The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Look at this,” Julia said. “‘While Victoria performed admirably in terms of learning her environment, she was unable to form lasting connections with humans. In fact, child test subjects shunned her, even when they were not informed of her android status. The problem may be what is referred to as the uncanny valley. Her appearance is close to human, but not close enough.’ ”

  “Creepy, just like you said,” Benji said.

  “Still, it’s sad to think of her being abandoned. What do you think they did with her?” I asked.

  Theo looked over his shoulder. “You saw that room, Mori. When things didn’t work, they took them apart.”

  Victoria might be in there, in pieces. I shivered. “It’s just a robot,” I whispered, more to myself than to my friends. Prince Philip buzzed on my shoulder. Then I lifted my head. “But Old Harmonie scientists wouldn’t really do that, right? Just ditch a project like this?” But even as I said it, I thought of what Theo’s mom had told us: When a project’s outcomes fail to warrant the expenditures, we cancel it.

  Julia’s watchu buzzed. “Darn it! I have my art lesson. I have to go.”

  “Let’s just all go back,” Benji said. “We can go swimming or play four square or something.”

  “Right,” Julia agreed. “We can come back here another day.” She reached out and turned off the computer and the creepy girl faded away.

  20

  Julia bolted out of there at top speed. Late once more and her parents said they’d take away her screen privileges for the whole week, and Zane and River were in the midst of a breakup. Benji said, “I’m off to practice my ollie. Wanna come?”

  I shook my head. I thought I’d feel better once we got outside, but my stomach was still churning.

  “All right, see you home fries later.”

  Which just left Theo and me. He picked up his bike.

  Scuttled. It was such a strange word. Like a crab crawling across a tile floor. But it meant gone for good, didn’t it? They were buried in history unless someone came along and dug them out of the pile like we had rescued the robobee.

  Phineas. Andromeda. DARYL. All those names on those files, so many projects gone. I thought again of Ms. Staarsgard in the museum. She had said that science charged forward toward things we couldn’t even imagine yet. And that’s what scared me. That and one more name that I had seen: Alana. My stomach hitched. I looked back toward the house. My brain was leaping, making a connection I didn’t want to make.

  Alana only sounds like Ilana, I told myself.

  And then I remembered how sad she’d looked sitting on the treadmill while the trainers ignored her.

  “There’s something I need to look at,” I said. “On the computer.”

  He turned his head over his shoulder to look back at the house. “You shouldn’t go alone.”

  “Come in with me, then.”

  We retraced our steps. I tried to catch glimpses of him beside me without his noticing. He really was bigger and stronger. His shadow lengthened out like a giant above mine. Maybe his mom had added other changes for him alongside his latency, like medicine to bulk him up. A lot of parents started doing enhancements like that when their kids turned thirteen if they still had their 30 percent left. Other parents only did what was necessary to fix medical problems. Benji’s did all the therapies he needed, but hadn’t made any enhancements, even if he probably would have liked some extra coordination for his skateboarding. They never dampened him, either, just like my parents. They didn’t think it was right to mess with temperament like that.

  Theo stood next to the bulkhead but didn’t bend over to lift the door. “So what’s this all about, anyway?” he asked.

  “There’s something going on with Ilana,” I said. “And I need to figure it out before something goes really wrong. And I think the answers are here.”

  I thought he would say I was being silly again, and chasing daydreams—darker ones than usual, but daydreams just the same. Instead he said, “Okay. I guess we should get that clunker running again.”

  When it booted, I knew what file I needed to go to, but I couldn’t push the button. The cursor of the mouse just hovered over the file. Finally Theo leaned past me and clicked on it. All the names were in front of us.

  “Alana, right?” he asked.

  So he had noticed, too. “Yeah.”

  He clicked open the folder and there she was: Alana. Ilana. I felt sick.

  Even in the tiny thumbnail picture, I could see her. Not exactly her, but like her. It wasn’t the uncanny valley, though. No, this girl seemed more real because she wasn’t perfect. In the picture, she smiled crookedly, and her eyes were more hazel than the green blue of Ilana’s. She had a mole on her right cheek. But they looked similar enough for me to know they were connected.

  I clicked on the picture and another document opened. “Background.”

  Alana (Advanced Life Artificial Nuanced Acclimate) represents the forefront of research merging cloning, genetics, robotics, and most importantly, artificial intelligence. Rather than being cloned and raised from a zygote, Alana was born a child, a mix of cloned cells grown in the laboratory, and merged with robotic engineering. Typical nano-enhancements were made. What distinguishes Alana from other bio-robotics is that, for the first time, we have created a silicon consciousness.

  I rubbed at my eyes, and the letters danced on the screen. I knew what most of the words meant, but I couldn’t piece them together and come up with Ilana. A clone. A clone mixed with a robot. Well, Theo and my parents had both said that cloning was part of reproduction. But clones were babies. This was saying she was born as a child: all of a sudden, she was just there.

  Unless it hadn’t been all of a sudden. They could clone cells, couldn’t they? Skin cells and even brain cells. Those had been grown in labs and used in surgery. Could they have made all the different parts, grown them separately, and then stitched them together?

