Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“You think she’s stuck like this forever?”

I thought so. The absence of body felt absolute. I was pure mind. I was floating. I was wishing I could float away, when the crowd parted, and Auden Heller came barreling through.

“Get away,” he hissed at them. No one moved. “Get the fuck out of the way!”

Auden wasn’t big enough to take on a hostile crowd; he was barely big enough to take on a hostile individual, and he was facing plenty of them. But they were facing Auden, half-crazed behind his thick black glasses. Maybe they saw something worth avoiding or maybe they’d just gotten tired of laughing at the frozen freak. Maybe their markers had run dry. For whatever reason, they got out of his way.

Auden wrapped his arms around my waist.

I don’t need you to save me, I thought furiously.

“I hope this doesn’t hurt you,” he murmured.

Nothing hurts me, I thought.

I didn’t expect he’d be strong enough to pick me up. He was. He carried me, my body stiff, my feet a few inches off the ground, my face staring blankly over his shoulder, watching the crowd, still laughing, recede into the distance.

“You’ll be okay,” Auden said quietly as we crossed the quad. “They’ll know how to fix you.”

I wondered what made him think I could hear. Or that I cared.

I wondered why he was bothering to help.

He brought me to the school’s med-tech, but of course, that was useless. I didn’t need first aid; I needed a tune-up. The tech voiced my parents, who must have voiced BioMax. Maybe they even went straight to call-me-Ben. And I waited, propped up in a corner, still frozen. Auden waited too, sitting in a chair next to my body, holding my hand.

“I’m coming with you,” he said when the man arrived to take me away.

The man shook his head.

“Yes,” Auden insisted.

The world flipped upside down as the man hoisted me over his shoulder. My face slammed into his back, and I was stuck staring at his ass.

“How do I even know you’re legit?” Auden asked. “You could be trying to kidnap her or something. It’s not like she can stop you.”

“It’s not like you can either, kid.” The man, large enough to multitask, shoved Auden out of the way, using the arm that wasn’t holding me.

“Let them go,” the school tech told Auden. “He knows how to help her.”

No one knows that, I thought.

The man carried me outside, out to the parking lot, past another crowd of jeering wannabes probably already posting shots to their favorite stalker zones. He carried me to a car and loaded me inside.

“Kid’s right,” the man muttered, folding me into the back. “I could do anything. Who’d know?”

His hand lingered on my leg, which he’d had to twist to fit into the narrow space. My limbs were rigid, but not as frozen as they’d seemed. With a little effort, they moved when he moved them. He rubbed his finger in a slow circle along the skin of my calf.

I can’t even feel it, I told myself. So it’s not really happening. It’s not really my body.

“Almost forgot,” he said, chuckling. He raised up my shirt, reached underneath. I watched the fabric undulate as his hands crept up my torso. I couldn’t feel him massaging the patch of skin just below my armpit or carefully peeling it back to reveal the fail-safe, an input port that functioned only with BioMax tech and a well-protected access code; an emergency shutdown. But I knew what he was doing. And no matter how much I willed myself to stay awake, I knew it wouldn’t work.

Don’t, I thought uselessly.

There are some moments you’d rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it’s mostly those moments in which it’s smarter—safer—to stay awake.

Don’t.

“Sweet dreams,” the man said.

Please don’t.

Lights out.

“Don’t,” I said, and I said it out loud, in a different place, a familiar cramped white room, a too-bright light in my eyes, call-me-Ben’s face inches from mine. I was back on floor thirteen.

“There you go,” he said. “All better.”

“What happened?” I remembered the car, I remembered the man’s hands on my body, under my shirt, I remembered his sour smile, and then… I was here, awake, with call-me-Ben. As if no time had passed.

“I’d suspect someone hasn’t been taking very good care of herself,” he said. “And your system… Well, think of it like this: In an organic body, too much wear and tear, overexhaustion, and malnutrition weaken you, make you susceptible to bugs. This body, when mistreated, can fall prey to the same problem. Not germs, of course.” He laughed fakely. “But every system can be crashed by the right bug—under the right circumstances. A temporary disconnect between your body and your neural network. Shouldn’t be a problem again if you take care of yourself.”

But that wasn’t what I needed to know. “How did I get here? Who was that guy?”

“The man who brought you in? Just one of our techs.”

“He knocked me out.”

“He initiated a shutdown,” said call-me-Ben. “Standard protocol. I’m sure it couldn’t have been very pleasant, frozen like that. We didn’t want to cause you any more discomfort than necessary.”

“He just brought me here?”

Ben nodded. “Straight here, and we fixed you right up. We’ll run a few more diagnostic tests, and then you should be able to go home.”

“How long?”

“Shouldn’t take more than—”

“No. How long was I out?”

Call-me-Ben checked the time. “About five hours, I believe. But they didn’t start working on you until I got down here. So it only took an hour or so to fix you right up. Just a minor problem, nothing to worry about.”

Five hours gone. Turned off.

And four of those hours lying in a heap somewhere, limp and malleable, like a doll , while the man, or anyone else, carted me around, did whatever he wanted. Or maybe did nothing. Maybe dumped me on a table somewhere, like spare parts in storage, and walked away.

If you can’t remember something, did it really happen?

No, I decided.

Or even if it did, it didn’t matter. The body wasn’t me , not when the brain was shut down. They treated it like a bunch of spare parts, because that’s all it was. It wasn’t me.

Which meant whatever happened, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

“You have to start taking care of yourself,” Ben said. And there was something about the way he said it that made it seem like he knew what I’d been doing, all of it. It was the same tone Sascha had used when she mentioned my boyfriend. A little too knowing, like he had to restrain himself from winking. “Will you promise me you’ll do that?”

“Can you guarantee this won’t happen to me again?” I asked.

“If you stop pushing yourself so hard? Yes, I can guarantee it. So can you guarantee me this won’t happen again?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t care what I had to do: I would never be that helpless again.

When I finally got home, there was a message from Auden waiting at my zone. His av was weird, like him, a creature with frog legs and black beetle wings. It chirped its message in Auden’s voice. “Are you okay?”

I ignored it.

But the next day at school, when he found me eating lunch behind the low stone wall, I let him sit down.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said.

“Neither are you.”