Read Wired by Robin Wasserman Free Online

  If you had never seen annihilation but mounds of lead, pieces of marble, stones, and pebbles, and you were presented with a cute windup lookout and little automata that spoke, sang, played the flute, ate, and drank, such as those which dextrous artists now know how to make, what would you think of them, how would y'all judge them, before yous examined the springs that made them motility? Would yous not be led to believe that they had a soul like your own…?

—Anonymous,

1744 Translated from the French by Gaby Woods

THE FIRST Solar day

"As last days go, mine sucked."

Lia Kahn is dead.

I am Lia Kahn.

Therefore—because this is a logic trouble even a dimwitted kid could solve—I am dead.

Except here's the affair: I'thousand non.

"Don't panic."

Information technology was my father'southward phonation.

It was—and it wasn't. It sounded wrong. Deadened and tinny, but somehow, at the same fourth dimension, too clear and too precise.

In that location was no pain.

Just I knew—before I knew annihilation else—I knew there should have been.

Something pried open my optics. The earth was a kaleidoscope, shapes and colors spinning without pattern, without sense until, without warning, my eyes airtight again, and there was nothing. No pain, no sensation, no sense of whether I was lying down or standing up. It wasn't that I couldn't move my legs. It wasn't even that I couldn't feel my legs. It was that, with my eyes closed, I couldn't have said whether I had legs or not.

Or artillery.

Or annihilation.

I think, therefore I am, I idea with a wave of giddiness. I would have giggled, but I couldn't feel my mouth.

I panicked.

Paralyzed.

There had been a motorcar, I remembered that. And a dissonance, like a scream but not quite; non fauna and not man.

And fire. Something on fire. The smell of something burning. I remembered that.

I didn't want to recollect that.

I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I couldn't open my own eyes.

They don't know I'thousand awake in here. In my mind I heard the pounding heartbeat that I could no longer feel, felt imaginary lungs constricting in terror, tasted the table salt of invisible tears. They tin't.

To my father; to my mother, who I imagined huddled outside the room, crying, unable to come inside; to the doctors, who my father would surely have had shipped in from all over the world; to Zoie, who should have been in the car, who should have been the one—

To all of them I would appear unconscious. Unaware.

I could imagine time slipping by, the doctor'due south vocalization rise over my mother'south sobs. Still no response. Still no movement, no sound, no flicker of her optics. Still no sign of life.

My eyes were opened once more, for longer this time. The colors swam together, resolving into blurry shapes, a earth underwater. At the upper fringe of my vision I caught something bulbous and fleshy, fingers prying my lids apart. And hovering over me, a dim, fuzzy effigy, speaking with my male parent'southward voice.

"I don't know if you can hear me withal." His tone was steady, his words stiff. "But I assure you everything will be all right. Try to be patient."

My father pulled his hand away from my face, and my eyelids met again, shutting me behind a screen of black. He stayed. I knew, because I could hear his breathing—just not my ain.

Every bit terminal days become, mine sucked.

The terminal mean solar day I would have chosen—the last solar day I deserved—would have involved more chocolate. Significantly more. Nighttime. Milk. White. Bittersweet. Olive infused. Caramel filled. Truffle. Ganache. There would have been cheese, too, the soft, runny kind that stinks upward a room every bit it dribbles downwards your throat. I would have lay in bed all mean solar day, eating the food I can no longer eat, listening to the music I no longer intendance to hear, feeling. The scratchy cotton of the sheets. The pillowcase, at commencement absurd to the bear upon, warmth slowly blooming confronting my cheek. Dried air hissing out of the vent, sweeping my bangs beyond my forehead. And Walker—because if I had known, I would have made him come over, I would have said screw my parents, forget my sister, just be here, with me, today—I would have felt the downy hair on his arms and the scratchy bristles sprouting on his chin, which, despite my instructions, he was notwithstanding as well lazy to shave more than once a week. I would accept felt his fingertips on my peel, a ticklish graze so calorie-free that, for all that it promised and refused to deliver, information technology almost hurt. I would have tasted peppermint on his lips and known it meant he'd elected gum over toothpaste that morning. I would have made him dig his stubby nails into my skin, not only because I didn't want him to let get, merely because along with one terminal real pleasance, I would take wanted one last pain.

