresh body, with a fresh mind, one that didn't know how blank eyes could get, or how quickly skin paled when blood pooled, still and lifeless in the veins.

It was a game I'd played before, toying with the idea of forgetting, wiping out a moment like it didn't exist.

Normal: I still wasn't going to do it. My body--Lia Kahn's body--was gone, which meant the only thing left of her, of me, was my mind. And sometimes it seemed like that was nothing more than a long skein of memories. I wasn't about to start unraveling the thread, throwing pieces of myself in the trash. I didn't know where the memories ended and I--whatever
I
existed without all the things that had happened to me-- began.

Normal: I was still afraid.

I couldn't stop watching the vids of the attack.

I did it alone, in my room, staring at the screen on the wall, playing and replaying the same shots. I saw it from every angle, in color, in infrared, in black and white. Over and over again, I watched myself in the center of the atrium, standing still, bodies dropping all around me. I watched the girl who looked like me pump the Naxophedrine into the air-circulation system. And smile.

And then, when that got old, the images so familiar that they left me numb, I moved on. I pumped Ariana Croft's zone, just before they slapped a priv-lock on it. I dipped into her friends' zones, but none of them had spoken to her since the download, so they only had stories about a girl who didn't exist anymore. There were plenty of pics showing what she'd looked like before, curly brown hair, violet lenses in her deep-set eyes, a little chunky but in such a way that you knew she was doing it on purpose to seem voluptuous. Totally artificial--a girl with that kind of credit and those kinds of friends wouldn't leave anything to chance. She'd go in for lipo once a week and make sure they left
just
enough fat behind to seem authentic. An extremely noncasual casual oversight, like a carefully tousled mess of hair or a faceful of haven't-bothered-to-shave scruff. But it wasn't sexy, just sad, like a wispy moustache that looked more like a smudge of dirt than a handlebar of hair.

Not that it would have mattered, once she got sick. I even looked up the disease, some kind of bizarre immune-system disorder that couldn't be screened out and couldn't be treated. None of the zones had any pics of that. But I knew it would have made her sick and fragile and, even without the weekly lipos, skinny. Without the download, it would have made her dead.

None of it told me anything, except that this girl wasn't me.

But maybe that was the one thing I needed to know.

There was no chance that BioMax had illegally downloaded a copy of my brain into another body, that the second, secret Lia Kahn had gone insane, taken on a new name, a new persona, and decided to kill a bunch of people she'd never met before. No chance whatsoever.

But it didn't hurt to confirm that Ariana Croft was a real person. A damaged whackjob, maybe, but not me. Even if she looked like me.

Our bodies were just things, right? My body was one thing. Her body, despite the choppy haircut and bad dye job (violet with green streaks), was another. Sometimes I ripped my eyes from the vids and stared down at myself, feeling as disconnected as I had those first few days after the download, untethered from legs, arms, skin, fingers, all of it seeming to belong to someone else. Sometimes I reminded myself that even if there had been no Ariana Croft (which there was), if someone at BioMax had figured out a way around all the safeguards (which they couldn't), and for some nefarious purpose had created another Lia Kahn in body
and
mind, it still wouldn't be me. It would have just been a copy, and by definition, a copy wasn't the same as the original.

Except that I wasn't the original either.

Except that if my brain and body were destroyed, my backed-up memories would be downloaded into a new brain. Another copy. And it would feel like me. It would
be
me. That was the whole secret to mech immortality, right? When is a copy not a copy? Not much of a riddle, because the answer is obvious: when it's identical to the original.

Maybe. But I didn't trust the logic enough to test it. I could ditch this body for a new one with a new face. This me could die, and an identical copy would live. Same difference, right? Except I was afraid it wasn't.

I was afraid.

These were the kinds of things I tried not to think about when I wasn't busy trying not to think about dead people. Or trying not to think about my father. Or call-me-Ben's daily, and increasingly threatening, reminders of our "deal," which for all I knew was moot now that I was no longer under suspicion-- but to believe that would have meant ignoring the fact that there were more shadowy, faceless mechs in that vid, attackers still to be caught. Thanks to the corp-town attack, we were
all
under suspicion, every mech. All of us with no fingerprints and no biostats--and according to Rai Savona and his little puppet Auden, no souls, which meant no moral compass or internal censor and thus nothing to stop us from wreaking havoc, sowing chaos by some kind of infernally programmed design, or just destroying everything around us by virtue of our very nature. I tried not to think about Auden too, telling myself that it could have been worse, whatever he'd turned into--whatever bitter, twisted dupe
I'd
turned him into--at least he'd lived. But that thought brought me right back to dead people and sent me straight back to the vids, and the whole thing started all over again.

It was like a cut on my lip that I couldn't help worrying with my tongue. Knowing that I should let it alone, knowing better, but so hyperaware of it every time I spoke, every time I moistened my lips, every time I was sitting around and my mind wandered, just for a moment, away from the constant litany of
Don't do that
, and without intent or even awareness, my tongue slipped back into place, exploring the crevices of the wound until the pain woke me up.

I could have stopped myself. Every morning and every night I looked at the small pile of dreamers I'd hoarded, sitting just beside my bed. I'd gotten them from Sloane, and I knew she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. I'd met Sloane before either of us came to live at Jude's estate--in fact, I was the one who'd brought her here, who'd convinced her that this, not another boyfriend, not another pointless suicide attempt, was the answer she'd been seeking. She'd spent the last several years, before and after her download, researching methods of escape.

