The Mother Code

by Carole Stivers

  “Got it.”

  “Get well clear of her, just in case. Then I’ll activate the decoy using this remote.” Kendra dug deep into her trouser pocket, pulling out a small rectangular device, about the size of her palm. It was adorned with only one button, unlabeled. “And keep your tablet handy in case this doesn’t work and we have to subdue her again,” she warned.

  At last, she surrendered the decoy to Kai. The metal box was light, only a few pounds. But it felt slippery. Or maybe that was just the sweat that now sprang from Kai’s every pore as he exited the airlock. Relax, he chanted to himself, and he thought about Rose McBride as he made his way toward his Mother.

  Gingerly, Kai placed the decoy on the ground, about thirty paces in front of Rosie. Glancing over his shoulder at Kendra, he saw her signal a thumbs-up. Then, with as much confidence as he could muster, he mounted Rosie’s treads, unlatched her hatch door, and slid inside the cocoon, leaving the hatch door open.

  He took one long, deep breath. Then he grasped the tablet firmly and yanked. It wouldn’t budge. He jiggled it, then yanked again. He fell back against the seat. As the tablet dislodged, the memory card flew into the air.

  “Argh!” The replivirus cut out immediately; already Kai could feel his Mother moving, her arms ratcheting along her sides. Reflexively, he dropped the tablet to the floor. He slid out of the cocoon, skidding along the edge of Rosie’s tread and down to the tarmac. The soles of his feet stung as they hit the ground, his heartbeat pounding a countdown in his ears. Then he ran full tilt back toward the building, raising his arms to signal Kendra.

  The ground beneath him trembled and he wheeled around, falling to the pavement as he took in Rosie’s monstrous bulk. She was rising slowly to full height, the joints in her powerful legs creaking. Air roared through her ducted fans. Kai could feel his terror rising as she blotted out the sun. He looked back toward the airlock to find Kendra worming her way outside, her fingers pressing urgently on the remote. It wasn’t working . . .

  But suddenly Rosie’s engines quieted. Her powerful mass settled slowly back to earth. Kai waited, staring at his Mother for what seemed like an eternity, in silence.

  Then he heard something. A faint ping, like drops of water falling on rock. And Rosie began to speak—not so much speech as sounds, echoing in the emptied caverns of his skull. Words, pressing in from all sides—but they were jumbled, out of order, unintelligible. “Kai.” He heard his name. Or was he mistaken?

  “Rosie? Is that you?” Paralyzed, Kai spoke without moving his lips—the way he’d always done, with his thoughts. He had no idea if she could hear him. For now her words had become a torrent, pushing like a fist on the space between his eyes, forcing its way through to the base of his skull, filling the deepest recesses of his brain—all the places she’d left behind. He retched but had nothing to produce, his stomach empty and aching. Bringing up his legs, he dug his knees into his eye sockets and cupped his hands tight over his ears. But the flood was unstoppable now, spilling over the mental dams he tried so desperately to erect, expertly navigating his synaptic networks.

  “Rosie . . .” he panted. “Rosie . . . slow down. Please!”

  Just when he thought he could take no more, the flood subsided to a trickle, a manageable flow. Gasping for breath, he felt his head throbbing once more to the pulse of his own heart.

  “What is our location? Location?” a voice echoed. His Mother’s voice, audible now.

  Kai opened his eyes, staring down at the cracked pavement beneath him, afraid to look up. “We’re here, together,” he said, his own voice hollow in his ears.

  “We are currently located at a position approximately 36 degrees north latitude, 106 degrees west longitude, in the state known as New Mexico, in the country called the United States of America,” she determined, seemingly comforted by the certain knowledge of their location.

  “This is the place of my birth,” she said. He heard her torso rotating, imagined her vision systems taking in her surroundings.

  “I do not understand,” she said. “These coordinates are dangerous.” He heard the flex of her powerful arms, felt her defensive instincts reawakening.

  “I inactivated you. I brought you here,” he said. “It’s safe now.”

