Devil in the Device

by Lora Beth Johnson

“It doesn’t meteor. I love skooling and helping and doing things. Teach me! Teach me! Please please pleeeeeeeeease?”

  Andra lifted an eyebrow. “Teach you how to clean the washroom?”

  The light in Lilibet’s eyes dimmed, but she didn’t let the smile fade. “Firm?”

  Andra laughed and brought up a holo’display. “Actually, I wanted to teach you some magic.”

  * * *

  Lilibet took to technology like she took to everything else—with enthusiasm and giddiness. After a few hours, she knew how to manually interface with a work’station and was even starting to learn basic coding. She could search through files and run programs if Andra directed her. She was eager to keep learning, but Andra needed a break. If not from the teaching, then from Kiv watching patiently, awkwardly from Andra’s cot, waiting for Lilibet to be done.

  Andra grabbed a small yellow clone’drive called a taxi’ and headed to the cavern under Southwarden where the rocket was being constructed. If she was going to focus on rebuilding it, she needed to refresh her memory on the few blueprints Griffin had left behind and transfer them to her work’station.

  It was a short trek. At least, it was short underground. It would have taken at least half a bell aboveground to walk from the palace to Southwarden, but belowground, Andra had dug new tunnels to connect the Vaults and the rocket and the Icebox and reinforced them with eco’tile. Well, Mechy had done all the work, but she’d given him instructions. The mech’bot who had led her to the throne room the day she’d controlled the pocket was now helping Andra in any way he could—which usually meant manual labor. She sent him a message through their cognitive interface to meet her at the rocket.

  There was a small hover waiting for her just outside the Vaults, in a cave Mechy had dug on the other side of the air’lock. Andra climbed in and set the coordinates. The hover zoomed through the tunnels, over paved eco’tile flooring, and past bright white eco’tile walls. Kinetic orbs flicked on and off as she passed, the passages slowly growing steeper and steeper as she traveled farther underground.

  Mechy was waiting for her when she reached the cave. He stood two meters tall, his black metal casing dull and scratched, limbs bulky and multi-jointed. His face was purely mechanical—a sheet of metal with an unmoving mouth and flashing eyes. Andra had gotten him new paneling and oiled his joints, but with each new construction project, his appearance grew haggard. He was nearly a thousand years old, after all. Almost as old as Andra.

  Despite her insistence that she didn’t need it, Mechy helped her out of the hover’cart.

  “You don’t have enough joints,” Mechy had once told her. “Do you wish me to build you more efficient limbs?”

  He’d accepted her refusal with bemusement but continued to treat Andra as though she were exceptionally fragile. Which, to be fair, compared to him, she was. An extraordinary brain trapped in a fallible body.

  They were in a narrow tunnel. The door to the cavern stood in front of her. Mechy had constructed it by borrowing one of the doors from the LAC annex—the office ruins above the Icebox. The size and shape were so familiar to Andra. It was the same as any door at any LAC location. Opaque eco’glass displaying a hologram of the LAC logo—a rotating DNA strand. It hovered over the outline of Ohio. At the Los Angeles location it would hover over the Cali Republic. In Tokyo, the Japanese Isles. Here, in an underground network of tunnels and caverns, a thousand years in the future, it was the outline of a state that didn’t exist anymore.

  The door was glitching, its security settings still tuned to those of the LAC annex. Mechy had tried fixing it, but so far he was the only one who could coax it open. He did so, eyes strobing as he interfaced with it. After a moment, the light on the lock flashed green, accompanied by a beep, and it swung open. Andra stepped into the cavern.

  It was enormous, the only part of the underground network large enough to house a rocket, since the last one had been destroyed. Thousands of feet high, a stone cathedral covered in moss, the air cold and stale. Andra felt minuscule in the space, looking at the rocket towering above her, the cavern swallowing it. Water dripped, echoing off the stone walls, and the buzz of ’drones ebbed and flowed around her. She shivered.

