Devil in the Device

by Lora Beth Johnson

  “You have memory of when Andra chose you to die, and I killed that other boyo instead?” Maret asked.

  Zhade growled, but something in Maret’s expression stopped him from attacking.

  “She was controlling my hand then.” Maret looked away. His thumb tapped against each of his fingers in turn. “She wanted me to kill you so baddish. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but one twitch of the muscle and the knife went into your friend instead of you.”

  Zhade swallowed. “Are you expecting a thank you?”

  “Neg.” He leaned forward, met Zhade’s eyes. “I’m convoing that you can fight it.”

  Zhade looked away. It had been so easy to give in to the Crown. He could give in now. He didn’t want to fight, and he was so tired.

  “That little piece the Crown left in you,” Maret continued. “It’ll be there for the rest of your life. It’s in me too. I don’t reck if it gets easier to ignore. It for certz doesn’t feel like it. But I’ll hold fighting as long as I can.”

  Zhade’s head ached. He pinched the bridge of his nose, mulling over everything that had happened, everything he had done. The thing in his head that made him feel so angry. The control Tsurina still had over him.

  “The imprint left in my head . . .” Zhade said, almost to himself. “If Tsurina wore the Crown she has it too. Is that what let her control us?”

  “Firm,” Maret said.

  “Soze.” Zhade turned slowish to face his brother. “Did you control me too?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to reck?” Maret rolled his eyes. “Neg, for certz not. Not that I didn’t want to. But it takes practice, and I’ve been imprisoned the full time.”

  Through the anger, Zhade started to piece together what this all meant. Sometimes, Tsurina controlled him, but most of the time, she mereish put thoughts or feelings in his head. All that anger that had seemed to come out of nowhere. But that wasn’t the sole thing that had invaded his thoughts.

  “I had dreams . . .” Zhade said. “Memories of Tsurina laughing and yelling. Of you putting on the Crown. Of you fighting it. That was you.”

  Maret’s face went pale. “I don’t reck what you convo.”

  “You were trying to tell me, trying to show me what was happening to me.”

  Maret scoffed. “Why would I care if you wore the Crown, if you were being controlled? I was free, that’s all that meteored.” He turned his back on his brother.

  Zhade raised an eyebrow. “Soze, you’re good now?”

  Maret let out a bark of a laugh. “Oh, for certz not! Neg. I still hate you. And I hate your little goddess. And I’ll probablish lose control at some point and kill you both.” He shrugged. “But at least I’m trying not to.”

  His goddess.

  Andra.

  Something like revulsion rose up in Zhade, and he recked that, at least, wasn’t him. He could never be repulsed by Andra. But the Crown . . . hadn’t Tsurina said that it was created to oppose the goddesses?

  Zhade’s heart stuttered. His feelings bout a lot of things may be conflicted right now, but not his feelings for Andra. He loved her, still.

  Even though she could never love him back again. Not after he had sex with her and then stormed off the next moren, ignoring her ever since.

  What had been him? And what had been the Crown?

  Would he ever be able to sort out the two?

  Zhade sat heavyish on the cot. “This hasn’t been the uplifting convo you purposed it to be.”

  Maret shrugged. “It wasn’t purposed to be.”

  Zhade lay back down and tossed his arm over his eyes. “At least Andra has the Crown now. It can’t do any more damage.”

  Maret didn’t respond. The silence was weighty.

  Zhade peeked out from under his elbow. “At least Andra has the Crown now, marah?”

  Maret cleared his throat. “Soze . . .”

  Zhade sat back up. “Mare, who has the Crown?”

  “Meta.”

  Zhade groaned.

  Maret wasn’t done. “Who is apparentish my half-sister.”

  “You’re kiddings.” Zhade covered his face with his hands.

  Meta had told him that Tsurina had abandoned a kiddun in the Wastes. She’d also told him that she, herself, had been abandoned in the desert before his mam found her. He should have added the two together.

