Crashed (16 page)

"You like the cat so much, you take it," I said. "He'll love you."

Who was less human than Jude?

"She brought it for
you
," he said.

"So?"

He didn't say anything for a moment, pretending to concentrate all his attention on the cat. But I could see his eyes flashing, watching me from beneath heavy lids. "So nothing." He stood up, scooped the cat into his arms. "You got that from Sloane, didn't you?" he said, nodding at the final dreamer on the night-stand. I reached for it, but I was still moving in slow motion. He swept it away with ease. Jude nestled the small black cube into his palm, rubbing his fingers along its smooth surface. Most dreamers had a series of lines etched into their sides, indicating their duration. This one, which Sloane had been hesitant to pass along, was unmarked. "It's a new one," she'd said. "Something about a neural feedback loop? I didn't really get it. But I guess somehow it works different on different brains."

"You control how long it lasts?" I'd asked.

She had hesitated, then shaken her head. "I don't think 'control' is the word for it."

"What do you care who I got it from?" I asked Jude now.

He smiled thinly. "I'd just suggest that you consider the source."

"Aren't
you
her source?" I said.

"That was for
Sloane
," he said. "Maybe I got tired of listening to her whine about how much she wants to die."

"She's over that now," I told him. A year ago Sloane had jumped out a window in some pathetic attempt to end whatever Great Pain she imagined was consuming her. She'd passed out in a puddle of her own blood and woken up with a mechanical body and a promise from her parents that no matter how many times she tried to break herself, they'd always Humpty Dumpty her back together. And they did, more than once.
You had an accident,
they'd say when she woke up, and she'd smile and nod and pretend to believe them and then try it all over again. Until eventually she gave up; she joined us.

"Whatever you say."

"This is none of your business," I told him.

"What? Sloane's death wish, or yours?"

I pulled my knees to my chest. "Don't talk to me about death." I knew I sounded like a child. "You don't know what you're talking about."

Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, the attack played out in reverse. The bodies climbed to their feet, alive again. But their bloody eyes were still dead.

"
I
don't know? Right." Jude flung the dreamer at the bed. "I don't know why I even bother trying."

"That was
trying
?" I asked. "That's just sad, Jude."

"Don't worry, it stops now." He left the room. Psycho Susskind climbed on top of me, his claws bearing down on my chest, and waited for me to do something. When I didn't, he padded out of the room after Jude. A new acolyte for the great leader.

Apparently Susskind didn't miss me any more than Zo did.

I don't want to think about that
, I thought, like a child.

But unlike a child, I had control over my life. I had control over everything--that's what being a mech was all about. I picked up the dreamer from where it had landed beside my pillow.

I didn't want to think about Zo or dead people's dead eyes or anything else.

And I didn't have to.

Time passed--or it didn't.

Thoughts glittered and fluttered. Words flickered bright and sputtered out, diamond sharp and meaningless.

Sweet in the brash and senseless blue and down and down and deep.

The silence of noise, waves made visible, shimmering green and gold. A universe of infinite vibration, quantum strands quivering and shivering.

Bare peculiar lands of majesty in six of purple plasma gray and I am lost.

And I am lost.

And I am.

I am.

Lost.

The world bobbing up and down, that was the first thing.

No, not the world, my head. Shaking, flopping back and forth on my neck.

Then: his hands on my shoulders, fingers gouging flesh.

His eyes, black in the dim light, wide. Scared.

I could feel the dreamer tugging me down. I was in the water again, the deep, black pool, the surface too far, the world through its murky window a soup of distorted shape and color.

"Lia!" His face in my face. My body still in his hands as he dragged me upright, as he pushed me against the wall, shouting, incomprehensible. And then the one sound that wasn't noise.

Lia.

The name like a slap, like breaking through the water into the pain of winter air.

Kicking toward the surface, reaching up toward dry land, toward him.

I could let go
, I thought.
Stop fighting. Drift away
.

Maybe this was what happened when you overloaded on dreamers--maybe at some point you didn't need the dreamer anymore, and the brain made its own dreams. Maybe after the dreamer ate away everything else, the dream was all you had left.

But I didn't let go. I held on. To the light and noise. To Riley, my face in his hands, my hands on his chest.

I woke up.

"How long?" I asked.

He let go of my face, eased me to the floor, one hand in my hand, the other at my waist. We sat cross-legged, facing each other. He didn't let go of my hand.

"How long?" I said again.

"Since Jude was here?"

I nodded.

