Wildcard (Warcross)

by Marie Lu

  I startle. The tape buzzes with static. When it plays again, I see Sasuke struggling wildly in bonds, in a coldly lit room. Nearby is Taylor, watching him with a calm, cool expression. “And who helped you try to escape, Sasuke-kun?” Taylor asks.

  Sasuke doesn’t look at her. His eyes are fixed instead on the door leading out of the room, like he might be able to will himself out of the lab. When Taylor walks over to him, standing purposely between him and the door, his eyes finally shift up to the woman.

  “Who helped you try to escape, Sasuke?” she repeats.

  Sasuke stays quiet.

  When he still doesn’t answer, Taylor shakes her head and motions for one of her researchers to bring a young girl forward. My eyes widen. She has shorter hair here, but she is unmistakably Jax. She follows the researcher obediently to stand beside her mother, and the sight of Jax in such a frightened state is so odd that I can hardly believe it’s her.

  “Did Jackson help you?” Taylor asks, still in that cool, calm tone.

  Sasuke shakes his head again, although now his eyes are on Jax. I walk invisibly around in the recording, noticing how Sasuke’s leather bonds are stretched tight now, his arms so tense that I can see a vein standing out against his skin. He still doesn’t answer.

  Taylor nods once at the others. As I look on, they loosen Sasuke’s bonds, so that his wrists and ankles are suddenly free.

  Sasuke doesn’t even hesitate. He bolts upright and leaps off the table, his eyes narrowed at the door. But the others are already moving, too. Taylor reaches for young Jax’s wrist, drags her forward, and pulls her toward the same bench that Sasuke had been strapped to only moments earlier.

  “Come here, my love,” Taylor says to her.

  This movement is the only thing that makes Sasuke freeze near the door. Jax whimpers, too afraid to run as her mother ushers her up onto the bench.

  “You want to leave so badly, don’t you, Sasuke?” Taylor says soothingly to him as a researcher begins to wipe Jax’s temples with a damp cloth.

  Sasuke watches with a frozen expression. It takes me a moment to recognize that expression as fear. Temptation. Guilt.

  “Then go. Die out there instead of letting us save you,” Taylor says, turning her back on Sasuke and focusing her attention now on Jax. “You aren’t the only patient we have in our ranks, and your progress has been slower than I would have expected. If you’re unwilling to cooperate, then I’ll simply have to replace you with someone else. Jax has always been the alternative for our study.”

  The girl stares at Sasuke with a desperate expression, but doesn’t plead. Instead, she shakes her head. Go, she seems to be insisting.

  Taylor turns around to meet Sasuke’s paralyzed gaze. “Well? The doors are unlocked. What are you waiting for?”

  And for a moment, it really does look like Sasuke will make a run for it. There are no guards stopping him, no one looking his way. Taylor is too far away to catch him. No one will come for him, not if he runs now.

  But he stands there and doesn’t move. His hands clench and unclench, his eyes darting from the woman to Jax, his expression tight.

  Taylor sighs. “You’re making me impatient,” she says, turning back toward Jax.

  Sasuke takes a step toward them. The movement is enough to make Taylor pause. Sasuke meets Jax’s eyes, then takes another step forward. When he speaks, he tries to keep his voice steady, but I can hear the trembling in it. “She’s not a part of the program.”

  Taylor doesn’t move to release her. “You have so much potential, Sasuke,” she says. “But I need you to choose, and choose decisively. If you want to leave, then leave. We won’t come after you. But you know you are the only one this entire experiment hinges on, and what you do could change everything. The results of your study could save millions of lives. It could save your life. We’ve all worked so hard for you. And here you are, ready to throw it all away.” She gives Sasuke a disappointed look.

  Even though Sasuke still seems afraid to step forward, I can also see hints of guilt on his face, Taylor’s manipulation wrapping around him like a vise. As if he’d suddenly owed this operation something, like he’d felt obligated to her—but most of all, like whatever happens to Jax will be his fault if he leaves. He meets her gaze now, and I can see traces of that unspoken bond between them, the accumulation of their days spent together and their nights huddled away in a nook.

  I find myself wishing silently for Sasuke to turn and run away, to leave it all behind. Of course, he doesn’t. Instead, I see his shoulders droop again, his head lower ever so slightly, and him take the first steps away from the door and back toward the lab table.

  “Let her go now,” he says to Taylor about Jax. On the table, Jax shoots a bewildered look at him, some panicked expression telling him not to do it.

  Taylor smiles. “And you’re not going to run.”

  “I’m not going to run.”

  “And you’re going to commit to this.”

  Sasuke hesitates, briefly meeting the woman’s eyes. “I will,” he replies.

  The recording ends. I realize that my heart is beating so fast now that I’ve had to sit down on the floor of my room.

  The next scene is dated only a month later, but Sasuke is a little taller, his limbs longer and his body ganglier. The most noticeable change on him is a single, thin strip of black metal now running along the side of his head, where part of his hair has been newly buzzed again. He’s back in the same laboratory, and answering a series of questions from the same technician who had been working with Taylor before.

