by S. C. Jensen
“Rae’s situation . . .” Patti ran the fingers of her right hand along the wall. She tilted her head back, as if searching for the right words. “I’ve seen it before.”
The narrow white walls of the hallway closed in on me. It was like I had cotton stuffed in my ears. The air seemed to get thin, and I sucked in deep lungsful trying to stave off the feeling of claustrophobia that encroached on me with her words. I closed my eyes and opened them again, willing the walls to stay back.
“Molly Elless said Rae had been possessed,” I said. “By some kind of failed program locked in a black box file on that hard drive we smuggled out of Libra.”
“Yes,” Patti said. “A hostile program has taken control of Rae’s body. It accessed her biocontrol panel and has hacked into her central nervous system. She may still have moments of lucidity, but it will be a battle of wills between her and the program.”
“I’m not going to pretend I know what that means,” I said. “But it doesn’t sound good.”
We re-emerged in the harness room where Johanna and Gore had sunk the safety equipment into tidy compartments in the floor and flipped up some lounge furniture. Johanna had a ball of purple flame in her right hand and was holding it out for Gore to inspect.
“We are fortunate that Rae has never favoured cybernetic augmentations,” Patti said, indicating the purple-haired cyber-witch. The android sank into a soft white marshmallow of an armchair. “She is less dangerous than she could have been.”
“Not that she could have had this.” Johanna rolled the ball of flame from one hand to the other. “I designed it myself and I’m not sharing.”
I sat across from Gore on a firm, silver-covered sofa and put my feet up on the smooth metal table between us. Gore lifted a hairless eyebrow at me but managed to keep his opinion to himself. Hammett pranced into the room and sat at my feet, making ridiculous cartoon eyes at me. I relented, scooped the sphere up, and put the SmartPet in my lap.
“What is that?” Johanna gaped at Hammett and extinguished her flames so she could reach out and pat the top of the stovepipe hat. “I need one.”
“Rae killed an orderly, Patti,” I said, ignoring the witchy woman. “She tried to kill Jimi Ng. Even without augments, she’s not exactly a cupcake.”
“Rae is still in there,” Patti said. “We have to do everything we can to help her, because she’s trapped in that body with this program, and if we don’t find a way to separate them, she could be killed.”
“She was wearing a necklace,” I said. “Similar to the ones with the corrupted nootropic, Tropical Punch. Do you know anything about that?”
Patti blinked. Her eyes darted from me to Johanna and back to me. She said, “Are you certain?”
“I just saw the chain,” I admitted, and Patti seemed to relax. “But the guy who gave us our assignment was wearing one too. And I’m sure his had a red stone.”
Johanna’s mouth twisted into a thin black line. She said, “That could be a problem.”
“It can’t be,” Patti said. “The necklaces were destroyed.”
“You said you’d seen this before,” I said. “Rae’s behaviour. Was it another project at Libra? What happened?”
Patti closed her eyes and didn’t respond.
“I know it wasn’t Rae I was fighting,” I said. “But it was her skull I had to bash in to get us out of there. I don’t ever want to have to do that again.”
Unless it was Nathanial Price’s head.
The sensation had burned itself into my metal fist, the way Rae’s temple seemed to collapse beneath my blows. Acid rose in my throat. But when I remembered what Price had done to Tom, I knew if I had to do it, I could have kept going. I could have punched all the way through a human skull. Though I didn’t like to admit it to myself, a part of me wanted to do just that.
Price would pay.
“The last time I saw something like this, I didn’t know what it was,” Patti said. “I wasn’t in a position to observe in the same way as I was today. You’re right. That wasn’t Rae. It was her body, but not her mind. And we are all incredibly fortunate that it was her body and not something like mine.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Libra put that program into some kind of soldier bots. We’re all going to die, aren’t we.”
“Would you let the lady speak?” Gore folded his arms across his chest.
I pointed my upgrade at him and said, “I’ve got questions for you, too, buddy. Don’t get too comfy over there.”
The gorilla stone-faced me. I narrowed my eyes at him and turned back to Patti.
“When I saw what was happening to Rae,” the android said, “it was like something opened up inside my mind. I was changing with her. Remembering things I never knew I had forgotten.”
“If you know something that can help us, please tell me,” I said. “I don’t have to like it. I just need to understand. Who else has this happened to?”
“You really are dense.” Hammett snorted and rolled off my lap and onto the floor. Johanna tittered behind a flame-throwing fist.
“What?” I said. “What did I miss?”
“She’s talking about herself,” Hammett said. The pig performed its pick-me-up trick for Johanna, and she swooped down upon it with a gush of baby talk.
Gore grinned at me with teeth that looked too small for his wrinkly balloon head. He said, “You know, I kinda want one now too.”
I ignored them and gaped at Patti. “But you’re an android.”
Patti took a deep breath and rubbed her face with her hands.
“I thought so too,” she said. “But recent events have caused me to reconsider much of what I thought I knew about myself.”
“What are you saying?”
“I believe I am an advanced cyborg prototype,” she said. “My mind is the only organic part left, and even that has been tampered with, but I believe I experience true empathy because I used to be human.”