"Twenty-two days." He winced like he was expecting me to freak out.

Three weeks.
Plus the weeklong dreamer before that and the three days I'd dreamed away before that. One month below. In the dark. One month gone.

But if you were going to live forever, what was one month? Infinity minus one is still infinity.

"You know, I get it," he said, pulling his hand away from mine.

"What?" But I knew what.

"Wanting it all to go away." He brushed his hands along his thighs, then placed them flat on his knees. It was like he didn't know what to do with them now that he was no longer holding on. "Forget."

Normally there was nothing I hated more than someone pretending to understand what was going on in my head. But this time, it didn't bother me.

"I keep thinking that someone should have screamed, you know?" Riley said. "It would have made it seem more like a vid. Unreal. But . . ."

"Yeah. No screaming," I said, letting myself remember. For the first time not fighting back against the images. The dreamers had left an empty space behind them. And the memories rushed in to fill the vacuum.

"There was a girl," I said. "A kid. I saw her before it all happened. She had this hot pink hair and--"

"Yeah." He stretched his arms behind him, leaning his weight back on them. "I saw her."

"She was probably eight or nine," I said, picturing Zo at that age. She'd been experimenting with different hair colors, showing up with purple streaks one morning, rainbow the next. It was before she'd settled on the retro thing, and instead she was obsessed with av-wear--a phase that we all went through, when instead of modeling your avatar to look like you, you turned yourself into a live-action av, complete with neon hair, net-linked morphtattoos, and the occasional glitter wings.

But Zo had gotten a chance to grow out of it.

He leaned forward, his hands uncertain again, on his lap, then on the floor, then cradled, one in the other. "I stepped on someone. When we were running away. I wasn't looking, and then--"

"We both did," I said. I wanted him to stop talking. I wanted to go back to the dream. But it was like we were flying. Like we'd jumped out of the plane, and nothing was going to stop us now, except the ground. "We couldn't help it."

He shook his head. "I looked down," he said. "When I felt it. Something-- I don't know. Soft and hard at the same time. You know?"

Soft and hard. The feel of a foot sinking into a chest.

"She was still alive," he said. "Mouth wide open."

"Like she was screaming."

"It sounds stupid," he said. "I know. She was just trying to breathe, but . . ."

"It looked like she was screaming."

"I stepped on her," he said. "And I didn't stop."

"We couldn't have helped her."

"You wanted to stop," he said.

"I didn't know what I was doing," I reminded him. "I froze.
You
got us out of there."

"And straight into hell," he said.

I rested my hand on top of his hands. He stiffened.

"Thank you for waking me up," I said.

He pulled his hands out from under mine. Stood up. "You would've woken up if I was here or not. Just good timing."

"Probably."

There was a loud scratching sound at the door. "Psycho Susskind," he said. "You want me to let him in?"

"
What'd
you call him?'

"Isn't that his name?" he asked.

Yes, but it was
my
name for him, mine and Zo's. Weird to hear it come out of Riley's mouth.

"He doesn't seem too crazy to me," Riley said. "Maybe you weren't feeding him enough."

"Have you
seen
him?" I laughed. "The last thing that cat needs is more food."

Riley grinned. "He never turned me down."

"
You
were feeding him?"

"Didn't think you'd want him to starve," Riley said.

"Sorry," I said. "You shouldn't have to take care of my cat."

So I had a cat again. I hadn't even wanted one the first time around. Zo and I had begged for a puppy. But when our father showed up with psycho Sussie, we knew better than to do anything but smile and say thank you. And then pretend not to be disappointed when we tried to pet him and he hissed and ran away.

"Someone had to. But I think he misses you," Riley said.

"Doubtful. But you can let him in."

Riley obviously couldn't wait to get away from me, and I couldn't blame him. I reminded him of everything we both wanted to forget.

He opened the door and the cat slipped in. A moment later, nodding a silent good-bye, Riley slipped out.

Susskind was gray with thin black raccoon stripes streaking his fur and a long strip of black trickling down his spine and tail, a reverse skunk. If you looked closely, you could see the gray was speckled with white, like a permanent dusting of dandruff. His eyes were a pale, watery green, the color of wilted celery. All of which made for one extremely ugly cat.

