“I would have stopped you,” Riley admitted.
“Lucky that it didn’t come to that,” Jude said, watching me. “That would be awkward, wouldn’t it. If you’d set the secops on me. You’d probably be standing here wondering exactly how much I hated you. Whether I’d spent the last six months plotting my revenge, or some such melodramatic scenario.”
Riley gripped Jude’s arm. “You know I always have your back. Like you’ve got mine.”
“Always,” Jude said, and disengaged himself, gently but firmly. “Must be strange, not remembering.”
“Yeah.”
It was something else I’d never asked him. I’d waited for him to bring it up in his own time; he hadn’t.
“Feels like another person, you know?” Riley lifted a hand in front of his face, turned it slowly like he was searching for cracks in the synthetic flesh. “Guess it kind of was.”
“Nice model.” Jude gave Riley another slow once-over. “Expensive.”
“Worth it,” I said, curling an arm around Riley’s waist. He didn’t shrug me off, but he looked like he wanted to.
“Too expensive,” Riley said.
We never talked about the fact that his new body had been bought with my father’s money. Not since he’d first found out, and freaked. It doesn’t mean he owns you, I’d told him.
But now he owns you, doesn’t he? Riley had said. Was that worth it?
After that, we put it on the ever-expanding list of Subjects Not to Be Discussed.
“So the last thing you remember… ,” Jude prompted.
“That night before we went to the temple,” Riley said. “We went over the plan one last time, then I uploaded, and then—it’s blank. But Lia filled me in on everything else.”
Jude’s smile had turned predatory. “I bet she did.”
“Something you want to say, Jude?” It popped out, though I knew better. That happened around him.
“Nothing I haven’t already said. Welcome.” He rubbed his hands together, disposing of the unseemly business. “Let me show you around.”
He guided us through the dark wonderland of gutted buildings and shattered glass; it made Riley’s city look like a paradise. Leave it to Jude to seek refuge in the midst of death and decay, a broken landscape that proved, with every step, exactly how much damage the orgs were willing to do to each other. So many orgs these days liked to claim that organic life was sacred in the eyes of God. But it didn’t seem to stop them from killing whomever they liked, whenever they got the urge.
They’re no different from you, I reminded myself. Same mind, same memories. You used to be an org. Whatever they’re capable of, you’re capable of.
But nothing in me was capable of this.
“I’ve only been here for a few weeks, long enough to get the lay of the land and establish that it’ll serve our purposes.” Jude paused, then added, in a high, squeaky voice, “So where were you before that, Jude?”
“That supposed to be me?” I asked sourly.
“Glad to see you aren’t any less of an egomaniac than the last time I saw you.”
“Jude—,” Riley warned him.
“Kidding,” Jude said. He led us up a wide boulevard lined by rubble. There were no weeds poking from beneath the stones, no trees, no bushes, no green of any kind. “But since you asked: I spent most of the time in Chindia, honored guest of the Aikida Corp.”
Once a small Japanese pharmaceutical corp, Aikida was now the largest bio-and gen-tech corp in the world, with global headquarters in Chindia and a major presence in every developed country except the United States. BioMax, their primary rival, had made sure it would stay that way. That had been one of the primary conditions when the corps bailed out the government and turned it into their own quaint department of civil engineering—preservation of our inviolable corporate boundaries. Since the Bailout no foreign corporation had done business on American soil unless approved by the corp consortium. “What would they want with you? Unless you got a PhD in gen-tech while I wasn’t looking.”
“I’ve got something more valuable than a PhD,” Jude said. When we looked blank, he rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “In here, geniuses. It’s worth millions—and trust me, there’s not a gen-tech corp in the world that wouldn’t pay.”
“So they’re trying to reverse-engineer the download process and you’re their guinea pig?” I asked, surprised Jude would let anyone experiment on him again, no matter the price. “And you’re still in one piece?”
“Funny, you sound disappointed.”
“Honesty über alles, right?” His stated policy, not mine.
“They didn’t touch me,” he said. “They’ve already tried that on other mechs. Stripping them bare—no luck. They wanted something else from me. So we’re going to get it for them.”
I glanced at Riley, who looked wary. Thankfully. At least I wouldn’t have to try to talk him out of whatever insane plan was coming next.
“They need the master code for the brain-scanning program, and the full specs for the neural matrix,” Jude said. “We get it from BioMax, sell it to Aikida, and live happily ever after.”
“What’s with ‘we’?” I asked. “You’ve got your own BioMax connection, as I recall. Get him to give you what you need and leave us out of it.”
“After the incident at the temple, my connections have dried up,” Jude said. “I think I’ve managed to convince them that I’m harmless enough to drop their ridiculous vendetta against me, but I can’t get inside. You can.”
“But why would I? So you can get rich? What do you need money for when you have all this?” I gestured to the rubble.
“I have what I need,” Jude said. “This is bigger.”
“This is pathetic. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but BioMax isn’t out to get us—even you.”
“Now who’s willing to do anything for money?”
“They don’t pay me,” I told him. “I work with them because I want to help.”
“Right, the party line: mechs and orgs together, one big happy dysfunctional family.”
“At least I’m doing something, instead of just whining about how everyone’s out to get me.”
“And exactly what are you doing?” Jude snapped. “Letting them parade you around on the network like a trained monkey? You think playing at being some brainless slut on a vidlife is going to convince anyone of anything?”
“Jude!” Riley’s voice held an implied threat—one I was sure he dreaded carrying out.
“You’re not exactly the target demographic,” I said, evenly as I could.
Jude just laughed.
“Give her a break,” Riley said. “She’s doing what she thinks she has to.”
I didn’t need him to defend me. But I couldn’t help noticing it wasn’t much of a defense.
“Right,” Jude said. “Working with BioMax.” He laughed again.
“You think I’m working for them?” I said.
“I think working for someone implies payment. And the freedom to stop working whenever you want. It implies choice. You have none of that. What you have… call it indentured servitude. Call it slavery. Call it whatever you want, but the fact is, they own you. They gave you that body, and they can take it away.”
“I’m not going to argue.”
That caught him off guard. “That’s a first.”
“They own all of us,” I said. We were at their mercy; we depended on them to honor their contracts, and our existence. “That’s why we have to work with them. Because they’re all we’ve got.”