Dad steps away from his terminal and comes toward me from the left. Meanwhile, General Hawke stops grappling with Mr. Harris and hands the guy over to his soldiers. Breathing hard, Hawke approaches me from the right. “Listen to your father, Adam. We can’t risk it. And besides, you’ve never transferred yourself before. You haven’t practiced it even once.”
Hawke’s moving fast, but not fast enough. “Better late than never,” I say. Then I hurtle toward Jenny’s Pioneer.
The biggest challenge is avoiding those flailing arms. I calculate the safest path, and when I’m close enough to Jenny’s torso, I extend my right arm to block any blows from that direction. With my left arm, I insert the other end of the fiber-optic cable into her data port. But as I do this, Jenny’s right arm bashes into my turret.
My frame shudders at the impact, and my acoustic sensor records a deafening clang. At the same time, my visual sensor goes dead. Jenny broke my camera.
I panic for a moment—I can’t see a thing! I’m blind! But an instant later I come up with another plan. I swiftly analyze the last images from my camera, observing the trajectories of Jenny’s arms, then extend my own arms to the predicted positions of hers. As our limbs collide, I open my hands and grasp Jenny’s arms at the wrist joints. Then I close my hands tight and lock them into place. Jenny keeps thrashing, but now her arms are immobilized. She can’t accidentally break the data cable.
My acoustic sensor picks up a jumble of voices. General Hawke shouts, “Break the link!” and Dad yells, “No, it’s too late!” I decide not to wait to see who wins the argument. With a silent prayer, I initiate the transfer.
It’s like being sucked down a drain. I feel like I’m falling, like someone just pulled the ground from under my footpads. I swirl downward into darkness, crushed on all sides, my mind compressed into a thin, furious stream. It’s horrible, nauseating, even worse than I expected.
The only good thing is that it doesn’t last long. In less than two seconds I’m back on my footpads, but they’re really Jenny’s footpads, not mine. I’m inside her Pioneer, and it feels like I’ve landed in the middle of a hurricane. Her circuits are roiling with waves of random data. They’re pummeling me from every direction.
It takes all my strength just to hold myself together. I can think only the simplest of thoughts: I’m here, I’m here, I’m Adam Armstrong, I’m here! I repeat this thought thousands of times, millions of times, holding it like a shield against the surges of data. It seems like a hopeless battle at first, but after several billion repetitions I start to make progress. My mind advances into the roiling circuits, deleting the random data and pushing toward where the noise is coming from. In a tenth of a second I reach the source, which is Jenny’s horrified mind.
My mind touches hers, and at the moment of contact a whole panorama of memories comes into view. I see thousands of images from Jenny’s childhood, pictures of her parents and her older brother and her family’s mansion in Virginia. But Jenny can’t see anything. She’s too paralyzed with fear to organize her memory files. She senses my presence, though, and her reaction just makes things worse. Her mind generates a fresh wave of terror, and her anguished cries go right through me: Stop…please…oh God…stop!
Jenny! I struggle with all my might to reach her. Jenny, it’s me! Adam Armstrong! I’m here to help you!
No…stop…let me out…LET ME OUT!
She can’t see or hear me. Her fear is too strong, and it’s eating away at her. The waves of noise are flooding her circuits and battering her memories. In less than a minute she’ll have nothing left.
Desperate, I plunge into her mind. Jenny, where are you? Say something! I’m surrounded by images from her past: her mom and dad entertaining guests at their mansion, her brother barging into her room to steal her toys, her snooty classmates teasing her at school. Then I see a sequence of more recent images: her room in the Cancer Center of George Washington Hospital, the Air Force Learjet that brought her to Colorado. But all these memories are inert, lifeless. Jenny isn’t here. Her cries are coming from somewhere else.
There’s no sound inside Jenny’s circuits, and yet I can follow her voice. I delve deeper into her files, frantically searching. Then I glimpse a memory from long ago, an image of a much younger Jenny looking at herself in the mirror.
She’s only two years old and dressed in pink pajamas. The mirror hangs from the inside of her closet door. While she studies her reflection, her older brother suddenly appears behind her and pushes her into the closet. Laughing, he closes the door, locks it from the outside, and runs away. And then I find the memory at the heart of Jenny’s terror, the memory of being trapped inside the pitch-black closet. No one in the huge house can hear her scream, “LET ME OUT!”
My first impulse is to delete the memory. To save Jenny, I need to silence the noise in her mind, and deleting this file would be the fastest way to do it. But this memory is part of her. It’s one of the threads of her soul. Without it, she wouldn’t be Jenny Harris anymore, at least not fully. After a millisecond of hesitation, I decide to transfer the file instead. I remove it from Jenny’s mind and incorporate it into my own. Then I go to the Pioneer’s control options and turn on her visual sensors. She needs to see that she’s not trapped in the dark.
Jenny, look! I take control of her turret and turn it. The camera pans across the laboratory, capturing video of General Hawke and his soldiers and Jenny’s father. We’re in the lab at Pioneer Base. You did it, Jenny. You’re still alive. Look, there’s your dad!
In the laboratory, only twelve seconds have passed since I transferred my mind to Jenny’s Pioneer. Mr. Harris is still struggling to free himself from the grip of the soldiers who are holding him. He’s shouting at them too, probably cursing them out, and I’m glad I didn’t turn on Jenny’s acoustic sensor. I give the turret another quarter-turn and the video shows my own Pioneer, now empty and immobile, standing next to Jenny’s.
And that’s me over there. Or at least it’s my robot. See the big dent in its turret? You smacked me in the face. Smashed my camera and everything. Your Pioneer has a heck of a right hook.
Jenny doesn’t respond, but I sense she’s digesting all this information. The random noise has died down and her mind has begun to organize its memories. Still, it would be nice to get a response, just to confirm that she’s on the mend. I turn the turret once more and spot Dad at his computer terminal.
And there’s my dad. You remember him, don’t you?
So sweet. Jenny’s voice is calm now, a low thrum in her circuits. You love him so much.
Uh, excuse me?
Don’t be embarrassed. It’s beautiful.
After a moment I realize what’s going on. Our minds have become so intertwined that Jenny can read my thoughts as easily as I can read hers. She can see how I feel about Dad, and everything else too.
Without delay I start separating my files from Jenny’s. Dad warned me that this process might be tricky, but it turns out to be easy as pie. Each one of my 452 million memories has a distinctive feel to it. Confusing one of my files with one of Jenny’s would be like mistaking Dad for Mr. Harris. It just wouldn’t happen. The only part of Jenny that I take with me is the memory of her two-year-old self trapped in the closet. I’ll give it back to her when she’s stronger, when she’s ready for it.