He curled up against me, butting his head into my arm.
Pet me,
in cat speak.
Love me.
But every time I gave in and stroked his fur, Susskind would stiffen and creep away. It was only when I gave up that he would return, nuzzling my hand, digging his claws into my leg, giving me those cat eyes, which, unlike a pitiful puppy-dog gaze, bore no neediness or desperation, just a pale green watchfulness. We repeated the cycle a few times, head butt, purr, escape, return, until he judged me worthy and lowered his bulk onto my lap. Now he gave me a different look.
I'm ready,
it said.
I deserve it.

What are you waiting for?

So I rested my hand on his soft coat, rubbing slow circles into his warm, ample belly. When I was a kid, Susskind's fur had looked irresistibly soft. I'd longed to run my hands through it--but he always ran away before I got the chance. Now the fur barely made an impression. The synflesh wasn't designed to appreciate that kind of subtle sensation.

He let out a guttural purr and clawed my arm.
That
felt good.

"Did you really miss me, you psycho?" I whispered.

He rested his paws on my knee, then lowered his head onto them. His eyes narrowed to slits. Naptime.

"I think I've slept enough," I told him. But I sat there with him, my hand on his back, rising and falling with the even breaths.

I hadn't been a cat person back when I was a person. But then, Susskind hadn't been a person cat. Orgs were as repulsive to him as they were to Jude. Whatever I was now, he approved. No questions asked. Even in catspeak.

"I missed you too."

Something to remember about cats: They're not your friend. If you ever came across a giant dog, some kind of mutant puppy towering twenty feet off the ground, the dumb thing might knock over a few trees while it was doing its yippee-yay-a-new-friend happy dance, but the worst thing it would do is lap at you with its giant tongue and maybe drown you in dog slobber.

A giant cat would bat you around for a while between its giant paws.

And then eat you.

You can't blame them; it's just the way they're built.

TEMPLE OF MAN

"It didn't happen because I was good.
It happened because I was lucky."

My zone was flooded.

I'd dropped out for this long once before--just after the accident. The voices and texts had piled up, digi-gifts heaped on an electronic shrine. Fake presents from fake friends, as it had turned out. But at least I'd been missed. Not that it had given me much comfort at the time. It was hard to remember that Lia Kahn, the one who still thought she was socially invincible. I had what everyone wanted--the right clothes, the right friends, the right look. I had the shiniest toys. And the one with all the toys decided who else got to play.

No one told me that when right turns wrong and your shiniest toy turns around and screws your sister, all that power disappears, along with everyone else. Game over.

I had a new zone now. New zone for a new body and a new life, and this one was sparse. I'd created it with Auden, chosen the avatar that he preferred--blond hair, silver skin, gray eyes, the face a merge of the old Lia and the new one. After Auden had finished with me, I'd kept the av. But it didn't have much to do these days. I wasn't zone-hopping or trying to up my pathetic Akira score. The stalker sites had never really been my thing, and they'd gotten even duller since the election--it was one thing to have a president in and out of rehab, so dropped on downers she barely noticed the difference, but this new guy had some kind of body-worship fixation, and there were only so many nude self-portraits you could gawk at before they just got old, six-pack abs or not.

I may have been watching the vidlifes, but that didn't mean I wanted to link in with other fans, trading chatter about Lara's latest hookup or whether you could still see Cord(elia)'s Adam's apple, post snip-tuck. I had no use for music anymore-- this brain, although it was supposed to be an exact copy of the biological version, processed melody as noise. And once I got used to the emptiness, I stopped posting vids and pics. It wasn't just that I had nothing to show off. I had no one to show off
for.
None of the other mechs were any more into their zones than I was. Quinn claimed she'd gotten enough of the network after all those years chained to a bed, seeing the world through a screen. Growing up in the city, Jude and Riley barely had zones in the first place--they didn't seem to get why you'd want them. Only Ani was obsessive, posting pics of everything and everyone, trying to disguise her disappointment when we didn't cross post on our own.

Mostly, I used my zone for the same thing that Jude used his for: finding myself. And not in the weeping, wailing, soul-song kind of way. I had turned my zone into a digital scrap-book, a patchwork of all the vids and rants about how us evil skinners were determined to take over the world.
Know your enemy,
my father used to like to say. When you
are
the enemy, I guess that translates to
Know yourself.

So once I'd cleared out the fog the deep dreamer had left behind, I linked in, determined not to fall back into an obsessive loop of corp-town attack vids. I would just dip in, see what I'd missed, then cut the link and start living my life again.

