Wired (Skinned, Book 3) Read online

  So we started our hunt.

  Searching for him by name proved useless, as expected. But there were cryptic references to a mystery mech popping up at certain elite gatherings, turns of phrase I recognized from my own days as Jude's dummy--"the past is irrelevant," "natural is weak," "natural is hell"--that pointed us in the right direction,

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  underground zones devoted to tracking his sightings. And once we knew where to look, he was everywhere. There he was bobbing in the background of a vidlife; there he was pretending to dose with a pack of zoners; there he was posing with a bunch of skinnerheads, their eyes large with longing. And he'd been noticed. Probably by BioMax, who had apparently decided to ignore the issue as long as he kept his mouth shut and didn't blow up anything else; definitely by a slow-growing cult of net-fans, orgs and mechs alike, who'd established stalker zones that went crazy every time there was a new sighting. Theories flew about who he was, what he wanted, whether he was some kind of messianic figure determined to save us all or the skinner manifestation of original sin, weaseling his way into the org world so he could tear it down from within. The persona and its attendant mysteries were so carefully crafted that I could only assume Jude had cultivated them himself.

  Not that Riley could see that, or would have cared if he did. All he saw was confirmation that Jude hadn't disappeared forever. Thus: "We have to find him," again and again, until there was nothing I could do but pretend I agreed. It was like he'd conveniently forgotten the way things had been with the three of us. The arguments. The sniping. The way Jude had held Riley hostage to the mistakes he'd made in the past, and the debt he owed Jude for things he'd done when he was too young to know better. The way Jude had sometimes looked at me like I was nothing, a passing phase, some toy that Riley

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  would eventually get bored with. And then the other times, when he'd looked at me like ... like he could see straight through me, into the secret at my center, one that I didn't even know myself. Like he and I were the same, and, stuck on the outside, Riley would never understand.

  But Riley and I were the only unit that mattered, which was why I went along with him on the search in the first place. We exhausted all the network sources without getting any closer to tracking down our target--Jude's fans were obsessed with him, but their devotion was, without exception, practiced from afar. We needed off-line help, and there was one obvious place to start: the only mech besides Riley who we knew Jude would trust--though he had every reason not to. She was out of commission, so we started with the next best thing.

  "You." Quinn Sharpe's face appeared in my ViM, unsmiling. She'd apparently missed me about as much as I'd missed her. "What?"

  "I'm fine, thanks," I said sweetly. "Life is good, and yes, I'd love to tell you all about it, thanks so much for asking, but I'd hate to interrupt what I'm sure is a busy day."

  "Then I guess you shouldn't have voiced," Quinn shot back. "Is that all?"

  I could see her reaching for the disconnect. "Wait!"

  "What?"

  I glared at Riley over the screen. This was exactly why I'd

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  wanted him to do it. But he'd been under the mistaken impression that, deep down, Quinn liked me.

  "I have a favor," I said.

  "Then I guess you don't need one from me."

  Calm, I instructed myself. Don't fight back.

  "I'm looking for Jude," I said.

  At Jude's name her mask of scorn turned into the real thing. "Why would I know where he is?" Quinn snapped. "You think he tells me anything? He hasn't even talked to me since ..."

  "Since you used him to screw over Ani?"

  "I didn't use him for anything but screwing," Quinn said. "Ani had nothing to do with it."

  "I'm sure that would be a huge relief to her."

  "Drop the act, Lia. It's not like you care about her any more than I do."

  I could hardly care less. There'd been a time when I thought Quinn might actually have loved Ani, or at least whatever the Quinn-world equivalent of that emotion might be. But she'd done an excellent job convincing me otherwise.

  "I care," I said.

  "Then why are you wasting your time asking me about Jude, when you could be asking her?"

  "You know I can't do that."

  "Actually, you can. Which you would know too, if you gave a shit."

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  "You're saying she's--"

  "Awake," Quinn said. "New body, healed brain, totally compos mentis. Figured you'd know that. Seeing how close the two of you are."

