This is a child’s toy, and not intended for professional record-ings, medical analysis, or admissible evidence in court. Glitches in data often warp memories, add/subtract details, or change them entirely.
—Whimsy® Holocket Instruction Packet, fine print
43//
00110100 00110011
When Andromeda woke, she was freezing.
This time, there was no cryo’protectant to drown in, no ’tank to trap her. There was, however, still panic. She sucked in a breath, thankful her lungs took in air, not water. Once she opened her eyes, she would know. Where she was. When she was. She kept them closed.
She was alive, at least. Once, that would have been enough. But now she knew the difference between being alive and living. Since there was no longer a government to legislate whether an AI was considered life, she would have to define it herself.
She took another breath.
“Andromeda?” said a voice. Familiar.
She eased her eyes open. Above her, a tiled mosaic formed an asymmetrical starburst in the ceiling. It was blurry, but that was to be expected. She’d been crying when she’d died.
“How long?” she gasped.
“A half moon,” Zhade said, squeezing her hand, and until that moment she hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.
Two weeks.
Okay. Breathe.
A little longer than she’d expected, but really, after having slept a thousand years the first time, two weeks was acceptable.
“You’re evens, Andra. Breathe.” Zhade was just a blurry shape at the corner of her vision. “Everything else can wait. Rest. Decide your fate.”
Her eyelids were heavy. She hadn’t rested during those two weeks in stasis; she’d just been on pause. And now she was alive, and she knew that even though everything wasn’t okay—even though Tsurina had to be dealt with, and Maret was in stasis, and the world was still dying—she could handle anything that came. She was AI after all. Her eyes drifted shut and her body relaxed and for the first time in a thousand years, she was awake.
44//
00110100 00110100
The light on the back of Andra’s ’locket flashed, then held steady. She unplugged it from the power source she and Rashmi had created, and then cupped the ’locket in her hand. It was so light. Everything about it was fragile.
Just like Eerensed.
Even though the ’dome was fixed and Rashmi was healed and Maret was in stasis, there was still so much left to do, so much at stake.
Though Andra was no longer a goddess, she was still an AI, and programmed to save the world. The knowledge of her purpose had retreated into her subconscious, and whatever she’d done when she’d pulled her reset tool free had prevented her from accessesing that knowledge again. But she would, eventually. And in the meantime, she would do what she could for the people of Eerensed.
As planned, the nanos had finished the ’dome the evening of Andra’s supposed death, soon enough after that the people chalked up its appearance to the Third’s sacrifice. And Zhade, as Maret, got the credit, for executing the Goddess.
The ’dome wasn’t enough, though. During the weeks since Andra woke the second time, they’d excavated the remains of the Vaults, and Andra fixed up some of the technology they’d found there, hoping to find a more permanent solution to the pockets. Rashmi tried to help, but she still had trouble accessing her AI abilities. She did what she could, while also guarding Maret’s cryo’tank. That’s where she was at the moment, in fact.
Andra leaned back in her chair, rocking a bit to listen to it creak. She’d set up a nice little office for herself at the new Schism headquarters in the tunnels under Southwarden. Ergonomic desk, personalizing chair. No windows, obviously, but she’d moved some synth’plants into the room, put some holo’displays up to mimic nature scenes. Mostly, she chose mountains and rain forests, because they didn’t remind her of the desert. Or home.
The door opened and Maret peeked in. Andra’s heart seized for a moment, but Zhade’s expression adorned Maret’s face. Lazy, arrogant. He could switch it on and off, like she switched on and off the ’locket. Like Maret’s persona was a hologram he had stored inside him. He took her lack of yelling as an invitation to enter. His hands were in his pockets, now merely out of habit. The grafter he had kept there so long had served its purpose.
“Settling in down here well, marah, Andra?” he asked. “Very mole-like of you.”
Since her “death,” she’d yet to go back above ground.
“What do you know about moles?”
He sank into a chair on the other side of Andra’s desk, tossing his legs over the arm. “Legendary tunnel-dwellers. Bit reclusive. Too many fingers.” He picked up a nearby data’pad and tossed it from hand to hand. “Fire breathers.”
She looked away. He didn’t have the right to joke with her anymore, and it was worse coming from Maret’s face. Not that she was mad at him exactly. If she were being purely analytical about it, she knew Zhade taking advantage of the situation to get his throne back wasn’t the same as taking advantage of her. But she wasn’t purely analytical. She’d been raised human after all—and that was the problem. She’d been raised human, but she wasn’t. And Zhade didn’t seem to fully understand that. He treated her as he always had. So she had to create the distance between them herself.
He tossed the tablet back on the desk with a thunk. “I just came to tell you that Skilla has finished moving the rest of the Schism from the Hive. And the . . . the lost district has been sealed off.” He kicked his feet up onto the desk. “Things are stable, Goddess. The people think you’re dead, that Maret’s alive. And the dome is up and holding steady.”
Holding steady for now. Even if she kept the ’dome maintained, it was still only a temporary solution. People were still dying. The nearby villagers. The Eerensedians, if the population grew larger than the ’dome could support. And Andra didn’t have a clue how much of the world was still populated. Eventually, the planet would kill them all. Earth would kill them all.
