This Cruel Design

by Emily Suvada

  Leoben shakes his head. “That’s not love, squid. You need to unlearn that shit. You can’t confuse protectiveness with love.”

  My shoulders tighten. “I know what love is.”

  “I’m just saying, you fell for a guy who’s pretty damn protective of you.”

  I look up, my hands curling into fists. “Yeah, well, you fell for a guy who was experimenting on you.”

  Leoben looks away.

  “Shit,” I say, “I’m sorry, Lee. I didn’t mean that.”

  “No,” he says, staring at the table. “I know it’s screwed up, trust me.”

  I let out a sigh, scrubbing my hands over my face. He probably has a point about Cole—I know I fell for him fast, and maybe it was partly his protectiveness. Maybe that’s what I’d learned to think love was, like Leoben said. But there’s more than that between Cole and me. Years more, even if I can’t remember it. What we have is screwed up in a hundred different ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

  “I guess Lachlan screwed us all up pretty good,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m happy you guys have each other.”

  He just nods, his eyes distant.

  “Do you want to go check on him? I can wait here for the scientist guy.”

  He looks up. “You sure you’re okay with him hacking something in your head?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly thrilled about it, but if it’ll help us find Lachlan, it’s worth trying. Go check on Dax. I’ll be fine.”

  He pushes away from the counter. “I think I will. But I didn’t fall for him, okay?”

  I roll my eyes. “Whatever, Lee.”

  He gives me a ghost of a smile and pushes back through the door, leaving me alone with my palms pressed flat to the metal table. The shelf of medical equipment looms in my peripheral vision, tugging at my memory, though I don’t want to remember what it might show me. I don’t know if it’s possible for anyone to come through a childhood like we had and not be screwed up for the rest of their lives. And yet, deep down, part of me is still reeling from the thought that I might not look like the man who did this to us. The man who still feels like my father on some fundamental level. I should be comforted that I don’t share his true face.

  Instead, I feel like another shard of whatever broken identity I’ve been clinging to has slipped away from me.

  The door squeals open, and the dark-haired scientist, Mato, backs through it with a metal tray balanced in his hands. My heart speeds up as he sets it on the table and looks around the room. I don’t know what the hack he wants to run on the implant involves, but something tells me it won’t be pleasant.

  And if he figures out who I really am, then there’s no chance Cartaxus will let me go.

  “This place is awful,” he says. He stands with his hands on one of the chairs, looking around. “Cartaxus is so backward sometimes. Human testing like this is archaic. Brink’s such an idiot, he doesn’t realize what a dinosaur Lachlan is. No offense, of course.”

  I swallow another reflexive urge to defend Lachlan. “Aren’t you one of their scientists? Should you be talking like that?”

  His eyes snap down to me, a cold smile spreading across his face. “Oh, I’m central command. I can say whatever I want.”

  He sits down opposite me, leaning back in his chair. I’m finding it tough to get a read on him. I came across a few hackers like him when I was working with the Skies—cocky, smart, but too sure of their abilities. The difference is, this guy is in Cartaxus’s central command, and something tells me he’s cocky because he knows how good he is.

  I still can’t remember how Jun Bei knew him either. He’s not the kind of person who’d be easy to forget, and not just because of his coding mask. He’s the same height as me, and around so many towering soldiers, it makes him stand out. There are musculoskeletal apps most people start running in childhood to manage their posture and proportions, and practically everyone wants to be tall. Especially guys.

  It’s funny, most people thought gentech would destroy the relationship between biology and gender, and in a lot of ways it did. There are apps that construct a synthetic Y chromosome, and others that inhibit its expression, as well as those designed to carve out presentations of gender across a spectrum. But the easy ability to change one’s appearance came with the pressure to do so, and some gender stereotypes became even more entrenched. Height and silhouette. Eyelashes and jawlines, shoulder width and hand size. The ability to download traditional beauty standards became a temptation few could resist.

