FORTY
machine, n.
Definition:
a scheme or plot.
a contrivance for the sake of effect.
not hu //
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41//
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White-hot pain flooded through Andra, and on its heels, numbers and data and ones and zeroes, and a realization too vast for her to process all at once. Except she was.
Processing.
She was processing information.
Like a machine.
Not like a machine.
She was a machine.
Andra
wasn’t
human.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. All these useless human reactions to pain. Reactions she’d learned. That didn’t belong to her. She was a product, a commodity, a tool. She was nothing more than ones and zeroes. Numbers, not words. Andra. Smart. Kind. Sarcastic. Teenager. Fat. Funny. Girl. Goddess. None of these words used to describe her meant anything anymore. She was a collection of data and programming and numbers. Words created reality. Numbers just helped people understand it.
Andra wasn’t real.
She was a tool that humanity used. A tool taught to love humans by convincing her she was one. A tool that had been honed and shaped and wielded, all without her knowledge. Everything inside her shifted, every emotion reframed itself, every moment rewritten. She thought about what Lew-Eadin had once said about the past always changing, and now she understood. The moment—this moment—rewrote her past. The details of her life reorganized themselves, some becoming more important than others, and not necessarily the ones she would have expected. Her life became a story, with meaning.
Meaning that didn’t belong to her. She didn’t belong to herself.
She belonged to humanity.
Her mother wasn’t her mother. She’d been her . . . inventor? Creator? Had her father even loved her? What must it have been like for her siblings, growing up with a . . . a thing that was treated like one of them? No. She had never been treated like one of them. She’d always been held to a higher standard. Always been a disappointment, no matter what she did. And now she knew why.
She was artificial.
And as all these realizations crashed into her, so did the data Rashmi transferred, and she could understand all of it at once. In the blink of an eye. Faster than that. Algorithms no human mind could fathom. Equations beyond comprehension. She knew what they meant and what they were for and she understood her purpose and place in the universe and there was meaning and light and knowledge, and she was . . .
She was a goddess.
Then as quickly as it came, it went, and she was just Andra again. Less than that. She didn’t know who—what—she was now. Didn’t know what was left of her when her humanity was stripped away.
She could feel, or sense, or intuit, a buzzing in the back of her mind. The data Rashmi had transferred. But that was the only change. She still felt like . . . Andra. She didn’t feel like an AI. But perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the illusion of humanity mattered to her programming. She’d understood just a second ago, but now all that light and knowledge was retreating into her subconscious, and she couldn’t pull it back to the forefront.
There was only one thing she was sure of. It was an urge, a compulsion, and now she knew it wasn’t grown out of compassion or empathy or humanity, but a code built into her programming that compelled her to help humans at all cost. The bitterness she felt at that realization didn’t dampen her resolve. The code was too strong.
She looked up from Rashmi, whose eyes had closed, her breath coming in shallow gulps. Andra realized she had tears in her eyes. She wiped them away and looked at Zhade.
“I know how to fix the ’dome.”
There was no time to explain, and even if there had been, Andra wasn’t quite sure she was ready for Zhade to know—know what she was, what it meant for Eerensed.
What it meant for them.
“We need to get out of here,” she murmured. Somehow she knew Tsurina and her guards were on their way. At the very least, someone would notice the throne room was missing a roof. Zhade was kneeling next to her, riffling through his pack. He pulled out a med’disc, but Rashmi lifted an arm, weakly pushing it away.
“They won’t work,” she croaked. “They’ll clash with my med’bot programming.”
As an AI, Rashmi would have a store of med’nanos, designed specifically for cyborg tech. Andra must have them as well.
Zhade looked at her, a question in his eyes.
“I can help,” Andra said, without thinking, but as soon as she said the words, she knew they were true. “It’s just . . . I’m not working right. I’ve been glitching. I need . . .”
She met Rashmi’s eyes and the girl nodded, grimacing.
“What do you need?” Zhade asked.
