Jaguar

by C. A. Gray

  “I don’t know how to access the prisoner database,” I told her, “but Francis does.” I didn’t explain further, but she knew why I was looking.

  In a moment, I’d pulled up the Commune and saw that Francis was online.

  “Did you see Liam’s arrest?” I wrote.

  “Yes,” he replied, just as Cathy joined Val over my shoulder.

  “Have you checked the database yet?” I wrote. “Where are they sending him?”

  A pause. I could see that Francis was typing, stopped, typing, and stopped again. Just as I was about to scream with frustration, he wrote, “Exmorton.”

  Cathy let out a little whimper behind me, and would have crumpled to the ground if Val hadn’t supported her. I could tell by Val’s expression that she didn’t know what Exmorton was any more than I did, but judging by Cathy’s reaction, it wasn’t good.

  “What?” I demanded. “What’s Exmorton?”

  After waiting for a few of Cathy’s long, labored breaths, I realized she wasn’t going to be able to tell us. I sent the same question to Francis. He wrote, “It’s a bad one. High security, harsh conditions. Also… average holding time before sentencing tends to be around forty-eight hours.”

  “Forty-eight hours?” I said aloud, my voice coming out shrill. But then I typed, “How can they sentence before he’s even had a trial?”

  “The trials are a sham anyway,” Cathy whispered. “Exmorton is a…” She couldn’t finish, but we knew by her expression what she meant. It was a death sentence.

  The three of us stared at each other; I’m sure my face was just as white as theirs. At last, Val pointed at my screen again and wiggled her finger. “Your mom,” she whispered.

  Sure enough, Mom was on now as well, and wrote, “Rebecca! I see that you’re online, so don’t you dare ignore me again. You had better be on your way back!”

  I just stared at the message for a long moment. She was right, I had been ignoring her. But I especially couldn’t deal with Mom right now. I wrote Francis instead.

  “Now what?”

  Typing, typing, typing. At last he wrote, “Trying to figure that out. I can’t even find the plans for Exmorton anywhere on the labyrinth. If we try to go in, we’d be going blind.”

  “We’ll just have to, then!” I wrote. “Val and I are already here. Can we think of any way to get me inside?”

  “Becca…” Val murmured, in that tone of voice people use when tiptoeing around someone fragile, someone who refuses to face facts.

  “No!” I said to her aloud, gesticulating with my index finger and not even turning around. I was not willing to brook any arguments. Not now. “There’s a way!”

  I heard Cathy’s sharp inhale behind me, as if she were holding her breath. Francis wrote, “Nilesh and Rick are going to Dublin to get a message to some virologist that Dr Yin is sexually involved with, to try to get him to join us and help with the mitochondrial virus. I’m talking to them about trying to get Liam out, but Exmorton isn’t the kind if place you break into. Or out of.”

  “Tell them to pick up Val and me first. We can help!” I wrote. “I don’t know how, but we can! We have to!”

  “Becca!” Val said, sharply now. “You’re not being reasonable—”

  The door chime made all three of us jump. One glance out the window told us that somehow we’d all missed the sound of a General Specs hovercraft landing on the lawn. Cathy practically fled to open the door, revealing Liam Senior for the second time that day. He was tall, dark, and handsome: an older version of his son.

  “That’s right, you miserable, cheating swine!” she shouted loudly, for whoever happened to be watching. “You think you can keep me from my rightful share, after everything I sacrificed for you? You’d better think again!”

  Liam Senior narrowed his eyes at her and snarled back as he stepped over the threshold, “Why you conniving, gold-digging wretch—!” But as soon as the door shut behind him, his anger vanished. Instead he commanded loudly, “Close blinds.” Apparently they were automated, because on cue, the shades over the windows lowered, and the previously spacious sitting room suddenly seemed like a cave.

  The moment they lowered all the way, Liam Senior closed the space between himself and his ex-wife, and took her into his arms.

  “There was nothing I could do,” he murmured into her hair, and Cathy let out a tiny sob, not fighting him at all.

