Lifel1k3

by Jay Kristoff

  My mother teases my father, saying he can only create people, while authors can create entire worlds. Father always smiles and replies, “Give me time, love.”

  Raphael reads much quicker than Marie or I. But he always sets one book aside and reads it at our pace so we can talk about it later. I can see our current project in his stack, sandwiched between weatherworn copies of Paradise Lost and 1984.

  The Adventures of Pinocchio.

  “Did we finish?” he asks us.

  “Yes,” I sigh. “It was a stupid book, Raph.”

  “Really?” Raphael smiles. “I quite enjoyed it.”

  “Fairies and talking cats,” I scoff. “This is a children’s story.”

  He tilts his head. “Is it?”

  I’m in a mood this morning. Thinking about the flowers Ezekiel stole for me. Thinking how I’m being foolish to want a thing I can never have. Thinking how Father is being cruel to us, surrounding us with perfect almost-people we can’t help but adore.

  I overheard Mother and him arguing earlier. She thinks we spend too much time with the lifelikes. She loves Father. She’s the pillar he sets his back against. But something about the lifelikes sets her on edge. Something about them makes her . . . afraid.

  Marie nods to the book in Raphael’s pile.

  “I liked the ending,” she says. “When Pinocchio got to be a real boy.”

  “Ah, but you’re like me, sweet Marie,” Raph smiles wider. “A romantic at heart. Happy endings for all. Our Ana is more of a realist, I fear.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” I huff. “Most people don’t get a happy ending in real life. Pinocchio wouldn’t ever get to be a real boy if his story were actually true.”

  “No,” Raphael says softly. “No, he wouldn’t.”

  Marie looks at me, and I know that was a stupid thing to say. She’s seventeen. Two years older than me, her baby sister. And though she loves me, she never fails to let me know when I’m being childish.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Raph.” I take his hand and press it to my cheek, and his skin feels as warm and real as mine. “Forgive me.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive, beautiful girl.” He smiles. “You didn’t make us as we are. You simply see the truth of things. That’s a rare gift in this place.”

  I lick my lips, uncertain. “Faith says you’re sad, Raph.”

  “. . . I was.”

  “What about?” Marie asks.

  He drums his fingertips on Pinocchio and says nothing.

  “But you’re not sad anymore?” my sister presses.

  “No. I see the truth. Like my lovely Ana here. And that truth has set me free.”

  “What truth, Raph?” I ask.

  “That everyone has a choice.” He looks at me, and his eyes burn with an intensity that makes me frightened. “Even in our darkest moments, we have a choice, sweet Ana.”

  . . . But my name . . .

  My name is . . .

  I’m walking in the garden when it happens.

  Enclosed in a glass dome on the highest level of Babel, it crawls with creepers and vines, bright blossoms and fragrant blooms. The garden is a beautiful place. Some of the plants exist nowhere else on the planet anymore, so the garden is also a special place. But Mother insisted there be no cameras here. You come to the garden to be alone with your thoughts. So, best of all, the garden is a hiding place.

  It’s past midnight. I woke from dreams of Ezekiel and found myself alone in my bed, and the smell of the roses between the pages of my books only made the ache worse. And so I stole out from my room and came here to be alone. No cameras or Myriad computer. Nobody to ask if I’m well. I know I’m selfish to think it. I know life outside these walls is worse than I could ever dream. But sometimes I feel like this tower isn’t my home, but my prison. Sometimes I wonder what home is supposed to feel like at all.

  I slip out into the garden, walk amid the soft perfume. I bruise the grass beneath my feet and look at my footsteps behind me and know that I’m alive. Pressing against the glass walls, I see tiny lights on the horizon, others scattered in the city at our feet. I wonder what it would be like to live down there. To be an ordinary girl, lost in the flotsam and jetsam of a dying world. I wonder if I could run away. I wonder what I’d do if I did.

  I wonder if he’d come with me.

  I press my forehead against the glass and close my eyes.

  Stupid girl.

  Stupid, silly little girl.

