The Firefly Code

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “It means they’re going to figure it out. The adults will fix it,” he said, but he wouldn’t look at me.

  “That’s what I was thinking, too. That they would take care of it, that it wasn’t my problem. But now I’m not so sure we can trust them to do that. Every time they try to fix things, they mess it up.”

  “Mori—”

  “No, Theo. You should know this better than anyone. When she grabbed my arm—that wasn’t her hurting me. It was whatever they did to her after she almost drowned. Remember she went to the doctor? They adjusted her but they overdid it or something, and that’s why she grabbed me. It was just like you after your latency, how mean you were.”

  “I said I was sorry.” He looked down at his scuffed sneakers.

  “I know, Theo. And I forgive you. And I forgive Ilana, too. She didn’t cause this. None of us did. But it is my problem. That’s what I meant about not being a good person. She was my friend and once I learned what she really was, I abandoned her. Part of me was relieved when I heard my parents say that the adults were going to take care of her. But that’s not right, is it?”

  “Mori, you can’t take this all on yourself.”

  “I have to,” I said. “I’m her only friend. What kind of person abandons her friend?”

  “You’re just trying to keep yourself safe. We all are.”

  “Ilana’s the one I need to keep safe. The answers were in that house, and we missed our chance to go in and it’s all my fault. My parents—I told them how we’d been there, and now the house is gone.”

  “You don’t think your parents burned the house down?”

  “Of course not. But I think they took it up the line, to your mom . . .” I paused. Something else Ms. Staarsgard had said to the Naughtons came back to me: If there are ever any problems, you will call me. Immediately. Maybe my parents hadn’t realized that stopping the Ilana project was a possibility, but Ms. Staarsgard had.

  “No,” he said. “She wouldn’t have called for that, or authorized it or anything. All that information? And all that equipment? No way.”

  He was right. We didn’t waste anything here. Waste and secrets and destroying evidence—that wasn’t the way things were done in Old Harmonie.

  One of the firefighters called out to another, and then together they lifted a huge beam and dragged it from the wreckage.

  Theo said, “You are a good person. I know that much. I think we’re just getting all mixed up. It’s been a crazy couple of days.”

  “It’s like I can’t get enough air,” I said.

  He turned and put his hand on my shoulder. “Is it the smoke? Do you need me to—”

  “No, I mean that’s what it feels like. Ever since I heard my parents talking about Ilana and how they might scrap her. I can’t get a full breath.”

  “Mori, we really don’t know if that’s what they’re going to do.”

  “If she doesn’t get better, they are going to get rid of her. How can they do that? How can they create a person and then get rid of her? That’s not what Old Harmonie was supposed to be about. Failure is just supposed to be a chance to do it again. To do it better.” That’s what they had done, I realized, they had tried to create Alana again. Only they had ignored the note in the problems file: they hadn’t considered the ethics of creating a person, of giving her friends, and then taking her away.

  “She’s not a person,” Theo said.

  “She is.”

  “But not to Krita.”

  And once again, his mother’s words came back to me: When a project’s outcomes fail to warrant the expenditures, we cancel it. Krita would show Ilana the same lack of mercy they had shown to any other project that had failed. Only she wouldn’t get a chance at a second life as some sort of museum exhibit.

  The smoke was drifting high up into the sky and out over the rest of Old Harmonie.

  “Can I show you something?”

  We rode over to the park and left our bikes by the empty tennis courts. He slowed down, but I kept walking right into the woods. At the pointy rock, I took a left. I could have walked this path in my sleep. Straight to the tree with the crook in it. A large branch had fallen on the path, and I bent over to lift it up. Theo crouched down next to me and together we got it out of the way.

  He didn’t say anything, and I led him right to Oakedge.

  The plants were doing wonderfully. The chard had thick, full leaves, and the mustard greens danced up perkily.

  “This was our garden,” I said to Theo. “Mine and Ilana’s.” I reached out and picked two of the pea pods—one for him and one for me. They were the kind you could eat pod and all, and were as sweet as could be. “She’s been taking care of it. I gave up on it, but she never did.”

  We both looked out over the garden. It was so easy to picture Ilana coming out here all alone, humming to herself as she tended the plants. “She helped me name Oakedge and make it real. Before, it was just some place I liked to come to, but it didn’t mean anything. We were going to have our own rules. No physical problems. No latencies. Just us kids.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean there would be no Ilana either?”

  “In Oakedge, she’s just a regular girl,” I explained. If only it could be true. If only you could build a place and have it be just exactly the way you had wanted it to be. I guess that’s what Agatha had wanted for Old Harmonie, Agatha and Baba both, but it hadn’t worked out for them and it hadn’t worked out for us, either. Agatha had left because this wasn’t her place anymore, but Oakedge could still be for me and Ilana.

  I sat on the damp earth and patted the soil around some of the chard. Theo dropped to his knees beside me, and together we weeded the whole patch and smoothed out the dirt behind us. Maybe she would come back and see it, I thought. It would be like a message to her. Maybe she would come back and see it and then we could both believe that everything really would be okay.

