by SL Huang
I grabbed out my own gas mask and slid it on so I could take a breath, leaning down at the same time to snag keycards off two of the guards. Checker had his mask on too; I tossed one of the keycards to him and he caught it one-handed, tugging Pilar closer against his shoulder with the other and rebalancing her weight before spinning toward the door.
“Where to?” His voice was muffled and metallic-sounding through the mask.
I was busy drawing Warren’s arm over my shoulders and heaving him into a fireman’s carry—he was not a small man. “Freight elevator to the roof. Back of the building.”
I staggered over to the door. The canister in my pocket was still hissing; I did some diffusion calculations and cracked the door—the guards outside already had to be sleepy from the gas seeping underneath it—
They both thumped to the ground in seconds. I kicked their legs out of Checker’s way as I went by, and we hurried into the hallway.
The floor was empty. No workers, and all of the other security personnel must have rushed downstairs to deal with the government people…
We ran. I lumbered unevenly under Warren’s weight. Checker built up a good burst of momentum and sped down the hall next to me; we blew through the doors and office corridors until we hit a back hallway. Panting, I smacked a hand down on the button for the freight elevator as Checker held up the guard’s keycard to the sensor, and the world constricted for the seconds it took before the elevator lurched up to our floor.
The doors on this freight elevator were manual. I heaved them apart, staggering as Warren’s weight shifted, and we piled inside. I half-slid Warren’s mass onto the floor and pulled the doors closed again as Checker punched the cracked button marked “R.”
The slow trawl of the elevator car felt like an age, but at last it wobbled to a halt. I shoved it open again to reveal a rolling metal door that was very securely locked. That was okay, because I already had the explosives out.
I packed in the C-4 and moved to the back of the elevator, crouching over Warren’s limp body in the corner. “Cover your ears!”
Checker spun to face the wall and ducked, but covered Pilar’s ears instead. I pushed the detonator.
The blast went off with a clang of metal, and a few whizzing bits of shrapnel pattered against the back of my jacket, though not hard enough to hurt. I hurried back to the door, kicked away the broken pieces of lock, and yanked it upward with a screech.
Checker was already navigating his way out onto the sun-drenched rooftop by the time I got Warren hoisted up over my shoulders again. The sky was wide and blue around us, the top of the building becoming an island far above the world.
An island with a helicopter parked in the middle of it.
I’d been mentally timing the gas canister, and it had run out in the elevator. I pulled the gas mask down off my face with the hand I wasn’t using to steady Warren’s bulk over me and shouted to Checker as we charged across the smooth, hard surface the roof. Well, in my case less of a charge and more of a shamble. I’d been keeping Warren perfectly balanced, but he was heavy. And big. This had seemed like a much better plan the night before, when I thought I wouldn’t have to use it. And when I’d figured it was a bad idea to tell Warren about anything other than what he strictly needed to know—I probably should’ve looped him in.
“I thought you said you couldn’t fly a helicopter!” Checker cried as we dashed under the long shadows of the blades.
“I read the manual last night,” I called back.
“You what?” Checker’s voice climbed shrill surprise.
“Shut up and get in!”
I punctuated the last words with levering Warren off my shoulders and through the door of the helicopter, landing him on the floor. He was starting to stir—he had a large body mass, and the gas was wearing off. Checker disentangled Pilar to hand her up to me; I grabbed her under the armpits and heaved her into one of the passenger chairs.
“You good?” I called back to Checker, vaulting into the pilot’s seat.
“Yeah, go!”
In my hours cramming helicopter schematics, I’d also figured out how to hotwire one—it had turned out not to be that different from jacking a car. The motor thrummed to life beneath us, the blades starting up and vibrating through the craft. I glanced back. Checker was inside and pulling his chair up after him; Pilar was slumped bonelessly, her head sagging to one side; but Warren was staggering upright, hunched over in the cramped space.
“Sit down!” I shouted over the engine noise. I couldn’t take off until the rotors were at velocity—
He turned toward me, anxious and terrified. “They want her! Those people, they want Liliana!”
“Probably,” I said. “Sit down!” I was trying to remember how to fly. Pedals, cyclic, collective, that was right.
Across the rooftop, the doors to the executive lift slid open, and both Arkacite security and the government people in suits poured out. They ran straight for us, but it was okay. They would be too late. I watched the RPMs and closed my left hand around the collective lever.
“Protect her!” shouted Warren, and jumped back down to the rooftop.
“What the hell!” I cried. Warren was sprinting toward the oncoming security forces, waving his arms, a man on a mission—the Arkacite guards had their Tasers out and the government suits were drawing Glocks—shit—
I did the math, thought of Checker and Pilar, and pulled back on the collective.
The lift yanked us into the air with absolutely no finesse. Checker yelled and grabbed at Pilar protectively, as if he was afraid I would pitch them out the still-open door. I looked back and to the side as we rose away, in time to see no less than three of the Arkacite guards fire their Tasers simultaneously.
Warren went down.
The helicopter shuddered as I drove a forward acceleration into the lift, propelling us away from the scene.
