Devil in the Device

by Lora Beth Johnson

  “How?” Andra managed to say, leaning heavily on the work’station.

  Griffin took a breath through her nose, closing her eyes briefly. “I woke her. Or the one before me did. After she woke Rashmi. She needed help, and your mother was always the more analytical of the two. She was running some tests on the soil out in the desert.” Griffin’s eyes glazed over. “It had been several days, so Griffin went looking for her.”

  Andra’s heart sank. She didn’t know if she wanted to hear the rest. But she had to know the truth.

  “From what she could tell, Isla was attacked by desert pirates. They took all her equipment but left her . . . body. Griffin brought her back and buried her.” She put a hand on Andra’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry you had to hear this way.”

  Andra felt numb. “I have to go.” She stumbled back. “I have to go.”

  Griffin shook her head. “I should run some tests. You should finish eating. Rest.”

  She reached for Andra, but Andra pushed her away and started running. Griffin called after her, but Andra didn’t pause to catch her breath, just propelled herself back down the hall. Ran past the elevators, unable to stomach the thought of standing still, and took the stairs two at a time. Stumbled out into the underwater bubble, the kinetic lights blinding her eyes, and ran smack into something hard.

  She nearly fell backward, but gentle hands caught her.

  “Andra?” a mechanical voice said.

  “Mechy,” Andra breathed with relief.

  “You were missing. But I followed you.”

  She wanted to throw her arms around him in a hug, but her grief was too strong. “I want to go home,” she whimpered, and the sound of her own weak voice tore a sob from her throat.

  Mechy scooped her up in his stiff arms and carried her back to the underwater lift. The ride to the surface was swift. The sun was starting to rise, glinting off the surface of the water. He placed her gently in the hover and started the engine, and together they skimmed across the lake toward the horizon.

  ELEVEN

  00110001 00110001

  The trip back to Eerensed was a blur. Andra went from crying jags to going completely numb back to crying jags. Mechy made sure she drank and ate but didn’t push her to talk. By the time they first saw Eerensed on the horizon, Andra had gone numb again.

  When she got back to the Vaults, she found Lilibet and Rashmi meeting with Skilla and Xana in a common room down the hall from her bedroom. It held a kitchenette and small round table. They looked up from their tense conversation to see Andra standing hunched in the doorway, Mechy towering behind her.

  “ANDRA!”

  Lilibet jumped up and ran to her, throwing her arms around Andra, who got a mouthful of long brown hair. Rashmi watched her curiously, eyes narrowed. Skilla’s face was red with fury, but as usual, Xana only had eyes for Skilla.

  “Where have you been?” Skilla snapped. “Do you reck how dangerful the Wastes are? And goddess or no, we still need your abilities to build that fraughted rocket and save Eerensed.”

  Andra sighed. “Missed you too, General.”

  Skilla scowled, crossing her arms and putting both feet up on the table. “Would you care to convo us what you were doing?”

  “She should rest,” Rashmi said. “Talking is for later and naps are for now. This is what my mom would say when I was cranky as a child.”

  “I’m not cranky,” Andra said.

  “I wasn’t talking about you.” Rashmi widened her eyes at Skilla.

  “No, she’s right.” Andra sighed. She was bone-weary, her muscles aching from the journey, her head throbbing from crying. She felt another bout of tears coming on, but she swallowed it. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  Mechy followed her into the room and pulled out a chair for her. Lilibet was still basically hanging off her, and Andra had to extricate herself in order to sit.

  The others stared, waiting, as she decided how much to divulge.

  Screw it. She was tired of keeping secrets.

  She let out a heavy breath. “Griffin is alive. I found her at the bottom of a lake, and she wants us to start waking up the colonists.”

  The others gawked at her.

  “She’s . . . alive?” Rashmi’s face turned ashen.

  “Well, sort of. Her clone is.”

  Rashmi laid her head down on the table and started muttering to herself. Andra had learned not to interrupt when Rashmi got like this. Whatever was happening in her head, she needed to work through it on her own.

  “The First? Is alive?” Skilla asked, but it was less of a question and more of a challenge.

  “What’s a clone?” Xana asked.

  Andra ran a hand through her hair, trying to figure out how to explain. “She has the same . . . body and abilities and intelligence. Only, she’s a different person. She doesn’t have the memories of the Griffin you knew. Well, I mean, she has access to them. She can watch them in a holo . . . scry . . .” Andra cleared her throat.

  Skilla shook her head, her dark ponytail bobbing. “I don’t reck why you imagined that explanation would help.”

  Andra winced. For a moment, the room was silent except for the hum of the kitchenette’s fridge.

  She sat forward. “The Griffin you knew is dead, but now there’s this new Griffin. She’s continuing on with what the old Griffin set out to do. Saving humanity, same as always. We just have a new plan now. And a different Griffin.”

  Skilla shifted, her weapons clanking against the chair. “Soze, let me full comp this. Someone who looks like the First but isn’t the First is hiding somewhere in the Wastes. She’s abandoned us, left us on our own, but expects us to continue doing what she asks? Is that right?”

  “This time it’s different.”

  “For true? How?”