  29

  For two days it seemed like Theo was right, that Ilana would go back to normal and it would all blow over. She didn’t come out to play with us, but we saw her around the neighborhood. I saw her with Mrs. Collins and the twins one morning, and I saw her out running with her mom. Things were almost normal.

  Maybe everyone had forgotten about it all. About her glitches and how she’d grabbed my arm. Maybe they had figured out the programming or whatever it was that was giving her troubles. Maybe she’d be all right.

  That morning I put on my denim shorts and the red T-shirt I knew she liked. I was going to have to see for myself. I was going to go see her.

  It was Dad’s day at home, and he was out front sweeping off the walk. He wore a large brimmed hat that covered the bald spot that was starting to grow on the back of his head, and he had a special towel around his neck that was supposed to keep him cool.

  “One for the record books today,” he said, and wiped at his brow. “Eighty-seven degrees already and it’s not even nine o’clock. They’ve issued an air-quality warning, too, so once you get wherever you’re going, you make sure you stay inside.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And if Benji even tries to leave the air-cooling, you tackle him. His lungs definitely can’t handle the ozone.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll see him today. I’m going to go over to Ilana’s.”

  Dad stopped sweeping. “Ilana’s?”

  “Yeah. It’s been a little while since I’ve seen her. I wanted—I just want to see her.”

  “I don’t know if today is the best day for that.” He took the towel off from around his neck and wiped his face.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Mori,” he said. He looked at me with the saddest eyes.

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you what, you go over to one of your other friends’ houses. And then later this afternoon maybe you and I can go over to Ilana’s house together.”

  My dad wasn’t normally so weird about things, and I wondered what was going on. But part of me was relieved to have
an excuse to put off seeing Ilana. “I guess I’ll just go to Julia’s, then.”

  “Good!” He grinned. “And, remember, stay inside.”

  “I promise,” I agreed.

  The air was hot and heavy, and I decided to walk instead of putting on my helmet to ride my bike. Even the tar of the road seemed soft, like it was squishing under each of my footsteps.

  I came around the bend of the cul-de-sac at the exact time a white van drove by on the street. I froze. It had no windows in the back, and tinted ones up front. No markings at all, not even a license plate. It slowed and I thought perhaps there was a driver—one who I couldn’t see—and he was going to roll down the window and talk to me, but instead it pulled into Ilana’s driveway. The van’s battery switched off, but no one got out. It just sat there, ominous as storm clouds.

  I started running. My legs pumped and my glasses bounced on my face. When I arrived at Theo’s door, my breath was coming in heavy puffs. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “It’s happening,” I managed to croak out.

  “What’s happening?” I could see the panic in his eyes, but I could barely pull in a breath.

  “Ilana,” I finally said. “Look.”

  From his house, we could see the van. The side door opened, and two people got out. They were wearing white jumpsuits. It was just like Julia had told me about with Mr. Merton, the way the men in the jumpsuits had come with a van to take his body. One of them carried a large silver case.

  “They’re going to scuttle her!” I said. “She’ll be like those parts we found.”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “They are.” My breathing was more even now. “My dad didn’t want me to go over there, and this was why. They’re doing something to her. They could be taking her apart right now. They’ll throw her in the trash heap.”

  “They won’t just throw her away,” he said. His voice was flat, and his face drawn. “She’s biological, too. I don’t know what they would do about those parts, but you know they’ll reuse some of the tech.”

  “Don’t talk like that. She’s our friend!”

  “What do you want me to say? I think you’re right. I think they’re going to scrap her.”

  “Theo, we can’t let that happen.”

  He pressed his palms into his eyes as if he had a sudden and fierce headache. “I know,” he said. Then he shook his head. “If it’s happening right now, there’s nothing we can do about it. But if this is just the first phase, then maybe we still have time.”

  “First phase? What do you mean?”

  “They’re probably still figuring it all out, how to shut down a project like that. That van and those guys, maybe they were just getting her parents ready. Or maybe they’ll like—you know, like with a hospital patient, at the end, when they turn the systems off, the breathing tube and the feeding system and all of that. Maybe they are going to start turning off her systems, and just let her—”

  “Die.”

  “Just let her go. Let her shut down naturally.”

  “We have to get her out of here.”

  Ilana’s front door opened again, and the two people exited. They didn’t have the case. Ilana’s parents stepped onto the front walk, and the four adults spoke for a while. Ilana’s mom nodded a lot, then wiped at her eyes. Then the two people in white got back into the van and it pulled away.

  “They don’t have her,” I said. “She’s still in there. We have to get her.”

  “You figure out where we need to take her. I’ll figure out how to make it happen. In the meantime, we can’t tell anyone. We’ll go tonight.”

  These were the things Theo and I had settled on:

  We would have to leave at night.

  We would tell no one else.

  We would tell Ilana at the last possible moment.

  We would find Agatha.

  It wasn’t much of a plan. But we knew that we had to move quickly. Even waiting as long as we did seemed risky.

  I felt certain that Dr. Varden would help us, especially when I told her that Lucy Morioka was my great-grandmother. Theo had wondered if she was even still alive, but I figured if she had died, people at Krita would have known, and we would have celebrated her. “She’s alive,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then let’s do this.”