  “Can he have visitors?” I demanded. Cathy and Liam Senior pulled apart to stare at me, and I said more forcefully, “We need to see Exmorton, since Francis can’t get any plans for it. I’ll go.”

  “No,” Liam Senior mused, and bit his lip. “You’re one of the Renegades. They can’t catch you on camera going to see him. I suspect Jaguar will be watching, and if she is, I can guarantee she’ll put together who you are, even with the disguise. You’ll end up in there with him. Besides, I still have an A.E. chip.” He seemed to think we’d understand this, but when he saw our blank expressions, he explained, “I can record everything I see, and send it to this prodigy of yours. Francis, is that his name?” We’d mentioned Francis as part of our resource list when Senior had been there earlier that day.

  Cathy nodded, wiping the tears off of her cheeks. “I want you to deliver a message to Liam,” she told her ex-husband, and then turned to search for her companion bot. “Elsie, can you bring me a pen and paper?”

  The little silver bot wheeled to Cathy’s desk, and Madeline rushed to help her with a tiny nudge from me. The two of them brought Cathy the implements she requested. Cathy crossed to the kitchen table and just scribbled simply, “Hold on, Liam. I’ll see you soon. I love you. Mom.”

  “Wait!” said Val, just as Cathy began to fold the note. “I want to add something.” Cathy handed her the note and pen, and I pretended not to watch. But I caught a glimpse of “love always.” I blushed, suddenly feeling like an interloper.

  “Do you want to add something too?” Val asked me, tentative.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. They would all read whatever I wrote—but what if this was my last chance? I briefly read Val’s note, which said, “We’re going to find a way to get you out of this. Love always and forever, Val.”

  What could I possibly add to that?

  Feeling Cathy’s and Val’s eyes on me, I finally scrawled at the bottom, “Couldn’t stay away, no matter what you said. You can yell at me later. Rebecca.” When I set down the pen, I saw Cathy watching me quizzically.

  “What in the world does that mean?”

  I shrugged, and said evasively, “He’ll understand.”

  Cathy and Liam Senior exchanged a look at this. The might not still be married, but they could apparently still communicate without words. Liam Senior nodded, and accepted the letter from Cathy.

  “I’ll report back as soon as I can,” he promised.

  “You’d better,” Cathy shot back, straightening his collar and giving him a pat on the back on his way out.

  Chapter 12: Liam

  I recognized the building the moment we arrived. Exmorton. The thick stone fortress was unmistakeable. High, electrically-charged chain link fencing surrounded it, but the police hovercar descended from above, bypassing the fence entirely. We settled on a landing pad on the flat stone roof. The police bots gestured for me to get out, and I did. Why bother fighting at this point?

  The silvery guard bots took charge of me after that, scanning me for weapons and then marching me inside. The floors and ceiling were stone as well, slick and polished to a high sheen, and it was deadly silent. A deep chill crept into my bones—but I wasn’t sure if it was from cold, or simply from dread. I had yet to see or even hear another human being.

  “In here,” said the guard bot behind me in its high, mechanical voice, gesturing at the open stone door. I still wore my Simvi Shah robes and face paint: they hadn’t bothered to change my clothing to that of a prisoner. This seemed almost more ominous than anything else. They don�
��t expect me to be here long, I realized.

  The inside of the cell itself felt like a meat locker. There were no windows, no lights, and no vents. I could tell that the moment the door closed again, it would be black as pitch. I noted the position of a scrap of fabric that might have been a blanket in one corner, and a bucket in the other which must have been the toilet. A smaller bowl by the door contained a clear liquid that must have been water. Best not to mix up those two, I thought wryly.

  I felt a hard poke in the middle of my back, shoving me inside. I stumbled forward, and the door swung closed behind me before I could correct my balance again.

  I closed my eyes, but it made no difference: my cell was just as dark, either way. I groped toward the corner where I’d seen the blanket, until I felt its mild resistance through my sneaker, and sank to pick it up.