Patti opened the palm of her hand in front of her and projected a hologram of a group of scientists, all in their white coats, standing around a flayed android with all its glittering silver viscera exposed beneath the excruciatingly bright overhead lighting. My eyes ached just looking at it. I blinked. My breath hitched in my throat as I recognized the faces in the ’gram.
Mol Elless, Ector Perez, Janek Kowalski, and Jimi Ng in the back. Jimi so young he barely looked old enough to vote in Trade Zone acquisitions. A young Rae, too, out front, but with her eyes turned adoringly toward Jimi. Other faces I had seen in Rae’s file—the dead and disappeared scientists Libra had been picking off like fleas.
“That’s me,” Patti said, pointing to a short, round woman with a cheerful face, thick glasses perched on her flat button nose. She looked nothing like Patti. “I was just like Rae.”
But I couldn’t focus on her words. One face leered at me out of the hologram and made my blood run cold. I hadn’t seen his face clearly in the video, but the bearing was identical, the violent arrogance of his posture. He had a handsome-enough face at a glance, but the sneer hanging off his jaw twisted all the features somehow, and he had the dead, black eyes of a shark.
Nathanial Price.
He had his hand clasped possessively around Rae’s shoulder, as if he’d never let her go.
“That’s him,” I said. “That’s Price, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Patti said.
“He did this to you?” I said. “He put you in a machine? How?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “The last human memory I have is of going in for a diagnostic appointment on my CBI. I never woke up from the procedure. Not as myself. But memories have been flooding back to me since . . .”
Her gaze seemed to turn inward as she relived whatever had happened to her. I studied the ’gram. Most of the scientists in it stared at the holocam, except Rae looked at Jimi, and
a mousy-looking woman in the back who stared at Price with the same kind of look, as if oblivious to Price’s possessive hold on Rae. Nothing like an unreciprocated lust triangle to spice up life at the office. She wore a fine silver chain strung with a red stone with glinted like a drop of blood between her collarbones.
“Who is this?” I asked.
Patti looked at the ’gram and opened her mouth to answer. Then she closed it and shook her head. “It was on the tip of my tongue,” she said. “And now it’s gone. I don’t remember.”
Gore turned his big frame toward the android, all playfulness gone from his expression. He said, “What do you remember?”
Johanna wilted slightly next to Gore. She stroked Hammett’s back absently and stared at a spot on the floor. I had a feeling she’d heard Patti’s tale already and that it wasn’t going to be anyone’s bedtime story.
“Price headed up an experiment,” Patti said. She drew her feet up underneath her body, curling into the chair as if it could protect her. “High level cybernetics. The melding of human and machine. He thought we could fix our failed attempts at AI programs with advanced biological coding. We were trying to train the program by allowing it complete access to a conscious human mind.”
“And you volunteered to be that mind?”
“I was one of many,” she said, and shrank in on herself. “None of us volunteered. I only remember bits and pieces . . . Being strapped to a table. Hallucinating multi-coloured webs and four dimensional shapes, like the world as I knew it was being deconstructed. My nerves screaming all over my body, feeling nothing and everything at once.”
I pictured Rae’s body, writhing and contorting in the observation room, shrieking as if her skin was on fire. A shudder broke across my shoulder blades. I said, “What happened to the others?”
Patti’s face scrunched up as if it were physically painful to draw the memories up to the surface of her mind. She rubbed her eyes. “They were changed.”
“Like Rae,” I said. “Isn’t there anything we can do? How did it change them?”
“The program was parasitic,” Patti said. “The subjects’ behaviour became erratic as the program forced them to do things . . . strange, unnatural things . . . so that it could learn and change. Test its limits. Their minds were cannibalized by the program. Their bodies, broken.”
“Not you, though.”
Patti let out a slow breath. She said, “My body died, just like the others.”
“But your mind survived,” I said.
“As far as I know, I’m the only one who survived long enough to receive a surrogate body,” Patti said. Then her brow furrowed. “Perhaps one other. I can’t be sure.”
“And you are only just remembering it now?” Suspicion crept into my voice.
“I had forgotten all about it,” she said. “Until I saw it happening to Rae.”
I had a creeping feeling, the way I had just before Rae attacked me with the scalpel, like the hairs on my neck were being plucked out by tiny, invisible fingers. “And what happened to this program?”
“We co-exist.”
Sounded like a nice way of saying the thing was still in there, biding its time, waiting for the perfect moment to pull out the knife. I turned to Hammett and said, “What’s your take on this?”
“Having to share a brain with a human?” Hammett shivered daintily in Johanna’s lap. “It’s bad enough being synched to your tattler. I’d like to hear the rest of the story, though, even if it gives me nightmares.”
Patti smiled ruefully. “It was like a nightmare. For me, and for the program, too, I’m sure.”
“It’s still in your head, though?” The tightness in my chest that I’d been feeling off and on since the fight with Rae came back with a vengeance now. I struggled to breathe. “You mean, Rae might never be the same again?”
“Rae is strong,” Patti said. “She may be able to survive. But it will not be easy.”
