Skinned (Lia imagines her boyfriend seeing her machine eyes and body)

Brief description

The narrator, Lia Kahn, had her brain downloaded and inserted into a humanoid robot after her body was severely maimed in a car accident. In this scene, she meets her pre-accident boyfriend, Walker, and imagines how he sees her.

Pull Quotes

*I thought you'd look more...human.* And I saw the body again like I'd seen it for the first time, like he was seeing it. The skin, smooth and waxy, an even peachy tone stretched out over the frame without sag or blemish. The way it moved, with awkward jerks, always too slow or too fast. The stranger's face with dead eyes, pale blue irises encircling the false pupils, and in the center of the black, pinpricks of light, flashing and dimming as the lens sucked up images. The eyes that didn't blink unless I remembered to blink them. The chest that neither rose nor fell unless I pretended to breathe. The body that wasn't a body. His girlfriend, the machine. "It's just weird," he admitted. "I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't--" "It's okay," I said quickly. "It *is* weird. It's weird for me too."

Work that the situation appears in

Title Publication Type Year Creator
Skinned Narrative, Novel Robin Wasserman
Who does what?
Aesthetic characteristics
Colours
Machine P.O.V
Not machine P.O.V.

Authored by

UUID
59f79571-1940-46d8-9995-7eccabab3bc7