I fell silent. They didn’t push it; they changed the subject. It was strange, I thought, barely listening to their debate over some celebrity gossip Zo had seen on a stalker zone, the way three people who’d spent so much time hating one another could function so seamlessly as a unit, understanding the things that weren’t said, knowing what to ignore and what to pretend so we could all make it through the ride to nowhere. There was even a moment, Zo teasing Jude about knowing something he shouldn’t have unless he’d been secretly perusing the stalker zone himself, when it didn’t feel like we were pretending at all. It felt like maybe normal was within reach again, somewhere on the other side of all our disasters.
That was the moment, that first glimmer of inexplicable hope, when Sari’s text came in, priority level high:
Come home
Something wrong with Riley
The apartment was cleaned out. Sari’s stuff—which had been splayed over the furniture and floor—was gone. Along with mine and Zo’s. The small pile of possessions we’d amassed since abandoning Casa Kahn was nowhere in sight.
Sari was gone too.
You notice the strangest things, the most trivial details, when everything’s falling apart.
Your eye takes in everything, too much: the fecal brown of the walls, the play of light across the windows, the sounds puncturing the silence, a gasp, a shriek, and an empty hole where your voice should be, but you have no words.
You have no words and you have no volition as your legs carry you to a body sprawled on the floor, facedown, arms crooked, everything still.
And, finally, you find your scream. “Riley!”
I was on my knees, cradling his head, the day repeating itself with different players. He lay motionless, eyes closed. His uplink jack lay beside him, like he’d been holding it when he fell. Sari had left him like this. Helpless.
“Riley!” I screamed again, thinking, hoping, that maybe, for whatever reason, he’d shut down for the night on the floor instead of the bed; that if I yelled loud enough, if I turned him over and slapped his face and shook him, then he would open his eyes. But if he’d just shut down, the first scream would have woken him. There was no such thing as mech deep sleep. There were just two basic options: On.
Off.
Zo tried to pull me away, but I elbowed her backward. Déjā vu. Like no matter how we started, someone would end up on the ground, someone would get pushed away, someone would be on her knees, desperate.
But Jude was stronger. He took my arm and yanked me to my feet.
I slapped him, harder than I’d hit Riley, harder than I’d hit anyone. “What did you do to him?”
“What? I was with you all day!” “You must have done something, when you fought—broke something, you must have—”
“Lia. Stop.” He grabbed my shoulders, held them steady, so much stronger than me, hung on no matter how hard I thrashed. He waited for me to stop, to face him—and eventually, there was no other choice. The only sound in the apartment was Zo’s uneven breathing.
“I’m calm,” I said, trying to sound it. “Let go.”
He did.
I was calm, and I would force myself to stay that way, until I got Riley whatever help he needed. Then I would figure out who to blame.
It was the last place any of us wanted to go, but there was nowhere else.
We loaded Riley into the car. Gently, although there was no need to be gentle. I tried not to wonder whether he was awake in there, if he knew what was happening. I lifted his eyelid, not sure what I expected to find. All mechs had a glimmer of gold at the center of each pupil. Riley’s had gone black.
That means nothing, I thought, as we sped toward BioMax and tried not to worry about what they would do when we arrived. What else could they do after everything that had happened but punish us—punish him. I was certain they’d turn us away.
They didn’t.
This has happened before, I thought, as we waited in a cramped hallway while the techs worked on him, and I tried to forget what was happening three or four floors below us, machines with our minds and our memories following orders, obeying commands.
What was the last thing I said to him? I thought, and hated myself for not remembering, because the truth was I hadn’t said anything; I had watched Riley and Jude break each other, and then I had watched Riley leave. No comment.
I didn’t understand why they were helping us, and when the tech emerged from his little room, apology fixed on his face, I waited for him to tell us it had been a mistake, word had come down from on high that Riley was not to be touched.
I couldn’t look at the guy’s face.
They had tossed three flimsy chairs into the hall for us, and we sat while the tech stood. There was no confusion about who was in charge.
“We’ve done everything we can think of,” the tech said, “but we’ve had no success waking him up. I’ve never seen damage like this before. The neural matrix is completely fried.”
He said it like he was talking about a damaged exhaust pipe on a used car.
“I was afraid of that,” Jude said. “So how long’s it going to take to get another body? Or can you reuse this one?”
The tech swallowed hard. “Someone’s coming down to talk to you about that.”
“Why don’t you talk to us about it?” Jude said, an edge to his voice.
“I’m not really qualified to—”
“What’s wrong?” I said. “Tell us. We can handle it.”
Lie.
The guy laid it out in a flat, toneless voice. “This has never happened to us before. The servers are supposed to be incorruptible. But…”
“But what?” That was Jude, and I wanted to press a hand over his mouth, because if the tech didn’t say it, it couldn’t be real.
“But the files have been corrupted. Something must have happened during the uploading process, some kind of bug; we don’t know yet. Whatever fried his neural matrix also destroyed his backup copy on the network server. It’s been completely deleted.”
Deleted.
Not dead.
Not gone.
Delete. Verb, meaning: to eradicate, obliterate, wipe away.
To expunge. To remove.
To erase.
It had been erased.
It, the file, the ones and zeros that had comprised a life.
The world narrowed and slowed, until there was no one but the tech, nothing but his bulbous face, his chapped lips curled up in a sickly smile, like if he pretended it was okay, we would all follow suit, and go happily on our way. I tried. Tried to focus on the bald patch just above his left ear, the scar slicing through one of his eyebrows, which must have been some kind of vanity mark, as all scars were these days, but it didn’t make him look dangerous, just defective. Bad call, I thought, and tried to feel sorry for him, but I couldn’t feel anything.