Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  She didn’t answer. Just crept silently toward the building, gesturing for us to follow. At the electrified zone, she held out her hand, waiting. I watched her face as our fingers touched, but it remained blank, no disgust, no curiosity, nothing. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d touched.

  With Riley’s hand firmly gripped in my own, we made it through the invisible fence. She took us on a circuitous route through the industrial zone, skirting motion detectors and, at one point, yanking us back into a shadow just as a floodlight swept across the pavement. Zo nodded to the source of the light, a bulky pillar stretching up from a nearby building, rotating slowly, painting a wide arc with its blinding beam. “AI targeters up there,” she whispered. “Coded to face recognition. If the light hits you and you’re here without authorization . . .”

  The use of deadly force was strictly prohibited in private security—which everyone knew meant it was tacitly allowed if the “private” in “private security” privately paid enough credit to make it worth someone’s while to look the other way. Still, if Savona was risking it at the Temple, it must have meant he was protecting something big. I could see from the intent expression on Riley’s face and from the way his eyes darted wildly across the landscape that he was constructing a mental inventory of the threats and weaknesses, like he already knew we’d be coming back—on our own.

  Creeping slowly, in fits and starts, Zo led us to the edge of the large domed building—judging from the retractable front wall of frosted glass and the decaying, wingless fuselage parked outside, it must have been a hangar for private planes. The glass was too thick to see through, but there were a couple broken panes near ground level. “Just don’t let them catch you spying on them,” Zo suggested, nestling herself in the shadow of one of the old planes.

  I hesitated. If we went for the windows, we’d be in plain sight, target practice for anyone who happened to walk by—or anyone who spotted us from within.

  “You came all this way,” Zo whispered loudly. “You want to puss out now?”

  So Riley and I knelt on the cement, peeking through the broken pane. We watched silently, ready to run. But there was only a handful of orgs inside, and none of them seemed likely to notice us. They were a little busy.

  Bustling back and forth through a room stuffed with equipment—and at the center, four pallets with four bodies stretched across them, nude, motionless, the skin on their bare skulls stripped, exposing the wiring within. Wiring that was connected to machines, piping data to oversize monitors. Four mechs, and even though the telltale blue hair was gone and we were too far to see her face, I knew. Ani, I mouthed, and Riley nodded, his fingers tightening around the sill.

  And hovering at her side, anxiously watching the man whose hand was shoved in her skull: the Honored Rai Savona.

  We watched for long minutes, as if time was going to give us some glimmer of understanding. But it didn’t, and eventually Zo released a long, low whistle. Time to go.

  “They cart them back to the Temple every morning,” Zo said once we were a safe distance away. “For the vids. Then back here every night. If it helps, I’m pretty sure the skinners have no idea what’s happening. I saw them up close once— they’re long gone. Totally checked out.”

  It didn’t help.

  I wanted to charge through the glass and throw them all over my shoulder, carrying them to safety. It was a fantasy. But maybe that made sense: This was a nightmare. “What the hell is he doing?”

  “He’s trying to figure out a way to kill them,” Zo said once we were a safe distance away. “All of you.”

  “Not possible,” Riley said. “Not for long, at least. Our minds are backed up.”

  “Savona turned on her,” I said, barely listening to the two of them, still seeing the mechs laid bare on those gurneys. Remembering what Jude had said about lab rats. “She threw herself away for him, and he did that to her.”

  “What? Your former friend, the Brotherhood’s newest recruit?” Zo shook her head. “Not exactly. She’s a volunteer. Savona talked her into offering herself up for ‘the Cause.’”

  “Which is?” Riley prompted her.

  “I repeat: He’s looking for a way to get rid of you, for good,” Zo said. “And he’s getting close.”

  “And you’re helping him,” I said.

  “Right. I’m helping him. By bringing you here.” Zo shook her head. “This isn’t what the Brotherhood’s supposed to be about. This isn’t why I joined.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re surprised?” I asked incredulously. “The whole point of the Brotherhood is to get rid of the mechs.”

