Then, suddenly, I understood. This was just another game, more leverage, jostling for position. Corporate make-believe. “You’re lying,” I said. A deep calm radiated through me. “Riley’s fine.”
Jude’s eyes were open and unseeing. He lowered his head. Zo laid her hand on top of his, and he let it sit there, like he couldn’t be bothered to care.
“Don’t you get it?” I asked him, almost giddy. “It’s a trick. To shut us up.” I laughed. “How stupid do we look?”
“Why would I want to shut you up?” the tech asked, confused.
“Not you,” I said. “Them.”
He was obviously getting nervous—which meant I was onto something.
He cleared his throat. “Maybe you didn’t understand—”
“We understood,” Jude said dully.
“No, I understood,” I said. “You’re giving up.”
“Lia, it’s not a trick.”
“How do you know?” I asked, hating him. He’d always believed there were no limits to what orgs would do—but he’d chosen now to believe what he was told? Now, when it made no sense? Why couldn’t he just believe me?
“He’s not gone,” I said. Mechs lived forever, from one body to another, one copy to another. It was what separated us from the orgs; it was our defining, constitutive quality.
Machines cannot die.
“Let her see him,” Jude said.
The tech shook his head. “We don’t—”
“Please.”
“Fine,” the tech muttered, and opened the door for me. “I am sorry.”
The door closed, and I was alone in the room. Riley was still, stretched out on a long metal table. Not Riley, not anymore. A body. Its eyes were open. Its face was slack.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Cradle his body in my arms. Press my lips to his. Brush his hair off his face. Stand by his side and hold his hand.
But I didn’t do any of it. Not because I didn’t want to, or because I feared he wouldn’t want me to, but because he wasn’t there anymore. Maybe I’d known when I had first seen the body lying on the floor. And if he could be erased so easily from the body, it was all too easy to imagine he’d been erased from everything else.
That the body was just a body. Would always be just a body.
That he was gone.
10. EMPTY
Of course it was call-me-Ben who came in and found me on the floor, back against the wall, knees pulled up to my chest. It was always Ben, delivering the bad news, delivering the truth, delivering me from evil, Ben, who fashioned himself my savior and all the while, I knew now, was only saving me so I could save him and BioMax, use my face to sell their story, and sell myself out with every word.
I didn’t fight him.
I searched myself, tried to find that certainty I’d had, that it was all lies, a game, that Riley was coming back—but it had slipped away. Truth or lie, the end result was the same: He was gone.
Somehow, I left the room and left the body behind. Small things registered: the pressure of Ben’s fingers on my arm, Zo’s strained grimace, Jude’s blank gaze. Nothing mattered.
Then, somehow, we were in a conference room: Jude, me, my sister, call-me-Ben. Again I had to shrug off the strange sensation that the day was repeating itself, rearranging itself with different places and different players. Jude was like a zombie. Zo told him when to walk, when to talk, pushed him into a chair. I couldn’t look at him, because Jude was unthinkable without Riley, as—no matter how much I’d tried to deny it—Riley was unthinkable without Jude.
“How does this happen?” I asked Ben. Thinking, You did this. We stepped out of line, and you punished us.
Ben held out his hands, encompassing his explanation between them: empty air. “We don’t know. I’m so sorry. This has never—We’ve been caught unawares here, all of us. But I can assure you there’s no need for you to worry—if this was a problem with our software, we would have caught it much earlier than this. No, this had to be some kind of external stimulus.”
“Someone did this to him,” I translated.
“That’s our thought, yes.”
“Someone like you.”
He literally convulsed at the suggestion, his eyebrows flying up as his mouth twisted down and his hands fluttered. Every time I saw him, Ben seemed less and less the preternaturally cool and collected mannequin I’d once known and loathed. His slimy self-assurance had been an almost reassuring constant. I needed it now, something to hate, something steady and immovable to push back against.
“Industrial sabotage,” he said.
“No. You did this. To shut us up, to punish us, I don’t know. Why don’t you just admit it? Why pretend you were trying to help him?”
“I’m not pretending. BioMax has an obligation—I have an obligation—to honor our contracts with our clients. To help them when they come to us. Doctors don’t heal just the people they like.”
“You’re no doctor.”
“Still. What happened in the boardroom has nothing to do with what happens in here. Can you understand that?”
I didn’t know who we were, pretending that it mattered what I thought. As if I had any power. I had nothing.
“And you know very well that certain factions have been researching this kind of disruption for quite a while now,” he continued, when I didn’t respond. “If they’ve succeeded…”
I glanced at Jude, certain his eyes were burning through me. But his head was down, his eyes on the table. Maybe he hadn’t even heard.
Yes, this could have been BioMax striking back against us after we’d had the asinine temerity to show our hand and try to force theirs. But it didn’t make sense—Riley had never been the biggest threat to them; they’d made that very clear in their pursuit of Jude, not to mention their cultivation of me. Shutting him up wouldn’t do anything but inflame us, make us more determined to do… whatever it was they thought we had the power to do. If they wanted to stop us, there were easier ways.
And, as call-me-Ben said, they weren’t the only ones who hated us. I’d seen the lab with my own eyes, the Brotherhood’s attempt to find a way to destroy us. To corrupt not just our brains but the brains stored on the servers; to take care of us—to delete us—once and for all. It was why Jude had been so determined to blow the place up, with its researchers inside.
But Riley and I had saved the researchers, saved Savona and his scientists, set them free.
I had set them free.
Don’t think about it.
“You still aren’t telling me how it could have happened,” I said. “Or even exactly what happened.”
“Think of it as a virus. Something must have been done to his uplink jack. He was clearly in the middle of the process when it happened, and it’s the best explanation we can come up with for how the stored files would also have been corrupted.”
“You’re saying this isn’t random—someone went after him, specifically?”
“Looks like it. The uplinker was most likely sabotaged. The network servers are completely inaccessible, so the damage must have been done on his end. Probably someone close to him, with access to his possessions, someone he trusted. Can you think of any—”
Jude’s chair clattered to the floor. He was on his feet, fists clenched, and then he was out of the room, his footsteps echoing down the hall.
“Where’s he going?” Ben looked bewildered.
I didn’t bother to answer. “Come on,” I ordered Zo. She didn’t ask questions, just ran after me as I ran after Jude.