Robin Wasserman - Shattered

It took months to adjust to the first download, teaching your brain to accommodate itself to its new surroundings. But subsequent downloads, in most cases, were easier. Your brain was already wired for mech life. It knew how to flex the artificial muscles, it knew how to work the artificial larynx and maneuver the artificial tongue.

Ben gave me reports: Riley was awake one week after the download, mobile the week after that. Talking no more than was required, spending his days in his room, scanning the network for accounts of the Brotherhood raid and the explosion, to fill the hole in his memory, the empty space left behind. But I’d scanned the network too and knew what he’d find and what he wouldn’t. I had to make sure he was safe from the truth.

He wouldn’t find what he wanted on the network—he would have to come to me.

One month later, he did.

We met by the flood zone. I got there early, stared out at the calm blue-red surface, imagining the sunken city that lay rotting below. I’d forgotten about the crowds at the Windows of Memory, and the way the orgs would glare at me as I slipped through, shrinking away from any accidental touch. The restrictions on mechs had loosened slightly, thanks to an upswing of public support after the Brotherhood’s role in the Synapsis attack had been made public. Not that the Brotherhood lacked its fair share of conspiracy nuts, now flocking in even greater numbers to the Temple’s doors. Savona was presumed dead in the explosion, martyred to his cause, slain by his mechanical enemy. I was convinced he’d just gone to ground, waiting for the optimal moment for his triumphant resurrection.

Meanwhile, Auden had taken over, promising a kinder, gentler Brotherhood of Man. But he hadn’t done much to stop the Brotherhood’s unofficial campaign of persecution against mechs all over the country or the official one still being waged in the back rooms of every corp, as they inched forward, lockstep, in defining us out of existence.

Everything will make sense again when Riley’s back, I had promised myself. We’ll know what to do.

But when he appeared on the horizon, inching his way down the hill with the tight, cautious steps of someone still uncertain of his control over his body, I just wanted to run away.

The custom body had been made to fit precise specifications, the face molded to match a pic on file at BioMax, stored alongside all the other physical and mental attributes of their initial slate of “volunteers.” It wasn’t a perfect replica—from a distance he looked like the boy in the picture, but as he drew closer, it was easy to pick out the tight and smooth synflesh, the unnatural combination of grace and awkwardness in his step, the lifeless eyes. He would never be mistaken for an org—but maybe, looking in the mirror, he would no longer be such a stranger to himself.

Like he was a stranger to me.

This is Riley, I told myself. The real Riley.

But it wasn’t. The deep-set brown eyes, the lips that curled up instead of down, slightly oversize ears and a slightly undersize nose, a square chin with a shallow cleft at its center, rich brown skin stretched taut across thick muscles, a crease in his forehead where his eyebrows knit together in concern. He was a stranger.

He drew closer, and I searched for something familiar, some ghost of the Riley I knew, in the way he walked, the way he held himself, some trace of Riley in his smile, in his eyes.

But there was nothing.

And when he reached me, and it was too late to run, and he said my name, that was different too. A differently sized throat, differently shaped mouth, differently spaced teeth—it meant different acoustics, and so a different voice. This one was lower, made him sound older, but there was almost something melodic about it, like he was singing as he spoke. Not that it mattered. A voice wasn’t a soul, it was just a set of vibrations in the air, just physics. As his body was just a machine, his features just molded plastic. None of it should have mattered. None of it was him , except the patterns inside his head, the data arranged into feelings and memories—but that was nothing I could see. Nothing I could touch.

He reached for me, and without thinking, I pulled away.

In that moment, I finally understood what had happened after my accident, why my friends, my boyfriend, my family, couldn’t see that beneath the wiring and the synflesh I was still me , no matter how I looked, no matter how I sounded. Because knowing something to be true is different than believing it.

This is Riley, I told myself. But you can’t force yourself to believe.

“What is it?” the stranger asked in a stranger’s voice.

I shook my head. What if I couldn’t do it? What if I just walked away from him, like everyone had walked away from me? What if, after helping him destroy his best friend, I left him alone?

He held out his hand, palm up, an invitation. “It’s still me,” he said.

I put my hand on his, palm to palm.

“It’s still us,” he said.

His arms felt different around my body. We didn’t fit together the same way, folded into the same curves and hollows. He was taller, slimmer. Even his lips were the wrong shape, the wrong size. But his hands cupping my face, slipping down my neck, my back, different and the same, all at once, and the feel of someone holding me up, a chest to lean against, a hand to hold—it was still him.

It was still us.

“Tell me what happened,” he said when we lay in the damp grass, in each other’s arms. “Help me remember.”

“BioMax lied,” I told him, launching into a well-rehearsed narrative. “They didn’t wait for my signal—they just showed up, busted us as we were laying the explosives. The explosion was an accident.”

“Jude wouldn’t have done it,” he said. “Not in the end. We would have talked him out of it. I wouldn’t have let him do that to himself.”

“I know. He’s your best friend,” I murmured, and tightened my grip on his hand.

“He’ll make contact when he can,” Riley said. “When he needs us. He knows we’ll help. He’ll be back.”

I hope not, I thought.

Because if he came back, then Riley would have to know what we’d done. Except that this Riley hadn’t done anything. He’d committed no betrayal, and given the opportunity, he might have chosen differently. In that one way— and only that one way, I told myself—the old Riley was dead. I’d left him behind and watched him die. This new one couldn’t be held accountable for someone else’s sins; this Riley was innocent.

It’s not a lie, I thought, telling him a story of what should have happened, where he was a hero and Jude was still his friend and happily ever after was still in reach for someone, someday. It’s a gift.

I would be his memory.

“It seems like a long time ago,” he said as we stood at the edge of the water, clothes in two neat piles on the ground, feet bare. “Since we were here.”

“It was,” I said to the stranger who wasn’t a stranger, with a hand that looked so wrong in my own.

We stood with our backs to the hill and everything it led to. Somewhere up there, beyond the horizon: the Brotherhood regrouping, Savona lying in wait, orgs hating us, orgs fearing us, BioMax holding us under absolute control, pretending we walked free, Auden knowing I’d saved him all over again and knowing I was the reason he’d needed to be saved. Somewhere up there: a home, my father asking God to forgive him for creating me, expecting me to be someone long dead, my sister, wanting to be anyone but my sister, not wanting me to die. Somewhere up there: Jude, who knew the truth.