by Joan He
“Who is this ‘Hero’?”
The sharpness of her voice startles me. “A—a boy.”
“A boy.” Kay’s gaze darkens. “Has he tried to hurt you, by any chance?”
The question prods at a memory of Kay telling me to be careful. She did that each time I went out. I smile. “Aw, love, I can take care of—”
“Cee. Tell me. Has this Hero ever tried to kill you?”
Kill.
I suddenly remember that we’re at the bottom of the sea, that I swam here after . . . after . . . he tried . . . and I did. Kill.
I killed him.
I didn’t mean to. And: “He didn’t mean to.” It sounds absurd, once I say it, but it’s true. The boy who tried to kill me didn’t recognize me, didn’t know me. He wasn’t Hero.
Kay sighs. “Well, you’re safe now.”
“So are you. You have no idea—” My voice breaks. No idea how hard I tried to find you. But words can’t convey that, so I violate my promise to give her space and lean in, through the holograph, and hug her.
She’s motionless under my arms. Then slowly, she pats my back.
“Cee,” she says when I pull back but keep my hands on her shoulders, marveling that she’s real and touchable and right in front of me. “Please. Have a seat.”
I plop back in the light-chair less warily this time. “Are we leaving now?” The room is cold and I’m not even the one sitting in goo.
“We are,” says Kay, then grips the sides of the casket. She pushes to her feet unsteadily. I reach out to help her, but my limbs won’t move. She steps one foot out of the pod, blue goo running down her leg and pooling on the ground, and my body stiffens. Her other foot joins the first, and my vision dims.
“Kay?” My voice sounds weak, weaker than it did after Hero choked me. Dread swirls in my stomach, gathering speed like it’s going through a drain. “What’s . . . happening . . .”
“. . . IT TERMINATES.”
The bot had found her. Once they refined the design, it’d do more than that. It’d take her out of stasis. Then it’d be up to Kasey, or whoever was designated as “re-habitator zero,” to wake everyone else up after confirming the habitability of outside conditions.
The bot’s job was done.
And so with a whir, it powered down.
“CEE.” ALL MY OTHER SENSES are fading, but I can still hear her crystal clear. “You should understand by now.”
She takes a shaky step closer. My fingers and toes go numb, as if in response. I can’t move anything but the muscles in my face as she stops half a meter away and says, “You’re not really human.”
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again—
“I know something happened to me.” Something that explains how I washed back ashore, alive, after rowing Hubert out for seven days, and how my eyeballs didn’t burst from the pressure of diving to the bottom of the sea. How Hero could have come back to life.
But none of that changes what Kay means to me.
“And I know I might not be . . .” human, not human “. . . like you,” I gasp, unable to choke out the words. I’m not like you. Not as smart as you. Not as strong as you. “But I’m still your sister, Kay.”
“My sister is Celia.” She doesn’t say it cruelly, just as a matter of fact. “And Celia died a long time ago.”
Died.
I swallow the obscene amount of saliva pooling in my mouth and almost gag as it slithers down my throat. “Then who am I?”
She glances over me, quiet. “You’re artificial intelligence prototype-C.” When I don’t react, she sighs, as if she was trying to spare me. “A bot.”
The words glance off me, missing the mark. I shake my head. I know what a bot is. A bot is U-me. I’m not U-me.
“When you couldn’t see in color,” says Kay, “that was because you hadn’t yet unlocked your next level of self-actualization. And once you saw in color, you felt a stronger pull to the sea, yes?”
No, I try to say, but find that I can’t. Can’t seem to lie, because yes, the day after my world filled with color, I did wake up in the sea.
“It’s a part of your programming. As a built-in safety, you’re drawn to all bodies of water, not just the ocean.”
Which would explain my jumping into the pool—no, stop.
“We designed you to be mechanically hardier than a real human for sustainability reasons, but you experience the same pain and psychological trauma. And while your intelligence is set to the fiftieth percentile, you possess an internal search engine that allows you to learn new skills in the absence of external models.”
