by Jenna Black
“Perhaps when you’re older and more mature,” Mosely went on, “your father will trust you with Thea’s secrets. But everything you’ve done since your Replica was animated proves that you can’t be trusted with them yet. You will tilt at windmills without once considering the cost.”
“And what about the cost we pay for Thea?” Nate asked. “Have you ever considered that?”
Nadia lay still. She wasn’t having any success ridding herself of the mouthpiece, and she didn’t want to risk drawing Mosely’s attention. Nate was fishing, trying to get Mosely to explain whatever the big secret about Thea was. And since Mosely thought Bishop had overheard everything and by now shared it with Nate, he didn’t know he had anything to hide.
“Only a starry-eyed idealist like you would consider a handful of hardened criminals and Basement-dwellers here and there a significant cost. Not for what Thea gives us in return.”
“Yeah, she made it possible for my dad to murder me without losing his heir. I can see how that’s a big benefit to society.”
“Do you know how much of our gross national product comes from the technology that Thea makes possible? We might not have produced many actual Replicas, but the revenue from providing backup services alone provides power and food and shelter to keep our state thriving. If we stopped feeding her, she’d refuse to make the backups and we’d be bankrupt in a matter of weeks. But of course you don’t care about that as long as we do what you think is the ‘right thing.’”
Feed Thea? Nadia remembered Mosely’s offhand comment about criminals and Basement-dwellers, and when she put the two together, she came up with a pretty revolting image. Her stomach turned over, and Nate looked a little pale. He’d come in here brimming with confidence—or at least doing a very good job of pretending—and he’d bluffed his way through the conversation so far with aplomb.
Mosely must have noticed the pallor of Nate’s face and made the correct assumption as to what it meant. He muttered something under his breath that Nadia felt sure was a curse of some kind.
“You didn’t know, did you?” he said aloud, shaking his head at Nate.
“No,” Nate admitted, his face still pale even as he tried to look triumphant. “Bishop didn’t hear anything you and the Chairman were talking about, except the name Thea.” He composed himself a little more, shaking off the horror. “So you’re actually feeding criminals and Basement-dwellers to Thea. How does that work, exactly? Thea’s just a machine.”
Mosely looked at his watch again with impatience.
“Your plan is to kill me and Nadia both, isn’t it?” Nate asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “If that’s the case, then what’s the harm of explaining while you wait for my dad to come give you the official order?”
Mosely eyed him. “Fine. Yes, Thea is a machine, and we aren’t literally feeding her. She was developed as a research tool.” Mosely turned his back on Nate and walked over to the table on which Nadia lay. He reached above his head and flipped a switch. A low mechanical hum sounded, and Nadia’s body was suddenly bathed in spotlights. One of the spotlights shone directly in her eyes, and she had to close them.
Nate yelled, and there was the sound of scuffling. Nadia turned her head and cracked her eyes open to see Nate lying facedown on the floor while one of the security officers held him down and slapped handcuffs on him. Even with her head turned, the lights were unbearably bright and she had to close her eyes again.
“More specifically,” Mosely continued, “she was developed to research the human body.”
Nadia heard Mosely move to the head of the table and heard him flipping more switches. She tried to open her eyes to see what was happening, to see if one of those evil attachments was moving toward her, but the blinding lights wouldn’t let her.
“Don’t you dare hurt her!” Nate bellowed, but Mosely ignored him.
“Obviously, she far exceeded our expectations when she succeeded in creating exact Replicas of human beings. She can re-create a body down to the tiniest mole and scar, as you already know. But because she was developed for research, continuing to learn more has always been a driving need for her.”
“It is my raison d’être,” a female voice said from somewhere above Nadia’s head. She couldn’t open her eyes to see, but instinct told her the voice had come from the apparatus that she was currently strapped to. Thea herself.
“Indeed,” Mosely said.
“That’s Thea?” Nate asked.
“It’s connected to her. The servers that house her are a few rooms down, but we’ve given her the connectivity she needs to operate.”
“To further my research,” Thea clarified.
“What kind of research?” Nate asked.
Nadia tried again to find a way to spit out the mouthpiece that kept her from talking. She now had more than enough damning, sensitive information captured to put some serious leverage on her side. But that leverage did no good if no one knew she had it. The idea that she might get her revenge after she and Nate both died at Mosely’s hands was not as much of a comfort as she’d hoped.
“I am trying to understand the human brain,” Thea answered. “I can copy it in its entirety, but I have yet to understand fully how it functions in connection to the rest of the body. I cannot separate mind from body.”
Thea was just a glorified computer program, with a computer-generated voice, but Nadia could have sworn she heard a hint of frustration in that voice.
“Why would you want to do that?” Nate asked.
“Because if she can separate mind from body, then she can create the Replica of a human mind in any body she wants,” said Chairman Hayes.
Nadia risked another quick blink and saw that the Chairman had arrived and was facing off with Nate, who had been dragged back to his feet by the security officers.