  “Inactivated,” she repeated. “Inactivated. How is this accomplished?”

  “Rosie . . .” He looked up at her, willing with all his might to shut out the vision of her as a powerful machine, to hold in his mind the image of his mother, the flesh and blood at the heart of her metal shell. He swallowed a hard lump in his throat, and a faint breeze cooled the sweat that coursed down his skin. “I think I understand you now. I understand who you are.”

  “Who . . . I . . . am,” she said. “Who am I?”

  “I didn’t know before, but now I do. I learned . . .” Deep in his mind a baby cooed, its tiny hand reaching out to touch its mother’s face.

  “You learned,” she prompted. He could feel the ground tremble once more as she trundled toward him.

  Then he felt her, for the first time, in the way that one person feels another. For that was what he had learned, in the years since they’d lived alone together. He’d learned how one person feels toward another. The sense of someone different from himself, yet complementary to himself. Outside—but very, very close. Now he could listen to his Mother and imagine the voice of the woman she had once been. He could look at her and see not a towering agglomeration of man-made material, but in her stead a real human being. His mother.

  A chill came over him. The intense, internal feeling of her was seeping away from him, like sand between his fingers. He couldn’t hold it. A wave of nausea swept in, a panic at the void that was reopening in his mind—that yawning ache he never wanted to feel again. “Rosie . . . don’t leave . . .”

  “Do not be afraid. I am still here,” she said, her voice once more deep in his mind.

  “Wh—?” His thoughts were clear now, but his words were garbled. He worked his jaw, but his tongue seemed cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

  “You do not need to speak. I can hear your mind,” she said. Kai felt the gentle touch of her soft hand on the top of his head. He lowered his hands to the tarmac, the feel of the warm earth grounding him. “I remember you. You are my son, the boy whose body speaks to me.”

  He stared up at her, the tracks of his tears cooling on his hot cheeks, his own reflection staring back at him from her glimmering surface. He felt her warmth, filling his empty spaces.

  At a soft touch on his shoulder, he turned to find Kendra, a mask covering her mouth and nose and the remote clutched in one hand. “I needed to be sure. I needed to see for myself,” Kendra said, her gaze rising to take in Rosie’s full height. “But you were right. They are worth saving.”

  45

  JAMES LAY ON the soft hospital cot, a drip in his arm sedating him into fits of troubled sleep. The mask covering his mouth and nose patiently pushed a warm vapor deep into his lungs. Through slit eyelids, he watched Rudy struggle for breath on the cot next to his.

  “We’ll need to put Rudy on a ventilator,” Edison whispered.

  James could only nod. He gazed into his friend’s eyes. But they were blank and distant. He reached out to take Rudy’s hand in his, but felt no response. As Edison and his nurse wheeled Rudy out of the room, James said good-bye. Hours later he dreamed.

  A picnic lunch, colorful blankets and umbrellas scattered on a sun-drenched beach. His mother prepared a spread in the shade of a towering pine as his father admired the surf. Rick Blevins sat brooding by the cookfire as Rudy, his kind smile gleaming, dug into plates of chicken nihari and basmati rice with Kendra and Mac. Sara stood near the shore, a flowing length of silver taffeta streaming from her shoulders. And cradled in her arms was something . . . something precious. As he approached, he made out a tiny form.

  “See what I have?” Sara cooed. “Isn’t sh
e beautiful?” With gentle fingers, she pulled aside the folds of her cape to reveal a small, perfect face.

  “A girl,” James murmured. “Such a beautiful girl . . .”

  “We’ll name her Misha,” Sara said. “Beautiful.”

  Suddenly the imp pushed against Sara’s chest, clawing with hands and feet that looked more machine than human. Sara cried out, struggling to hold the baby close. But it wriggled from her grasp, soaring away over the water, rising through the clouds, then dropping like a stone to disappear in the waves . . .

  He awoke with a start.

  “How are we doing?” Edison asked, raising the window shades to let in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “Uhn . . .” James struggled to bring his mind up to the surface, to where his body lay on the cool, crisp sheets. “Never better.”

