The Body Electric - Special Edition by Beth Revis Page B

course you remember me, you said my name. You’re real. You’re Dad.” I say the words for me as much as him.
    I search his eyes. “You’re alive.” Saying the words makes me—finally—accept them as true. Nothing else matters. With Dad back, he can cure Mom. He can help me solve this terrorism problem. He can fix everything.
    “Ella…”
    “Please!” I cry, “Say something other than my name!”
    “Ella.” Dad’s voice cuts through every other sound in the plaza. “Ella. You have to wake up.”
     

twenty-two
     
    My eyes open blearily. I’m on a thin mattress in a small but richly decorated room that smells of musk and wood oil. I’m wearing all my clothes, even my shoes, but a knitted throw covers the lower half of my body.
    For a while I just lay there, staring at the taupe wall with heavy wooden accents. My father was there in front of me.
    But he wasn’t really.
    I… I hallucinated. That’s the only answer. I know he’s dead—I know he’s dead, but seeing Representative Belles with his family while I was thinking about Dad…
    …But it was so real .
    I could feel him. Touch him. I heard him. He was there .
    But he wasn’t.
    It all happened in my mind.
    I’m going crazy . My stomach twists and I curl up in the fetal position. I did this to myself. Those extra nanobots I injected into my body so I could help Mom with her reverie, the ones that gave me the ability to go into other people’s reveries…
    A person can only have so many nanobots in their system. Too many, and the body fails. The mind fails. Bot-brain… and death.
    I shut my eyes, and force myself to think the words slowly. I. Am. Going. Crazy.
    Only crazy people hallucinate like that.
    Only crazy people believe their hallucination is real.
    Oh, shit. I choke back a sob in this silent, unknown room. And then I wonder: what did I do? In my mind, I grabbed my father, I spoke to him. Did I just speak to the air? Did I grab a stranger? Is this a waiting room to a mental institution?
    And what if… what if I lose my mind more? What if I disintegrate into nothing? Or worse—what if I hallucinate with Mom around? What if I hurt her?
    I feel sick—physically sick, like I’m going to throw up. I feel as if my brain is turning to jelly, and there is nothing I can do but feel it leak into my blood, twist around my veins, and seep out of my skin. I swallow down the bile rising in my throat and squeeze my eyes shut. I can envision the microscopic nanobots in my body wiggling over my brain and crawling into the wrinkles. I grip the sides of my head, pulling my hair. A part of me wants to rip the skin open and claw my own flesh out.
    “Ella?” a female voice calls from the other side of the closed door.
    I sit up quickly, my legs tangling with the blanket as I swing them over the side of the bed. The door creaks open, and a young woman with deeply tan skin and wavy dark hair enters. She holds a tab-screen in one hand, idly tapping at it, and glances up to look at me in a bored way.
    “You okay?” she asks as if she doesn’t really care one way or another about the answer.
    I nod warily.
    “Ella Shepherd, right?”
    I don’t answer. The woman looks up from her screen. “We scanned your cuff,” she says.
    “Yeah,” I confirm.
    “You collapsed,” the woman says, eyes back on the screen. “The meds said you were dehydrated.”
    I glance at my cuff; everything seems perfectly normal. My health stats are fine.
    “The representative offered his office for you to recuperate,” the woman continues. She sounds exhausted from the effort of paying me any attention. “Your emergency contact has been reached, but—” She glances up at me, meeting my eyes directly, and for the first time I feel like her attention is entirely on me. “The representative wants to speak to you.”
    “Representative…?” I ask.
    “Representative Administrator Santiago Belles,” the aide says. “He’s on his way; he should be here in a few