Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Arwen Dayton Elys

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was giving me a chance to lie. But I had already died once in my life. Keeping this secret any longer would kill me again.

      I met his eyes and I whispered, “Yes.”

      All the parts beyond the meshline felt like jelly, unstable, dissolvable.

      “It was … it was the most awful, evil thing,” I said. “And I did it.”

      He stared at his burger for a little while. At last, meditatively, he said, “I hated you for months. I lay in the hospital, hating you. But … I did it on purpose too. After the movie, telling people. I wanted to … I don’t know …”

      “Keep away from the freak?” I prompted, still in a whisper.

      “Yeah.”

      “Make it your story, not mine?”

      “Yeah,” he agreed. “I kept thinking about my grandma finding out. I thought she’d get into the car and she’d just know—what we’d done, and what you are.”

      It didn’t offend me to hear him say what you are. Because whatever I was, he was too. He’d been scared that people would learn about me, and he would be tainted by association: the guy who got off on machines; the guy who liked weirdos; the guy who had sex with the artificial girl because he couldn’t get anyone else. So he’d thrown me to the wolves preemptively. And I’d thrown him to the bus.

      “I shouldn’t have told people,” he said.

      “You shouldn’t have told people,” I agreed. “But I shouldn’t … It was …”

      “You, like, martyred me for my beliefs,” he murmured, taking a bite of his burger. He licked a gob of ketchup from the corner of his mouth.

      “You didn’t die,” I pointed out. “A martyr has to die.”

      “Did you want me to die?” he asked. He was looking at me with open curiosity. I imagined him in the hospital, turning over this question in his mind.

      I shook my head. Even a moment after I’d pushed him, I’d wanted so badly to take it back. Undo, Undo! If there had been such a button, I would have pushed it over and over, taking back the bus, the theater, my accident, everything.

      “If I’d died, then I really would have been a martyr,” he went on, as if the idea pleased him. “Or even a saint. You’d have to light candles to me and memorize my life story, Milla.”

      “Hagiography,” I told him. “That’s what you call the life story of a saint.”

      “Yeah. I think I knew that,” he said around another mouthful of burger. “You’d have to memorize my hagiography and ask for my help warding off evil and interceding with God on your behalf and finding your lost keys and stuff.”

      I smiled at that, and then, setting down my sandwich, I declaimed, “St. Gabriel. A true warrior of faith. Succumbed to temptation and slept with a cyborg, then became one himself.”

      He laughed.

      And there was nothing more to say about what had happened between us.

      “Want my fries?” I asked. “I’m not that hungry.”

      “Yeah.” He dumped the fries on his napkin, squeezed ketchup all over them. He ate the fries with an expression I recognized. He knew he liked fries and the taste was good, but they didn’t provide him with quite the same feeling he was used to. “Ugh. They’re like fry-flavored Styrofoam,” he said, his mouth full. “But coffee’s different now, isn’t it? It’s, like, way better.”

      My eyebrow quirked up almost lasciviously. Coffee. “It tingles around the edges,” I told him, hearing dreaminess in my own voice, “like the coffee is eating the mesh, digesting it so—”

      “—so it blends back into everything else,” he finished for me, in the same rapt tone. “Like the fake parts are starting to become real again.”

      Yes. That was exactly what drinking coffee felt like now. It was why I’d been in that coffee shop in the first place.

      “Have you had the coffee at Go Get ’Em Tiger since …?” I asked him.

      “No. Is it special?”

      “It’s like what you were describing,” I told him, “but ten times more.”

      “Hm. Maybe we could go there sometime,” he suggested casually.

      I snorted at that, sounding less like a barfing dog than usual. Laughs, snorts, coughs—they were all getting better. Was he really asking me out?

      “Sure, we could get coffee,” I told him, “but don’t think that I’m going to have sex with a robot.”

      It’s a popular myth that the most deadly animal in history is the human, because murder and war and genocide can be laid at the feet of our species. However, the deadliest animal is of course the mosquito.

      Fortunately, both species can now be significantly improved.

      —Erik Hannes Eklund, Chair of Bioethics and Species Design, Columbia University, in his opening remarks to first-year medical students, 2041

      Let’s leap ahead a little more …

PART THREE

      Elsie Tadd woke up in a room she did not at first recognize, with a dry throat, a throbbing head, and aches and pains all over. It appeared to be nighttime when she first opened her eyes, but when she sat up on the edge of the cot with the faded patchwork quilt, she noticed a hint of sunlight coming in through the window up by the ceiling.

      “Church basement,” she whispered, identifying her location.

      This was the spare room of her father’s old church, where he would sometimes sleep if he stayed late to speak with parishioners or to work on a sermon. Elsie knew the room well, though she hadn’t seen it in a long time. Besides the little bed, there was an old desk and a couple shelves full of dusty books—mostly rare versions of the Bible. One wall was covered by a rather beautiful mural that had been painted by Elsie’s own mother. The painting depicted God, in radiant robes, up near the ceiling, and below him was Jesus, healing the ten lepers who had called out to him on the way to Jerusalem. In the Bible, the men had said, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” but Elsie had always wondered how they’d been sure it was Jesus and whether they might have started out with something like “Excuse me, young fellow with the beard. Are you that Jesus everyone’s been talking about?” or maybe they’d called out “Jesus!” really quickly and waited to see if he looked around. When she was younger, Elsie had spent hours in this room, drawing and doing her homework, and she’d imagined painting speech bubbles over the lepers’ heads and filling in their words.

      “But how am I here?” she whispered, because her presence in the church basement didn’t make much sense. Elsie’s father had been the minister of the Church of the New Pentecost СКАЧАТЬ