“We have to tell them what is happening to Rae,” I said. “That she’s still in there.”
“They know.” The android’s voice fluttered like a dying bird.
“Molly Elless,” Gore said. “Probably some others . . . They were all at Libra when this experiment was happening. They’ve all seen it before.”
I pictured Molly’s crumpled form outside the observation room. Her voice crying out, It’s all my fault. She had known exactly what she was doing when she instructed Rae to upload the data to her CBI. The black box, the virus. Had they set me up? Was it all a lie designed to motivate me to go after Libra?
And then there were the necklaces. The woman in the photo. Rae. Mr. Fen. Something connected them all and I just couldn’t see it.
“I didn’t realize what I was,” Patti said. “What I had been. But they knew. They reached out and welcomed me with open arms when I double-crossed Libra. They brought me to the asteroid. But none of them hinted at the truth. I think they wanted to keep me in the dark for as long as they could.”
“What do they want with you?” I said. “What do they want with Rae?”
“I thought it was the files,” Patti said. “I thought they wanted to conduct their own AI experiments. The off-world colonies require more workers than we can find to populate them. Intelligent drones would be the ideal solution.”
“But the files were only part of it,” I said. The image of Nathanial Price’s hand gripping Rae’s shoulder flashed in my mind. “They wanted Rae.”
Patti nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Patti said. “But it must have something to do with the trials. Though everyone died, they were considered a success. They must have gone onto the next phase.”
“You were one of maybe two survivors,” I said. “How can that be a success?”
“They only needed one of us,” Patti said. “One to prove it was possible. They studied me, designed a new trial. Prepared new test subjects . . .”
“Rae never told me any of this,” I said.
“She didn’t know,” Patti said. “I didn’t connect the dots until my memories came back to me in the observation room. There was a new CBI chip, a prototype upgrade with advanced new biocontrols. Everyone on the original android project received one.”
“They’re trying again.” I shot to my feet and paced around the room, wishing there was something I could do. The powerlessness of my situation ate away at me from the inside. Just like the cannibalistic program. Just like the thing inside of Rae. I said, “And you didn’t remember being human?”
Patti shook her head. “My memory was obliterated in my battle with the AI.”
“Even if Rae survives, she won’t remember who she is,” I said. “Who I am? Or Jimi? I can’t believe that. She knew us.” My voice broke, but I forced out the words. “Even when I hit her, I felt her inside her body.”
“We will be able to help her remember,” Patti said. “Now that the floodgates are open, I’m discovering new bits and pieces of my past life all the time.”
Johanna gently placed Hammett on the floor and brought me a cold, green can of NRG soda from the concession area of the lounge. She said, “Here. Let’s take a break from all of this. It’s going to be a long trip if we burn ourselves out on all this positivity.”
“Thanks,” I said. I cracked the can open and poured the familiar chemically sweet liquid over my tongue. I guzzled it, barely pausing to breathe between mouthfuls. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was. I set the can on the counter and crushed it with my metal fist. “I needed that.”
“Like a hole in the head,” Gore muttered. “The ship does have water, you know.”
“Don’t tell me how to live my life.” I belched in his direction. “That’s Rae’s job. And I’m not giving up on her yet.”
“Charming,” Gore said. “I can see what Tom sees in you.”
I whipped the can at his head. He caught it an inch from his nose. I didn’t even see his hand move.
Johanna slow-clapped.
“Smashing performance,” she said. “I can see we have placed our faith in the utmost of professionals.”
“Why is that, anyway?” I said. “I figure LunAstro sent us because we were the most expendable people in the compound. Pretty sure this guy even comes with some kind of guarantee. Kill your target in fifteen hours or your next assassination is on us.”
“Not quite,” Gore said. “But LunAstro doesn’t have to pay until the job is complete, so if I die, SecurIntel will send in a replacement.”
“Good incentive not to die, I guess.”
I rifled through cupboards in the concession stand, hoping to find something edible. But apparently whoever had stocked the thing was on a veggie-protein kick. Nothing but stale green bricks in crinkly cellophane packages.
“Toss me one of those, would you?”
I hucked a brick in Gore’s direction and grimaced as he bit into the thing and chewed with relish. Through a crumbling mouthful of green stuff he said, “You know, it’s not about the money.”
“It’s about making the world a better place,” I said. “Right? Or wait, no. You just like topping the rich and powerful so much you’d do it for free? You’re such a good guy.”
“The more governments and corporations I work for the more I’ve come to realize there are no ‘good guys,’” Gore said. “But there are good people. There are good friends.”
“And Tom is a good enough friend to you that you’d put your life on the line to save him?”
“We’ll save Tom,” Gore said. “Or I’ll die trying.”
It should have made me feel better, having this genetically engineered super-mercenary on my team. It was a relief to have someone to rely on, I had to admit. But resentment boiled inside my guts. I’d gotten Rae and Tom into trouble. Everything had been fine until I took Patti’s job and accidentally exposed Libra’s scheme with the androids. Now two of the most important people in my life were dying, and they were completely out of my reach. And I couldn’t help them.
