“No, that’s me,” he repeats, mouth empty now. “Got it figured out.” He scratches behind his ear at one of his sensors.
My fork topples out of my hand, but luckily Julius catches it before it can clatter to the floor. Raising it up, he sets my fork carefully on my plate, eyeing Yamaguchi. “Calm it down.”
“You’re not sharing right now.” My whisper is more of a hiss. A few heads turn my way and Julius turns to Flavius beside him, pretending to ignore me, and asks for the salt.
He goes a few minutes without a word, eating and occasionally tapping a few things on his tablet in his lap. Images begin flashing across the screen, images of the table in front of him and his own freckled hands. He folds the tablet and stuffs it back in his pocket.
“Back on again.” He chugs his glass of orange juice.
“Let me do it!” My cheeks bloom a violent red.
He pushes back from the table. “Soon.” Bending forward to collect his empty bowl, he whispers, “Pru knows.”
First hot, now cold. A chill pools in my gut as I glance at Pru, still chatting with Yamaguchi. No.
I give Julius a minute—can’t seem too interested in following him. I cram an unwanted bite of toast in my mouth and walk, casually as I can muster, toward the Caf exit.
In the hallway, I scurry up to him. “Julius! What?” I croak.
Julius’s pale face sunsets into a deep crimson. “Pru, sneaky little genius, figured I was up to something, and turns out she’s about as good as I am at hacking. She knows, Val.”
Thursday. “We have to make it happen tonight, then.” I fight the urge to shout in rage. Pru will not take this from me.
Julius drops his chin. “I know you want this. But I need more time.”
“Ju—”
He holds up a hand. “Val, it’s wait or nothing. I can be ready by tomorrow, but no sooner. It takes a certain amount of”—he rakes a hand down his tired face—“precautions to make something like this happen.”
A breath full of air hisses out through my nose. Julius is all I’ve got. Without him, I can’t turn my sensors off short of ripping them out of my skull. And that is tantamount to suicide. “If Pru turns us in before then, there’s no point continuing.”
The conversation halts as some Threes march by from the Caf. Everywhere we walk, we march, no time to waste in these long white halls. The smell of coffee trails behind them from steaming cups.
Julius starts walking again. I follow.
“She won’t get us before Sunday,” Julius murmurs.
“How’s that?” I can hear voices up ahead and I drop my gaze to the floor as four little Eights scamper toward their bowls of oatmeal or plates of fruit. Their lives are free of so much worry right now. Soon, though, the streams will start to wash away their personalities, their laughter, their smiles, and mold them into one. Just like us. My eyes sweep back at them as they pass us without so much as a glance. Pity and pride and jealousy twist inside me. They are freer than I am. But not for long.
“It’s a shame,” I whisper.
Julius sees me watching them and asks, “What is?”
“This. What they do to us.”
He frowns. “You mean when the laughter stops.” We haven’t laughed like those kids in so long. “Well, maybe you can laugh like that tomorrow night.”
Snapping me back to the topic, I think about what Julius said before the kids passed. “But Pru? You said she won’t be able to stop us.”
He nods. “Those precautions I talked about.” Now a half smile cocks up one side of his mouth. “I wouldn’t set up something like this without a few safety nets in place.”
Could he be that good?
In answer to my unspoken question, he adds, “If they go peeking, they won’t see much.”
“How?” I imagine Yamaguchi opening the brain files and watching this conversation or any of the others Julius and I have had this week. We’d be boxed in no time.
He smiles in earnest now. “I’m not giving away all my secrets just yet.” But at my desperate expression, he whispers, “Cameras are easy to hack. Your eyes aren’t that different.”
I want to slap him and hug him at the same time, but I do neither. So, he’s been meddling in my brain files. So be it. Let him do whatever he needs to do to get us ready for tomorrow night.
“Your thoughts? Now that’s a different story. But that’s what tomorrow night is for. I think I’ve bought us that much time anyway. Whatever hunting Yamaguchi can do in the brain files won’t turn up much. But the stream on Sunday? Well, we both know that’s going to be much harder to pass.”
