Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“I’m just doing a reorder,” I said. Same look, new size. It’s what you did after an all-body lift-tuck or a binge vacation, when you didn’t want anyone to notice your new stats. It was ill-advised—no, that was too mild; it was potentially disastrous—to do a reorder with an all-new body. New hair, new face, new coloring. Fashion logic demanded a new look, especially for a fashion leader. But I preferred the old one. The masses would deal.

“Express it,” my father said. “So you’re ready for Monday.”

“Monday?”

“School. You’ve missed enough.”

“I thought…” I didn’t know what I had thought. I had, in fact, tried not to think. I still hadn’t peeked out from behind the priv-wall on my zone. As far as anyone knew, I was still missing in action. Although obviously, they’d seen me on the vids. They knew what I’d become. “Sascha, the counselor, said maybe I should take things slow.”

“Things?”

“Readjustment… things. Like, school. I figured, maybe I could link in for a while, and then—”

“You know how your father feels about that,” my mother said.

I knew.

School was the “crucible of socialization.” School was where we would be molded and learn to mold others. Meet—and impress and influence and conquer—our future colleagues. We were, after all, preparing to take our place behind the reins of society. There’d be time enough for linked ed when we finished high school and started specialization. And when we did we’d beat out all the asocial losers who’d spent their formative years staring at a ViM. So he’d said when I was six, desperate to escape day one and all the days that followed; so he’d said when Zo got caught cutting, when Zo got caught dosing, when Zo got caught scamming a biotech lab for one of her zoned-out friends and almost got kicked out for good. I didn’t want to make him say it again.

Zo stared down at my empty plate. “If she’s too scared to go to school, I don’t think you should make her.”

Thanks a lot, Zo.

“I’m not scared.”

Zo rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”

“I’m not .”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“Zoie!” That was our mother again, trying, always trying, to keep the peace.

“What? I’m just saying, if it were me, I’d be afraid people would think I was, you know.”

Say it.

“You’ve been gone for a long time,” Zo said, like a warning.

I looked at my father. “Long enough. So, fine. Monday.”

I was ready.

Or I would be.

No one was linked in, no one but Becca Mai, who didn’t count, not even in an emergency, which this wasn’t, not yet. Of course no one was there. It was Thursday night, and Thursday night meant Cass’s house—not her parents’ neo-mod manor of glass and steel, but the guesthouse they’d built by the lake, even though they had no guests and never would.

I voiced Walker, who never went anywhere without a flexiViM wrapped around his wrist, set to vibrate with incoming texts and to heat up when I voiced. But he wasn’t there, and I pussed out. I couldn’t let him hear the new voice for the first time in a message. So instead I texted:

I’m home.

I flicked on the mood player, but no music played.

Right. Because the selection was keyed to biometrics, body temp, heart rate, and all the other signs of life I didn’t have anymore. So I skimmed through the playlist, chose at random, a soulsong from one of those interchangeable weepers we’d all worshipped a couple years before, when they’d first engineered the musical algorithm that would make you cry.

It didn’t.

But it was more than a lack of tear ducts. Or tears. It just wasn’t music for me, not anymore, not in the same way. I’d tried it a few times back in rehab, putting on a favorite track, something guaranteed to sweep me out of myself, and it had just been rhythmic noise. Song after song, and I heard every note, I tracked the melodies, I mouthed the lyrics—but it didn’t mean anything. It was noise. It was vibrating air, hitting the artificial eardrum with a certain frequency, a certain wavelength, resolving into patterns. Meaningless patterns.

It wasn’t a download thing, Sascha said. It was a me thing. Plenty of mech-heads still got music. I just wasn’t one of them. “There are some things about the brain even we don’t understand,” Sascha had admitted. “Your postprocedure brain is functionally identical to the organic model, but many clients encounter minor—and I can’t emphasize that enough, minor —differences in the way they process experiences. Finding themselves indifferent to things they used to love. Loving things they used to hate. We don’t know why.”

“How can you not know?” I’d asked. “You built the… brain. Computer. Whatever you want to call it. You should know how it works.”

“The download procedure copies the brain into a computer,” Sascha had said. “But each brain is composed of billions of cognitive processes. We can model the complete structure without understanding each of its individual parts. Which is why, for example, we don’t have the capacity to create new brains from scratch. Only nature can do that. For now.”

“So all you know how to do is make copies,” I’d said. “Except you can’t even get that right. Not exactly.” When we were talking about my brain, the things I loved and hated, when we were talking about me , “close enough” didn’t really get the job done.

“It can be disconcerting at first, but you’ll learn to embrace the exciting possibilities. One client even emerged from the procedure with a newfound artistic passion. He’s already so successful that he’s linked on the president’s zone!” Saying it like that was some kind of achievement. Like the president wasn’t too doped up to notice who stuck what on her zone; judging from the vids, she’d barely even noticed being re-elected.

I didn’t have any new passions, certainly none that would make me famous. And I’d thought maybe the music thing was just temporary, that once I got off the thirteenth floor and back to the real world, things would return to normal.

I shut down the music. What was the point?

Susskind, our psychotic cat, sashayed into the room and leaped up onto the bed. And maybe he had the right idea. Except that going to bed would mean facing all the other things that hadn’t gone back to normal. All the prebed rituals that had been made obsolete.

I had my own bathroom, tiled in purple and blue. My own shower, where I washed off the grime every night and washed on the UV block every morning, now no longer necessary. My own toilet with a med-chip that analyzed every deposit for bio-irregularities—no longer required. My own sink, where I would have hydro-scrubbed my teeth if they weren’t already made of some gleaming white alloy impervious to microbes. Not like they came into contact with any, what with the whole no-food thing. My own medicine cabinet, with all the behavior modifiers I could ever need, uppers for perk, downers for sleep, Xers for parties, stims for work, and blissers for play, but no b-mod could help me now. On the face of the cabinet, my own mirror. I stayed away from mirrors.

Psycho Susskind crawled into my lap.

“Great.” I rested my hand on his back, letting it rise and fall with each breath. “Of course you like me now.” Sussie was afraid of people, even the people who housed and fed him; maybe—judging from his standard pattern of hissing and clawing—especially us. Or make that, them. Because apparently Sussie and I were now best friends.

I didn’t dump him off my lap.

“I smell good to you now, Sussie?” I whispered, scratching him behind his ears. He purred. “Like your other best friend?” That would be the dishwasher, which Sussie worshipped like he was a Faither and the dishwasher had a white beard and fistful of lightning bolts.