“Just to be clear: You’re refusing to explain your activities of the last three days?” she asked. “You’re aware how that looks?”
“Like I care. What I do is my business, not yours.”
“Maybe.” She sighed, tugging at the cheap material of her corp-provided suit, the wrong cut and a size too small. I could have told her that shoving herself into the beige sausage casing wasn’t working and that she should go back to pinching her pennies to save up for her next lipo—lift-tucks and the like were rarer in corp-towns, more of an occasional splurge than a fact of daily life, but no amount was too much to pay to stave off age and fat. Too bad for her, I wasn’t really in the fashion-favor-granting mood. And for all I knew, pleasantly plump was the latest trend in her corp-town, the better to make clear you weren’t an underfed city rat. Besides, at least she still got to eat. Let her deal with the consequences.
“But here’s your problem,” she continued. “It’s my job to decide what’s my business. And right now, I say it’s you.”
“I want a lawyer,” I said.
“Tough.”
“I have rights,” I reminded her.
“Oh, really?” She smirked. “What are they?”
I hesitated. The ins and outs of the criminal justice system weren’t exactly a hot topic of study at the Helmsley School. “I know you can’t just lock me up here when I haven’t done anything wrong. If you won’t let me voice a lawyer, at least let me tell someone I’m here.”
“And who would that be?” she asked.
“None of your business,” I said. Thinking: No one. I hadn’t talked to my parents in months. So who did I know that could fix this kind of problem. Jude?
Riley, I thought. But that was idiotic. How was he supposed to help? Even if it turned out he wasn’t the reason I was here?
“Since you seem a little murky on the facts, let me explain them to you,” Detective Ayer said. “One: There has been a major attack on a civilian population. Two: There are indications that this may be part of an ongoing threat. Three: I’m empowered to do anything within my means to ensure another such attack doesn’t take place. Four: You’re a skinner. Not a person. Just a person-shaped box with a computer inside. Boxes don’t get lawyers.”
“The government considers me a person,” I said. “Look it up.”
“Five,” she continued, like I hadn’t said anything. We both knew that the government had outsourced all security matters to the corps. Everyone had agreed it was safer that way: The government couldn’t be trusted with unlimited power, they’d made that obvious time and time again. But the corps were, in principle, regulated by the exigencies of the market. They thrived when the customer thrived, and mutual self-interest was the ultimate satisfaction guarantee. So now corporate boards made the rules, and the corporate secops carried them out. No questions asked. “No one knows you’re here. And until you cooperate with me, no one will.”
I crossed my arms. “Is this where I’m supposed to cry?”
I am a machine, I told myself. You can’t threaten a machine.
“You can do whatever you’d like,” the detective said. “As long as you tell me the truth. Let’s start with Friday morning. Why don’t you tell me everything you did from the moment you woke up.”
“And if I say no?” I asked. “What then?” Even if I could formulate a convincing enough lie about the last several days, how would I remember all of the details on the inevitable second or third time she walked me through it? Why hadn’t I spent the last couple days planning what I would do when I got caught? What had I expected, Riley and I would just go on the run forever, playing house in some urine-stained room on the thirtieth floor of west tower, scavenging for spare power and poking around the network once a year to see whether it was safe to come home?
“You don’t want to test me, Lia.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s say I do.” Nothing like a good offense, right? Especially when your defense is nonexistent. “What next, you torture me or something? Violate the HRC?” Even at Helmsley, they’d made sure to teach us about the Human Rights Covenant, supposedly some kind of guarantee that the government would never go psycho again, rounding up people by the hundreds and abandoning them to darkness and pain until they vomited out details of nefarious plots they may—or in most cases, may not—have known anything about. All that trouble, and they hadn’t managed to prevent Chicago or St. Louis or the Disneypocalypse. It turned out that bio-sensors and facial recognition screeners were more efficient than torture.
The government had signed the HRC back when they still ran security, but the secops were all bound by it.
“There you go again, talking about your rights,” the detective said. “Human Rights Covenant. What makes you imagine you qualify?”
I could tell her the truth, I thought. Not because she scared me, with her sausage suit and empty threats. But because I was tired, and if I could make her believe me, this could all be over.
She would never believe me. That I’d been in the corp-town while, in a stunning coincidence, another mech, one who just happened to have my face, enacted an insane plan I knew nothing about? Odds like that hovered somewhere around absolute zero.
“Do whatever you want,” I said. “I’m a machine, right? Machines don’t hurt.”
“I’m told that’s not quite true,” she said, smiling. Like she was enjoying herself. “But I’m afraid you misunderstand. I’m not threatening you. And certainly—given you have no need to eat or sleep—I’m not going to waste my time by waiting you out.”
“So we’re done here?” Like I had any real hope of that.
“I’m starting to think you’re misunderstanding me on purpose,” Detective Ayer said. A new image popped up on the screen. My sister, Zo. “You don’t care about what happens to you, that’s obvious,” she said. “And frankly, I can’t blame you.” She swept her eyes up and down my body, then shuddered. “Probably just waiting for someone to put you out of your misery.” Another image popped up next to Zo. My mother. “But what if you weren’t the only person at stake?” My father. One big, happy, Lia-less Kahn family. “What if your actions actually had consequences?”
I forced myself to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”
“People are dead,” she snapped. “Living, breathing, organic humans are dead. Thanks to you and your friends. Is that a joke to you? Because it’s not to me.” Leaving the screen lit, she retreated to the door. “Your coconspirators are still out there. Which means people could die. And I’m willing to do pretty much anything to stop that. So why don’t you sit here for a while and think about whether you really have nothing left to lose.”
She closed the door behind her. I heard the lock catch. Now they’ll watch me, I thought. Hoping they’ll catch me—but that was where my imagination failed. Catch me what? Monologuing about all my evil plans? Smearing my finger across the layer of dust on the table, letter by letter spelling out my confession? Or did they just hope to catch the exact moment I broke, staring at the faces of my family, imagining what might happen to them if I didn’t give Ayer what she wanted? Strange, the way orgs clung so desperately to this idea that we weren’t human, then ditched it as soon as it was no longer convenient. If I was just a machine, then why would I care what they did to a family that, by their standards, wasn’t mine? And if I did care, didn’t that mean I was human after all?
Apparently not.