  I couldn't believe it. BioMax had been studying her brain, searching for signs of what the Brotherhood had done to it and what they might have learned. They said the research would last "indefinitely," which I'd started to believe meant forever. "I didn't know."

  "Obviously."

  "Where's she staying?"

  "Still in rehab," Quinn said. "The luxurious accommodations where you and I began our own beautiful friendship."

  "So have you ... talked to her?"

  There was a pause. Long enough for me to imagine a whole series of unanswered calls and texts, unheard apologies, aborted visits. But maybe I was giving her too much credit.

  "Ani's old news," Quinn said. "I've got better things to do. And that goes for this conversation, too."

  She hung up.

  "Sure you don't want me to come in with you?" Riley asked.

  We stared up at the cement monolith.

  I shook my head. "I'll be fine." Some lies were necessary, even kind.

  The download and rehab facility sat at the heart of a

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  hundred acres of carefully cultivated wilderness, hidden from prying org eyes and nosy BioMax investors alike. Its location wasn't secret--but it was sixty miles away from the complex that housed BioMax's corporate headquarters. That was a sculpted swirl of glass and steel molded into the corp logo, but its existence was largely symbolic, a concrete manifestation of BioMax's presence in the world, to prove to anyone who saw it--on the network, at least--exactly how much power the corp wielded. This building, the faceless stone fortress, was the power itself. All the labs, the devices, the networks, the brains that made BioMax the second largest biotech corp in the world, were here.

  Also here: an icy storage room of lifeless, broken bodies awaiting disposal, their grinning skulls hollow as jack-o'-lanterns, their brains scooped out, sliced, scanned, tossed away. Down the hall a new machine, its eyes fluttering behind closed lids, its body rigid, wires feeding in and out of its exposed skull, monitors flashing, a family standing by, worrying, waiting. Or maybe no family, no visitors, just the thing, about to wake up and discover what it meant to no longer be human. To be an it.

  To be a skinner.

  The thirteenth floor would be filled with them--though not as full as it had been a year ago, before public sentiment had turned so sharply against us. Download was now exclusively for the desperate. But I supposed those were in constant supply. Accident victims, sufferers of incurable diseases, they'd all be

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  there, healed , defective husk of a body traded for a model in full working condition. Twitchy mechs with spasmodic limbs, their brains learning to control the machine, their tongues learning to maneuver around porcelain teeth, their fake lungs forcing air through a fake larynx, mechs learning to walk and speak and pretend to smile. Every mech needed rehab, although it was a much shorter hell if you'd been there before and your downloaded brain had already formed the pathways needed to control a mechanical body. I hadn't been back for more than a year, since I'd walked out, stiff and new but hopeful-- stupid. Expecting things to be like they'd been before.

  I could understand why Riley wanted to wait outside.

  "I shouldn't blame her," he said.

  I didn't argue, or agree. I could tell he was working up to something.

  "But I guess I do," he continued, after a long pause. "I get that she was mad, but to turn on him like that? After everyt
hing?"

  Jude and Riley had met Ani in BioMax's experimental facility when the three of them were selected for the first download procedures. The first successful procedures, Jude would have reminded me. I could only imagine what he thought of me helping BioMax. Riley claimed to understand--that I was doing what was necessary. That you didn't always get to choose your allies. But I hadn't been there with the three of them; I didn't know what had happened, or what BioMax had done

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  to them. So I knew only what little I'd been told, and what I could guess from the unspoken promises and debts that had bound them together. Until Jude slept with Quinn and blew the whole thing apart.

  "It wasn't everything," I reminded him. "It was after one specific thing."

  Riley scanned the distant windows, as if he could find Ani through the shaded glass. "One thing," he said. "One time. It shouldn't be the only thing that matters."

  I knocked.

  There was a muffled sound, something that could have been "Come in," so I did.

