The Body Electric

The sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever.

I cannot imagine a more perfect hell than being trapped inside my own mind.

If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?

We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.

Science can make a heart beat,” Jack says softly, each word falling on me like a caress. “But it can’t make it race.

How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me.

I feel hollow inside, as if there’s a black hole where my heart was, as if I am caving in around myself.

When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t cry.

I shut my eyes, and I force myself to feel myself. You never really think of what it’s like to be in your body, but even with my eyes shut, I can feel the boundaries of my skin, real or not. Everything that’s me is contained inside this body, and I feel it all. The heartbeat I cannot control. The mind that may not be mine. I am here, in this moment, in this body. All that I am—maybe not all that I ever was, but all that I currently am—is right here.

You gonna fight for something, you fight for something that you're willing to die for.

I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life. This… this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from.

And then I realize: this isn’t dirty water falling from the sky. It is—literally—blood. I look up, and a droplet of blood splashes directly into my eye. I curse, rubbing my face, trying to get the blood out, but it’s everywhere, it’s like trying to dry off in the middle of the ocean. Shielding my face as best I can, I stare up into the sky. I am in the center of a cyclone. Giant white clouds swirl like a spiraling galaxy above me, the eye a tiny dark speck. The storm rages, throwing out bloody rain like punches, the wind so vicious it tears my clothes and cuts my skin. Representative Belles’s mind is swirling with dark thoughts—bloody thoughts—and they have created the biggest storm I have ever seen. I have to stop the cyclone. I have to get him into a peaceful reverie, something that he can hold on to while I root around his brain, looking for answers. I focus all of my concentration on stopping the bloody rain. The drops come slower and slower. I take a deep breath, imagining the clouds breaking up, spinning into fluffy bits of cotton-candy like clouds. I don’t open my eyes until the sounds of beating rain disappear and I can feel the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on my face.

She is trying to control me with fear, because she cannot control me any other way. My eyes open wide. They burn as if they are on fire—no, as if they are made of fire. Eyes are the window to the soul.

What if eternity is nothing more than me, alone, in the darkness?

She stops speaking, but I can hear her silent sobs. They’re the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

Or… maybe I’m not going crazy. “Maybe I’m some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I’m just breaking down. I’m not sure which way is worse. Dad laughs. “You’re not in your right mind, dear,” he says. “No, no, no, you’re not.” And then— —Silence. Dad fades away. The reverie chair disappears. There’s just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead. And, just as I’m starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn’t soft; it’s not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark. I don’t know why—it makes no sense, the way dreams often don’t—but I want to touch the light. So I do.

Mom used to say that the thoughts in our heads were nothing more than electrical impulses. I remember Dad and her talking about this over dinner. It frustrated Dad that the human brain can fire electrical sparks and think, but that the electricity he’d pump into an android brain would never give it independent thought. The body isn’t that different from a machine. Humans and androids both run on electricity. That lightning spark of energy I saw in the reverie. That was my mother’s last thought, an echo of electricity, something that sparked when I entered her dreamscape. That spark is gone now. Her life is gone now. Everything that made her, her, is gone now. Faded into nothing.

I’ve made her relive, over and over, the last few days,” I say softly, watching Ms. White’s body. “I’ve had to fill in the blanks with my own feelings and experiences. She’s spiraling around those last moments, those times when she went against me, and she’s feeling it from my side, the pain, the betrayal.” She thinks she’s awake. I’m doing to her just what she did to me. I’m making her feel what it was like to slowly go crazy, to question everything. To watch my mother die. To fight for my life against my best friend. To feel the man who loved me try to kill me. To know that the woman I trusted as much as my own mother betrayed me. That’s what I’m making her feel. I’ve turned her into me, and made her live the life she forced me to live. Over and over and over again.

Besides,” he says, “every hero I know is soaked in blood.

Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.

It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true.

All the computers in the world are on a network. They’re linked by our cuffs. But I’m a computer. Jack’s a computer—Akilah—PA Young—all the cy-clones. We’re all computers. You know the great thing about computers? They can be hacked.

I’m not human. I’m better.

It’s all in my mind. I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy. "You need to wake up, Ella." The words are a command I cannot obey.

My heart stutters—not why? or how?—those are not the important questions. The really important question is: by whom?

She stares back into me, as if we are both seeking a humanity that neither of us has.

I am surrounded by death, inside and out, and all it does is remind me of how futile everything is, everything ever was.

Remember that time I punched you in front of my father’s grave?” I ask in a sentimental voice.

There’s a war going on, that much is clear. And I’m no longer sure I’m on the right side.

I can see, for just a moment, his beating heart in his ribcage, and then that, too, withers and dies, the useless, blackened lump tapping against his ribs before plopping out of his body.