Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“I mean, I know it’s you, I get that, but you sound different, and you look different, and…”

“It’s because it was an emergency. They had to give me a generic model. My dad picked it out. He says it’s the one that looked the most like me. Not that it looks like me, I know, but it was the best he could do.” Too much detail, I told myself. Stop talking . But I couldn’t. Once I stopped, he would have to start again. Or he wouldn’t. And then we’d just sit there, and he would try not to stare at me, and I would try not to look away. “Some people get these custom faces designed to look just like them, the way they were—or like anything they want, I guess. It’s totally crazy what they can do. The voice, too. You just make a recording and they match it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, I know, but it’s… closer. Easier. But you’ve got to place the order in advance. You’ve got to give them time, and if there’s an accident or something, well…” I tried another smile. “There’s nothing I can do about it now. The artificial nerves and receptors are already fused to the neural pathways or whatever, and they say structural changes would screw with the graft, but next time, I’ll do it in advance, so I’ll be able to order whatever I want. Then I’ll look more like…”

“Lia,” he said.

I am Lia .

But I said it in my head, where there was no one to hear.

“I’ll look more like me ,” I said out loud. Calmly. “Next time.”

“Wait, what do you mean, next time?”

“When the, uh, body wears out or—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to block out the echo of the crash, the scream of metal that refused to die—“if something happens to it, they’ll download the, uh…” Data? Program? Brain? Soul? There was no right word. There was only me , looking out through some thing’s dead eyes. “They’ll do it again. When they need to.”

“So you just get a new body when the old one runs out?” he asked. “And they keep doing it… forever?”

“That’s the plan.” As the words came out of the mouth, I finally saw it, what it meant. I saw the day he found the first tuft of hair stuck in the shower drain or woke up to a gray strand on his pillow. His first wrinkle in the bathroom mirror. The day he blew out his knee in his last football game. The day his potbelly bulged as he stopped playing and kept eating. Any of the days, all of the days, starting with tomorrow, when he’d be one day older than today; and then the next, two days older, and the next and the next, as he grew, as he aged, as he declined… as I stayed the same. Shunted from one unchanging husk of metal and plastic to the next.

I got there a moment before he did, but only a moment, and then he got there too. I saw it on his face.

“Forever.” Walker grimaced. “You’ll be like… this. Forever.” He stood up.

Don’t leave, I thought. Not yet. But I wasn’t about to say it out loud. Even if he couldn’t see it, I was still Lia Kahn. I didn’t beg.

“So, what’s it like?” he asked, crossing the room. To the bed—to me. He sat down on the edge, leaving a space between us. “Can you, like, feel stuff?”

“Yeah. Of course.” If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.

I held out a hand, palm up. “Do you want to…? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want.”

He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.

He touched it. Me.

Shuddered. Snatched his hand away.

Then touched me again. Palm to palm. He curled his fingers around the hand. Around my hand.

“You can really feel that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So what’s it feel like?”

“Like it always does.” A lie. Artificial nerves, artificial conduits, artificial receptors, registering the fact of a touch. Reporting back to a central processor the fact of a hand, five fingers, flesh bearing down. Measuring the temperature, the pressure per square inch, the duration, and all of it translated, somehow, into something resembling a sensation. “It feels good.” I paused. “What does it feel like to you?”

“You mean…?”

“The skin.”

“It’s…” He scrunched his eyebrows together. “Not the same as before. But not… weird. It feels like skin.” He let go.

I brushed the back of my hand across his cheek. This time he didn’t move away. “You need to shave.”

“I like it like this,” he said, giving me a half smile. It was the same thing he always said.

“You’re the only one.” That was the standard response. We’d had the fight that wasn’t a fight so often it was like we were following a script, one that always ended the same way. And if I acted like everything was the same, maybe…

“It looks good,” he argued, the half smile widening into a full grin.

“It doesn’t feel good. So unless you want to scratch half my face off when—” I stopped.

Nothing was the same.

The coarse bristles sprinkling his face wouldn’t hurt when he kissed me.

If he kissed me.

“Lia, when you were gone all that time, I…”

“What?”

A pause.

“Nothing. I’m just… I’m glad you didn’t, you know. Die.”

It was what he had to say, and I gave him the answer I had to give. “Me too.” For the first time, sitting there with him, I could almost believe it was true.

Another pause, longer this time.

“When you were in that place… I should have come to visit.”

“You were busy,” I said.

“I should have come.”

“Yeah.”

Not that I would have let him see me like that, spasmodic limbs jerking without warning, muscles clenching and unclenching at random, the mouth spitting out those strangled animal noises, the tinny speaker speaking for me until I could control the tongue, moderate the airflow, train the mechanism to impersonate human speech. If he’d seen me like that, he would never have been able to see me any other way. He would never see that I was Lia.

“I should go,” he said. “You must be… Do you get tired?”

I shook the head. “I sleep, but it’s not… I don’t dream or anything. I just…” There was no other way to say it. “Shut down.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” I said suddenly.

“What?” He scrunched his eyebrows together again. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” There were no mechanical tear ducts embedded in the dead eyes. No saltwater deposits hidden behind the unblinking lids. Add it to the list of things I wouldn’t do again: cry. “I just am. I’m sorry that I’m… like this.”

I admit it. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me. I wanted him to tell me that he wasn’t sorry. That I was beautiful. That the hair felt like real hair and the skin felt like real skin and the body felt like a real body and he wasn’t weirded out by the thought of touching it. That he saw me.

He stood up. I didn’t. “You going back to school soon?”

“Monday.”

“So I guess I’ll see you there.” He backed toward the door. When he opened it, Zo was on the other side. Like she’d been there the whole time, waiting, as she’d done when Walker and I had first gotten together, and she’d been a kid, annoying, always around, hovering outside with her ear pressed to the door, giggling every time we were about to kiss.

“Guess so.”

He hesitated, like he was waiting for my permission to leave. The old Walker had waited for my permission to do everything.

“Aren’t you going to kiss her good-bye?” Zo asked, sounding so sweet, so helpful, so hopelessly ignorant, and then she smiled, and the smile was none of those things.