Crashed (5 page)

I went.

Alone was easier said than done.

"Go away!" I shouted. The knocking stopped. But then the door eased open, enough for me to glimpse a patch of blue-black hair through the crack. "Unwanted visitor," I told the room. "Terminate."

The room didn't respond, nor did it deploy countermeasures to keep Ani out. Apparently the new smartchip tech had its limits. Quinn had had the house fully equipped the month before, moments after the AI chips hit the market, promising us it would change all our lives. Like the automated plane, it was a perk of excess credit, a luxury the rest of the world would enjoy only through vids. So far it had been less than earth-shattering, learning who liked what when it came to lighting, temperature, noise level, all the little things that can make life so irritating. When you were walking around with a computer in your head, it was hard to be impressed by an artificially intelligent doorbell. Especially one not intelligent enough to keep out unwanted visitors.

Ani paused in the doorway, as if waiting for the termination order to be carried out. "Since I'm still alive--"

"Don't let Jude hear you say that."

"Since I'm still
intact
," she clarified. "Can I come in?"

"Would it stop you if I said no?"

"Not really. But you might hurt my feelings." She flashed me that strangely shy smile, the one that always made me wonder how she'd hooked up with Jude and Riley in the first place, much less how she'd managed to score even a minimal quotient of Quinn's attention. Not that she wasn't pleasant enough, even sweet. She was just there--but she was
always
there, and somehow that made the difference. She was a little like a fungus, I'd decided. She grew on you.

"I don't want to talk about it," I warned her. "The past is irrelevant and all that, remember?"

She stepped into the room and sat down on the floor, her back against the wall. "No talking. Got it." She pulled her knees up to her chest and latched her arms around them. "So what do you want to do?"

I wanted to know what she thought of me, now that she knew what I was running from.

No,
I thought.
Not running
. Running away was for cowards. I'd run
toward
. I'd chosen a new life. And I'd done it to protect everyone else, not myself. I knew that--and not just because Jude told me so.

"Whatever." I flicked on the ViM screen, calling up my zone. Strange to think there was more raw computing power in my head than in the ViM, but then, that was the beauty of Virtual Machines--no one needed a computer anymore, not with your whole life stored on the network. All you needed was a screen and a password, and you were good to go.

My zone was pretty bare these days--a few pics, a couple texts from randoms I'd never met who didn't realize I'd pretty much dropped off the network. In the old days, I'd basically lived my life on the zone, along with everyone else. Now it was just another reminder of all the crap I'd decided to forget. "What should we do?" I asked.

"You're asking
me
?"

"I was asking the room, actually, but you'll do."

Ani pulled herself up and wandered over to the room's AI port, tracing her fingers along its outer rim. "You think it can understand us?"

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "I was
joking
."

"No, seriously," she said. "Artificial intelligence, right? So what if it really is intelligent? Maybe it has, like, a personality in there. I mean, if they shoved our brains into a house somehow, we'd still be us, right?"

"Would we? How do you know?" The idea creeped me out enough that I didn't want to think about it. "Anyway, it's not the same thing. AI computers are fast, and they're--I don't know,
clever
, but they can never be
smart
. You know they can't build consciousness from scratch. It's why they're stuck with us--exact copies of the real thing."

"The
real
thing," Ani echoed quietly, still examining the port. "Yeah. As opposed to us fakes."

"You know what I mean," I said, starting to get seriously annoyed. "Anyway, wasn't the whole point to be focusing on something that
wasn't
insanely depressing?"

"Right." Ani turned to face me again, her game face on. She grinned. "So what'll it be?"

"Something normal," I suggested. "Something . . ." I didn't want to say,
Something that lets us forget for five seconds that we're the trailblazers to a new and brighter technological future, or whatever it is we're supposed to be calling ourselves instead of chip-brained freaks.
That was the sort of thing we weren't supposed to think, much less say. Besides, which of the "normal" activities-- shopping, gaming, zone pumping and dumping--on the agenda would be up to the challenge? Even if, and it was a big if, I could picture Ani and me pumping the network for the latest trend killers the way I used to do with Cass and Terra, or even just sitting around and playing Akira, the way Walker and I wasted time when we were too tired or too lazy for our preferred way of passing an afternoon, none of it would be the distraction I needed. There was a reason I spent so much time blanked out in front of the screen watching vidlifes. There was a reason for the dreamers.