  Back at the cabin, I thought I was short because I had hypergenesis. There were no apps safe enough to give me another few inches, to taper my square ribcage or lengthen my legs. But Jun Bei could have made herself look however she wanted, and for her to have kept the natural expression of her genes must have been a radical choice.

  It’s one that Mato made too, and it’s starting to make sense as he holds my gaze, an undercurrent of razor-sharp intelligence glinting in his eyes. It feels like his height is making a statement—a way to intimidate people in the same way that I was frightened of Cole at the cabin when I saw he was unarmed. It sent the message that he could kill me with his hands if he wanted to.

  Maybe Jun Bei’s and Mato’s size is a message that their real strength lies in their minds.

  He slides a metal pen from his pocket and holds it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, flicking one end to spin it around, catching it again. “You’re lucky to have one of these implants. They’re very rare.”

  “What—the memory suppressant?”

  He tilts his head. “They can suppress memories, but that’s not what they’re for. Have you even seen what the implant looks like?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “I thought it was just a chip. It’s in my skull, right?”

  “Part of it.” He spins the pen again and lets his eyes glaze, a comm request with his full name blinking in my vision.

  I accept it hesitantly, and a VR animation of a person’s head appears above the table. I blink, staring at it. I’m still not used to just seeing things appear in front of me that look as real as this. I reach out for the image, and it rotates slowly as my fingers brush through it. The skin and skull on the head are both rendered in semitransparent yellow so I can see through to the animated brain inside. A red oblong the size of my thumbnail is attached to the inside of the skull. The skin on the back of my head prickles at the sight.

  “That rectangle is the chip,” Mato says, spinning the pen again, “and these are the neural wires.”

  The image updates, a thick red line growing from below the chip, coiling into the person’s spinal cord. Another dozen wires emerge, growing up and out like vines. They multiply, branching as they spread until they look like the limbs of a vast tree stretching through the brain.

  The image seems to pulse in my vision, and the prickling skin on the back of my head rises into an ache.

  There’s one of these things inside my head.

  “It’s an amazing piece of tech,” Mato says, staring at the image, a gleam in his eyes.

  I open my mouth, but I don’t trust my voice. There must be a thousand wires digging through my brain. I’ve known all week that Lachlan found a way to alter my mind, but I’ve never really felt the horror of it until now. The violation of it. This wasn’t some game where he tried to create a perfect daughter. This was an experiment. It was cruel, and sick, and the tools he used are still buried inside me.

  I think I’m going to throw up.

  I turn from the image, dragging in a breath, covering my mouth. The tiled walls seem to pulse, the room suddenly stifling.

  “Oh,” Mato says, waving his hand. The image disappears. “We can wait if you’re feeling weak.”

  I shake my head, trying to control my breathing. “I’m fine.” I force myself to straighten, turning back to the table. Putting this off isn’t going to make it any easier, and I don’t want to look weak in front of this guy. “What’s the implant supposed to do?”
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  Mato spins the pen again, catching it cleanly, then passes it to his right hand. This time when he spins it, it clatters across the table. “I’m better at this with my left hand than my right,” he says, his eyes on mine, “but it’s not from practice. It’s from the implant.”

  He spins the pen in his left hand again. A clean, perfect arc.

  “You’re telling me you’re using code to spin that?” I ask.

  “Precisely. It’s just a mental command coded into the implant. Whenever I think of spinning it, my body responds.”

  I frown as he spins the pen again. Code-controlled motions aren’t new—that’s how puppets work. They have a wiring system feeding impulses into their muscles and nerves. Some athletes have been caught cheating with similar tech. The sad reality is that machines are slightly better at almost any task than humans are. They still can’t be programmed to move in all the ways that people can, but if you train a machine to replicate a single action—like catching a ball—it’ll learn to do it faster and more accurately than the most talented person.

  The controls aren’t perfect, though. Even with wires in your muscles, your body would rather listen to your thoughts than to your tech. That’s why puppets twitch.

  But the implant doesn’t send wires into your muscles. It sends them into your brain.