  Suddenly a wave of exhaustion overtook me. I sank to my knees, and then lay on the cold ground, pulling the blanket around myself and shivering. I still wasn’t sure how much of the shivering was from nerves, and how much was from actual cold, but I didn’t have long to think about it. I fell asleep almost at once.

  When I woke, I felt disoriented, unsure if it was night or day. At least now there was a sliver of light in the cell through the door, though, looking into the hallway: apparently there was a smaller door within the door, through which food could be delivered. The smaller door had been outfitted with bars, in case I got any ideas, but I could see an iron plate on the floor, illuminated from the light in the hallway. My stomach grumbled, and I reached over to slide it toward me, hardly caring what it was. It turned out to be some sort of carbohydrate that tasted much like cardboard, but it settled my growling stomach for the time being—and in the sliver of light, I could at least distinguish the pot from the water bowl to wash it down.

  Unfortunately, now I had nothing left to do but think.

  I knew a little about Exmorton by reputation. Nobody sent here got turned into cyborgs. This was a place for the doomed.

  Rebecca’s face floated into my mind, and I let myself indulge in the thought of her, like a masochist. I imagined how things should have gone a few mornings before, when she’d told me she loved me. In my mind’s eye, I crushed her against me, covering her mouth with mine with desperate urgency. My hands found the skin of her imaginary lower back, and slid up the indentation of her spine, heat building in every place where our bodies pressed together…

  But that wasn’t how it had happened. Instead, I’d broken her heart, and walked away. She didn’t know that I’d broken my own, also.

  Then I thought of what Dad told me at General Specs: she and Val were here. They’d gone to talk to Mum—she had gotten the message to Dad without me.

  If only I’d thought of that myself, I wouldn’t be here right now.

  All of it was for nothing.

  Some time later—I hardly knew how long—I heard voices. Real, human voices, for the first time since my arrival. I sat up, straining my ears to listen as they came closer.

  “Liam Kelly Junior,” said a tinny, robotic voice through the grate in my door. “You have a visitor.”

  “Can’t you let me inside?” the visitor demanded, and I felt a weak surge of hope.

  Dad. He came.

  “We cannot allow you any unsupervised contact with the prisoner,” declared the tinny voice. “You may speak to the prisoner through the grate.”

  “What, do you want me to get down on my hands and knees?” Dad declared indignantly. “Do you know who I am?”

  “You may speak to the prisoner through the grate,” the bot repeated, unfazed, before I heard it rolling away.

  “Dad?” I called, crawling up to the grate and lying flat on my stomach to see him.

  With an irritated grunt, Dad got on his hands and knees too. It probably wasn’t a position he’d ever been in in his life.

  “Liam,” he said, glancing around my cell once, and then closing his eyes. “Aw, son.”

  After a long pause, I said, “You know every word we say will be recorded.”

  He shook his head discreetly and lowered his voice. “No it won’t. I took care of that already.”

  I furrowed my brow. “How?”

  Dad raised his eyebrows at me. “I did build all these bots, you know. And the camera system in this place is ours, too.”

  In spite of myself, I gave a short laugh. “Well in that case, you also built Jaguar. The same logic should apply.”

  “That’s different and you know it,” he muttered.

  But I wasn’t ready to give up on this topic. “Dad,” I hissed urgently. “You have to find a way to dismantle her. You know that.”

  He bit his lip. “Jaguar already has access to the accumulated knowledge of the entire human race, Liam. Every day she downloads another batch of older data, including camera imports, and the recorded movements of every human on the labyrinth. She’ll be damn near omniscient soon.”

  I shook my head firmly. “There has to be a way. If all the General Specs engineers that built her in the first place put their heads together—”

  “Remember Henry Culley?” Dad cut me off. I blinked at him—I hadn’t heard that name in years, but he’d been in his forties when I’d last seen him, and he was one of the smartest programmers I’d ever met. Great guy, too—I remembered how he adored his two little girls, always showing pictures of their dance recitals and displaying the art projects they’d made on his cubicle walls. I nodded. Dad went on, “He tried to take her down in her nascent stages, before we knew that she had access to all the camera data in General Specs in her working memory.”

