His voice grows louder again, full of enthusiasm. “Once the Pioneers have mastered these tasks, our hope is that they’ll be able to establish a connection with Sigma. If all goes well, they’ll start communicating with the AI before it launches any of the Russian missiles. And then the toughest challenge will begin. At the same time that the humans are learning how to be machines, they’ll have to teach Sigma how to be human.”
Everyone in the auditorium gawks at the robot. Although it has no mind of its own yet, it’s easy to imagine a human intelligence trapped inside it. I can’t understand why Dad is so excited about the idea. The huge machine seems horrible to me.
Meanwhile, General Hawke comes back onstage and approaches the robot. There’s an odd resemblance between the general and the machine. They’re both sturdy, hulking creatures, built for combat. Hawke slaps the robot’s armored torso, then turns to the audience. “And if communicating with Sigma doesn’t work, we have a backup plan. Our Pioneers will also learn how to fight the AI.”
I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. While everyone else stares at the robot, I lower my head and look down at my ruined body. Something doesn’t make sense. There’s a paradox here, something that violates the rules of logic. It troubles me so much that I try to raise my right hand to get Dad’s attention. Lifting my hand above the height of my shoulder is agony for me, and the wasted muscles in my upper arm tremble from the effort.
Luckily, after a couple of seconds Dad notices my struggle. His head whips around and he looks at me with concern. “What is it, Adam?”
My hand is shaking, but I manage to point it at the machine. “The intelligence in the robot? Would it be a perfect copy of the person’s intelligence? No difference at all?”
Dad nods. “That’s right.”
“But if my intelligence is in the robot and also in my brain, which one would be the real me? Would I be in two places at once?”
He takes a deep breath before answering. “Good question. If we copied all your memories into the circuitry, the machine would think of itself as Adam Armstrong, wouldn’t it? And it would have just as much right to that identity as you have.” He shakes his head. “But in the real world, fortunately or not, we don’t face this problem. We won’t have two identical intelligences existing at the same time.”
“But you just said the intelligence in the robot would be a perfect copy.”
Dad frowns. All his enthusiasm has vanished. His face is slack and pale now. “I’m sorry, Adam. I should’ve mentioned this earlier. The X-ray pulses from the brain scanner are more energetic than typical X-rays. They’ll destroy the brain tissue. We can’t copy your mind without killing your body.”
The auditorium goes silent. Then everyone in the room starts shouting.
I sort of blank out for the next half minute. I’m vaguely aware that lots of things are going on—the rich girl’s father is yelling at Hawke, the deformed boy’s mother is cursing like a sailor—but the commotion seems distant and unreal. All my attention is focused on my right hand, which now rests on my thigh. I grasp the meager flesh there, the stiff band of dead muscle, and squeeze it as hard as I can. Though it’s broken and dying, this is my body. How could I exist without it?
I remain in this trance until General Hawke takes the microphone and booms, “Quiet! Please!” He’s not used to dealing with civilians, and the strain shows on his face. “No one’s forcing you into this. You have a choice.”
“This isn’t a medical treatment!” The rich girl’s dad jumps out of his seat. “This is murder!”
“I’m very sorry we can’t do more for your children. All we can give you is the chance to preserve a part of them before they die. Maybe the most important part. And in the process, they’d be doing their country a great service.”
“It’s sick! You want to harvest their minds!”
Hawke doesn’t argue with him. “Because we realize what a difficult decision this is, we’re going to let you go home to think it over. It’s a security risk, but as long as all of you keep your mouths shut, we won’t have a problem. We can’t give you a lot of time, though. The threat posed by Sigma is growing every day.” He narrows his eyes. His face is like stone. “You’ll have to decide within the next forty-eight hours.”
CHAPTER 7
I wake up to a Kanye West song blaring from my Star Wars clock radio. I’m a big fan of Kanye. I love the fact that his songs annoy my parents. And it’s funny to hear his X-rated raps coming from a radio shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet.
I’m back home in my bedroom. Although the clock radio says it’s 1:00 p.m., it still feels like morning to me. The return flight in the Air Force Learjet took longer than expected, and we didn’t land in New York until way past midnight. After we got home at 3:00 a.m., I slept for ten hours straight, but I’m still not ready to wake up. So instead of calling for Dad and starting my day and thinking about the big decision I need to make, I just lie in bed and look around my room, thinking random thoughts. I loved doing this when I was a kid, especially on weekend mornings when there was no school to worry about. And I can still do it now. It’s one of the few things that my illness hasn’t taken from me.
I hate to admit this, but my bedroom doesn’t look like it belongs to a seventeen-year-old. With my Darth Vader radio and my bookshelf full of comics—Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America—it looks more like the room of a geeky preteen. There’s a Rubik’s cube on my desk and a Star Wars chess set. There’s also my Pinpressions toy, which is like a sandwich made from two squares of transparent plastic, one of them studded with hundreds of sliding pins. If you press your face against the back of the thing, it pushes the pins out the front, making a funny-looking mold of your features.
Next to this toy is my digital camcorder, which I used to bring to school every day so I could take videos of Ryan and Brittany and everyone else who crossed my wheelchair’s path. And next to the camcorder is my prize possession, an official NFL football from Super Bowl XLVI, which in my opinion was the greatest football game ever played.
Because the New York Giants were in the Super Bowl that year, my parents let me throw a party in our living room. I was eleven at the time and my doctor had just told me I’d have to start using a wheelchair soon, so the party was a kind of consolation prize, something to make me feel better. I invited every kid I’d ever played touch football with, sixteen of them in all. Ryan was there, of course, and so was Brittany, who was a pretty decent kicker and receiver in those days.
We ordered half a dozen pizzas and swilled enormous quantities of Pepsi and screamed at the television set for three-and-a-half hours. A few of the kids cheered for the New England Patriots, but most of us were New York fans, and we went nuts when the Giants scored the winning touchdown with fifty-seven seconds to go. Ryan lifted me off the couch and carried me piggyback across the room, running in joyful circles around the coffee table while I clung to his shoulders.