  “State your name.”

  “Sasuke Tanaka.”

  “Your age.”

  “Twelve.”

  I do the quick calculation. By this point, Hideo was fourteen, I was eleven, and Warcross had already become an international phenomenon, the NeuroLink welcomed into millions of households.

  “Your city of birth.”

  “London.”

  “What is the name of your brother?”

  “Hideo Tanaka.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Mina Tanaka.”

  The questions go on for a while, a long list of simple facts and details about his life. I watch Sasuke’s face as he mentions the names of his loved ones—and for the first time, I notice that he doesn’t seem to react to the names. No flinch. No wince. There is recognition that sparks in his eyes, but it is as if he were saying the names of acquaintances instead of his family members.

  “Show him the TV,” Taylor says.

  The technician pauses to switch on the screen. As we look on, the TV plays an interview with Hideo, now gradually growing into his newfound fame. I glance back at Sasuke. Not long ago, he had grabbed Jax’s arm and cried at the sight of his brother. Now he watches the interview with some notable interest, although he doesn’t seem truly affected by it. It’s as if he were fascinated by a celebrity instead of missing his brother.

  The questions start again.

  “Who is this?”

  “Hideo Tanaka.”

  “And is he your older brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  A hesitation, then a shrug.

  As he answers each question, the technician observes a series of data appearing on a screen beside him and taps down notes on a pad he’s holding. As he goes, he reads out some of his reactions. “Zero’s signs of recognition still holding steady at eighty-four percent. Overall response times have improved by thirty-three percent.” The man drones on as Sasuke answers each question.

  Whatever it is that they’ve been doing to him, they’ve taken away something—something real and human, an intonation in his voice and a light in his eyes—something that defines him as Sasuke. There’s no sign of struggle now, and Sasuke seems perfectly willing—if not eager—to do as he’s told.


  “Zero’s cognitive skills are all wholly intact,” the technician finally concludes, as the final question happens. Someone injects Sasuke in the arm with a needle, and as I look on, his eyes roll back, his body going limp against the platform.

  “Good,” Taylor says with her arms crossed. “And what about his reactions to mentions of his family? He’s still responding to them with a degree of emotion. That should be tracking down faster than this.”

  “He’s holding on harder than I expected. Don’t worry. He’ll be yours before long and believe he has always worked for you. We should be all caught up in the next few weeks. He’ll be fully downloaded well before he expires.”

  Before he dies.

  As the tech talks, I pick up on something else in the recording. Now that the system has been switched to the NeuroLink, I’m able to wander around the recording, and I notice something on one of the screens in the room that catches my eye. At the top of it is the same symbol I’d seen on Sasuke’s sleeve, and below it is written the following in large letters: PROJECT ZERO.

  I head over to it, suddenly afraid of what I might see. Beside me, Jax does the same, talking softly as we go.

  “Project Zero is an artificial intelligence program,” she tells me. “Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has improved everything from search engines to face recognition, to the ability for a computer to defeat a human at complicated mind games like Go. But Project Zero is building on that, to install the advances of AI into the human mind and the human mind into AI, to blend the two so that we can have all the benefits of a computer’s mind—logic, speed, accuracy—and the computer mind can have the benefits of a human’s—gut reactions, imagination, instinct, spontaneity.”

  Taylor is literally separating his mind from his body. Downloading his mind into data. She is transferring his mind into a machine. A machine that she can control.

  I sit back, my world spinning, my mind flooding with questions. Why not just stick to the artificial, to installing human instinct into machines? Why destroy a human like this?

  “What’s the end goal of this technology?” I whisper to Jax.

  “Immortality,” Jax replies as we go on to a final recording. “You know how Taylor fears death. She wants the mind to live on beyond the body. With this technology, she can.”

  In this one, Sasuke no longer looks like Sasuke, but like the Zero I recognize, standing in the middle of the lab room with his cold, unfeeling gaze.

  “But what did they do to him?” I finally ask as I stare at Zero, still puzzled. “He’s gone this far, he’s being experimented on in this artificial intelligence program—but what’s the end result? What can he do now, that he was unable to do before?”

  At that, Jax fixes me with a hollow stare. “The end goal is to transform him into nothing but data.”

  I blink. “Data?”

  “Emika, Zero isn’t real.”

  Right as she says it, I see a technician walk straight through Zero, like he’s nothing more than a virtual simulation. A hologram. Just like what I’d seen at the lab earlier tonight, when I witnessed him walk right through the glass wall.

  Blood rushes to my head. That can’t be true. “What do you mean, he isn’t real? I’ve seen him. He’s physically been in my room, in the same space as us, plenty of times. He’s—”

  “Has he?” Jax interrupts me, her eyes distant and bleak. “Zero isn’t real. He’s an illusion. Sasuke Tanaka’s real body died years ago on a lab gurney. What you’ve seen standing before you is a virtual projection. Emika, Zero is Sasuke’s human mind successfully transmitted into data. He is an artificial intelligence program.”

  21

  Zero isn’t real.

