Beneath the Shine

by Sarah Fine

  “What does that even mean?”

  “He monitored police channels and detected a police officer offering an accurate description of his exterior as well as his license ID.”

  “But . . . suicide?” Odd. I’m not sure I ever thought of him as living, which now seems unfair.

  “Jacques thought it prudent to crash nose down into a field from five thousand feet instead of allowing police officers to apprehend him. The debris will consist of small pieces, and because of the height from which he fell, much of it will be embedded in the dirt. It will take the law enforcement cannies an extended period to find the fragments necessary to identify his remains.” Yves is quiet for a moment. “His consciousness can be replicated using the server at the embassy, though without experiential memory,” he informs me. “There is no need to feel sad or guilty.”

  I feel neither. At least, I don’t think I do. I’m in too much pain to ponder it right now, and I want to get back to the embassy, where I can examine myself in peace and privacy, rearrange my face to its default configuration, and take a nice, long bath. God, I could really use a bath. And a manicure. “Tell him thank you—”

  “He’s already gone, sir.”

  “Very well.” I pause before closing the car door. “Not feeling suicidal yourself, are you, Yves?”

  “If necessary, I will do the same, though I believe the ambassador will be not be pleased to lose two of her fleet in the same brief time interval. She may pull us in for triple-S scans before she allows you to ride in one of us again.”

  I chuckle. The triple-S—Safety, Sanity, and Stability—is an analysis program provided by canny manufacturers. We all know AI can be a bit fragile when it isn’t operated within its parameters, like an airplane flying out of its flight envelope. My father used to joke with me and tell me he was going to give me a triple-S if I didn’t listen to my mother.

  My mother never thought it was funny.

  I shake off the memory of both of them and the resulting ache in my chest. My steps are quiet on the driveway, and Yves’s headlights illuminate the leaning front porch of the house. I wave my hand for him to turn them off, and the path forward is plunged into darkness that doesn’t affect me at all.

  Chen is peering at me through one of the glass cutouts in the front door, his expression tight. Well, half of it. The left side of his mouth is drooping. He opens the door quickly as I mount the porch steps and ushers me into the small entryway. Ukaiah is next to him. Their helmet devices hum and click. Ukaiah’s cheek is twitching compulsively, and I wonder if she had that tic the last time we met or if it’s new.

  “We think the FBI is doing flyovers, but there was some sort of explosion about twenty minutes ago that drew them back across the Potomac.”

  Probably Jacques, completing his final self-assigned mission. “So we have a little time.”

  Chen nods. “I know you want the goods, but I have to show you this. Just got it this afternoon from my buddy who works at Bethesda.”

  “You have far more friends than I might have guessed,” I say to him.

  “You’d be surprised how many of us there are,” Ukaiah says, walking toward the gloomy kitchen with rust-stained sinks and mouse droppings along the baseboards. I haven’t heard the house itself say a word, so it’s either too old to have a consciousness or it’s been disabled by my two hacker friends—or looters desperate to make a bit of coin. “We just want to live without government oppression and control.”

  “So who did you vote for?”

  They both look at me as if I’m insane. “What makes you think we’d vote for either?” Ukaiah asks.

  “Sallese certainly seems dangerous.”

  “Oh, he could be,” says Ukaiah, giving Chen a meaningful look that I don’t have time to parse right now. “But Zao was just as bad in his own way, working with Congress to outlaw new tech that couldn’t be controlled by his friends like Gia Fortin and Simon Aebersold. Yolanda Reynolds was more of the same, a technocrat through and through. She might’ve won, too, I think, but then her campaign ran up against a few factors they couldn’t control.”

  Both of them laugh. They might be talking about Marguerite. Anyone on the Mainstream knew that with a massive war chest and the help of every tech corporation in America, Reynolds was coasting until Marguerite burst onto the scene, full of grief and passion and a demand that her leaders do better for people. The Sallese campaign knew emotional genius when they saw it, and it was all downhill for the technocrats after that. Marguerite raised a tsunami of pent-up rage, and Sallese is a very good surfer.

