Free Working Stiff by Rachel Caine Page A

couldn’t move, couldn’t do
anything
, not even demand for them to stop the video.
    Fideli wasn’t watching it. He and McCallister were watching
her
. She was peripherally aware of that, but she couldn’t tear her horrified gaze away.
    “Right, give her the full dose,” said the crisp voice of a doctor in the video. “Start the clock … now.”
    It took long, torturous minutes, and then … then … Bryn’s body stirred. Gasped. Spasmed.
    But there was nothing else.
    “Vital reactions,” the doctor said. “Note the time in the log, please.”
    A nurse spread a sheet over her naked body. They seemed to be waiting for something, and Bryn realized that the video-Bryn hadn’t opened her eyes, or taken another breath after that first, convulsive one.
    The doctor glanced up at a clock on the wall. “She’s not responding. I’m going to have to call it.”
    “Wait.” In the video, Joe Fideli moved out of the shadows and put his hand on her face. “Come back,” he said. “C’mon, Bryn, don’t do this. Come on back. Come back.”
    He slapped her, a stinging blow, and Bryn saw her blank eyes finally blink, slowly.
    And then she screamed.
    The same scream.
    Fideli held her hand through the rest of it. Bryn didn’t listen, couldn’t over the rush of blood in her ears. She felt dizzy and sick and very, very strange.
    She looked at Fideli, who shifted his gaze away. Then she moved her mute stare to McCallister, the cool corporate drone, who leaned forward and took her hand in his. Squeezed, silently, and waited until the video finally ended.
    Fideli shut the TV off. In the silence, Bryn heard some rational voice in her head screaming,
It’s fake; it’s all fake, special effects. This isn’t happening; this can’t be happening.
    The only problem was that she knew it
was
happening. She’d seen, and she finally, horribly,
believed
.
    She looked up at Patrick McCallister’s face and saw emotion there, quickly hidden. Pity, maybe.
    He was still holding her hand. He’d been holding it through the whole ordeal, though she’d forgotten he was even there.
    “Joe,” he said, “I don’t think we need the gun anymore.”
    Fideli put it away without a word. Bryn realized that she really ought to say something,
do
something, but for the moment, all she could think of was to sit very still, holding to the warm anchor of another human being. She felt like all the world around her had turned into a black, sucking whirlpool, and she was afraid that if she let go, even for a second, she’d drown.
    Go back to … that. That empty ashen thing on the hospital bed.
    Oh, she believed, all right. And it terrified her.
    “What did you do to me?” she whispered. She was staring right into McCallister’s eyes now, looking for that spark of connection again, but it wasn’t there. He’d shut down. Maybe he had to, to deal with the emotion pouring out of her just now. She’d never felt so scared, or so alone. So
empty
.
    “There’s good news,” he said, in a soothing, quiet voice that unpleasantly reminded her of Lincoln Fairview, with his nice suit and cultured palate and nasty lies. “You need a daily shot, but apart from that one thing, you’re in the best shape you’ll ever be in. No sickness, no aging. You won’t change, because the nanites returned you to a template of what you were just at the cessation of life, and holds you there.”
    “I’m dying. I’m
dead
.”
    “You’re dying less than the rest of us,” he said. “You’re …
on hold
would be a good description. And there are positives, believe me.”
    “Positives!”
She couldn’t control the bitter, shaky laugh that burst out of her, and put her hand to her mouth to muffle it. “God.”
    He didn’t tell her it was okay after that. He just let her sit and think for a while.
    Finally, she wet her lips and said, “How in the hell does a company set out to create … this?”
    “They didn’t,” he said. “Returné was an accident, a side