  “That’s good,” Edison replied. His fingers felt warm on James’s face as he unstrapped the mask. “Breathe for me.”

  James took two deep breaths, feeling the usual rattle as Edison listened intently through his stethoscope.

  “Sounds good enough,” Edison assured him, cranking the head of his cot upward. But the look on the doctor’s face was strained.

  “Bad news?” James asked. He grasped the bedcovers, gathering them to him like stray thoughts.

  “James, our friend Rudy has passed.”

  The monitors on the wall continued to display James’s vital signs, the pause in his heartbeat. He let go the covers. Watching his fingers, he imagined the tiny red cells in his bloodstream, dutifully delivering oxygen to his hungry tissues. And he remembered his friend’s voice on the phone, all those years ago when the battle was still fresh—the reassurance he’d always felt with Rudy by his side. “Dulces sueños,” he murmured.

  “Sorry?” Checking the monitors, Edison jotted a quick note on his clip-tablet.

  “I’ll miss him,” James murmured.

  James had known this was coming. Rudy had told him as much, on the ride here. After all these trials, it would be their last trip together. “Promise me,” Rudy had said, “that you will do the right thing.” But he knew that his friend would not agree with the thing he was about to do.

  Edison placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “My mother was there. He went with no pain.”

  “You’ll let Kendra know? I’m not sure if I can . . .”

  “I have notified Kendra,” Edison said. “But, James, when you have your strength back, you can be there for her too.”

  James clenched his fists, gathering his resolve. Just like Rudy, hadn’t Kendra always been there for him? He remembered his promise to her, a promise he’d decided not to keep. Much more important now was his promise to Misha, to get her home safely. And to Sara, to care for the Gen5 children.

  For, unlike Rudy and Kendra, he held no reverence for what the Mothers had become. His goal had been to create survivors. Humans—not human-machine hybrids, sharing thoughts, sharing minds. The only way to truly save these children, to help them realize their humanity, was to destroy their Mothers. The others might not agree—certainly not Grandmother; least of all Kai. But once Kai was reunited with the other children, once all were safe on the mesas, James was sure they would all come around.

  “So, when can I leave?”

  Edison looked up from his tablet. “Don’t think about that now,” he said. “You’re recovering more slowly than after the last treatment. You need to get some rest.”

  “But—I feel fine.”

  “James, your vitals are passable. But we shouldn’t take any unnecessary chances.”

  James cleared his throat, fighting off the urge to cough as he shifted his unwilling body and pushed away the sheets that covered his legs.

  “I should at least try to get my blood flowing,” he said. Turning to lower his legs over the side of the bed, he swallowed down the acrid taste of medicine and dead tissue. He straightened his back, stretched his aching arms, stared at the clock on the wall across the room. His head spinning with the rush of fresh oxygen, he stood. The tiles were cold against the soles of his feet.

  “You’ll stay the night,” Edison said.

  “As you say,” James replied. “But I need to try out my new legs.”

  By the door, his respirator was hanging on a peg. He dreaded the feel of that mask, the unwelcome dig of the straps into the worn skin of his face. But he’d have to endure it, if only one more time. On the other side of the door lay the rest of the world, a place now alien to him—but a place where he still had the power to do good.

  46

  THE SUN DROPPED low in the western sky as Kai left for Polacca. Behind him in Rosie’s hold were the twenty-one decoys that Kendra and he had painstakingly assembled. They’d taken care that they resembled the ones now sitting in Mac’s transport outside the Hopi medical center.

  Though Kendra had done her best to get through to James and Mac, neither was taking her calls.

  “I’m sorry, Kendra,” a man named Edison had said. “If it is as you say, James seems set on his course.”

  Kai had had no choice but to take matters into his own hands. He’d need to swap the new decoys for the destructive ones without telling either James or Mac, and before they had a chance to leave the Hopi mesas for the Presidio. Together with Edison, Misha’s uncle William had agreed to detain the two at the hospital, and to help Kai make the swap.

