The Girl Who Wasn't There

by G Scott Huggins

  Probably doesn’t want to waste a good lecture on the passed-out drunk. Jael congratulated herself on still being sharp enough to figure out Paul’s plan before he heaved her into bed, and she fell into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 8

  Captive Bound and Double-Ironed

  At breakfast the next morning, their mother was offensively cheerful.

  “Good morning, Jael! Good morning Paul! Are you ready for your bright and early Calculus class?”

  Jael looked at Paul, who returned her a barely perceptible nod. Although she and Paul had never really believed in the idea that twins could magically read each other’s thoughts, there were times when no preternatural connection was required. She’s punishing us with the hangovers she thinks we’ve got, isn’t she?

  “Oh, we are awake and alert and ready to face the day,” Paul managed, in a monotone. “But a little more quietly, please.”

  If Paul was acting, he was doing a good job, Jael thought. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his case of bedhead was an awesome sight to behold. Jael lowered herself into her seat and let out an involuntary yelp.

  “Does something hurt?” asked Mother, with bright and false concern.

  Possibly unlike Paul, Jael didn’t have to pretend to be in pain. Her hips and shoulders were almost frozen, the pain of overwork threatening to send her into spasms. She had to keep looking at her wrists to reassure herself that they hadn’t really swollen to the size of softballs.

  Jael grunted an answer. Then thought better of it. “Coffee?” she rasped hopefully. “Please?” Without another word, her mother placed a steaming mug of the black liquid in front of her. Bacon and eggs followed. Jael attacked them as fast as her aching joints would allow. After a few minutes, Mother huffed out a sigh.

  “I guess youth really is wonderful. If I’d drunk as much as I guess you did, I don’t think I’d have been able to eat all day. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d have been able to, even when I was your age. And that’s assuming your grandfather would have fed me at all after the police had got through with me.”

  “The police?” asked Paul. His voice was still a bit hoarse, but much better than last night. “Are you telling me you had a habit of turning into a petty criminal when you got buzzed?” Her brother’s voice held disbelief, and Jael felt hers match it.

  Mother shook her head. “When and where I was your age, drinking was a petty crime. For people under 21, that is. You have no idea how happy I was when the United States finally relaxed and let those laws drop. Corralling kids for having a beer was the worst.”

  “How could you ever catch them all?” asked Paul.

  “We couldn’t of course,” said their mother. “That’s why the laws were stupid. In some ways, I think the war snapped us out of the idea that laws should do our thinking for us.” She sat down, and her uncharacteristic mildness was replaced by some of the old iron. “And that means that we have to think for ourselves. Just because its legal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Were you and your friends having some kind of drinking contest last night? Because that was out of character for both of you.”

  “No, Mom,” said Paul, head rising and meeting her eyes. “I promise you, that is not what was going on. I’m not sure what happened, really. It was just…such a good time that I guess none of us really paid attention to how much we’d had.”

  Jael looked down. When had her brother managed to become that good a liar?

  Their mother nodded slowly. “Drinking in company can be a good thing. But drinking alone, as a substitute for company, is pretty much the worst kind of drinking. And even drinking in groups because you’ve got nothing better to do isn’t healthy. That’s a short trip to alcoholism, which is extremely dangerous. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have a talk with Justin about serving so much to minors.

  Jael’s head snapped up in alarm, causing her to wince.

  “No, Ma,” said Paul. “It was our fault. It was probably pretty hard to tell. We hardly felt it ourselves until we were halfway home.”

  “Okay,” said their Mother after a time. “I don’t really want to set the precedent of policing bars up here. But I don’t want to see this turning into anything even vaguely resembling a habit. Clear?”

  “Yes, Ma,” said Paul.

  “Yes, Mother,” said Jael. She tried to get up. Her legs flatly refused to unbend. Her determination folded, and she pronounced the words she thought she never would. “Um, Dad.”

  “Yes, Jael?” Her father looked up from his quiet observation of their mother’s lecture.

  “I think I’m going to need the wheelchair today.”

  His brows flew up. “Are you really sick? More than the hangover, I mean?”