  The rocket was just a skeleton at the moment, but it was tied into a huge work’station at the end of a narrow ledge that led from the cavern entrance. Mechy had fitted it with an eco’railing as it ascended from the cavern floor to the stone platform ten meters up that held the ’station. Despite the railing, Andra always grew dizzy as she traversed the narrow space.

  Her heart was fluttering, her head pounding by the time she reached the work’station. It was almost impractically large, with holo’screens reaching meters high and wide against the cavern wall. It was all hooked up to a physical metal hub: a bland rectangular box larger than Andra that stored the energy it would take to power the rocket. It was basically a really powerful, really complex battery. There was one just like it, only smaller, in the cathedzal to help power the ’dome, but this one held far more energy. Andra was careful never to touch it. The power of it could overwhelm her own nanos, destroying them or converting them faster than she could replenish them.

  Andra took a deep breath as she sat at the translucent ’desk and brought up the ’display, filling the cavern with the glow of hundreds of holos. She filtered through the file of sims and notes she’d found and compiled from Griffin. She’d scoured these millions of times (two hundred and forty-three, to be exact; humans embellished, AI did not), but maybe today was the day she would find something useful.

  “Do you need assistance?” Mechy asked.

  “No.” Andra waved him away, plugging the taxi’ into the ’desk. “You can power down for a while. You probably need to recharge.”

  Mechy had spent the day reinforcing the palace foundation. Much of Eerensed was on shaky ground, with the network of tunnels and ruins running under the city, but the palace was by far the most precarious. It sat on a boulder that could easily fall straight on top of the Vaults if they weren’t careful. Mechy had been shoring up the foundation for weeks, adding technological components that measured stability and sent nanos to reinforce areas of concern.

  Mechy shrugged. A human gesture he’d picked up from Andra. “I wouldn’t mind some rest.” His voice inflected in the perfect mimicry of a human.

  His eyes flashed, then went dark. Andra turned back to the work’station and played the first vid of Griffin as she transferred the data.

  The LAC CEO was in a lab coat, her hair pulled back into a fishtail braid, showing off her silver crown. Her modded eye zeroed in on her notes, then on the camera, then back to her notes.

  “The rockets act as a companion to the Ark,” she was saying. “They will fly alongside it as support, necessary redundancies for a self-contained system. I’ve included detailed instructions in the accompanying file.”

  Andra had watched this so often, she could recite it by heart. The rocket the Schism had been building for Griffin had been in production well before Griffin had woken up. Skilla herself said that the Schism started long ago, if not before the colonists had gone into stasis, then right after. Andra had assumed that it had been some offshoot of LAC that was desperately trying to save a world destroyed by the corrupted tech of the pocket, and that Griffin had co-opted it to help her create a rocket to get the colonists off Earth.

  But it turned out that Griffin had created plans for the rocket as part of her initial colonist program. She had always intended to use them, in addition to the Arcanum generation ship that would take the colonists to Holymyth. Which meant that when Griffin had awoken, she must have discovered that though the Ark was still in orbit, her rockets and shuttles had been destroyed by pockets, but were being re-created by the Schism.

  That still didn’t explain how Andra, Rashmi, and Griffin had been removed from the Icebox and what Griffin had planned to do once she’d woken to find
herself on a destroyed future Earth.

  Andra wished she could go back in time and ask Griffin what she had intended, why Andra had been created, what she should do now.

  She watched the vid again. And again. It wasn’t until the fifth time that she noticed the shape on the door in the background. If these sims had been recorded at HQ, the LAC double helix would have been rotating in front of the outline of Ohio. But it wasn’t. It was in front of . . . some kind of . . . blob shape? Maybe a mountain? Whatever it was, it meant Griffin had recorded these somewhere else. Andra just didn’t know where.

  She shut down the work’station. Her head really was pounding. She felt weak and dizzy, and the room around her started to blur. The others were definitely right. She couldn’t keep going on like this. She needed to rest. Take a bath. Eat a goddamn vegetable.