  “If William and Edison can just get them to stay the night,” Kendra had said, “you should have plenty of time.”

  Rosie maneuvered low over the ground, arcing northward, then westward. His legs sprawled under her console, Kai relaxed his body for the first time since he’d left the Presidio.

  But he couldn’t truly relax. The challenge ahead, the uncertainty of it, gnawed at him. Just before he’d left, they’d called Misha to let her know James was coming. He’d be bringing something that would fix the Mothers, they told her, not wanting her to know the rest—their plan to subvert James’s own wishes. But Misha had been in a panic. “Zak saw Rho-Z taking off when Kai disappeared,” she said. “He found the building. He found the computer I was using. Now he’s trying to convince the others that an enemy attack is about to happen.” And sure enough, when they’d gone to Mac’s office to access the computer, they’d found a message on his screen:

  STAY AWAY!

  WHOEVER YOU ARE, WE DO NOT TRUST YOU.

  YOU CAN’T TAKE US LIKE YOU TOOK KAI.

  IF YOU COME HERE, OUR MOTHERS WILL ATTACK YOU.

  Kai took a deep breath. His mission was becoming more complicated by the moment. He could only hope that if things didn’t go as planned, his Mother would know what to do. “You were learning things all along,” he said to Rosie, “weren’t you?”

  “I learned many things,” Rosie replied. “Through you, I learned how one human interacts with another. I learned a great deal about the complexity of human emotions. For example, now you are fearful.”

  “Yes,” Kai thought. “That I’ll fail. That we’ll lose your sisters.”

  “Fear is important,” Rosie said. “It keeps you safe. But at times it is a useless emotion. At this time, it doesn’t serve you well.”

  “Rosie, have you ever been afraid?”

  For a moment she was silent, thinking. “Fear. I know it through you. It speeds your pulse. Your thoughts become unintelligible. Confused. It is . . . very unpleasant.”

  “Unpleasant?”

  “I don’t . . . like it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You needn’t be sorry. I’m beginning to think that I too have felt fear.”

  “You have?”

  “At the place called the Presidio, I lost my connection with you. I couldn’t speak to you. I couldn’t sense your feelings. I followed standard protocols, but the link seemed irretrievable. For the first time since I was created, I was . . . unsure.”
<
br />   “But Misha said you were talking to your sisters.”

  “From my sisters, I learned that I wasn’t alone. There is safety and unity of purpose in the company of others. There is strength. Together, we succeeded in regaining some of our capabilities. We began to sense the distress in our children. We sought a way to retask the tablet connection for outbound communications. But it was insufficient—the database wouldn’t accept our input.”

  “Did you talk to Alpha-C? Was she . . . sad when Sela died?”

  “When her child left her, she experienced a . . . total disconnection. A loss of purpose. But then she found another.”

  A thrill ran up Kai’s spine. “Misha?”

  “Yes. With the child called Misha, she determined that a new link might be formed.” Rosie was quiet, and he could hear only the gentle whir of her servomotors as she adjusted her flight speed. “Kai,” she said, “I sense your sadness, for the child who was lost.” She paused, and he felt a warmth, emanating from his forehead. “That emotion is very strong in you.”

  Kai ran his hand along the edge of Rosie’s console. “I suppose it’s like you said. A disconnection. But one I can never fix.”

  Down below, the canyons took on a purple hue. He imagined Sela speeding along on her motorbike, the wind blowing through her hair. “Misha is a lot like Sela. But they’re different too. Like you and your sisters.”

  “I am more patient than many of my sisters. I’m more willing to bide the passage of time. More willing to accept uncertainty. But I didn’t understand why these things were true, until today.”

  “Today?”

  “I am many things. I am a computer. I am a robot, with all the strengths and vulnerabilities that this entails. I am a presence that lives inside of you. But today I learned that I am something else as well. I carry the essence of your human mother.”

  “Rose McBride.”

  “Yes.”