Girl of Flesh and Metal

by Alicia Ellis

  “We need to officially eliminate you as one,” Johnson said. It was the first time I’d heard him speak, and he had just the kind of low, authoritative voice I would have expected of a law enforcement professional. “We want to make sure we understand your side of the story. Tell us about your fight with Harmony last Monday.”

  His words thrummed around me like an echo. Far away. Melody’s face still glared at me from behind my eyelids. Or was it Harmony’s?

  “Miss Hayes?”

  “We were friends.” My thoughts jumbled together, but that part I knew. Or I thought I did. I shook my head and stood up, back straight, narrowing my focus in on the detectives. “When I saw her that morning, we were in a good place. Happy, getting along. She wanted to get to class early, so she left Melody and me alone. That’s when I told Melody about my new arm. I’d hidden it up to that point.”

  “Your new arm?” Johnson nodded down at my metal hand. “Tell us about that.”

  “I lost my original arm in a car accident a month and a half ago. Last Monday was my first day back at school. I thought Melody would understand and accept it, but she didn’t. The next time I saw her was at lunch, and Harmony was there too. I told everyone about my arm, and they were okay with it at first.”

  “At first?” Detective Garrett’s left eyebrow started an upward march.

  “Harmony tried to comfort me by touching my shoulder, which isn’t healed yet. The pain made me react without thinking.”

  Both detectives now leaned forward, their faces expectant. They knew I was leaving something out. They probably already knew all about the fight and just needed to hear it from my point of view.

  “I grabbed her arm and yanked it around behind her back.” The words tumbled out in a rush, as if saying them quickly would give the detectives less time to realize what they meant. “She shouldn’t have touched me. It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t.”

  “You blame Harmony for the physical altercation?” Garrett said.

  “No . . . I don’t know. I just wish it hadn’t happened. I realized what I did—that I made a mistake—and I left the cafeteria. That was the last time I saw Harmony.”

  They were quiet for a span of several seconds, and I shifted from foot to foot as I waited. My father told me once that being silent was a good way to make other people talk. Others felt awkward in silence and tried to fill up the space.

  I had a feeling the officers were doing that now, waiting for me to volunteer information. I pressed my lips together and willed myself to stay silent.

  I could have told them the fight wasn’t my fault at all. The arm had reacted. But I knew from Ron and Simon’s lectures that I controlled the arm. If it reacted, it did because I wanted it to. Suggesting I wasn’t in complete control would make me look more like a murderer, not less.

  Detective Johnson took over the questioning again. “Where were you last Monday and Tuesday nights?” He asked the question casually, as if it were a mere formality and not a subject of great concern—more like panic—on my part.

  “I went to bed around 10:30 both nights.” That was the truth—not the whole truth of course, but as close as they needed to know right now. Until I knew exactly what I’d been doing on those nights, I didn’t want the police looking into it. If I was going to end up in jail, it would be on my own terms.

  “Can anyone confirm that?”

  “My parents and housekeeper can confirm about Monday. For Tuesday, there’s also my nighttime bodyguard.” I tilted my head toward Owen. “Not him. There’s another guy. He sat outside my bedroom door all night. Walt something-or-other. My parents can give you his full name.”

  “Good. That’s all we need for now,” Detective Garrett said. “Thank you for your time, Miss Hayes.”

  Even though these cops didn’t know it, I was invested in this investigation. If the police found the killer, I was off the hook. And if I ever wanted to get a good night’s sleep again, I needed to be off the hook.

  “Wait.” I grabbed her arm to stop her from leaving. By instinct, I used my left hand. Instead of shaking me off, Garrett stared at the hand, her expression fascinated. I yanked it back. “Do you have any suspects?”

  “We’re not at liberty to say.” She turned to walk away again, but I slid in front of her.

