Robin Wasserman - Torn

“So,” he whispered finally. “This is awkward.”

“We probably shouldn’t talk.”

“Right. Safer that way. Someone could hear.” I could feel his chest moving with every word.

“Right.”

So we didn’t talk. Not for a while, at least.

“The thing is, we never really got the chance,” he said, some endless amount of time later.

“The chance to what?”

“Talk.”

So I wasn’t going to be able to avoid it. “Fine. Talk.”

That seemed to shut him up. It was several minutes before he came up with something to say. “What are you thinking?”

“That’s what you want to talk about?”

“I’m making conversation.”

“Fine. I’m thinking…” It wasn’t really any of his business. But then, it wasn’t much of a secret. “About Zo. What are you thinking?”

“You want to know the truth?”

“Not really.”

“I’m thinking about trying not to think about all the water underneath us.”

I prepared myself for yet another guilt trip. Of course he was afraid of the water; he’d nearly drowned. But I wasn’t about to let him tell me it was all my fault. I wasn’t apologizing again.

“Not a problem for you, I guess,” he said.

“What, water?”

“The lack of, you know, facilities ,” he said. “I can hold it for eight hours, but I’ve got to warn you, that’s pretty much my limit… .”

“Gross!” I had to smile. “That’s what you were talking about?”

“What’d you think?”

“Nothing.”

“Now, I’m not saying I’m going to wet my pants—well, our pants, really, considering the circumstances—and it’s not like I’m thoroughly humiliated or anything by the mere prospect, which is maybe something else I’m thinking about absolutely, and completely not thinking about.”

I wondered if he was trying to make me laugh.

“Seriously, you can stop now,” I told him, trying not to. “I get the picture.”

“I’m just saying, it’s rough for a guy.” I could tell he was holding in laughter too. “You know, you’ve got the water down there, and then you try to stop thinking about that, and all you can think of are lakes, rivers, water fountains…”

“Showers,” I put in helpfully. “Rain.”

“Flushing toilets.”

“Tall, cold drinks of water.”

“Waterfalls.”

There was a long pause. Neither of us was laughing anymore.

“It’s not an excuse, you know,” I said instead.

“What?”

“What happened to you.” I paused, half expecting him to correct me. What you did to me. But he didn’t. “It doesn’t give you the right to do whatever the hell you want.”

“I guess this is where I tell you that I didn’t mean it. That I was angry. All that.”

“Well?”

“I meant it,” he said. “All of it. Or, at least, I thought I did. Which is all that matters, right? Now…”

“Now what?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t want to say it. Mostly because I didn’t want him to guess how much I needed the answer. “What happened to you?”

“You know what happened.”

“ I happened? Is that what you mean? I did this to you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I know that.”

“You didn’t make me jump,” he said.

“You tried to save me.” “That’s not what you told your Brotherhood. ”

“I never thought you meant to hurt me,” he said. “I was always very clear about that. I just…”

“Wanted to hurt me back. Job well done.”

“ I hurt,” he said. “Do you get that? You don’t feel anything, but I feel everything . My back, my stomach, my legs, they hurt . And my right arm…” The one that wasn’t there anymore, that had been replaced by plastic and gears. “That hurts the most.”

I feel everything. You used to know that.

But out loud: “I said I was sorry.”

“Yeah. You did. Right before you walked out. To go be with them .”

“You kicked me out!”

He snorted. “Please. I was half delirious. You wanted to believe me. You wanted an out.”

“That’s not true.”

“It was easier to leave, so you didn’t have to look at me,” he spit out. “That’s the mech way, right? You hate weakness. You don’t believe in it.”

“There is no mech way. I’m not one of your cultists, too pathetic to think for myself.”

Except that Jude was the one who’d told me Auden was better off without me. That mechs and orgs weren’t safe together, because they were too weak and we were too strong, because they would always hate us and we would always hurt them. Before Auden had announced it to the world, Jude had whispered it in my ear. And I’d believed him.

Maybe Auden was right, and it had been easier that way.

“I don’t know how to forgive you,” I said.

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Do you forgive me?” I asked.

“No.”

I didn’t say anything. The walls felt closer than before. It was wrong, lying here with him. We didn’t belong like this; we didn’t fit anymore.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Because you’re right. I helped start this.”

“Because you believed in it,” I pointed out. “You just said that. You thought the mechs were evil, soulless parasites. And you meant it, remember?”

“I remember what I used to think of you,” Auden said. “Before the download. When you were just one of them, and I was…”

The weird loser with the antique watch, the ragged backpack, and the nutcase conspiracy theories. The nobody.

“I thought you were useless,” he said. “Not to mention brainless. I told myself you were nothing but a…”

“Bitch?”

“Pretty much.”

“You were probably right.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. “I believed it. I was so certain—that’s what I told myself, but that didn’t make it true.”

Auden was the one, the only one, who’d been sure that I was the same download as I was before. I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t true. That the person he’d come to know, the friend he’d had, before everything had fallen apart, wasn’t the same person as the blond bitch who’d cheered on the Neanderthals when they leaped on their prey.

“What happened to your glasses?” I asked instead.

“What?”

“Your glasses.” Auden had been the only person in our school, the only person in our world, really—that is, the world of people who counted—who was born as a natural. Life-threatening imperfections were corrected in the womb, but everything else was left as it was, thanks to his mother’s crazed Faither beliefs. He’d rejected the beliefs but kept the nearsightedness, kept the glasses—right up to the moment when he’d followed in her zealot footsteps. The moment that he’d declared artificial to be evil and natural to be divine. It had always seemed a strange time to let himself be artificially perfected, to bring himself that much closer to the boundary between org and machine. And without the glasses he seemed like someone else.

“I finally got it,” he said. “What an insult it was. Ignoring the defect when I could fix it so easily.”

“An insult to who?”

“To anyone who couldn’t be fixed. I thought I was the only one being real. But I was playing pretend. So I got my eyes fixed. No more glasses.”

“Oh.”

“Surprised?”

“I guess I thought it had something to do with… your mom.” I didn’t know if I was allowed to bring her up. “I always thought you kept the glasses because they were, like, some kind of reminder.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t really need that anymore, did I? Once I teamed up with the Faithers.” He snorted. “She would have been so proud.”