It was strange, this sudden awareness of vulnerability. It was supposed to be the reason the orgs hated us, the reason there would always be an us and a them. They died; we didn’t. And now that we were just like them, it meant… nothing? Meant only that now they had the opportunity to get rid of us one by one. Vids popped up of flash mobs surrounding mechs, dismantling them piece by piece, a helpful how-to of the unmaking of a person. Like the virus, or whatever it was, had granted ultimate permission, had turned us from a threat into a target, literally overnight, even though nothing had changed except our mortality, except the fact that erasing us now meant erasing us for good.
“That’s what this is,” Jude said, still inhabiting some other plane of preternatural calm. “Genocide.”
We watched the story unfold on the news zones, scrambled to track down the mechs we knew, and didn’t speculate about who was behind it. Partly because we’d already settled on the Brotherhood as the most likely suspect; partly because we were afraid they weren’t acting alone. If any of this was BioMax’s fault, if this was retribution, then that made it our fault. That made Riley our fault.
The BioMax connection surfaced within the hour, an hour that felt like a week, barricaded in that tiny apartment, poring over the vids, just like old times at Quinn’s estate, when we’d locked ourselves behind electrified walls and try to decipher who hated us and what they planned next.
It came in as a joint announcement, simulcast to all the major news zones and dumped into the personal zones of me, Jude, and probably any mech they could track. Rai Savona and our old friend M. Poulet, appearing side by side, faces somber and pale. “When I founded the Brotherhood of Man, I did so to elevate and illuminate, to remind the human race of our unique destiny in God’s plan.”
Zo snorted. But it was a mark of how serious things were that Jude held back whatever retort must have been on his tongue. I did the same.
“I blame myself for this tragedy,” Savona continued. “A tragedy born from the mind of an unstable teenager.”
No.
“I felt I had to atone for my own mistakes, and so I allowed myself to overlook the zealot hiding in our midst. I ceded control to a very young, very damaged boy—I gave him a platform and a voice, and I have only myself to blame for his wrongheaded actions.”
“The Honored Rai Savona came to us with his suspicions, and our investigation confirmed them,” M. Poulet said. “Auden Heller masterminded the release of an insidious virus directed at download recipients, or mechs, as they often refer to themselves. We’re doing everything we can to apprehend Heller, and our brightest minds are at work on the virus. In the meantime we implore the public to be respectful—”
“Respectful,” a pretty word for “not murderous, bloodthirsty, and mad with a furious skinner bloodlust.”
“—and we assure all download recipients that the problem will soon be taken care of. But we remind all download recipients that this is a very serious matter. As of now, forty-seven erasures have been confirmed. Several hundred clients remain unaccounted for. The source of infection appears to be the uplink connection, so this is cruciaclass="underline" Do not upload your backup memories until we have this problem solved. More information will follow, as soon as we have it.”
Forty-seven “erasures.” I wondered if they’d all gone by accident. Or if some had been left behind, like me, and just decided it would be easier to let the virus run its course.
It seemed they’d come to the end of the script, when Savona leaned in and grabbed the microphone, eyes burning into the camera lens. “Auden, if you’re out there, if you’re listening to this, please come to me. I understand, son. You’ve been hurt, you wanted to lash out and hurt them back, but this is not the way. Come home to the Brotherhood, and help us fix this. Save yourself.”
“He’s lying,” I said.
“Obviously,” Jude said. “This has Savona’s stink all over it.”
“No, I mean, he’s lying about Auden.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of defending him?” Jude asked. “The guy shot you. What else does he have to do to convince you he’s not on your side? He thinks you’re the freaking devil.”
“And you think he is. So you’re not exactly objective on the subject.”
“And you are?”
“I’m not defending him,” I said.
“Really? Because it sounds like—”
“I’m not defending him for his sake. The more we know about what’s going on, the better chance we have of stopping it.”
“Except we don’t know that Savona’s lying just because you feel it. There’s a little difference between a fact and a wish.”
“So you’re saying you think Auden’s behind this?” I asked him.
“Honestly?” Jude paused. “I don’t think that twonk could plan a picnic, much less a genocide.”
“So—”
“So who cares? Either Savona’s telling one lie, or he’s telling a bunch of them. It’s beside the point.”
He was right. The point was someone trying to kill us. BioMax, according to the private messages it had sent out to its mech mailing list, was working to “contain” the problem and “strongly suggested” that all download recipients report to a facility they’d designated as Safe Haven, to protect us from org violence and any further attacks while we were in such a “vulnerable state.”
A state no more vulnerable than any orgs on any given day, but somehow it felt like walking around with a knife at our throats. Because what if this was just phase one? Org viruses mutated; maybe this one would, too. Maybe in its next variation it would kill us where we stood. We drew power from a wireless grid—if they could hack the servers, no reason to think they couldn’t hack the grid, too. Poison us from afar. They’d wiped out our backups—wasn’t the obvious next step to eliminate us once and for all? I didn’t see how any Safe Haven could keep us safe from that.
11. HIDDEN
Two of us had nowhere to go—nowhere safe, at least. But one of us did. So I decided to start with her, the one person I could help, or at least protect. The one part of this situation I could controclass="underline" Zo. I sat her down on Riley’s couch, but I stayed on my feet. It was better to say this from above, to loom. Jude sat at the narrow kitchen table on the other side of the room, plainly watching—but without ejecting him from the apartment, this was as much distance from him as I was going to get.
“I think you should go back home,” I told Zo.
Then, reconsidering my tone and the presumed response, I said it again, and this time it wasn’t a suggestion. “You should go home.”
“The hell I should.”
“I know you don’t want to—”
“Not. Going. To. There’s a difference. Never speaking to either of those assholes again. Never setting foot in that house.”
“Zo, I know that’s how you feel now.”
“You sound like him,” she said.
It was a low blow.
“It’s safer there,” I told her.
“Then you should go.”
“Zo, come on, I can’t just hide out and wait for this to go away.”
“Because suddenly you’re this brave, conquering hero? Since when do you care about anything but whether your microskirt matches your boots?”
“You don’t know me anymore,” I said, coldly. “And that was your choice. So you don’t get to have an opinion on what I care about.”