The Body Electric - Special Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 chair, 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