The Body Electric - Special Edition

  She knows something’s wrong.

  She’s trying to keep it from me, to make me think it’s not as bad as it is. I shut my eyes briefly, weighing my options. When I open them, I smear a grin across my face. If she wants me to pretend everything is fine, I can pretend. For her, I can pretend.

  seven

  Mom breathes a deep sigh when we reach the reverie chamber and she settles into the plush cushions of the chair. She runs her fingers over the armrest, tracing patterns in the fibers. I lower the hood over her head—a large, half-globe helmet that will emit sonic flashes that she won’t feel or hear, but that will spark the memories in her mind. Mom shudders as I press the cool electrodes onto her forehead.

  Before I do anything else, I connect Mom’s cuff to the reverie chair, checking her health stats. I have to swallow back a gasp of surprise—I’ve never seen her with such bad stats. Dangerously low blood pressure and heart rate, low oxygen, vitamin deficiency, constant dialysis pumps… how has she hidden how bad off she is from me for so long?

  “Ella?” Mom asks when she notices that I’ve frozen, my eyes glued to her stats.

  I force a watery grin on my face. “Ready?” I ask.

  Mom nods and I turn my focus to the neurostimulator and adjust the dials, setting a low direct current of electricity to her brain. In moments, Mom’s slipped into sleep.

  I take this moment to look at Mom, and try to ingrain her image into my memory. This image. The lines on her face smooth, and a small smile twitches the corners of her mouth. She looks peaceful now. Like she’s not even sick at all.

  My fingers glide over the controls in the room. Every single thing—from the automatically dimming lights to the reverie chair itself—was designed by Mom. People had theorized that reveries were possible, but it was Mom who made the system. It’s Mom who’s changing the world with it.

  Reveries are a state of controlled lucid memory recall. When you’re in the reverie chair, you experience a memory—your best memory, the time when you were happiest—just as if it were all happening again. On a purely theoretical level, reveries are easy—a dose of a specially designed drug plus transcranial direct current stimulation equals a state of lucid dreaming based on a pre-existing memory.

  Reveries enable you to retreat into your own mind. Ms. White works with the government so she can funnel grant money into Mom’s research, and she’s experimented with having scientists and researchers use reveries to focus entirely on a formula or problem they have to solve. It almost always works: Reveries open your mind up so that everything inside of you becomes entirely focused on one thought.

  But Mom didn’t invent reveries for science. She invented them for herself, for a reason.

  In reveries, she gets to see Dad again. Before she got sick.

  I slip out of the reverie chamber, keeping an eye on Mom’s health stats. I know from experience that Mom will be dreaming about Dad, reliving a day with him. It will feel real to her, as real as real life, and when she wakes up, maybe she’ll be able to hold onto that peace and happiness, at least for a bit.

  As I watch Mom’s health scans, I can see everything improving—her tension, her blood pressure, her heart rate—it’s all getting better with every second she’s in the reverie. There’s no science to that: happy people are healthier. It’s not a permanent cure, but the effects usually last her a couple of days at least.

  Red flashes across the control panel. I lean in, inspecting it. Her brain scan goes off the charts—her reverie is failing—and by the time I look back at Mom’s health stats, every single one of them is back up.

  I race back into the reverie chamber just as Mom’s eyes flutter open. I can’t tell if, as the reverie fades, Mom feels fear or panic first, but either way, her eyes grow wide and then suddenly narrow. Her arms and legs twitch, as if she’s trying to summon the strength stand up.

  “What happened?” she asks, looking at me. Her eyes are glazed—the reverie drug is still in her system.

  It’s just not working.

  “I couldn’t get you to a reverie,” I say. “I’m sorry, Mom, I thought I did everything right…” I lean down, inspecting the chair, the sonic hood, the electrodes.

  Mom puts a hand on my arm. “Ella,” she says.

  I ignore her, trying to figure out what went wrong.

  “Ella.” Mom’s voice is firmer this time. I pause. “You know why it didn’t work.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not it.”

