“They don’t 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 couldn’t 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 human—clothe 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.”
“You’re not weak!” someone behind us shouted.
“This is new,” Ani whispered to me. “Usually it’s just the same old stuff—I’ve never heard this before.”
Auden shook his head. “But I was weak, friend.”
Friend? It wasn’t just what he was saying, it was the words themselves—it didn’t even sound like Auden, not the one I’d 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 something 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 touch—all 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 weren’t 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 couldn’t 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, I’m grateful to it for that.”
Now the crowd didn’t 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 doesn’t 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 lie—their bodies can’t.”
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 on—it didn’t penetrate. I’d heard it all before, empty logic resting on the existence of some ludicrous invisible eye in the sky. It was easier because it wasn’t Auden.
At Savona’s 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 anyone’s 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 didn’t 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 mother’s hand. They couldn’t be here; none of them could. I wouldn’t give in to the delusion. But as if gripped by some disease—the aftereffects of heavy dreamers or heavy guilt—I couldn’t erase their impossible faces.
So I shut my lids and shut them out.
“We can’t forget!” Savona was shouting. “We can’t 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!”
Ani nudged me, and I opened my eyes again, fixing on Savona, ignoring the crowd.
“Today, together, we forge a new beginning!” he ranted. “Your presence here is a promise. Standing here today we enter into a bond with our neighbors, with our Brothers. We cele-brate our humanity!”
Auden leaned forward to whisper something in Savona’s ear. He nodded. “This is no metaphor, friends. No empty words. We are more than words, remember. More than mind. We are alive, mind and body, and we embrace that fact, as we embrace one another. So go ahead!” he shouted. “Embrace your Brother, embrace your Sister, celebrate the bond we forge together!”
The people around us shifted uncomfortably.
“What’s he talking about?” I murmured to Ani.
She shook her head. “Don’t know. He’s never done this before.”
“I mean it!” Savona cried. “The network has torn us so far from one another, turning us into a sterile community of words and thoughts. Fight back. Here, now, fight back. Affirm your existence, the fact that you are here, not just in spirit, not just in mind, but in body. You are alive, you are human, as are we all. Embrace it!”
Tentatively at first, then enthusiastically, the audience turned in on itself, stranger greeting stranger, shaking hands, hugging, as Ani and I shrank toward each other, searching for an escape before someone could touch us. But there was no safe path through the crowd. The orgs closed in.