Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“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 choco-late, 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.