  But this Alana wasn’t just a clone. She was robotics, too, like the artificial limbs we had seen—so well-designed, they were even better than what people were born with. And all of this put together, right from the start. They took the cloned parts and the robotics and put it together: that was Alana. One hundred percent designed. The opposite of natural.

  We began with memories, recording them using test subjects and androids, and uploaded these wirelessly into her brain, which itself was grown from stem cells harvested from the same child used for other cloning procedures.

  “What child?” I murmured.

  Theo leaned in closer as he read over my shoulder.

  Initial memories were process-based, starting with simple functions like walking. This was deceptively difficult, as it involved not only memories in the brain, but also muscle memory. Slowly, over time, Alana learned to walk, talk, and interact with others. From there, experiments were done with more personal memories, such as a sixth birthday party.

  “They put memories in her?” Theo asked.

  “But they weren’t hers. This girl, Alana, she thought she had a past, but she didn’t. She didn’t know what she was.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Theo. He was frowning, his brow furrowed.

  We were both thinking about her. Our Ilana.

  I shook my head. I needed to learn all I could and then we could make the connections.

  I read on about how they were able to give her the memories of a whole life, to give her dreams. It was a big deal when she began to dream on her own. She never left the lab. She didn’t have any parents, just the scientists. She was watched all the time, even when she slept or bathed or daydreamed. Her life was not her own in so many ways.

  I closed the folder labeled “Background.”

  “She must have been so lonely,” I said.

  “That’s not Ilana. Not exactly.”

  “I need to find out why this other Alana was scuttled.”

  I scrolled through the folders looking for the one titled “Problems,” like we had seen with Victor
ia. A crow cawed outside, followed by a rustling. It sounded big, whatever it was.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked Theo.

  “You’re just skittish,” he said.

  My heart was racing, beating out a message to me: Get out, get out, get out.

  But I clicked on the “Problems” file. The screen filled with a document, bullet point after bullet point: failure to thrive, altercation, social rejection, moodiness, power maintenance. My eyes scanned all the terms and landed on the final point:

  Conclusion: At this time, the ALANA project must be considered a failure. She is not able to adequately integrate into society. Before that problem can be solved, though, issues of power generation and memory stability must be solved. More importantly, ethical considerations must be fully examined. This project has been put on hold indefinitely.

  “Indefinitely until now,” Theo said.

  I didn’t know that words could make me feel this way, that an idea could sink my stomach and my soul until I was twisted into a knot I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to untie. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. I still didn’t understand it all, but this idea was starting to crystallize in my brain. An idea I didn’t like too much.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said as much to me as to him. We were sitting on the merry-go-round in the playground. I sat in the middle, and Theo on the edge. His foot hung down and he swung us back and forth, back and forth. “I mean, it might not even be related to our Ilana.”

  “We both saw the picture, Mori. Ilana could be the next generation. Better technology. Better implementation.”

  “She’s not a robot,” I said. I put my head in my hands, my eyes closed: all I could see was Ms. Staarsgard leaning down toward Ilana: “I’ve taken a particular interest in Bio-Tech-Intelligence. I presume you have, too, Ilana.” Ms. Staarsgard knew. She knew that Ilana was . . . something else.

  “Ilana must have created a power surge somehow during the fitness test—when she fell, you know, and that fried the electronics of the treadmills.” His voice was growing more excited, like this was one of his complicated puzzles, and he was solving it.

  I rubbed my eyes. If it was true, and Ms. Staarsgard knew it, then why would she have wanted us to see the exhibit? Was she trying to tell us the truth? Or was she just so pleased with the developments Krita had made, she couldn’t contain herself? No, I told myself. No, I was wrong. I was jumping to conclusions. “She’s not glitching or power surging or anything like that. She’s a person. She’s our friend. She has a body and she has memories—”

  “They aren’t her memories. I bet she wasn’t ever in Calliope. She’s been here all along.”

  “Stop it!” I said. But the facts kept piling up in my brain. That’s why she couldn’t name her flag. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t from California. She wasn’t from anywhere. Everything from the cells up was manufactured. She had no parents, no heritage to hold on to. She was totally ungrounded.

  “Mori, you have to face facts. She’s a piece of technology. A really cool, really advanced artificial intelligence development, but technology nonetheless.”

  I didn’t understand how he could be so calm. He was talking about her like she was a homework assignment, something to be figured out. But my mind was untethered from its moorings. All along I’d been convinced she was natural. She was so perfect, so beautiful. But she wasn’t natural at all. Everything I’d believed was completely backward.

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said. “Don’t even think it. I know the scientists were working on those artificial intelligence projects before, but if what you are saying is true—that’s crossing a line. Dr. Varden and Baba had rules and guidelines for things like this. You can’t just create a whole new person! That’s not right!”

  “We have to face facts—” he said again.

  “Is that what your puzzle brain is telling you?” I asked. My voice sounded like it was coming from someone else: icy and razor sharp. “Have you figured her all out? Have you solved the riddle?”