The flaw in that plan: Like I said, my zone was flooded. The list of suspects in the attack had been leaked, complete with my name, and in came the hate mail. The standard trash from Savona's brainwashed ex-Faithers calling me an abomination in the eyes of God, plus a few death threats from randoms too stupid to understand the "can't" in "can't die." And plenty of generic mass texts that looked like they'd been sprayed out to every mech on the network, warning that we were all the same, we were all dangerous, and soon they hoped to see us all in the same landfill, shut down, rusted, and busted beside heaps of burned-out cars and broken-down ViMs.

I wasn't about to go weeding through the venomous junk, but a few messages were red-flagged as req texts, meaning that they wouldn't archive until they'd been read. Only the government and a few of the most powerful corp consortiums had that kind of authority:

From Corps United in Regulating Borders, my passport had been revoked. Explicit permission from CURB was required if I wanted to leave the country.

From the Associated Union of Credit Corps, my credit-- what little of it I had after leaving home--was frozen.

From the Conglomeration of Transportation Corps, mechs were forbidden to drive without at least one person in the car. There was an asterisk beside "person" and a note at the bottom that clarified, "qualifications for categorization as a 'person' to be at the discretion of the CTC."

And from the Department of Justice--which, despite outsourcing the majority of its portfolio to the private sector and neutering itself in the process, refused to follow its fellow governmental departments into the great blue yonder and instead stubbornly clung to life, no matter how toothless or obscure-- notification of congressional hearings to be conducted on a new definition of the word "person," for general legal and regulatory purposes. Buried in the bureaucratic blizzard of words, the heart of the proposed definition: "Resolved: A 'person' will be defined as an organic entity, its brain and body conforming to the biological criteria of the species
Homo sapiens
, its defining qualities including but not limited to birth, aging, and death."

A lot could happen while you were dreaming. It was tempting to just go back to sleep.

Instead, I went to find Riley. Not because I thought he would know what to do, since there obviously wasn't anything
to
do. Not because I needed him to explain the world to me; I had the network and the vids and, even without watching them, I had a pretty good idea of the whole trajectory, mech attacks orgs, orgs attack mechs, what could be more logical than that? I didn't need him for anything.

But I went looking for him anyway.

The smarthouse was smart enough to tell me that Riley was in the vidroom. It just wasn't smart enough to inform me that he wasn't alone.

"Bastard!" Jude shouted as I opened the door. He was in full VR gear, whacking an invisible hockey stick against an invisible puck. Not that the herky-jerky motion bore any resemblance to an actual hockey play, but I'd spent enough tedious hours watching Walker's virtual reality stick work to recognize the body language.

"Suck it," Riley shot back, grinning and jerking to his right. From Jude's grunt, I figured he must have blocked the shot.

You could play VR sports the couch potato way, lying around and steering the action with your fingers and eye twitches--but most guys I knew preferred the full action, full contact method, cramming a little reality into their virtual.

"Give up yet?" Riley taunted, muscling past Jude with a sharp elbow to the shoulder.

Jude whipped around, raising the invisible stick above his head. "Do I look like that kind of loser?"

"There's more than one kind of loser?"

Jude sent a shot careening past Riley, who lurched for it, then swore under his breath when he missed. "You're the expert," Jude drawled, "you tell me."

Riley ducked, swiping an invisible puck away from his head. "Watch the face!"

"Was that your face?" Jude asked, all innocence. "I get confused--your face, your ass, so tough to tell them apart . . ."

"Staring at my ass now?" Riley sputtered through his laughter, slapping a shot to the left. He raised his hands in triumph. "He shoots, he scores! He's beaten the all-time record! He's--"

"Even more obnoxious when he wins than when he loses," Jude said, grinning. "Even though he gets zero practice."

I realized I'd never seen Jude laugh for the fun of it rather than at someone else's expense; I'd never seen Riley laugh at all. But here they were, no different from Walker and his brain-burner football buddies, assing around like a couple of idiots with nothing more to worry about than whether they could finish the bottle of chillers before their girlfriends showed up for date night.

Riley kept telling me that I didn't know Jude, not the way he did. So was this what he meant? The real Jude, the astonishingly normal, orglike Jude, who dropped the all-knowing guru act as soon as he was alone? Or was it just a mask, designed to fool Riley into thinking that his faith and loyalty were well-founded, even though they were miles and bodies away from whatever ties bound them together.

Or maybe he was both at once; maybe he was neither.

"See something you like?" Jude suddenly asked, taking the VR mask off his face, staring at me like he'd known I was there the whole time. I suddenly felt like I'd been spying on more than just a game. Riley jerked around toward the doorway and pulled off his own mask, wearing that bleary-eyed expression of someone yanked into reality before he was ready.

