Days passed.
I made lists. People I knew. People I hated. Words starting with the letter Q. I tried to make a list of all the ViMs I’d ever owned, from the pink My First Virtual Machine with its oversize buttons and baby-proofed screen to my current favorite, a neon blue nanoViM that you could adhere to your shirt, your wrist, even, if you felt like flashing vids as you sashayed down the hall, your ass. Not that I’d tried that… more than once. But things got hazy midway through the list—There’d been too many ViMs to remember them all, since if you had enough credit, which I did, you could wire almost anything to function as a virtual computer that would link into the network.
I sang songs to myself. I practiced the lines I’d been forced to memorize for English class, because, according to my clueless teacher, “the theater may be dead, but Shakespeare is immortal.”
Whatever that meant. Walker had done a passage from Romeo and Juliet with Bliss Tanzen playing Juliet, and I wondered if Bliss would be the one—or if you counted her D-cups, the three—to replace me.
I listened to the doctors, wishing they would betray some detail of their personal lives or at least say something other than “delta waves down,” “alpha frequency boosted,” “rhythm confirmed as normal variant,” or any of the other phrases that floated back and forth between them. I tried to move my arms and legs; I tried to feel them. I could tell, when they opened my eyes, that I was lying on my back. It meant there must be a bed beneath me, some kind of sheets. So I tried to imagine my fingers resting on scratchy cotton. But the more time passed, the harder it was to even imagine I had fingers. For all I knew, I didn’t.
I stopped trying.
I stopped thinking. I drifted through the days in a gray mist, awake but not awake, unmoving but uncaring.
So when it finally happened, it wasn’t because of me. I wasn’t trying. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It just… happened. Eyes closed, eyes closed, eyes closed—
Eyes open.
There was a shout, maybe a doctor, maybe my father, I couldn’t tell, because I was staring at a gray ceiling, but I’d done it, I’d opened my eyes, somehow, and they stayed open.
Something else moved. An arm.
My arm. And, for a moment, I forgot everything in the pure blast of relief: my arm. Intact. I couldn’t feel it, wasn’t trying to move it, but I saw it. Saw it jerk upward, across my field of vision, then back down to the bed again, hard, with a thump. Then the other arm. Up. Down. Thump. And my legs—They must have been my legs. I couldn’t feel them, couldn’t see them, but I could hear them against the mattress, a drum-beat of thump, thump, thump. My neck arched backward and the ceiling spun away, and I was flying and then a thud, loud, like a body crashing against a floor. Crack, crack, crack as my head slapped the tile, slapped it again, again, all noise and no pain, and then feet pounded toward me and all I wanted was the motionlessness of the dark again, but now I couldn’t close my eyes, and two hands, pudgy and white and uncalloused, grabbed my face and held it still, and then for the first time since I’d woken up, everything stopped.
To sleep: perchance to dream.
2. EYES WIDE OPEN
There were no dreams.
I opened my eyes.
I opened my eyes. It was a triumph. If I could have smiled, I would have.
But I couldn’t.
I closed my eyes, just because I could. Then opened them again. Close. Open. Close. Open. It wasn’t much.
But it was something.
“Lia, can you hear me?” It was a new voice, one I didn’t recognize. The face appeared. Small mouth, big nose, squinty brown eyes with a deep crease between them. His parents must not have cared enough to spend the credit on good looks, I decided. Either that or his gene pool was so crowded with ugly, this was the best he could get. “Lia, I want you to listen to what I’m saying and try to respond if you understand me.”
Respond how? I wondered. For a doctor, he didn’t seem to have much grasp of the situation.
“Our instruments are indicating that you’ve gained control of some key facial muscles, Lia. You should be able to blink. Can you blink now, if you understand me? Just once, nice and slow?”
I closed my eyes. Counted to three. Opened them again.
All I’d done was blink, but the doctor beamed like I’d won a championship race. Which should have seemed completely lame. Except I felt like I had.
And that felt pretty good, right up until the point when I started wondering why I could blink, but still couldn’t speak or move. I wondered how long that would last.
I wondered if I could figure out the blink code for “Kill me.”
“You were in an accident,” he said with a little hesitation in his voice, like he was telling me something I didn’t know. Like he was worried I would freak out. How much freaking out did he expect from a living corpse?
“I’m sure you have questions. I think we’ve got a way to help you with that. But first we need to establish a cognitive baseline. Is that okay? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
No. Not okay. Okay would have been him telling me exactly what was wrong with me and how he was planning to fix it. And when. But that answer wasn’t an option. I was stuck in a binary world: Yes or no. I blinked once.
It was something.
“Are you in pain right now?”
Two blinks. No.
“Have you been conscious at any point before now?”
One blink.
“Have you been in pain?”
One blink. I kept my eyes closed for a long time, hoping he’d get the point. His expression didn’t change.
“Are you able to move any part of your body?”
Two blinks.
I suddenly wondered if I was crying. I probably should have been crying.
“I’m going to apply some pressure now, and I want you to blink when you feel something, okay? This might hurt a little.”
I stared at the ceiling. I waited.
No blink.
No blink.
This can’t be happening to me.
The doctor frowned. “Interesting.”