  “The beauty of the implant,” Mato says, “is that this skill would take up space in a normal brain, but I only have a few neurons dedicated to it. When I train a new movement into the implant, it sends the command directly into my spinal cord and suppresses that part of my brain until those neurons atrophy.” He picks up the pen with his left hand again, his eyes glazing, and tries to flick it, but he suddenly looks clumsy, like he can barely hold it at all. “I’m using my brain right now, but the neurons that once controlled my hand are gone.”

  His eyes glaze again, and the pen twirls around smoothly. Only, this time it doesn’t just flick around his thumb. It rolls back and forth between his fingers, spinning seamlessly as he lifts his hand, never losing control. He’s just showing off now, but the nausea I felt when I first saw the implant has subsided, curiosity taking its place.

  “So you can’t use your hand anymore?” I ask. “What if the implant glitches?”

  He sighs. “A coder with as much promise as you shouldn’t be so limited in your thinking. If a machine can move my hand better than me, then why wouldn’t I let it? A lot of our brain is dedicated to simple biological controls, and that’s valuable real estate. After you suppress an action for long enough, the brain will reuse that space. The neurons that used to control my left hand can now be used for better things—thoughts, memories, calculations. This isn’t a tool for controlling movements. It’s a reorganization system for the human brain.”

  I sit back, staring at him. The thought is completely wild: rewiring the brain and relegating movements to chips, reclaiming the space to become smarter. It’s horrifying to think that Lachlan put this inside me against my will, but a hint of excitement flutters in my chest at the thought of using it. This is cutting-edge tech. Mato sets the pen back down, and I find myself watching him, taking in the intelligence in his eyes.

  I wonder just how much of himself he’s given to the implant, and what he got in return.

  “So, no,” he says, rolling the pen back and forth on the table with his fingers, “it isn’t a memory suppressant, but it could be used to isolate the parts of your brain that hold your memories and quiet them. There are a lot of simpler ways to do that, though.”

  I nod, shifting uneasily, my eyes following the pen as he rolls it across the table. There are a lot of simpler ways to do everything Lachlan has done to me. Hide me, change me, suppress my memories—even releasing the vaccine through me. But Lachlan has never been one to waste time and energy on something he didn’t need to do.

  There’s a lot I don’t understand about what he’s done, and it’s starting to frighten me.

  “Are you ready to try the hack?” Mato asks. “If you’re too scared after seeing the implant, we can wait. . . .”

  I look up, narrowing my eyes, expecting a condescending look on his face, but instead his gaze is more like Leoben’s during our sparring sessions. Fierceness in his eyes, the ghost of a smile on his lips, like he’s pushing me into a place that’s not comfortable but he knows I’m strong enough to handle it. I still don’t know where Jun Bei knew this guy from, but something uncoils in me as I stare back at him. A voice, rising to his challenge.

  “I’m not scared,” I say, leaning across the table. “Bring it on. Let’s do this.”

  CHAPTER 9

  MATO FLICKS HIS DARK HAIR back from his face and stands from the table, unwinding two cables from the side of the genkit. One is a normal reader wire designed to burrow under the skin and connect with a panel, but the other is a bigger cable—a coiled black cord the thickness of a pencil. It’s used to hook into the sockets that a person’s panel grows inside them—in their knees, hips, shoulders, and spine, controlling the infrastructure of wires that distributes their code.

  “We’ll jack in to your panel like normal,” he says, passing the slender reader wire to me. It’s tapered to a needle point to dig through the skin, with a hollow tip to allow a stream of nanites through.

  I take the wire, nerves fluttering through me at the thought of jacking myself in. If Mato decides to scan my panel, he’ll find out the truth about who I am, and then I’ll never make it out of here. I just have to hope he isn’t feeling curious about my tech or my DNA.

  I press the wire to the glowing stripe of my panel, and it lurches free the moment it gets near my skin, diving into my arm. I flinch, my panel flashing as it connects, the lab flickering momentarily out of focus. A green icon pops up in the corner of my vision, showing me a connection to the genkit on the wall.

