Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman

good. You know. Especial y a long run. You get an adrenaline high. Or whatever.”
    “Have you tried it? Since the procedure?”
    I shook my head. There was supposedly a track somewhere in the building, but I hadn’t bothered to find it.
    “Why not?”
    I looked down. The hands were sitting in my lap. I stretched one of them out along my thigh. It felt good to be able to move again. After almost a month of rehab, I didn’t even need to think about it most of the time; the hands clenched themselves into fists when I wanted them to, the fingers closed around bal s and hairbrushes and tapped at keyboards just like real fingers. They registered the fabric on my legs—standard issue, hideously ugly BioMax thermo-sweats. Not that I needed thermo-regulation now, not when I had it built in, but that’s what they had, so that’s what I wore, because it was easier than buying al new clothes, and my old clothes no longer fit.
    “What would be the point?” I said final y.
    “The point would be to feel good.”
    In my head I laughed. The mouth spit out something harsh and scratchy. Laughing was tricky.
    “You disagree?” Sascha asked.
    “I guess it depends on your definition of ‘feel.’”
    “You’re processing emotional and physical sensation differently now; that’s natural,” Sascha said, oozing understanding. Not that she could ever actual y understand. “But your programming is designed to emulate the neurotransmitters that stimulate emotional response. Your emotions are the same, even if they don’t feel that way.”
    “I feel the same, even if I feel different? Is that supposed to make sense?”
    My father would kil me if he ever knew I was talking to an authority figure like this, even a figure with such questionable authority as Sascha.
    “When I get angry, my stomach clenches,” Sascha said. “I feel sick. When I’m upset, my hands tremble. Sometimes I cry. What happens when you’re upset?” I said nothing.
    Which was pretty accurate.
    “Without a somatic response, it’s natural that the emotions wil seem weaker to you,” she said. “More distant. But the stronger the emotion, the more ‘real’ it may feel, partly because you’l be too consumed with the powerful emotion—or sensation—to analyze al the things you’re not feeling. And as your mind relaxes into old patterns and finds new ones, as it will —”
    “I’l be my old self again. Right.”
    “Lia, haven’t you been able to find any advantages to your new body?”
    That had been my “homework” from the other day: design a pop-up for the download process, complete with catchy slogan, and a list of fabulous advantages available to every download recipient. Sascha thought it would tap into my creativity skil s.
    It turned out I didn’t have any.
    “I can link in whenever I want,” I muttered. But that wasn’t new. For my sixteenth birthday, I’d final y gotten a net-lens, which meant that once I got used to jamming a finger in my eye, I could link with a blink, just like the pop-ups said. Could superimpose my zone and my av over blah reality, type on a holographic keyboard that only I could see. But the pop-ups didn’t mention how it made you nauseated and made your head burn. Now I had a built-in net-lens, and migraines weren’t an issue.
    Hooray for me.
    “Good,” Sascha said, nodding. “Anything else?”
    “I guess no more getting sick.” Not that anyone got sick much these days, anyway. Not if you could afford the med-tech, and if you couldn’t, wel , you had bigger problems than the flu. “And if I get hurt, it won’t, you know. Hurt. Much.” There would be pain, they’d told me that. Of al the sensations, the neurochemistry of pain was the easiest to mimic, the best understood—and the most necessary. Pain alerts the brain that something is wrong, cal -me-Ben had said. An alarm you can’t ignore . So there would be pain, they had promised, and I knew it was possible, because I’d felt it when I was stil