Lifel1k3

by Jay Kristoff

  “I like Stumpy, myself.” Cricket waved at Ezekiel’s severed arm. “Just putting it out there.”

  “My name is Ezekiel.”

  “And my name’s Eve.” She tilted her head. “Or wait, is it Ana?”

  The lifelike sighed again. “I told you I was confused when I called you that. I hurt my head in the crash.”

  “So Braintrauma it is, then.”

  “Mistress Eve, I thi—”

  Eve hissed as white light burst in her head. A slideshow of images strobing in her mind. She and her family gathered around a long dinner table and smiling at each other. A tower looming over a kingdom of burned glass. Her family again, cold and dead on the floor. Four figures in a pretty row. Their eyes cold. Their faces perfect.

  More human than human . . .

  She was on her hands and knees, head bowed, Cricket beside her.

  “Evie, can you hear me?”

  “Mistress Eve, are you—”

  “Give her space, you bastard,” Cricket growled. “Let her breathe.”

  “I’m trained in human anatomy and medical—”

  “Oh, all the better to murder them, right?”

  “In case you missed that firefight back there, little man, I just saved her life.”

  “We don’t need your help, Stumpy!” Cricket yelled, shrill with fury. “And if you call me little again, I’ll rip off your other arm and shove it up your—”

  “Will you two please shut up?” Eve moaned.

  Cricket zipped his lip immediately, hovering beside her like some metallic mother hen. Eve squeezed her eyes closed, hissing in pain. The ache slowly subsided, her breath came easier. The blood in her temples pounded in time to the pulse in the walls. A war-drum rhythm to match the war inside her skull.

  Lub-dub.

  Lub-dub.

  Ezekiel knelt beside her. Not saying a word. But as she glanced up at it, she saw fear shining in those too-blue eyes.

  The walls are white and pristine. Ezekiel is on one knee beside her bed, fingers entwined with hers. A gentle ping sings from the machines beside her, chiming with every beat of her heart.

  “I thought I lost you,” he whispers.

  Eve frowned, temples pounding. “. . . What?”

  The lifelike blinked. “I didn’t say anything, Mistress Eve.”

  The world was dark again. The pulse thudding through the chamber, throbbing at the base of her skull. Eve pushed her fingers into her eyes to stop the ache.

  “Evie, you okay?” Cricket asked.

  She shook her head. “I think my Memdrive is fritzing.”

  The little logika inspected her implant, head tilted. “Looks like that murderbot fractured a chip when it slugged you. Not good.”

  “Which chip?”

  “Third from the back. The red one.”

  Her memories. The fragments of her childhood, held together with spit and masking tape. The ones Grandpa had pieced together for her.

  “. . . Grandfather?” A sharp smile twisted the lifelike’s perfect lips. “Oh, you poor girl. What has he been telling you?”

  Eve closed her eyes, wincing against the pain.

  “Evie . . .”

  “I’m okay. Just gimme a sec.” Eve cursed, slumped back on her haunches. She looked to Ezekiel, trying to banish the flickering images in her mind’s eye. “What were you saying, Braintrauma? Stomachs? Kraken?”

  Ezekiel glanced at Cricket, concern written clearly on its face.

  “Spit it out, dammit,” she snarled.

  “You’ve heard of BioMaas Incorporated?” it finally asked.

  “My Memdrive is fritzing, but it’s not totally OOC.” Eve scowled. “They’re one of the two big mainland Corps. They’re all about gene-splicing and DNA modification.”

  “Their motto is ‘Sustainable Growth.’” Ezekiel nodded. “And they take it seriously. BioMaas technology isn’t built anymore, it’s grown. Thing is, they don’t like utilizing materials already used by the ‘deadworld.’ They consider them polluted. Impure.”

  “We know all this, Stumpy,” Cricket growled. “Half the junk in Dregs was dumped there by BioMaas. They’d rather toss it than recycle it.”

  “Thing is, they still need raw materials,” Ezekiel said. “So they build kraken. They’re basically huge, living vacuum cleaners that trawl the oceans collecting elemental particles.”

  “Like metals and whatnot?” Eve asked.

