The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Jenna Fox Chronicles 1)

I close my eyes. I struggle. I concentrate on every twitch within me. Every joint that wants to sweep me up the stairs. I concentrate on every word I have practiced since yesterday.

Don’t go, Jenna.

Don’t go.

Don’t go.

I open my eyes. I remain in place. I have not gone anywhere. I am drained from the effort.

I glare at them both. ‘How dare you!’ I say. ‘How dare you play with my brain! How dare you pretend with me that I’m normal! How dare you program me!’

The word sends a shockwave through the room. For a moment neither one speaks, stunned by the outing of their dirty secret.

‘Jenna, come here,’ Father finally says. ‘Come closer to the screen. Sit, so we can talk.’

‘Do I have a choice? Or is that another thing that is programmed into me. Sit down, Jenna. Sit down! Sit down!’

‘Jenna, please,’ Mother pleads.

‘Jenna Angeline Fox!’ Father says. ‘Look at you. Are you in your room right now? No. You’re obviously not programmed. Let me explain!’ I don’t move. ‘Angel,’ he adds.

I step forward and sit in the kitchen chair Mother has pulled up to the Netbook. Am I doing this of my own free will? I’m not sure.

‘It was a suggestion, Jenna. We only planted a strong suggestion. Like a subliminal message. It wasn’t programming. And it was for your own protection. You’ve been through a terrible trauma, not unlike any patient who has had a severe brain injury. Erratic behavior can sometimes be a side effect of such an injury. Usually medication is used to lessen adverse effects. But medicine won’t work with you, Jenna. You don’t have the same circulatory system or nervous system of other brain-injury patients. So a very simple thing we did was plant something that is no more controlling than a subliminal message in case you started behaving out of control.’

Who is really out of control here?

‘I don’t want you to control me,’ I say.

‘We don’t,’ Mother says firmly. ‘Like your father said, you’re here and not in your room. Right? But until you could understand everything that has happened, we also had to have a way to get you out of sight fast if we had to. For your own protection, and others’, too. We’ve already told you that a lot of people have put their lives and careers on the line for you. If someone should show up here unexpectedly, someone asking questions—’

‘We’ve taken a lot of precautions, Jenna,’ Father interrupts. ‘But if someone were to see you right now, it would be difficult to explain. Your organ failures, severe burns, limb losses—it was all on hospital records. We’ve managed to make changes to a lot of those records, and we’re still trying to make more. But we can’t change what people saw. There are a lot of medical staff who would remember. A lot who knew you were beyond the limits of what the FSEB legally allows. For now, the official story we’ve given everyone is that you’re stabilized and receiving private nursing care at an undisclosed location. That alone has been a source of questions and rumor because no one expected you to live, much less recover. If they were to see you as you are now, it would certainly lead to an investigation, or worse. Let’s face it, I’m news, and with my background with Bio Gel and the high profile of Fox BioSystems, red flags would go flying. The media would have a field day and the FSEB would be out to make an example of us. Everyone involved would be facing jail time. And I’m not sure what would happen—’

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to. I can fill in the unspeakable blank. Me. What would they do to the uploaded thing that is me?

‘That’s why we didn’t want you to go to school, but we knew that eventually we had to let you have your life back, too, or what would be the point of it all? But no one knows where you and your mother are. The house was bought under Lily’s name, and I keep my travels there to a bare minimum to avoid anyone tracking us down.

‘And as I said,’ he continues, ‘we’ve been making adjustments to hospital records and eventually as time passes, if someone sees you and questions anything, we can attribute discrepancies to faulty memories. So it was for your protection, too. Since you didn’t understand the whole scope of what is going on, we had to have a way to remove you from a potentially harmful situation. You have to see that we felt we had to plant this suggestion.’

‘And just how did you “plant” this suggestion?’ I ask.

Father opens his mouth to answer, but Mother intervenes. ‘It was uploaded,’ she says plainly.

I close my eyes. This or the dark place? It is a draw. I open my eyes and look first at Mother, then at Father. ‘Is there anything else you thought it necessary to upload? We may as well get it all out right now.’

There is a prolonged pause, each waiting to see how forthcoming the other is. My question is answered. There is something else.

I sigh and lean back in the chair.

‘You were missing so much school,’ Mother says. ‘You were so sick. We knew you would have enough challenges as it was, and we honestly didn’t think you’d ever be able to go to school again.’

‘It was a mistake. We realize that now,’ Father says. ‘But we uploaded the tenth-through-twelfth-grade curriculum of the Boston Unified School District. It was probably too much information—not what you would have absorbed naturally—but we can’t take it back. It doesn’t work that way. Not without starting from scratch.’

None of it is really mine.

My synapses fire like a fireworks display.

Thoreau.