“For instance,” Thea continued, “I still have in storage the very first backup scan I ever made of our beloved Chairman. When his body fails, I could theoretically create a Replica from the old backup, despite your silly human laws.” Human laws that prohibited the use of Replicas in the case of death by natural causes. “But it would be missing all the years of growth and learning and memory that had happened since that scan. When I am able to isolate the mind from the body, I will be able to create a Replica of the Chairman with his current mind and his forty-year-old body.”
“It’s the key to immortality, Nate,” the Chairman said to his son, as if there were no one else in the room. “Thanks to Thea and the important research she’s doing, I will be able to live forever, with Thea creating a new, younger body for me whenever my current one wears out. And you and everyone you love throughout your lifetime can live forever, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“You know you sound like a raving lunatic, right?” Nate asked his father, echoing Nadia’s thoughts.
The Chairman shrugged. “Spoken like an eighteen-year-old who thinks he’s going to live forever anyway.”
“Hey, unlike you, I’ve died once already.” Nate’s voice got a little thick, and though he was trying to sound angry, Nadia heard the pain beneath the anger. “And I think if I manage to survive another hour today, it’ll be a miracle.”
The lights above Nadia dimmed, so she was finally able to open her eyes again and see. Nate’s hands were cuffed behind his back. One of the security officers was holding his arm, and the other was pointing a gun at him. The Chairman had come close enough to put his hand on Nate’s shoulder, and either he was a really good actor or there was genuine sorrow on his face.
“I’m truly sorry, Nate. I don’t want to hurt you, but you’ve made it necessary. I can’t trust you to keep this knowledge to yourself.”
Nadia struggled against her bonds and screamed as best she could around the mouthpiece. The Chairman was going to kill Nate right here in front of her. She had the means to stop him, if only she could talk. But the bindings weren’t getting any looser, no matter how hard she struggled, and the mouthpiec
e wouldn’t budge, and no one was paying any attention to her.
The Chairman reached out and slid the second officer’s gun out of its holster. “At least this time I’ll take care of you myself,” he said. “I’ll make sure you don’t suffer.”
Nate locked gazes with his father as the Chairman started to lift the gun. He had to be terrified, but it didn’t show. He didn’t wince, didn’t look away, didn’t try to escape.
“Hey, Nadia,” he called, gaze still locked on his father’s, “are those the earrings you were telling us about?”
Nadia’s eyes widened, and she stopped struggling. She’d forgotten that Nate knew about the earrings, but even if she’d remembered, she probably wouldn’t have expected him to realize she was wearing them. She nodded as emphatically as her bonds would allow, and Nate smiled.
The Chairman’s hand slowed in raising the gun.
“I think you might want to take that gag off Nadia and hear what she has to say before you go and do anything irreversible,” Nate said. “Unless you want the world to hear the conversation we’ve just had, that is.”
Chairman Hayes froze with the gun only halfway up. He looked over his shoulder at Mosely. “Do it.”
For the first time she could remember, Mosely actually looked … apprehensive, and she figured he had a good idea what Nate’s statement meant. He tore out some of her hair in his efforts to get the mouthpiece off her, but she didn’t mind a bit. The movement so near her throat made her gag, even though Mosely was taking the damn thing out, and Nadia had to swallow convulsively a few times to get the gag reflex under control so she could talk.
“Check my left earring,” she told Mosely. “You’ll find there’s a transmitter in it. I’ve arranged for whatever I’ve recorded to be sent out wide in the event of my unfortunate death or disappearance.”
Mosely’s eyes glowed with an emotion Nadia thought came very close to hatred. She felt a thrill of triumph.
“Just think of all the things the world will know if that recording gets out,” she said. She was trying to sound brave and victorious, but the quaver in her voice ruined the effect. It was certainly possible that Mosely and the Chairman were arrogant enough to think they could find the stored recording before anyone knew she was dead or “missing.”
Nadia cried out as Mosely ripped the earring straight out of her ear. Little droplets of blood splashed her face, and Nate roared in outrage.
“Don’t be an idiot,” the Chairman said, and when Nadia blinked away her tears of pain, she saw that he was now holding the gun firmly to Nate’s head. Any hesitancy he might have felt earlier about the prospect of shooting his own son seemed to have vanished. His aim was steady, his face wiped clean of emotion. Nate stopped struggling against the officer who held him.
“Are you okay?” he called to her while Mosely picked apart her bloody earring, looking for the transmitter.
“Yeah,” she called back, though she was anything but. Her ear stung and throbbed, her head ached from when Mosely had hit it on the table, and her whole body still felt discombobulated from the electricity that had run through it. She was freezing cold, staring up into a contraption full of torture implements, and strapped to a table completely helpless. She was about as far from okay as it was possible to get, and the thrill of triumph she’d felt was long gone.
Mosely found the transmitter and let out a low curse. He dropped it to the floor and crushed it under his heel, but he had to know the damage had already been done. Always before when he’d looked at her, even when he’d been angry, Nadia had had the sense that Mosely felt he was just doing his job, that any emotion he showed was no more than skin-deep. That certainly wasn’t the case now.
“You brought her down to the heart of the Fortress, into Thea’s domain, and you didn’t check her for electronic surveillance?” the Chairman asked his favorite hatchet man in a voice that would have sane people scurrying for cover. “She was wearing a tracker and a transmitter, and you didn’t find either?”