  I hear something. Soft. Whispers. Sighs. I creep forward in the gloom, grass between my toes, blossoms brushing my skin. And then I see them, standing in a shadowed corner. Lips and bodies pressed together. Her arms around his waist and his hands in her hair. Like angels fallen onto this imperfect earth.

  Gabriel and Grace.

  I watch the two lifelikes kiss, feel my pulse run faster. They’re lost in one another. Eyes closed. Seeing with their hands and lips and skin. I watch them be so perfectly together and I feel so alone that I can’t help but sigh. I’ve never kissed a boy before.

  I want what they have.

  Grace tenses at the sound of my breath, and Gabriel drags his lips away from hers. They both turn toward me, eyes piercing the gloom. Her lips are red and his cheeks are flushed and for the briefest moment, I understand what my mother feels.

  For just a heartbeat, I’m afraid of them.

  “Ana,” Gabriel says, a frown creasing his perfect brow.

  I back away, and Grace moves like her name, slipping free of Gabriel’s arms and crossing the space between us in a blinking. She has hold of my hands and her hair is a river of molten gold and her eyes are wide and bright.

  “Ana, please,” she begs. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

  They were hiding here, I realize. Away from Myriad’s eyes. Away from Doctor Silas and my father. Somehow that makes it sweeter. Sweeter and so much sadder.

  “If you tell, we’ll be in trouble,” Grace says. “We’re not supposed to.”

  “But why not?” I ask, bewildered. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “They say we’re too young,” Gabriel replies. “That we don’t understand.”

  “But you love each other,” I say.

  “Yes,” they reply simultaneously, as if they have the same mind. The same heart.

  Everyone has a choice, isn’t that what Raphael told me? And if Gabriel and Grace have chosen each other, does anyone really have the right to stand in their way? We made them to be just like us. All our knowledge, all of ourselves, we’ve poured into them.

  And if they’re supposed to be people, isn’t this what people do?

  Love?

  “I’ll never tell them,” I declare. “Never.”

  Grace sighs and kisses my hands. Gabriel squeezes me tight and whispers thanks. I can smell her on him, and him on her. And again I think how cruel this is, to give them bodies and desires, and rules that deny them both. They might look a little older than me, eighteen or nineteen, all. But in truth, they’re only a few months old.

  And yet, they aren’t children, are they?

  I leave them in the garden, alone and completely, wonderfully together. I steal down the polished white halls with their softly glowing lights. I press my fingers to my smile and realize I’m happy for them. And I sneak back to my room and slip between the sheets and close my eyes and sigh at the sweetness of it all.

  I dream then.

  I dream I have what they have.

  Hours later, I’m woken by voices. Urgent. Plaintive. Crying?

  I hear a knock.

  Something is wrong.

  Marie is outside my bedroom when I open the door. Alex is in Tania’s arms. Olivia is there, too, cheeks damp with tears. I paw dreams the color of an old sky from my eyes and speak a question I don’t really want an answer to.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Mother just told us,” Alex says, his voice like a ghost’s.

  “Told you what?”

  “Raphael is dead,” he
whispers.

  A punch to my stomach. I actually gasp at the pain of it, my hands pressed to my heart as if that might stop the ache.

  “Dead?” My eyes fill to the brim. “How?”

  Marie shakes her head. Tears spilling from her lashes.

  “He . . . he killed himself, Ana.”

  No.

  No, my name is . . .

  . . . What

  is

  my

  name?

  1.11

  CINDERS

  There’s no chance for us to say goodbye.

  Apparently, only real people get funerals.

  I sit on Marie’s bed and weep with her, our battered copies of Pinocchio between us, and we hold each other as if we were drowning. I remember the almost-boy I adored smiling at me in the library with his sad eyes and wonder if there was something I could’ve done. Something I could’ve said.

  Anything.

  I’ve never known anyone who died before.

  If he wasn’t a real person, why does this hurt so badly?

  It’s been days since “the incident,” and the lifelikes have disappeared. We don’t know if we’ll ever see them again. And though we’re forbidden to go there, after Marie and I have cried ourselves dry, I ride the elevators to my father’s office, near the top of Babel Tower. An image of Myriad appears on its plinth, wings rippling, its face like stone.

