Read Electric Forest for Free Online Page B

I don't mean a broken
    ankle though you're not completely unbreakable. I don't mean a grazed knuckle, either. Your wise new f lesh
    mimics the mortal variety exactly. It can bleed and it can heal. But I don't mean any minor injury. What I do mean is, don't drown, don't walk under an auto-bus, don't jump from the roof of a building. Even your type of frame can't sustain that sort of treat-

    35

    ment. In any case, the shock would kill you. Literally kill you. Because you can feel pain just as you can
    feel silk on your skin or sea-spray on your face. Your pseudo neurons are as efficient as the genuine ones. They'll send all their messages through your consciousness via your physical brain and back to your
simulate, activating its response centers just like the originals. They have to, otherwise you couldn't see or hear, taste or feel or smell, or any of those things which you incredibly can do. But they'll let you have pain, as well, if the message that reaches your brain centers carries the correct pain cipher. Cut your finger, and you ’ll know it. So no crazy stunts. Excess pain can be a killer, even if it isn't happening to you at all." There
     

     
     
    was a prolonged pause.
    She heard the vibration of the tape fizzing from spool to spool. Then his voice came again. It was different. It had lost its clinically boastful note. It had become dru n k with a clear white poison.
    "You scared me," it said. "And what I've done. You still scare me. Perhaps I'll just drop by your capsule, and rip out the leads."

    As the tape guttered into silence, Magdala's body sprang to its feet.
    No longer alien, it was suddenly, essentially, her own. And her terror was pure, animal and overwhelming, uniting her forever with this flesh.
    She hurled herself at the door and through it as it opened. She raced, aware of the naked scintillance of her bare soles on the carpeted corridor, toward the small white room. Upright, light as a cat, beautiful, her body ran. This body was hers. She knew it. She loved it. If he cheated her, she would kill him
    Revelation came like a blow in the belly. She stopped running and sank to her knees at the entrance to the white room. She could almost catch his laughter, cruel and unstable, in the empty air.
    She was looking straight at the capsule. Its leads were in-

    36
    tact. It was all intact. If he had meant to do as he said, he would have done it hours ago, after he had
    finished recording his lecture. Done it as she postured before her mirrors, learning each glowing atom, each velvet nerve, each jeweled microcosm of skin. Or when she slept, an ultimate joke, he would have done it. No, he had offered even this threat with a purpose, electrically to charge her into unity and self-defense. And it had worked well. She had been electrified, and afraid. It was the first time fear had braced her since she had gazed into the mirror. She had not been afraid through all the afternoon, till now, Magdala Cled, Ugly, whose behavior had always been governed by the low inner throb of her fear...
    But fear persisted. She had deduced the subsidiary aspect of his game. She was intended to confront the capsule, as in the future she would have to. For, in this most uncanny fashion of all, she was going to have to learn to live with herself.
    She had not yet grasped the full scope of his taped lesson; but enough. Ironically, she recognized that the
inner chill that crept over her as she rose and advanced was the product of her brain within the capsule.
    In the tilted glazium mummy-case, roped and entwined by apparatus and glimmering tubes, coroneted by its silver skull-cage, lay a gruesome crippled dwarf.
    Magdala's gorge filled her throat, though she knew it did not, could not. (She could probably puke the
    food-digesting chemical bile if her distress sufficiently nauseated her, such was the strength of the stimuli from her brain. But it was simple to control, this second-hand mental impetus. While the anesthetized monster