Mosely’s hands clenched at his sides as he faced his boss. “She’s a meek little schoolgirl I dragged from her bed,” he protested. “It never occurred to me that she might be wired.”
The Chairman shook his head in disbelief. “She wasn’t so meek that she didn’t go running off on her own independent investigation in defiance of your instructions. Perhaps that should have been your first clue.”
“Why don’t you two fight about this later,” Nate suggested, now standing calm and relaxed in the security officer’s grip. He, at least, was convinced they’d won. He was even smiling, the old impish smile she’d always loved, although there were shadows in his eyes that dimmed the smile’s brightness. “Right now, you need to get those restraints off Nadia and these handcuffs off me. Then maybe we can move this party to a conference room and discuss terms.”
“Thea?” the Chairman said, ignoring Nate’s demands as if he hadn’t heard them.
“Yes, Mr. Chairman?”
“I’d like you to dissect the young lady’s brain until you find out where the signal has been sent.”
The blinding spotlights brightened to their full intensity again, forcing Nadia’s eyes closed, and there was an ominous whirring of machinery above her.
“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” Thea said.
“I’m sure you thought this operating theater was a modern-day torture chamber,” the Chairman said, and Nadia didn’t know if he was talking to her or to Nate. “But thanks to Thea’s research, it is no longer necessary to torture suspects for information. She can retrieve the information directly from the brain. Although, of course, this process is terribly unpleasant for the subject and ultimately fatal.”
“Don’t hurt her!” Nate yelled, and there was a frantic edge in his voice. From the sound of it, he was struggling again.
A high-pitched whining sound started up, and Nadia fought past her terror, fought to think coherently instead of letting herself visualize one of those drills or saws descending to cut into her head.
“It won’t work,” she said in something between a whimper and a scream. No matter how pointless it was, she struggled against the bonds that held her to the table, not caring that they dug painfully into the flesh of her wrists and ankles. “I don’t know where the data is stored.”
Dirk Mosely gave a bark of laughter. “Of course, you would never say such a thing if it weren’t true.”
The high-pitched whine was coming steadily closer.
“I’m not stupid,” she countered. “You made it clear from the beginning you were willing to torture me. Making the recordings would do me no good if you could torture the location out of me.” She couldn’t suppress a little whimper of fear, which didn’t do much to enhance the illusion that she was bargaining from a position of strength. “If you let your pet monster do this, and she finds I’m telling the truth, you’re completely screwed. This is your last chance.”
A bubble of hysterical laughter swelled in her chest. She was lying here tied to a table, about to be vivisected by a sentient machine, and she was telling the Chairman that it was his last chance. This all had to be some crazy dream, right? An epic nightmare created by her subconscious to terrify her in her sleep. It couldn’t possibly be happening in real life.
“Wait,” the Chairman said.
The whining sound continued to come closer.
“Thea, stop,” the Chairman said, more firmly.
“I can find the recordings, Mr. Chairman,” Thea protested. “Even if this subject does not know their actual location, I will discern who does know, and we can proceed from there.”
“And by the time you do, the recordings will be all over the net,” Nadia said. “What do you think would happen if everyone in Paxco, hell, everyone in the world knew what you were doing down here?”
Just saying the words made Nadia think about it herself, and she didn’t much like what came to her mind. There was already a resistance movement forming within Paxco, infiltrating the upper echelons of the st
ate. Right now, they were biding their time, working their way more deeply into the infrastructure. She didn’t know for sure what their eventual goal was, but she’d gotten the impression they were working toward a political coup, not a violent one. But if word of what the Chairman had been doing and condoning came out, violence seemed inevitable.
“You’d risk civil war at the very least,” she said, thinking about all the states and nations that already found the ethics of the Replica technology questionable. It was outlawed entirely in many parts of the world, Replicas not even being recognized as human beings. And it was against international law to create a Replica of a living person or of a person who had died of natural causes—specifically to prevent scenarios like the one the Chairman envisioned of his eternal reign. Paxco could very well find itself under attack at the same time that its citizens were rising up against it. When Nadia had first started down this road, she had never considered that her attempts to protect herself might lead to the very brink of war.
“Thea, I’m giving you a direct order,” the Chairman said. “Do not proceed.”
The whining sound stopped, and the spotlights dimmed to a bearable level. Nadia opened her eyes, then wished she hadn’t. A circular saw, its blade still turning from leftover momentum, was bare millimeters from her forehead.
“Don’t be childish, Thea,” the Chairman said. “Move the blade. And Mr. Mosely, please release Nadia from her restraints.”
“Are you sure about this?” Mosely asked.
“Yes,” the Chairman snapped, apparently not appreciating having his order questioned.
The saw blade above Nadia’s head whirred to life briefly, nearly giving her a heart attack, but Thea withdrew the arm. Nadia swallowed hard. Thea might be a machine, but she was an AI, and had something resembling free will. Just because Chairman Hayes ordered her not to cut Nadia open didn’t mean she wouldn’t. And Nadia couldn’t help seeing that brief reactivation of the saw as a threat, and a sullen one at that. She couldn’t get off this table soon enough.
