STAND ALONE
The residential tower was a city within the city, a self-contained vertical ark that could accommodate all the needs of any of its well-heeled occupants without them ever having to leave the confines of the building. Only Hanka’s best and brightest resided here, where each apartment was a penthouse in itself, an isolated retreat from the rest of the city’s tumult far below.
From the outside, the hundred-story condominium was aesthetically pleasing. The windows in all of its many apartments were round rather than square, with the philosophy that the inhabitants could look outside and see a world that was, for them, literally globe-shaped. The theory was that this provided perspective, a calming start to the day and end to the night: this was where you were in the place of things.
The interior echoed the exterior, walls painted neutral pinkish beige, with rounded archways instead of rectangular doorways. The archways led from the living room to several smaller spaces barely larger than alcoves, each one two steps up from the main floor, with walls that curved to a rounded ceiling.
Genevieve Ouelet had made one of these smaller spaces her bedroom. The whole apartment was spartan, with no furniture save for bathroom fixtures and the yellow-tiled block for viewing holo data in the center of the living room. Ouelet didn’t even have a bed. She lay sleeping on a thin mattress covered with a nest of blankets on the bedroom floor, exhausted from the day’s horrendous events. Even the ceiling light overhead did not wake her.
The Major stood quietly over the sleeping doctor. She had shown her Section Nine identification to the doorman, so he was obliged to let her inside. The Major had told the doorman that Dr. Ouelet was expecting her. Perhaps that was even true. She had never been here before. Something had always made it seem improper for her to cross the boundary between Ouelet’s working world in the labs and the office at Hanka, and the doctor’s personal world here in the tower.
Ouelet would have slept through until morning, but she sensed something amiss. The perception pierced her dream state, enough to wake her. For an instant, Ouelet thought the shadow falling across her was a remnant of her dream. Then she saw it really was the Major, understood that she was awake, and gasped.
“Oh, Mira.” Ouelet sighed in relief. “Oh, my God, you’re safe!” She expected a friendly response and waited. When the Major didn’t speak, Ouelet filled in the silence. “You’ve been gone for hours!” She swallowed. “And no one knew where you were.”
The Major said nothing. She just kept up her level stare, straight into Ouelet’s eyes.
“What?” Ouelet was pleading now. “You’re scaring me.”
When the Major stepped forward, Ouelet instinctively retreated, scrambling backward on hands and bent knees until she was in the bottom of the wall’s curve. This was totally unlike Mira. “Calm down,” the doctor instructed, trying to contain her fear.
The Major finally spoke, and her tone was calm enough. It was her words that frightened Ouelet. “How many were there before me?”
Ouelet contemplated her options and decided there was no point in trying to deflect the question. The Major clearly knew there had been experimental prototypes before her, robots implanted with human brains. She tried to answer in a way that would blunt the Major’s anger. “The intricacies of shelling your mind, it had never been done before. It was inevitable there would be failures.”
“How many?”
“Dozens,” Ouelet conceded.
The Major wanted the exact number. “How many?” she repeated.
“Ninety-eight unsuccessful attempts before you.” The enormity of the admission fell between them. Ouelet’s regret appeared genuine, but the Major didn’t care.
The Major’s head moved up and down, less a nod than an attempt to contain her rising outrage. “You killed ninety-eight innocent people.”
“No, I di—” Ouelet stammered over her protest and tried again, “didn’t kill anyone. You wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t exist if it… if it weren’t for those experiments.”
“‘Experiments’?” Now the Major was the one backing away. She felt an urgent need to get away from this woman, this lying, manipulative hypocrite who had positioned herself as a surrogate mother. “Is that what I am to you?”
“No!” Ouelet protested.
But the Major turned and walked out of the bedroom.
Ouelet scrambled to her feet and rushed into the living room after her, so quickly that the bottom of her lightweight night-robe lifted and floated behind her as she ran. “No, Mira!” The Major wouldn’t meet her gaze, but stared pensively into the middle distance.
Ouelet began anew with her explanation. “Sacrifices were made.”
“Where did the bodies come from?” the Major wanted to know. “Where did I come from?” She turned to Ouelet and advanced again.
“Mr. Cutter brought them to us,” Ouelet said. Her tone was defensive. Then it became ashamed. “I didn’t ask questions.”
The Major no longer knew whether to be angry or despairing or just numb to the core. Every fact she had known about herself was falling away and breaking. “The harbor! My parents. The way they died. Did that happen?” The memories of the refugee boat, of people drowning in the harbor, still seemed real, but they felt different from the memories of the pagoda and even the cat, the memories in the glitches.
Ouelet took her time before she finally confessed, her eyes downcast. “No. We gave you false memories. Cutter wanted to motivate you. To fight terrorists. I didn’t approve. It was cruel, but my work, it was important, and you were born. You were so beautiful.” Ouelet reached out a hand to touch her splendid creation, the child that had been birthed by her work, but the Major grabbed her hand to stop her.
She had been lied to by Ouelet: about her memories, her parents, the reason that she existed. The Major was so livid she could barely get the words out. “Nothing I have is real.” Before she could lie to her once more, the Major said flatly, “I found him.”
Ouelet knew the Major was talking about Kuze. Her face reflected her dismay. “I told you to be careful.”
“You knew where he was the whole time,” the Major accused. “You built him.”
Ouelet desperately wanted Mira to understand what had happened with Kuze. “He had a violent, unstable mind. The cerebral connections wouldn’t hold!”
The Major began walking to the door. Ouelet continued, pleading her case to Mira’s back. “I tried to save him!”
This might have been Ouelet’s cruelest lie yet. “No,” the Major said. “You left him to die.” She went out through the apartment door. Ouelet’s lip trembled as she lowered her head in despair, but the Major never turned back.
A pair of hycops, helicopter drones with airplanestyle wings, soared above New Port City, training red searchlights on the ground below as they conducted radar scans of every floor of every building.
In the streets below, Batou monitored the scans as he maneuvered his car through the traffic. “Nothing on Kuze yet, sir,” he reported to Aramaki over the mind-comm. “Checking upper zones next.” He was more concerned with the answer to his own question. “Is there any word on Major?”
Aramaki’s voice betrayed nothing. “She’s gone. Off-grid. Silent.”
So the Major had cut herself off from all communications and computer networks, and was thus untraceable. Unless you knew her as a person. As Batou did. “Copy that, sir. I know where to find her.”
At the bottom of New Port City Harbor, the water was dark and cold, a world separate from the one above. In the depths of the night-dark sea, there was only the faint shimmer of shifting tides, and scant light trickling in from far above. The Major hung in blue-black water, slowly descending as gravity pulled her down. As she went deeper, the sounds of the distant city began to fade, gradually to be replaced by a thick, all-encompassing silence. Her eyes opened as she sank.