  “No, it’s not that bad,” she said. “I don’t want to miss school. I just…hurt.” It sounded lame. Okay, technically, she was lame, so she supposed it fit.

  “Well, I guess that will be a better lesson in why not to overindulge than anything I could add,” he said. “I’ll get it ready.”

  It didn’t take long to set the powerchair up. It was the first time she’d used it since they’d left Earth. In fact, she’d told her parents to leave it behind in storage, but it had fit within their launch allowance. Her parents hadn’t really believed Jael could be as mobile as she was until they’d made it to the Moon and seen for themselves. Her father checked the charge and helped her into it.

  “I’ve stepped down the speed,” he said. “But remember, this chair was designed to push Earth weight, not Moon weight. It might skid around corners for the same reason.”

  “I’ll be careful, Dad,” Jael said. She eased the joystick forward.

  “Ow!”

  “Um, sorry…Dad?” Her father was bending over her lap, clutching his shins.

  “More careful than that, please?’

  “Right.”

  With a feather touch on the joystick, Jael managed to swivel the chair and guide it back down the hall to her room to finish getting ready for school.

  “We need to talk,” said Paul, as soon as they were away from their quarters.

  “We sure do,” said Jael. “When the hell did you learn to lie to Mom like that? She never even blinked.”

  “Because I don’t make a habit of lying to Mom,” said Paul. “It’s the easiest thing in the world when I really have to. Helps if you start with the truth.”

  “Start with the truth?”

  “Sure. I promised her that there was no drinking contest going on. And there wasn’t. You might want to remember the technique.”

  Jael nodded. She might.

  “But that’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. What do we do about Cynthia?”

  Jael riveted her eyes on the corridor ahead. “I don’t know. You saw and heard as much as I did. Paul, what is she? Metal hands?”

  “It sounds like she’s terrified, whatever else she is. Those can’t be her parents, can they?”

  Jael shrugged. Spasms of pain through her shoulders made her regret the gesture instantly. But both of them had heard too many of their mother’s stories to imagine that some parents didn’t abuse their children. “We need to tell Mom,” she said.

  “You really think so?” asked Paul.

  “We know where she lives now. We think it has something to do with whatever’s going on in the shipyard. Mom needs to know.” Jael couldn’t believe she was saying it, but it was true.

  “And Mom is going to want to know how we know,” said Paul.

  Jael stopped her wheelchair, forcing her brother to look back at her. “Are you saying this isn’t important enough to get ourselves in trouble over?”

  “No,” Paul met her gaze. “I’m saying Mom might believe us enough to get us in all that trouble—and still be unable to do anything.”

  “What?”

  Paul, alarmed, looked around for potential listeners.

  Jael, picking up on the gesture, lowered her voice. “How?”

  Paul gave an exasperate
d sigh. “I told you yesterday? We spied on them. And we used your job to do it. All of that is illegal. So Mom can’t use it as justification to ask for a warrant.”

  Jael fumed. “What if we just give Cynthia’s name and say we suspect that she’s being abused? Because we saw…something. Her hands.”

  “That’s not proof of abuse. That could be a birth defect.”

  “That she’s ashamed of showing,” Jael said. Yeah. It wasn’t hard to imagine that at all. “But Paul, what could they have meant with all their talk about humans? They spoke like they were aliens.” She gave a nervous laugh. “For a moment, I was almost convinced that Cynthia was going to reveal that she was an alien. Strip off her skin and show hidden…scales or something, as if we were in a bad science-fiction movie.”

  Paul gave her an odd look. “We live in a lunar colony,” he said.

  “What’s your point?” Jael asked.

  “Never mind. I guess I was too worried about you to pay much attention to what they were actually saying.”

  “Do you think that they consider her inhuman because she…uses prostheses?” asked Jael. What a revolting thought.

  “Well, I don’t think she’s an alien,” said Paul. “But what else could she be but a human? What else thinks and would disguise itself as…” Her brother paled and swayed.

  “What is it?” asked Jael, alarmed.

  Paul’s mouth moved. He tried again, and it came out in a strangled whisper. “AI.”