The good thing about knowing math, I thought, was that I knew there was nothing I could have done. The probability I would’ve been able to get Warren out of there without one or more of the rest of us also being taken into custody, or worse—
I didn’t feel guilty, I told myself. The math exonerated me. It did.
The helicopter lurched and dipped for a moment. Fuck. I wrestled it back to level. Jesus, concentrate! Just get them out of here, and then sort this mess out. He was only Tasered. He’ll be fine.
A short hop later—and a terrifying one to my passengers, if Checker’s continued yells and Pilar’s eventual squeals were any indication—I dropped the helicopter onto the ground with the grace of a falling rock. The struts hit the pavement in the parking lot of a nearby school where I’d parked a car that morning.
I was out under the slowing spin of the rotors and impatiently starting the engine of the car before Pilar and Checker had undone their seatbelts. “Come on!” I shouted.
Pilar was weaving as if in a daze, her equilibrium still off from the drugs. Checker helped her down from the helicopter and she tumbled into the backseat; Checker got in the front and pulled his chair in on top of himself before slamming the door. “We’re here; we’re good; go!”
“Don’t get comfortable,” I said, pressing down on the accelerator and spinning out so quickly that Checker grabbed onto the door and Pilar started scrabbling for a seatbelt. “We’re switching cars soon.”
Pilar made a squeaking sound.
“I’m still trying to get over the fact that you RTFM’d a helicopter and became Trinity,” said Checker weakly. “Holy crap.”
“Hang on,” I said, and dropped us into the maelstrom of LA traffic far too fast.
Chapter 23
Arthur was waiting for us outside Miri’s building.
“Tegan?” I asked.
“They got other friends with ’em now. People they trust.” He took in our frazzled appearances—Checker looked a little green and Pilar was leaning on his shoulder to stay upright. “You guys okay? Been trying to call…”
“Fill
him in,” I tossed in Checker and Pilar’s direction, and buzzed into the courtyard.
Miri stood up as we barged into her apartment. She’d been spread out with Liliana on the floor, with bowls of…some sort of milky liquid…that had the cheerful green tint of food coloring. Miri was in leggings and an overlarge T-shirt with the collar cut out, her hair thrown up with a pencil stuck through it and a smudge of white powder on her cheek. She looked so absurdly relaxed and removed from the insanity of our morning that the cognitive dissonance took me aback for an instant.
“Is everything okay here?” The words burst out aggressively. “No one’s been bothering you?”
“Nope,” she said. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” I said. “Everything’s peachy.”
“Miri taught me to make oobleck!” chirped Liliana.
We all stared at her. She raised tiny green-stained hands toward us proudly and then smacked a palm down into one of the bowls; the fluid inside spasmed like a living skin.
I recovered and pointed a finger at Checker. “You—get on a computer. I need intel, now.”
Checker moved carefully around the mad science in the middle of the room and pulled a laptop off a stack of papers and knickknacks. “Sorry about this,” he tossed at Miri as he went by. “Taking over your apartment and all—we’ve got a, a situation, long story—”
“Oh, it’s fine,” said Miri. “I can go back down to Carol’s. Don’t have less crazy lives on my account.”
“That’s ridiculous. We’re not going to kick you out of your own home,” Checker objected, already typing madly on the laptop.
“It’s not a problem,” said Miri. “I’ll just wash the cornstarch off and get out of your hair. This does mean you owe me, though. I’m calling it a trip to Sacramento.”
Checker stopped typing, his jaw dropping open. “We’ve been over this! You might be good enough, but I am not nearly—”
“Then I guess you owe me extra practice time, too. Ta-ta!” She skipped off down the hallway.
“Hey. Intel,” I said.
Checker muttered under his breath and went back to his computer.
Pilar knelt down to pay attention to Liliana, whose face had started wrinkling up at the tension in the room and our lack of excitement over her non-Newtonian fluids. Arthur crossed the room to Miri’s television set, a squat little CRT with an indoor antenna.
The display was a touch fuzzy, but visible. The news conference was on every channel. Arthur found one that was playing it in full, and I came over to join him.
We stood and watched a man named Morrison Sloan as he introduced his Liliana clone to the audience. As he spoke to her for a while. As he suddenly collapsed her into lifelessness with an electrical surge, smashed open the silicone and metal of her skull, and tore her brain to careless pieces.
The whole time, he talked with a passionate charisma about the dire threat of artificial intelligences among us, about these false humans infiltrating us for some doubtless nefarious purpose, about the ominous danger now threatening us, and about the people we thought were friends and neighbors who would turn against us in the worst sort of science fiction nightmare.
“We will find them,” he declared, “and we will tear them apart, and whoever is doing this will know—they cannot con us, they cannot dupe us; their lies will not hold! The spies they have sent among us, whatever their purpose, will be destroyed, just as these automatons will be destroyed!”
I watched him, feeling sick. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“Don’t know how this Sloan fellow got a hold of her,” said Arthur, “but he must not know she was just a research project. Or maybe he’s one of those people afraid of science or something.”
