When I came back online, I was lying flat on my back with my hands folded across my chest posed like a corpse again. One of the paper dolls must have laid me to rest and left me for dead in the middle of the road. And as the sun began its descent in the west, I wished I really was dead.
I mean how much loss can a woman take? First, Rita killed herself, then Paula was executed, then Oscar went belly-up. I’d left my home, abandoned Old Lemon, and murdered my husband. But after all that, I still had a little fight in me. I came here determined to stop Maggie, but now that Wayne was gone, I just didn’t see the point anymore.
I’d hit bottom.
But a beautiful thing happened at the bottom—I just stopped caring. Without caring, there was no worry. And without worry, no anxiety. Imagine me with no anxiety. For the first time in my entire life, I truly felt liberated. Lighter. Relaxed. I’d been freed from worrying about others. I had nothing left to lose. No one to care for. Nobody to love. And that made me the most dangerous woman in the world.
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.
“What?” I stared up at the sky and mumbled to the cloud, “I wasn’t trying to connect.”
When I found myself inside the mind of Officer Margaret Rouser, I simply couldn’t believe it. Maybe I’d stumbled into a memory leak or slipped through her firewall or something, because I was seeing exactly what she was seeing, in real time. Her surroundings overlaid mine, just like that superimposed porn at the overseas tech symposium.
Maggie stood alone in the center of her empty room with all three display walls playing a chaotic collage of video memories. Each wall was divided into dozens and dozens of screens, and every single frame featured Wayne. The size of each screen was directly proportional to the intensity of her feelings as she mourned him.
I knew this, because Maggie knew this.
A mirror behind her utility wall reflected this collection of moving memorials into infinity. The overlapping audio created a jumbled soundtrack, and Maggie stood naked in the center of it all sobbing.
That cold-hearted bitch was actually crying.
One of the larger screens featured our first fight club, but this time I saw it all through Maggie’s eyes. She focused on Wayne’s bloody face as he mocked her, then finished their fight with a headbutt that sent his skull cracking against the concrete. It still made me gag, but this time, I also felt what Maggie felt. His betrayal had enraged her at the time, but now that Wayne was dead, she had serious regrets. She felt guilty.
I never thought Maggie regretted anything.
While she fixated on the horrible ending of their relationship, I scanned the other videos playing on her walls. An awful lot of if looked like porn, too much, to be honest. Those two sure had a lot of wild sex, but there were some tender moments too. It freaked me out, so I chose to focus somewhere else. The biggest of all the memorial screens showed Maggie entering the knight’s house through the atrium. But instead of going to our library, she slipped past a bushy palm and hustled down a narrow hallway. Soon, she unlocked an arched wooden door at the end of the corridor and stepped into a workshop. Unlike the modern sandboxes of the bower, this space looked medieval. Wrought-iron sconces held lit torches along the stone walls. The floor was gray stone and the ceiling planked wood. All around, odd tools, strange gizmos, and homemade machines cluttered workbenches. But she focused on a body draped with a white sheet on an operating table in the center of the room.
It reminded me of Frankenstein’s lab.
She went to the table, lovingly caressed the muscular shoulder under the sheet, and said, “Soon, my love.”
Maggie hurried past a row of titanium skeletons that had been arranged on stands from shortest to tallest. At the end of the line, she pressed a big green button. High above, a chain rattled around a gear as empty hangers sped past just like at the dry cleaner. First came the women’s skins. The deflated female bodies passed by, then disappeared back into the wall with their empty heads hanging upside down over their backs like floppy hoods.
And I thought of Rita.
When the first male shape appeared, Maggie pressed the red button to stop the rotating skins. She caressed a dark sleeve and said, “Yes, I think Black will be excellent.”
Next, she passed a walk-in refrigerator that looked just like the dairy department at Wiggly’s Market. Behind the first glass door, stacked five-gallon buckets were marked BLOOD COOLANT. Behind the next door, trays full of positronic brains filled a rack. Each mind plugged into a socket, making the nanofiber optic neurons glow. The next case was loaded with silicon breast implants. Arranged from smallest to largest, each pair sat in a little compartment. Maggie couldn’t resist opening the glass door and squeezing a couple boobs.
It was a disturbing thing to see yourself reduced to parts.
The last glass door reminded me of the egg case at the grocery store. All different colors of styrofoam cartons filled the rack, many brown, some green, some hazel, but nearly half blue. Maggie opened a brown dozen. It was full of eyeballs.
“The windows to the soul,” she said as she selected a dark brown pair. Maggie quickly returned to the operating table and pulled the sheet off the body’s face to reveal the skinless man underneath. With little effort, she popped the eyeballs into his empty sockets. Then she said, “My name is Margaret Rouser, and I am your maker.”
“It is my pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” the lipless man said, “you can call me whatever you like.”
“Wayne Dixon,” Maggie replied as she kissed his skinless forehead. “Your name will be Wayne Dixon, and you will be mine. Now let’s get you dressed. I have a skin all picked out.”
BUFFERING...
No. It couldn’t be. Wayne can’t be… Maggie can’t be… My chest hitched and heaved as I fought back hot tears. Immediately, I started to panic, and the insight into her mind got all staticky. My emotional state was interfering with my connection. If I didn’t get myself under control soon—
CONNECTION LOST.