I am about four thousand percent too nervous to eat at this table in this building in this company, let alone strike up conversation. It isn’t the biggest or most pressing of my questions by far, but I say: “What if they find me here? I thought the Director was coming?”
“The Director isn’t here tonight. She’s at a meeting in Shanghai.” He catches sight of my confusion. “Ah. You thought she was going to head the search fleet herself?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“No.” 22 draws the word out an extra half syllable, investing it with some layer of meaning I can’t read. “She doesn’t do that. She’s kept quite busy otherwise.” Unconsciously he brushes his thumb against the back of his other hand.
“Still. If they find me here. Won’t I get arrested or something?”
“No.”
“Why? This place is supposed to be locked down like a prison, nobody—”
“Because I won’t allow it.”
It’s almost exactly what 06 said before. Now as then, it sounds like bluffing. Which, considering who these people are, what they are capable of, is ridiculous.
I can’t help it. I have to ask.
“You, um. How exactly does that work? You’re—” intellectual property, my brain supplies helpfully—“don’t your orders, um—” I grope for vocabulary—“supersede—”
For a long moment 22 just watches me. I fill this silence by pouring myself some water. At least a little of the shaking of my hand has to do with the wreckage of my shoulder muscles.
“My orders are nonspecific in this particular regard,” 22 says, with so much stilted precision that it reads for all the world like irony. Like he’s parodying himself, or at least the side of him Stellaxis shows us. A trivia tidbit pops into my head from somewhere: there is only one face of the moon we ever see. “As there is very little precedent.”
“You don’t usually feed leftovers to civilians.”
“No.”
“Not even temporarily requisitioned ones, section eighteen-point-whatever-C.”
22’s mouth quirks, there and gone. “We do not encounter those as a general rule.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?”
“Perhaps for you. But sixty-two civilian casualties arrived safe with your assistance.” He makes a vague gesture at the trays. I notice he hasn’t removed his gloves. “This is the least we can do.”
We, he says. But he and 06 have done nothing but grate against this building since the second we set foot on the lawn.
The question is a scab I can’t stop picking. What am I doing here?
“You could’ve called in a medical transport.”
22’s everything goes guarded. “We could have. And painted those people with a twenty-ton target.”
“Or called in 08.”
“08 is lately indisposed.”
This seems almost to trip him up. Like he was about to say something else instead of 08. Like maybe a name. An actual human person name he’s not allowed to say in front of some dumbfuck civilian like me who entirely lacks the clearance for that kind of information. And maybe it only almost caught him up because this, whatever’s going on right here at this table, does not tend to happen, and his guard is down.
All of which is quite probably a pile of nonsense. The idea of 22 with his guard down is laughable. But there’s something. I don’t know what it is, but I can see its presence clearly. I can see all the ways he’s dodging around it. Whatever it is, he’s uneasy with it, and that’s enough to put me very much on edge.
Why I can read 22 better than I can read normal human people is a mystery for another day. Jessa would laugh her entire ass off as a certainty.
Moreover: What does indisposed mean for a lab-grown weapon? Malfunctioning? Broken? In for repairs? If B is right, I’d read it as sick, maybe wounded. Either way: odd. It’d be the first I’ve heard of that happening, but then again, it doesn’t really seem like the kind of thing they’d announce on the news.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say carefully. “I hope he recovers soon.”
“Occupational hazard,” 22 says evenly. This seems to amuse him, but darkly. Little green shoots of anger poking up through an endless field of calm and being crushed back into place. I’m beyond lost trying to parse this.
I haven’t heard anything about 08 taking fire. Or being in the field at all. For months. What other occupational hazards do they have? The newsfeeds have been reporting that 08’s been away, doing some kind of diplomatic something or other in another country somewhere. Jessa would know.
But 22 didn’t say busy or unavailable or away. He said indisposed. With the same downplayed deadpan he’d used to joke about being mangled by resonance grenades, being vaporized by the HQ grounds perimeter.
In his understated, on-brand, 22 way, he is saying something he’s not actually saying. To me, or to whoever it is he thinks I’m recording for.
What in the comprehensive fuck did I walk into?
Whatever it is, I’m not sure how much deeper I can go and still find my way back out. Just shut up, Mal. Stop talking. Stop recording. Delete the whole thing. He’ll never know. You’re going to get yourself arrested. They’re going to write essays on you: How Not to Be a Spy.
“Was he wounded?” I ask. “At the front?”
“The front,” 22 echoes. “No, he won’t be—” Deliberately he pauses, resets. “No.”
I make oh-right-of-course body language. “Because he’s still away on that mission. That diplomacy thing.”
There is a look Jessa will give you if you try to debate her when she knows she’s right. Flat, open, do-go-on-enlighten-me. There is statistically significant overlap in the Venn diagram between that look and the look 22 brings to bear on me now.
His looks a lot less passive-aggressive, though, and a lot more flat-out fucking confused. Inasmuch as he allows this to signal on his face, which is not very.
“Diplomacy thing,” he says with studied calm. Smooth and serene and fragile as glass. “Is that what—”
Something passes over his face, vanishes like a rock into a lake.