  “But now you’re on the side of the technocrats?” I ask. “Despite their corruption?”

  “We’re on the side of freedom,” says Chen. “And that’s why we have to show you this.”

  He reaches up to the side of his head and pulls a wire from it. The silvery filament unspools as he offers one end to me. “We plug this into your comband, and you can see what I see. We have to hardwire it—too dangerous to let those electrons loose.”

  Ukaiah shudders next to me. “I don’t envy you,” she says to Chen. “I wouldn’t want to watch it twice. Poor girl.”

  I hesitate before accepting the wire. “Bianca? If this is a vid of her final moments, I don’t want to—”

  “What, you think I’m into torture porn or something? Why would we show you that?” Chen looks outraged as I take the end of the wire from him and plug it into the port on my comband. “No, I think this might be actionable. If we’re not too late.”

  I stop breathing as my screen flickers and comes to life with the vid Chen begins to stream. It’s from a surveillance chip located in the upper corner of what looks like a hospital room. There’s a bed against the wall. There are wrist and ankle restraints dangling from the metal railings along its sides. But that’s not what makes me want to slam my fist through a wall.

  It’s Kyla. Her eyes are wide, and her pretty face is twisted in an agony of sorrow. “You can’t do this,” she shrieks as three scrub-clad medical cannies close in. They are smooth and certain, none of the little twitches and pauses that make humans human. Kyla’s hands are up, trying to hold them at bay. “I didn’t agree to this! My mom wouldn’t want you to do this! Please!”

  Her back bumps against the bed railing. She’s sobbing now, and she sounds terrified.

  “When was this taken?” I bark.

  “Two days ago,” Chen says, but I barely hear him over Kyla’s screaming. The med cannies are on her now, wrestling her onto the bed, prying her fingers from the railing, blocking her kicks. She wails as they fasten the wrist and ankle cuffs. They speak in soft tones to her, telling her that she’s going to feel better soon, that everything is going to be all right. They are following an empathy and reassurance protocol.

  They tell her all is well as they wheel her out of the room, but Kyla, smart and sensitive as she is, knows better.

  “What did they do to her?” I ask quietly.

  “My source is a janitor. Hasn’t been able to get back in to see her, because he was told to take a week of paid vacation. He said all the human staff were. Security is tighter than anything we’ve seen, because of the administration’s involvement. But there’s something weird going on over there. The doc who gave that press conference asking technocrats of interest to come forward? We’ve got vid of her, too.”

  “In the hospital?”

  He shakes his head. “No, this was her public statement. Something odd about it. Hang on.” His fingers dance over the surface of the helmet, over the various sensors wired into his skull. “Here it is.”

  I look down at my screen again. There’s Dr. Barton, who has Kyla’s high cheekbones, standing at a podium with the president and his staff behind her. One of them I recognize—a fellow with graying hair and a narrow face. I’ve seen him in campaign vids, always standing next to Marguerite and a dark-haired woman who I assume is her mother, given their similarities.

  “That’s Elwood Seidel,” Chen says when he follows
the focus of my gaze. “He’s now—”

  “The president’s chief of staff,” I supply. “He managed Sallese’s campaign. They go way back.”

  Elwood is standing to Dr. Barton’s left. She’s announcing her intention to work with the Sallese administration in order to find the people responsible for killing her husband. She’s urging Gia Fortin to cooperate with the investigation in the name of all those who were killed, including Dr. Barton’s husband, also a researcher.

  “We thought it was really strange that Wendy Barton was willing to toss her former boss under the bus like that,” Ukaiah says between cheek twitches. “By all accounts, they were friends.”

  “So we analyzed this vid really closely,” says Chen. “And look.” He pokes his finger at my screen. “See? Look at the back of her neck. It’s coming up in a few seconds. Easy to miss.”