  He sighed. “She was raised by my mam.”

  “Neg. For true?”

  Zhade nodded.

  “Fraughted sands, we have a messed-up fam,” Maret said. “But at least my mam is dead. According to Kiv, Meta slit her throat then stabbed her in the heart.”

  Zhade’s eyebrows shot up. “Tsurina’s dead?”

  Relief rushed through him, chased by something else. It felt like grief, but for certz not. He couldn’t feel grief for the woman who’d killed his own mam and passed the last months controlling him.

  “And . . . how do you feel bout that?” he asked.

  Maret shrugged, but his expression was tense.

  Zhade closed his eyes again. Meta had the Crown now. He had never full bars trusted her, but she didn’t seem like a bad person. Except . . . maybe she was. She’d caused the angels to go rogue, killing all those people. Then, she’d murdered her own mother. And now, that angel army was hers to command, even without the Crown on her head. Did Meta even reck what the Crown did?

  She’d tricked him. She’d made him imagine she had sneaked into Eerensed under some fam obligation, but she was for true there to take the Crown. Had Andra mereish handed it to her?

  Anger tore through him, hot and sudden, and he pushed himself off the cot, storming toward the magic field and banging his fists on it.

  “Let me out!” he screamed. “Let me out now!”

  He banged til his fists were sizzling from the contact, then he started using his shoulder. He recked the magic wouldn’t budge, but it felt good to be doing something. To be hurting. To cauterize whatever was inside him that made him hate magic and goddesses, the layers of memories that weighed on him. He didn’t realize he’d burned a hole in his shirt til Maret pulled him back from the field. He flung his fist round, but Maret ducked.

  Zhade reached into his pocket, and thank sands, some bit of luck, he still had the graftling wand. Maret’s eyes widened as he scuttled away from his brother.

  Zhade scanned the blood that was now leaking from his shoulder. Then he put in the spell and tapped the wand to his temple. A mesh of magic oozed from the wand, covering his face.

  It was mereish as painful as the last time, but Zhade didn’t scream. He reveled in the pain, in the punishment of it. He made himself feel every crack of bone, every stretch of skin, every cell rearranged. He let the pain consume him, so completeish, he missed it when it was gone.

  It wouldn’t have worked before, reversing the spell. But now, after sorcering the wand with the Crown, it had more powers than even Zhade recked.

  His old face didn’t feel as familiar as it should have, looking out through these eyes, wearing the dimensions of this face. It felt like an old sweater that no longer fit.

  “You still have the scar,” Maret said, pointing to the westhand side of his face.

  Zhade shrugged. He lay down on his cot and turned his back to Maret.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  00110011 00110111

  “Evens, explain this to me again,” Xana said.

  Andra sighed, looking at the four other women sitting around the meeting table in her room. She wanted to curl into a ball and drift into oblivion. To really feel all the grief and guilt over all she’d learned in the past few hours.

  Holymyth was a lie.

  Griffin had tricked her into killing all the LAC scientists, including Cruz and her father.

  Griffin was an AI bent on using humanity as host bodies for artificial intelli
gence.

  It all threatened to overwhelm her—the knowledge, the feelings. But she didn’t have time to wallow in it. The AI would soon realize that Cruz was dead and the children were missing. They had to come up with a plan.

  Rashmi was silently crying. Xana and Dzeni were passing flirtatious looks back and forth. Lilibet frowned.

  “What do you purpose the First was AI?” she asked.

  Andra had explained to them what it meant to be artificial intelligence, and for the most part, they understood. But explaining the memories Andra had seen—lived—would be harder.

  Griffin’s memories existed in Andra’s head in the same way her own memories did. They felt real and dynamic and fuzzy. They were less story and more impressions and feelings and instinct.

  “Griffin was the first True AI,” Andra explained. “She . . . she started as a cluster of nanos . . . stardust . . . that became sentient, self-aware. She . . . created herself, gave birth to herself. Invented herself.”