I shrugged. Let Ani figure it out. She was the one supposedly determined to cheer me up. I was ready for some cheering. "What kind of stuff did you do with your friends? Before?" I asked.

Mechs don't have lungs, and we don't have capillaries or pulses, which means our skin doesn't change color when we get upset, nor does our breath speed up and slow down. We don't blink or shiver or do any of the other things that an org body does when it's giving away a secret that its owner would prefer to keep shut up inside. Our secrets belong to us.

But once you know what you're looking for, there are things you can see. An awkward jerk in a step that should have been smooth. A blank expression, because the mind behind it is suddenly too busy to remember to infuse the lips and eyes with some simulacrum of life. Sometimes just a stillness.

Ani went still.

"Sorry," I said. "Forgot." Hard to do stuff with friends, or do much of anything, when you're a genetic malfunction, abandoned by parents who realized nine months too late that they shouldn't have had you in the first place, warehoused in some kind of "facility" that was basically a loading zone on the curb of death. Ani was lucky that she'd been carried away not by starvation or infection or madness, like everyone else she knew, but by the helpful hand of the BioMax research team, seeking test subjects for the download technology and eager to recruit anyone with the right biospecs who was desperate enough to volunteer.

Or, as Ani put it, with the requisite air quotes, "volunteer."

Ani had shown me a pic of her with Jude and Riley, who she'd met in the hospital before they got the procedure. In the pic, their teeth were crooked and cracked, their cheeks sunken and sallow, Ani's malformed torso and Jude's withered legs giving Riley's malnourished but intact body a glow of health. In the pic, their skin flowed the spectrum from coffee to chocolate, warm browns--as opposed to the pale synflesh they'd been poured into, flesh white by default, ready for the majority of customers who had come calling once the "volunteer" stage was over and the download went on sale.

"Race is an extraneous category when it comes to us," Jude liked to say. "What's race when your skin is synthetic and your bodies disposable? What are you but mind and mech?"

What he meant: It was easier just to forget.

Add it to the list of things we weren't supposed to talk about.

"Brahm's party," Ani said finally, looking like she regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. "Want to?"

"Do
you
want to?" I asked, skeptical. It's not that I had anything against Brahm, a mech who'd joined up about the same time I did. Brahm was the former heir to the largest wind-farm fortune in the midwest, one of the first to download as a paying customer. Blind since he was a year old, he now walked around with a perpetual squint, as if afraid of seeing too much, too soon. His parents had tossed him out the day he committed to the procedure. Like me, he now had nowhere else to go; unlike me, he wasn't shy about sharing the details to anyone and everyone who'd listen. "Talking" to Brahm meant listening to him rant-- about his parents and the Faithers who'd convinced them to disown their apostate mechanical son, about the weather, about the lack of closet space in his first bedroom, and then the lack of southern exposure in the room he'd replaced it with. But ranting or not, he'd come to us with a sincere desire for refuge and plenty of credit to contribute to the cause.

This was the point never included in our newbie speeches, never raised at all, not explicitly at least, but always effectively communicated by Jude to each and every new recruit: Contributions weren't required--but they were always welcome.

"I wasn't invited," I said, stalling.

Ani whacked me lightly on the shoulder. "Come on."

Okay, so everyone knew d-day parties were open to all. And I'd long since gotten over my aversion to celebrating download anniversaries, at least when it came to other mechs. I planned to let my own slip by without the streamers and linked dreamers and rousing choruses of "Happy Death-day to You."

But I suspected Ani wasn't going to leave, not unless I left with her--and maybe disappearing into a noisy crowd wasn't the worst idea. In the quiet, it was too easy to hear Auden's voice.
I believe it didn't mean to hurt me.

He'd never been a good liar.