  All this time, I thought he was flesh and blood. But he is an illusion, a projection, a virtual image so realistic that I couldn’t even tell the difference.

  That’s impossible.

  The thought bubbles up in my mind, and I feel a desperate urge to laugh at Jax. I must not have understood her.

  But then my memories come back to me, faster and faster. The first time I’d ever seen him was in the Pirate’s Den, a virtual space. The second time, inside a game of Warcross. The third time, he had been standing in my dorm room, only to vanish when everything exploded. When I arrived at the hotel to meet with him and the Blackcoats, Jax and Taylor had been with him, and he’d been leaning against the wall, not touching anyone.

  But no! When I saw him standing on the balcony with Jax, hadn’t he pressed his hand to her back, pulling her to him? My mind whirls frantically, remembering that moment and searching for a sign that would make this conclusion false.

  No, Jax had only stood close to him, and he had only bent down near her to whisper something in her ear.

  I have never touched Zero, and he has never touched me. We have only ever been close to each other—never making physical contact. That cold, artificial look in his eyes is because he is artificial.

  The realization sends me spinning, and I put a hand out, steadying myself against my desk.

  Zero isn’t real. He is an illusion.

  Sasuke Tanaka died a long time ago.

  Jax watches me as the information hits me in waves. There is a haunted expression on her face now. “Living eternally inside a machine is something we’ve always talked about, isn’t it? Only now, Taylor has actually done it. Zero’s mind is as accurate and agile as a human mind—in an intellectual capacity, he’s every bit the same as he was when he was Sasuke. Only now, Zero can exist anywhere and everywhere. He has no physical form. He does not age. And so long as there is an Internet, so long as there are machines, he’ll exist forever.”

  “What—” My voice catches, and I have to try again. “What about his memory? His recognition of his family?”

  “Taylor can’t have him going off to see them, can she? Reporting to the authorities?” Jax replies. “She gave him immortality. In exchange, she took away his memory, linking his mind to hers. He does what she wants. He believes what she believes. And when she dies, he’ll shut down.”

  Jax has scrolled us onto another file, and I stare numbly as this one shows a detailed list of names. Clients.

  The military. The medical-industrial complex. The one percent. Tech companies. Government officials.

  My mind aches. There are plenty of people eager to benefit from the results of this research—maybe to make obedient supersoldiers or as a cure for the terminally ill or whatever it was they needed. Maybe just to live forever.

  “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Jax says in a resigned voice. “In a way, Taylor did keep her promise to Mina Tanaka. She saved Sasuke’s life by making him permanent. The only price was to kill him.”

  I think back to institute, how I watched Zero move in tandem with that armored figure, how his gestures manipulated the machine. “What about the robot in the lab?” I ask. “The one Zero was controlling?”

  “A physical form for him,” she replies. “He can sync with that machine, as surely as if that were his own body. He can control one of them; he can control multiple ones if he wants to.”

  Supersoldiers.

  “Now, imagine this hooked up to the NeuroLink. How easily Taylor could replicate this, on a massive scale.”

  “But,” I say hoarsely, clearing my throat, “do all these clients—patrons—know how she did this experiment? What it took?”

  “Would it matter now, if they knew?” She shrugs at me. “If the end results are this remarkable, would you throw away the research just because the process was unethical? Immoral human experimentation has been around forever, has been performed by your country, by mine, by everyone. You think people don’t want the results of this kind of research, regardless of how it’s obtained? People ultimately don’t care about the journey, if the end is worth it. And what was the price tag here, in exchange for immortality?”

 
One life.

  She’s right. If the experiment is exposed, it can be blamed on the Blackcoats, and all of these clients can just point the finger at them, denouncing it as heinous and illegal while being absolved of any blame for funding the research. But no one would throw away these findings just because Sasuke had died for it.

  “His parents,” I whisper. “Sasuke’s mom. Did she . . . ?”

  “She never knew what happened to him. She knows he disappeared several months after she withdrew him from the program, and I know she nearly killed herself trying to find out what happened to him—but what could she do? People disappear frequently in Japan. There isn’t even a national registry that catalogues the missing. Taylor was the director of the institute. She had the power to hide whatever needed to be hidden, and an accusation this wild would’ve just made Mina look like a grieving mother gone mad.”

  “And what about you?” I ask softly.

  “Taylor often hired people as needed for her projects. Most who worked with us weren’t exactly upstanding citizens. So as her ambitions grew, she wanted someone like me to enforce her control and protect her. I may not have gone Sasuke’s route, but I tested very well for my reflexes. So she had me trained.” Jax smiles bitterly. There’s the fear in her eyes again. “Nothing commands authority like a professional killer, and no killer surprises someone more than a young girl.”

  Even though Jax doesn’t say it, I know she still thinks of Taylor as her mother. A cruel one, one who doesn’t care about her. But family, nevertheless. It’s hard to sever the mind’s ties, no matter how painful they are.

  Taylor had made me believe that she was a force of good, that her mission was still fundamentally moral, the need to rid the world of regimes and technology like Hideo’s that sought to control others.