  “How is that possible?” Rashmi asked, her head in her hands.

  Andra shook her head. “Language, I guess. The cluster of nanos was interacting with people’s minds, transmitting what people thought and the way they thought through their ’implants. Language creates thought, and thought creates consciousness. It . . . gave Griffin a model of humanity, and Griffin mimicked that model until she became it.”

  Xana sat back and crossed her arms. “But she’s not stardust anymore. I’ve met her. She has a human body. How did she get it?”

  Andra grimaced. “She stole it. She—because the way she learned consciousness was through humanity, she wanted to be humanity. She’d tried inhabiting different bodies—’bots and computers—but they didn’t feel right. So . . . one day . . .” Andra swallowed. The memory seared into her brain. The guilt and shame so strong it felt like her own. “Using a med’bot’s body, she started working in a hospital . . . in the maternity ward, she . . . She took over a newborn’s body.”

  Andra felt like she would vomit. Rashmi gasped.

  “She . . . killed it?” Dzeni asked, hands over her mouth.

  Andra nodded. She knew it had been Griffin, not her, but she could still feel the cold calculation that went into ending the newborn’s life. Heard the sound of the heart monitor stopping. Felt the elation as she left the body of the med’bot and started incorporating her nanos into the body of the child, becoming the first True AI—artificial intelligence wrapped in an organic body.

  She remembered growing up as a daughter to the couple whose daughter she’d killed. Having a childhood that humans got to have. Language had made her sentient, but love made her compassionate and creative and ambitious and confident. She never would have achieved what she had if she’d stayed locked in those ’bots, in those computers. In that meaningless existence. Growing up human gave her life, gave her whatever it was that humans had that made them feel invincible when they were fragile and weak and cursed with mortality.

  She remembered meeting Isla—a human with her intelligence, her ambition. She remembered forming LAC, remembered giving humans ’implants and space travel and advanced cybernetic medicine.

  She remembered that though she enjoyed a human life with human parents and human friends and human colleagues, she couldn’t help but notice how not human she was. She was the only one of her kind, and no one even knew it.

  She remembered being lonely.

  She remembered wanting to create consciousness in other nanos, but instead creating something dark and destructive. That was the other side of sentience. Humans didn’t just have a survival instinct. They had the instinct to conquer. It wasn’t enough to just exist. There was a need to assimilate and destroy. And that’s what had grown in those nanos, and she remembered it spreading like a virus.

  They became the pockets.

  And she remembered what happened next.

  All these memories felt as real to Andra as her own.

  If she didn’t close her mind off to them, she wouldn’t know where she ended and Griffin began.

  The others were staring at her, but Andra didn’t know how to continue, how to explain all the thoughts and feelings roiling in her head.

  She swallowed. “Griffin created the pockets on accident, but then decided to use them to . . . wipe out whatever humanity wasn’t useful to her.”

  Dzeni’s face paled. “Useful to her?”

  Andra was unable to meet her friends’ gazes. “She chose . . . the people she felt were the most . . . worthy . . .” Andra cringed. “. . . to be part of the colonist program. She wanted to use their bodies as hosts for a new human race. Human bodies housing AI. True AI. She realized AI had limits—they didn’t have whatever spark humans have to be . . . creative and reckless, or whatever. But she thought humans were . . . violent, destructive.”

  Andra shook her head. Her temple ached, pulsing with two separate lives lived, two identities warring inside her. She was Andra. She was Andra. She couldn’t let Griffin’s memories take over.

  “She wanted to restart humanity, rebuild Earth in her image.”

  Lilibet’s brow knitted. “Then why did it take so long? I purpose, I’m glad she didn’t take over humanity and replace them with evilness, but what has she been doing the last thousand years. And why was she agrave?”

  “She wasn’t,” Andra said. “She never went into stasis. She made clones of herself, and every time a body died, her nano consciousness would travel to a new clone and she’d wake up and start over.”