Quinn's estate was an odd mix of ancient and modern, brick and stone mingling uncomfortably with glass and solar-paneled steel. It wasn't that unusual these days to see structures that straddled the architectural ages. Tacky owners remaking a perfectly good house in their own image, a jumbled mash-up of trends past their sell-by date, plus a little old-school charm to offer a hint of respectability. But Quinn's parents had had plenty of taste-- unfortunately, they'd had significantly less luck and had died before the renovations were completed.
I like it this way
, Quinn told me once, explaining why she'd never finished the job.
Like it doesn't care about being one thing or another. It's okay being everything at once.

The mansion didn't have a fairy-tale ballroom, but the domed observatory in the south wing came close enough. Nearly thirty feet across with ceilings almost as high, the observatory offered a superb view of the night sky through its windowed walls and dome, even if the stars had long ago disappeared behind a layer of thick red clouds. Now the dome was lit up with flickering projections--not, I was relieved to see, glamour shots of Brahm's nude mech form (a new trend in d-day commemorations). Instead, it was a live feed from the pool house, the writhing bodies of linked dreamers smeared across the sky.

Music pumped and a few mechs twirled in the center of the observatory, their rhythmic movements mirroring the wild gyrations of the dreamers projected above them. Several others were playing at slam, a mech riff on rugby that forewent the ball and the scoring in favor of mass tackles, often propelled by sneaker jets. Points were awarded for style and speed of collision; losers were often required to relinquish an article of clothing. Judging from the flesh on display, they'd been playing for a while.

"Should we congratulate the death-day boy?" I asked, scanning the crowd for Brahm.

"I think he's busy," Ani said sourly, jerking her head at the wide metal stump at the center of the room, which Quinn claimed had once held a massive telescope, before the cloud cover rendered it useless. Only the base had been left behind, a vestigial artifact, its metal skin glowing in the flickering lights, an altar to the party gods. And perched on top, two bodies in their death-day suits, swaying in time to a music none of us could hear--the divine offering.

"You want to get out of here?" I asked Ani, as Quinn stuck her tongue down Brahm's throat.

Ani shrugged. "Everyone deserves a d-day kiss, right?"

"You want me to go up there and drag her off him?" I said, only half-joking. "Because I will."

Ani shook her head, her face a rictus of pleasant disinterest. I dragged her across the room, dodging the slam players and positioning us against the windows, hoping she'd have a strong enough self-preservation instinct to turn her back on the room and look out at the night.

When she didn't, I put my hands on her shoulders and did it for her.

"Tell me this doesn't bother you," I challenged her.

Ani met my eyes without flinching. "She does what she wants."

"And that's okay with you?"

"Jude says--"

I pressed my palm flat against the window, blotting out a hand-shaped chunk of the orchard spread beneath us. The window was ice against my synflesh--Brahm liked his temperatures extreme. "Forget what Jude says."

"But he's right," Ani said quietly. "Monogamy's an org thing. We shouldn't be trying to make it work for us. We're better than that."

"Fine, let's say you're right. So who else is on your list?" I turned my back on the window and peered into the crowd, trying to pick out faces in the murk. But the only person I recognized was Jude, leaning against a wall, arms crossed, eyes on me. Even from this distance, even in the dim light, I saw him see me, smile--and turn away.

"I don't have a list," Ani said.

I shook my head and faced the window again. "Exactly. So why does Quinn get to have one?"

"It's not like that," Ani insisted. "She missed a lot. She's just . . . enjoying herself."

"So what's Jude's excuse?" I muttered under my breath.

Too loud--she heard me.

"He missed a lot too," Ani said very quietly. She refused to ever speak about Jude's past, or Riley's. It was the only thing she wouldn't back down on. They'd been there when she needed them, protectors, Jude especially. Like the big brothers she saw in vid-lifes, she'd once confessed, the kind of no-questions-asked reliability that she'd always assumed was imaginary, and beyond even the realm of imagination for someone like her. She would, and did, talk about this unseen aspect of Jude ad nauseum.
You don't know him like I know him
--it was her go-to explanation for everything. "But I don't think it's about that for him. I think he's just--"