Shattered (3 page)

The speech, like everything else, was getting old. I'd shown them the guest houses, the orchards, and the manor itself—steering clear of only the pool, full of zoned-out mechs tripping on digital hallucinations. I'd played the good little tour guide, a live-action pop-up for Jude's estate. (True, it was Quinn's fortune, Quinn's property, but after all these months, none of us thought of it as anything but Jude's.) They were intrigued, I could tell. Tempted, even if it meant giving up the last, desperate hold on their old lives. They just needed that one final push.

Thus, the speech. I gave it the way I gave the tour, mechanically, out of habit, the words dribbling out without my help. Sometimes it felt like this was all I did: tow new recruits across the estate, schooling them in life according to Jude. It seemed so quaint and retro now, the old way, infiltrating BioMax support groups to find the few and far between who weren't interested in being
normal
. There were more of them, a lot more, now that the download had been reclassified as a voluntary procedure, easy to qualify for as a genetic tweak or a lift-tuck. At least, as long as you were between sixteen and twenty-one—above the
age of consent, below the age when the download would fry your neural circuits and leave you a mess of frozen limbs and scrambled brains.

“The orgs demand that we imitate humanity, they
designed
us to do so—and then they attack us for claiming an identity that's not our own. They call us skinners, mech-heads, Frankensteins.” The words bored me, but I kept going, because I was good at it, and because Jude trusted me enough to let me speak for him, and that gave me power.

And because the more I delivered the speech, the more I believed it.

“They tell us we've stolen the lives of the dead—that we're nothing but a mechanical copy of the people we used to be. People who died so that we could live. Or whatever it is we do. And you know what? They're right.”

There weren't any gasps this time around. But of the six mechs following me through the grounds, four looked ready to bolt. The other two were calm; voluntaries always were. It's easy to be calm when you don't care. They were curiosity seekers, probably fame whores beaming back to their favorite stalker zones. Let them try. Jammers locked the whole estate behind an impenetrable priv-wall. We'd been burned by voluntaries before. Now, we let them in, we let them listen, but we never expected them to stay.

“You can tell yourself you're the same person you always were. But you know that's a lie. You know nothing feels the same. Sometimes it probably seems you barely feel at all.”

Feel
. Such a ridiculously imprecise verb. What was a feeling? The scratch of something rough against your skin? The sensation of a toe dipping into water, the deep, wordless truth of
this feels cold this feels wet.
Then there were the feelings that happened inside your head, the whirring hamster wheel of
happy sad angry bitter jealous bored scared happy
.

Whatever orgs chose to believe about us, mechs had both types. We felt wet—or, at least, we
processed
wet, the artificial nerve endings in our synflesh sending a coded impulse to our neural networks. We processed all environmental conditions with precision. Much as we processed everything else:
Wrecking the car, burning alive, waking in an alien body that wasn't a body
equaled
bad. Angry.

Sad.

But there was something else, wasn't there? The connection between the two types of feelings, the thing that bonded the feeling inside your head to the feeling inside your body. The thing that made your palms sweat when you were nervous, your stomach clench when you were afraid, your lungs heave and your eyes drip when you thought too long and too hard about what you used to have.

Mech bodies functioned perfectly no matter what was going on beneath the titanium skull. Heaving and dripping would indicate a malfunction. And when that happened, we just returned to BioMax and got ourselves fixed.

“The orgs set us up to fail. They punish us for imitating humanity; they punish us for rebelling against the illusion. Too
bad. You can lie to yourself and pretend they don't hate you—”

“My parents don't hate me,” one of them argued, a blandly pretty mech with long brown hair and a high-pitched voice. “They love me. That's why they brought me back.”

This was an easy one. “They don't love you.” Harsh, but better now, before the damage had been done. “They love their
daughter
. Who's dead. What do you think happens to you when they figure that out?”

She didn't look convinced; I hadn't been either. Sometimes they had to figure it out for themselves. Then they came back.

I had.

I led them down the shallow, grassy slope toward the greenhouse. When I'd first come here, it had been a decaying wreck, scabby with rust and shattered glass, much like the rest of the estate. With Quinn's parents long dead and Quinn herself an amputated, bedridden lump living only on the network, there hadn't been much call for home repairs. Once Quinn had downloaded, she'd been too busy smelling the roses and screwing everything in sight to deal with clogged plumbing.

Things were different now.

The main house gleamed, its stone face polished to a shine, its grounds lush with well-trimmed gardens and fruited trees, the greenhouse a crystalline temple exploding with purple and green. I stopped the group just outside the glass door, pulling a pressed purple flower from my pocket. “This is a Quinn,” I said, then paused just for the pleasure of watching them wait. Sometimes it was a snooze mouthing the same thing to an unending
stream of rebels without a clue. But sometimes, posing under their unblinking stares, it was a power trip.

“Quinn's parents had the flower designed for her on the day she was born—it's part orchid, part hyacinth, impervious to extreme temperatures, and capable of going three weeks without water. Man-made. Org-made. We know it's alive because it can die.” I crumbled the flower to dust. “But it's not natural. There is no natural anymore.” I paused again, this time to let them see it for themselves, the clouds thick with microscopic toxin scrubbers and ozone patchers, the grass designed to suck moisture out of even the driest desert air and stand tall against frost and drought, buzzing and rippling with new populations of genetically modified bumblebees and squirrels. Let the mechs who were still missing Mommy and Daddy flash on Mommy's lineless lift-tucked face or Daddy's anabolically enhanced biceps and the roid martinis that shot his testosterone through the roof. “
Natural
is hell.”

Hell as in the miles of dead zone, underwater or under quarantine, as in the death of summer and the permanent cloud masking stars most of us didn't believe were there. As in the ruined bodies littering the cities, bodies without gen-tech or med-tech, all scabbed and lumpy and rotting.