“What’s that?” Zhade asked, pointing to the holocket still clutched in her hand, her thumb hovering over the final memory.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ve been looking at the numbers and—”
He leaned forward and snatched the ’locket from her.
“Hey!”
“All your tech-no-lo-gy.” He sounded it out, like Oz had when he was learning to read. “So many buttons to press.”
Before she could grab the ’locket back, the first memory exploded around them. Zhade was holding it, so he was in Andra’s place, Oz snuggled next to him on the brown camelback sofa in their living room a thousand years ago. A pre-book was on his lap, something about dinosaurs, but Andra didn’t remember the title. The ’locket couldn’t duplicate copyrighted materials.
Her holographic hand flipped the pages, her voice murmuring from Zhade’s direction. Oz smiled and looked up at him—at Andra. He was probably six in this memory. Two of his front teeth were missing, and he wiggled another one with his tongue and giggled.
“There’s not!” Oz cried in response to something Andra had said.
There was a pause as she responded.
“I know there’s no tooth fairy,” Oz said, frowning. “Acadia told me. Mom said she’ll give me credit anyway.”
Another pause. Then Oz looked up at Andra (at Zhade) (at Maret) with a look of such adoration, Andra’s stomach clenched.
“Turn it off,” she said, in the present, a thousand years after Oz had lived and died across the galaxy.
The memory drained back into the ’locket, deflating like a balloon. The living room, the sofa, the book were all gone. Oz was gone.
Zhade reddened with embarrassment. He set the ’locket gently on the desk in front of Andra.
“Your brother?” he asked.
She nodded, thoug
h he wasn’t really her brother. She knew that now. She was part of his family the same way her father’s dogs had been part of their family. The same way the AI her mother had deactivated was part of their family.
Zhade waited silently.
She didn’t take her eyes off the ’locket as she said, “You can go.”
She heard him sigh, but he left without another word, and Andra was alone.
The computer beeped beside her, shutting down after too long sitting idle. She should run diagnostics. She should start problem-solving a way off this planet. She should take an inventory of their assets. Instead, she stared at the ’locket.
She touched the chain, dragging it toward her in increments, until the pace was too frustrating. She grabbed it off the table, and in one movement, opened the ’locket and jammed her thumb onto the sixth button.
The final memory popped up.
But it wasn’t hers.
Instead of that last recording—the sim she’d taken of Oz on the hover’swings—there was a hologram of a room. The room they’d practiced in at the palace. And standing in it was Dr. Alberta Griffin.
She was dressed like an Eerensedian—long, shimmery clothing, impractical and elegant. There was a patch covering her modded eye. Her blond hair had gone white and was pulled into a loose bun, neural’crown tarnished underneath, and she looked older than Andra had ever seen her, and wearier. Nothing like her statue.
“Hello, Andromeda,” she said.
Andra’s breath caught. She reached out, forgetting this was nothing but a hologram, her fingers skimming the projected data. The pixels scattered under her touch.
“I don’t have much time,” she said, looking over her shoulder. As if on cue, the sounds of shouting and cursing came from behind her. “There was so much more I wanted to do,” she said, almost to herself. Then she squared her shoulders and looked directly at Andra. “You must go to the LAC annex. Go to the deepest level, find the door marked with the cryonics symbol. The code is the coordinates for Holymyth. Once you’re there, you’ll know what to do.”
The yelling grew louder. She looked behind her again and swallowed.
“I should have done this earlier, but—” Someone pounded on the door. “I thought I could fix everything myself. I couldn’t. No one can fix what we’ve done. What I’ve done. But you can start to set things right. You can save whoever’s left. Like your mother always said, Andromeda will save us all.”
The hologram took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry I don’t have time to break this news gently, but Andromeda, you’re an AI. You were created to fulfill a very specific purpose, but before I explain, I want you to know that your mother—”
The sound of the door bursting open rent the air, and the shouting grew to a deafening decibel. Fear flashed across Dr. Griffin’s face, and she tensed. Then the recording cut off.
Andra sat in silence, trying to process what she’d just seen—everything it meant. After a moment of running her finger over the ’locket, she played the recording again. And again. Gleaning as much information as she could, processing the implications. After her fifth viewing, she set the ’locket aside, the resulting stillness settling like a weight.
Then a voice broke the silence. “Mam?”
Andra turned. Zhade was behind her.
FORTY-FIVE
THE GUV
Zhade stepped forward, hand reaching out to where his mam had just stood. She’d seemed so real, and for a moment, Zhade was back in kidhood, listening to her tell him wild stories bout an ancient civilization that made things fly and explored the depths of oceans. Fishes and wishes.
That’s what she was now. An illusion. A stupid hope. And before he could comp what was happening, she was gone again, and he realized she’d never been there. It was one of Andra’s glamours. She turned to him, face ashen, eyes wide.
“Alberta Griffin was the First?” Andra asked. “Alberta Griffin was your mother?”
Zhade didn’t answer. His mam had been there, right afront of him, and then she was gone, and he felt her loss all over again. The last fam he’d had. Evens, except for Maret. The person he’d wanted to impress more than anything in the Hell-mouth, and she’d died before he’d succeeded.