  The lifelike nodded. “Iron. Lead. Copper. There’s upward of twenty million tons of gold in the ocean. Thing is, it’s so dilute that it was impossible to collect until BioMaas developed the kraken project. Now they have dozens trawling the seas, filtering pure materials out of the water. But the oceans are so polluted, kraken tend to scoop up a lot of junk, too. It gets collected in specialized stomachs like this one and ejected in designated dumping grounds when the kraken gets too full.”

  Cricket folded his arms. “So you’re saying this thing is just going to swim around with us in its stomach until it . . .”

  “Dumps us,” Ezekiel nodded. “Literally. Probably a few fathoms below the surface.”

  “This. Is. FOUL,” Eve muttered.

  “I mean, the technology is fascinating, but—”

  “And they just swim around brainlessly eating anything they come across?”

  “Kraken are actually very intelligent,” Ezekiel said. “And they have crews inside them. Biomodified to be better suited to their jobs, but still human.”

  The pain was easing in Eve’s skull. She stood slowly, dragged her water-logged fauxhawk into a semi-upright position. “So where are Lemon and Kaiser?”

  Ezekiel shrugged. “Probably in another stomach. Kraken have dozens. These things are huge. The biggest living creatures to ever inhabit the earth.”

  “Well, we’ve gotta go find them and get out of here,” Eve said. “That lifelike kidnapped Grandpa. Do you know where it’d take him?”

  Ezekiel glanced sideways, avoiding Eve’s eyes. “Yes.”

  “It called you ‘little brother.’”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re all 100-Series, right?” Eve pressed. “The lifelikes who rebelled against Nicholas Monrova. Destroyed GnosisLabs.”

  He glanced up at her then. Eyes brimming with sorrow.

  “You know something you’re not telling me . . . ,” she said.

  “I—”

  She hissed suddenly, clutching her brow and doubling up in agony.

  “Evie?” Cricket asked.

  She collapsed forward, clutching her temples and screaming as the pain surged again. The walls about her seething, rolling, splintering like glass. And beyond, that thought was waiting. The one too big and terrifying to contemplate. That flickering picture show, that kaleidoscope, that blinding barrage she was finally realizing . . .

  Not just images.

  “Evie!”

  Memories.

  1.10

  GARDEN

  The Research and Development Division of Gnosis Laboratories takes up most of Babel Tower. My family lives in the upper apartments, pristine white walls and music in the air. In the city below are tens of thousands of workers, all sworn to the Gnosis Corporate State. But in the lower levels, the walls are gray. And instead of sonatas hanging in the air, the scientists hear a voice. Deep and lyrical and sweeter than any music playing in the floors above.

  “GOOD MORNING, MISTRESS ANA. GOOD MORNING, FAITH.”

  “Good morning, Myriad,” we reply, stepping out of the elevator.

  The holographic angel is waiting on a plinth, shining with a vaguely blue light. There are multiple instances of it throughout the tower, assisting and advising. Sometimes simply watching. The artificial intelligence that beats at the heart of Babel can see through almost any camera it likes. Listen through almost any microphone it wants. Truthfully, it’s as close to a god as anything I know. Except that gods rule, and Myriad exists only to serve.

  “YOU SLEPT WELL, MISTRESS ANA?”

  “Yes, thank y
ou, Myriad,” I reply.

  “AND HOW ARE YOU THIS MORNING, FAITH?”

  “Wonderful, thank you, Myriad,” Faith says, and her smile is like sunshine.

  The R & D levels are hustling and bustling, as always, men and women in long white coats rushing to and fro. Computers humming, a million machines singing in time. On levels below this one, they make weapons for the Gnosis military. Machina and logika to patrol the Glass, beat back the predations of the other CorpStates. My father showed me how clockwork functions when I was a little girl, and the R & D levels of GnosisLabs are almost like that. Every piece intermeshed and moving perfectly in time.

  Faith and I walk hand in hand to the lifelike labs. As we arrive outside, the doors whisper apart and out he steps, with his old-sky eyes and strong, chiseled jaw and the clever hands I sometimes dream about but never speak about. Not even to my sister Marie.

  Ezekiel smiles and his dimple creases his cheek, and it’s all I can do not to stare.