“
Natural
is weak, like orgs are weak,” I told them, opening my hand and letting the purple dust drift to the ground. A little drama queeny? No doubt. But effective. I could see it—not in their blank faces but in the way they stood, frozen and silent, forgetting to put on the little “aren't I human?” show we all used
to play at, pretending to fidget and flop and blink. I fixed on one of the girls, Ty, her fuchsia hair pulled into a knot behind her right ear. She'd made it clear that she hadn't wanted to come, that her friend had dragged her along. And that she knew I was full of crap.

This was the one we'd get. I would have Jude invite her on our next cliff dive, and even if she said no at first, she'd eventually give in. Join his movement. Whatever it was moving toward.

“You want to talk natural?” I said as the girl stared me down. “It's the job of civilization to improve on nature. To perfect it. Which makes
us
inevitable—perfected bodies, perfected brains, without defects or weaknesses, without an expiration date. We're the
natural
end of the line.”

“Impressive. I think you're even starting to sound like him.”

I swatted my ear. Mosquitoes might have been extinct, but there were plenty of other pests still going strong.

“You were watching?”
I asked silently, knowing my voice would find Quinn wherever she was hiding. I'd gotten the VM chip—illicit tech courtesy of Jude's illicit sources—installed only a week before but I already hated the way the computerized voice wormed into my head. Implanted in the access node at the base of my skull, the Voice/Mind Integrator intercepted the signals sent from our brains to our artificial larynxes, digitized them into a robotic monotone before we could make a sound, and sent them out to anyone within a three-mile radius, as long
as they were tuned into the right frequency. I couldn't have been the only one who cringed at the way the v-mod replaced the rise and fall of familiar voices with flat computerized tones, the same disembodied voice we'd all spoken with in rehab before learning how to use our new mouths and tongues.

But then, that was the problem with the “improvements” Jude served up, doling them out at sporadic intervals, crediting only vague sources and underground suppliers. Few of them were an improvement on anything, and I would have been happy enough to go without. But I wasn't about to get left behind. I might have renounced my past and embraced a new and improved me and all the other empowering soulsong crap that, true or not, still sounded like bullshit when we spewed it out to the newbie mechs, but I had enough in common with the old Lia Kahn to know where I stood on the concept of loops. That's
loop
as in
do whatever's necessary to stay in the
. So the majority ruled. If the majority wanted infrared vision or internal GPS or strangers' voices crawling through their brains, then I wanted them too. So what if every addition carried us further away from normal?

“Normal” was just one more thing better left to orgs; one more thing we'd left behind.

Quinn was the only one who used the VM with any regularity. Maybe it reminded her of the voice she'd spoken with since childhood, each word selected by the flicker of an eye, one of the few body parts left intact after her accident. We all held on to a few things it would have been easier to forget.

“I'm always watching.”
There were micro-cams all over the estate, left over from Quinn's predownload years.
“By the way, that shirt makes you look like a whale.”

I smirked, forcing myself not to seek out the camera. It would be hidden in a branch or a gutter, likely invisible and definitely out of my reach, which meant there was no point in tipping her off about how much the eye-in-the-sky act creeped me out.
“It's Ani's shirt,”
I said, plucking at the skintight mesh rippling with bucolic scenes yanked from the network. At the moment, there was some kind of galactic nebula unfurling across my chest.

“Was her shirt. Who do you think made her get rid of it?”
Quinn's low chuckle sounded almost authentic. Even after all these months in the mech body, I still hadn't gotten a handle on laughter. Ani told me I was imagining things, but I was convinced my spastic barking made me sound like a wounded seal. Quinn had mastered it back when we were still in rehab. And she loved rubbing it in.
“If I were you, I'd ditch it immediately.”

“As in strip down right here while you're watching?”

“Now or later,”
Quinn said with a soft giggle.
“Remember what I said.”

I'm always watching
.

I started heading back to the house.

“Wrong way,”
Quinn said.
“I have something for you.”

“What?”

“Just a little treat. Trust me.”

“Busy,”
I said.

“Don't you think Jude's ass could use a break from all that kissing?”

I stopped walking.

“You don't want to give him a rash,”
Quinn added.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning back when you thought we were all freaks, Jude was enemy number one, and now you prance around here like his trained monkey.”

Thanks to the VM, I could answer even with gritted teeth.
“Jealous?”

“Of you?”

Jude liked his toys new and shiny, that much I'd figured out. I suspected that Quinn had started to look a little rusty by the time I showed up. Besides, he may have been a mech, but he was still a guy—and when it came to guys, no toy was shinier than the one they weren't allowed to play with.

“It's not sucking up if I actually agree with him,”
I reminded Quinn.
“We all want the same thing, right?”

“I know what I want,”
she said.
“What about you?”

“You first.”
Not that I was avoiding the question. The question was irrelevant. What I wanted I couldn't have, so I'd decided to stop wanting it.

“I want you to come play with me,”
she whined.

“Ask Ani.”

“Ani's busy.”

Hard to believe. Quinn's attention span was half the size of Jude's—out of sight, out of mind was a way of life. And Ani knew it.
“I guess Ani and I have that in common.”

“Somehow, I think the vidlifes can get by without you for a few minutes,”
Quinn drawled.

“You know, I do have a life outside the network,” I lied. Living on my own with no parents, no school, and no obligations was a freedom the old Lia Kahn would have killed for. Freedom to hook up with Walker, to party all night dosed up on Xers and zone the days away on a cloud of chillers and chocolate, to dance in the moonlight with Cass and Terra while the randoms watched our flickering shadows, wishing they could steal our lives.