by Alicia Ellis
Instead, I lifted my hand-screen from the nightstand, intending to call Liv, but an alert blinked in the corner of the display. I touched it, and the device notified me that Philip Pollock was streaming a new audio program. It was probably a bad idea to listen to it right now. It would get me further riled up, but that was exactly what my bad mood needed—something to feed on.
I hit the play button. For the first five minutes of the program, I settled back against the headboard, my pillow tucked under my back. Instead of getting me angrier, as I’d suspected it would, the audio calmed my nerves by reminding me there was a whole community out there that shared my feelings.
“The Model One rollout is scheduled for less than two weeks from today, with the first androids being delivered to a limited number of elite customers. It is inevitable that artificial intelligence, if allowed to grow unchecked, will displace humanity. Scientists and scholars have predicted it, but the Hayeses do not care.”
This Hayes absolutely cared.
“Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to block the distribution of these atrocities through legal means, but I urge you to continue writing letters to CyberCorp. Tell whoever will listen that CyberCorp and their androids directly contradict nature. They are ungodly.”
There was that word again—ungodly. The same word from the protester and from the letter to CyberCorp.
“Speaking of ungodly,” Pollock continued, “it’s been confirmed that Tom and Marissa Hayes have upgraded their own daughter. Many of my listeners sent photos today of Lena Hayes, who was at the CyberCorp building wearing what appeared to be a robotic arm.”
My ears perked up. I’d never been mentioned in one of Pollock’s programs before. I always figured that, if I got a mention, it would be for something good—like congratulations for maintaining my ethics despite having been raised in this house.
No such luck.
As the audio played, I did a quick web search for the so-called photos, and the pictures flooded my display. Those hand-screen cameras had done their jobs earlier today. They had captured me from every angle.
In the bright sunlight, my long sleeves were slightly sheer, and it was clear from the photo that the metal extended from my hand all the way up the arm. In a few of the images, the sun glinted off the thing, emphasizing how unhuman it was.
“As usual, the Hayeses disregard everything that makes us human. By modifying their own child, they send a clear message: humanity is not to be cherished. We are to place machines over flesh and blood—even our own flesh and blood.”
I shut off the audio. I couldn’t be upset with Pollock. He spoke the truth I’d already recognized—the arm made me less human and more monster, and my parents were to blame.
I couldn’t lie in this bed a second longer, so I jumped up and paced the room, anger pulsing in my bones. I started to call Liv, but my fingers had other plans. Before I knew it, the hand-screen was calling Hunter.
“Hey. What’s up?” he answered before I could disconnect.
I pulled the hand-screen away from my ear and stared at it. Why had I just called him?
“Lena?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m here. Sorry for calling so late. I have a lot on my mind.” I expected him to laugh it off, tell me I was being ridiculous, tell me how great my life was—the way Jackson would have.
“Tell me about it.”
I launched into an explanation of everything that happened at CyberCorp after he and Liv left.
“Shit,” he said when I finished.
“Exactly. Is it wrong to wish my parents had never founded CyberCorp?” I stared down at my left arm, uncovered in the tank top I wore in the privacy of my room. “I’d probably have both arms.” I clenched and unclenched my metal fist. It reacted so easily now, the same way my other one did. I hated it for that, even more than I’d hated it before. The least it could do was behave like the machine it was. Now, it was masquerading as a real, flesh-and-blood limb.
“If your life was totally different, we might not have met.”
I searched for the joke in his words but found none. “I guess.” I meant to put more enthusiasm into it. After all, Hunter was turning out to be a decent guy.
He’d gone out of his way to make sure he was the one who told me about Harmony. He’d played hooky with me, and even though he claimed it was to see CyberCorp, I suspected it was really because he knew I needed to get away from school. And now, despite that I was rude to him most of the time, he seemed content to listen to my problems.
“Want me to swing by?” he asked. “I could climb through your window. Just talk until you get too tired to be upset.”
My heart did a cartwheel that flopped abruptly, leaving me winded. I wanted to see him, but Jackson was the only boy who ever climbed through my window. Every Monday at midnight, like clockwork. Now, he was in a coma—where I put him. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Okay.”
Silence filled the call line for so long that I thought we might have lost the connection. “Hunter?”
“If I were smarter, I’d take that as a hint and wish you goodnight. But I’m not. So how about a drive instead? It’ll get your mind off things.”
“You don’t have auto-drive, do you?” The words were out there before I could even plan them.
He chuckled. “Nope. Can’t afford it.”
“Sounds good. I’m sending my address over.” I sent a quick message to his hand-screen. “When can you be here?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll meet you on the street. Don’t ring the bell or pull into the driveway.”
“You sneaking out?” he asked, his voice teasing. “The CyberCorp princess is a rule-breaker?”
“I don’t have many options. My mom’s gone insane, and I have a bodyguard standing outside my bedroom door.”
Fifteen minutes later, I opened the app on my hand-screen that controlled our home security system and suspended the alarms. I pushed up the window next to my bed, thanking the stars that my bodyguard slept on the other side of my bedroom door.