I stop walking. “Julius? Is it even possible for us to avoid getting caught in the stream?”
He doesn’t smile, but he doesn’t frown either. Determination like I’ve never seen on his face hardens his freckled features like weathered stone. “Possible, yeah. Probable? Not likely.”
Eight
By the next evening, Friday evening, Julius is finally ready to go. I’m nearly exploding with anticipation. My lab work has been surprisingly efficient, though, fueled by the promise of a free thought. I’ve made it my entire source of hope.
But time has run out. It is the weekend, and surely the Director will have read my thoughts by Sunday night at the latest, and he will soon know all.
“Val?”
Julius opens my bedroom door and peeks in. I’ve hardly been asleep at all since I lay down two hours ago.
“I’m up.” Levitating with excitement, and not a small amount of fear, I hop out of bed.
“You look too happy to be code breaking right now.”
Julius, I notice, is not smiling.
Walking out of our domus, I look up at a camera. Blind! That’s what it is, thanks to Julius and his mad hacking abilities. We are invisible.
“All the cameras?”
He nods. “From here to the lab. But we need to take the stairs.”
“You’re amazing,” I say.
“I know. Took a while to get enough empty hallway footage on all these cameras, though. Good thing my firewalls haven’t failed me yet.”
“Let’s hope they don’t decide to fail tonight.”
“Oh, they won’t. My program alters them every three hours so the Center never even knows there is one. Never should have put me near those gorgeous quantum processors if they knew what was good for them!”
I take the stairs two at a time up to Level Ten, Julius right behind me.
As we climb, he continues, “Funniest part, though, is they made me make that firewall, Val. It’s what filters some thoughts out of full-Order streams. They need a failsafe—to keep dangerous, code-breaking thoughts out of everyone else’s heads. It works pretty well, but obviously doesn’t get all the bad thoughts or they’d have nothing to worry about. They need my firewall, they just didn’t know I’d perfect it so much that they can’t even recognize when I’m using it against them.”
Incredulous, I gape at him. “Your firewall is what filters—”
“Yes, but that’s not what I wanted to tell you.” He grins a maniacal grin, full of secrets. “I feel like confessing, and you’re all I’ve got.”
My teeth grind my bottom lip, unsure where this is headed or why. “Okay?”
“You know how I told you that I’m a code breaker too? Well, turns out—”
But at that moment, we hear voices just beyond the nearest corner. I recognize the voice of the Sixth Order’s domus nurse but the other is unfamiliar. Julius’ eyes bug and his knuckles on the door turn white. He jerks his head at the door and I shuffle back into the stairwell. Julius lets the door close quickly, but catches it and closes it without a sound.
“Someone there?” says a voice on the other side of the door.
“Go,” he mouths.
I leap up the stairs, not thinking about where I’m going. I try to land on my toes, but Julius clomps like a rhinoceros.
I burst out on the eleventh floor, Julius right behind me. The stairwell is full
of the sounds of people following us. One of them tells us to stop.
“In here!” Julius yells, slapping his palm against the wall beside a door.
The door slides open, and we hop inside.
“Welcome, Valeria and Julius the Fifth!”
Wheeling around, I realize we’ve just entered the microtech lab. Their personal robot, Roberta, greets us with a smile and asks us who we’re here to see.
I blink at Roberta for several seconds.
“Checking on Prudentia V,” Julius nearly shouts. He elbows me, and I look up. There, in the only lit station in the entire lab, is Pru, ever relentless in her pursuit of publication.
I walk behind the buxom robot to Prudentia’s workstation. Her face is stuck to a bionic microscope that moves when she does and grossly magnifies her eyes. She looks scarier than the robot beside me.
“Prudentia V, you have a visitor.” Roberta offers an outstretched hand.
Peeling off the microscope, Pru glares at me with sinister condescension, her eyes ringed with the impression of the rubber eyepiece. “You better have a good reason for interrupting me.” Her buzzed hair has dents in it from where the microscope latched on to her head.