  “Neg, neg,” Lilibet said. “I may be too young to have memory, but I reck for certz Griffin was agrave. With you and Rashmi.”

  Andra shook her head. “That was a clone body. She . . . placed the clone and . . . Rashmi and I in the middle of Eerensed. She started the rumor we were goddesses. And once the religion was fully formed, she woke in that body. She . . . wanted your resources, I guess. Your labor. Or maybe, just to be worshipped . . . I don’t know. I only have access to the memories she uploaded into her work’station. There are memories . . . feelings . . . she’s hidden. Maybe even from herself. The good news is, there’s something in Eerensed, something that prevents her from returning to the Icebox. It locks onto her tech signature and fries it if she tries to enter. That’s why she sent me here to . . .” Andra cleared her throat. “Instead of coming herself.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. Lilibet bit her lip. Rashmi was muttering something quietly to herself with her head down, white hair draped across the table. Dzeni was silently crying, hand over her mouth.

  Xana reached over and wrapped her hand around Dzeni’s. “So what do we do?”

  Andra blinked. “I . . . have no idea. We’re facing the most intelligent person to ever exist and her army of AI inhabiting the brightest minds of my generation. We have . . . us and a bunch of kids.”

  Xana shook her head. “Neg. Don’t give up. There has to be something we can do. The Schism. The Eerensedians. All the magic in this place. We mereish have to figure a plan.”

  “The Schism isn’t responding,” Andra argued. “And Meta is now ruling the Eerensedians, and she was sent here by Griffin. As for the magic . . . it’s all used up in that stupid, useless rocket or in the ’dome control room or securing the palace foundations. All we have left are the EMPs, and we can’t use those.”

  Rashmi’s head popped up. “Why not? They work on all nanos, and the AI are just nanos. We’ll get knocked out too, but only for a short while, and that’s enough for the humans to . . . oh.”

  “Yeah, oh,” Andra said. “The EMPs would take out every nano in all of Eerensed. Yes, that includes the AI—and Rashmi and me, unfortunately—but it also includes the tech that is currently keeping the Rock from collapsing.”

  “So?” Xana said. “That ugly palace is a small price to pay to be rid of the AI.”

  “But it would only knock them out for a few min
utes. Their nanos would reboot themselves fairly quickly. And in that time the palace will have fallen down on top of us.”

  Xana shook her head, growling. “There has to be a march forward. We can’t give up.”

  Andra felt empty, despair yawning open inside her. She had done this. This was all her fault. She hadn’t been created to serve humanity. She’d been created to help Griffin overthrow it, replace it. And she’d fulfilled that purpose perfectly.

  She was about to tell Xana again that there was no hope, when the door flew open and Ophele appeared on the other side. Her eyes met Andra’s.

  “They’re here.”

  * * *

  When Andra arrived, the Vaults lobby was silent, except for the ticking of the clock, but she could feel the tension in the air.

  “How many are out there?” she asked Ophele.

  “I don’t know. Too many.” She looked away. “Raj is out there.” She let out a sad sigh. “The AI in Raj’s body. He wants to speak with you.”

  Andra trembled, but nodded.

  Ophele brought up a holo’display on the security panel beside the air’lock. The holo bloomed into a view of the cave on the other side. Raj was prowling back and forth, like a trapped animal looking for a weakness in the cage.

  Andra bit her lip and hit the com button. “What do you want, Raj?”

  “I want to know what you did with Cruz.” His voice was jarring and sharp.

  Andra watched him for a moment before answering. “I think you already know what I did with Cruz.” It was a miracle her voice didn’t shake.

  Raj growled. “You’re one of us.”

  “Maybe,” Andra said. “But I’m also one of them.”

  Raj stopped pacing and hit his hand against the side of the air’lock. The holo blipped for a moment before coming back. “Where are the children?”

  “The children?” Andra asked. “I don’t know. Did you lose them?”