Robin Wasserman - Frozen

It’s not like I had no way to fill the time. Showers and music weren’t generally the bulk of my standard evening activities. There was always a game going on the network. Or I could tweak my av, update my zone, chat with the net-friends who’d never seen my flesh-and-blood body and so wouldn’t notice it was gone. I could even hit the local stalker sites and read all about myself, wealthy scion of the Kahn dynasty stuffed into a mech-head and body. What will she do next, now that she’s home, where will she go, who will she see, what will she wear?

Instead I pumped the network for information on emotion, for why people feel what they feel and how. But I couldn’t make myself read through the results, facts and theories and long, dense explanations that had nothing to do with me.

Walker still hadn’t texted back.

I cut the link.

My tracksuit didn’t fit me any better than the rest of my clothes. The pants and sleeves were too short and too baggy, the thermo-lining, cued to body temp, was superfluous, and the biostats read zero across the board. But they would do, as would the shoes I got from BioMax, which didn’t cushion my feet like the sneakers that no longer fit, but still registered body weight and regulated shock absorption, which was all I needed. Zo was out somewhere; my parents were in bed. There was no one to notice I was gone.

It was a cold night, but that didn’t matter, not to me. There was a path behind the house that wove through the woods, a path I’d run every morning for the last several years, layered in thermo-gear, panting and sweating and cursing and loving it. The gravel sounded the same as always, crunching beneath my soles.

I need this, I said silently, to someone, maybe to myself or maybe to the body that locked me in and denied everything I asked of it. Please. Let this work.

It didn’t.

I ran for an hour. Legs pumping. Feet pounding. Arms swinging. Face turned up to the wind. The body worked perfectly. I didn’t sweat. I didn’t cramp up. I didn’t wheeze, gulping in desperate mouthfuls of oxygen, because I didn’t breathe at all. I pushed faster, pushed harder, until something in my head told me I was tired, that it was time to slow down, time to stop, but my muscles didn’t ache, my chest didn’t tighten, my feet didn’t drag, I didn’t feel ready to stop. I just knew I was, and so I did.

There was no rush, no natural upper coasting me through the last couple miles. There was never that sense of letting go and losing myself in my body, of existing in my body, arms, legs, muscles, tendons, pulsing and pumping in sync, the world narrowing to a pinprick tunnel of ground skimming beneath my feet. None of the pure pleasure of absence, of leaving Lia Kahn behind and existing in the moment—all body, no mind.

The body still felt like someone else’s; the mind was still all I had left.

I walked the rest of the way back to the house, navigating the path in darkness. The heavy clouds hid even the pale glow of the moon, and so I didn’t see the shadows melt into a figure, a man, not until he was close enough to touch.

Fingers wrapped around my arm. Thick, strong fingers. A hand, twisting, and my arm followed the unspoken command, my body tugged after it. He pinned me against a tree, his forearm shoved against my throat.

Lucky I didn’t need to breathe.

His face so close to mine that our noses nearly touched, I recognized him. It was the face I’d seen through the car window that morning, the hollow face howling at me through the glass.

I should run away, I thought. I should scream . But the ideas seemed distant, almost silly.

“It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” the man hissed. “We are His people, and the sheep of his pasture.” His breath caressed my face. I wondered what it smelled like.

I wondered if his boss knew he was still here, lurking. I wondered who his boss was. The man with the too-pale skin and the too-dark eyes? Or did he report directly to the big boss, the eye in the sky? I wondered what he would do to me if I asked.

“Thou shall not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

I was linked in. I could have sent for help. But I didn’t particularly want any. His arm bore down harder against my throat.

“That’s you,” he spat out. “A graven image. A machine . Programmed to think you’re a real person. Pathetic.”

Enough. “Yeah, I’m pathetic,” I snapped back. “You’re hiding behind a tree, trespassing on private property, and about five minutes away from being picked up by the cops and probably shipped off to a city, and I’m pathetic.”

“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” he whispered, grinning like the nonsense words harbored some secret power. I shuddered.

“Righteousness, righteousness shall you pursue.” He reached up his other hand and stroked my cheek. “God says be righteous to your fellow man. But he doesn’t say anything about what to do with things like you.” The fingers traced the curve of my ear. I jerked my head away, but he grabbed a chunk of hair and tugged, hard. “Guess I’m on my own, figuring out what to do. Got any ideas?”

He laughed, and that’s when the fear came, fast and hard, like a needle of terror jabbed into my skull. “Anything,” that was the word that echoed. He could do anything. I grabbed his hand, the hand that was crawling down my neck, along my spine, grabbed his fingers and bent them back until I heard the joints crunch and the arm at my throat reared back, struck me across the face, snapped my head back into the tree but my leg had already swung into motion, had connected with his groin. He doubled over and I ran, and I could hear him behind me, cursing and grunting, crashing through the brush, closing in as I pushed faster and pulled away and I could almost imagine a beating heart and heaving lungs, because the panic was so real. But he fell behind, and I made it through the electronic gate in plenty of time, locking him out, locking me in. The fear faded almost immediately, and as it leaked out of me, I had one last, terrifying thought.

I should go back.

To slip through the gate again, to face the man, to fight the man—or not to fight, to let him do whatever he wanted, to choose to meet him and his consequences, to turn back, because behind me, where the man glowered from the treeline, was something real. Something human.

The stronger the emotion, Sascha had promised, the more real it would seem.

I’d felt it. I was hooked.

Back in my room, safe and alone. The man, whoever he was, long gone. And with him, the fear.

I stripped off the sweat-free tracksuit. Uploaded the day’s neural changes, ensuring—with nothing more than a few keystrokes and an encrypted transmission to the server—that if anything happened to this body, a Lia Kahn with fully up-to-date memories would remain in storage, ready and waiting to be dumped into a new one. Would it be me or a copy of me? And if it was a copy, did that make me a copy too, of some other, realer Lia? Was she dead? Was the man right that I was just a machine duped into believing I was human? And if I had been duped, then how could I be a machine? How could any thoughtless, soulless, consciousness-free thing believe in a lie, believe in anything, want to believe?

And did I consider those questions while I was dealing with my brand-new bedtime ritual? Did I follow the primrose path of logical deduction all the way to its logical endpoint, to the essential question?

I did not.

I dumped the tracksuit; I uploaded; I pulled on pajamas; I twisted the blond hair back into a loose, low ponytail; I dumped psycho Susskind into the hall. I did it all mechanically. Mechanically, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatically, involuntarily. Mechanically, as in like-a-machine.