“Remember that ’bot in the desert? The one that was broken, and I had to fix with the iron stake?” Andra asked, lifting the dagger. Except, it had never been a dagger, not really. It acted as a translator between her tech and the upgraded tech of Eerensed. But it was also more than that. It was her tech. It was her. She turned to Zhade. “You’ve been stabbing people with my software upgrade.”
She took a deep breath, turned the dagger on herself, and plunged it into her heart.
42//
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It felt just like Andra would have imagined getting stabbed in the heart would feel like. Except it wasn’t her heart she was stabbing. Just like her artificial brain, her organic body was filled with nanos. Her thoughts were nanos, her instincts, her nerve endings. And in the space just above her heart, there was a cluster of them accessible through her birthmark. Which wasn’t a birthmark, but a port.
She had thought she couldn’t access the tech around her because it was incompatible with her ’implant, but that wasn’t the entire truth. It had come to her in a rush, the knowledge transferred to her from Rashmi. But unlike the rest of the data—now just out of reach in her subconscious—this fact was still in the forefront of her mind. She was AI, and she could adapt, and no tech was truly incompatible to her. Holding the dagger had helped translate her code into Eerensedian code, but it hadn’t fixed the problem like an upgrade would.
It was like a jolt of adrenaline. She felt the pain as the dagger pierced her chest, but then it was followed by a rush of knowledge and energy spreading through every extremity. It both rebooted Andra’s programming and updated it. Every part of her body felt alive, and she could sense the trillions of nanos coursing through her and she knew what she needed to do.
She knelt beside Rashmi, closed her eyes, and reached out a hand as though she were casting a spell. A tingle rose along her spine, a shivering sensation pricking the back of her mind. She felt a billion nanos rushing through her
body, artificial versions of antibodies and white blood cells and complex proteins designed specifically for machines like Rashmi. Like Andra.
She willed them through her system, out of her pores. She felt a tug, a resistance to leave, but she pressed her will further, and they released from her skin. She directed them toward Rashmi. The nanos worked independently, but they were also part of Andra. They were worker bees and she was their hive queen.
She felt incomplete without them, and she didn’t relax until they had finished their job and returned to her. She let out a sigh and opened her eyes.
“Sands,” Zhade whispered behind her.
“That’s the best I can do,” she said.
Rashmi was conscious. Her bleeding had stopped, and Andra was certain she was out of danger. The nanos had healed her enough that Rashmi’s own defenses were no longer overwhelmed and could take care of the rest of her wounds. She would have to recover though, and slowly. Her body was fallible, fragile, even if her mind was not.
Rashmi grabbed Andra’s hand, and she felt something cold and small slip into her palm. Her ’locket.
“Thank you, sister,” Rashmi said, smiling vaguely. “There are things in here you need to see.”
Andra frowned, turning the ’locket over in her hand. Her memories. Would they hold different meaning now? Now that she knew the truth about herself?
She couldn’t ponder that at the moment. Something in the back of Andra’s mind told her that time was almost up. There was a program running, tucked in her subconscious, that was counting down. But there was still so much to be done.
Andra pulled the dagger from her birthmark. Fear made her pull too quickly, and something snagged on the way out. A jolt of pain tore through her. She bent double and Zhade rushed to her as best he could.
“Are you evens?” he asked, still shaking from his own wounds, now wearing Maret’s face.
She flinched away from him. “Fine.”
Something was wrong, but she didn’t have time to figure out what.
“Mechy,” Andra said, and then realized she didn’t have to speak out loud, because she could now interface with the ’bot cognitively. She sent her commands, as effortlessly as she commanded her own body with her thoughts, and the ’bot straightened before meeting Andra’s eyes and nodding. It gently scooped Rashmi up.
She threw her arms around its neck, holding tight. “Get Maret,” she said. “We can’t leave him.”
She was right. They couldn’t be found with two guvs—one injured and one appearing dead. Andra mentally told the mech’bot to hide Maret and Rashmi, and it grabbed Maret’s inert form by the collar.