Pause. Reset.
Programming or brainwashing? Which wall is he coming up against? Hell, people can be programmed too. Look at me, happily paying a dollar an ounce for my company-store water while this place sits here on its watered lawn with its pond and its fountains and its—
“08 is unfortunately feeling a bit under the weather,” he says. Softly, so softly, and his whole self is braced like the saying of it causes him some kind of unseen pain. There comes a sound, which I realize is his hands, gripping the stainless steel table edge. He lets go and makes an unconscious smoothing motion over the surface, but the dents remain.
He looks at me, and his eyes are asking me something his voice, for whatever reason, cannot say. I can’t make out the detail of its outline, but its general shape looks, horrifyingly, like please.
“That isn’t really what you meant to say,” I whisper before I can stop myself. “Is it?”
Something in 22’s face wrenches hard, once, then almost instantly shuts down. The hesitation before he speaks is infinitesimal.
“Eat,” he says. “Then I’ll see what I can do about getting you home.”
I push some food around on my plate, buying time. This is a dead end. They can’t tell me anything. I’ve seen that much already. But can’t as in not allowed to or can’t as in goes against their programming?
The longer I see them, the actual, real-life them, the more convinced I am that they’re human. If pressed, I’m not even sure I could tell you why. Neither robots nor people are fields of study in which I am what anyone would call competent.
Before B brought it up, I wouldn’t even be questioning what the operatives were. But now that I’ve spent some time with them, what 22 and 06 seem like… Have you ever seen one of those big old houses they used to have in movies, with those trees that rich people have cut into the shapes of other things? The Stellaxis CEO had
some of those in his yard in the documentary. He had one shaped like a bird in flight, one shaped like a bear on its hind legs, one shaped like some kind of fish. Really detailed shaping, really intricate, the positioning of the limbs and wings suggesting naturalistic movement. But for all of that? Still trees. That’s what they remind me of.
All that aside, I can’t see some lump of hyperrealistic biotech doing what 06 and 22 have done in just the time in which I’ve barely known them. Why would they, for example, help those people against orders if they were robots? Why would they hide me from the security check? What benefit would it be to an AI to keep me around? Feed me dinner? Attempt, however awkwardly, to engage me in conversation?
But the same question applies if they’re human. Why do any of this? It’s like I’m being tested, and I don’t know what for.
All the obvious answers point one way. I’m not being paranoid. They are hoping I’m recording. They don’t want Stellaxis to know. There’s something they want me to carry out of here for them. Some information. Whatever’s really going on with 08, maybe. I don’t know.
If they’re acting against orders, though, why hasn’t anyone come to chew them out? 06 is just sitting there in Medical, and 22 is here eating stir-fry with an intruder. I don’t get it. I don’t get the first goddamn thing about it.
Was B right? I don’t know. I wish I could just open up my mouth and ask. Obliquely is the only way I can bring myself to arrive at this. I have a sneaking suspicion that coming straight out with a so hey, they say you’re a machine, what’s your take is going to sour this implausible moment of hospitality that I am currently enjoying. I am finding that I need, on a gut-deep level, not to wreck this. Whatever it is.
Do you know a girl named Elena? I want to ask, but my mind is at war with itself because asking the wrong question is going to catapult me straight out of 22’s limited supply of good graces, and I am not a saint.
I can’t give up, though. Not when I’m in this deep already. Whatever he is, he’s my age, and he’s lived in this building for at least the better part of, and maybe all of, his life. I don’t make the mistake of assuming that means he wants conversation for conversation’s sake—I like to think I’ve assessed 22 a little more accurately than that—but there is no question there is something he’s trying to tell me. He is drilling it into my head with the force of his attention. I just have no idea what it is.
It reminds me powerfully of how his in-game version regarded me in those few seconds before it killed me. I set that thought aside.
It’s the hardest thing in the world not to just ask him straight out. So. Funny question. What are you really? But I just manage to talk myself out of it. First off, an AI designed to pass as human probably wouldn’t know the truth. Second, that would almost definitely qualify as asking the wrong question, and then it’s game over, the end, thanks for playing.
“22,” I say, fake-casual. “06. 08. 17. 33. Why not consecutive numbers? Or, you know, names? Doesn’t that get confusing?”
“No. It doesn’t.” Each syllable neatly bitten off. Then, just when I’m certain I’ve fucked this up categorically, he seems to reach a decision. His whole posture tightens even further, like he’s bracing for something. Raises his gaze from the table and locks on. “Not anymore.”
This throws me. “Because…” I falter. I am walking a minefield. I just can’t see it. “Because there are only the three of you left.”
Another silence. But this one feels different. He’s not stonewalling me. He’s watching me expectantly.
Sometimes back home we play charades after power curfew. Well, usually I don’t—performative is not my flavor of choice—but a few of the others do. What this reminds me of is watching them play. Like 22 is waiting for me to say something he can’t.
What does he think I am? What does he want from me? What does he mistake me for being capable of? I feel like an actor in a drama, missing my lines over and over. If you asked me this morning how I thought I’d be spending my day, being tragically overestimated by 22 would not have topped that list. The whole situation is drifting slowly away from what passed for my control. Irreparable.
