UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

“You’ll require a lot of physical therapy, of course. Not as much as you might think, though.” The nurse checks the devices that are attached to her legs. They are electrical stimulators, which cause her muscles to contract, awakening them from their atrophied state, building them back to prime body tone. Each day she feels like she’s run miles, although she hasn’t left the bed.

She’s no longer in a cell. It’s not really a hospital, either. She can tell it’s some sort of private home. She can hear the roar of ocean surf outside her window.

She wonders if the staff knows who she is and what happened to her. She chooses not to bring it up, because it’s too painful. Better just to take it day by day and wait until Roberta comes for her again, to tell her what more she has to do to fulfill the terms of her so-called contract.

It’s not Roberta who visits her, though, it’s Cam. He’s the last person she wants to see, if she indeed can call him a person. His hair has filled in a bit since the time she first saw him, and the scars on his face from the various grafts are slimmer. You can barely see the seam where the different skin tones touch.

“I wanted to see how you were feeling,” he says.

“Sick to my stomach,” she tells him, “but that only started when you walked in.”

He goes to the window and opens the blinds a bit more, letting in bars of afternoon light. A particularly loud wave crashes on the shore outside the window. “ ‘The ocean is a mighty harmonist,’ ” he says, quoting someone she’s probably never even heard of. “When you can walk,” Cam tells her, “you should look at your view. It sure is pretty this time of day.”

She doesn’t answer him. She just waits for him to leave, but he doesn’t.

“I need to know why you hate me,” he asks. “I’ve done nothing to you. You don’t even know me, but you hate me. Why?”

“I don’t hate you,” Risa admits. “There’s no ‘you’ to hate.”

He comes up beside her bed. “I’m here, aren’t I?” He puts his hand on hers, and she pulls away.

“I don’t care who or what you are, nobody touches me.”

He thinks for a moment, then says, in all seriousness, “Would you like to touch me then? You can feel all the seams. You can see what makes me me.”

She doesn’t even dignify that with a response. “Do you think the kids who were unwound to be a part of you wanted it?”

“If they were tithes, they did,” Cam says, “and some of them were. As for the other ones, they had no choice . . . any more than I had a choice in being made.”

And for a moment, within the fury she feels toward the people who created him, Risa realizes that Cam, as much as all the kids who were unwound to make him, is a victim too.

“Why are you here?” she asks him.

“I have lots of answers to that one,” Cam says proudly. “ ‘The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’ Carl Jung.”

Risa sighs, exasperated. “No—why are you here, in this place, talking to me? I’m sure Proactive Citizenry has more important things for their beta test to do than talk to me.”

“Where the heart is,” he says. “Uh—I mean—I’m here because this is my home. But I’m also here because I want to be.”

He smiles at her, and she hates the fact that his smile is sincere. She has to keep reminding herself that it’s not his smile at all. He’s just wearing the flesh of others, and if it was all peeled away, there’d be nothing in the center. He is little more than a cruel trick.

“So did your brain cells come preprogrammed? A head full of ganglia implants from the best and the brightest?”

“Not all of them,” Cam says quietly. “Why do you keep holding me responsible for the things I had no control over? I am what I am.”

“Spoken like a true god.”

“Actually,” he says, returning a little bit of her attitude, “God said, ‘I am that I am,’ if you’re going by the King James version.”

“Don’t tell me—you came programmed with the entire Bible.”

“In three languages,” Cam says. “Again, not my fault, it’s just there.”

Risa has to laugh at the audacity of his creators—did it occur to them that filling him with biblical knowledge while playing God was the ultimate hubris?

“And anyway, it ain’t like I can regurgitate it verbatim, I just got a workin’ knowledge of a whole lotta stuff.”

She looks at him, wondering whether the sudden change in speech pattern from advanced-placement to country-casual is a joke, but she can tell it’s not. She supposes as connections spark through the various and sundry bits of his brain, he kicks out all kinds of talk.