  “No! We don’t want any more of them to be created. And we want to make sure the ones who still exist can’t hurt us. Restrictions. Sanctions. We don’t want to kill them.”

  “You can’t kill a machine,” I reminded her. “You just shut it off. I’m not human, right? I’m not your sister. That’s what you said.”

  “You’re not,” Zo said. “But . . .” She rubbed her hands furiously over her face. “I don’t know. You’re something, okay? You talk like her and you act like her and . . .” Zo sighed. “It’s just enough. Enough death. Enough.” Her voice hardened. “You should get out of here,” she said. “Before someone sees you.”

  You don’t even see me, I thought.

  “Come on.” Riley looped an arm around me, tugged me toward him. “Let’s go.”

  “Auden doesn’t know,” Zo said suddenly. Awkwardly, with the same shamefaced half smile she used to flash on my birthday, when she would shove a gift in my face, then run away before I could open it.

  “Know what?”

  “What Savona’s doing. I’m not supposed to either. But Auden’s clueless. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thanks, Zo.” I wanted to hug her.

  Not because of what she’d done tonight or what she’d just said or because when I had last hugged my father, I had let go too soon. Like I let go of everything too soon.

  Because she was still my sister, even if I wasn’t hers.

  Because she still didn’t want me. But she wanted me to live.

  WHAT HAPPENED

  “This isn’t my skin.”

  It was Jude’s idea to fly. Anyone could be listening, he said, glancing up at the ceiling, where we all knew cameras were hidden behind the plaster. No one can be trusted. He didn’t have to say her name; we were all thinking it. If Ani could turn—Ani, who’d been with Jude from the beginning, who had been beyond suspicion, who knew all our secrets—then maybe anyone could.

  So we went to the mountains. Just the three of us, Jude, Riley, and I, in Quinn’s plane. Jude had somehow managed to cut Quinn out with just enough subtlety that she hadn’t tried to fight him on it, or maybe she’d just run out of fight. We found an untouched landing spot, a snow-covered valley between the low, rolling peaks, miles from civilization, miles from anything but more mountains and more snow. And we jumped.

  Once we were in the air, surfing the wind, nothing mattered but the thunder in my ears and the pressure shifts that buoyed me up and down, the frigid slipstream flowing past, the ground hurtling closer as I angled my body down, coming in safely this time, not too fast, not to steep, no more recklessness than necessary, time slowing down as I plummeted and floated at the same time, and everything else—Zo and Ani and Auden and the Brotherhood—floating away from me as surely as Riley and Jude were, black and violet blots against a gray sky, disappearing into the clouds.

  I landed soft and shallow, kicking up a mushroom cloud of snow. Jude and Riley were already down, wriggling out of their flight suits. By silent agreement, we gave ourselves a moment to recover from the flight, to ease back into ourselves, exchange the freedom of release for the strictures of restraint, to absorb the fact that the subzero temperatures, the snow beneath us and fluttering around us, the frost already forming on our eyelashes, provided no discomfort. The awareness of cold, the knowledge of it, but with no more discomfort than a thermometer might feel.
Registering the sensation without experiencing it, that’s what it meant to remember ourselves and so we sat there under the heavy gray sky, staring up at the dingy white slopes, our bare fingers plunged into the snow, remembering.

  And then I told Jude everything.

  And not just about what we’d seen with Zo. Jude had to know what Savona was capable of; he had to know what Savona had done in the corp-town and what he’d threatened to do next. I told him the truth. All of it.

  “No one died,” I said, keeping my eyes on Riley’s face, begging him not to be angry that I hadn’t told him sooner. “Savona was behind the attack, just like we thought, but the deaths were staged.”

  Riley didn’t move, didn’t speak, but his hand closed over mind with a gentle pressure. Jude didn’t react.

  “We can’t go public,” I said quickly, before he jumped to the obvious conclusion. “We can’t let him kill all those people.”

