“It might leave a scar,” she says in the end.
A scar. I almost laugh and say, Have you seen my face? But of course she hasn’t. I’m hiding beneath a millimeter of concealer. My brain is high on psychdels. Without the pills, I wouldn’t even have been able to walk myself down here. A glance at my vitals would reveal everything wrong with me.
But here they don’t check. And if they do check, then they’re under no obligation to care. This body shop is the opposite of everything Ester stood for, but I don’t think it undermines the human experience. If anything, it celebrates the fact that our bodies are ours and we’re allowed to treat them to nonessential procedures. Nonessential experiences. That’s all I wanted—to live and laugh without consequence, to feel the sea like people did in the past.
And look how that turned out.
“Hey.” Fingers snap in front of my eyes. “You okay there?”
“Yeah.” My breathing has quickened. Thinking about your upcoming death is no fun. “Yeah. Just feeling the drug.”
The bodyworker frowns. She’s about to say something else, when another voice interrupts.
“Jinx. I’ll take this one.”
The memory fades as I reach the bottom of the sea.
It’s flat, without the ridges, grass, and trees of the land above. Just pebbly sand that stretches on and on, and I don’t know why I swim in the direction I do—it’s all more of the same—until something sparkles in the distance.
A house-sized dome, emerging from the sand.
It’s silver, like the lid to a fancy dish. It lifts like a lid too, when I reach it. I swim in without a second thought and it sucks me down, dumps me—seawater and all—onto some slick, cold surface.
Coughing, I push onto my hands. The ground beneath my fingers emanates blue light—dim, too dim to illuminate anything beyond the curved walls to my immediate right and left. My eyes burn when I squint to see more. Weird. They didn’t sting before, even though I had them wide open in seawater. I also wasn’t freezing before. Now I shake from head to toe.
I slosh to my feet—and almost faint. Static sands the backs of my eyes. My nerves feel singed. My spine crimps, and I double over, water geysering from my mouth and nose. My esophagus burns like my eyes by the time I’m done.
Then the dam breaks. Emotion and thought chainsaw through me, and I scream as the numbness is drained from my veins, all the pain gone for a split second before it’s back, tenfold, because I remember.
I remember.
Hero … trying to kill me … but I killed him … he was dead … but then he was—is—alive … and I—I walked right into the ocean, swam and dove down and I drowned but kept on swimming, kept on diving until I reached the bottom and here I am, here I fucking am, inside some strange dome on the seafloor, alive, but have I ever been? Alive?
Have I ever been alive?
I reach for the wall for support—and flinch away when my touch triggers a row of lights to blink on. I’m in a tunnel that winds downward, built of some smooth, matte material.
Slowly, careful not to touch any more walls, I walk down the tunnel. Lights pop on anyway. They’re the only sentient things in this cold, inanimate place, and the deeper I go, the more I lose my senses. I stop smelling the seawater. I stop hearing. The air is too odorless. Too quiet. Misgivings mushroom in my gut, but my gut nevertheless tugs me forward, brain telling me to turn around, but then what? Swim back to the surface? Confront the fact I literally dove to the bottom of the ocean? How long did it take? How much time has passed since I tied Hero to the bed? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m more scared of: the questions ahead of me, or the answers I left on the island.
My feet pad on without a care, then stop on a patch of blue-lit floor that looks no different from the other patches of floor—until a disk of it sinks. I’m taken like a pill, swallowed into the ground. The disk deposits me somewhere at least 500 meters beneath the surface of the seafloor. I step off the disk before I can stop myself, into the darkness.
Without fail, the lights come on.
28
“HELLO, C” WAS SIMPLY A placeholder command, chosen by Kasey on the fly. After P2C agreed to endorse Operation Reset （and renamed it as such）， she and Actinium had worked late into the night to build the model she now rolled onto the stage. It was harmless and mindless, at a glance, like all bots under the Ester Act, prompting confusion from her audience when she said, “This is the secondary barometer, meant to serve in conjunction with the primary system.”