  “Good morning, Faith,” he says. “Good morning, Mistress Ana.”

  “Good morning, little brother,” Faith replies.

  Father calls us all his children. The lifelikes all call each other brother and sister. And yet they call us mistress and master unless we command them not to.

  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

  There’s a heat in my cheeks when Ezekiel looks at me, and I feel like a child then. Stupid and silly and much too young. I’ve seen so little of the outside world, barely spent any time with boys my age. I don’t know what I’m feeling. Love? Lust?

  I don’t know why whenever he’s in the room, it seems like there’s no one and nothing else. I don’t know why I wake in the middle of the night and wish he were there. But I see the way he looks at me. And I think, I hope, I dream he might feel the same.

  But still, I know it’s wrong. Though he looks like a beautiful boy, I know he’s nothing close. People can’t love robots, any more than they can love the palmglass in their hand or the computer on their desk. He isn’t a real person. He isn’t a person at all. And I know I’m foolish to want something I can never have.

  But still, I do.

  “Have you been to the botanics section today?” Ezekiel is asking us. “They managed to make the roses bloom this morning.”

  “They solved the replication issue?” Faith asks, her eyes alight.

  Ezekiel launches into a complex explanation about enzymes and helix reconstruction and clonal nodes. Faith follows along, rapt, but much of it is lost on me. I’m told my intelligence quotient is exemplary, but I’m not the scientist my father is. I understand barely half the work they do here—dragging species back from extinction, isolating and cataloging, saving the world one molecule at a time.

  My father is a great man. And he’s always said that great men and women have a great responsibility. Humanity almost destroyed this world of ours. Here in Babel, sometimes it feels like the war never happened, but I know life outside these walls is brutal and short. The deserts are black glass where the bombs landed during the Fall, burning our civilization to cinders. Out near the coasts, the great CorpStates of BioMaas and Daedalus struggle with each other for territory and resources. But Father’s going to save us. He’s going to save the world one day.

  And here I am, still trying to find my place in it.

  I’m fifteen years old, and I’ve never spent more than a few hours outside this city. Never slept under an open sky or gotten lost in the rain or smelled the ocean or . . .

  “I’ve never seen real roses,” I realize.

  Ezekiel tilts his head. “Would you like—”

  “Get in here, you two,” says a gruff voice inside the lab. “I haven’t got all day.”

  The three of us smile, because we know what it means to keep the surly old chief of Research and Development waiting. But a part of me would give almost anything to know what Ezekiel was about to ask me, and I can say with almost certainty that, yes, I’d definitely like to. Even if it’s wrong. Even if it can never be.

  Instead, the beautiful almost-boy nods and strides off down the corridor, and Faith and I hurry inside the lab, the doors whispering closed behind us.

  There are hundreds of people working in here, at computers, on complex simulations, modeling and mapping. Another hologram of Myriad is assisting a crop of researchers around a bank of humming terminals. Against one wall sits an ancient machine salvaged from the wastes. Inside the glass box is one of the first androids humanity ever made: a coin-operated mechanical man dressed in faded cloth. Its paint is flecked and its eyes are made of glass. A sign above the glass box implores me to MAKE A WISH. A handwritten note taped below it reads: Wishing about it won’t get it done.

  At the heart of all this chaos stands a thin, elderly man, shrouded in a white lab coat. He walks with a limp. A shock of gray hair sits atop his head, and his gray eyes are sharp as scalpels. The name CARPENTER is embossed on the ID badge on his chest.

  That’s my surname. Carpenter.

  But . . . isn’t my surname Monrova?

  “Good morning, Doctor Silas,” I say.

  The man who is definitely not my grandfather nods in return.

  “Morning, Ana.”

  But my name . . .

  My name is Eve?

  “Evie!”

  She blinked. Back in her body again. It was the same body as the girl whose life she saw playing out in her head. But that girl was called Ana Monrova. This was the body of Eve Carpenter. The body of . . .

  “Mistress Eve, just try to breathe,” Ezekiel urged, fear plain in its voice.

  No, not its voice . . .

  His voice . . .