“How’d you know she was in here?” I ask Julius, ignoring her question.
“I didn’t.” He perks up, looking at Pru with wide eyes. “Just popping in. Wanted to see your bots.” The last word sounds eerily like “butts.”
She scoffs.
“Your nanobots, that is,” he adds with a scuff of his shoe.
“Really?”
Julius turns to Roberta. “Could you please tell the people behind us that you haven’t seen us?” Roberta nods, smiles, and struts away toward the door to the lab.
“What you’re planning, this ridiculous moment of freedom, won’t last, you know.” Pru sneers at me. “Just because they didn’t catch you when I told Yamaguchi about your plan doesn’t mean they won’t ever catch you. You’ve broken too many rules this time, Valeria.”
Julius lets out a panicked laugh. “Yep. Just bombing the Codex all to pieces, no big deal.”
“Get out of here.” Pru’s voice is sharp like glass. “Don’t drag me into it.” She’s looking at me as if I’m the perpetrator. “I think I’ll just go, too.” She reaches her arms out to her sides. With the words “power down,” she lowers her arms and all of her screens go dormant, plunging us into the dim silver light of the always-on emergency lighting near the ceiling.
The door to the lab slides open across the huge room. Without a word, we all drop to our ankles in a squat. We hear the voices of our pursuers talking with Roberta, who appears to be throwing them a string of unnecessary questions.
“Pru,” Julius whispers. “You’re innocent here.” He turns toward her and points at the door to our right that leads to the adjacent room, the test lab, where they try out everything made in microtech. “Go.”
He and I scramble on our hands and feet to the other room. Roberta is actually singing now, as if trying to cover up the racket we’re making.
“Why is she helping us?” I ask Julius as we break into a full run in the test lab.
“Roberta?” Julius laughs. “I helped design her back when we did rotations. My month in the microtech lab was spent designing Roberta.” We skitter to a stop at the door to this lab. “Pru and I worked on her together.”
In the hallway, we run back to the stairwell, then hammer down a flight and spill again onto Level Ten.
“That was fun,” Julius says through panting breaths. “And I didn’t mask those cameras up there.” I look back at him, mouth hanging open, and he nods. “Yep, they saw us.”
“Are you serious?”
He shrugs. “Didn’t think we’d go up there. Come on, we better hurry.”
His station in the bin lab, or binary lab, lights up like the stage of the Senate chamber when we arrive. He starts activating things and talking to his t-screen as sheets of code start falling through the air around us.
“I was able to isolate your sensors’ signal while I was watching your thoughts, like I hoped.” He grins at me. “Don’t worry, I didn’t watch for long, and you were mostly just playing with your chemicals, trying to airbrush humanity.”
I shake my head, cross my arms, too anxious to say anything.
After several minutes, he looks up. “You ready, Val?” His tablet is open in his palm and we are surrounded by bright walls of his own personal codes. I think that it looks very much like an actual firewall, if a firewall were visible.
I nod, unsure if words are my best option at the moment. Elation has taken over.
He taps some things, then his tablet becomes the receptor for my sensors. My thoughts, mostly just the face of the boy before me, fly across the screen. Then, he reaches up to his projected t-screen and presses the word “Initiate.” The tablet screen goes blank.
I’m on my own now.
Julius smiles goofily at me—just proud of his work, I’m sure. But I don’t feel any different. Somehow, I’d wanted to be able to tell that my thoughts weren’t being broadcast to a hidden computer.
Julius bends over his tablet, apparently reading something.
Then his eyes, full of panic, shoot to mine.
“Val, they know we came here. They told Yamaguchi and she’s headed this way now. We’ve got to shut it down!”
“Give me another minute!” I’m not ready to be caged again so soon!
He looks at my pleading eyes. “One minute, then it’s off.”
Only a minute of this! What can I think in one minute that will make a difference? I close my eyes, wanting to savor every image that comes to my mind. I will never share these images; they are not being collected by a massive computer. They are mine.