"I'm just, uh, looking for Ani," I stammered, backing away.

"She's out," Riley said. "Another rally, I think."

Jude glared at him.

"What rally?" I asked.

Riley opened his mouth, then, with a wary glance at Jude, closed it again.

Obedient like a dog,
I thought in disgust.
Not attractive.

It wasn't the kind of thought I wanted to be having about Riley, or any of the mechs. Attractive, not attractive--not my problem, either way. Not that I was oblivious to his broad shoulders or sinewy muscles. And not that he wasn't exactly my type, not just the tall, dark, and monosyllabic thing, but the way he could say all he needed to with a touch or a look or--even though I didn't technically have proof of this, I had no doubt--his biceps tightening around you, curling you into his chest, into that body-shaped hollow created by his open embrace--

No. That was exactly the kind of thinking I didn't need. One disastrous night with Walker had been enough to prove that when it came to mechs, anatomically correct was necessary but not sufficient. I could do anything I wanted--it was the
wanting
that was the problem. There was a reason we had to jump out of planes and dive off cliffs to get a high, to break through the wall separating us from the ability to experience something real. I'd wanted Walker all right, just as much as before the download--but when I had him, his body tangled up in mine, it had been cold and awkward and empty. It had been--why not just say it?--mechanical.

Walker wasn't the only one
. That was the renegade voice in my mind, the one that insisted on reminding me of everything I'd prefer to forget, like that afternoon by the waterfall with Jude. But that didn't count. That hadn't been real. Just a moment of desperation. It didn't prove anything other than the fact that I was right about staying away.

"What rally?" I asked again, determined to stop thinking about things there was no point in thinking about.

"See for yourself," Jude said, flipping on the nearest screen and calling up a live vid.

Savona had upped his production values while I was dreaming. What had once been a bare stage with a plywood podium was now an elaborately dressed proscenium, framed by dark velvet curtains that perfectly set off the glowbars lining the stage. The eerie golden glow encircled a central dais, coated with iridescent paint that shimmered under the stage lights. Savona stood at its center, the glowbars showering him in a golden aura. And sitting by his side, as always, his most loyal disciple.

He looks stronger than he did before,
I told myself.

An audience of hundreds cheered them on. "Do you want to live in fear?" Savona shouted at his Brotherhood. "Is that the country you want for yourselves, for your children?"

"No!" the crowd roared back.

"Are their rights more important than our lives?" he shouted. The camera zoomed in on his flushed face. Despite the frenzy in his voice, his black-eyed gaze was ice. "More important than our
souls
?"

"No!" the crowd faithfully called back.

"Friends, we once were lost, but now we are found," Savona intoned. He raised a finger:
Wait.
At his command, they fell silent. Auden planted his hands on the arms of the chair and heaved himself into a standing position. He leaned against Savona for a moment, steadying himself, then stood upright, unassisted. "Our message has been heard," Savona said. He grasped Auden's hand. "Our sacrifices have not been in vain."

They raised their clasped hands. "We are in the right," Auden said, his raspy voice projected over the crowd. "Will we do whatever is necessary?"

"We will!" the crowd thundered.

"Will
you
?" Auden asked, and when the camera zoomed in on him, his gaze was anything but steady. His eyes were wild, unfocused, and at odds with his strangely placid smile. I wondered if Savona had drugged him up before wheeling him out onstage.

"I will!" the crowd shouted as one.

"
I
will!" Auden shouted back. He and Savona raised their hands again.
"We will!"
they cried in unison. The applause drowned out whatever they said next. The vidroom's sound system was designed to be louder and clearer than life; the cheering erupted all around us.

I forced myself not to lunge for the controls and blot it out.
No more dreams,
I told myself.
Eyes open
. So I watched. I listened. Until I couldn't take it anymore, and as if he somehow knew exactly when I would break, Jude shut it off.

"They've been throwing one of these every week," Jude said. "Your little boyfriend's gotten pretty popular."

"It's not Auden," I insisted.

"Sure looks like him," Jude retorted. "So unless you're not the only one with a convenient double floating around--"

"Enough!" Riley held up a hand to each of us, palms out. "It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter that she's denying reality to believe whatever the hell she wants to believe?" Jude asked, voice soaked in sarcasm. "Maybe she should go join her boyfriend onstage. She'd fit right in."

"This isn't helpful," Riley said. He and Jude looked at each other for a long moment. Then Jude nodded.