  Her fingers drifted to the Memdrive implanted in her skull. The chips plugged into it. Third from the back. Bright red. Like rubies. Like blood.

  “Who am I?” She looked up at Ezekiel, eyes narrowed in growing fury. It couldn’t be.

  It had to be.

  “Who am I?” she repeated.

  Ezekiel chewed his lip, pain in his eyes.

  “Silas warned me not to te—”

  “Tell me!” she roared. “He’s not even my grandfather, he’s some scientist from GnosisLabs! Why do I know that? How am I seeing these things?”

  “Mistress Eve—”

  “Cut the Mistress Eve crap!” she shouted. “Tell me who I am! I’m ordering you!”

  Ezekiel shook his head sadly. “Lifelikes aren’t bound by the Three Laws, Mistress Eve. I don’t have to obey you. But I want to protect you. Please trust me.”

  “How can I trust you? I don’t even know you!”

  But that wasn’t true, and she knew it. The walls were crashing in. Two lives, colliding like stars inside her mind. The life she knew—the life of Evie Carpenter. Domefighter. Top-tier botdoc. A skinny little scavvergirl eking out a living on the island of Dregs. And someone else. Another girl entirely. A virtual princess in a gleaming white tower, looming over a city now dead and abandoned.

  My father was just a lowly engineer.

  He and my mother died when militia . . .

  Pain in her skull. That damaged Memdrive. That shattered chip. The fragments of her childhood collected by her grandpa after the militia headshot that almost ghosted her.

  “. . . Grandfather?” A sharp smile twisted the lifelike’s perfect lips. “Oh, you poor girl. What has he been telling you?”

  Silas Carpenter wasn’t her grandpa. They weren’t even related. And if that had been a lie, everything she knew, everything he gave her, was now suspect.

  Best to be rid of it, no matter what waited for her beyond.

  “Evie?” Cricket asked. “Evie, are you okay?”

  She held her breath. Head swimming. And fixing the lifelike in her stare, she reached up to the Memdrive in her skull. Third chip from the back, riddled with cracks.

  “No,” Ezekiel warned. “Don’t.”

  And with a hiss of pain and a flash of sparks—

  “Don’t!”

  —she tore it f
ree.

  There are roses waiting in my bedroom when I get back.

  Half a dozen blooms, a shade of scarlet I’ve never seen, laid out on my pillow. I know who they’re from, and my chest is full of fluttering, flitting wings, and I press my fingertips to my lips and smile so hard I want to burst.

  I hide the flowers inside one of my mythology books. I have rows of them, salvaged from the wastes. Stacked in shelves in my clean white room with my clean white sheets. Some of them are torn, some of them swollen with old damp, but all of them are loved. Sometimes they feel like the only thing in here that’s real. I settle on the story of Eros and Psyche, pressing Ezekiel’s flowers between the pages so I can keep them. Because I know if Father knew, he’d take them away from me.

  Because I know this can’t ever be.

  I hear later that the head botanist is furious. That those blooms took thousands of man hours to make, and whoever stole them will answer to her. And I wonder, if Ezekiel is programmed to obey, how can he steal? How can Grace hide the way she feels about Gabriel? How can Faith ask me to keep secrets?

  Even though they’re only a few months old, I realize they’re learning to be like us.

  They’re learning to lie.

  Marie and I meet Raphael in the library the next day. He’s sitting in a patch of tinted sunlight, and his skin seems as if it’s aglow. His eyes are closed and his face is upturned against the light, and for a moment, I can’t help but adore him.

  “Hello, Raph,” Marie says, plopping down into her seat.

  The lifelike opens his eyes and smiles his secret smile at us, but I catch a hint of sadness in his gaze. I sit opposite and look at the pile of books in front of him. Babel is one of the only places in the world that has real books anymore. My mother sends teams across the Glass, bringing back all they can find in the old world’s ruins and collecting them in Babel’s great library. Most of them already exist in our computer archives, but there’s nothing quite the same as sitting with a real book in your hands. Breathing in the ink and feeling all those wonderful lives beneath your fingertips. In between the pages, I’m an emperor. An adventurer. A warrior and a wanderer. In between the pages I’m not myself—and more myself than in any other place on earth.