  Mom sighs, shifting in the reverie chair. “I theorized about this before. Hebb’s Disease attacks the synapses in my brain. My body’s not strong enough to have a reverie.”

  The amount of pain in her eyes when she says this kills me. Reveries were the last thing that gave her any modicum of peace. She couldn’t forget about being sick, not ever, except in a reverie.

  This damn disease has taken away so much. Not just her health, but her chances of happiness. She used to love to go out; now she never does. She used to run. She used to sing. But Hebb’s has slowly, irrevocably taken it all away.

  And now it’s taken away reveries, the only chance she had to escape.

  “It’ll work; let me try one more time.”

  “Ella,” Mom says gently. “It’s hopeless.”

  “Just stay there. Don’t unplug.” I pause. “Actually, here.” I give her a second dose of the reverie drug—it won’t hurt her, just make her sleep.

  She’s asleep again by the time I slip back into the control room, pacing, pacing. There has to be something I can do. Mom’s sick—really sick this time, maybe so sick that—

  I force myself not to complete that thought.

  But she’s in pain. She’s been hiding it, but her health stats don’t lie. She hurts, she constantly hurts, but this—this—a reverie—would alleviate that pain. Just for a little. But that would be enough.

  My mind races in a myriad of thoughts. Mom can’t have more nanobots. Mom can’t have a reverie. There’s nothing I can do.

  I pace back and forth in front of the control panel, thinking, thinking. There has to be something that I can do. I can’t just not do something. I have to—

  I stop.

  Mom can’t have more nanobots.

  But I can. I’m nowhere near my limit.

  On the other side of the control panel is another door, a secondary reverie chamber that’s connected with Mom’s. Mom theorized that someone could go inside someone else’s reverie by linking two chairs together. She experimented, but it never worked—until she developed nanobots that were designed to help the observer break into the other person’s mind. She ultimately decided that it was too great a risk to give someone the additional nanobots, and she closed off the room.

  But if it worked…

  I could go into Mom’s reverie. I could enhance it, make it stronger, help her to stay in her memories, help her to remember what life was like before she got sick.

  I check Mom’s stats one last time—the extra dose of the reverie drug has helped, and her mind is building the platform for her memories, but I can tell it’s shaky at best. She’s going to wake up again any second.

  It’s now or never.

  eight

  My hands shake as I approach the secondary reverie chair. It’s nowhere near as nice as the one Mom uses with clients—why bother cloaking it in cushions and velvet when no one can use it?

  A small recess in the wall holds what I was looking for: the additional nanobots needed for someone to use the chair. I pick up the vial. The inside looks empty, all except for a tiny sprinkle of silver glitter on the bottom. When I shake the vial, the silver moves like liquid.

  There are millions of microscopic nanobots in that vial.

  I take a deep breath.

  I know this is dangerous. I have no idea what my nanobot count is, but I know that I shouldn’t be letting any more infect my body.

  But Mom developed these. And if, by taking them, I can help her…

  I stride across the room to the c
hair, and slide the nanobot vial next to the poison-green reverie drug in the injector. One dose will give me both the drug and the bots, administered as a puff of gas in my eyes when the sonic hood turns on.

  My body wants to turn and run.

  Instead, I sit in the chair. It’s long and reclined, designed to make me lay down more than sit. I slide my left arm against the raised bar, connecting my cuff to the system. I jam the electrodes onto my skin and lower the sonic hood over me.

  Commence joined reverie? The system asks me in warning yellow letters.

  I shut my eyes, flinching even though nothing has happened yet. I think about the microscopic bots crawling over my eyes, behind them, into my brain, burrowing into grey wrinkles.

  “It’ll work,” I say to myself, trying to convince myself that wishful thinking was truth.

  I push the button.

  The reverie chair hums with life. I have a moment to see the sparkle of the nanobots mixed with the green puff of reverie drug, and then I blink, and then—

  —My body explodes with pain.