“No,” I said. “He’s not.”
“You think he got some other motive?”
“He doesn’t have a motive.” The words felt surreal. “He’s a robot, too. Just like Liliana.”
Arthur whipped around in surprise. “You sure?”
“Dead sure.” The too-even sinusoids of his voice and movement echoed tinnily through my senses. “He’s artificial.”
“What the hell’s the point?” cried Arthur. “Who’s setting this up?”
“Well, you’re probably right that it’s someone anti-science—or at least anti-AI,” I said. “Look how it’s hitting the news.”
“’Cept that makes no sense,” pointed out Arthur. “If whoever’s behind this hates the tech so much, why’re they using another robot instead of doing it themselves?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I flashed back to all the warnings and paranoia about information leaks at Arkacite. Christ, they’d been right to worry, but this? “Checker, are you—”
“Already on it,” he called. “I’m looking Sloan up. We’ll figure it out.”
Arthur and I kept watching the news conference. Sloan finished his speech, nodded to the assembled crowd of reporters and spectators, and left the dais. Why was he even on a dais, I wondered? What was the pretext for this news conference? How had they gotten the reporters there?
“News reports have been saying he’s some business tycoon guy,” said Arthur, clearly thinking along the same lines I was. “I dunno, I never heard of him before this. They’re already mentioning him as a candidate for Senate. Pushing some sort of down-with-AI platform, obviously, whipping people up about this ‘threat’ we got going hidden in the population…”
“Like we need another anti-science candidate,” said Checker, without looking up from his computer. “I’m thinking about starting my own country.”
“’Fraid they’re already doing the anti-science thing without him,” said Arthur. “Was watching the news coverage at Tegan’s, and there’s calls out to shut down all sorts of different kinds of computer research until this is sorted, and some of the ones saying that are in Congress. There’s other people saying the government oughta be checking everyone with blood tests or something to make sure we’re real humans. And of course Reuben McCabe’s been making a ruckus, more’n the rest.”
“Him? Oh, God,” said Checker.
“Who?” I said.
“Seriously? McCabe? How have you missed this guy?” Checker split his attention between flailing at me and continuing to type. “He’s the poster boy for How to Wreck Your Country By Being Rich and a Douchebag. He puts his entire family fortune behind legislation that ruins people’s lives—his political action group was the one that hamstrung women’s rights in Texas, and shut down federal funding to certain types of genetics research—”
“They went crazy here in Cali back when we was fighting for marriage rights,” put in Arthur. “Poured so much money into the state it got ridiculous. We couldn’t combat that kind of resources.”
“Yeah, McCabe’s been spreading his filth for decades,” said Checker. “It felt like he calmed down a little the past few years—I hoped he’d been swallowed by irrelevancy, or better yet eaten by a grue. But he’s popped up again over this past year, and he’s been walking the line on inciting people to violence this time.”
“Walking the line? Ha,” scoffed Arthur. “He should’ve been arrested for the Yapardi shooting, no question.”
My eyes were glazing over from the political talk. “I don’t care. I’m concerned about us and Liliana. Can we figure out what the hell is going on, please? How are the people behind Sloan doing this? If the news is talking like he’s some business powerhouse, how long has he even existed?”
“A day,” said Checker. He’d stopped typing, and his voice sounded funny.
“What?” I hurried to look over his shoulder.
“It looks like more time—a lot more. There are records; he’s all over the ’net—people are claiming to have known him, although who knows, he’s been fabricated to be famous so maybe they’re just trying to sound important—but so far all the records I’ve found are backdated. From yesterday. Whoever did it knew what the heck they were doing, I can tell you that. They did an amazing job making
it look like Sloan is some sort of top dog oil magnate. But he isn’t.” He blinked up at me. “It makes more sense this way, actually—if he’s got the same AI capabilities as Liliana, he wouldn’t be able to be a business tycoon for real. The programming isn’t that good.”
“He didn’t take questions,” I realized. “His speech—there must be NLP limitations. They sent him up there with a pre-programmed speech, but he wouldn’t be able to respond naturally enough to the reporters’ questions—they’d start figuring out something was off.”
“But then why use one of ’em in the first place?” Arthur asked again. “’Specially if it’s such a risk of exposure?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s not just Sloan,” said Checker, pounding madly on his keyboard again. “I’m finding—this Liliana, the one he destroyed, she had a backdated history, too. She was enrolled in daycare, under the name Alice Whittaker. She had—she had parents, at least they say she did, and there are all sorts of other records; they’re making it look like she existed after the fact—”
“Won’t hold up,” said Arthur. “It can’t. People got to realize eventually that no one’s ever seen her before.”
“Well, let’s see.” Checker hit a link and a video of a news interview popped up.
The woman with the mic in her face was a frazzled-looking soccer mom with gray poking in at her roots and some dumpiness collecting around her middle. She spoke haltingly, with wide eyes, about how her children had played with this girl, how they’d had her over to their house—she was emotional and believable and the type of woman any mother could relate to—
—and not real.
I found my voice. “She’s one, too.”