“I know you hate me,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on my mother and his voice low enough to ensure she wouldn’t hear.
“I don’t have any feelings toward you one way or another. You’re irrelevant.”
“I wasn’t part of what the corp did to you,” Ben said. “I didn’t even know about it at first.”
“Even if I believed you, it doesn’t matter. And I don’t believe you.”
“We’ve done good things.” Ben sounded desperate. “This technology is a miracle. It can change everything. Artificial intelligence. Space exploration. Medical miracles. We’ve only just begun to imagine the possibilities. It can save us all, like it saved you.”
I almost bought it. Could he actually be this naive? Maybe. Did it matter?
Not at all.
“Let me prove it to you,” he said.
“Prove what?”
“That I’m trying to help. Some of us—most of us—mean well, Lia. We’ve always been on your side.” He handed me a folded-up printout. “When the time is right, this is where you’ll find him.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see.”
Curiosity overpowering judgment, I started to unfold the paper, but he stopped my hands. “Wait until you’re inside,” he said, glancing again at my mother. “You might want to keep this one to yourself.”
“Lia.” My mother pointed to the front door. The guard stood at the ready.
“Maybe don’t be so hard on her,” Ben said.
“Seriously? You want to give me advice on being a good daughter now?”
“You don’t have kids,” he said. “If you did…”
There was nothing I hated more than the familiar you haven’t been there, so you can’t really understand crap. Which I was about to point out to him, when I noticed how distant he looked, and wondered if he was thinking of his own kid, the girl about Zo’s age, who, I gathered, hated him about as much as I did.
I decided to let it pass.
“Can I go now?”
“Right. Of course.” Ben put out his hand for me to shake, then dropped it after a few seconds when I didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why? According to you, you didn’t do anything.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry,” he said. “I hope someday you’ll understand that.”
Here’s what Ben would never understand: When I woke up in the hospital that wasn’t a hospital, facing the doctor that wasn’t a doctor, unable to speak, unable to move, the mirror reflecting a fright show with dead eyes and exposed skull, he’d been the one to tell me the truth of what I was, and he’d been the one to roll me into that silvery morgue to see my hollow, ruined body, the body he’d taken away. Whatever happened next, whatever role he had or hadn’t played in setting up the car accident, in lobotomizing our stored neural patterns, in manipulating and lying and plotting a mechanical genocide, it would never matter. He was the face of what I had become, the face of BioMax, the face of death. You don’t try to understand the Grim Reaper; you don’t forgive.
You turn your back on him—knowing there’s nothing left he can do to you—and go inside.
It was strange to be back in the house, my second homecoming in six months, and like last time, much as I wanted the house to feel like a prison, it felt like home. The same overwrought antiques, the same stiff chairs and couches that screamed Don’t sit on me! lest some disastrous spillage occur. The same virgin-white rug that had never felt the touch of a shoe. The only difference: my father, slumped on the gray love seat, his head down but eyes unmistakably fixed on the door, my father, who was always in motion, consumed with impossibly important business, planted there like a piece of furniture, posture sagging and defeated. My father, around whom the world turned, sitting on the sidelines, making no move to interfere or even react to my arrival; my mother barely acknowledging his presence. I was almost sorry I hadn’t been around to watch him adjust to his new domestic reality. I suspected he was wondering if, back when he’d had a choice, he should have just opted for prison. Losing a daughter was one thing. Being bossed around by my mother? For him that would surely be intolerable.
My mother and the guard flanked me on either side as we trooped up the stairs.
“Lia.” I thought I heard my father’s voice trailing behind me, but it could have been my imagination, and I didn’t look back.
“This is for your own good,” my mother said. “You’ll thank me some day.”
“Been reading from the parental-cliché handbook again?”
“Put her in there,” she told the guard, gesturing to my room. Jude was already inside.
“You can’t make me want to be your daughter,” I told her. “You know that. You can keep me prisoner here as long as you want. It isn’t going to change anything.”
“You are my daughter,” she said, cold and calm. “Whether you want to be or not. So consider yourself grounded.”
She brushed her lips against my cheek, lightly enough that I barely felt them, quickly enough that by the time I thought to push her away, she was gone. The guard shoved me into my bedroom, then switched the room into lockdown mode, sealing us in. The setting had come standard with our security system—drop-down bulletproof shutters over the windows, network jammers, electronic locks, all designed to turn your average everyday bedroom into a prison. Designed for keeping burglars out—used most often, in our house at least, for keeping unruly daughters in. Zo had lived half her life in lockdown mode, but it was a new one for me. Still, I’d heard Zo complain enough to know that throwing my weight against the door or clumsily trying to pick the lock with a paper clip wasn’t exactly going to cut it.
Predictably, Jude had his head buried in one of my drawers, but at least he wasn’t pawing through my underwear. “Find anything you like?” I asked.
“Nothing that’s going to get us out of here,” he said, rapping a fist against the window shutter.
I unfolded the paper Ben had given me, scanning the dense chunk of file names and techno jargon for something that would make sense. This is where you’ll find him.
I’d seen this kind of thing before, when Zo had hacked our father’s ViM to try to get us some answers. It seemed like a million years ago, but I recognized the way the file names were diagrammed into decision trees, branching across the page.
It was a map, I realized—and then realized I’d seen many of these file names before. It was a fragment of the network hierarchy of the internal BioMax servers. The secret, isolated ones that stored brains ready for stripping and dehumanizing, for loading into BioMax’s “intelligent machines.” And one of the file names was circled, a meaningless string of numbers. I knew, from our BioMax break-in, that the lobotomized brain patterns were stored by ID number rather than name. This one was 248713, and there was a second file marked 248713b. But it was the original that was circled in red, with Ben’s handwriting beneath it: intact.
I handed the page to Jude. After all this time, it still seemed strange that my hands weren’t trembling. Because my brain felt like it was vibrating inside my head, bouncing off the inner walls of my skull in sync with the seconds ticking by, time running out. “Tell me if that means what I think it means,” I said, and watched him run his eyes down the page, tried to mark the exact moment he saw what I’d seen, and understood.
He saw it. Then he said what I couldn’t, because I was afraid to believe it.
“Ben gave you this?” he asked.