  “Greg Miller has a lot of enemies. You should track them down. Start with Dr. Athena Fisher. He fired her son and blackballed him with other tech companies. Also, check out Mark Hoffman and Kyle Lowry. Miller fired them on Christmas Eve, and one of them raised a stink on his way out. And don’t forget about Adam Pollock. He’s probably the one.”

  “We’ve spoken to all four of them,” Garrett said. “Anything else?”

  Since I had no intention of offering myself as a suspect, I shook my head.

  “Thank you, Miss Hayes. We’ll let you know if we have any more questions. In the meantime, stay safe.” She pointed at my bodyguard, who nodded at the detectives. “Keep this guy nearby.”

  Maybe Owen could protect me if the murderer came after me. But if I turned out to be the killer, could he protect everyone else?

  23

  As planned, when my morning classes dismissed for lunch on Monday, I visited Ron and Simon to handle my sleepwalking.

  A twinge of disappointment nagged me when I walked through the CyberCorp lobby. The windows looked like new. They’d been replaced, and not a shard of glass remained on the floor. CyberCorp was invincible.

  Ron and Simon led me up to a large corner office. A plaque beside the door informed me that the space belonged to Dr. Fisher.

  I pointed at the nameplate as we stepped into the room. “Is she going to join us?”

  Simon shook his head. “She’s busy with the Model Ones.”

  “We don’t have offices of our own. Just cubicles.” Ron pointed at an array of cubicles nearby. “She said it was okay to use hers for this. How are you feeling, by the way? I heard about the little incident at your folks’ party after I left.”

  “Just a little weirded out.”

  “Lucky you had the arm. I heard it saved your life. Who knows whether you would have been able to defend yourself without it?”

  Yeah. Lucky me. “I guess. They’re saying there’s no way the man who attacked me—Adam Pollock—could have killed Harmony and Kevin.”

  “And you think it’s Fisher,” Ron said, with more than a hint of amusement.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but you’re not as subtle as you think. The only reason she didn’t realize you were grilling her Friday night was that she was drunk. I, on the other hand, was not. She didn’t do it.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Fisher is an academic. If she wanted someone out of her way, she’d make it happen with this.” He tapped his temple. “Not with brute force.”

  I had to admit his assessment of Fisher seemed accurate. I couldn’t imagine her breaking into the Millers’ home and strangling Harmony in her bed. Fisher was tightly strung, but she wasn’t a killer.

  If I needed any more evidence of Dr. Fisher’s dedication to the Model Ones, her office gave it to me. An oversized vid-screen acted as the far wall, and it currently displayed life-size versions of three Model Ones, the first turned to its right, making its left profile visible, one faced forward, and the other turned to its left.

  In digital ink, Dr. Fisher had scrawled notes all over the vid-screen, some with arrows pointing to different parts of the Model Ones. No one that dedicated would work against CyberCorp by killing its employees’ kids.

  The wall to my left held stacks of cubbies, each holding metal parts and wires, and each with a neat label underneath. An android’s head sat on the edge of her desk surface. Its metal eyelids were open, and its red eyes stared at us as we stepped deeper into the room.

  It reminded me of the broken android skull I left in my wake the night I’d pulled an unwitting Hunter into my destruction of the lobby.

  It seemed a waste to ha
ve the attention of two CyberCorp employees and not ask them what they knew about the vandalism. I’d been so worried about the murders—which I might not have committed—that I’d ignored the crime I had committed.

  It would be nice to know whether anyone suspected it was me. Then I could do some damage control. Maybe I could confess to my parents before they found out from their security team.

  “I overheard my dad saying something about a break-in in the lobby.” I tried to keep my voice casual, like I was asking out of curiosity. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure.” Ron gestured for me to sit in one of the two leather guest chairs in front of Dr. Fisher’s large desk. “Probably one of those crazies who hang out on the sidewalk. The security team is doing a complete overhaul. There’s talk of upgrading all the equipment now. It’s never been necessary in the past, because ID chips are so reliable. No one gets past the lobby without an authorized chip, and our scanners all over the building tell us who’s been where.”