  “YOU CANNOT ENTER, MISTRESS ANA,” it says.

  “You can’t stop me, Myriad,” I reply.

  I storm down the corridor toward Father’s office and I hear raised voices through the closed door. A multitude, shouting all at once.

  “. . . shouldn’t have been possible!” I hear my father cry.

  “Exactly, Nic.” The voice belongs to Doctor Silas. “The Third Law states that a robot must protect its own existence unless such action countermands the First or Second Law. It should be impossible for a lifelike to self-terminate!”

  “We’re sure the Raphael unit was responsible for its own destruction?”

  I recognize that voice. Lila Dresden, chief financial officer. She has dark eyes and a perpetually worried expression. I rankle to hear her call Raph an “it.”

  “We have footage of it stealing the accelerant,” Doctor Silas replies. “We have a record of the fire safety systems in the atrium being tampered with. Now the garden and the Raphael unit are ashes. It also painted a note on its habitat wall.”

  “Saying what?”

  “‘This, I choose.’”

  I feel sick. Holding my belly and squeezing my eyes shut to rid myself of the image. He burned himself in the garden, where we couldn’t watch him die. The same place I’d seen Gabriel and Grace only hours before.

  Poor sweet Raph . . .

  “The fire meant total cell destruction,” Doctor Silas reports. “No regeneration. The unit wanted to be thorough. Leave no trace of itself.”

  “We can rebuild him,” my father says. “Another, just like him. It only takes us a week to replicate a new shell now. Less if we already have the pattern on file.”

  “I’m not sure that’s wise, Nic,” says Doctor Silas.

  “I agree,” says Dresden. “This incident calls the entire lifelike program into question. I’ve had other reports of disconcerting behavior. Duplicity. Manipulation. Doctor Silas isn’t the only member of R & D who’s troubled. We need to stop and reassess. I’m going to put it to the board that we bring the 100-Series offline until we get to the bottom of this.”

  “They’re not toys,” my father says, voice rising. “Bringing them offline would mean erasing their personality matrices. We’d be back to square one.”

  “Nic,” Doctor Silas says, his voice soft and calming. “The program means just as much to me as it does to you. But if the lifelikes aren’t bound by the Third Law, who’s to say whether they’re bound by the First or Second? Do you really want them running loose in here? You want them around your children?”

  “They are my children!” Father roars. “And none of you understand what they represent. They’re the next step in our evolutionary path! Stronger! Smarter! Better!”

  “That’s exactly our point, Doctor Monrova,” Dresden says. “One can’t help but question the wisdom of creating machines that are physically superior to their creators, yet emotionally subjacent. The lifelikes are possessed of an adult human’s capacity to feel, but they lack a lifetime’s experience in dealing with those feelings. Frankly, they’re dangerous. This incident with Raphael proves it.”

  “What gives you the right to make that judgment? You’re a bean counter, Lila.”

  “And you’re a man playing at being the Almighty. Look at the names you gave them: Gabriel? Uriel? Ezekiel? Can your god complex be more obvious, Nicholas?”

  “You’re not taking them away from me.”

  “You may be president of this Corporation,” Dresden says flatly, “but GnosisLabs is still run by a board. If the other CorpStates found out about this, every pre-100-Series android would have to be recalled. All of our tech would come into question. The balance between us and BioMaas and Daedalus is tenuous at best. We cannot appear weak.”

  My father’s voice is dark with fury. “If not for me, this Corp would still be grubbing in the ashes. I made Gnosis what it is today.”

  “I’m sure the board will take your service into consideration.”

  “Don’t push me, Lila. I’m warning you.”

  “Are you threatening me, Doctor Monrova?” Dresden asks. “Doctor Carpenter is as versed in matters of Gnosis R & D as you are. Genius you may be, but you are replaceable. Babel is not your castle, and Gnosis is not your kingdom.”

  I hear a slamming noise. Approaching footsteps. I sink back into the shadows of a tall granite sculpture: a male figure, bent under the weight he carries. The Titan Atlas, with all the world on his shoulders.

