Robin Wasserman - Frozen

I shook my head. I didn’t know.

But…

Pain , I thought. I miss pain.

I shook my head harder.

He tossed the knife and caught it neatly, gripping the blade. Then, like a knight making an offering to his queen, extended it to me. “You’ll like.” His teeth gleamed. Not like the knife handle. It was inky black, sucking in light. “You’ll see.”

“You’re crazy,” I whispered. I couldn’t get my voice to work right. Just like I couldn’t make myself walk away. “You’re all crazy.”

He just nodded.

And the knife was still there, waiting.

I didn’t want it.

I did not .

“I’m not one of you,” I said louder. Backing away. “I don’t belong here.”

The mech-head just shrugged and started carving again.

They were all psycho, I told myself. Freaks. Nothing to do with me. Nothing like me.

I’d been wrong to come; I’d been stupid.

I’d been stupid a lot, lately. But that was over. And smart decision number one? Leaving this place, these… people .

Leaving—and never coming back.

One month passed.

See how easy that was? From point A to point B in three little words, skimming over everything that happened in between. As if it were possible to do that in real life, as if you could just shut your eyes and open them a moment later only to find: One month passed.

It’s not. Days pass slowly; minutes pass slowly. And I had to live through them all. I went to school, most days, at least. I lingered in empty classrooms after the bell, then hustled to the next class at the last minute so I could slip in the door just before the teacher started droning. And again for the next class, and again. I ate lunch outside, alone, in a spot behind the lower school building where no one was supposed to go. No one ever knew I was there, because the biosensors deployed to catch students wandering astray couldn’t catch me. I went directly home at the end of every day, taking the long way around to the parking lot so I wouldn’t have to pass by the western edge of the track and see Zo and the others running heats across the field.

It got colder.

I didn’t notice. Some afternoons I shut myself in my room, linking in and sending my av on missions across the network, avoiding the zones of anyone I used to know, racking up kills on Akira, thrashing players who lived on the other side of the globe and had no idea they were playing against a machine.

I skipped dinner. Even when my mother begged; even when my father ordered. And neither tried very hard. They didn’t want me there either, stiff and still at the table, watching the mouthfuls of risotto or filet or chocolate mousse disappear. Then there were the nights when I slipped down to the kitchen, snagged a brownie or a cookie or anything chocolate, mashed it up with a fork, and tried to swallow it, washing it down with a swig of water in hopes of forcing something past the grate at the base of my throat. Not because I wanted to taste any of it—not that I could taste any of it—but just to see what would happen. Nothing happened.

I didn’t upload, not anymore. It was supposed to be a daily routine; it was supposed to be my protection against the finality of death, every experience stored, every memory preserved, so that when the next accident came along, I—the essential I , the mysterious sum of seventeen years of days and nights and the best quantum computing credit could buy—would remain intact. But what was the point? If the worst happened, and I had to start over again, what would I need to remember? Waiting out the minutes behind the school until it was time to slog through yet another vapid class? Or maybe the moment Walker saw me, froze, then turned abruptly and zagged off in the opposite direction? Not quite treasured memories. So I let them slip away.

Nights, I ran. Factory specifications recommended that I stop running when the body reported its fatigue; that I “sleep” when the normal people slept. But I couldn’t stand the way it felt. It would be one thing if I dreamed, but there were no dreams. It would have been okay even if there was just darkness. I had spent plenty of time in the dark. But shutting down meant surrendering to a blank; closing my eyes and opening them again, immediately, only to discover that hours had passed. When you sleep, your body marks the time. Yesterday dies in the dark; tomorrow wakes. Eyes open, you know. The body ages, the hourglass empties, death approaches, time is devoured but not lost. It wasn’t like that for me, not anymore. I couldn’t shut down without feeling like I was losing myself all over again, night after night. So instead I ran.

I ran through the woods in the dark, full out, without fear that I would stumble over the uneven ground or the broken branches blown across the path, running faster, maybe hoping I would fall, just to see if it would hurt, and if it did, maybe that would be all right, because feeling something was better than nothing. But I never fell. And I never stopped when I was tired. The body told me it was wearing down, but I didn’t ache, I didn’t cramp, I didn’t wheeze. The body’s monitoring system flashed red warnings across my eyes; I ignored them. The coach, before she’d thrown me off the team, had always said that running was 90 percent mental. That was for humans, I decided. ( Orgs . The word popped into my head, but I ignored it, because that was Jude’s word, Jude and his freaks, not mine.) For me it was all mental; the body, and whatever it wanted, was irrelevant. So I ran for hours, for miles, until I got bored, and then I ran farther until eventually I retreated to the house to wait out the dawn.

One month passed.

It happened on a Tuesday.

I was crossing the quad, the grassy, open-aired corridor between two wings of the school. There was an enclosed hallway too, and most people used that, not wanting to spend any more time outdoors than necessary. I preferred the cold.

I didn’t feel strange before it happened. I didn’t feel much of anything, which was the new normal.

Everything was normal. One foot in front of the other. One step, then another. And another. And then—

Not.

I was still. Left foot forward, flat on the ground. Right foot a step behind, rising up on its toe, about to take flight. Arms swung, one forward, one back. Head down, as always.

Move, I thought furiously. Walk!

The body ignored me. The body had gone on strike.

Being a human statue didn’t hurt. It didn’t wear me out. It felt like nothing. I felt like nothing. Like a pair of eyes, floating in space.

I couldn’t speak.

And, like most statues, I drew a crowd.

“What the fuck!” more than one person exclaimed, laughing.

A couple people poked me. One almost knocked me over before another grabbed my side and steadied me on frozen feet. Laughing, all the time. Several of the guys helped themselves to a peek down my shirt.

Walker and Bliss passed by, hesitated, then kept walking. She’s the one who paused. He pulled her away.

I stayed where I was.

“You think she can hear us?”

“Who broke her?”

“Don’t you mean who broke it ?”

Someone balanced a banana peel on my head. Someone else approached my face with a thick red marker. I couldn’t feel it scrape across my forehead. But I could see his satisfied smirk as he capped the marker and stepped away.

Maybe, I thought, I was being punished. Maybe the Faithers were right, and I wasn’t supposed to exist at all. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, but if He or She or It or Whatever was pissed off to see me wandering around all soulless and abominable, this seemed like a pretty effective start to the divine retribution.