Exin Ex Machina

by G. S. Jennsen

  The woman grumbled under her breath, and again he shivered. Such minor, incidental body language, yet it was setting off multiple triggers in his mind. Like déjà vu, or a half-recalled dream.

  “I know your Model Vk 3.2 limb augment carries a virutox designed to fundamentally alter the user’s personality. I need to know why you put it there.”

  He blinked and struggled to stay focused. With every modulated and filtered word, her voice snaked beneath his skin, evoking echoes of the past, ragged snippets of memories as elusive as her face.

  “Several large shipments of those augments were recently stolen during transport to their intended distributors. I don’t know by whom, but I know they’ve been leaking the augments out into markets everywhere. If there’s a virutox embedded in the augments, it was put there by the thieves. Not me.”

  She laughed, and his head swam. “What a pathetically convenient excuse. Stolen? That’s all you can come up with?”

  “I do have a weapon pointed at my heart, so I’m not at my best. However, it also happens to be true. Check with Justice—wait, what am I saying? Criminals can’t check with Justice.”

  “You might be surprised what I can do.”

  For the briefest instant she paused her fluid movement, and the rippling filter seemed to fade. Not completely, but enough to reveal swirling aquamarine eyes, full lips beneath a perfect nose and void-black hair swept away from features which were thinner than he remembered—

  Endorphins flooded the pathways of his body faster than his internal systems could regulate them. “Gods…Nika?”

  Her name rolled off the man’s tongue in a seductive purr delivered straight to her soul. Its utterance sent her reeling, mentally and very nearly physically.

  She dampened all emotion processes before she lost control of the situation—she was suppressing those processes too often of late, and she so did not care right now.

  Then she took three swift steps toward Ridani and pressed the muzzle of her Glaser directly against his forehead. He doubtless kept a recent psyche and memory backup stored in a secure location, but if she pressed the trigger now it would be up to someone else to see about a new body and a regen for him. “How do you know my name?”

  He flinched at the press of metal against his flesh, sending a lock of amber-tinged chestnut hair falling across his temple, but quickly recovered to frown darkly.

  “You don’t remember…of course you don’t. If you did, then you would have—” She increased the pressure of the weapon against his skin, and he cleared his throat dramatically. “Your name? It fucking haunts my every waking thought. It’s my own personal hell—”

  She growled in protest. “A real answer!”

  His gaze darted toward the doorway. “There’s no time. I already alerted security, before I realized—they’ll be here in thirty seconds. You need to go, now. Meet me tomorrow evening at…the Hataori Harbor Pavilion. At 1800 local, just after sunset. Meet me, and I’ll answer as many of your questions as I can. Hopefully, then you’ll answer a few of mine.”

  Shit, shit, shit. Of course he’d alerted security, and she’d wasted precious seconds not assuming he’d done so and reacting accordingly.

  Nika: “Joaquim, Ryan, abort and evac immediately!”

  “So you can lure me into a trap and turn me over to Justice?”

  He exhaled through his nose. “Dammit, Nika. If I wanted to turn you over to Justice, I’d simply stall for another twenty seconds until security gets here. How can I convince you to trust me in less time than that? Okay—you have a tattoo on your back. It represents a constellation in the shape of a phoenix.”

  She’d never despised the void in her mind where her many pasts should live more than she did at this moment. “How do you know that?”

  One corner of his lips curled up, and flecks of copper glinted to life in the rich hazel of his irises. “The usual way one knows such things. Do you remember what it signifies?”

  The thought that this man might have not merely known her but been with her in the most intimate of ways, while she had no recollection of it, shook her in deep places. In the tumult of emotions that flared to overflow their dampeners, her poker face failed her, and he smiled cockily before she could conjure a half-assed answer.

  “No? I do. Meet me tomorrow evening, and I’ll tell you. Now go!”

  The thud of jogging feet echoed from the hallway to jar her out of her escalating shock spiral. She met his gaze a final time, was nearly knocked out again by what she saw in his eyes, and took off sprinting for the window. She fired on the glass ahead of her arrival, shattering it a split-second before she sailed through it, deployed her wingsuit glider and vanished into the night.

  EXCEPTION

  ERROR

  20

  * * *

  Nika.

  “Sir! Are you damaged?”

  Dashiel looked up to see Henric Addison, his deputy chief of security, rush into the room and over to him. He forced words past a suddenly constricted throat. “Um, no. She—I think it was a woman, though I can’t be sure—had a weapon, but she didn’t use it on me.”

  “Where did she go? Through the window here?” Henric gestured toward the jagged hole in the glass that was allowing a frigid wind inside to whip around the office.

  He blinked; he had to get a game face on and fast. Reeling confusion wasn’t a good look on him, and he needed to take control of the situation. “No. She ran back into the hall and off to the right when I told her I’d alerted security.”

  Henric spun to the security dynes who had arrived to guard the door. “Units 1 and 2, pursue the fugitive along the stated route. All exits are locked down, but we need to make certain the intruder isn’t still in the building. Unit 3, follow behind them and search every possible hiding place on the route. I’m calling up additional units to search other potential escape routes.” He turned back and again pointed to the shattered window. “How did this happen?”

