The Body Electric

Chapter 17

My father is standing right in front of me.

“Dad?” I ask again. My eyes are watering now for an entirely different reason, my heart thudding in my chest so violently that I feel as if I’m about to throw up. I try to say his name again, but I don’t have any more words within me. Instead, I rush forward, my arms out—

—And I go right through him, as if he was nothing more than a ghost.

Nothing more than a projection.

Because that’s what he is. This is what the program downloaded directly to my eye nanobots is. It’s a trick. It makes me see my father. Dad’s dead. I force myself to think those words until I believe them again.

I raise the opacity of the program using my cuff, and, sure enough, my dad becomes more and more transparent. More and more ghost-like. Thinking that makes a shiver run up my spine, and I shoot the opacity back down to zero so that he appears solid and real again.

Dad—the projection of Dad that only I can see—raises his arm silently, pointing to the door that leads out of the apartment. I follow him, my eyes half-blinded with unshed tears. Out of the apartment, down the lift, across the lobby, out the front door of the Reverie Mental Spa. And all the while, Dad is just out of my reach, pointing, pointing, pointing. His eyes stare into mine.

I know he’s not real. I know he’s merely a projection in my tech contacts, that he’s a part of a hacker’s program that broke through my security and downloaded into my system against my will, that I should report the program to Ms. White and the interface police, that I should delete the program without a second thought.

But I can’t take my eyes off Dad.

Wherever this computer-generated image of my father is leading me cannot be good. Someone left that file for me to find—me specifically, judging from the retina scan I had to give in order to get to it. And I can’t trust anyone who would use such an underhanded tactic as to send me my father to lead me down an unknown path.

But I can’t not follow my father. I have to see where he’s leading me.

Jack Tyler—or whoever it was who hacked the Reverie interface—did an excellent job at figuring out how I ticked. He knew exactly that the only thing I’d ever follow into the unknown was something with my father’s face.

Dad leads me all the way to the lifts at the center of the park. New Venice is a bridge city, a man-made metropolis that spans across the Mediterranean Sea between the two islands that make up the nation of Malta. The upper city is where the businesses are; the work of the city happens here. But the lower city is where people go to play.

The loud do-dee-doe sounds of the lifts ring out across the central area as the masses of people of converge in the center of the gardens. A fat man pushes past me when I pause, scanning the crowd for Dad. My father’s image stands near one of the lifts, a ghost only I can see, his image wavering as tourists pass through him in the mad scramble to the lifts to the lower city.

I approach the tills in the center of the plaza. Half-androids—the upper half human-shaped, bolted to the lower-half ticket-dispenser—accept credits as people tap their cuffLINKs against the scanners. I do the same, a red twenty credits deducting from my account on the screen when I do.

The lifts are all glass, so that tourists can have the full view of the lower city. I get crammed against the back wall as an entire Australian lacrosse team—all wearing offensively bright orange shirts splattered with their team logo—jumps into the lift after me. They’re loud, but under normal circumstances, I would quite like being packed into a lift with so many good looking young men. But Dad’s disappeared now, and I’m anxiously looking for him through the lift’s glass walls.