  It was like Jude hadn’t heard me.

  “You’re sure Ani was in there?” he asked. “Did she see you?”

  “I told you, no one saw us,” I said, exasperated, not wanting to repeat what I’d told him about Ani’s condition or remind him that she probably wasn’t seeing anything anymore.

  “How do you know it wasn’t a setup?” he asked after making Riley run through everything Zo had told us a second time. “The org might have just been showing you what they wanted you to see.”

  “The ‘org’ is my sister. And she was telling the truth,” I said. “I can tell.”

  “Oh, you can tell? Why didn’t you say so.” Jude groaned and let himself flop back into the snow. “You dragged me all the way out here for this?”

  “You dragged us out here,” I reminded him. “And I’m telling you I trust her.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Trust me.”

  He laughed. “I don’t do that either.”

  “Then trust me,” Riley said. “I was there, I saw it. Whether it’s a setup or not, that part’s real: They’re experimenting on them.”

  “They opened up their brains,” I said, wishing I could talk about it without seeing it, without imagining that it was happening to me. “And Zo said there’s . . . damage.”

  “You start treating people like toys, playing with their insides, there’s always damage,” Jude said darkly. He swept his arms out to his sides, carving an angel in the fresh powder.

  “I just don’t get the point,” Riley said. “They’ve got to know whatever they do to us, we can download from storage.”

  I’d spent the last day thinking of little else, and I was afraid I understood what Savona was trying to do—afraid because it seemed like it could work, and because it was smart.

  Auden’s kind of smart.

  “What if he’s going after the backups?” I said. “Wipe those out, and he can do whatever he wants with our bodies.”

  “The backups are stored on the central servers,” Jude pointed out. “The same ones that store all the network data. They’re impossible to get to. You’d need an army.”

  “I know that,” I snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “And neither is Savona,” he shot back. “So where does that leave us?”

  “With the daily backups,” I said, and here’s where it got scary. “What if he’s trying to find a way to get to the storage servers through us? We access the server every time we do a memory dump. If they could find a way in through that . . .”

  Jude looked thoughtful; Riley looked stricken. “We have to get them out,” he said. “Now.”

  Jude packed a handful of snow into a tight snowball, tossing it up and down as he thought everything through. Then he smiled. “No, we don’t.”

  “Aren’t you listening?” I shouted. It felt like there should be an echo in a place like this, filled with so much emptiness, but my voice was just carried away by the wind. “We have to help them.”

  “I didn’t say we wouldn’t help them,” Jude said. “Just that we wouldn’t get them out.” He threw the snowball up as high as he could. It fell apart in midair, showering us with snow. “Think about it: We have two objectives, right? Rescue our friends—and destroy the lab.”

  He said it like it was obvious. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “If you’re right, and they’re working on a way to wipe us out, then we have to stop them,” Jude said. “So unless you want to change your story, and now you think the org was lying . . .”

  “No.”

  “Then we have to get rid of the lab. So we do them both in one shot. Look, they’ve got heavy security in place, and if the hostages are . . . damaged, that means they might not be able to run, or walk. Or even understand what’s happening. How do you expect the three of us get in and get out—get all of us out, without getting caught ourselves?”

  “Maybe I could convince Zo to help with the—”

  “No. No orgs. If we do this, we do it. We don’t rely on someone who can screw us over at the last minute. Ruin everything.” He shook his head. “But I don’t see how we get them out—get past the guards, the fence, the security AIs. Maybe we can get ourselves in. But we’d need more firepower or . . . I don’t know, more something to get everyone out.”

  I don’t know—it was a phrase I was pretty sure I’d never heard him say before. Perfect timing for the all-knowing Jude’s knowledge to run out. “It doesn’t have to be just the three of us,” I said, afraid I already knew exactly what he’d think of that. “Plenty of other mechs would—”

  “I can’t trust anyone,” Jude said, his voice laced with steel. “Not anymore. I trust Riley. Riley trusts you. But that’s it. We’re done.”

