by C. A. Gray
My eyes tracked next to the abandoned VMI machine. I’d stopped my research on that because I didn’t know what else to do, if Alex wouldn’t sit for me. I knew a little more about how Francis’s brain worked now, but I’d gotten distracted by the film idea and hadn’t gotten any further.
Were film scripts the best use of my time now, though? People wouldn’t rebel against a government they’d always loved and trusted after just seeing a film or two. Maybe if we had years to try to turn the tide… but we had only weeks. Jaguar changed everything.
“Becca?” Julie approached me cautiously, and I blinked at her, my thoughts returning to the present. Queenie sniffed at my feet.
My eyes flickered to Alex again, involuntarily. She was the key somehow. I knew it. But I needed to peek inside her brain in order to find out how, and she would never let me do that.
“Whatcha thinking?” Julie prodded.
“I need to talk something out,” I told her, distracted. But not to Julie. I reached down and grabbed her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze, before I darted toward the stairs.
I wasn’t totally sure where I was going until I found myself a few feet from Liam’s door. I heard voices inside already though, and I froze. They were muffled and low, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I crept closer, and with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I recognized the other voice. Val. Of course.
“…be another way!” she was saying.
“…isn’t,” came Liam’s reluctant voice. “Has to be this way. I’m sorry.”
“Liam! Just because… Giovanni… database…” I couldn’t make out everything Val said because of her soft, breathy voice, but I felt a little like I’d been kicked in the stomach.
He was telling Val what he’d been working on—I’d been right. He was confiding in Val, and intentionally not in me.
Suddenly I realized I was standing in a hallway, overtly eavesdropping outside Liam’s door, where anyone might see me. Recollecting myself, I decided it was better to pretend I hadn’t heard anything. There was silence now on the other side of the door, anyway. I rapped on the door once, and opened it before they could start talking again.
They were kissing.
The floor might have dropped out from beneath me. I just stood there, too shocked to move, as they jumped apart.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” I heard myself say, and stumbled backwards, closing the door again. I heard voices calling after me, but I barely registered them.
I’m not totally sure how I got back to my own room—the journey was a blur. I only recall the moment when the door swung closed, and the sudden onset of heaving, desperate sobs. I sank down on the floor, my back resting against my bed. Madeline was there, stroking my hair, murmuring something—I don’t know what. I couldn’t stop long enough to listen. I choked out what I’d seen in just the barest details, the only ones that mattered.
Knock knock knock.
“Rebecca?”
It was Liam’s voice. I managed to get ahold of myself just enough to stay still and quiet.
“I know you’re in there,” he said after a pause. “Open the door.”
Madeline’s wide eyes tracked from me to the door, and back to me. I gave her one sharp, angry shake of my head—Don’t you dare.
When I still didn’t reply, he called, “Okay, well, if you’re not in there, then you won’t mind if I come in…”
The door swung open, and I turned my face away from him, mortified. He stood there in the doorframe watching me for a minute, and then the door clicked shut. He walked over to where I sat, and sank down to the ground beside me wordlessly. Fresh tears burst forth, even though I held them back as best I could, my chin trembling with the effort. I could not look at him.
At last, he began, “Bec—”
“Go away.”
“Let me explain, please—”
“There’s nothing to explain. Please just go away!”
He sighed. “Okay. I will, if you’ll just answer one thing first. Are you crying about Val and me?”
What could I say? Wasn’t that already humiliatingly obvious? What could I possibly gain by admitting it now?
When I didn’t reply right away, he prodded, bumping my shoulder with his, “Bec? Please, I just need to know—”
Madeline got angry on my behalf now, rolling in between us. “Can’t you see she wants to be left alone?” she snapped at him. “Get out!”
Liam hesitated, and I saw the blurry form of Madeline’s extended metal arm, gesticulating at the door. I felt rather than saw Liam rise, and during a pause that felt like indecision, I almost called after him to stay. I just wanted to know—if I admitted to him what we both already knew at this point anyway, what would he say? What could he say that would matter?
But I heard the door click shut. The moment was gone.
Madeline rolled back over and wrapped her metallic arms around me, and I sobbed afresh as if I might never stop.
Madeline stroked my hair, making shushing noises. “What would make you happy?” she asked me, over and over again. “Tell me what would make you happy.”
“Nothing, now!” I choked out.
“There must be something. Tell me. What about Val?”
“Liam and Val are back together—end of story. I figured this would happen from the moment Val showed up. I missed my chance, if I ever had one to begin with.” My voice cracked as I said this.
“But don’t you think there might be more to it? He did run after you, after all…”
I shook my head vehemently. “He only did that out of obligation, to let me down easy,” I insisted. “He wouldn’t confide what he was working on to me, but he did to Val. And they’re clearly together now. There’s nothing else to tell.” I wasn’t going to let Madeline give me hope. Not again. I wiped my face, and sucked in a shaky breath. “I don’t want to talk about Liam and Val anymore. It’s done. I am Quentin Cordeaux’s daughter, and I’m going to focus on stopping the Silver Six—like I should have been doing all along! We have weeks left now, because I’ve been wasting time on all this stupid crap that doesn’t matter!”
