Skinned -1 (19 page)

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 stil 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 swal ow 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 al over again, night after night. So instead I ran.

I ran through the woods in the dark, ful 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 fal , just to see if it would hurt, and if it did, maybe that would be al right, because feeling something was better than nothing. But I never fel . 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 al 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 eventual y 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 hal way 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 stil . 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, al 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 pul ed 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 al . 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 al soul ess and abominable, this seemed like a pretty effective start to the divine retribution.

“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 Hel er 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, stil laughing, recede into the distance.

“You’l be okay,” Auden said quietly as we crossed the quad. “They’l 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 cal -me-Ben. And I waited, propped up in a corner, stil 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 careful y peeling it back to reveal the fail-safe, an input port that functioned only with BioMax tech and a wel -protected access code; an emergency shutdown. But I knew what he was doing. And no matter how much I wil ed 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, cal -me-Ben’s face inches from mine. I was back on floor thirteen.

“There you go,” he said. “Al 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 cal -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…Wel , 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 fal 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 cal -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’l 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?”

Cal -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 mal eable, 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 real y 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 al 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, al 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. “Wil you promise me you’l 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.

“Computers think; humans feel.”

W
hen I final y 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 wal , I let him sit down.

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

“Neither are you.”

“But they can’t catch
me
.” I nodded toward the biosensors. “No bio, ergo, no sensing.”

Auden shrugged. “And they don’t care about catching me. No one’s paying attention.”

“How do you know?”

He unwrapped a slim sandwich with some suspiciously greenish fil ing. “Where do you think I used to eat? Before you took over my territory, so to speak.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’ is right.”

“So I guess I should thank you or something,” I said. “For yesterday.”

“I guess you should.” There was a pause. “But I can’t help noticing that you didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or shove the sandwich in his face. I certainly wasn’t saying thank you.

“So what’s in the bag, anyway?” I asked instead.

“What bag?”

I rol ed my eyes. “That bag.” I pointed to the green sack he always toted around. “Or is it just your security blanket?” Auden flushed. “Stuff. Nothing important.”

“Real y?” I doubted it and reached for the bag. “Let me—”

“Don’t!” he snapped, snatching it away. His fists bal ed around the straps.

“Okay, whatever. Sorry.” I held up my arms in surrender. “Forget I asked.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but…”

“I mean it. Forget it. I don’t want to know.”