  “Didn’t the scanners record who was in the lobby during the break-in?”

  “That’s the problem,” Ron said. “According to the security personnel, there were two intruders. One stayed outside the whole time, so our chip scanners couldn’t get a read on him, and the cameras didn’t get a good view. The other guy was inside, but he kept his face hidden.” He cast me a look with narrowed eyes. “He was in full view of our chip scanners, but they didn’t read an ID chip.”

  Did he suspect me? He was among the few people who knew I had no ID chip.

  “Security replaced all the scanners in that section of the main floor,” Simon added, before Ron could say more. “At least one of them should have caught a reading, so we’re scrapping all of them.”

  Ron grabbed a cable from one of the cubbies against the wall and removed his hand-screen from his pocket. Pulling the sides of the hand-screen apart, he extended the screen in one direction and then the other, until it was almost as large as a piece of paper. Then he used the cable to connect the hand-screen to the plug in my arm.

  “Let us concentrate for a few minutes,” Simon said. “Okay?”

  I nodded and kept silent.

  He and Ron spent the next ten minutes looking through the files that made up the program for my arm. They flipped through one file after the next, muttering to each other about the contents. All the while, the fingertips of my right hand played a quickening rhythm against the underside of my chair. Eventually, Simon grabbed my hand to stop me.

  “Your code looks fine,” Ron said. “It hasn’t been tampered with, and it looks like it’s running the way it’s supposed to.”

  Simon nodded his agreement.

  I tried to peer at the hand-screen over their shoulders. “So nothing’s wrong?” There had to be something. If the code wasn’t the cause of my sleepwalking, then I had no idea how to stop it.

  “We’re still looking,” Ron said. “Give us a bit longer.”

  A few minutes later, Simon squinted at the display. “Are you seeing this?”

  Ron pushed his face closer to the screen. “It’s hard to miss.”

  “What are you guys looking at?” I asked.

  Simon ignored me, his gaze glued to the hand-screen.

  “Remember how we told you your arm is artificially intelligent?” Ron said.

  “I wish I could forget it, but unfortunately, it’s melded to my flesh.”

  “That means it’s a learning machine, based on the Model Two actually. Its software has both code and data. The code tells it how to interpret the data, which is everything it has encountered while interacting with the world. It learns from those interactions.”

  “So what?”

  “So this file represents your data—everything your arm has learned since we powered it up two weeks ago.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “That’s the problem,” Simon said. “We expected a lot of data, but this is a lot of data. Too much for the time period the arm’s been active.”

  “What has it learned?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to tell from a quick look,” Ron said. “We’re going to have to go through it line by line and figure out what it means when combined together. It’ll take a while.”

  “But the timing of the data is interesting.” Simon pointed at the display on the hand-screen. Each item in the list included a timestamp. “Looks like you’re doing a lot of learning late at night, which is odd because we’d expect you to do almost no learning while you’re asleep. That’s probably a result of the sleepwalking.” For the first time, he dragged his gaze from the screen to me. “You sleepwalk every night?”

  I shook my head. “It’s only happened a couple times.” I didn’t mention that those times lined up with the murders.

  “Your arm learns a lot every night, so the sleepwalking isn’t the only cause of that. We need time to weed through it. We might need to delete some of this data if the arm has picked up some bad habits.”

  “Why don’t you just delete all of it?”

  “That’ll take you back to square one. You’ll have to start over with your physical therapy, which means you’ll have to move back in here again.”

  As horrid as that sounded, if I were back here at CyberCorp, I wouldn’t have to worry about murdering people in my sleep. Plus, I’d be too weak to hurt anyone. “I’d rather do that than the sleepwalking. I’ve been exhausted for a week and a half, afraid I’ll wake up on the side of the road somewhere—or worse.”