Say something to make her stop. “But my memories . . . all my memories. Of you. Of us . . .”
“Seventy percent were Celia’s, retrieved from her own brain.”
“Seventy?” The number feels wrong in my mouth, too precise and too incomplete.
“Five percent had decayed with time,” says Kay, as if memories are made of wood. “Ten percent, we enhanced.”
“We?”
“My team and I.”
A team. Multiple people, privy to things inside of my head. I want to crawl out of my skin. “So you . . . built my memories.” Like a boat? A raft?
“Coded them,” corrects Kay, and then before I can even ask, “all but for fifteen percent. Overall well-being improves when your brain is allowed to fill in the gaps, in whichever way is best suited for your circumstances.”
It sounds smart and logical and like gibberish. “But why? Why give me these . . .” memories. No, they can’t be memories if they’re manufactured. “Why give me this at all?” If I’m not her? Denial chills my spine. My need to find Kay is real. Our kinship, our bond. My memories are real, and this . . . this whole situation is fake. A dream. I’m not here. I’m still on the island, still Cee—
“Deep breaths, Cee.”
Fuck it, I don’t want to—
I start taking deep breaths.
As I sit, locked in my own skin, Kay looks over me. Her face goes mask-still, but her eyes give her away. I see the calculations being conducted in them. She’s weighing the costs and benefits. Choosing between what makes sense—
She sighs.
—and what will make me happy.
“Cortisol, negative one point five.”
The fear bubbling in my stomach calms to a simmer.
Kay sits at the foot of the casket, covering the holograph projector. The translucent numbers and graphs between us vanish. We’re eye level now, and Kay makes sure to look at me as she speaks.
“I know these three years haven’t been easy for you, Cee. So allow me to explain. You were designed to find me.”
She goes on. She talks about a time when Earth was failing, its air, water, and land poisoned by humankind. Scientists came up with all sorts of ways to clean things up, but every innovation had an unforeseen side effect. Some of what she says rings true within me, and I know I must have a buried memory to match. But when she gets to the megaquakes and the casualties, numbering in the hundreds of millions, the ringing stops. I guess that’s where my—Celia’s memories end.
“But why me?” I ask after she explains the solution she proposed to the world. It’s brilliant, of course. All of Kay’s ideas are. “Why not send out a . . .” No, no, no. “. . . a real human?”
“You’re better than a real human, C. Real humans, well, they die. Or they lie,” she says, voice roughening, “to further whatever self-interests they may have. You can’t die, and your data logs true. Besides, consider the ethics. You’re the final bot, released only because your predecessors successfully reached progressively higher happiness thresholds. Bots A and B faced far harsher environments, suffering immensely in their struggle to ‘survive.’ To ask humans to do the equivalent? That plan would never pass.” She frowns as tears fill my eyes. “Cortisol, negative two point zero.”
“I have loved ones, too,” I whisper as my emotions dampen yet again.
“The boy, Hero? Oh, Cee.” Kay speaks as if I�
��m the younger sister, green and naive. “Some people bear a grudge against humanity and can’t be stopped, no matter what you do.”
“That’s not Hero,” I blurt. “He doesn’t have a grudge against anyone.”
“I know,” Kay says quietly, rubbing her wrist again. “I’m not talking about Hero.”
And neither was I. Hero wasn’t the loved one I was referring to. Not entirely. He’s not the one I see in my dreams, not the face right before me.
My hands begin to shake at my sides. “So what now?” I ask, before Kay can notice and dial down my emotions. “What are you going to do, now that I’ve found you?”
What’s going to happen to me?
“Set the pods on course for the surface, where everyone will be released from stasis,” answers Kay.
Stasis. Pods. Stasis pods. The vocabulary returns to me like it’s always been part of my world. I am Celia, I think. I am Celia. But I am also Cee, and I can’t help but acknowledge that when I say, “What if I lied? What if my data is messed up and Earth isn’t re-habitable?”