  “Clean link,” Mato says, his eyes glazing. It’s a small note of respect for him to hand the wire to me instead of connecting it himself. It hurts to connect a reader wire—just a pinch, but it’s enough to make most people afraid of it. Coders are used to it, though. Gentech coding sessions can be done over a wireless connection, but there’s nothing as fast and secure as jacking yourself in.

  “This one’s more difficult,” he says, lifting the coiled black cable. He hangs the end over a hook on the edge of the table. “We’re going to have to connect directly with the implant, which means adding a socket there. You can take it out once we’re done if you want, but I keep a permanent port to avoid having to reinstall it.”

  I wince. He means to screw a piece of metal into my skull. “You can’t use the spinal node?”

  “It needs to be closer.” He lifts a tool from the trolley that’s shaped like a handgun with a wide barrel. A socket installer. “You can do this yourself, but it’s probably easier if I do it.” He steps closer, but I lift my hands.

  “Just slow down,” I say. “I don’t understand how you’re going to find this tracker if the implant was wiped.”

  Mato sighs impatiently. “The tracker wouldn’t have been wiped. I think Lachlan hid it in the implant’s power controls. I should be able to see it if I can get the implant to reboot. I really thought you were smarter than this.”

  I sit back from the table. “You don’t have to be so rude.”

  He shoots me a strangely disarming smile. “You’d actually be surprised by how much it helps in my job.” He lifts the gun. “Now, are you doing this, or am I?”

  My chest tightens at the sight of the socket installer. “I . . . I think you’d better do it.”

  “Of course.” He walks around the table, gesturing for me to lean forward. My shoulders tense, but I press my hands to the table’s surface and lean my face into them, letting him pull the hair away from the base of my skull.

  “This will only hurt for a moment,” he says. The barrel of the gun presses against my skin and something whines, shaving away a circle of my hair. My heart rate kicks higher in anticipation. I walked into the lab of my own
volition, but now there’s a wire in my arm and a gun at my head in the hands of a member of Cartaxus’s central command. I’m rapidly losing control here.

  But there’s no walking away now.

  I close my eyes, digging my fingernails into my palms. Mato shifts the gun slightly, the metal cold on my skin, then it clicks and something smacks into the back of my head.

  He lied about the pain. It crashes through me before dipping, but it doesn’t fade away.

  “Goddammit,” I spit, scrunching my eyes shut. It feels like a spike driven into my head, making my vision swim. I sit up and bring my shaking hand to the back of my head. A circle of cold metal is lying flush with my skin, the flesh around it slowly turning numb.

  “Okay, let’s check it,” Mato says, stretching the cable around to the back of my head. It locks into the new socket with a click of metal that echoes through my skull. “Clean connection. I think we’re set to run the hack. I’ve invited Crick in to monitor your panel and make sure you’re okay as we go.”

  The screen in the corner of the room blinks to blue, showing a spinning white icon. A circle with a jagged slash through it, like a snake eating its own tail.

  “That logo is from the implant,” Mato says. “It was designed by a hacker called Regina. Do you know of her?”

  “Of course I do.” Regina is one of the world’s most famous coders. Some say she’s as talented as Lachlan, but she never turned her focus to commercial apps. She leads a commune of genehackers living in a city they built in the Nevada desert called Entropia. They created the passenger pigeons and contributed plenty of work to the Skies’ databases of code during the outbreak, but I haven’t spoken to many of them. Regina’s hackers tend to keep to themselves. I’ve never seen this logo before, but a flicker of recognition rises through me as it spins on the screen. “I didn’t know Regina worked on tech like this.”

  “She’s worked on everything,” Mato says. “It’s my job to monitor the Skies’ servers, but I also keep an eye on Entropia itself. You’d be surprised how much of Cartaxus’s technology started out as files that were stolen from Regina’s vaults. Brink’s biggest mistake was trying to develop a vaccine in-house instead of collaborating with her people.”