  Andra folded and unfolded her hands. “Um, well . . . we’re still going to build the rocket, but to do that, we’re going to wake up the colonists and . . . put a spell on them that makes them invisible to . . . pockets.” Her voice seemed to give up on the last word.

  Skilla blinked slowly. “So, now you have magic that will save your precious colonists, but doesn’t do anything for the Schism, or the refugees, or the Eerensedians. Why am I helping you again?”

  Andra leaned heavily on the table, arms splayed toward Skilla. “Okay, it doesn’t help the Eerensedians now, but it will.”

  Skilla rolled her eyes, kicking back her chair. It scraped across the floor.

  “We’ll convo later,” she snapped, and stormed off.

  “It will, I promise!” Andra called after her.

  “I said we’ll convo later!” Skilla yelled back, already halfway down the hall.

  Xana gave Andra an apologetic look and followed.

  The room fell silent, Andra staring after Skilla and Xana, Rashmi mouthing words to herself, Lilibet staring wide-eyed between them. Andra wanted to tell Lilibet about her mother being dead and about the grief that had washed over her on the trip back from Lake Superior. She wanted to tell Rashmi that they hadn’t been created for a reason and commiserate with her that their existence was random with no real purpose. She wanted to tell them both about the voices she was hearing and the dead nanos and how she was scared that whatever corruption was inside her would take over. But she couldn’t let her emotions sweep her under. She had to focus.

  “I guess . . . we should go wake some of the colonists now . . .”

  Rashmi’s head shot up. “NO!”

  Andra blinked. She’d never heard Rashmi’s voice like that, so strong and sure. “But Griffin’s clone—”

  “Talking is for later. Naps are for now. Talking is for later. Naps are for now.”

  “Rashmi,” Lilibet said, setting her hand on Rashmi’s arm. “Are you evens? I can make you some hot cho-co-late.” Lilibet stumbled over the word. “Kiv skooled me h
ow they do it akitchens. And I stitched a little sweater for your mug to hold it hot for longer but also to protect your hands from that hotness. I invented it myself! I call it a snuggle! Because it snuggles your mug!”

  “I don’t want to wake the colonists,” Rashmi said, her voice a high, thin whine. “I want to . . . I want to . . .” She growled in frustration and set her head back down on the table. “I just want to be human for now. I don’t want to remember what it was like not to be.”

  Andra bit the inside of her cheek. Something inside her didn’t want to wake the colonists either. Something argued that the humans weren’t her responsibility. If Griffin wanted the colonists awake, she could come do it herself.

  You don’t have to do this, a voice said. It sounded just like the voice telling her to destroy.

  She shook it off. If there was a way to protect people from the pockets, she needed to at least try. Besides, even if there wasn’t a specific reason she’d been created, she was still meant to serve humanity. And if the upgrade worked, she could find a way to fit the Eerensedians with ’implants. Then they could keep working on getting everyone off the planet.

  “It’s only a few people, Rashmi,” Andra said. “Just the LAC scientists. I promise. Besides, they can help us.”

  “No one can help us,” Rashmi muttered, her face smushed against the table.

  Andra sighed. She wished she knew how to help Rashmi. She didn’t know how much of Rashmi’s trauma was having her programming stripped away and how much was because of what she went through in the dungeons. Maybe if Rashmi would talk about the time before Andra woke, Andra could help her. But talking only seemed to make things worse.

  Talking for later. Naps for now.

  “I can help,” Lilibet said. “I purpose, can I? I’m getting so good at magic, and I practice nearish as much as I do my stitches. I reck I can’t do goddess magic, but I can do small magic if you need help. Can I?”

  For the first time since hearing about her mother’s death, Andra smiled.

  * * *

  Lilibet followed Andra through the LAC annex beneath the silver tower, Mechy trailing behind.

  Andra hated the place.

  Though Mechy had cleaned out the skeletons and reinforced the sections threatening to collapse, Andra didn’t come here unless she needed to. He’d done a fine job. Eco’tile, kinetic orbs. It was almost restored to what it had been in Andra’s time. Except it was missing all the people. No scientists, no guests, no admin personnel. Just Andra and Lilibet, heading toward the underground warehouse that hid a million colonists.

  Andra heaved the huge metal door open to reveal the enormous room beyond.

  The Icebox creeped Andra out. It was too big. Too empty of signs of life, too full of frozen life. The echo of her footsteps seemed to go on forever, and she had the urge to whisper. The dark gray hardcrete walls felt ominous. And the harsh sound the lights made when they turned on echoed eerily.

  It was miles to the opposite end of the Icebox, so they had to take a hover. Lilibet didn’t stop chatting about how excited she was until they reached the cryo’station set up against the far wall. Mechy pulled the hover to a stop, and Andra hopped out.

  As soon as she approached the work’station, dozens of holo’displays flickered to life, taking up twenty feet of the wall from floor to ceiling and casting the cavernous room in a gentle glow of data and charts. There was a glass semicircular holo’table, with an ergo’chair Andra had adjusted to fit her body perfectly.

  She thought about all the times she’d been there, how her eyes had skimmed over the colonist map on the work’station holo’display, and she’d avoided looking.