This can't be happening.

Not to me.

I lay there. I tried to be patient, as my father had asked. I waited to wake up.

Yeah, I know: full cliché. This must be a dream. You tell yourself that, and peradventure you even compression yourself, even though you know it'south cheesy, that the mere act proves information technology'southward non a dream. In a dream you never question reality. In a dream people vanish, buildings appear, scenes shift, y'all fly. You fall. Information technology all makes perfect sense. You only decline weirdness when you're awake.

So I waited to wake up.

Big shock: I didn't.

Phase ane, denial. Check.

I learned the five stages of grief when my grandpa died. Not that I passed through them. Non that I grieved, not really, not for some guy I'd only met twice, who my father seemed to loathe and my mother, the dead human's simply daughter, claimed to barely remember. She cried anyway, and my father put up with information technology—for a few days, at least. Nosotros all did. He brought her flowers. I didn't roll my optics, not fifty-fifty when she knocked over her glass at dinner for the third time in a row, with that same abrasive aren't-I-clumsy giggle. And Zo pumped the network and dug upward the five stages of grief.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

Since I was dead—or worse than dead, buried alive in a trunk that might every bit well exist a coffin except it denied me the pleasure of suffocation—I figured I should be allowed to grieve.

No, not grieve. That wasn't the right word.

Rage.

I hated everyone, everything. The car for crashing. My torso for burning, for breaking. Zo for sending me in her place. For living, breathing, partying somewhere beyond the darkness, in a body that worked. I hated Walker for forgetting me, like I knew he would, for the girls he would engagement and the girls he would screw and the girl he would ringlet upward with in his bed, his arms closing effectually her, his lips whispering promises about how she was the but one. I hated the doctors who marched in and out, prying my eyes open, blinding me with their pen-size lights, squinting, staring, waiting for some kind of reaction I couldn't requite them, all while I was screaming in my caput I'thou awake I'm alive Hear me Aid me and so the lids would shut me into the blackness again.

My father stayed by my side, the only 1 to speak to me, an unending monotonic litany: Be patient, Lia. Try to wake upwards, Lia. Attempt to move, Lia. It volition exist okay, Lia. Work at it, Lia. You'll exist okay. I wanted to believe him, because I had ever believed him. I wanted to believe that he would fix this like he'd fixed everything else. I wanted to believe him, only I couldn't, and so I hated him virtually of all.

Next came bargaining. In that location was no one to plead with, merely I pleaded anyway. First, to wake up—to open my eyes, sit upwardly, swing my legs out of bed, walk away, and forget the whole matter. But that obviously wasn't happening. So I compromised: Just let me open my eyes, let me be able to speak, permit me be able to move and feel. Let this not exist permanent. Allow me become ameliorate.

And then, afterward, still no change, still no promise: Permit me open my eyes. Let me speak. Permit me escape.

That was before the pain.

Like

the doctors, it didn't bother to sneak up on me. Information technology exploded, a starburst of calorie-free in the blackness. I lived in the pain. It was my whole being, information technology was timeless, it was forever—and and so it was gone.

That was the beginning.

Intense pleasure, a spreading warmth building to an almost intolerable burn down. Biting cold. Searing heat. Misery. A bubbling happiness that wanted only to laugh. Fear—no, terror. Sensations sweeping over me from out of nowhere, disappearing simply as fast as they came, with no reason, no pattern, no warning. And—never staying abroad too long before returning for a visit—the pain.

