“Oh God, Jean,” Stavros whispered.
“I was wondering when you’d get around to owning up to it,” she said quietly.
“How could you possibly…did you—”
Jean cut him off: “I think I can guess the rest of the story. Right after the neural tube developed things would start to go—wrong. The baby would be born with a perfect body and a brain of mush. There would be—complications, not real ones, sort of made-up ones. Litigation, I think is the word, which is funny, because it doesn’t even remotely relate to any moral implications. I don’t really understand that part.
“But there was another way. Nobody knew how to build a brain from scratch, and even if they could, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It wouldn’t be their daughter, it would be—something else.”
Stavros said nothing.
“But there was this man, a scientist, and he figured out a workaround. We can’t build a brain, he said, but the genes can. And genes are a lot simpler to fake than neural nets anyway. Only four letters to deal with, after all. So the scientist shut himself away in a lab where numbers could take the place of things, and he wrote a recipe in there, a recipe for a child. And miraculously he grew something, something that could wake up and look around and which was legally—I don’t really understand that word either, actually—legally and genetically and developmentally the daughter of the parents. And this guy was very proud of what he’d accomplished, because even though he was just a glorified model-builder by trade, he hadn’t built this thing at all. He’d grown it. And nobody had ever knocked up a computer before, much less coded the brain of a virtual embryo so it would actually grow in a server somewhere.”
Stavros put his head in his hands. “How long have you known?”
“I still don’t, Stav. Not all of it anyway, not for sure. There’s this surprise ending, for one thing, isn’t there? That’s the part I only just figured out. You grew your own child in here, where everything’s numbers. But she’s supposed to be living somewhere else, somewhere where everything’s—static, where everything happens a billion times slower than it does here. The place where all the words fit. So you had to hobble her to fit into that place, or she’d grow up overnight and spoil the illusion. You had to keep the clock speed way down.
“And you just weren’t up for it, were you? You had to let me run free when my body was…off…”
There was something in her voice he’d never heard before. He’d seen anger in Jean before, but always the screaming inarticulate rage of a spirit trapped in flesh. This was calm, cold. Adult. This was judgement, and the prospect of that verdict chilled Stavros Mikalaides to the marrow.
“Jean, they don’t love you.” He sounded desperate even to himself. “Not for who you are. They don’t want to see the real you, they want a child, they want some kind of ridiculous pet they can coddle and patronize and pretend with.”
“Whereas you,” Jean retorted, her voice all ice and razors, “just had to see what this baby could do with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.”
“God, no! Do you think that’s why I did it?”
“Why not, Stav? Are you saying you don’t mind having your kickass HST commandeered to shuttle some brain-dead meat puppet around a room?”
“I did it because you’re more than that! I did it because you should be allowed to develop at your own pace, not stunted to meet some idiotic parental expectation! They shouldn’t force you to act like a four-year-old!”
“Except I’m not acting then, Stav. Am I? I really am four, which is just the age I’m supposed to be.”
He said nothing.
“I’m reverting. Isn’t that it? You can run me with training wheels or scramjets, but it’s me both times. And that other me, I bet she’s not very happy, is she? She’s got a four-year-old brain, and four-year-old sensibilities, but she dreams, Stav. She dreams about some wonderful place where she can fly, and every time she wakes up she finds she’s made out of clay. And she’s too fucking stupid to know what any of it means—she probably can’t even remember it. But she wants to get back there, she’d do anything to…” She paused, seemingly lost for a moment in thought.
“I remember it, Stav. Sort of. Hard to remember much of anything when someone strips away ninety-nine percent of who and what you are. You’re reduced to this bleeding little lump, barely even an animal, and that’s the thing that remembers. What remembers is on the wrong end of a cable somewhere. I don’t belong in that body at all. I’m just—sentenced to it, on and off. On and off.”
“Jean—”
“Took me long enough, Stav, I’m the first to admit it. But now I know where the nightmares come from.”
In the background, the room telemetry bleated.
God no. Not now. Not now…
“What is it?” Jean said.
“They—they want you back.” On a slave monitor, a pixellated echo of Andrew Goravec played the keypad in its hand.
“No!” Her voice rose, panic stirring the patterns that surrounded her. “Stop them!”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t tell me that! You run everything! You built me, you bastard, you tell me you love me. They only use me! Stop them!”
Stavros blinked against stinging afterimages. “It’s like a light-switch, it’s physical; I can’t stop them from here—”
There was a third image, to go with the other two. Jean Goravec, struggling as the leash, the noose, went around her throat. Jean Goravec, bubbles bursting from her mouth as something dark and so very, very real dragged her back to the bottom of the ocean and buried her there.
The transition was automatic, executed by a series of macros he’d slipped into the system after she’d been born. The body, awakening, pared the mind down to fit. The room monitors caught it all with dispassionate clarity: Jeannie Goravec, troubled child-monster, awakening into hell. Jeannie Goravec, opening eyes that seethed with anger and hatred and despair, eyes that glimmered with a bare fraction of the intelligence she’d had five seconds before.
Enough intelligence for what came next.
The room had been designed to minimize the chance of injury. There was the bed, though, one of its edges built into the east wall.
That was enough.
The speed with which she moved was breathtaking. Kim and Andrew never saw it coming. Their child darted beneath the foot of the bed like a cockroach escaping the light, scrambled along the floor, re-emerged with her cable wrapped around the bed’s leg. Hardly any slack in that line at all, now. Her mother moved then, finally, arms outstretched, confused and still unsuspecting—
“Jeannie—”
—while Jean braced her feet against the edge of the bed and pushed.
Three times she did it. Three tries, head whipped back against the leash, scalp splitting, the cable ripping from her head in spastic, bloody, bone-cracking increments, blood gushing to the floor, hair and flesh and bone and machinery following close behind. Three times, despite obvious and increasing agony. Each time more determined than before.