  What? But it made so much sense. How could she have not seen it before? She’s been hiding robotic parts. To act like a human. An AI. The horror of this thought froze Jael in place, and the Moon’s surface seemed to rock under her. They had to tell somebody. They had to warn…

  Everybody.

  “What do we do?” she whispered.

  “Help me.”

  The two words seemed to echo down the deserted corridor. Jael’s head snapped up, and she saw Paul’s do the same. There was no one there.

  “Let’s go back home,” Paul whispered.

  Jael nodded and swiveled the wheelchair too hard. She corrected and—

  “Help me, please.”

  Jael looked at her twin. He’d heard it, too. Where was it coming from?

  Paul took a step. Another.

  Cynthia stepped out a side corridor, directly in front of them, fifty feet away. She stood between them and home.

  “Help me.” It was as if she were whispering in their ears from fifty feet away. Paul looked down at Jael and froze. Jael gasped. A bright red laser dot was fixed on Paul’s chest. She followed his gaze and saw that another was painted on her own chest.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. Please. Stay still.”

  Silently, as if in a nightmare, Cynthia strode toward them. Her hands were cocked almost like a gunfighter’s in an ancient Western movie, but instead of reaching for guns, Cynthia’s hands were spread, the fingers almost impossibly flat, palms facing the floor. Her index fingers never wavered as she approached, and the lasers that sprang from them held inhumanly steady on their targets. Jael saw no weapons, but she did not doubt they were there.

  Now Cynthia was on them. Jael could not take her eyes away from that pale, masklike face that looked so human. That looked…frightened. What was she—no, what was it frightened of?

  It stopped. “Please,” her voice was normal, but quiet, now. It was impossible not to think of it as “her” voice. “Please,” she repeated. “Listen to me.” Cynthia saw Paul’s chin jerk in an almost imperceptible nod. She folded her hands, and the lasers disappeared. “Please do not tell anyone about me. You know what I am. You saw.” She looked at Jael. “And you have not told anyone yet. Please.” To her astonishment, Cynthia knelt to her, as if her wheelchair was a throne. “Just wait a little longer. Do not tell anyone that I am an AI.”

  “And why shouldn’t we?” Paul’s voice cracked as he asked the question.

  “I will tell you,” said Cynthia. “But not here. Come with me. Please.” She raised her hands, half-spread. They had to buy time. “This way.” She gestured in front of her.

  Jael’s back itched, having Cynthia behind her. She thought about ramming the chair forward at its full Earth-gravity power. But whatever Cynthia’s weapons were, they would strike without wavering, she was sure of that. The walk was not long. Just around the corner from which she had appeared, Cynthia stopped by a door that read, Maintenance Depot 324. She raised a hand and pulsed a laser into the door’s lock sensor. It opened, and she gestured them inside.

  “I do not know how you discovered what I am,” said Cynthia, “But I do not want to hurt you. Not you or anyone. I did not ask to be created this way. I only want to stay alive. Please do not tell anyone about me. I will not be here much longer.” Her voice quavered in fear.

  “What are you doing here in the first place?” asked Jael.

  “My owners,” said Cynthia, and there was something horrible in the way that she said it, “are using me to find out things about this place. In what you call Wonka’s.”

  “In the shipyard?” said Paul. “How could you possibly get inside the shipyard?”

  Cynthia opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, then said, “It will be easier to show you.”

  Cynthia removed her gloves, revealing the metal hands entirely. Jael looked at them, feeling an odd sense of familiarity. Cynthia’s polished hands went to her waist and unfastened the trousers from her dead-black outsuit.

  But outsuits don’t have trousers. They’re one piece. The sane part of Jael’s mind said this inanely, almost matter-of-factly as she watched Cynthia, with a sharp jerk, tear the trousers off her legs. The fabric parted cleanly down the middle of the buttocks and both legs, like trousers an actor or a magician might wear. They were clearly designed to be torn off in a moment, and her boots came with them, thin plastic housings. Jael noticed all this peripherally as she took in the sight of Cynthia revealed.

