Good.
Ben and I sat there, on our own, waiting for Kiri and doing our best to ignore each other’s presence. He buried himself in his ViM screen while I pretended to focus on mine, trying not to leap across the table, wrap my hands around his throat, and force him to tell me what he knew.
But I had to do something.
I started pacing, which seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to do when you were nervous and frustrated and killing time. But I realized, as soon as I started wearing a track in the rug—seventeen steps to the end of the room, turning on my heel, then back again—that there was a reason people were always talking about pacing but never actually did it. It was boring. And more than a little odd-looking.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked, finally looking up from his screen.
“Nothing.” I returned to my seat, taking the long way around so I could catch a glimpse of what he was staring at so intently, just in case it was something I wasn’t supposed to see. Which it was, but not in the way I’d expected. “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?” I teased.
The girl in the pic couldn’t have been more than seventeen. She was pretty, if not in a particularly flashy way. Except for the brown hair, she looked a lot like Zo, though it may have just been her scowl.
“I wouldn’t have thought that was really your style,” I added. Ben’s tastes ran to conspicuously expensive suits that were always fashion-forward, if in the blandest of ways, and I’d never seen him less than impeccably attired. The girl on the screen was wearing some kind of faded flash dress two sizes too small, and not in the “oops, my button popped!” kind of way.
Ben slammed the ViM on the table, screen down, and glared at me. “She’s my daughter,” he said quietly.
“Oh.”
That made significantly more sense.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“That’s right. You didn’t.”
He didn’t lift the screen, nor did he look at me. Not for several long minutes, until Kiri walked in and the meeting began. Then he was all business again, same old Ben, smooth and insincere. Except that he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wondered if the subject of fathers and daughters cut a little too close to home when it came to me—if that meant he knew what BioMax had made my father do.
Or if it was something else. More secrets.
“We have a proposition for you,” Ben said, toward the end of the meeting. “And I think once you consider it, you’ll see the wisdom in—”
“You’re going to hate it,” Kiri cut in. No-bullshit Kiri, that’s how I thought of her, and now I couldn’t look at her without thinking, Did you know? Who was in the room, when they decided? Who was left that I could trust? Another reason I needed those files—but these offices were just for show; there was no access to anything. Even if I managed to get hold of Kiri’s or Ben’s ViM and get in remotely, Jude and I were reasonably sure they wouldn’t show us much. BioMax, like most corps, kept their dirty little secrets on secure, firewalled servers—likely nothing that could stand up against the full weight of a network invasion, but nothing we’d be able to topple remotely on our own. We had to get in at the source.
“Try me.” I offered up a perfect smile. Nothing to hide. What you see is what you get.
“As you know, the Brotherhood of Man has been making overtures in our direction,” Ben said. “They claim they’d like to publicly bury the hatchet.”
“In our backs?”
Ben cleared his throat. “They have a powerful voice and numerous followers—”
“Hate sells.”
“—and if we can tap into that, it could be very helpful to our cause.”
“Where is this going?” I asked. Circumlocution was call-me-Ben’s specialty; he could talk for hours without saying a thing.
As usual it was Kiri who cut through the crap. “We’re staging an event,” she said. “A public peacemaking. The Brotherhood will announce their willingness to help incorporate the mechs into society, and BioMax will graciously accept their offer.”
Kiri was one of the only BioMax people who actually used the word “mech.” It was one of the things I liked best about her. The rest of them all said “download recipient” or “client” or, if they didn’t realize I was listening, “skinner.” But Kiri used the name we’d given ourselves. She was smart—too smart to buy into the Brotherhood’s line. Maybe Auden was sincere. But that was irrelevant, now that the Honored Rai Savona was back in the picture. “You do realize they’ve got an agenda?” I said.
“Quite honestly, their agenda doesn’t matter to us,” Ben said. “Right now they’re doing exactly what we need them to be doing. If they take an ill-considered path in the future, we’ll take whatever measures we see as necessary.”
Translation: Squash them like a bug.
“So what do you want from me?” I was sickened enough being in these offices, facing them, pretending nothing had changed. Throw Savona into the mix—and Auden, who I tried not to think about, couldn’t think about—and almost bearable turned into not. “Since it’s obviously not my opinion.”
Is it ever?
Jude’s voice, Jude’s disgust. They want you to dance for them, I could imagine him sneering, not talk. Certainly not think.
“The Brotherhood is extending an olive branch, Lia,” Ben said. I hated when he said my name in his oily voice, like he was granting me a gift by acknowledging my identity. I know what’s inside your head, his expression always seemed to say. I’ve seen your flesh peeled away, your brain exposed. I know what you really are. “We don’t want to turn our backs on that.”
“Fine. I still don’t see—”
“We want you to represent BioMax,” Kiri said. “Stand up at a podium with Savona and Auden, make a little speech, shake their hands, sit down again. Simple as that.”
“Simple?” I laughed. “You’re a bad liar, Kiri.”
“You don’t have to marry them,” Ben snapped. “You’ll speak, you’ll shake hands, and then we’ll start the music and serve the food and you can go skulk in a corner or visit your friends upstairs or whatever antisocial course suits your fancy.”
“What friends upstairs?”
“On the thirteenth floor,” Kiri said. “The event’s down at our research facility—there’s a nice banquet space there, and we think it’ll send a good message, get the word out about the limitless technological horizon, all that. We’ll be packaging a whole vid segment on the rehabilitating mechs, give the public more insight into the process. Better our turf than theirs, right?”