Robin Wasserman - Crashed (Skinned, Book 2)

I see... a new and commanding breed rising up, fearless and fabulous, unsparing of blood and sparing of pity, inured to suffering the worst and to inflicting it and ready to stake all to attain their endsa race that builds machines and trusts machines, to whom machines are not soulless iron, but engines of might which it controls with cold reason and hot blood.

Ernst Jnger, Copse 125

It took a kiss from a princess to wake me up.

By the time we slipped into the auditorium, Savona and Auden had already taken the stage. Several hundred people crowded into the wide, windowless space, crushed against one another in their desperation to get closer to their heroes. Audens face beamed down at us from giant screens lining the walls. His face, ten feet high, every scar magnified. It was easy, it was nothing, to have a scar brushed away, but Auden had left his intact, thick, pale worms of white crawling across his cracked lips and crooked nose. He looked different than beforenot just paler and thinner but almost like a stranger, his nose jutting at a sharper angle, his chin flatter, and I remembered the patchwork of bandages across his face the last time Id seen him in person and wondered how much of him had been rewired and rebuilt.

His eyes sparkled, pools of black at their center flooding out the green, as if he stared out at a darkened room. Or as if he was zoned. It felt like he was watching me.

But when I turned away from the screens, forced myself to look at the real Auden, a tiny figure on the distant stage, it was obvious he couldnt have seen me in the crowd. From where I stood, I could barely pick out the familiar features of his face or the cane he leaned on for balancethere was no way he could look into the sea of bobbing heads and pick out my hood-rimmed face in the crowd.

They dont understand, he was saying, alone under a spotlight. Savona stood off to the side, hands folded, nodding with approval. They wore identical iridescent suits that rippled in shimmering rainbow, like light on an oil slick. Those who stay comfortably at home, watching us on the vids. They think its all the same. But is it the same?

No! the crowd shouted, barely waiting for the question. They were well-rehearsed.

No, Auden said again, as quiet and calm as the crowd was manic. We meet here, we come together in person, body to body, to affirm our own humanity. To remind ourselves that being human is about more than the ability to watch a vid, to make a speech, to communicate, to think. Are we just minds, disconnected islands of cognition, connected only by an electronic web?

No! came the enthusiastic response.

Mind is inseparable from body, Auden said. When one hurts... He paused, and the giant screens overhead showed him brushing two fingers against a jagged scar on his neck. The other screams in pain. He shook his head. We dont live in our minds. We live in our bodies. There is no mind without body, no body without mind. Life is born in their merger. A mind shoved into a machine is

Still a machine! the crowd screamed. Still a machine! I glanced at Ani, who was dutifully mouthing the words. But I couldnt fit my lips around them.

Dead, Auden said. Dead thoughts in a dead body, imitating life. But we know life, he said. Life infuses the heart, the liver, the arms and... He paused again, looking down at the cane. Legs. Auden limped forward to the edge of the stage, peering intently out at the audience. The room fell silent. The skinners wear a mask, he said, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. They hide among us. They clothe themselves as humanclothe themselves in human skin, identities stripped from the dead. They prey on the confusion of the grieving. He clapped a fist over his chest in an unmistakable gesture of self-flagellation. They prey on the sympathies of the weak.

Youre not weak! someone behind us shouted.

This is new, Ani whispered to me. Usually its just the same old stuffIve never heard this before.

Auden shook his head. But I was weak, friend.

Friend? It wasnt just what he was saying, it was the words themselvesit didnt even sound like Auden, not the one Id known. What did they do to you? I thought.

What did I do to you?

I believed that because it spoke like something human, because it appeared to act like something human, it was some-thing human. And why not? In that life, before, I lived a life of the mind. I worshipped at the altar of rational thought. I told myself I believed only in what I could see, what I could touchall the while ignoring the reality of what my senses were telling me. What did I really believe in? An imaginary entity, the mind, the self, as if that was something that could exist outside of the brain. As if it was possible to distill an identity from electrical impulses, suck them out of a skull, dump them into a computer. I told myself I was a rationalist, that the Faithers believed in a fairy tale.

There was a bit of uncomfortable mumbling in the crowd, as if they werent sure whether they were supposed to cheer or boo.

But I was the one trapped in the fairy tale, Auden continued. I was under a spell. And just like in a fairy tale, it took a kiss from a princess to wake me up.

I couldnt shake the feeling that his eyes were resting on me.

The skinner breathed its dead breath into my body. It gave me life, though it had none of its own to give. And despite everything else, Im grateful to it for that.

Now the crowd didnt hesitate. The booing and cursing drowned him out for several moments. But then Auden raised his hand, and they fell silent.

I am grateful, he said. Because when I opened my eyes, when I felt the pain of being trapped forever in this broken body, I knew the truth. That humanity doesnt live in the mind. That I am my mind and my body. And no matter what the skinner says, no matter how good a show it puts on, this is the one truth the skinner cannot hide. They can lietheir bodies cant.

Savona joined Auden at center stage, basking in the applause. It was easier when he began to speak. I could ignore his words, the same old Faither bullshit about how only God could create life, about how skinners were abominations, how creating more of them would drive society to its knees, and on and onit didnt penetrate. Id heard it all before, empty logic resting on the existence of some ludicrous invisible eye in the sky. It was easier because it wasnt Auden.

At Savonas command the screens overhead began streaming images from the corp-town attack, but even that was easier than listening to Auden. Ani was rapt, but I just looked away. Into the crowd, careful not to meet anyones eye but helpless not to search their faces, wondering what had drawn them here. What it was about their lives that hating me would remedy.

I didnt find answers. Instead I found too much to recognize, fuel for paranoid imagination. A dusty blond head peeking over the crowd became Zo; a squarish face covered in brown scruff glanced at me with eyes I could imagine bleeding on the floor of Synapsis Corp-Town; a dead girl with pink hair clutched her dead mothers hand. They couldnt be here; none of them could. I wouldnt give in to the delusion. But as if gripped by some diseasethe aftereffects of heavy dreamers or heavy guiltI couldnt erase their impossible faces.

So I shut my lids and shut them out.

We cant forget! Savona was shouting. We cant be lulled into a false sense of security by their assurances that this will never happen again. This will happen again! And again! And again! Unless we stop them. Unless we send the message, loud and clear, to each and every skinner. That you are not one of us