  “Just get to the point,” Riley said. Something in his voice made it sound like he already knew where Jude was headed.

  “After what’s been done to them, we don’t even know if they can be fixed,” Jude said. “What we do know is that they’ve got perfectly good, intact copies in storage. If something happened to their bodies, they could just be downloaded again. Start fresh. So we make it happen. We don’t rescue them—we destroy the lab, and we destroy them with it.”

  Riley was nodding.

  Just one problem. “How do we get out?”

  Jude shrugged. “Same way we get in—it’ll probably be easier, all the Faither freaks running around trying to save their precious lab. They won’t even notice us. And if that doesn’t work . . .”

  “What?”

  “We go out the same way the others do,” Jude said. “Destruction. Download. Simple.”

  Right. Simple. Just blow up our friends—and ourselves along with them. Die, and wake up miles away in some BioMax lab with no idea how we ended up there. Shoved into new bodies, and forced to pay whatever price for crimes we couldn’t remember committing. If anything went wrong . . . But that’s not what you’re afraid of, I told myself. No more avoiding the truth.

  Death meant nothing anymore. But I was still afraid of it.

  “Even if we could do it . . .” I hesitated, unsure how to put words to what I was feeling. The idea made sense . . . but it felt wrong. “We just let them die?”

  “It’s not death,” Jude reminded me. “It’s just their bodies, not their minds. Their minds are safe in storage.”

  “Copies of their minds,” I said.

  “You’re a copy,” he pointed out. “Feels real, though, doesn’t it?”

  I am what I remember, I told myself. I am what I think. How I think.

  And all that was bits of electronic data, coded into a computer. It didn’t matter if the data was in my head or on a server. It didn’t matter which head the data was in, or how many times it had been duplicated. Maybe I wasn’t an exact copy of the old Lia Kahn, because you always lost something going from analog to digital, from org to mech. But the next me would be just as mechanical as this one. The next me would be a perfect replication. The next me would be me. And if it was true for me, it was true for all of them.

  “We do it this way, they start fresh,�
� Jude said. “Whatever Savona’s done to them, they won’t have to remember it. It’ll be like none of this ever happened. And Ani . . . who knows when she last backed up. It could all disappear.”

  And she could come back like nothing happened, I thought, hearing in his voice how much he wanted it.

  “I have a guy who can get some explosives,” Jude said. “Riley and I know how to rig them.”

  Like it was just a trivial errand, a grocery list. Pick up apples, two pounds of chicken . . . and enough explosives to blow up a secret laboratory and everything inside.

  “We get in, blow the lab, get out—if we’re lucky, no one will even know we were there. As a bonus, it looks like the Brotherhood blew up its own hostages. Can’t hurt with public opinion—and since there’s nothing we can do, yet, about the Synapsis attack . . .”

  There was something surreal about this whole thing. Like I’d become someone unrecognizable; we all had. But: “It actually sounds like it could work.”

  Riley frowned. “You’re not saying all of it,” he told Jude.

  Jude wasted half a second on a wide-eyed Who, me? stare, then gave in. He never said no to Riley, not in the end. “You said they’re never alone in the lab?” Jude asked me.

  I nodded. “As soon as they’re done with the experiments for the night, they take the mechs back to the Temple, string them back up on the posts. Zo says there are usually people in the lab working all night—” I finally got it. “No. No, we get them out first. Sound some kind of alarm. Send a warning. Something.”

  “The whole point is that it has to be a total surprise,” Jude said. “If they knew we were there, we’d have to fight our way out. And we’d lose. There’s no way to alert the orgs without giving ourselves away.”

  “Then we come up with another plan!” I insisted. “I’m not—” I didn’t even want to say it out loud. The words would have sounded ludicrous coming out of my mouth. I’m not killing anyone. As if I was the type of person for whom that was even an option. Unrecognizable was one thing. This was alien. This was unthinkable. “Tell him, Riley. Tell him we can’t do this.”