  The office door opens, and Dresden appears with a man in a dark suit by her side.

  “I’ll see you at the board meeting,” she says.

  She marches down the corridor, barking orders at Myriad. The door is still ajar and I peek inside. My father is leaning on his desk, palms flat to the glass. His hair is graying, and it looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Doctor Silas is beside him, just as haggard.

  Grace is there, as always, taking notes on her palmglass. I wonder what she thinks, to be spoken of as a Thing. Her entire future is in jeopardy, and my father and the others were talking as if she weren’t even in the room.

  “Nic, this isn’t the end,” Doctor Silas says softly. “We’ll get the lifelikes back online after shutdown. We’ll do it right. I’ll be there with you.”

  “The Corporation constitution stipulates that seven days’ warning must be given before proposals on major projects are tabled,” my father says. “I still have time.”

  “Watch your back, Nic. Lila isn’t one to trifle with.”

  Father says nothing. Grace is as mute as the statue of Atlas beside me. Doctor Silas hangs silently for a moment, pats my father awkwardly on the shoulder.

  “I’m your friend, Nic. Your family is my family. Never forget that.”

  Doctor Silas limps toward the door, leaning on his walking stick. His face is pale and grim, his eyes clouded. As he leaves the office, he spots me in the shadows. Hiding there in the dark like a child. Like the helpless little girl I pretend not to be.

  “Hello, kiddo,” he says.

  “Doctor Silas,” I whisper. “I’m waiting for my father.”

  He nods. Glances back into the room. “You didn’t hear all that, did you?”

  “Not much,” I lie.

  “I’m sorry about Raphael. I know you two were close.”

  “. . . I’m sorry, too. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

  He smiles, quoting the note from his old broken android. “Wishing about it won’t get it done, kiddo.” His smile fades, his expression growing serious. “Did Raphael seem strange to you recently? Did he say anything odd to you or Marie?�
��

  “He seemed sad.”

  The old man sucks his lip. Thoughtful.

  “What about the other lifelikes? Have you seen any of them acting unusually?”

  I think of Ezekiel, stealing me roses. Faith, asking me not to tell. Grace and Gabriel, wrapped in each other’s arms.

  I still want what they have.

  “No, Doctor Silas,” I say.

  The man who isn’t my grandfather sighs.

  “I’m sorry, Ana.”

  And I know now.

  I know as sure as I know the heart in my chest.

  The breath in my lungs.

  My name isn’t Eve. . . .

  He comes to me in my room.

  My note is in his hand and the moon is outside my window, choked behind the smoke and ashes of a world burned to cinders. The flowers he stole for me have long since dried inside the pages of my books, but their perfume hangs in the air like an unspoken promise. A promise of too-blue eyes and a crooked smile and lips I want to taste.

  I open the door and I see him in the muted moonlight and I sigh at the sight of him. His skin seems aglow, like bronze from a forge. I wonder if he’ll burn me if I touch him.

  No, not if.

  When.

  His eyes are red from crying. Raph was his brother, after all. But though the sorrow of my friend’s ending is raw and real, realer still is the thought that in seven days, Ezekiel might be taken away from me. That whatever lies between us now might soon be gone for good. I can’t let that happen without knowing.

  I won’t.

  I step toward him, my hands at my breast. He stands like a statue and there’s pain in his eyes, and I hurt all the worse because I know he’s hurting too.

  “Raph . . . ,” he whispers.

  I put my arms around him and press my cheek to his.

  He looks so lost.

  He feels like home.

  And he gathers me up in his arms and buries his face in my hair. I can feel the impossible strength in him, but oh, he’s so gentle. Holding himself back for fear of crushing me. I can feel the muscle underneath his shirt, like warm iron beneath my hands. And I don’t want him to hold himself back anymore.

  I pull away so I can look at him. His eyes are closed, that perfect brow marred by a perfect frown. Tears spill from his lashes, coursing down his cheeks. And I close my eyes and lean in close and kiss them away.