Robin Wasserman - Frozen

I hate him.

He puts the ball between the hands lying uselessly in my lap. I can finally hold up my own head, and I do, so I don’t have to see them—mechanical digits covered with layers of fake skin, threaded with fake nerves.

I can feel them now, sometimes.

“Feel” them, at least. Know when someone is squeezing them. Know, even with my eyes closed, when Asa dips them in boiling water, when he presses them to ice. I know, the way I know my name, as a fact. This is cold. This is hot. I know, but that doesn’t mean I feel. It’s not the same.

Nothing is.

“Try to throw the ball to me,” Asa chirps. He’s all blond hair and brawny muscles, like a twelve-year-old’s av, the virtual face you choose for yourself before you realize that pretty and perfect is perfectly boring. “You can do it. I know you can.”

Move, I tell my arms. Just do it.

It would be easier if they hurt. If there was pain to push through, to guide me back to where I started. If I knew that the more it hurt, the closer I was getting. But there hasn’t been any pain since that first day with call-me-Ben. The brain was exploring its new environment, they say. All that is behind me now.

I don’t tell them that I miss it.

Move! I think, and I know I am angry, at myself and at Asa. I am angry all the time now. But the voice in my head sounds nearly as calm as the computer I still use to talk, and will use until I can make more than grunts and groans with the artificial larynx. That may take the most time of all, they warn me. But most people master it eventually. Most.

The arms jerk away from the body, and the ball dribbles out of the hands, then drops, rolling under the bed.

“Good!” Asa exclaims, looking like he wants to applaud.

And then the session is over, and Asa hoists me out of the chair, like I’m a giant baby, his thick arm cradling my knees, another digging into my armpit. I forget to hold up my head, and it flops backward against his shoulder. This is life now.

From the bed, to the chair, to the bed again.

They turn me off at night—I’m supposed to call it “sleep,” but why bother?—and turn me on in the morning. Soon, they tell me, I will learn how to do it myself. Just like I will learn to monitor my status, to will the system diagnostics to scroll across my eyes. I will learn how to upload my memories for safekeeping. I will learn to speak. But that’s all later. Now, life is lived for me. Asa monitors me, Asa dresses me, Asa turns me off and on, and off again. It’s how I know one day has passed. And another. I play catch with Asa and I stare at the ceiling and I wait and I try not to wonder whether I would rather be dead or whether I already am.

I hated to picture myself like that. Helpless. I tried to forget, but Sascha kept forcing me to remember. Like I was supposed to be proud or something. Like I was supposed to be happy. Even when I tuned her out, which was often, I couldn’t escape the memories. The frustration. The humiliation. As long as I was stuck in this place, part of me was still stuck back at the beginning, a patient—a victim.

I guess remembering those early days in rehab was better than remembering what came before: the crash, the fire, the long hours frozen in the dark.

Better, but not by much.

“Are you worried that if you see them, you might find that you’ve changed?” Sascha asked. “That your family might think you’re different now?”

“I am different now.” I wondered how much they paid her to force me to state the obvious.

I could tell from her smile that I’d said the right thing, which meant I’d said the wrong thing, because it meant she thought we were about to make progress . Sascha was big on progress.

I, on the other hand, was big on reality. A concept with which Sascha didn’t seem to be acquainted.

“I’m not talking about physical differences, Lia. I’m talking about you .” She leaned forward, tapping me on the chest where my heart would have been. “About what’s going on in here, and”—she tapped the thick blond weave that covered the titanium plates—“up here. You’ve been through a serious trauma. That would be enough to change anyone.”

“I guess.”

“But I’m thinking it might be more than that.”

Big surprise.

“Many clients in your position worry about what the download process means for them. Whether they lost something of themselves in the procedure or if they’ll ever be the person they were before. They worry a lot about who they are now. Do these concerns sound familiar?”

Sooner or later, wherever our conversations began—if you wanted to call them conversations rather than verbal dodgeball games where Sascha pelted and I ducked and weaved until, inevitably, she managed to slam me square in the face—we ended up in the same place.

“I know who I am,” I said. Again. “Lia Kahn.”

“Yes.” She smiled. I could see the beads of white frothy saliva forming in the corners of her mouth. I didn’t have any saliva. The tongue was self-lubricating. “ Yes . You are Lia Kahn. But surely some of the things you’ve been seeing and hearing on the vids about… people like you… They don’t trouble you at all?”

I was still practicing my emotional responses: when to raise the eyebrows and how far. What to do with the nose when the mouth was stretched into a smile. When to bare teeth, when to press lips together, how often to pretend to blink. It was all a lot of trouble, so most of the time, I just left my face as it was, blank and impassive. Sometimes that came in handy.

“I’ve never seen any vids about ‘people like me,’” I lied. They didn’t go for concrete nouns here, nouns like “skinner” or “mech-head.” Or “machine.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of new-found terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter?

Lesser of two evils, apparently: “Lia, you should be aware that you’re going to encounter some people who don’t yet understand the download process. You’re going to have to help them make peace with what’s happened to you. But I assure you that with time, those who know and love you will accept it.”

But that was a lie. I knew what I was; I knew what the people who loved me could handle. They couldn’t handle this.

You’d think I would at least get some superpowers as part of the deal. Legs that could run a hundred miles an hour. Arms that could lift a fridge. Supersight, superhearing, super something. But no. I get skin that washes itself and is impervious to paper cuts. Legs that have barely learned how to walk. A tongue that lies in my mouth like a dying fish flopping and thrusting and scraping against heavily fortified porcelain teeth, mangling every burst of sound I manage to choke out of the voice box.

No lungs, just an intake hose feeding into the larynx, so I can shoot air through when necessary, make the artificial cartilage vibrate at the right frequency, funnel the sound waves up the throat, into the mouth. That was the first step. “A big one!” Asa says, clapping as I grunt and groan. I can do all the animal noises now. Monkey hoots. Cow moos. Dolphin squeals. And, as of this morning, sheep. “Baa! Baa!”

“Your first word,” Asa cheers. “Almost.”

I still hate him.

You don’t need a tongue to sound like a sheep. But if you want to sound human, that’s another story.