Robin Wasserman - Frozen

I wasn’t a skinner. I wasn’t a mech-head. I was Lia Kahn. And it was about time I started acting like it.

One week later they sent me home.

Someone must have tipped them off, because when we got home, they were waiting.

Getting into the car was hard enough. When it lurched into motion I curled myself into a corner, shut my eyes, and tried to pretend I was back in my room on the thirteenth floor, standing still. I wasn’t afraid of going home. Lia Kahn had nothing to fear from her own house. It was just the ride—the pavement speeding underneath the tires, the sat-nav whirring along, veering us around a corner, a tree, a truck…

I linked in, picked a new noise-metal song that I knew I would hate, turned the volume up too high, and waited for the ride to end.

Except that when the car stopped, we still weren’t home. The music faded out, and a new voice shrieked inside my head. “An abomination! We shall all be punished for her sins!”

I cut the link. Opened my eyes. A sallow face stared through the window, mouth open in a silent howl. When he saw me watching he extended his index finger, and his lips shifted, formed an unmistakable word. “You.”

My father, behind the wheel even though he wasn’t actually using it, pounded a fist against the dash. The horn blared. My mother stroked his arm, more a symbolic attempt to calm him down than anything that actually had a prayer of working. “Biggest mistake they ever made,” he muttered. “Programming these things not to run people down.”

“Honey…” That was symbolic attempt number two. Except in my mother’s mind, these things actually worked; in the fantasy world she inhabited, her influence soothed the savage beast.

“I should plow right through you!” he shouted at the windshield. “You want something to protest? I’ll give you something to really protest!”

They crowded around the car, pressing in tight, although not too tight. The legally required foot of space remained between us and them at all times. They planted themselves in front of the car, behind it, all around it, blocking us in, so we had no choice but to sit there, twenty yards from the entrance to our property, waiting for security to arrive and, in the meantime, reading their signs.

“I’m sorry, Lee Lee,” my mother said, twisting around in her seat and reaching for me. I pulled away. “I don’t know how they found out you were coming home today.”

Their signs were hoisted over their shoulders, streaming in red-letter LED across their chests, pulsing on their foreheads. Jamming the network so we couldn’t call in reinforcements.

GOD MADE MAN. WHO MADE YOU ?

FRANKENSTEIN ALWAYS BURNS

BREATH, NOT BATTERIES

“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.”

My father cursed quietly, then loudly.

“Just close your eyes,” my mother suggested. “Ignore them.”

“I am,” I said, eyes open.

My favorite sign depicted a giant extended middle finger, with a neon caption:

SKIN THIS!

It didn’t even make sense. But it got the point across.

My father fumed. “Goddamned Faithers.”

“Apparently we’re the damned ones,” I pointed out. “Or I am.”

“Don’t you listen to them.” My mother flicked her hand across her console and my window darkened, blotting out the signs. But it wasn’t the signs I’d been watching, it was the faces. I’d never seen a Faither, not up close. Before the accident, I hadn’t even seen much of them on the network. But after… Somehow my name had ended up on a Faither hit list. Until I fixed my blockers, they’d flooded my zone with all the same crap about how I was a godless perversion, I was Satan’s work, I didn’t deserve to exist. But I hadn’t expected them to come after me in person.

Religion went out of style right after the Middle East went out in a blaze of nuclear glory. Not that some people, maybe lots of people, didn’t keep privately believing in some invisible old man who gave them promotions when they were good and syphilis when they were bad. If you had the credit, you could even snag enough drugs for a one-on-one chat. You sometimes heard rumors about people—especially in the cities, where it’s not like there was much else to do—actually gathering together for their God fix, but as far as most people were willing to admit in public, God was dead. The Faith party was for all those leftover believers who—even after the nukes and the Long Winter and the Water Wars of the western drought and the quake that ate California and the wave that drowned DC—refused to give up the ghost. They were for life, for morality, for order, for gratitude, and, until recently, not against much of anything. Except reason, my father was always quick to point out. Then BioMax unrolled its download process, and the Faithers found their cause.

Now they’d found me.

My window was still blocked, but I could see them through the front windshield, silent now, all of them pointing.

“That’s it, we’ll go manual,” my father said, gunning the engine. “I’m going through them.”

My mother shook her head. “It won’t let you.”

“You have a better idea?”

She didn’t.

“Come on, Ana, we’re listening.”

She sighed.

He put his hands on the wheel, switched to manual. “I’ll find a way.”

“Wait.” I leaned forward, touching his shoulder without thinking. He didn’t flinch. I glanced out the windshield, and he followed my eyes, saw the man at the center of the crowd, the one with close-cropped blond hair and black-brown eyes, who had his hands in the air. It was a signal, and his followers—for it was obvious who was leading and who was following—fell back, clearing a path for the car. The man bowed low, but kept his face raised toward the car, his eyes fixed on me. He swept his arm out, his meaning clear. You may go. For now. And then it was our turn to follow.

It was Thursday, and Thursday meant Kahn family dinner. Even if one-fourth of the family no longer ate. They probably would have let me out of it, just this once let me sneak off to the room I hadn’t seen in nearly three months, close the door, start my new-life-same-as-the-old-life on my own, but that would have meant asking, and I didn’t. The food arrived before we did, and Zo, who usually showed up to family dinner an hour or two late, if at all, waited at the table, playing the good girl. “I got steak,” she said instead of “hello” or “welcome home” or “I missed you.” “And chocolate soufflé. All your favorites.”

And so we sat in our usual spots, and I watched them eat all my favorites.

“But what happens if you do ?” Zo asked, stuffing the meat into her mouth. She didn’t even like steak. “Does it screw up the wiring? Or would it just sit there and, you know, rot? Like you’re walking around with chewed-up bits of moldy bread and rotten meat inside you?”

“Zoie!” My mother’s fork clattered to her plate.

“She’s just curious,” my father said. “It’s only natural.”

“It’s rude . And it’s not appropriate at the dinner table. Not while we’re eating.”

“We’re not all eating,” Zo pointed out.

I did not ask to be excused.

“There’d be nowhere for the food to go,” I said. “There’s a grating over the vocal cavity. Air goes out when I talk. Nothing goes in. Want to see?” I opened my mouth wide.

Zo shirked away. “Ew, gross. Dad!”

“Not at the table, please,” he said mildly.

To me , not to Zo.

“We thought you might want to take tomorrow off, dear,” my mother said. “Maybe do some shopping, spruce up your wardrobe?” Unspoken: Because my old clothes, custom-tailored for my old measurements, wouldn’t fit my new body. Another factoid she’d neglected to mention: I hadn’t shopped with my mother since I was nine years old. Now, for Cass, Terra, and me, it was a tradition—or, as Cass called it, a fetish—first the full-body scan, then the designer zones, ignoring the pop-ups for crap we would never wear, sending our virtual selves on fashion model struts down virtual runways, knowing that whatever we selected would, automatically and immediately, become the new cool, the new it , and savoring the responsibility.