  “Let’s save that as a last resort,” Simon said. “At least until after the Model One rollout. Dr. Fisher is going to flip if she’s pulled off that project to oversee your case full time again.” He unplugged my arm from the hand-screen. “Go home. We’ll let you know when we figure out what’s going on.”

  I trudged from the room, head hung low. I had hoped this little session would tell me why I was sleepwalking, and maybe even fix the problem. Instead, we’d discovered that not only was my head connected to a machine.

  But we had no idea what that machine was doing.

  24

  While I was in the building, I figured I ought to visit Jackson. This time, I didn’t ask Ron or Simon’s permission to see him. Instead, I persuaded one of the engineers I passed to direct the elevator to his floor for me. I would have needed an ID chip to do it myself.

  I dragged my feet to Jackson’s room, prepared to sit by his bedside like a dutiful girlfriend—or ex-girlfriend. I still couldn’t be sure what our status was.

  I knocked when I reached his door and then opened it without waiting for an answer. If he was alone in there, I couldn’t exactly expect his unconscious body to invite me inside.

  But he wasn’t unconscious.

  His blue eyes were wide open, and he sat up in bed, scarfing down what looked like multiple portions of scrambled eggs. He was working on one bowl full of the stuff, and an empty bowl sat on the cart next to him.

  My shoulders lightened at finding him intact, smiling, and alive. For a moment, I didn’t care that we were in the middle of an epic fight, or that his metal parts outnumbered his flesh ones. I ran to his bedside and threw myself on top of him.

  Laughing, he squeezed me back, lifted me from my feet, and rolled me over him to the other side of the bed until I lay next to him.

  I laid my head on his shoulder. “You’re awake,” I said.

  He grinned at me. “And you say obvious things.”

  “How long have you been conscious?”

  “Not long. Since yesterday.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? I would have come over.”

  “We broke up.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I felt like a fool for wondering whether we’d made a clean break.

  A few seconds before, everything had been perfect. I fit perfectly in the crook of his shoulder, and the world had righted itself after having tilted this way and that over the past few days. This was home . . . except it wasn’t anymore. We’d broken up, and I didn’t know how to feel abou
t that.

  Jackson pushed a lock of curly hair out of my face and leaned close to whisper. “But you came anyway. That means something.”

  My heart skipped. Everything had changed. My life had been tipped upside down, but this one thing—Jackson and me—this was something I could fix.

  This could go back to the way it was supposed to be. And if this could be good again, maybe everything could be. Safe and comfortable.

  “I know you didn’t mean it when you said I don’t listen to you.”

  My smile wavered.

  He continued, oblivious to the fact that I had shifted farther away from him and was now nearly falling off the bed. “I’m on your side, but I don’t think you’re being fair. We’ll have a great life.”

  I slid off the bed and changed the subject. “How are you feeling?” He looked a little too well. The last time I saw him, he’d looked barely alive, pale with a sickening mix of metal and flesh. I squinted at him now but found no signs of injury.

  A wide smile stretched across his face. “I’m perfect. Better than ever.” He pointed at his left arm. “This arm is awesome.” Then he pointed to his collarbone and the left side of his rib cage. “These are awesome.” He pointed down at his pelvis, his left leg, and then his right. “All awesome.”

  My mouth dropped open. “They replaced all of that?”

  He nodded. “This is actually the second time I woke up. The first time was three weeks ago, when they’d only replaced the left arm and leg. Those were unsalvageable. The other body parts were a mess though. They told me all about the years of physical therapy I’d have to endure, and maybe someday I’d be able to pee on my own. I told them to replace everything they had to.” He pointed at his pelvis. “I died on the table twice while they were replacing this one.”

  I couldn’t respond to that. Whether I wanted to be with him was still unclear. But Jackson was one of my oldest friends. I’d known him longer than I’d known Liv—even longer than I’d known Allie. I couldn’t imagine waking up each morning to a world where he didn’t exist. The thought of him lying dead on that table broke my heart.