  We had to live that day as if it was normal. So we went over to Julia’s house and played in her pool. Julia sat on a deck chair at the edge of the pool watching me and Theo as if she could tell something was up.

  “Hey, do you drain your pool in the fall?” Benji asked Julia.

  She shook her head. “Just partially, then you put a special cover on. Why?”

  “It would be so dope to skateboard in there.”

  “I think my mother would personally break your skateboard into bits.”

  Benji laughed. “Come on, guys, that’s funny. Can you picture Julia’s mom breaking anything into bits.”

  I tried to force a laugh, but Theo just let himself submerge underwater, the bubbles coming up around his head.

  “What’s up with you two?” Julia asked as Theo burst out of the water.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Theo wiped the water from his eyes and looked at Julia. “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing. I’m staring at a whole lot of nothing.” Then she turned back to me. “My mom wants to know if you can have a sleepover tonight.”

  I glanced at Theo. He frowned. I was being too obvious. “I can’t tonight.”

  The water in the pool felt cold, and I shivered. There were little goose bumps rising up on my arm like tiny anthills blooming.

  “What are you doing?” Julia asked.

  “Swimming,” I replied.

  She frowned. “Tonight? What are you doing tonight?”

  “Ilana’s coming over. Actually.” Not that I’d spoken to her yet, but that was the plan.

  Julia blinked her eyes, and I knew she was remembering what I had said, that it was better without Ilana. But then she narrowed her gaze. “Actually,” Julia mimicked.

  “I miss her,” Benji said. “The old Ilana, I mean. Not the off-her-rocker-do-that-to-your-arm Ilana.”

  “There is no old Ilana or new Ilana. There’s just the same girl,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Julia lowered her sunglasses over her eyes. “There’s only ever been one Ilana.”

  I dove under the water, sick of these circular conversations, and sick of Julia pushing and prodding.

  Maybe I should have handled things differently from the start. I should have brought Ilana over to Julia’s pool instead of going out into the woods with her. We could have all been friends, and Julia never would have gotten so jealous, and then maybe—just maybe—all of the other pieces would have fallen differently. But that would mean I wouldn’t have had Oakedge with her. Or the day she came to get me and take me to the museum. She was so excited about everything, then, and so was I. Now, just thinking of her felt like a weight dragging me down.

  How had things changed so quickly?

  I saw Theo moving toward me, his body fuzzy; the receptor chip still had trouble when I sank underwater; it couldn’t quite recognize the images sent by the camera in my goggles. When his wavy foot was near mine, I popped out of the water, startling him. “They’re going to scuttle her,” I said to Julia as she came into focus. “They’re going to scrap her and I’m not going to let it happen.”

  And so I told them everything I had discovered. We’d gotten out of the pool and were wrapped in towels as we sat around the table on the deck. I told them what Theo and I had found in number 9 and what I had heard my parents say. “She’s Agatha’s project,” I said. “Or at least an offshoot of it. We’re going to bring her back.”

  “Take her back where?”

  Clara had said that home was home. Well, Agatha’s house had just been burned to the ground, but she’d left it long before to go back to her real home. “She’s back
at MIT. At her old lab.”

  “MIT?” Julia asked. “In Cambridge? You know that’s practically Boston, right? There’s only a river between them. You can’t go to Boston.”

  “We have to get her out of here,” I said.

  “This wasn’t our plan, Mori,” Theo said. “We weren’t going to get everyone else involved.”

  “You should’ve stuck to your plan,” Julia said, sucking the water from the end of one of her braids.

  “No. You can’t leave us out of this,” Benji said. He cleared his throat. “It’s the same as her dying, isn’t it? If they scrap her?”

  “If they made her once, they can make her again,” Julia said.

  “Julia,” I said, as if just saying her name could mend the broken thread between us.

  “Put aside all the awful things she’s done, all the things she’s ruined—we’re not even talking about a real person. She’s a step up from a droid, maybe two steps up from a helper bot. Not to mention the fact that she assaulted you—”

  “That wasn’t her. It was a—”

  “Glitch,” Theo finished for me.

  “Right. Because she’s a project. A thing. Don’t you get it? What you’re talking about, it’s theft. It’s the same as walking into a lab and taking an experiment—someone’s work. That’s the kind of thing that could get a family kicked out of Old Harmonie.”

  I glanced over at Theo, who looked straight ahead. Benji rubbed the space above his lip.

  “Not that you have anything to worry about, Theo,” Julia added. “The Staarsgards aren’t going anywhere, but we don’t all have moms who run this place. Our parents need these jobs.”

  “This wasn’t Theo’s idea,” I said.

  Julia turned to me, her braid thwapping against the deck chair and her eyes flashing. “Oh, I know whose idea this was. Trust me. But tell me, Mori, would you do the same for me? Or Benji?”

  “Of course, but I would never need—” And then I stopped myself and looked down at my hands in my lap.

  “That’s right. You would never need to do something like this for us,” Julia said. “You wouldn’t have to because we’re people. We’re your actual human friends, and she’s—”