“Possible,” says Kay. “But not probable.”
“What if?”
My hands are balled so tightly that a little bit of feeling prickles through them. Kay notices, but lets me have my pain as she decides whether or not to entertain my “not possible” scenario. She rubs her wrist, and this time, the gray material covering it slides up enough for me to see a green-black line encircling her skin.
“If I had reason to believe your systems were malfunctioning,” she finally says, “I’d check the surface for myself.”
I can’t look away from the line on her wrist. “And if things weren’t right, you’d go back to sleep?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The pods run on a closed, infinite energy loop. Opening them breaks the loop and weakens the electrical balance of the solution. In time, the body’s cells will resume aging.”
It takes me a moment to understand the implication. “Then you . . .”
“Yes. If, hypothetically, I were to be woken prematurely, there would be no way of returning to complete stasis.” Her gaze narrows. “But I’d release the next C-model to run its trial, and it’d been in charge of waking the second re-habitator zero come time.”
I imagine this playing out. Kay, alone in this facility forever. Or Kay, living out the rest of her years on the island, as lonely as I was. It feels like a kick to the kidneys. “Why did you volunteer for this?” I croak.
“I’m the creator of the idea.”
She says it like it’s the most logical conclusion. But it’s not—at least not from the sister I knew. Kay accounts for the risks, however slight. She had to have been okay with a chance of dying alone, without being joined by the rest of the world.
I confirm my hunch by looking into her eyes. In the depths of her pupils, I see cold fire, the same kind that consumed her years ago, when she was lost in the world of her mind and I was too distant to notice. But then we repaired our relationship and slowly, that fire abated.
What has happened since I—Celia died?
I look back to the line on her wrist. It shouldn’t be there. Never was, in all my dreams and memories. Who did this to her? Who hurt her while I was gone?
“Kay.” I don’t care if I’m in danger. I want to touch her, to cup her cheek and prove I never left her. “You have me. You’ve always had me.”
The facility quiets.
I can hear a thousand things I didn’t hear before. The lights, drawing energy from generators embedded in the walls. The sea, pulsing around us. The beat of our hearts, mine and hers, in perfect sync.
Kay clears her throat.
“I’m sorry, Cee. I had to program you with a terminate function. There was no other way Operation Reset would’ve passed the international board of ethics.”
“Kay—”
My body goes rigid as she stands. Or tries to. Even if the blue goo was supposed to preserve her body cell for cell, her muscles are clearly still weak after a thousand years of disuse, and she sits back down on the compartment’s edge, bracing her hands on her knees to try again.
The moment stretches out before me, forking in two paths. In one, I let her stand. I let her be the person I always knew she could be, someone who’s going to save billions of lives. The other path . . . I won’t let myself envision it. It’s selfish and it’s wrong and it’s . . . it’s right, to want to live. A right. I deserve to live, I think as the word terminate boomerangs through me, shattering me where it hits, breaking bone and bonds and beliefs I thought I needed but all I need—all I want—is to see the rest of the stars in the sky with Hero and taste every unmade taro recipe and hear the words left for U-me to define and feel all the life I—Celia, Cee—have yet to live.
Kay would want that for me.
Which means the person before me isn’t Kay. If Kay were actually here, with me, she’d be thinking of a way to get us out of this situation.
But she’s not here.
In this room at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by billions of people depending on me to die for them, I am on my own.
Not-Kay starts to rise, and my mind scrambles.
“You—” A string tightens from my belly to my throat, straining to fish up a feeling, a memory, a something, anything to stop her—“You never saw her die!”
Silence.
Stillness.
Then it starts. In her eyes. Emotion, spreading slow. She’s thinking that I shouldn’t know this. There’s no way I can, but apparently I do and it’s the truth: Kay never saw Celia die. This must be one of those learned memories she was talking about, something of my brain’s making, best suited to my circumstances, and it works, because after a moment, Kay sits back down, as if the strength has been stolen from her legs, and like a scale, strength tips back into mine. The bonds around my limbs weaken. Feeling prickles back into my skin, then freedom—a glorious rush—and before I can give my body permission, it rebels against its oppressor. My mutinous hands shove into Kay’s chest before either of us realizes what’s happening. She falls backward into the pod. I see her shell-shocked eyes there, then gone. I’ve heaved the lid shut.