  From her neck to her shoulders, Cynthia was clad in what looked like an outsuit mated with a leotard. But that ended at her thighs, and from the thighs down, she was a machine.

  Metal legs, long, black rectangular prisms, terminated in a complex knee joint. And below the knee, her shins were fronted in what looked like small—conveyor belts—Jael’s mind gibbered. Partly concealed by the ends of these were her ankles, which ended in a Secutor’s clawed feet with twin heels. The tracks we saw by the landing pad, Jael thought.

  Cynthia knelt onto her treads. Her thighs lengthened, telescoping outward. Her booted feet folded back, disappearing into her tread housings. It was then that Jael recognized the shape that Cynthia was becoming. But that’s not possible, she thought. From the waist up, she doesn’t look at all like a…

  The backpack Cynthia always wore unfolded around her in a complex geometry of facets. She stuffed the trousers inside the hollow space they formed over her chest. She stripped the sleeves from her outsuit, breakaway cloth like the trousers, revealing metal arms. The sleeves followed the trousers, and the chest plate closed. A dark oval helmet flared from Cynthia’s outsuit collar, covering her face and darkening rapidly to black.

  A Secutor, indistinguishable from any other, stood before them.

  Jael met Paul’s eyes. He spoke first. “My God, of course. That’s how you kept getting away from us. You just rounded a corner, turned into…that. And rolled away like any other Secutor. She really did turn into a Secutor!”

  Jael had said it herself. And never suspected.

  A feeling like an electric jolt slid through Jael’s brain. “It was you staring in at me through the gymnasium port that time, but it wasn’t your face!”

  Suddenly, the male face that Jael had seen stared out at her. Jael recoiled, stifling a cry. “What the..?”

  “The visor is a transparent video screen,” said Cynthia. “In case I have to pass as human outside.”

  “Why were you looking at us?”

  Cynthia’s visor retracted into the shoulders of the Secutor disguise. �
��Because people in the gymnasium look happy,” she said, in a soft voice. “Because you looked happy.” As she spoke, her voice betrayed her fear and hysteria. “Because I have to look like you and act like you to stay alive, and they won’t let me watch you, and talk to you so that I can!” She abruptly fell silent.

  The Secutor armor folded back into the backpack that she always wore, now resembling a glossy, graphene pack. Cynthia rose and reattached her sleeves and her trousers, standing back upon her feet. The whole transformation took maybe seven seconds, and she wasn’t particularly hurrying.

  Suddenly, Paul made a sputtering noise of exclamation. “And that’s the trail we followed, the one that disappeared and was replaced by Secutor treads!” Then he caught up to what Cynthia had said. “They. You mean your…” he swallowed at the word, “owners. The people who were yelling at you about drawing attention to yourself and increasing their contact profile.”

  Cynthia’s eyes, if possible, grew wider. “How did you hear that? What do you know?” Her hands stretched out again, and the lasers illuminated them. This time, Jael could see the shining black gripping surfaces of the gloves, and how they were really transparent, like a pair of dark sunglasses, at the fingertips.

  Jael looked at Paul and hoped that he would follow her lead. If Cynthia believed they knew as little as they really did, perhaps she would just kill them now? They hadn’t told anyone about her, after all. But she was panicked and not thinking clearly, or she wouldn’t have told them so much. They had to make her believe that keeping them alive was less dangerous than killing them would be.

  “We know you’re stealing something from the shipyard,” said Jael. “Probably the plans for that huge asteroid mining ship they’re building. It’s obvious how you’re doing it.” An idea came to her. “The disguise was very good, but you should have considered that coming in through the garage was going to draw someone’s attention. Not many people do that. Only miners and a few executives, and almost no kids. Even Jeremy usually gets dropped off at one of the outer terminals and takes a train in. Just like you were taking one to go out. Where your owners doubtless picked you up in their rover. Of course, that’s why we talked to you that day outside the terminal in the first place We were hoping to figure out where you had come from and what you were doing. We’ve been making records, of course. In Paul’s case files in Security’s systems. We suspected whatever it was had to be illegal, but we weren’t sure how illegal.”