  My knees jerk up toward my chest as my muscles spasm and tighten. It’s like a cramp for my whole body. Pain slices through me, shredding my muscles. I gag on bile, then gasp for air, and I’m deeply aware of the heavy thump of my heart, ricocheting in my chest.

  And then—nothing.

  Nothing at all. I cannot hear the sound of my beating heart. I cannot feel the warmth of life within me.

  I’m dead.

  nine

  I hear music. I almost recognize the tune, something soft, played on a guitar, but then the world bursts into being. Light explodes from a pinpoint in the distance, and with the light, everything else—scents, warmth, the feel of air on my skin.

  In the distance, I can see a house.

  I know that house.

  It’s where we lived when I was a kid, before everything bad happened, a narrow two-level building in Rabat, a dusty, limestone-drenched suburb of New Venice.

  I step toward the house, and in that one step I cross kilometers. The house moves from the background to right in front of me, so close that I can touch it.

  Singing.

  I creep around the edge of the house. It’s perfect in every detail, from the stone walls to the clay tiled roof with aggressively green, stubborn ivy crawling up the wall toward the kitchen window. A potted chinotto tree standing by the doorway wafts in the warm breeze.

  The window in front of the kitchen sink is open. I stand on my tiptoes, peering inside. My mother—younger than normal—dances around the kitchen, laughing, covered in flour. And Dad’s behind her, pulling out a huge bouquet of yellow roses for her. I can hear childlike laughter—my laughter, I realize, when I was a little kid—weaving in and out of the sounds of my parents’ chatter and over the whirr of the electric mixer, but my mother’s reverie isn’t focused on me as a little girl.

  It’s focused on Dad.

  If my mother looked through the window over the sink, she could see me as I am now—eighteen years old with dark brown hair hanging just past my chin, my gold-flecked brown eyes staring straight at her. But I don’t think Mom will do that. Her body is aware that this is a reverie and not real, but her subconscious is letting her relive the memory. I could probably stand nose-to-nose with her and she wouldn’t see me. Her brain wants to live in the reverie and will do anything to protect itself from leaving it.

  From becoming aware that this isn’t real.

  Looking at Mom and Dad now, I wish this was real. I would trade anything to be able to let my mother live this life.

  But it’s past. This is long ago, well before her disease ate her from the inside out. Before I grew up. Before Mom developed the technology that even makes reverie possible. Before Dad died, giving her the reason to invent the process of reveries so she could live with him in her mind.

  Mom’s memory falters. The house flickers.

  I duck under the window, just in case this was enough disturbance to push Mom out of the reverie. Crouching against the house, I cup my hands and blow air into them, thinking cinnamon.

  A warm, overwhelming scent of the spice wraps around me. I throw my hands up, envisioning the smell permeating every corner of Mom’s dream.

  “The cookies!” I hear Mom say, her voice a trill of laughter. She’s fully back in the reverie now, the flicker gone.

  But just in case, I do everything else I can think of to make Mom’s memory even more real. I hum the opening strands of Dad’s favorite song, “Moon River,” the song I heard at the start of the reverie. The sound continues long after I quit humming—Mom’s memory has picked it up, adding depth to her reverie. I add my memories of the old house to hers, and the kitchen grows in sharper details, like a blurry image coming into focus.

  I think everything’s going well. Maybe I can leave the reverie, let Mom’s mind fill in everything else.

  But then I hear her voice. It is so strained that I stand up and lean closer, despite the already-weakened state of the reverie.

  “Philip,” Mom says, her voice heavy with unshed tears. “Philip, I don’t think this is real. I wish it was… but I’m in a reverie, aren’t I? You’re not real. You’re just a memory.”

  I act on instinct as I swing my arm, and the wall separating me from the kitchen and my mother disappears. The laws of physics do not apply in reverie. My mother starts to turn, but I lunge forward and grab the sides of her head, keeping her facing Dad.

  I can feel, deep within me, power. Control. I can control my mother’s reverie, like a puppet master pulling strings. I concentrate with all my strength on the idea of this memory.