  “Her hair covers her—”

  “Look. It’s here in three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  I look at the back of her neck, covered by her black hair, but still, for a brief second, I see a little flash of blue. “Pause it. Can you enlarge that, or is it locked?”

  All official vids are, to prevent tampering. But Ukaiah grins. “Locked. It’s as if you don’t know us at all. Hang on.” Chen fiddles with his Incomp.

  The focus zooms in on the back of Dr. Barton’s neck. I squint at it, grateful for my augmented vision. “What is that?”

  “Come on, P. You know exactly what it is.”

  I raise my head. “A neurostim device? Why would she of all people be wearing one?”

  “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?” Chen says. “But Elwood Seidel knows it’s there. We used gaze triangulation. He looks right at it four times during this vid. Bet he gave the order to have it installed.”

  “Without her consent?”

  Chen arches an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the question?”

  “Does the president look at it, too?”

  “Not even once,” says Ukaiah.

  I focus on Elwood Seidel’s face with new interest. First Bianca, and now this. “What’s your read on him? Is he a henchman or a weasel?”

  “He’s someone to watch out for, is what he is,” says Ukaiah.

  “We used to call him the puppet master,” says Chen. “He knows how to get things done, even if he’s not the one doing them.”

  “Puppet master.” What does that make Marguerite? “And speaking of, I believe you’ve been pulling on my strings just a shade too long.”

  “Told you,” says Ukaiah with a low laugh. “It’s not like he was going to forget.”

  Chen gives her an irritated look, I think. It’s a little hard to tell, because of the thing on his face and the sagging lip. “I’ve got ethical qualms.”

  “Ethical qualms? So you’re willing to violate a sacred trust bestowed on you by a dead man? You’re willing to keep information from me when you claim to be a champion of freedom and choice? You’re willing to—”

  “Fine,” he says loudly. “But tell me this, P—have you ever activated your integrated neural menu?”

  “Once.”

  “Did you happen to notice anything . . . incomplete about it?”

  (option disabled)

  “What do you have for me?”

  He swallows, and his shoulder jerks up and down a few times, no doubt another tic caused by one of the wires he’s implanted inside his own brain. “A few weeks after he died, I got a package, like I told you when we first met.” He limps out of the room and returns with a small plastic case. He presses his thumb to it—the thing must have been coded to his DNA. My father must have trusted him.

  Chen’s hand trembles a bit as he lifts two pieces of blank paper from the case. “One is coded to me. The other . . . that’s for you. But read this first.” He brushes his finger over the embossed flower on the top of one of the sheets of paper. Writing appears on it as he hands it to me.

  Chen,

  If you’re reading this, the worst has happened, and I must ask you for a favor I’ll never be able to repay. You have always been the most perceptive and thoughtful of my staff, and I will always be grateful that you came to me with your suspicions instead of making them public.

  “I had helped him debug a piece of unbelievably complicated nanocyte code. Really cutting-edge stuff,” Chen says. “And I made some educated guesses based on what I was seeing. We all knew he and Flore had a sick kid at home. We all knew no one had ever caught a glimpse of you. But the code . . .”

  “It was for me. For something they were doing to me.”

  “He admitted as much. He knew the government child-protection agency would swoop in and take you if I made a call. But he told me that he knew he could give you a better life than you would ever have if he and Flore didn’t take these risks.” He blows out an unsteady breath through the sagging part of his mouth. “Talk about an ethical dilemma . . . but in the end, I knew how brilliant he and your mom were. And I also knew they were good people.”

  I go back to reading the note.

  Percy already has all the building blocks he needs. But there are certain things we wanted to keep locked until he is old enough to make sound decisions. I had hoped that Flore and I would be here to guide him through it, but I also wanted to make sure we didn’t leave him completely alone in this if we couldn’t. So—here is what I ask: Watch over him from a distance. Reach out to him when you feel the time is right. And when he reaches the age of eighteen, give him the second page of this document. It’s already coded just for him. And please let him read this.