For the first time in my life, the conscious thought: I wish I were smarter.
“It must have been a lot harder with all twelve of you,” I say slowly. “Especially when you were so young.”
This is the bait I am hoping he’ll rise to. An artificial intelligence will not have at any point been young. At least not in a way that would make remembering a dozen two-digit numbers a challenge.
But no.
“By that point it was easy,” he says quietly.
And flinches like he’s been stung. Hard enough to drop the fork he wasn’t really using anyway. Then it’s gone, like it never happened, and he’s already on his feet and gesturing me to mine. Every motion has gone clipped all of a sudden, and in a way I recognize. It’s the way you carry yourself around pain.
I look at the dented table. I look at how 22 holds himself, always holds himself, like the world is a trip wire he’ll set off if he breathes wrong. That razor-edge precision. That balance.
Something in my mind shifts a little, makes me think of the videos I’ve seen of icebergs, the way they were supposed to have been. The surface fractions. The mass beneath.
Sudden unshakeable feeling that I’ve been staring at him all evening but I haven’t seen him, really seen him, up till now.
“You wanted to get home, yes?” he says. “I won’t keep you waiting.”
If I had a coherent protest formulated, I’d have to shout it at him, because he’s already cleared the room and is making his way out the double doors.
But I don’t, so I don’t. Besides, I’ve seen the SecOps documentary. He could hear me if I whispered it across a city block during rush hour. I swallow all my questions and walk after.
On the way back to the front desk, the halls are still pretty much deserted. Sentry bots, the odd soldier or scientist or salaryman, but that’s all. It’s only nine p.m. It’s not that late. Then again, it’s a big building. For all I know there are thousands of people here.
I follow 22 to the elevators and ride up to the ground floor in silence. He’s just standing there now, hands clasped behind his back, elegantly glowering. Neat if I had the faintest inkling how I’d managed to disappoint him, foregone conclusion though that certainly the fuck was. We have the elevator to ourselves.
It’s now or never. Whatever it is.
The doors whish open, and I mash the button to shut them again.
This gets 22’s attention. He whirls on me, hand on sword hilt, faster than anything.
“Wait,” I choke out. “Wait.”
I stop the recording and palm my lenses. Nowhere to put them. Doesn’t matter. I hold both hands up, palm out, trying to keep my lenses in place with a thumb.
“I can help you,” I whisper. I have no idea what I mean by it, how I’ll make good on it, why this lie is falling out of my mouth. But if B is right about the operatives, then Stellaxis has told a lot worse lies than that. If B is right, then the superweapon menacing me with a goddamn sword right now is a human person pretty much exactly my age, who lost a family just like me, and might be living in old town with me and Jessa and the rest of us if this place hadn’t gotten its hooks in him first.
“Do I give the impression,” he breathes at me, “that I am in need of your help.”
Maybe I have him all wrong. Maybe I have his life all wrong. Maybe B is full of shit, and I’m about to paint an elevator with my insides on somebody else’s misguided assumption. And there’s no save point waiting to respawn me.
But I’ve been watching some buried conflict go at it with itself all across his face for an hour now, and I know better. Or I hope to holy hell I do.
A test, I think.
Slowly, looking straight at him, I nod.
22 rears back a couple inches like a slow-motion snake. “Is that right.”
“I know,” I say, and
my voice gives out.
He watches me in level silence. His patience is the patience of the sea.
“I know that the company has been lying about you and 06 and all the others all along,” I say, forcing the words out, even though my voice is cracking. “I know that they tell people you were grown in a tank and given computers for brains, and I know that’s not true. I know they’re doing something to you when you say things they don’t like. And I know this,” I continue, searching his face. It’s a gamble, but I think of the way he never takes his gloves off, the way he touched the back of one hand when he mentioned the Director, the way he brought me here in the hope that I could see between the lines to everything he’s been trying to tell me, and I go all in. “Kidnapping children to torture them into becoming weapons is a war crime. Or it fucking well should be.”
Minutes of silence, or so it feels. It’s probably seconds at most. Whatever conflict he’s been suppressing escalates from periodic skirmish to full-on brawl. He’s wound so tight it’s like someone has tasked him to keep all the world’s secrets. If he so much as twitches at such close quarters, I could die.
“Forty-eight,” he says at last. It’s the barest whisper, and I have to strain to hear it. There’s no footage to replay this time. “There were forty-eight.”
0011
THE DOORS WHISH OPEN, AND I MASH the button to shut them again.
This gets 22’s attention. He whirls on me, hand on sword hilt, faster than anything.
“Wait,” I choke out. “Wait.”
The recording ends on a freeze-frame of 22 looking like somebody just flipped his murder switch. A replay icon pops up in the middle of the screen.
Jessa nearly throws the pocket screen across the room. “You stopped recording?” She’s too worked up to wait for an answer. “Why?”
She definitely wants an answer to that part, but I’m not sure I have one she’s going to like. I’ve been kicking it around in my head since I left the Stellaxis building, mentally replaying that conversation over and over, as if by so doing I’ll etch it indelibly into my brain.
Firebreak Page 17