  It wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Ani was sitting up, wearing normal clothes--which I took as a sign that she was past the days when a perky caretaker would roll her over every morning and dump her into shapeless BioMax sweats, maneuvering rigid limbs through armholes and legholes, resolutely ignoring any and all bare skin. She'd gotten enough control of her body to dress herself. When she saw me, her face didn't move. Which meant either she hadn't remastered her emotional responses--or she was choosing to keep them to herself.

  "Who told you I was here?" she said.

  "Quinn." I waited for a wince that never came. Her face was empty.

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  "I didn't want anyone to come," she said. But she nodded at the bed. "You're here. Might as well stay. Sit down."

  The room looked exactly like the one I'd had. Featureless white walls, but Ani had posted no pics to remind her of the people waiting for her in the outside world. Before, she'd been one of the most avid zoneheads I knew, taking pics of everything, posting them to all of our zones and guilting us into pretending we cared. But now there wasn't even a ViM screen in sight. It was just the bed, the chair, the desk, and her. She sat so still, she could have been another piece of furniture.

  "So, are you ... doing okay?" I didn't know what to say. But stupid seemed better than silent.

  "Would you be?" she asked dully.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Why?"

  "For, you know. All this."

  "Why do people do that?"

  "What?"

  "Apologize for crap they didn't do. I'm the one who should be sorry, right?"

  "Are you?

  She shrugged.

  When I'd found her in the hidden lab, she'd been stretched out on a gurney, naked, her skull peeled back, her eyes staring at nothing, her lips forming a constant stream of nonsense syllables. Sloane and the others had been in the same condition--

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  because of Ani , I reminded myself--but they'd long since been downloaded into new bodies. Only Ani had stayed trapped in the strange digital limbo, a fugue state that call-me-Ben had assured me was painless. Probably.

  "So ... how bad was it?" I asked. "Did it hurt?"

  "Which part?" Her face twisted into a scornful un-Ani-like expression she could only have picked up from Quinn. "The Brotherhood experimenting on my brain? Or BioMax experimenting on my brain? Or dying all over again and coming back to life?"

  "Any of it," I said lamely. "All of it."

  "None of it," Ani said. "Unfortunately."

  I didn't ask what that meant.

  "Last time I uploaded a backup was at Quinn's estate," she said, and I knew what that meant, at least: that when they'd rebooted her in a new body, they'd used Ani's last stored memory. One she'd uploaded before the ambush at the Brotherhood. "But they told me what happened. And I saw some stuff on the network." Stuff like archived vids of Savona preaching while Sloane, Ty, and Brahm hung limply from wooden posts. While the camera flashed to Ani in the audience, Savona's pet skinner.

  "It's weird," she said. "Knowing you've done things that you can't remember. It's like, I'd never do that-- but I did it. Didn't I?"

  "Yeah. You did."

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  "Except it wasn't me," Ani said. "Just a copy of me. And now I'm a copy of a copy."

  "Don't," I warned her. If she started spouting Savona's crap about how we were nothing more than computer programs deluded into thinking we were real, I didn't know what I'd do, but it would end with her shutting up.

  "It doesn't matter." Then, the ghost of a tentative smile, almost like the old days. A little shy, more than a little playful. "I watched your vidlife. It was ... different."

  "The same, you mean," I said. "As ridiculous as the rest of them."

  "I meant, different for you."

  "That was the point, I guess. Show the orgs we could be the same as them."

  "Acting something out doesn't make it real."

  "We're hoping the people who watch vidlifes are too dumb to figure that out."

  "I figured it out," Ani said.

  "Well ... you know me."

  "Do I?" The last trace of the smile faded away. "I saw you with him."

  "Riley? He's waiting outside, but he can come in if you want to see him--"

  "Not Riley."

  I knew she didn't mean Riley.

  "Have you heard from him?" I asked.

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  Ani shook her head. "What did he whisper to you?"

  I shrugged. "Same old Jude. Everything's need-to-know, right? And I guess I didn't need to know anything."

