Shattered (4 page)

Now Walker was hooking up with the sister I hadn't spoken to in half a year, and b-mods modded nothing. Music was just noise to me, the same way Cass and Terra were just names of people I used to know. My own life had taken a permanent trip to the department of dull. Who could blame me for preferring someone else's?

It's not that I'd become a total vid-head. I wasn't one of the wastoids who spent all day and night whispering directions into the ears of the vidlifers and watching a bunch of strangers act out my wildest fantasies. I didn't need to pull any strings to watch my dark and shameful fantasy unspool across the screen. Because it was there for me at any hour of the day, in infinite
variations: the vidlifers themselves, head cases who had given up their identities, their wills, their
lives
to the masses. They spoke no words that weren't piped into their ears, made no choices that weren't chosen for them by randoms spread across the network. They'd erased themselves.

“Come on,”
Quinn wheedled.
“You don't want to miss this.”

I gave in.
“Fine.”
The only thing more embarrassing than watching vidlifes was envying the vidlifers. I wasn't about to put myself at Quinn's lack of mercy.
“Where are you?”

“Everywhere,”
she hissed in a deliberately spooky whisper. Then cackled.
“But right now? Down by the pool.”

I groaned.
“No swimming, Quinn, you know that.”
She just didn't know why. No one did, except for Jude. And he was keeping his mouth shut; it was the one thing I'd let myself ask him for.

“Who goes down there to swim?”

“Not that either,”
I snapped. But the small black cube was still in my pocket.
Just for emergencies
, I told myself. Like I always told myself.

“You're just endless amounts of fun,”
she complained.

“Feel free to go bother someone else. It'll be hard, but I'll get over it.”

There was a pause.
“Just get your ass down here,”
she said.
“Oh and, Lia?”

“Yeah?”

“Seriously. Lose the shirt.”

Like Quinn said, swimming wasn't exactly the only reason, or even the main reason, to trek across the grounds to the neo-mod steel-and-glass erector set that housed the pool. Nor was it the only reason I stayed away. The solar panels along the ceiling served double duty as net-linked screens, so you could fine-tune your zone and your backstroke at the same time. Or, as was mostly the case these days, so you could project a dizzying strobe show of light, color, and sound that made the perfect cooldown for anyone coming off a dreamer.

That's what we called them.

Of course, usually when you dreamed—or should I say when orgs dreamed—they dreamed alone. Even cradled in each other's arms, they were alone in the dark inside their own heads. For orgs, sleep was the ultimate isolation. Dreamers, on the other hand, didn't require sleep. They required nothing but a tiny black cube, an ocular uplink, and the will to disappear into madness for anywhere from five minutes to forever. Thanks to the dreamers, mechs could, in their own way, regain their dreams. And thanks to the dreamer links—yet another of Jude's “unofficial” updates—they didn't have to dream alone. Hence the mechs sprawled across the pool deck, twitching and keening, and the bodies lining the pool floor, amorphous shapes wrapped together in the rippling water, their brains melting into a shared madness.

You didn't have to touch to have a linked dream, but I heard
it helped. Water too made things more intense. At least, that's what I heard. I'd never tried it myself. These days water made things a little
too
intense—and the idea of dropping a dreamer in public repulsed me.

Quinn was waiting outside, and she wasn't alone. I scowled at Jude. Typical of Quinn to drag him along. “What's he—” I stopped.

It was Jude, but also . . . not Jude.

“Seth, this is the girl I was telling you about.” Quinn shot me a wicked smile. “Seth's not interested in staying, but . . .” She raised her eyebrows. “I figured you could change his mind.”

He had Jude's face—the harsh, angular lines, the bland beauty we all shared sharpened by raking cheekbones, hooded eyes, full lips built to smirk. But he wasn't smirking, and his eyes—slate gray, not Jude's flashing amber—darted from Quinn to me to the ground and back again. His flesh was an unbroken plane of creamy peach without any of Jude's swooping silver circuitry, and his long, muscled arms looked like org arms, without the transparent panel Jude wore on his left bicep, showing off his internal wiring like a badge of honor.