  But then I hear my mother whimper, and I know that now she’s remembering the pain of her disease, and all around me the kitchen flickers, and even the memory of my father flickers.

  No. I reach deep within me, to a core of power I didn’t know was there, and tap into every happy thought and memory I have of my parents like this and I imagine them all pouring out of me, engulfing my mother.

  warmth love heart-full joy love chaos kissing the taste of his lips the feel of his body love the child the soft sleeping noises tiny fingers tiny toes clear brown eyes open wide love love love

  I rip my hands away. My mother’s reverie body sags and relaxes. I reached inside her and pulled out the deepest memories in her body, the memories that words can’t describe, the memories that are as much a piece of her as her arms and legs. Those are the ones she’s filled with now.

  Mom’s face looks up to Dad’s, and I know now she truly is in the reverie, and this feeling of peace and joy will stay with her long after she wakes up.

  It worked.

  I turn to leave. It’s safe for me to go now; Mom’s reverie is definitely connected.

  But I glance back. I can’t help it.

  I miss Dad, too. I miss the way he looks. My own dreams are nowhere near as vivid as Mom’s. And even though he’s younger here than I remember him, and he has a scruffy bit of facial hair that makes him look reckless, and he’s missing his glasses, and there’s more hair on top of his head, it’s still Dad.

  And then he looks at me.

  “Ella,” he says, his voice cutting through the soft sounds of memory in sharp, precise tones. “Ella. You have to wake up.”

  ten

  I jerk so hard that I crack my skull against the sonic hood. I throw it back, ripping the electrodes off my skin, nearly breaking the chain of my necklace in the process. My skin vibrates. I stare at it, awed and scared, as my flesh ripples like an earthquake. The vibrations seep past my skin, into my bones, and I feel as if I’m hearing something, the buzzing of my soul within the confines of my flesh.

  And then I blink, and everything is silent and still.

  I cover my eyes with a shaking hand, trying to regroup. A hallucination. My body is reacting to the extra nanobots I injected myself with. That last image was… disturbing. And it shouldn’t have been possible. Reveries aren’t real. I wasn’t really there in Mom’s
head. Memories are nothing more than electrical impulses shooting across the brain’s synapses. There is no way Dad—it wasn’t Dad, it was just a dream of him—there’s no way that could have seen me. Could have spoken to me.

  I gasp, and check Mom’s stats, worried that the last image of Dad being so weird and creepy affected her. But she’s blissfully asleep, still in her dreamworld, her health stats calm and far better than they were before we started.

  The door slides open and Ms. White bursts in, her eyes wide and panicked. “Ella!” she screeches. “What did you do?” She rushes to my side, noting the cold sweat prickling my skin.

  “I did it,” I say, fully realizing what just happened.

  “Are you okay?” Ms. White ignores me, checking the health stats on my cuff. “Where’s your mother?”

  I jerk my wrist free and grab her hand, forcing Ms. White to look at me. “I did it,” I repeat, a smile breaking out on my face. “I did it!”

  “Did… what?” Her voice is hesitant and wary.

  A quiet beeping starts from the control panel, followed by a flash of red. “Mom’s almost out,” I say, jumping from the chair and pushing past Ms. White. Her head turns between me and the secondary reverie chair, and I almost wish I’d been looking at her face when she noticed the empty nanobot vial.

  “Ella!” She gasps, chasing after me.

  I race into Mom’s reverie chamber just as her eyelids flutter open. “Good reverie?” I ask, beaming at her. My smile falters. What if she remembers when it almost broke? What if she remembers Dad being so strange?

  But then I see her expression, and my heart melts in relief. “The best,” she says.

  I help her get up out of the reverie chair. “What did you remember?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

  Mom squeezes my hand. “My last good day.”

  She moves forward to talk to Ms. White, but I’m paralyzed. Her last good day. Every day since then has paled in comparison to that one day, years and years ago.