Thanks to Jude--which meant thanks to me--she'd discovered a new one.

These weren't the puny hour-long dreamers that barely topped the buzz of an intense b-mod. These were industrial-strength dreamers, good for days, even weeks, of blissful mental absence. A nice long vacation from everything.

I kept them by my bed as a test. Every time I passed them by I knew I was stronger than that. I wasn't that kind of mech. They sat there for days, one week, two, and I kept passing the test, passing them by.

Until one day, I didn't.

I wasn't prepared.

Heavy dreamers weren't anything like the lightweight version I'd sampled.

They dragged you down.

Deeper than I'd ever been.

Trapped in a dream inside a dream.

Blind in a white fog.

Existence and nonexistence in one.

Being and non. Here and not. Pleasure and pain.

That was all there was. All I was.

And I was nothing.

Waking up was like breaking through the surface of a deep, black pool of water, emerging from silent depths into the too-bright, too-noisy open air. Everything was sharp edges; everything was off-key. I just wanted to slip back under.

"I thought you hated these things," Ani said, standing over me.

"How'd you get in here?" I mumbled. It felt like the dreamer had blown my body into a million pieces, drifting on the wind, hidden in the crevices of the walls and floorboards, dissipated. I was everywhere and nowhere at once. "I locked the door."

"Quinn had the house open it for me."

Right. Artificially intelligent locks could be fooled. That was the beauty of dumb, mute technology: You couldn't reprogram steel.

I reached for the next dreamer. It was set to last a week. "Have her lock it again when you go."

Ani glanced at the dreamer in my hand. "Or I could stay. We could talk."

I shrugged. The world was getting too sharp, the fog fading away. The longer I was awake, the easier it became to think. And I wasn't in the mood to think.

"I'm just worried," Ani said. "After what happened--"

"Get out." I didn't want to remember
what happened.
That was the whole point.

She flinched.

"Please," I added. But I didn't say it nicely.

"If you stay under too long . . ."

"I'll be fine," I said. "The dreamers are safe."

"Right. Tell that to the empties."

It was what we called the mechs who dreamed away their lives, twitching and shuddering for weeks on end. Empties because they were nothing without the dreamers; because they were hollow. Bodies whose minds were on permanent vacation.

These days, I only felt empty when I was awake.

I was the center of a storm.

Light swirled around me. Through me. Wind blew in waves of red and purple and black. Color had sound and sound had color. There was no body, but there was pain.

And noise, like metal on metal, like a scream.

And need, and memory, and flesh on flesh, and lips, and the weight of a body on my body.

And weightlessness. And nothingness.

The storm raged, but I was its center, and I was still.

Quiet.

It was getting harder to come back.

When the dreamer died, there was a moment in between. Like the dazed limbo between org sleep and waking when the dream dies away and reality strays just out of reach. It was like falling--but falling so far and so fast, through a darkness without a bottom, that it felt like flying.

When I came back to myself, Jude was there.

"Sweet dreams?" He leaned against the doorframe, arms laced across his chest.

"Very." But there was nothing to remember about what these deep dreamers were doing to me; I didn't have the words to describe it to myself. It was like becoming another person; an unperson.

"Then you must have been dreaming of me." The words rang hollow, a force of habit. Or maybe it was just that the dreamer made the world seem tired, Jude's words dull and empty.

"Worried about me?" I asked.

"Why would I be?" His eyes strayed to the single remaining dreamer. No matter--once they were gone, Sloane would supply more, as many as I needed. She understood escape.

He slung a scuffed red backpack over his shoulder and crossed the room, perching on the edge of the bed. With a cool smile, he swung his legs onto the mattress. I slapped them away. "This came for you." He dropped the backpack on the bed. I reached for it--then jerked my hand away as the bag twitched toward me with a low mewing noise.

Jude shoved a slip of paper at me. "This too."

He misses you,
the note said. Typed, so I had no way of knowing who it was from.

But when the bag mewed again, I had a pretty good guess. I groaned and unzipped the bag. A flabby gray cat poked his head through the opening and nuzzled into the back of my hand. "Great. Just great."

"You know her, I presume?" Jude stroked his hand along the cat's head. It purred, arching its back. That was a sign. In a few moments, the cat would get freaked out by all the affection and lash out a claw. I kept quiet--let Jude figure it out for himself.

"It's a him," I said. "Psycho Susskind."

"Doesn't look very psycho to me," Jude said, scratching his knuckle against the scruff of Susskind's neck.

"He loves machines," I said. "Thought the toaster was his best friend. People, not so much."

"She dropped it off in person," Jude said. She. There was only one
she
it could be. "Middle of the night. So does she look like you used to look?" he added. "Before?"

"I thought we weren't supposed to talk about the past," I reminded him.

"I'm just saying, she's hot."

"You would think so." Jude was exactly Zo's type, I realized suddenly. Not on the surface, maybe--there was nothing about him that resembled the creepy, greasy retros my sister used to bring home, their eyes red from a late-night dozer session or wide and twitchy from too many hours locked in a virtual reality circuit, fingers grasping at imaginary demons. Losers, and she knew it. Choices guaranteed to spite our father, sending him into one of his silent, pale-faced rages. But Jude could match Zo smirk for smirk, shoot down her snide crap with crap of his own. Throw in the gaunt, angular features, sharp and chiseled where the rest of us seemed waxy and soft, and he was the complete package. Either her soul mate or her double.