From the window ledge, I grabbed a branch of the tree just outside and climbed down to the ground.
When I jumped into the passenger seat, Hunter gave me a slow once-over. His gaze slid over my long-sleeved T-shirt, partially covered by an unzipped hoodie, and then veered down to the jeans that hugged my hips. I’d spent twelve of the last fifteen minutes choosing something to wear that showed off my curves and also looked casual enough that someone might slip into it for a late-night drive.
Hunter gave a nod of appreciation. A delighted shiver rippled through me, but guilt slammed it to a stop when I imagined Jackson in his hospital bed.
Hunter set the car into motion as soon as I buckled in.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I figured we could drive around McCauley Park.”
It wasn’t until we got to the park that I realized what a great pick it was for a nighttime drive.
Just north of downtown, McCauley was the greenest area in the city because it was a nature preserve. That meant no digital billboards—real or virtual—in or around the park.
The only lights surrounding us were the occasional streetlamps, casting a soft glow over the trees and shrubbery we passed. If I squinted at a spot above the center of the park, I imagined I could make out a single star outside the reach of the city’s bright lights.
“What happened to your knee?” I asked him.
“You know that already. They replaced it.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“Oh, you want the long version.” He paused for a moment, as if sorting out his thoughts. “I was in a bad bike accident when I was a kid. Hit by a car. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but my knee was basically destroyed. I had a couple surgeries at first, but it never healed right, always needed more surgeries, and each one meant a painful recovery.” He glanced quickly down at his knee and then back at the road. “Until CyberCorp.”
“I have my life back. No more surgeries, and no more being afraid anything I do is going to make it worse—which would mean more surgeries. CyberCorp saved me.”
I spread my metal fingers across my thigh and tried to think about my arm that way. Without it, I might have needed surgery after surgery to keep my flesh-and-bone limb working, or I would always be in pain, or I would just have no arm. I tried to be grateful, but my anger won out.
The artificial intelligence, and my parents’ role in the whole thing, tipped the scales for me. I had a computer in my head, interpreting my brain’s activities and deciding what my arm should do—and my parents had put it there. As much as I wanted to believe this arm was mine now, part of me felt like I wasn’t the one in control.
“But you had a choice. Your knee wasn’t working like you wanted, so you chose to have it upgraded. Right? Plus, it’s all you up there.” I tapped his temple. “No artificial intelligence.”
“True.”
I couldn’t imagine having a conversation like this with Jackson. For years, I’d told him how I felt about CyberCorp, and for years, he’d listened without actually hearing me. He brushed off my feelings as if they were the product of rebellion. He refused to see who I really was.
And now he lay in a hospital bed, held together by metal parts, and here I was counting all his flaws. I silently cursed myself.
“What’s wrong?” Hunter asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you doing that thing with your face?” He pointed at my mouth.
I slapped his hand away. “I’m not doing a thing with my face.”
He laughed and pointed again, daring me to slap him away a second time. “You scrunch your lips up when you’re thinking really hard.” He touched my lower lip. “It’s adorable.”
This time, I didn’t move his hand. He left it there a second longer than necessary, and excited tingles spread outward from his touch. My pulse fluttered as my heart tried to make a break for it, right through my ribs.
“Oh, I forgot.” He moved his hand from my face and popped open the glove compartment. He extracted a chocolate candy bar and pushed the compartment closed again. “I got this for you.”
I stared at it for a second.
“You love sweets, right?”
“Yeah, definitely.” I accepted the chocolate and tucked it into the pocket of my hoodie. “Thanks.” I didn’t like chocolate, but Allie would appreciate it. She’d adopted my bad sweet tooth, but without the dislike of chocolate that came with it.
“Are we done pretending this conversation is about me?” he asked, after he returned his hand to the steering wheel.
I sighed. “Sure.”
“It was wrong for your parents to remove your original arm without discussing it with you. But don’t you think you would have come to the same conclusion eventually?”
“I’ll never know the answer to that. All I’ll ever know is that I spent my whole life in CyberCorp’s artificial shadow, and then one day, my parents’ beliefs were pushed on me without my approval. If I’d had a say, at the very least, I would have insisted they remove the AI from the arm. If that meant waiting longer for a working prosthetic, then so be it. It would have been my choice and based on my principles.” The anger I had felt for weeks ballooned in my stomach and became so large I felt I would burst.
“Take a right up here.” I pointed to the intersection ahead of us.
Hunter slowed the car and turned the wheel.
This route would take us past CyberCorp. I wanted to see the building. I needed a target for my hatred right now, or it would explode out of me and paint the car’s dashboard red and sticky with my insides.
“Stop,” I said when we were right in front of the building.
A prudent driver, Hunter pulled into the roundabout in front of the driveway rather than stopping in the middle of the street.
“Where are you going?” He grabbed at me as I opened the car door and jumped out.
Before I knew what I was doing, I flipped up my jacket’s hood and ran toward the building. Hunter’s footsteps pounded the pavement behind me, but I didn’t look back.