  "Didn't look that way," she said.

  "He said: 'When you want to find me, I'll be a mile past human sorrow, where nature rises again.' Mean anything to you?"

  "No. But then nothing he says means anything to me."

  I knew better than to antagonize her when I needed her help, but there was only so long I could keep pretending that Ani was the wronged party. "Look, I know he screwed up, but--"

  "If you're going to tell me it doesn't matter, and it was a long time ago, don't. Long time for you, maybe. For me it's been a week."

  "No. I was going to tell you that if you wanted to get back at him, you should have done it. To him. Sloane, the others, they didn't do anything to you."

  There was a long silence. I waited to see what would come next, anger or acceptance. I suspected she didn't know either, until she spoke.

  "It sounds crazy, doesn't it?" she said, with a weak smile. "That's what I said, when they told me. I thought they were lying. Then they showed me the vids."

  "They weren't lying."

  "I remember wanting to hurt him," she said. "And I knew

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  how to do it. He doesn't care about what happens to him. You can't do anything to him that someone hasn't already done. I needed something that would ... I don't know."

  Make him feel responsible.

  Make him feel deceived. Betrayed. Lost.

  Make him give up on trusting anyone, including himself.

  She was right; she did know him.

  "It was just an idea," Ani said. "I didn't think I would actually do it."

  I couldn't imagine how strange it must be to wake up and learn you'd become a different person, somewhere in that dark space between one memory and the next. That you'd done the unthinkable, and you would never remember enough to know why.

  Then again, maybe she was lucky: She got to forget.

  "I'm not sorry," she said.

  I didn't know how I was supposed to respond.

  "You can't be sorry for something you didn't do," she added.

  "But you--"

  "Not me," she said. "Not really."

  I wondered whether she actually believed it. I could understand why she wanted to.

  "Do you know what you're going to do, when they let you out of here?" I said. Small talk seemed the best defensive maneuver.

  "Throw a party?" she said dryly.

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br />
  "I mean, do you have anywhere to go? Because you could stay with me... ." I tried to picture that, Ani bunking in the doily-draped guest room Zo used as a dump site for discarded junk, the three of us gaming, shopping, giggling like it was a fifth-grade sleepover. "Or Riley has some space, and I know he'd--"

  "I'm going back to the Brotherhood."

  "What?"

  She spoke slowly, enunciating for my benefit. "When I leave here, I'm going back to the Brotherhood of Man. Auden has agreed to take me back."

  "You've talked to--" I stopped myself. Auden was beside the point. "You can't."

  "Actually, I can."

  "They hate us," I told her. "They're against our very existence. They're trapped in an archaic, delusional, Dark Ages philosophy and can't accept the fact that consciousness is transferable, humanity is fluid, that life isn't defined by flesh and blood, it's defined by our nature, and our nature is human. They think--"

  "Spare me the speech," Ani said. "I've seen you on the network. I get it. But you don't understand what the Brotherhood is about."

  "Oh, really? It's not about ripping your head open and trying to find a way to get rid of us? Because I was there, and I know what I saw. What they did to you."

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  "That was Savona," Ani said. "Auden's in charge now, and he's different. You, of all people, should know that."

  "He was different," I agreed. "You, of all people, should know that things change."

  "And the Brotherhood has," she said, with a serenity I could only assume masked insanity, or at least severe delusion. "So have I."

  "Okay, tell me. What does this new and improved Brotherhood have to offer, besides self-hatred?"

  "The Brotherhood of Man celebrates humanity in all its forms and services those who have been overlooked or forgotten by--"

  "Spare me the speech. I've seen the press release. What's it got for you?"

  "I don't know." Ani wouldn't look at me. "Maybe ... absolution."

  "Ani--"

  "Everyone belongs somewhere," she said. "They have to."

  I didn't know what to say.

  "So when is this joyous reunion taking place?" I asked finally.

  "They say I can get out of here in another week." She smiled. "You should go. I don't want to fight. Not with you."