She’d left him instructions. Save the Third. Don’t let Maret have the crown. He’d accomplished both, so why did he feel like he was disappointing her still?
Maybe because Maret was alive somewhere in these tunnels, still asleep—in stasis, as Andra called it—and she wouldn’t tell him where.
Zhade would be guv and he would hold Eerensed safe and do everything his father hadn’t done, everything his mother had wanted to do. He would slowish remove Tsurina’s influence. He would take control of the city. And he would hold everyone alive. But Zhade would never be something his mother could be proud of til her murderer was dead.
There were sole so many places Andra could be hiding him.
“How could it have been her? Why?” she asked, but Zhade mereish stood there, staring at the spot his mother’s specter had vacated.
When Zhade didn’t answer, Andra deposited the ’locket that held his mam in the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a glamoured mask from her desk drawer, spelled for a generic Eerensedian face. Zhade bareish registered as she grabbed a bag and started listing everything she needed. Before she left, she grabbed his arm.
“I’m going to get some supplies,” she said. “When I get back, have this ’mask set to someone who won’t be recognized.”
“Where are we going?” he croaked.
“The tower,” she said. “To find some ghosts.”
46//
00110100 00110110
Andra’s brain buzzed with information—too many pieces trying to slot themselves together. Zhade’s parentage, his knowledge of tech, the genius of the rocket and the ’dome. But Dr. Griffin was gone. She’d left them. She and Andra’s family and everyone else had abandoned Earth. Something began to gnaw inside of her—fear and panic and dread and underneath it all: a frantic, desperate hope.
Hope derived from her code, hope driven by the chance to fulfill the purpose she’d been created for.
An illogical sort of hope. An artificial emotion.
It was easy to mentally overlay Riverside as she had known it over Eerensed as it was now, and once she did that, she wasn’t surprised by where the LAC annex was located—beneath the silver tower that had called to her. It hadn’t been something mystical, or even intuition. It had been programming.
Andra brought a laser’drill from the Vaults, grateful the museum’s techno’seals had held and everything still worked. Excavating the tech museum had been a slow, tedious process, but they had a lot to do—reconstruct a rocket, locate Holymyth, save the world—and Andra had the feeling they would need all the technology they could get. Besides her and Rashmi.
I’m not real.
She shook the thought away.
Zhade followed her silently through the city, and when they passed the pillars surrounding Alberta Griffin’s statue, he aggressively avoided looking at it. Andra felt like she needed to say she was sorry for beating the shit out of his dead mother’s statue. But she wasn’t and she didn’t. This was the woman who’d organized the colonist program. She was the inventor of so much of the technology Andra was familiar with, and all the technology of the Schism, and in the palace.
And of Andra.
She’d invented Andra. She’d taken a computer and stuck it in a hollowed-out body, and let it grow thinking it was human, let it grow into Andra. Let the hidden parts of Andra’s brain run hundreds of years’ worth of code while Andra slept. Let her learn to love a family, feel safe, feel awkward and unsettled. Feel human.
But all along, she’d been nothing more than a tool.
She wasn’t sure where her organic body had come from, but it didn’t escape her notice t
hat she looked like her parents. Dr. Griffin had probably grown her brainless body in a lab using Isla and Auric’s DNA.
Andra hated Alberta Griffin.
No, you don’t, a small voice inside her said, but she knew it was only her programming.
They sneaked into the silver tower through the sole entrance, a small door that they both had to crawl through. It had been secured with extensive tech, but it was no match for Andra. Inside, it was tall and hollow, like an empty silo, silver and shiny as the outside, filled with unnatural light Andra couldn’t find the source of. The stairs only led up, but Andra set up the laser’drill and let it do its work.
After the ’drill excavated deep enough, it released a nesting ladder. Zhade stared as it disappeared into the darkness below. He’d barely spoken since he’d seen the hologram of his mother. Andra wanted him to stay above ground. She wanted to do this alone. But the look on his face told her there was no talking him out of accompanying her.
The climb down didn’t take long, and when they reached the bottom, Andra almost wanted to hold back, wait. Whatever was down there, behind the doors Dr. Griffin had talked about, would change everything.
But no. Andra was done with pauses, done with waiting. It was absolute darkness—the kind her eyes couldn’t adjust to—but she’d pilfered a couple of flashlights from their resources and pulled them out, tossing one to Zhade.
She clicked her light on, and the beam fell on a skeleton.
She bit back a scream, stumbled into Zhade. He put a reassuring hand on her back, and the fact that he didn’t respond with a flippant quip revealed his mental state. He didn’t have a clue what he was walking into. Andra hoped she did.
She hoped she didn’t.
There it was again—hope. It didn’t belong to her. It was just another algorithm that pushed her to survive.
The LAC annex was in ruins, like the grocery store the Schism had used, and the remains of the Vaults. It was difficult for Andra to get her bearings—the reception desk should be there, the security scanners over there, the entrance to the main hallway next to that other skeleton—but after a while, she began to see the patterns of the building she knew so well. She’d practically grown up here.
Goddess in the Machine Page 35