  Dashiel straightened his shoulders and tried to appear exasperated. “She fired a warning shot when I refused to unlock the executive data server for her.”

  “You’re lucky, sir. Many criminals would have just blown your head off. Did she access any of your records?”

  “Not from me—not from here.”

  “We’ll look into it. I’m leaving two dynes right outside to guard your office. For your safety, you should stay here until we’ve secured the building.”

  He nodded in agreement. Henric mercifully hurried out, leaving him alone save the dynes, who were far less likely to bother him with questions the answers to which he dared not share.

  After taking a deep breath that did nothing to slow his pulse, he began pacing silently along the length of his desk. Adrenaline coursed through his veins and endorphins flooded his neural network in time with his racing heartbeat.

  Nika. She was alive. Awakened, walking, talking, breathing air. Not stored, not trapped in indefinite retirement. Alive.

  Knowing she was alive made him feel more alive than he had in half a decade. And while their reunion hadn’t gone down quite as he’d always imagined it might, and he had more questions than he could begin to give voice to…she had kept her promise. She had found him.

  Your name? It fucking haunts my every waking thought.

  Nika glided between the city towers on autopilot, her consciousness fixated on the encounter she’d just fled from.

  But since the wingsuit didn’t actually have an autopilot setting, her inattention led her to nearly crash into a narrow spire of a building before she’d flown two blocks. Her body reacted instinctively, and she angled sharply to veer around the building with a few centimeters to spare.

  Her pride, her secret conceit she kept buried deep in the crevices of her psyche, fought to reject everything the man had said. It fought to lash out against memories that didn’t exist for her. Yet the chasm in her soul that yearned for all she’d lost cried out in renewed hope, grasping frantically for the answers Dashiel R
idani now enticingly offered.

  You don’t remember…of course you don’t.

  The truth was that her physical, autonomous functions had reacted viscerally to him, even before he said her name. His appearance, the first syllables spoken by his voice, had prickled every nerve receptor in her body and snapped every perceptive process to attention. What did it mean? Had her kernel somehow recognized him, even if her higher-order psyche did not?

  Ryan: “Clear on the ground.”

  Right, escaping. She was supposed to be escaping, which meant she needed a landing area.

  Joaquim: “Clear on the ground. Ryan, rendezvous at Marker 2. Nika?”

  Nika: “Still airborne.”

  She scanned ahead for a level, unpopulated stretch of ground. There weren’t so many of those in the heart of Mirai One, and during her mental gymnastics she’d drifted way off her intended course. But after a few seconds she spotted a familiar facade—the tower with the entwined quartz crown. There was a park next to it, with a small pond in the center and not so many trees. She increased her angle of descent and dove toward it.

  In the usual way one knows such things.

  She landed hard on the shore of the pond, rolled sideways to avoid ending up wet and rose to her feet—

  “Are you damaged, citi—?”

  Her right arm shot out, and the blade at her wrist carved the security patrol drone in half before it finished the inquiry. Then she knelt on the ground beside the upper half and fried the processing core so there would be no recording of her arrival here.

  Nika: “Clear on the ground. I’m too far from Marker 2 to join you there, so let’s reconvene at The Chalet. I’ll be slightly delayed, as I also landed some distance from any door.”

  Joaquim: “Copy that. Did you get what you needed?”

  She abandoned the remains of the drone to stand and stare at the pond. The water rippled in silvered strands beneath a misty moon, but she was seeing every nanosecond of the brief interaction with Ridani projected in its reflection.

  Nika: “I don’t know.”

  21

  * * *

  Joaquim was waiting on her in her room when she finally arrived back at The Chalet, cleaning and checking the weapons he’d used on the operation. He looked up as she walked in. “Why the emergency evac? What happened?”

  “I got interrupted. Dashiel Ridani showed up—turns out he has a private and unmarked lift straight into his office.” She motioned Perrin in behind her, closed the door, and sank onto the edge of the bed.

  Joaquim sat his blade on the table in front of the couch. “Damn. Did you confront him?”

  “Didn’t have a choice.” She leaned forward, hands fisted at her chin, and gazed at them both in turn. “He knew me.”

  “Through the perception filter? Where did he recognize you from—”

  Perrin gasped, eyes wide. “You mean from before?”

  She nodded tightly.

  “What else did he say? Who were you? Does he know what happened to you?”

  Normally, Perrin’s instant enthusiasm would be infectious, but the more distance Nika had put from the encounter, the more conflicted she became. Her not-so-quiet, not-so-peaceful life had just been upended, and right now really wasn’t the best time for it.

  “There wasn’t exactly a chance for a detailed debrief, as he’d alerted security the instant he saw an intruder in his office. He asked me to meet him tomorrow evening at Hataori Harbor Pavilion.”

  Joaquim eyed her from beneath a tense brow. “It’s a trap.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You shouldn’t go.”

  She huffed a breath. “I have to go. There’s no way I can pass up this chance. Surely you get that.”

  “Take a team with you to keep the area clear.”

  “I would be putting other people at risk. If it is a trap, I can get away cleaner on my own.”