This guy, this
Seth
, looked normal, in a way all of us on Quinn's estate had accepted we would never be. But he also looked like Jude.

“Don't zone on me, Lia,” Quinn warned. “It's only weird for a minute. You get over it.”

Easy for Quinn to say. She had a custom-made body and face, tailored to her exact specifications. Unlike Jude, who'd
been plucked from life in the gritty city to serve as one of BioMax's first experimental subjects—it was strictly off-the-rack for him, a body and face the corporation now kept in reserve for emergency procedures, the downloads that no one saw coming. Downloads like mine. It was one thing to know the doubles were out there—somebody else's brain behind your face, some random's words coming out of your mouth—it was something else to see one.

“What's the point?”
I VM'd to Quinn, knowing no newbie would have access to the illicit tech.
“You track him down just to freak me out?”

“First of all, Seth found me,” Quinn said aloud. “He wanted to take your little tour, but I figured he'd get a better impression one-on-one. He just woke up a few weeks ago. Still figuring out how everything works, right, Seth?”

He smiled with that awkward grimace of a newbie mech trying to fake something that used to come automatically. “It's kind of weird at home these days,” he said, slow and steady. I remembered that too. It was hard work, figuring out how to control the air flow and the self-lubricating tongue and the artificial larynx to produce something approximating human speech. From his nervous smile as the words stumbled out, I figured he was fresh out of rehab, still expecting his gold star.

“And second of all?” I prompted Quinn.

“I knew you'd like him,” she said.

“And I thought you could use him,”
she added.

“For what?”

Seth looked cluelessly back and forth between us. It must have looked like we were frozen in a staring contest or some equally inane battle of silent will.

“Look at him,”
Quinn shot back.
“Everything you want, without all the complications.”

“I don't want him,”
I said, disgusted.
“Either of them.”

Quinn pulled a dreamer from her pocket, tossing it from hand to hand. “Seth can't wait to try it,” she said aloud. “Can you, Seth?”

“She won't tell me what ‘it' is,” he said. “But . . .” He trailed off, spreading his arms wide like he was helpless not to put himself at Quinn's mercy.

“I get it,” I said. It wasn't my job to keep some random out of dreamerville. “Have fun.”

“It's linked,” Quinn told me, “so we can all play.”

“Forget it.”

“Not even tempted?”
Quinn grinned.
“You're tempted.”

“I'm leaving.” I forced a smile at the newbie. “Nice to meet you, Seth. You'll be welcome if you decide to stay. This is a home for every mech who needs it.”

He shook his head, hard. “I was just curious. Just visiting, you know?” he said. With Jude's voice. “I'm not like—I mean . . .”

“Not like us,” I said, biting back the
If you say so
. “That's okay. I really do get it. Been there, done that.”
I traced my
fingers along the silvery streaks rimming my neck. I hadn't embraced the freak-chic thing as much as the others. But to the newbie, I knew it was irrelevant. I was one of them; he wasn't—he thought. “Maybe you'll make it work.”

Maybe you'll be back.

Absolute control, Jude always said.

If I'd had that, I could have stopped thinking. About Jude's double. About my double. Out there somewhere with the same body I'd have until I got up the credit and the nerve to trade it in for a new one, custom-made. About whether Jude's double was right: if it was different for him and if that meant it could have been different for me. Which inevitably led where everything always led, straight back home to the damage I'd done just by being me—or, more accurately,
not
being me: perfect daughter, perfect sister, perfect girlfriend, perfectly breakable. The crash broke me; I broke everyone else.