Madeline wheeled back and forth in front of me, fretting. “But there must be something that would make you happy!”
I sniffed, and gave a short, humorless laugh, feeling something harden inside of me. “Well, sure. I can think of one thing. If I could peek inside Alex’s brain, that would be terrific.”
“What?” Madeline asked, confused.
So I told Madeline about Halpert’s address, the creation of Jaguar, and that someone—one of us—had deleted the film from the Commune. I told her what I’d been intending to tell Liam, before I walked in on that soul-crushing scene: my suspicions that Alex was the key somehow. She had been the one to delete the film from the Commune.
“She hates us,” I burst out, pacing, “and she’s working against us somehow. I know it, I just don’t know how or why. Is she just getting even with us for framing her, or is it worse than that?” I shook my head. “Brain images won’t tell me her motivations, I know. But intuitively, I just know I have to see inside her head. It’s critical. I just have to figure out how to get her into that VMI machine. There’s a way. There’s got to be a way! What would Dad do?” I murmured this last bit to myself, under my breath.
“Maybe you should… sleep on it?” Madeline suggested at last, glancing at the clock. I followed her gaze—it was late.
“I can’t sleep, though,” I murmured, reaching instead for the notebook that had become my makeshift journal, and my pen. Solutions tended to come to me as I wrote them out. And I probably needed to emotionally vomit everything that had happened with Liam and Val that day first, just to purge it from my system… but the very idea of reliving it made my chest ache, and I thought better of it.
And besides—what did any of this matter? We might literally have only weeks left. The human race might have weeks left, or at least only weeks until we h
it the Point of No Return.
“Don’t,” Madeline begged as I reached for her power button to turn her off for the night. “I want to stay up tonight, so I can think of ways to help you!”
I felt the tiniest twinge of foreboding at this, but I wasn’t sure why. I forced myself to smile at her—she was just being helpful. I reached over to kiss her cold forehead. “I love you,” I whispered.
“I love you too, Rebecca,” she beamed back up at me. But even as she said it, Mack’s words flashed through my mind.
Madeline can’t hurt you. But she also can’t truly love you, the way a human can. It seems to me, Rebecca, that some part of you is still in hiding, still trying to protect yourself from the pain you felt when you lost your dad.
Maybe he was right, I thought. But Madeline was so trusting. So faithful. She wouldn’t ever hurt me.
And that was definitely more than I could say for humans.
Chapter 29
I thought I didn’t sleep at all that night, but I must have, because the next thing I knew, a pair of little metallic hands shook my forearm.
“Rebecca, wake up!” she insisted. “You have to go downstairs!”
“Wha—?” For a second, I felt disoriented, not sure where or when I was. Then the horrible memory of the night before came crashing down upon me, like a sack of rocks in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t nausea exactly, and yet I wished I could throw up and purge it all the same.
“Go downstairs, to the basement!” Madeline insisted.
“Why?”
“Just go! I have a surprise waiting for you!”
Now a wave of dread succeeded the memory of the night before. I did at least grab a robe on the way out of my room, and crept barefoot down the silent hallway to the basement door. One thing about being underground: it was impossible to tell what time it was, except in the dome room upstairs. But it still felt like the dead of night. I hadn’t bothered to check the clock before I’d left.
The lights in the basement were on, and for a moment, I hesitated, my hand on the knob. What if I found Liam down there, working? Was that all Madeline wanted me to see? I wasn’t ready to encounter him alone. But, I had to know what Madeline was so excited about, even if it did turn out to be just Liam. I opened the door.
It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. Hepzibah waited in the middle of the room as if she were expecting me, and under the VMI machine, unconscious…
“No,” I croaked.
“We have done as you requested,” came Hepzibah’s tinny voice. “We have taken VMI images of Alex’s brain.”
I stood halfway down the stairs, frozen, as wave after wave of horror washed over me. Alex’s body draped across the VMI chair, the helmet secure over her skull, but her head lolled to one side. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, but I willed myself to speak.
“Is she…” I wanted to ask dead, but my throat started to constrict.
“She is asleep,” Hepzibah informed me, matter-of-factly.
I almost cried with relief. “But… how did you get her down here?”
Hepzibah tilted her head to the side. “You ordered that she be sedated and brought down here for analysis.”
“I did nothing of the—!” But I stopped. Madeline did. Obviously. And she said the order had come from me.
As if I hadn’t spoken, Hepzibah said, “Once she was sedated, your companion and I carried her here and ran VMI images of her brain. They are ready for your inspection.”
I don’t know how long I continued to stand rooted to the same spot on the stairs before I finally descended, my feet acting of their own accord. Memories came fast and tumbled over one another in rapid succession as I descended, with the crushing weight of realization.
Andy’s ex-girlfriend Sarah, accused of plagiarism and kicked off the dance team.
Yolanda, whose false ‘family emergency’ took her away from Andy while they were at the beach together.
Madeline’s offer to ‘make Liam pay’ for embarrassing me back when we were in San Jose.
And now this.
Madeline is dangerous, I realized with dawning horror.