I never slept. I could feel the fourth dimension laissez passer, could tell from the things the doctors muttered to one another that days were slipping by, just I never lost consciousness. I lost control when the waves came, I lost reason and lost myself in the bottomless sensations, merely I never got swept away, much as I wanted to. And in the moments in between, when the dark waters were still and I was myself again, I went back to bargaining.

Let me sleep.

Let me die.

"I'll do it—just you owe me," I had told Zo. Before.

She'd ignored me, twisting her hair into a loose bun and clipping it simply above her cervix. Her hair was blond, similar mine, except mine was shiny and full and bounced around my shoulders when I laughed, and hers was tangled and limp and, no thing what she did, looked like it hadn't been washed. I always told her she was just as pretty as me, but we both knew the truth.

"Try once more. You owe me," she finally said, pulling on a faded brown sweatshirt that made her look like a white potato. I didn't mention it. Our parents had selected for girls, selected for blond hair and blue eyes, paid the actress credit to ensure decently low body-mass indexes and decently high IQs, but in that location was no hands screened-out cistron for sloth—no amount of cash that would take guaranteed a Zo who didn't piss all over every genetic advantage she'd received. "Or practise you lot want me to tell Dad where you lot really were this weekend? I'1000 sure he'd love to know that when you lot said 'cramming for exams' you really meant 'cramming your face into Walker's'—"

"I said I'd do it, Zoie." She hated the proper noun. I snatched the key card out of her hand. "So, do I get to know where you'll exist while I'one thousand changing diapers and wiping snot on your behalf?"

"No."

Neither of us had to piece of work. Given the size of our parents' credit business relationship, neither of us would always accept to work. Except for the fact that our male parent was a big believer in productivity.

Arbeit macht frei, he used to tell u.s. when we were kids. It's German language, similar my smashing-swell-not bad-grandparents. Work will set you costless.

I was twelve the day I repeated that to one of my teachers. She slapped me. And then she told me where the slogan came from. The Nazis preached it to their prisoners. Right before working them to death.

"Ancient history," my father said when I gave him the bad news. "Statute of limitations on grudges expires after a hundred years." He had the teacher fired.

I wasn't required to become a job because I was an athlete. A winner, my father said every time I brought home another runway trophy. A worker. He never came to the meets, but the first-identify trophies lined a bookshelf in his part. The 2nd-place ones stayed in my room. Everything else went in the trash.

Zo didn't play a sport. She didn't, as far as I could tell, do anything just hang around parking lots with her loser friends and get zoned on dozers, some new kind that puffed out these foul clouds of smoke when you sucked, so you lot could feel like a retro from the bad old days before the nicotine ban. "Explain to me why information technology's cool to await like Grandma," I asked her once.

"I don't exercise things considering they're cool," Zo snapped back. "That's you lot."

Just for the record, I didn't do things because they were cool.

Things were cool because I did them.

So every twenty-four hours, I ran ten miles at the track while Zo worked her dad-ordained shift at the solar day-care centre, wiping drippy noses and changing shitty diapers, except on the days she suckered me into doing information technology for her.

"Fine," I told Zo. "Merely I swear to you, this is the last fourth dimension."

Information technology was.

The coordinates were already programmed into the car. Our male parent would cheque that night to make sure it had gone where it was supposed to, but he'd have no manner of knowing which sister had gone along for the ride. TotLand, I keyed in, then flung myself into the backseat. Walker couldn't wait to be eighteen so he could bulldoze manually, simply I didn't get the indicate. Better to curl up and let the seat mold itself to my body, heed to a mag, link in with Walker to remind him about that night's party, prowl the network to make sure none of my friends had stuck upwardly pics of something I shouldn't have missed (an impossibility since, by general agreement, if I'd missed information technology, it was worth missing).

But that day I unplugged. No chats, no links, no vids, no music, no nothing. Silence. I closed my optics.

