“It doesn’t matter.” She wasn’t happy, no. Nor sad nor angry. There would be time for that, she suspected, days when she would cry and days when she would want to scream and break things. But right now there was only an overwhelming sense of freedom, of possibility. She could be anyone, do anything at all.
“All the meds, the exams—you guys thought I was like Nicholas, didn’t you? You thought I was a psychopath.”
“We didn’t know what you were, or what you’d become,” Moira replied. “And I’m certain now that you’re perfectly fine. But we had to keep an eye on you, just in case. Ectogenesis was—still is, really—a very new and relatively untested technology. We didn’t know what the psychological side effects would be, so we had to monitor you closely.”
“All these years I thought I was messed up, that’s why you stayed here and left Dad. Do you realize what that’s done to me?” She slammed her hand onto the bench, making Moira jump. “I thought I couldn’t have friends. I stayed away from people. Jim Julien was the best and last friend I ever had, did you know that? I couldn’t bear to have anyone around me after we left Guam—I thought I was a freak! And as it turns out, I was right. I may not be a psychopath like Nicholas, but I’m not normal.”
“But you are. I didn’t want to screw that up for you, Sophie, which is why I never told you. I wanted you to have a chance at a real life.”
“No you didn’t! At least you didn’t do it for my sake. You did it because I was a better control if I was ignorant, if I lived thinking I was normal. Isn’t that it? Well, isn’t it?”
“Sophie! No, it wasn’t . . .” But Moira’s eyes told her all she needed to know. She’d been given as normal a life as they could give her, but it had never been for her. It all came back to Corpus.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Moira. “None of this matters anymore. After what happened today, I’ll be fired. Corpus will exterminate all the Vitros Nicholas woke, and they’ll likely kill him too. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.” She looked drained, as if she could barely hold her head up. She slid down the wall and sat with her knees drawn up, her hands kneading her hair.
“I can’t save them,” she whispered. “I tried. I did everything I could. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” Gun still clutched in her hand, she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Nicky may have woken them, but I destroyed them.”
Sophie thought of the bleary-eyed newborn Vitros, of their nightmarish introduction to the world. “Is there a way to reset them? Can you erase their memories or something, put them back to normal?” She didn’t want any part of it; she wanted to walk away now and never look back, to forget this woman, this place, all of it. But she was haunted by those empty faces and she knew she would never stop hating herself if she didn’t try to help them.
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Moira. “There’s no cure. This is what they are. This is what I made them to be.”
“What about Nicholas?” Sophie threw out. “What makes him immune to imprinting? What’s the difference between him and those miserable kids out there?”
Moira looked up through a mess of hair and fingers. “I told you. He’s a psychopath. Him and Mary, Jay, and Wyatt.” “Yes, but why? Why didn’t they imprint like all the others?” “It was . . . there were complications.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say—that there were complications?”
Moira made no reply.
“Fine. Whatever. Keep your secrets for now.” She began pacing the length of the wall, one arm crossed over her stomach and her other hand cupping her chin. “Think, Mom—Dr. Crue. Whatever. Can’t you save them? Reverse it somehow? If they’re imprinted on Nicholas, then they’re useless to Corpus, I get that. But if they stopped being useless—don’t you see? We’ve got to make them nonexpendable. We’ve got to make them necessary.”
Moira turned the gun over in her hands, her brow knitted in thought. “We can’t undo it. Once imprinted, imprinted for life. It even extends beyond death.” Her hands froze, the gun pointed at the ceiling. “Philip Wolf—one of the doctors—he had a stroke, and there was nothing we could do to save him. But one of the Vitros, a girl named Clarissa—” Her voice choked out; she shook her head. “She was imprinted on him. It was like she just . . . crumpled. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t stand for him to be gone. She went crazy, breaking things, trying to dig up his grave . . . We had to put her down, in the end.”
“Put her down,” echoed Sophie, pausing to stare at her. “Like she was a dog.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see how bad off she was. We tried everything else—erasing her chip, medication, even electrotherapy. Nothing worked. Her world ended when his did. So it’s no good shooting Nicky—might as well shoot them all. Do you know what he did?” Moira’s hands trembled with anger. “He told them to jump off the cliff. He’d murder them, just to get back at me.”
Sophie’s mouth opened in horror. That sick, twisted bastard.
“Is there no way to save them?” She was thinking of Lux now as much as she was of the other Vitros. She’s the only family I have now. If there’s any chance of saving her—
“The other doctors are trying to deal with them. I came down to see if there were any left sleeping, but he got to them all. But they won’t give up trying to carry out Nicholas’s orders unless he tells them to.”
“Yes—but I mean isn’t there a way to save them permanently? To un-imprint them?”
“It all comes down to the code,” said Moira, shaking her head. “The computer code on the chips—we call it the Imprima Code. We can manipulate it, but we can’t erase it— the chip is too integrated with the brain. Even if we took all the data off of it, the information would be stored in their cerebral cortex. We’d have to insert a new code, something to override it.” She shook her head. “But there’s not time. And there’s no way of knowing what that code would be. It’s like trying to invent the bicycle before the wheel. Like trying to paint something you can’t see.”
“What I don’t understand, what I’ve been trying to understand all this time—is why would you even do this to begin with?” Now Sophie was ranting, spitting out words simply because she was tired of holding them back. “How could you be so heartless as to give people life only to strip away their identities? What’s in it for you?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Moira rose quickly to her feet, her eyes burning defiantly. She slipped her gun into the deep pocket of her coat. “It wasn’t about imprinting in the beginning. That was an accident, a sort of side effect. You should have seen this place back then, when we were first getting started. Your dad and me and the others—we were so full of hope and excitement about the future. We were working to save the world, not . . . not this. The chip technology was originally intended to be a new form of psychotherapy. This technology is huge, Sophie—it’s world-changing. We can influence the human mind by speaking to it through computer code. We’ve achieved a human-machine hybrid technology whose full ramifications we’re only just beginning to realize. At the beginning, the chip was meant to be a cure. We knew that if we could manipulate the psyche with the aid of the chip to translate computer code into human thought, affecting the brain in the same way you’d download a program onto your computer, we could cure almost any mental disorder and, in time, even physical ones. We could cure Alzheimer’s and bipolarity and schizophrenia and . . . and psychopathy.”