  If she had just looked, she would have realized her mother was missing.

  A bout of grief threatened to overwhelm her, but she shoved it away in a little pocket of her mind.

  Andra handed Lilibet a tablet she’d networked to the cryo’station. “I need you to monitor vitals and protocols. If anything starts flashing red, use that code—spell I showed you.”

  Lilibet nodded with a grin. Andra swiveled her chair toward the myriad of ’displays.

  “Here goes,” she muttered, and brought up the controls for the reanimation procedures. The map of the Icebox twirled in front of her, a million people minimized to dots on a map. With her pointer finger, she highlighted the section of cryo’tanks closest to them—the ones that held the LAC scientists—before remembering that she could just mentally interface with the work’station.

  She thought about isolating the ’tanks for the LAC, and the program complied. All she had to do was wish for the reanimation to begin, and it would.

  Reanimation was a delicate procedure but mostly automated. Cryo’techs were specially trained on how to instigate the procedure and troubleshoot in emergencies. But their main purpose had been dealing with patients before and after the freezing process. Unless something went wrong—like when Andra woke—the latch would open on its own, the cryo’protectant drain, the life support detach. But the people would be weak and naked and scared. Andra decided it was best to wake them up one at a time for now, until there were more people to facilitate the process.

  She scanned the names of the LAC scientists, some she recognized, some she didn’t.

  Daphle Hanson, cryo’engineer, life support

  Luke Walker, terraformation specialist, atmosphere

  Cruz Alvarez, AI technician, social protocols

  Andra stopped, her heart leaping into her throat.

  She’d known Cruz worked at LAC, but thought he’d been an intern for her mother. She hadn’t known he’d been an AI tech. Social protocols. Did that mean . . . ?

  There were plenty of AI technicians at LAC, but Andra always assumed they worked with robotic AI, not True AI. Because up until recently she didn’t believe True AI existed. But now she had to wonder. Which did Cruz work with? ’Bots or bodies?

  He’d been friends with Andra, something other than friends with Rashmi. Had they just been part of his job? To teach them social protocols?

  Something rose up inside her, and it took her a moment to realize it was hurt. She thought she’d reached her capacity for sadness about what it meant to be an AI, but each new blow stung as sharply as the last.

  She shook away the pain and kept scanning.

  Brooker Jackson, interstellar engineering

  Han Li, terraformation specialist, farming and agriculture

  Isla Lim-Watts, vice president of colonization

  Her cryo’tank was grayed out.

  Andra took a deep breath to steady herself and kept reading.

  She read name after name until, finally, she found someone that might be useful.

  Ophele Hammad, senior cryo’technician

  Bingo.

  She could wake up Ophele, have enough time to walk over to her ’tank, and then help her out to start the reanimation procedures. Mechy had set up a makeshift reanimation therapy station in the center aisle, but Andra didn’t know what she was doing. Ophele did and would be able to walk Andra through her own procedures, and then help with the next person.

  This was perfect. Now all she had to do was start the actual reanimation.

  Andra thought with will and intent about the ’tech waking up, and the process began.

  Dozens of monitors that usually displayed statistics and vitals started flashing red. A single message blinked in the center.

  Reanimation in: 1 minute and 22 seconds

  Reanimation in: 1 minute and 21 seconds

  Reanimation in: 1 minute and 20 seconds

  That was faster than Andra had expected. She’d need to locate Ophele quickly, so she would be there when she woke up.

  “Uhh, Andra?” she heard Lilibet say behind her.

  “Not now, Lilibet.”

  “Firm. I reck it full impor
ts to look now.” Lilibet’s voice shook.

  Andra turned to see Lilibet holding up the tablet Andra had given her showing the map of the cryo’tanks. All of them were flashing red. She snatched it from Lilibet, muscles tense, and began to interface back and forth between the tablet and the work’station, but she knew what was wrong before they told her.

  The colonists were waking up.

  All of them.

  “How did this happen?”

  Reanimation in: 1 minute and 3 seconds

  Andra ran a hand through her hair. Had she done this? Was it because her AI abilities were on the fritz? Or had it been the thing inside her? Was it no longer just a disembodied voice, but somehow acting on its own accord?

  She shoved the tablet back at Lilibet.

  “Use the stabilization code. I have to figure out how to stop this.”

  She didn’t wait for Lilibet’s response, just turned back to the work’station. She was met with a barrage of data. Temperature readings. Vital signs. Cryo’protectant and reanimator gel ratios. Her subconscious began absorbing the information and comprehending it faster than a human would be able to. She typed commands and algorithms into the ’display.

  Reanimation in: 48 seconds

  There was a method to the mass reanimation process. The colonists furthest along were those most critical to the colonization: the LAC scientists. They were followed by their families and those in integral professions like food distribution and health care. From there, the groups someone (Dr. Griffin?) had determined were most vital to society.

  Andra’s mind was able to write algorithms while still processing the fact that someone had planned for a mass reanimation. Whether they had intended for it to happen, she didn’t know. But there was a protocol in place in case it was necessary. And whatever Andra had done had triggered that protocol.

  Now it was on her to stop it.