Quotes From "The Body Electric" By Beth Revis

She is trying to control me with fear, because she cannot control me any other way. My eyes open wide. They burn as if they are on fire–no, as if they are made of fire. Eyes are the window to the soul. Beth Revis

Family is never really gone. Beth Revis

It’s all in my mind. I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy." You need to wake up, Ella."The words are a command I cannot obey. Beth Revis

Or… maybe I’m not going crazy. “Maybe I’m some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I’m just breaking down. I’m not sure which way is worse. Dad laughs. “You’re not in your right mind, dear, ” he says. “No, no, no, you’re not.” And then–– Silence. Dad fades away. The reverie chair disappears. There’s just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead. And, just as I’m starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn’t soft; it’s not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark. I don’t know why–it makes no sense, the way dreams often don’t–but I want to touch the light. So I do. . Beth Revis

As the dreamscape around me grows clearer, I slip further away from it. The mind is a magical thing, I’m discovering. A dreamscape is made of thought and is wider than the sky, able to grow large enough to fit not just our own world, but every possibility and impossibility beyond it. Once I quit thinking of it as being forced into the laws of physics, it’s easy to manipulate the dreamscape into anything I want. I don’t know how I know all this, no more than I understand how I know things when I dream. I just do. I throw up my hand, and a wall rises between the orange grove and me. Behind the wall, I start creating the world I need in Representative Belles’s mind. Beth Revis

And this is what she wants to do to people. Let them have their own lives, until she wants them. Give them the strength of giants, but not the power to control it. Beth Revis

As soon as I say the words, I know they were the right ones. My eyes dip down to Dad’s memorial plaque. Truth doesn’t lie in the heart of fortune… it’s under Triumph Towers, where the labs are. Beth Revis

Ella! ” the voice yells, but I cannot tell where it is coming from. The sound wraps around me, spreading like spilt water and then evaporating into silence.“ Where am I?” I whisper again. The darkness stretches out for eternity. I take a few steps forward, but the feeling is surreal– I cannot tell if I’ve actually moved or not, because everything is nothing. I feel something wet and warm slide down my cheek, and I touch the tear with my fingertips, swiping it away. Representative Belles is dead. I’m certain of that now. He’s gone. I’m… I’m in the place where he was, and now he’s gone, and now I’m stuck. I’m stuck in the nothingness of a dead body, and I don’t know how to get out. My heart thuds against my chest, and I gasp for air. What if I can never get out? What if eternity is nothing more than me, alone, in the darkness? Trapped in someone else’s death. I collapse, but it’s not like I fall on the floor. There is no floor. There was the illusion of one, but as my body gives way, I realize that I’m floating. I stretch out, my fingers and toes aching to feel, but there’s nothing, nothing at all, and I draw myself into myself, hugging my legs, my knees tucked under my chin. I’m alone. Maybe when Representative Belles died, I died too. Maybe this is it. . Beth Revis

And I try to remember if this happened before, because this is a memory I would want to keep. But there is no echo of it in my mind. Beth Revis

Mom used to say that the thoughts in our heads were nothing more than electrical impulses. I remember Dad and her talking about this over dinner. It frustrated Dad that the human brain can fire electrical sparks and think, but that the electricity he’d pump into an android brain would never give it independent thought. The body isn’t that different from a machine. Humans and androids both run on electricity. That lightning spark of energy I saw in the reverie. That was my mother’s last thought, an echo of electricity, something that sparked when I entered her dreamscape. That spark is gone now. Her life is gone now. Everything that made her, her, is gone now. Faded into nothing. Beth Revis

We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves. Beth Revis

It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that’s already come true. Beth Revis

I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life. This… this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from. Beth Revis

I reached inside her and pulled out the deepest memories in her body, the memories that words can’t describe, the memories that are as much a piece of her as her arms and legs. Those are the ones she’s filled with now. Beth Revis

The freedom of our people is more important! ” Julie says fiercely. “We will never stop fighting, never stop working for what is right! ” Jack just smiles at her. “That’s a nice lie to believe, ” he says. Beth Revis

I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom’s answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.“ Oh, of course! ” Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. “How could I have forgotten?” And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don’t know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not. Beth Revis

I have emotions, ” I whisper. I am nothing but a black hole of emotions. Beth Revis

We keep sending colonies up into space, ” Akilah says, “and we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of the sea.”“ Yeah, we do, ” I counter. “Fish and stuff.” Akilah laughs. “We’ve barely explored the sea. There are places where the water is so deep that it has never seen light.” She sighs. “I would like to go to those places. I would like to sink down and down and down and see what’s hidden at the bottom.” The sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever. I stare back at the shoreline, where heavy boulders clutter the shore, a remembrance of the attacks during the Secessionary War. For all the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, more are dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea. I tread water, turning slowly, so the island’s behind me and all I can see is the blue-green waters. The sea goes on forever and ever. We are tiny, almost invisible specks. It could swallow us up. We are less than the bright stars of the night sky, compared to the vastness of the sea. And it is this place, as one tiny, barely visible speck bobbing in the water, where Akilah feels safe. Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death. Beth Revis

I cannot imagine a more perfect hell than being trapped inside my own mind. Beth Revis

If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity? Beth Revis

How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me. Beth Revis

I’ve made her relive, over and over, the last few days, ” I say softly, watching Ms. White’s body. “I’ve had to fill in the blanks with my own feelings and experiences. She’s spiraling around those last moments, those times when she went against me, and she’s feeling it from my side, the pain, the betrayal.” She thinks she’s awake. I’m doing to her just what she did to me. I’m making her feel what it was like to slowly go crazy, to question everything. To watch my mother die. To fight for my life against my best friend. To feel the man who loved me try to kill me. To know that the woman I trusted as much as my own mother betrayed me. That’s what I’m making her feel. I’ve turned her into me, and made her live the life she forced me to live. Over and over and over again. . Beth Revis

When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t cry. Beth Revis

I wish you were here, ” I say, shutting my eyes and remembering the way Dad looked in my hallucination. I hear his voice again, so real that I’m worried I’m about to fall into another hallucination. Maybe that’s what I really want. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity? Beth Revis

Ella! " the voice yells, but I cannot tell where it is coming from. The sound wraps around me, spreading like spilt water and then evaporating into silence. Beth Revis

And then I realize: this isn’t dirty water falling from the sky. It is–literally–blood. I look up, and a droplet of blood splashes directly into my eye. I curse, rubbing my face, trying to get the blood out, but it’s everywhere, it’s like trying to dry off in the middle of the ocean. Shielding my face as best I can, I stare up into the sky. I am in the center of a cyclone. Giant white clouds swirl like a spiraling galaxy above me, the eye a tiny dark speck. The storm rages, throwing out bloody rain like punches, the wind so vicious it tears my clothes and cuts my skin. Representative Belles’s mind is swirling with dark thoughts–bloody thoughts–and they have created the biggest storm I have ever seen. I have to stop the cyclone. I have to get him into a peaceful reverie, something that he can hold on to while I root around his brain, looking for answers. I focus all of my concentration on stopping the bloody rain. The drops come slower and slower. I take a deep breath, imagining the clouds breaking up, spinning into fluffy bits of cotton-candy like clouds. I don’t open my eyes until the sounds of beating rain disappear and I can feel the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on my face. Beth Revis

She stops speaking, but I can hear her silent sobs. They’re the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. Beth Revis

My heart stutters–not why? or how?–those are not the important questions. The really important question is: by whom? Beth Revis