Control meant never looking back, never questioning why I had walked away. Wiping out the memory of their faces: My father, pretending he didn't look at me and see a corpse. Auden, bandaged and pale, his eyes willing me away—first from the room, then preferably from the planet. And Zo's face the last time I saw her. That was the one I kept coming back to.
Tell me I'm your sister,
I'd begged that last day. I kept seeing it: Zo's face when she didn't answer. And I kept wondering: What if I had waited? What if I had stayed?

But that would have been selfish. I had accepted that.
Forcing myself into my old org life, into my old org family—it would have ruined all of us. If I'd understood that earlier, Auden would have been safe. And if I'd ignored it, if I'd stayed, given Zo a chance . . . she might have been next.

So don't think about it,
I told myself every day, all day.
Forget.

I had control, I thought, imagining Seth and Quinn writhing in the pool, locked in the shared dream that would give them a few hours of escape. I had control but not enough of it.

My room was nearly bare: just a chest of drawers, a flatscreen ViM striping the wall, and a bed. The latter was unnecessary; I could shut down just as easily with my back against the wooden floor. All it took was an internal command, and the world went away. For a while, I'd experimented—shutting down while standing up, hanging upside down, dangling out the window. In the end, I preferred the bed.

I lay down and took out the dreamer Jude had given me. The dreamers were nothing more than code, bits of data that overrode our neural homeostasis and threw our systems into a chaos that simulated physical and emotional response. Almost like jumping out of a plane, but more effective. Because they were just programs, they should have been reusable, but for whatever reason, no dreamer ever had much of an effect after the first few uses. Just one of the things no one, including Jude, understood about what they did to us. We all had our theories, but in the end, we just crossed our fingers and flicked the switch.

I hadn't had a fresh one in weeks. I'd promised myself I wouldn't, not anymore. It was too easy—and it made waking life
too gray. Like nothing was as real as the world inside your head.

I flicked the switch.

When I was alive, I dreamed in stories.

They weren't real, of course. Org dreams are nothing but random neural firings, spurts of color and unprompted emotion. The story comes later, in that instant before waking, your muddled mind making sense of the chaos by stringing the randomness into a narrative.

Mech dreams were different. There was no once-upon-a-time. No faces, no nightmares. No flying.

There was:

Rage.

Soft.

Wild.

Scared.

Bliss.

Raw jolts of emotion as if there was no body, no bed, no Lia Kahn, only the roiling froth of
joy grief terror pain joy
.

There was no “I.”

“I” was an illusion, evanescent, a null spot at the eye of the hurricane, an emptiness that drew its reality from the storm swirling around it.

There was want. A surge of need, pain and pleasure welded together, craving, and the sweet excruciation of denial, giving way, finally, inevitably, to satisfaction.

There were no stories and no faces, but then I saw his face,
amber eyes flashing, spiraling silver making his flesh shimmer in the light, lips curled, knowing.

Lips.

I reached out. I wanted. I
needed.

“Sweet dreams, I take it?” he said, catching my wrist just as my fingers grazed his cheek.

I was awake.

“I have seen the truth.”

I
yanked my hand away. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I should be asking you that,” Jude shot back. “I just wanted to see if you were in here—no one asked you to molest me.”

I sat up, trying to shake off the effects of the dreamer. After, everything felt hollow. Shadows flickered in corners, like the dream was lurking out there somewhere, waiting to reclaim me.

“As you can see, I'm here,” I snapped. “Now you can get out.”

Jude smiled and perched on the edge of my bed. I hopped to my feet, keeping the bed between us.

“If you really hate me as much as you like to pretend, why move in with me?” he asked.

“You and twenty other mechs,” I pointed out. “It's not like we're playing house.”

“We're playing something.” He shook his head. “At least you are.”

“That's exactly your problem. You think this is all just a game.”

Something flashed across his face, gone too quickly for me to interpret. “If I thought you were stupid enough to believe that, you wouldn't be here. Or at least, I wouldn't be here with you.”

“So being stupid is the key to getting you out of here? I could give it a try.”