This is my veritas.
Without hesitation, Marcus’ face swims into focus behind my closed eyelids. I paint a scene of us walking down a lane with trees beside it. It is autumn. A breeze lifts my hair, which I imagine is hanging down to my shoulders, though I’m not sure what its texture would be like that long. I visualize us from a distance. Even in my head, it appears I am not me.
Julius calls out thirty seconds. Not enough time! As I stand with my eyes closed, I realize that thoughts of Marcus can’t be the only thing I think of during my moments of freedom. Anger stampedes up from my toes. He does not define me! I want to think of something that is strictly Valeria, but nothing definitive comes to mind.
Lab Two. My research. My work. That isn’t it either! Think! Our domus. The rooftop. Like a mirror her mind. No! My reflection. No, no, no!
“Time’s up.”
I open my eyes, horrified. I’m not finished yet.
“Got to turn them back on.” Julius offers a hurried, apologetic look and taps his t-screen.
My thoughts are now being gathered for collective use once again.
My freedom … barely more than a minute of it! And I didn’t even think anything revolutionary!
“Was it worth it?” he asks, brown eyes searching mine for honesty.
I realize for the first time that Julius is handsome—someone hand-selected his looks, after all—but just not the kind of handsome I’d ever noticed. I tilt my chin back. “Yes.” Must look satisfied. “Thank you for this.”
“Good. Glad it worked.” He barks a few orders to the computer and starts shutting things down. He opens up a few new boxes as the door to the bin lab slides open, revealing a tired-looking Yamaguchi.
His station is only a few steps inside the bin lab.
“Play along,” he whispers, already plastering a smile on his face.
The slender woman eyes me and Julius as she approaches.
“What are you doing here, Valeria?”
Julius takes over. “She was coming here to have her sensors looked at. The Director told her he reads her thoughts all the time, so she wanted to see if that was true.” He doesn’t miss a beat, but continues, “I told her I could do it.”
She nods, then reaches for J
ulius’ wrist, draws it toward her, and glances at his wristband. “You’re not overly stressed right now; your heartbeat is normal.” She drops his hand and sighs. “Valeria, you seem uncomfortable.” Yamaguchi’s tear-shaped eyes flicker toward my wristband, which is blinking in mutiny at my crazed heartbeat. She looks almost sad.
Julius nods. “Stressed out, I imagine, because I just proved to her that the Director does, in fact, read her thoughts frequently.”
I have not had to say a word yet.
“We’ll have to find out what is going on here,” Yamaguchi adds apologetically. “We’ll be monitoring you both more thoroughly now, too, of course. And you may have to do a few more modifications, as well, if we see anything dangerous.”
Fuming inside, I manage a nod.
“You two may take the elevators back to our domus now. I’ll just take a quick look around.” Yamaguchi excuses us as she begins tapping the air that is Julius’ t-screen.
Walking out of the bin lab, I whisper to Julius, “Will she—?”
“No. It’s all so encoded, she won’t know what she’s looking at. Only another bin lab guru could fish anything out of my t-screen that isn’t perfectly in line with Codex.” He grins.
The stress between my shoulders deflates.
Entering the elevator, a question tugs at me. “Julius? What do you think defines who we are? I mean us as individuals, not the Order?”
He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “That’s deep, Val. I don’t know.” The doors close in front of us, showing our reflections. “Maybe … look at it this way, you’re good at genes, I’m good at code. Pru, well she’s good at everything, but she’s best at tiny stuff. Seems like we’re all gifted differently, even though we all have the exact same amount of information in our heads.” He’s smiling again. “It’s like what we’re interested in most is what we become good at. So, I guess it’s our interests, not our abilities, that are the real gifts.” He shrugs. “That’s the best I got.”
“The Director said almost that same thing,” I mutter. “But somehow you made it sound much better.”
Valeria is good at genetics. Julius is a genius hacker and programmer. Prudentia is a wizard with microscopic robots. We are not all the same.
The Veritas Project Page 7