  “Take me with you. Somebody has to watch your back.”

  She shook her head. “No. I won’t put any of you in danger while I run my own personal demons to ground.”

  “But—”

  “I appreciate you worrying about me, Joaquim. I do. But I can handle myself—and this time, I have to handle myself.”

  Perrin laughed. “Jo’s secretly worried you’re going to go all starry-eyed and swoon at the man’s feet, and then we’ll never hear from you again. After all, he is fabulously handsome. I looked him up.”

  “Forgive me if I’m far more worried about her physical safety.”

  Nika scowled at Perrin. “If you go in for the buffed-and-polished type, which you know I don’t. I like my men…” she searched her mind for the right phrase, but it just kept serving up Ridani’s face “…confidently rough around the edges.”

  “When I looked him up, the rumor tags made it sound like there is some roughness around his edges. So I’m assuming he meant he ‘knew you’ in the carnal sense?”

  “Because you always assume that about people I know that you don’t.”

  “Well, did he?”

  She glared. “Perrin.”

  “Okay, I’ll drop it. For now. But after this meeting tomorrow, I’m expecting salaciousness.”

  Nika groaned and buried her face in her hands. She’d instinctively shared the details of the encounter with them, but exactly how much was she planning on telling them going forward?

  She trusted Perrin and Joaquim, because when they’d found her at her weakest and most vulnerable, they had helped her without question or expectation of reward. They’d welcomed a blank slate that self-evidently must have a problematic past into their home and their lives. But what if when the veil was at last pulled back, the reality of her problematic past didn’t sit so well with them?

  Perrin was the forgiving sort, but Joaquim maintained a lengthy list of grudges both real and imagined, and ‘the benefit of the doubt’ wasn’t something he kept on good terms with.

  Still, she could hardly judge any of this herself until she learned what the veil revealed. Best not to tangle herself into knots until there was good cause for it, right?

  She straightened up deliberately. “About the operation. Ridani claimed the limb augments were stolen during distribution, but we can’t take him at his word.

  “What I saw of the executive communications revealed nothing suspicious, though I didn’t get the whole database before I was interrupted. I did get all the augment development and production files, and we need to run them through the gamut. Even if they don’t contain explicit evidence of the virutox itself, they can help us understand it better by understanding the inner workings of the augment.”

  Joaquim nodded. “I’ll set the algorithms running tonight. They’ll be done tomorrow in plenty of time to arm you with ammunition for your…meeting.”

  “Thanks.” She stood, adding a wince only mostly for visual effect. “I’m going to call it a night. I need to run some internal repair routines to patch up from a bit of a hard landing.”

  Perrin pouted, but she reluctantly followed Joaquim out.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Nika collapsed on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She needed to do her nightly backup, but first she needed to think. Good timing for it or not, her life had now become vastly more complicated. Uncertainties spun outward from her, multiplying into a morass of paths she couldn’t crystallize into focus.

  Most troubling of all, it occurred to her that the newly terrifying prospect of finally discovering who she had been was the least terrifying of the paths.

  What if the man who held the answers she’d sought for five years was also behind the spread of a debilitating virutox destroying lives? How in Hades’ five rivers was she going to maneuver through that one?

  22

  * * *

  The next morning came too soon and brought too few answers.

  She’d taken care of herself last night—performed all her backups and reserved twenty minutes for depri time before transitioning to sleep. Sensory depriva
tion sessions revitalized synthetic parts in much the same way sleep did organic ones—if far more quickly—so she’d covered all her bases. Her processes were clean and sharp, her memory buffers cleared, her file structure ordered. Yet she awoke as burdened with conflict and disquiet, as buffeted by anticipation and doubt, as she’d suffered the night before.

  But it didn’t matter, because she still had work to do. So after showering, she went downstairs to survey the state of The Floor.

  Maggie and Ava were shouting at each other outside the training room. Listening to a few snippets of their overlapping barbs gave no clues as to what might be in dispute; their argument had devolved into a sort of shorthand language only the sisters understood.

  On the other side of The Floor, near the equipment storage, Ryan held the mangled remains of PeterBot under one arm while he thrust a finger at Carson’s chest. Carson batted Ryan’s arm away and stepped back, hands in the air.

  Cair paced in greater agitation than before in front of the Board. Every few seconds he jerkily gestured at one name or another, then resumed pacing. Nika frowned; two new names had been added to the list since…yesterday?

  Near the far wall, Perrin huddled with three of the newcomers, likely trying to reassure them this was not the norm and everything would be just fine.

  Except it wouldn’t be. Not on their current trajectory. Parc’s absence had created an even larger hole than she’d realized, and the reason for his absence was spurring paranoia and helplessness in equal measure.

  Okay.

  Nika took a deep breath, brought two fingers to her lips and whistled loudly. “Hey! All active and impending violence will cease this instant. Everybody paying attention? Great. Here’s what’s going to happen.

  “Ryan, stitch PeterBot back together. Then you’re taking point on developing defenses and countermeasures to the virutox lurking in these limb augments. Build a team of four others to work with you on the project.”