Time’s up.
The explosions were like gunshots, close range, and in their wake the world fell quiet, and the building shook.
The building shook, and a chunk of the wall blew out, slamming into Riley, knocking him down in a cloud of plaster and twisted steel.
“Riley!” I shrieked.
There was no answering call.
Flames licked the walls, smoke turned the air heavy and opaque, and Auden buried his face in his shirt as we lurched toward the door, gasping for breath. This time I couldn’t breathe for him. I could only get him out.
The walls were crumbling.
Riley’s head and torso jutted out from the pile of debris, and he was shouting something I couldn’t understand, arms waving in an unmistakable gesture. Go. Go, get out.
Get Auden out.
And that was what I thought, as I turned my back on Riley, as I held Auden up, grabbing on as he slipped away from me, as his head nodded drowsily, eyes clouding and lungs filling with smoke. Not him, not again, I thought, as I stumbled through the smoky black in the direction I imagined the door to be, sound returning to the world in the form of smaller, secondary explosions, ceilings collapsing, equipment imploding, as we pushed through an opening in the wall, into the cool fresh air of night, and left Riley behind.
No one dies tonight, I thought as the BioMax troops dragged us away from the flames, dragged me away, as I kicked and screamed and lunged toward the flickering storm of fire, and they held me back, because they were stronger. They were in control. And Auden sucked in oxygen as I watched, now silent and still, no breath and no heartbeat, helpless and useless, as a geyser of fire spurted through the roof, and the laboratory—and the machinery and the research and Riley—disintegrated in a crash of thunder and a plume of blue-orange flame.
20. FLOATING HOME
When life isn’t life, death isn’t death.
No one died that night.
That’s what I told myself.
Bodies break. Brains burn. But memories can be stored, and memories are life. An exact copy is the same as an original in every meaningful way. Mechs are minds. Minds are patterns, data. And data is transferable. So when they transferred Riley’s backed-up memories into the new body, it was a logical, inescapable truth: This is Riley. A Riley who had never burned, a Riley who had never set foot onto the Temple grounds, never betrayed his best friend, never disappeared in a storm of fire. Never shuddered at something Jude whispered in his ear or looked at me like I might be the enemy. A Riley who had backed up his neural network one last time, one last night, then ceased to exist.
He was the same, and he was alive, as if none of it had ever happened—and for him, it hadn’t. A fresh start. A new beginning, same as the old one.
That’s what I told myself.
Jude escaped in the chaos. No one knew where he’d gone. Including me, though BioMax seemed not to believe it.
Sloane, Ani, Ty, and Brahm remained at BioMax, under observation. The corp had determined the damage couldn’t be reversed, but refused to terminate their bodies and start afresh until they knew exactly what the Brotherhood had done—and exactly how far they had gotten in their research. Ani and the others were in no discernable pain, were likely unaware of their condition, trapped in a dreamless sleep rather than a waking nightmare. Likely. Less likely, but still possible, they were awake inside their madness. It was a chance BioMax had elected to take, without objection from the mechs’ families, without doubt. Call-me-Ben told me that.
Studying their condition, prolonging their dead-end lives, was for our own good.
Ben told me that too.
And when they woke up in new bodies, they wouldn’t remember any of it—they wouldn’t be the same mechs who’d gone into the Temple and hung from those posts, so what did it matter what happened to them in the meantime? If the memories would eventually be ground into dust along with the bodies, then maybe it was as if it hadn’t happened at all.
For mechs, even the earliest involuntary volunteers, a new body to replace the old was part of the deal. It was the BioMax guarantee, and so far, the corp had always honored it.
But they didn’t have to. It was one of the things I hadn’t thought of before, had just accepted, because my new body, and the one after that and the one after that, was already bought and paid for, and because my father sat on the BioMax board. But I thought of it after the explosion, with Riley’s body gone and his mind sitting in storage—I let myself think about what would happen if BioMax reneged, because it was easier than thinking about where Riley was now, whether his mind was somehow alive in the storage server in the same way it would be in a body, or if he was just gone, erased from the world, until they brought him back.
We have no control, Jude had said, naming, as was his compulsion, a truth it would have been easier to ignore. Alive only as long as they let us live. Just another funny little perk of mech life: Machines were objects, and objects had owners.
Which meant Jude had been right. BioMax wasn’t the enemy, yet. But it would be, eventually, inevitably.
And eventually, inevitably, we would find a way to reclaim ourselves.
In the meantime, the corp delivered our bodies. Riley was slated to get another generic model, a duplicate of the one he’d lost.
I had a better idea.
“This is important to you,” my father said.
I nodded.
We met in his office, at my request, to make it clear this wasn’t a homecoming, the prodigal daughter returns. This was a transaction. Or it would be, if he granted my request.
“I assume it’s important, or you wouldn’t have come to me,” my father said.
I nodded again. Because if I had lied, acted repentant, he would have known.
“It won’t be cheap,” he said. “This is a lot of credit you’re talking about here.”
I knew that. More credit than Quinn had been willing to spare—though these days, Quinn wasn’t much in the mood for handouts. Not for me, at least. As far as she was concerned, Jude and Ani had both abandoned her, leaving me behind as an unwanted consolation prize. She hadn’t thrown me off the estate, not yet, but she was doing a pretty effective job of freezing me out.
“And what do I get in return?” my father asked.
“Whatever you want,” I said. “I will pay you back someday.” Somehow.
He didn’t even pause. It was like he’d been waiting for me, like he knew I’d eventually need something big, so big that I’d be willing to do anything in return, and he was ready. “I want you to come home. To stay.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t pause either.
I wasn’t there when Riley woke up in his new body. And I didn’t visit him in rehab as he learned how to use it.
I left him a message on his zone, explaining what had happened, how he had ended up on the thirteenth floor of BioMax, waking up all over again. Except I didn’t explain all of it, or really any of it. I told him we had gone through with our plans, that we had rescued our friends, that no one had died. That the lab was destroyed and he’d been caught in the explosion.
That I would tell him more when I saw him. And I would see him, I would come to visit, if he wanted me to.
I promised him that, although I couldn’t imagine going back to the thirteenth floor—much as I couldn’t face the thought of sitting by a bed, next to another broken body, another person that I’d left behind. But I would have come, if he’d asked.