Robin Wasserman - Shattered

And then eat you.

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

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, soulsong kind of way. I had turned my zone into a digital scrapbook, 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—”