  “And?” I asked, feeling a creeping sense of foreboding.

  “She had him arrested and taken here.” That was all he said, but it was all he needed to say. It was pretty obvious what happened to Exmorton prisoners. My throat constricted as I thought of those two little girls without a daddy.

  “As soon as he was arrested, four other engineers in his department banded together outside of General Specs, thinking that if they worked off site, she wouldn’t find out. But apparently she suspected them anyway, and tapped into the camera data in their immediate vicinity to listen in on the meeting. A few days later, all four of them ended up in here, too.”

  “Then create a place where she can’t listen in, like you did here,” I urged, “and get them all together—everyone you think might be on our side!”

  “You realize that she’ll immediately suspect me if I do that, and she’ll send me here myself?”

  “Dad—”

  “I risked my life even in corrupting the surveillance cameras today, Liam,” Dad went on. “She sees everything. She knows when I left the office, and she knows that I came here. Then I’ll vanish from her system. She’ll know I’m here talking to you, obviously, but she won’t know what we said, and she’ll probably wonder why I went to all the trouble to keep her from finding out. She knows you’re a Renegade, and she knows you want me to dismantle her, which is why she sent you here in the first place. I’m on very thin ice, as it is.”

  “Then you don’t have much to lose, do you?” I countered.

  Dad watched me for a long moment. “I guess I don’t.” Then he said heavily, “Tell me about Brian.”

  Briefly, I explained how and why the Renegades had met Giovanni, one of the original creators of humanoid bots before he’d gone into hiding—and how Giovanni had told me about the prisoner database. “I’m sure I’ll be on there soon too, if I’m not already,” I added.

  “What’s the database labyrinth address?” Dad frowned, and I could see his unfocused eyes as he opened a browser with his A.E. chip.

  I told him, watching his eyes slide through the air as if he were reading text hovering right in front of him. Then his eyes tracked down and up again very fast, an indication that he was scrolling through the list of names. I saw the moment he found what he was looking for: his face softened and became vulnerable.

&nb
sp; “He’s really still alive?” he whispered, and his voice caught.

  I nodded. “Apparently. I only just found out myself two days before coming to London. I meant to come up with a plan of how to rescue him before I approached you, since obviously I wouldn’t survive on the lunar station as I am, even if I managed to get there somehow—but when I heard about Jaguar, I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  Dad was still on his knees, but now rested his elbows on them and buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know how things got so out of hand,” he whispered. “And now, you in here…” He looked up at me, desolate. “I’ve lost you both.”

  My eyes widened as an idea struck me, and with it came a sudden surge of hope. “Maybe not. What if you were to use your influence to get my status changed, from execution to test subject, and I have the same surgery Brian had? If they send me to Goliath too, I could actually survive long enough to try to find him!”

  “My ‘influence’?” Dad repeated bitterly, gesturing around us as if to demonstrate exactly how much influence he had.

  “If you can confuse the cameras so they’re not recording our conversation, you can find a way to hack into the database and change a few things, right?”

  He sighed heavily. “Liam, do you know what the overall survival rate is for test subjects?”

  “As long as it’s higher than zero percent, it would improve my odds,” I pointed out. “Besides, they’ve been sending human test subjects to Goliath for years now. They must have refined that surgery by now, at least. They won’t want to kill their subjects—that’s wasteful.”

  “And we can’t have anything less than one hundred percent efficiency,” Dad agreed, his tone dripping with sarcasm. I watched his face, wondering what he’d been through in the five years since we’d really spoken. It sounded as if he’d been disillusioned for a long time. I wished I’d tried to reach out to him again sooner—but my pride had stopped me. We’d parted on such bad terms, I’d never considered that in the intervening years he might have had a change of heart. Perhaps he might have been willing to listen long before now. If I’d reached out again earlier, could all of this have been avoided?