I slammed my metal fist into the wall of windows leading to the lobby. The window shattered, and glass pieces tinkled to the ground around me. The glass was reinforced, but still no match for the high-tech monstrosity that was my arm.
Shock coated me like ice water as I stared at the broken glass scattered around my feet.
But the cold left a burst of fire in its wake. It felt good. Powerful.
An alarm cut through the night. Its wail pierced my ears. Pain bloomed in my head, focused where they’d installed the chip.
Spots danced in front of my eyes, but I ignored them. I wasn’t done yet.
“Stay there!” I shouted to Hunter, without turning to look at him. “They have cameras.”
I kicked away a large chunk of glass from the lower frame of the window and stepped inside. The alarm continued to wail. My vision blurred as the pain in my head swelled even further. Guards would be here any second, but I needed to do this.
I knew this lobby like the back of my hand—my old one. So as I ran to the other side of the reception desk, I kept my face tilted down and away from the cameras attached to the back corners of the ceiling.
When I reached the Model One on display beside reception, I pulled back my left hand and swung my fist forward. Metal crunched against metal, and the android’s face collapsed.
I grinned until my face ached. I felt alive.
Still angled away from the cameras, I gripped the thing’s mangled head and yanked upward. With a screech of metal against metal, the neck broke and the head came free. I crushed the skull in my hand and grinned as it clattered to the ground.
“Lena, let’s go!” Hunter shouted from the direction of the car.
I spun on my heel and ran toward him, head still tilted downward, hood pulled low over my face. Before I reached Hunter, two guards barreled toward me, both clad in black uniforms with Tasers at their hips.
The ache in my head rose and sharpened. I clutched at my temples, certain I would pass out. But I went numb instead. My body reacted.
I shot forward and slammed into the nearest guard. We tumbled to the floor.
I scrambled to my feet and pointed the Taser down at him. The guard reached for his hip—but came up empty. My metal hand now held the weapon he’d been going for. Somehow, I had managed to slip it from its holster when we were on the ground.
I didn’t know whether to be creeped out or grateful.
“Look what I’ve got,” the other guard called from outside.
I could barely hear him over the sound of my own heartbeat, filling up my ears, speeding my breath until my head went light.
He had Hunter in a bear hug from behind, Hunter’s arms pinned to his sides. Hunter squirmed in the larger man’s grasp, but even though he matched the guard in height, the guard had him by about fifty pounds of muscle.
My head still dipped low, I shifted the Taser from the man on the ground to the one holding Hunter. “Let him go.” He had to be fifty feet away—way out of the weapon’s reach.
“Drop it.” He squeezed Hunter harder, until he cringed at the pressure.
My heartbeat skipped and then barreled forward, leaving me breathless.
I hoped my hood and the darkness masked my features. Otherwise, even if we got out of this without getting arrested, I was going to be in deep shit.
I did as instructed and raised both my hands in a sign of surrender.
His face relieved, the guard on the ground climbed to his feet and touched his ear to make a call. I leaped back into motion and lunged at him, metal arm extended. I slammed into his chest. The man grunted and hit the ground. He blinked up at me, dazed. I slapped my palm into his ear to deactivate the comm. The man’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he went limp beneath me.
The other guard still held Hun
ter in a tight grip.
I swiped the fallen Taser up from the ground and ran toward them, back through the broken window frame. When I reached them, I leveled the weapon at the guard’s face. “If you let him go, we’ll leave. We can pretend none of this ever happened.”
What would tomorrow’s news reports look like if they recognized me? Would the police come for me before or after they reported that Lena Hayes had destroyed part of her parents’ pride and joy? Or maybe CyberCorp and my parents would keep it hushed. Best-case scenario, I would be grounded forever, and only a select few CyberCorp employees would know what I’d done.
“Those windows are going to cost thousands to replace.” He pointed at the shattered glass littering the ground between us. “There’s no walking away. The best you can do for yourself is to drop the Taser and turn yourself in.”
Hunter ground his heel into the man’s foot. The man flinched, and his arms loosened. Hunter took advantage and dropped to the ground, slipping through his captor’s arms. I leaped over Hunter and slammed my palm into the side of the guard’s head. He grunted and collapsed to the ground.
I stood frozen outside CyberCorp, with the two guards and my friend on the ground around me.
“A little help here.” Hunter reached a hand up.
I grabbed it and hauled him to his feet. I didn’t know whether the guard’s call for backup had gone through before I disconnected it. But with these alarms blaring, someone had to be on the way.
The two of us ran for Hunter’s car and jumped in. He gunned the engine even before I could buckle my seat belt, and we took off in a shriek of rubber tires.
We drove two blocks in tense silence, my fingers clasped around the sides of my thighs, the fingernails of my right hand digging into my legs.
“Lena.”
I looked over to find Hunter with one side of his mouth tilted upward and an arched eyebrow to match. He reached over, grabbed my metal hand, and eased my fingers from my legs. “You’re going to leave a bruise.”
I loosened my other hand on my own and sagged back into my seat. For weeks, my chest had felt tight, like a rubberband pulled taught. Now, the band loosened—not much, but enough so that I could breathe without breaking.