But there’s blue goo on the ground, evidence of what I’ve done.
And the pod door is glowing with words:
POD-BREECH DETECTED.
POD-BREECH DETECTED.
SOLVENT WILL SUSTAIN ELECTRICAL BALANCE FOR 192 HR.
191 HR 59 MIN 59 S
191 HR 59 MIN 58 S
191 HR 59 MIN 57 S
And my heart is hammering. I could reverse this. I could open the pod. My heart is not my body my heart is not my body my heart—
Is broken. By the one I thought I loved.
So it joins my body on the goo-splattered ground and on my knees, I sob.
“GOOD WORK,” EKATERINA SAID AFTER the presentation. The message arrived in Kasey’s Intraface with a ding that must have reverberated in Actinium’s, too. Ever since the day on the pier, and more so after building the demo-bot together, their minds had felt connected, and as they parted at their respective ducts, his going down and hers up, she knew they were thinking the same thing.
Oh, what P2C didn’t know.
Yes, the solution was universal. Everyone could and would be put into stasis. Earth would clean itself, and be repopulated—by the ones who could be trusted not to ruin it again. As for everyone else? They could sleep on. Kasey and Actinium would ensure it. It was a simple bit of programming: a perma-lock command on the pod, activated by rank, or whatever empirical measure of planetary stewardship they decided upon. It wouldn’t kill those people—not in the same way they’d almost killed the rest of them, and might yet still if they were allowed to return.
But one thing at a time. First, Operation Reset needed to pass. Seven out of eight eco-cities currently supported it; eco-city 6 was still on the fence. Kasey didn’t blame them. It was one thing to ask your citizens to spend at least 33% of their waking mom
ents in holo to save the world, and another to ask them to sacrifice even more to protect the people who hadn’t.
Meanwhile, the outside territories were much more divided. Delegates from Territories 6, 7, and 11 had pledged themselves to the solution; they’d also charted the highest percentage dead. Territories 1 and 12, on the other hand, mostly unscathed by the megaquake, had pledged zero. Human selfishness at its best. Kasey committed those territories to memory. Info like this could be factored into calculations of who deserved to wake and who, for the sake of everyone else, was better left in stasis.
Granted, they’d all suffer if selfishness prevailed. The solution required a 100% participation rate or none at all. Governments would rather let their people die than fall behind. The deadline for a consensus was just a week away, and with only 57% delegates pledged despite Kasey’s presentations and P2C’s broader maneuvers, Kasey had no idea what else might help.
Ekaterina did. At night, she messaged again, asking if Kasey was willing to present in Territory 4 tomorrow—in person. “You wouldn’t be exposed,” Ekaterina was quick to mention. “But to make inroads among some of these territories, we’re going to have to establish more of a human connection.”
Of course, Kasey thought into her Intraface messaging app, transmitted it, then looked to the night sky beyond the polyglass. She was in the Coles’ unit, sitting on one of their chaises. As her biomonitor reminded her this morning, it was the seventh anniversary of their passing. Seven years since the day Celia had sobbed in her room, and Kasey had violated her brain by trying to cancel her pain. Correlated or not, Celia had spent the next two anniversaries alone. It was only after Kasey committed her second violation by trying to rebuild their mom that Celia stopped avoiding her. Together, they’d gone to the Coles’ unit; Kasey had watched as Celia dusted off the picture of Ester, Frain, and their boy on the coffee table before filling the vase with everfiber flowers. The gesture seemed wasted on the dead, but when Celia did it, it felt right in a way Kasey couldn’t emulate. So tonight, Kasey had come empty-handed. She wasn’t her sister. Wasn’t persuasive or likeable enough.