Suddenly it was undeniable… but deep down, I had to admit that I’d known it was Madeline all along. Madeline was a companion, designed to seek my happiness above all else. To her electronic brain, the welfare of others took a backseat to my desires. Wasn’t that what the Renegades had feared from the bots all along? They would destroy anything—or anyone—that stood between them and the realization of their core purpose.
Yet another wave of horror washed over me—if I’d said I wanted Val out of the way last night…
But I couldn’t finish that thought. I had to deal with this.
I strode across the room to the netscreen connected to the VMI machine, where the image Hepzibah had snapped sat waiting. I hadn’t intended to analyze it, since to do so would make me complicit in Hepzibah’s and Madeline’s crime… but before I could delete it, I froze.
The image on the screen looked like a brain… sort of. Almost. But it also didn’t. Curiosity, mingled with foreboding, won out. I zoomed in randomly, just to a section of the cerebral cortex, and took a histology sample.
Histology report: laboratory-synthesized myelin sheath upon silicon, it said. I zoomed out and chose a different area, in the basal ganglia this time.
Histology report: laboratory-synthesized myelin sheath upon silicon. I zoomed out of that, and zoomed in to an area of the brainstem.
Histology report: laboratory-synthesized myelin sheath upon silicon.
I sat frozen, thunderstruck.
The brainstem was necessary for the autonomic activities of life. How could anyone survive a surgery in which it was replaced with synthetic materials?
Then it occurred to me: most VMI machines had a feature that would analyze overall composition. I’d never used it before, as it had seemed rather pointless for the studies I carried out, but at the moment… I poked around, and found it presently. I ran the analysis.
Synthetic myelin, comprised of glycolipids, Myelin Basic Protein, and water: 68%. Synthetic silicon: 32%.
I stared at the screen, and did the math in my head, just in case I was wrong.
But nope. That added up to one hundred percent.
One hundred percent synthetic.
She’s one of them.
Perhaps because I’d already spent my quota of emotions in the last two days, I now felt nothing. It might have been because I was in emotional shock.
She’s one of them, I thought again, trying the words on for size. I hadn’t gotten to the part about what that meant… I could only think about how to tell everyone, without telling them how I knew. But again, when Alex awoke, she’d tell them all anyway.
And if she’s one of them, do we even want her waking up?
The door upstairs opened suddenly, and I whirled around, my heart in my throat. Liam’s face was half turned, looking at the light switch with a perplexed expression, before he turned back around again and began to descend the stairs. After about three of them, he stopped, eyes wide, taking in the scene. Then he looked at me.
“What the hell is going on?”
Chapter 30
For the briefest second, I considered lying to him. But I was a terrible liar, and I couldn’t lie to Liam anyway.
“She’s one of them,” I said out loud. I said it with no inflection, but somehow saying it made it more real.
He blinked at me, uncomprehending, as he reached the basement floor and crossed to where I sat. “I’m sorry, what?”
I pointed at the screen, and let him do the math. “She’s one of them,” I repeated. “She’s not a cyborg. She’s a humanoid bot. Like the Silver Six.”
Liam stared at the screen for a long moment, then closed his eyes, wiping his hand roughly over his face as he processed this. “How did this—?”
He began to gesture at Alex and the VMI machine, so I blur
ted the whole story: how I’d told Madeline last night that I was sure Alex was the key to the whole thing somehow, and I wanted to peek inside Alex’s brain. She’d asked me to leave her on all night so she could help me think, and when I’d gotten downstairs this morning and Hepzibah had explained what had happened, I’d pieced together the rest.
“Wait, when did you have time last night to tell Madeline that?” Liam interrupted, turning to look at me pointedly.
“Last night before bed. I was journaling about how to stop Halpert.” I met his eyes, like a challenge. I knew what he was asking, and no Liam, I did not spent all last night crying about you. There are more important things going on here. I felt a little surge of pride, hoping my steady gaze communicated all this and more.
A flicker of confusion crossed his face, but he blinked it away. “Okay, well, we need to go get Giovanni.”
Now it was my turn to be confused. “Giovanni? Why him?”
“Because he’s the only one of us who’s actually built synthetic bots like her before,” Liam said. “We need to know if it’s possible that she could ever have been human, if her brain is completely synthetic now. If not, then she’s lying, which means she’s a spy.”
“What time is it?” I asked Liam when he was already halfway to the stairs.
He understood me, and glanced back, shaking his head. “About half four. Nobody else should be up for awhile.”
“Why are you up this early?”
He hesitated. “I still had some work to do. But it just got superseded, at least for the moment.”
I sat in silence—just me, Hepzibah, and the sleeping Alex—for whatever length of time elapsed between when Liam left and when he returned with Giovanni. The older man’s iron gray hair, what he had left of it, stood up in every direction, and the bags under his eyes and lines on his face seemed more pronounced than usual. He wore a robe, like I did—only Liam looked like he’d already gotten ready for the day. I noticed that Liam locked the door behind them. It’s what I should have done when I’d come downstairs the first time, except at that point I hadn’t known what I was walking into.
