Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman Page B

get that, but you sound different, and you look different, and…”
    “It’s because it was an emergency. They had to give me a generic model. My dad picked it out. He says it’s the one that looked the most like me. Not that it looks like me, I know, but it was the best he could do.” Too much detail, I told myself. Stop talking . But I couldn’t. Once I stopped, he would have to start again. Or he wouldn’t. And then we’d just sit there, and he would try not to stare at me, and I would try not to look away. “Some people get these custom faces designed to look just like them, the way they were—or like anything they want, I guess. It’s total y crazy what they can do. The voice, too. You just make a recording and they match it. I mean, it’s not exactly the same, I know, but it’s…closer. Easier. But you’ve got to place the order in advance. You’ve got to give them time, and if there’s an accident or something, wel …” I tried another smile. “There’s nothing I can do about it now. The artificial nerves and receptors are already fused to the neural pathways or whatever, and they say structural changes would screw with the graft, but next time, I’l do it in advance, so I’l be able to order whatever I want. Then I’l look more like…”
    “Lia,” he said.
    I am Lia .
    But I said it in my head, where there was no one to hear.
    “I’l look more like me ,” I said out loud. Calmly. “Next time.”
    “Wait, what do you mean, next time?”
    “When the, uh, body wears out or—” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to block out the echo of the crash, the scream of metal that refused to die—“if something happens to it, they’l download the, uh…” Data? Program? Brain? Soul? There was no right word. There was only me , looking out through some thing’s dead eyes. “They’l do it again. When they need to.”
    “So you just get a new body when the old one runs out?” he asked. “And they keep doing it…forever?”
    “That’s the plan.” As the words came out of the mouth, I final y saw it, what it meant. I saw the day he found the first tuft of hair stuck in the shower drain or woke up to a gray strand on his pil ow. His first wrinkle in the bathroom mirror. The day he blew out his knee in his last footbal game. The day his potbel y bulged as he stopped playing and kept eating.
    Any of the days, al of the days, starting with tomorrow, when he’d be one day older than today; and then the next, two days older, and the next and the next, as he grew, as he aged, as he declined…as I stayed the same. Shunted from one unchanging husk of metal and plastic to the next.
    I got there a moment before he did, but only a moment, and then he got there too. I saw it on his face.

    “Forever.” Walker grimaced. “You’l be like…this. Forever.” He stood up.
    Don’t leave, I thought. Not yet. But I wasn’t about to say it out loud. Even if he couldn’t see it, I was stil Lia Kahn. I didn’t beg.
    “So, what’s it like?” he asked, crossing the room. To the bed—to me. He sat down on the edge, leaving a space between us. “Can you, like, feel stuff?”
    “Yeah. Of course.” If it counted as feeling, the way the whole world seemed hidden behind a scrim. Fire was warm. Ice was cool. Everything was mild. Nothing was right.
    I held out a hand, palm up. “Do you want to…? You can see what it feels like. To touch it. If you want.”
    He lifted his arm, extended a finger, hesitated over my exposed wrist, trembling.
    He touched it. Me.
    Shuddered. Snatched his hand away.
    Then touched me again. Palm to palm. He curled his fingers around the hand. Around my hand.
    “You can real y feel that?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “So what’s it feel like?”
    “Like it always does.” A lie. Artificial nerves, artificial conduits, artificial receptors, registering the fact of a touch. Reporting back to a central processor the fact of a hand, five fingers, flesh bearing down. Measuring