  Something tickled her nose. She touched it, and her finger came away bloody. The ache in her head grew sharper.

  It was like something was trying to get in, tapping at the edge of her consciousness. No, not tapping. Knocking. Pounding. Suddenly, it was taking all her willpower to keep it out, but maybe that was the problem.

  Rashmi? she thought.

  No answer.

  Zhade?

  He hadn’t communicated with her via the Crown since that day in the throne room, but maybe this was an emergency.

  She pushed harder. Zhade, is that you?

  Something like white noise, a radio being tuned, grew in her skull. The pain sharpened. She fell to her knees, clutching her head, holding back a scream. She heard Mechy say her name.

  Then everything quieted. All that was left was a voice.

  Destroy.

  Destroy.

  DESTROY.

  Andra tried to block it out, but it just got louder. It hissed and scraped and was somehow both a single voice and multitudes.

  DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY

  The scream Andra had been holding back forced its way past her lips. She pulled herself up, fingers grasping at the work’station, and coughed. Black blood splattered the translucent surface. She expected an accompanying taste of copper, but none came.

  “Andra?” Mechy asked.

  She pushed him away. She needed space. She needed air. She had just vomited blood all over the rocket work’station, and though Andra didn’t know much about medicine and anatomy, she knew vomiting blood was an emergency. Nanos swarmed around her, waiting for her command.

  “Andra?” Mechy asked. “What do you need?”

  The dizziness threatened to overtake her again, and she expected to feel the surge of med’bots rise inside her, but there was nothing.

  Andra breathed hard, head hovering over the work’station, now stained with blood.

  Dark and tarry and forming slick pools.

  But no.

  It wasn’t blood.

  Andra wiped some up with her finger, tinting the tip black. She felt a strange tingling sensation, almost as though her finger had gone numb. She looked closer.

  Not blood.

  Dead nanos.

  It was the same as the lines of rot that had decorated the ’dome when it was dying. Except these had been inside of her.

  Her pulse raced, and the air chilled. Something was rotting within her, destroying her from the inside out.

  Her body was blood and bone and sinew, but the truest part of her—that part of her that gave her consciousness—was nothing more than the same nano’tech that swirled around her in the air, that composed the skin of the ’dome, that lived inside the pockets.

  Something inside her was wrong, something ever since she took control of that pocket in the throne room. She’d known it, ignored it, and now she was coughing up dead nanos. How quickly would it spread?

  She had things to do. A rocket to build, colonists to wake, Eerensedians to save. She had no clue how to do any of that, and now it seemed she was on a deadline.

  Pain seared her head, but this time, the voice she heard was Mechy’s.

  “Andra? Are you okay?”

  She looked up from where she was huddled on the floor of the rocket’s cavern. Mechy crouched a few feet away from her, the position awkward with his many-jointed limbs.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Your tone suggests you are lying, but I’ve noticed polite protocols demand I not press.”

  “Good call.” Andra cradled her stomach as though she could hold herself together just a little longer.

  “What can I do to help?” Mechy asked.

  Andra didn’t know. That was the problem. There was just so much she didn’t know.

  “You could help me up.”

  Mechy took her by the hand and under the elbow and gently lifted her to her feet. She groaned as she sat back in the work’station chair.

  She couldn’t keep guessing how to build the rocket or control the mini’pocket, couldn’t keep just trying things and failing. If something was destroying her, she didn’t have time for a series of trials and errors until she figured things out. She needed to know exactly what Griffin’s plan had been, so she could enact it before time ran out.

  But Griffin was dead. And the only person alive and awake who had known Griffin’s plans was Rashmi, and those memories appeared to be gone for good.

  Andra laid her head down on the cool glass of the desk, groaning when she realized the truth.

  Rashmi wasn’t the only person who had known Griffin.

