“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, if you thought more highly of me, then you might fear I’d figure out your little secret… Vergon.”
To his credit, he didn’t even blink. But then, that only confirmed my suspicion. We stared at each other in the crowded room, the murmur of customers all around us. The rain crackled on the roof. I’d deliberately spoken softly enough that the customers perusing the gravboards over in the corner wouldn’t hear me.
I stepped forward so we were even closer, dropping my voice to a whisper. “Don’t insult me by denying it,” I said.
He said nothing for a long time, then nodded. “How did you know?”
“A couple things,” I said. “Your name, first of all. Asif Phoenix? As in, the phoenix that rises from its own ashes? It was a little too cute.”
“Right.”
“And then there was how you didn’t even break a sweat scaling the mountain.”
“Of course. I should have been more careful and installed sweat glands.”
“It was pretty clever,” I said. “I never would have put it together except how things went down with Granger Holdings and Vergon Enterprises. When I realized it was exactly the way you would have wanted things to go down, I understood why Granger Holdings bought out Mind-Body Technologies, and I also knew what the problem Bwer-Fwer mentioned was. It wasn’t a problem at all. It was just that you couldn’t quite cover all your tracks. You created a second android, didn’t you? You created two Vergons.”
“No,” he said. “There was only one Vergon Daughn and he died. It had to be that way for my plan to work. I am Asif Phoenix. That is my identity.”
“But you have Vergon’s memories?”
“Yes. For all intents and purposes, I am Vergon. I only changed my identity in the physical sense. Inside, I am still the same person.”
“A person who happens to covertly control an ownership stake in Granger Holdings?”
“Yes.”
I nodded, amazed at the brilliance and audacity of his plan. Once he’d realized that Ginger would kill him to get what she wanted, he knew that the only way to stop her was to actually die and then have another company take over and force her out. She would have gotten at least half of his net worth in a divorce, which would have probably destroyed Vergon Enterprises in the process.
“Why not bump her off yourself?” I asked. “That would have been a lot easier.”
“Easier, yes,” he said. “But I’m not that kind of android, and despite what Ginger is, I am still concerned for her welfare. It’s why I left her with some money. I could have easily left her broke and heavily in debt. I didn’t want to hurt her. I just wanted to prevent her from hurting others.”
“Sounds like love to me.”
“Call it what you will.”
He reached behind the counter and brought up a handheld, punching a few buttons on the tiny black keyboard. “So how much do you want?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I assume you want me to pay you for your silence.”
“Oh no, I didn’t come for that. I just came to satisfy my curiosity. And to say well done. Your secret is safe with me.”
He nodded. “Thank you. I will always be in your debt.”
“Only one thing I don’t understand.”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you stay human? You could have transferred your essence into another human rather than an android. Did you decide that you liked being an android better than being a human?”
“No, that wasn’t it. In fact, despite what I said to the media, I quite liked being a human. And I see nothing wrong with an android who decides to become one. Or vice versa.”
“Then why?”
He looked thoughtful, and I wondered how much of it was in the look and how much was in the thought. After all, that android brain of his was a million times faster than mine, and any answer he’d thought of would have taken a nanosecond. The rest was just for show. Or was it? Maybe there were some things you could wrestle with for one second or for a million and it wouldn’t make a difference.
“I’m not sure I could adequately explain my decision,” he said.
“Try me.”
“Well, perhaps it would be best if I just summed it up with a simple colloquial expression… Ignorance is bliss.”
One of the customers looking at the gravboards wandered over, asking for help, so he didn’t get a chance to explain. That was okay. He didn’t need to. Androids, after all, couldn’t feel anything. They couldn’t feel the enormous pain of being hurt by someone they loved. In that sense, I envied him. He could say that he’d loved Ginger once but the memory of it no longer stung.
And if I wasn’t so squeamish about trying to separate the essence of me from my human body, I might have asked him if he could make me an android too.