  “I’m just trying to think rationally,” he said.

  “Well, don’t!” I cried. I stood up. The merry-go-round shifted beneath my feet, and I almost pitched forward onto him. “I shouldn’t have trusted you with this,” I said. I jumped down from the merry-go-round and started walking away from the playground.

  “Mori, wait!”

  But I didn’t listen to him. I just marched away. I was halfway around the cul-de-sac before I realized I didn’t know where I was going. I stopped in the middle of the road, the sun beating down on me. I looked over each shoulder as if the way would suddenly become clear to me. I couldn’t tell Julia, because she already hated Ilana. It would overwhelm Benji. I couldn’t go to Ilana herself until I knew just what to say to her. I was all alone on Firefly Lane, something I had never been before.

  21

  Usually words helped me, but reading Agatha’s journal just confused me more. I read it trying to erase what I had learned about Ilana, but all of it kept reminding me. Agatha’s bees were failing, succumbing to a wide variety of illnesses. The genetic modifications weren’t working, and the cloning wasn’t going as well as Baba had hoped, either.

  Then Dad tried to be chipper over lunch, but really he was just trying to get back to talking about my latency, and I didn’t want to think about that at all. So I ate quickly and then hurried outside.

  All along my heart just kept pounding and pounding, and my stomach shriveled to the size of the dates the deliver bot dropped off as a special treat.

  On my bike I could feel a little bit freer, like nothing I had learned mattered at all. My head sweated under my helmet, and the wind blew into my eyes, making them tear up, and I could pretend I was a prisoner on the run—an honest kind of prisoner, captured under false pretenses by a corrupt police force. I was making my way to freedom, which meant going round and round the cul-de-sac at an ever faster pace. My retina camera buzzed with trying to keep up with it all.

  Finally, dizzy, I slowed, and turned up onto the straight part of the road. My breath came a little fast, and I could feel a drip of sweat going down my neck, and I could almost see why Julia liked running so much.

  Ilana was in her driveway, and I cruised my bike up to her. She was crouched over a drawing she was working on with sidewalk chalk. I had seen a movie once about a guy who did sidewalk art that was so real you could actually step into it and go into that other world. Ilana’s was that good. It was a whole garden of tangled flowers, each one so detailed and vibrant I could practically smell them.

  Because she’s a robot. I wish I could say it was Theo’s voice in my head, but it was my own.

  “That’s nice,” I said. I hopped off my bike and let it fall onto her lawn.

  “Hey, Mori! Thanks!” She wiped her hands on her shorts and stood up. “I’m so glad you came around today.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I looked up the street toward Julia’s house.

  “I’m fine, by the way.” She smiled.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t seen you since I fell on the treadmills.”

  I kicked my shoe into the ground. “That was so strange,” I said. “What even happened?” I wanted to know if Theo was right, if Ilana was robotic and she’d had some sort of power surge—but of course if that was the truth, she wouldn’t come out and tell me.

  “It was weird, huh? They told me it was a blip in the power field.”

  “My treadmill was fine. It was just your row.”

  She shrugged. “You were really cranking.”

  “So were you. And Julia.”

  She laughed. “Maybe that was the problem. Julia and I overworked the system.”

  “Maybe,” I said, wondering if perhaps that was getting close to the truth. “I am glad you’re okay.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “We were wondering when you were going to come back out.”

  “You know how parents are—cautious, cautious.”

  I f
orced a smile and said, “Don’t I know it?” But all the while I was thinking, But they aren’t your parents. You don’t have parents. And as I had the thought I realized I was starting to believe Theo’s version of things: that Ilana was a new version of Alana. She was a creation of the scientists of Old Harmonie, which meant that everything I had thought about Old Harmonie was a lie, too. I felt dizzy and it seemed like the sun was burning hotter and hotter, melting the road beneath my feet as I stood there.

  “Cool. You wanna do some chalk drawings with me?”

  I thought of how pale and lifeless my own drawings would be next to hers. “No, thanks.” I wished I could unknow what I had learned about her.

  “How about hopscotch?” Then her face brightened. “I love hopscotch!” It was like she was just realizing that fact about herself. Maybe she was.

  Ilana drew the squares with an orange piece of chalk, a complicated course with a tough mix of singles and doubles. She numbered them all, then grabbed a pebble from the side of her driveway. “Do you want to go first?”

  I took the stone from her. “I haven’t played hopscotch in forever. Julia and I used to play all the time in second grade.” I tossed the pebble and it landed on the three, so I hopped on one foot, one, two, then jumped and landed with my feet straddling on the first double. Back onto one foot, then through the rest of the course. I pivoted and started hopping back, but on my second jump, I wobbled and put my other foot down.

  “Out!” Ilana exclaimed. Before I could get it for her, she picked up the stone. “My turn!” She tossed the stone and it landed all the way in the right-hand box of the second double. She hopped on one foot like it was nothing, sky-high like a pogo stick, got to the end, pivoted, and returned to the start, scooping up the stone in one easy motion. “One point for me,” she said.

  “You don’t keep score in hopscotch.”