  Her son was currently sitting on the throne of Eerensed.

  THREE

  00110011

  Andra stood at the bottom of the hover’lift, wringing her hands. The tunnel around her was dark, and there was the faint scent of mildew. She’d been hesitating long enough that the engine of her hover’cart had cooled.

  There were so many reasons this was a bad idea. She could be seen. This might not work. He might not even show up.

  She’d sent Mechy with a message to Zhade: meet her in the suite where they used to have goddess lessons. She could have called it Griffin’s old rooms, or the suite that belonged to his mother, but she’d chosen to word it in a way that reminded him of when they used to get along. When it had been them against the world, learning how to survive and falling for each other in the background. Even if Zhade no longer wanted to be with her—and who could blame him, she was a robot, a thing—surely he’d still meet with her for old times’ sake.

  She forced herself to step onto the lift.

  Back when Andra hadn’t known who Zhade’s mother was, he had mentioned that she was the one who taught him magic. He’d grown up with the Schism, watching them build the rocket. And he’d known—at least to some extent—how to open Andra’s ’tank. Which had been made of the cryo’plating she needed for the rocket. Surely, he had some knowledge, some hint of his mother’s plans. If not, together, Andra and Zhade could search through everything Griffin had left behind, mine Zhade’s memories, and possibly discover how to save humanity.

  No pressure.

  Jolts of adrenaline rushed through Andra as the lift ascended. They hadn’t been alone together since . . . Andra couldn’t remember when.

  The lift neared the top of the shaft, stopping just before flattening Andra against the rocks above. She reached up and pressed her thumb to a scanner, and the rock opened with a scrape into a bathroom. The lift ascended a few more feet, and she pulled herself out of the passage onto the floor.

  At first it was pitch black, but then kinetic orbs lit the room around her. The bathroom was the size of Andra’s entire living quarters in the Vaults, every surface and detail decorated in the coils meant to symbolize the First. The tile was a deep blue, the faucets and feet of the tub gilded in intricate designs. Andra stood and wiped off her pants, not necessarily because they were dirty but to rid herself of her nervous energy.

 
She left the bathroom and traveled down the short hall to Griffin’s bedroom, the orbs flashing on as she passed. The door was slightly ajar. Andra took a deep breath. She could do this. She could interact with Zhade, and it wouldn’t be weird, and she would be okay with the fact that he no longer wanted to be with her, that being a robot was a deal breaker for him. After all, she had been the one to instigate the distance.

  She opened the door, breath still held, and walked into an empty room.

  Her breath left her in a rush.

  Not only was Zhade not there, but neither was the furniture or other detritus of a life lived, or goddess lessons taught. The dim space was filled only with the faint stench of mildew and dust. There were dark spots in the carpet where the bed and chairs had been. The walls were bare.

  Andra felt oddly disappointed. She hadn’t realized it, but she’d developed an emotional attachment to the room. The sofa where Wead would play the guitar-like instrument. The wardrobe Lilibet would rifle through. The rug she had danced on with Zhade. Now all of it was gone, and she couldn’t help but feel hurt.

  It was a weird response for an AI.

  “Miss me?” said a voice behind her.

  Andra whirled, and Zhade was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, leaning against the frame, like always. Unlike always, he wore both his brother’s face and the Crown he’d used to control all the tech in the city. Andra was still thrown into shock every time she saw Zhade’s expressions on Maret’s face, the Crown tacked on his head. Something about it didn’t feel right. Felt dangerous. The few times she’d brought it up, though, Zhade had blown off her concern. Then they’d stopped talking altogether.

  Now the Crown was limned in blood, Zhade’s—Maret’s—eyes watery, dark circles underneath. Just like Maret had looked in the days before she’d removed the Crown and put him into stasis.

  Zhade wore his own clothes, at least: khaki pants and a dark shirt with the top buttons unbuttoned. And, of course, his signature smirk.

  Andra grimaced. This was going to be harder than she thought.