In that location was this feeling that I but got when I was running, a couple miles in, after the tidal wave of exhaustion swept past and the world narrowed to the slap of my feet on the pavement and the air whistling through my lungs and the buzzing in my ears—not a feeling, actually, but an absence of feeling, an absence of self. Like I didn't exist anymore. At to the lowest degree not equally Lia Kahn; that I was nothing but a blur of arms and legs, grunts, pounding claret, tearing muscle, wind, all body, no listen. Lying there that day with my eyes closed should have been nada like that, but somehow it was. Somehow I was: Empty. Gratis of worry, free of thought. Lost in the black backside my lids.

Like a part of me knew it was going to happen.

Similar when everything flipped upside down and the scream of metallic on metal exploded the silence and the earth churned effectually me, ground over sky over ground over heaven, so, with a thunderous crack and a crunching of glass and steel, a twisted roof crushing me into a gutted floor, ground, I wasn't surprised.

I tell people I don't remember what happened after that. I tell them I hit my caput and information technology all went dark. They believe me. They want to believe me.

They don't want to hear how I lay trapped, skin gnashed by metal teeth; legs numb, absent, like the universe ended at my waist; artillery torn from sockets, twisted, white hot with pain. They don't want to hear how one eye was blinded backside a film of blood but the other saw clearly: black smoke, a slice of blueish through a shattered window, freckled skin spattered with carmine, the white gleam of bone. An orange flicker.

They don't want to hear what it felt like when I started to burn.

I wish I could say my life had flashed earlier my eyes while I was trapped in that bed. It might have made things more interesting. I tried to force it. I thought if I could remember everything that had always happened to me, moment by moment, then maybe it would be most similar being live over again. I could at to the lowest degree kill some hours, perhaps even days, reliving Lia Kahn'south greatest hits. Just it was useless. I would showtime with the primeval moment I could call up—say, screaming at the pinprick pain of my first forenoon med-bank check, convinced by toddler rationality that the tiny silverish point would suck out all my blood, while my mother smoothed dorsum my pilus and begged me to stop crying, promising me a cookie, a lollipop, a puppy, anything to shut me upward earlier my father arrived. I would recall the tears wet on my face, my father's disgust clear on his—and then I would think virtually how the daily med-checks and Deoxyribonucleic acid-personalized medicine were supposed to make us all healthy and safe and live nearly forever, and how nearly wasn't close enough when your motorcar's nav system crapped out and rammed you into a truck or a tree and flipped yous over and chewed you lot up. I would recollect my female parent'south hand across my forehead, and wonder why I never heard her phonation in my room.

Days passed.

I fabricated lists. People I knew. People I hated. Words starting with the letter of the alphabet Q. I tried to make a list of all the ViMs I'd e'er owned, from the pink My Beginning Virtual Automobile with its oversize buttons and baby-proofed screen to my current favorite, a neon blueish nanoViM that you could attach to your shirt, your wrist, even, if you felt like flashing 6

ds as y'all 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 y'all had enough credit, which I did, you could wire almost anything to function every bit a virtual figurer that would link into the network.

I sang songs to myself. I good the lines I'd been forced to memorize for English form, considering, according to my clueless teacher, "the theater may exist expressionless, but Shakespeare is immortal."

"To dice,—to sleep;—

No more; and by a sleep to say nosotros cease

The heart-ache, and the k natural shocks

That mankind is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish't."

Whatever that meant. Walker had done a passage from Romeo and Juliet with Elation Tanzen playing Juliet, and I wondered if Bliss would be the one—or if you counted her D-cups, the three—to supersede me.

I listened to the doctors, wishing they would betray some particular of their personal lives or at least say something other than "delta waves downwards," "blastoff frequency boosted," "rhythm confirmed as normal variant," or any of the other phrases that floated dorsum 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 fiber. But the more than fourth dimension 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 non 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 simply…happened. Optics closed, eyes closed, eyes closed—

Eyes open.

At that place was a shout, maybe a doctor, maybe my father, I couldn't tell, considering I was staring at a grey ceiling, merely I'd done it, I'd opened my eyes, somehow, and they stayed open.

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