“You will.”
7. JUMP
Jude didn’t believe it, not at first. We had to show him the files we’d hacked and the vids we’d taken, and even then, I could tell, he wanted to think we’d somehow gotten ourselves turned around, stumbled into an alternate realm with no bearing on the real world. It was the first time I’d ever seen him underestimate the boundaries of org depravity.
On its surface this was less brutal than the antiskinner attacks and lynchings, less bloody than the corp’s initial foray into the download technology, its path littered with the corpses of unwilling “volunteers.” But I thought I understood Jude’s uncertainty and—though he never would have admitted it—his panic. Because this was coordinated and systemic. For all we knew, it was the reason BioMax had pursued the download technology to begin with. Certainly, supplying the military industrial complex paid better than a semihumanitarian mission to heal the broken children of the wealthy. Not to mention the domestic-sector applications, which we’d all seen. Which we’d all—the self-revulsion at this thought was overwhelming—used without a second thought.
“How could I be this stupid?” Jude said, as we huddled in his car and told him everything.
“How were you supposed to know?” I asked. “I worked there, and I didn’t.”
“Exactly. Stupid.”
I wasn’t going to fight with him, even if it would have been easier. “You’re right. We were stupid. Now what?”
“You’re asking him?” Zo said.
“I should be asking you?”
“Since when do you ask anyone?”
I wouldn’t have thought I had to remind her that things changed.
“Bossy big sister doesn’t exactly translate into fearless leader,” Jude said.
“Asshole. I got us this far, didn’t I?”
“With my plan,” he pointed out.
“My execution.”
“Congratulations,” Zo said. “You’re both equally useless.”
“This doesn’t have to change anything,” I said. “We can still sell the info to Aikida.”
Jude frowned. “And let them do the same thing?”
“So we go public,” I suggested. “This has to be illegal.”
“Not if they don’t want it to be,” Jude said.
“So what’s your brilliant idea?”
He didn’t answer. That was the worst part. Jude, the one person who shouldn’t have been surprised, had somehow failed to question the fundamental truth of our existence. That we were the only copies. That each of us existed as a unique unit, a single person, our identities protected and sacrosanct. It was the lie that allowed us to be human, wasn’t it? Because how could I be Lia Kahn if there was a second Lia Kahn wandering the earth, a third, a fourth, a hundredth—how could I be Lia Kahn if there was a battlefield of Lia Kahns, tanks and planes and, for all I knew, vacuum cleaners, all of them somehow, not quite, but mostly me? If BioMax could lie about this, they could lie about anything. They could put a copy of my brain into another body, awaken as many Lia Kahns as they liked.
Stripped-down personalities were still personalities; lobotomized brains could still think. Artificial intelligence dictated intelligence. So what made us people and them machines?
Nothing, I thought. To BioMax, we’re all just things.
There’s no sin in lying to a thing.
“So we’re screwed,” Zo said.
“We’re screwed,” I said. “You’re…”
“Not involved. Right. Somehow I forgot.”
I couldn’t stop saying the wrong thing. “Let’s just go home,” I said. Then, because someone had to, even if it was a lie: “We’ll figure something out.”
The real problem: This wasn’t a flaw in the system. This was the system itself. This was the corp that owned us, body and mind. This wasn’t something we could fight. But we were going to have to.
I dumped Zo and Jude at Riley’s place. Zo lunged for the shower, as if eager to wash off the day. I understood the impulse. Jude was more than happy to ensconce himself on Riley’s turf to keep an eye on Sari—the two of them circled each other warily like rival alley cats, and I half expected one to start peeing to mark the territory. True to form, Riley didn’t ask questions.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I told him.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t care. Please.”
He gave in.
Only one problem: I didn’t know where I wanted to go. So we drove aimlessly, watching the muddy browns and grays stream by the window, the river of concrete and mud and smog. The water, that’s what I thought of first, the dead city beneath the sea. Our place, with its silent buildings and frozen cars, our city of algae and coral and darkness. It was the first place Riley had taken me, the first place he’d kissed me, back when we’d fit with jigsaw perfection. But we’d gone back too often these last few months, neither of us admitting what we were trying to do. It was a way of going backward. Beyond that fence nothing existed except us. We didn’t talk there, not like we used to. We ducked beneath the water and held hands and let the current carry us wherever it wanted to go. We hid.
It was too quiet there; it was too easy. Too still. After everything that had happened, I needed something else—not just the relief of Riley’s arms around me, but the relief of adrenaline and fear and forgetting. And then the answer was obvious.
It wasn’t our place; it wasn’t my place. It had belonged to Jude, once; it had belonged to all of us. I hadn’t been back there in nearly a year, because I had been too afraid. It was the place to start over again, because it was the place where things had gone wrong.
I keyed in the coordinates. Recognizing them, Riley tugged me toward him, and we curled up in the front seat as the car veered to the right, taking us west, off the highway, into the country, away.
The waterfall was tamer than I remembered. But it was wild enough.
Riley looked uncertain. “Why here?”
He knew how I felt about the waterfall. “I want us to jump,” I said.
“I thought you wanted to talk.”
“After.”
I led him to the water. We took off our shoes, peeled off our clothes, and waded out to the edge of the precipice, buffeted by wind. The water roared. I could have shouted all my secrets and let the wind carry the words away.
I held out my hand. He grabbed it, squeezed, then let go.
There was no point in counting down. No point in being afraid. I’d leaped from planes. I’d leaped from cliffs. This was no different. If anything went wrong, my brain, my self, was safely copied and stored. Whatever happened to this body, BioMax had Lia Kahn, to do with whatever they wanted. She was their toy. I belonged to them.
I closed my eyes. Lifted my arms to the sky.
Jumped.
It was everything I needed. It was mindless, breathless, timeless, twisting and flailing and falling. The pleasure of the flight met the pain of the rocks. The water carried me down, carried me away. Sucked me under the falls, into a churning storm, the surface lit by a sheet of white water, the river cycloning around me, driving me down, dragging me up, then down and up again, like a bobbing cork, like a doll, like a body.
It was the moment that my brain kicked in, that I thought, Auden, and remembered his body sailing over the lower falls, floating at the bottom, facedown, breathless.