  Below this is a description of all the things they did to me. It is more than I ever guessed. The way the parts of my body are held together, the way the things that live inside me communicate, the options I have (and don’t have) to control them. And below that . . .

  A chill goes through me, as it always does when I read my own name in my father’s handwriting.

  Percy, I wish I could have made a vid to explain all this to you, but it’s too dangerous. Paper is the only thing that can’t be hacked. It’s time for you to make your own choices. The second page will tell you the rest. It is for your eyes only.

  “Can I have the room?” I ask softly.

  “We don’t think there’s any going back after you do this,” says Chen, sharing a worried look with Ukaiah. “You might want to be double sure.”

  “Please.”

  They leave.

  I sit on a rickety kitchen chair at the rickety kitchen table, and I activate the second page with a brush of my own DNA.

  I read my father’s instructions. His admonitions and warnings. His belief that I must be able to control my fate.

  And then I scan the code that enables me to do just that.

  When it’s done, I clear the paper. My hands are steady as I tear the now-blank page into tiny pieces and wash them down the kitchen sink. When I join Chen and Ukaiah in the dank living room, they look at me as if I’m a dead man walking.

  It’s possible they’re right. I just don’t know yet. “I thank you for the gift.” I smile at them and offer a deep bow and a flourish of my hand. As I straighten, I ask, “So Kyla and Dr. Barton are at Bethesda Medical Center?”

  They both seem to understand that we are not going to discuss what I just did, not now, not ever. Ukaiah’s cheek twitches as she says, “Remember what we said about it being well guarded?”

  “What if I could get around that?”

  The two hackers eye each other, then Chen nods. “We’d do whatever we can to help you get them to safety.”

  My comband vibrates. “Sir,” says Yves. “Your aunt has commed twice. She’s heard about Jacques and is calling the entire fleet back to the embassy.”

  “On my way,” I say, then pull a different piece of paper from my pocket—the one on which I’ve written the codes that will signal the time and place and nature of our next meeting. I hand it to Chen and walk toward the door. “Keep an eye on my channel. We’ll reconvene once I hav
e the necessary information.”

  “This isn’t going to be easy, kid. Picking up fugitives on street corners is not exactly the same thing as stealing a patient from a facility guarded six ways to Sunday by the Secret Service. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve got on board—you’re still made of flesh and bone. You can’t force your way in.”

  “Oh, I have no intention of using force.”

  That’s because I have every intention of using Marguerite Singer.

  Chapter Twenty

  Marguerite

  Catch me if you can.

  Is this a game to him?

  Or maybe it’s a trick—a way to keep us tied up in knots, trying to find the account and its user, while he goes off in another direction?

  Is this Percy? If so, does he have any idea how dangerous this is?

  I want to help either way, whether this is a stranger who hates me or . . . the strange boy from school who probably also hates me. Because in a short time, the technocrats who appeared enemies now seem largely innocent of everything except privilege and obliviousness, or at the very least of the murders I know at least one person on our side is capable of. It doesn’t change a thing about what I believe—all Americans deserve access to the same technology and education and jobs, things I will never stop fighting for. But the battle can’t be won when El is on the field. He seems too willing to destroy our humanity just to score a victory—and that’s something I can’t live with.

  Leaning over my desk screen, I call up the comment reply box and tell it to send a private message to FragFlwr. “Taking this into the back room,” I say, watching my words appear in the message area. “Because I’d like to have an honest conversation. Send.”

  There. FragFlwr has come at me before, challenging me to take a hard look at the Sallese campaign and what it really stood for, questioning whether Uncle Wynn himself was a good man. It was always easy to brush off as technocratic paranoia, especially because by that time I’d gotten to know Uncle Wynn. “Good man” doesn’t do him justice—“great man” is closer to the truth.