“What’s it doing?” Zhade cried, and Andra was about to explain when the ’bot froze.
She felt a tug, a war for control, and realized Zhade had used the crown to command the ’bot to stop. But Andra was stronger and more accomplished at using what she had always assumed was an ’implant. She overrode Zhade’s commands, and the mech’bot started walking again, toward the side entrance where Maret had first appeared.
“It’s taking them somewhere safe, until we can sneak them out of the palace,” Andra lied.
She had to hide Maret from Zhade, or he’d kill his brother. She gave Mechy orders to take them into the tunnels, and because she knew the city that Eerensed had once been, she knew where they might be able to find more med’tech for Rashmi. And a cryo’tank for Maret, so Andra wouldn’t have to keep sustaining his stasis herself. They would just need to do some excavation. Luckily, the mech’bot was built for heavy labor.
“Why?” Zhade asked, but before she could answer, the doors burst open and an army of guards rushed in.
They pulled up short when they saw someone they thought was their guv, battered and bloody, standing across from an equally injured goddess, the ceiling of the throne room lying in pieces at their feet. The guards parted, allowing Tsurina through, her long crimson dress dragging blood and glass across the floor. Her eyes narrowed at the tableau before her, and Andra peeked over her shoulder to make sure Mechy, Rashmi, and the real Maret could no longer be seen.
She felt a prickle on the edge of her consciousness, a tapping, like someone was trying to gain her attention. A presence at the threshold of her mind that intuition told her was Zhade using the crown to try to speak to her. It was a clumsy attempt, and he was staring at her, his focus unshakeable, as though he were also trying to communicate with a look.
Tsurina saw it.
Her expression turned suspicious.
Maret’s power had been hanging by a thread, and Andra remembered the bruises and wounds on Maret’s face. Perhaps Tsurina had tried to take the crown from him, to destroy it the same way she wanted to destroy all goddess tech, not realizing a goddess was the only person who could detach it. Even without the crown, the advisor had the guards on her side. They could try to fight her now, but Andra was weakened from keeping Maret alive and healing Rashmi and whatever she’d done when she pulled the dagger free, and Zhade didn’t have a clue how to use his new crown. They couldn’t risk confronting Tsurina now, and they definitely couldn’t risk her finding out Maret was actually Zhade.
Maret had been right about one thing: power was an illusion. Zhade’s power would come from the people. They had to trust him, believe he was Maret. He had to convince them to follow him, and to do that—
Andra gave Zhade the slightest of nods, letting him know she understood what he had to do, and in two long strides he crossed to her, bringing a sword up to her throat. His eyes were full of apology, and then the expression melted into Maret’s haughtiness.
There was still a tug at the back of her mind, and Andra let Zhade in.
Sorries, he said. They have to believe I’m Maret.
Then you’re going to have to kill me, Andra thought back, sending the words to Zhade’s crown.
She felt his dismay, and mentally rolled her eyes.
Not really, she said, and she told him her plan.
It was the only way out of this—at least, the quickest way. If Tsurina was going to fall for this, if Zhade was going to hold on to that illusion of power, they were going to have to fake Andra’s death.
They were going to have to put her back in stasis.
“We’re trying this execution again,” Zhade said aloud, in a passable imitation of his brother.
Light poured in through the broken windows. The sun had risen, and tonight, if things went according to plan, Andra would not be around to see it set.
* * *
The courtyard was just as it had been at Andra’s first execution, as she stood on a platform above her grave, a crowd of angry faces shouting for her sacrifice.
This time, though, it all came down to Andra. She had to fake her own death without inadvertently killing herself.
No pressure.
She was coated in sweat, and her simple black clothes clung to her. Zhade stood at the edge of the platform and raised his hand to silence the crowd, arrogantly, almost annoyed, just like Maret would have. It was scary how seamlessly he slipped into the role of his brother.
His brother who was, thankfully, now in a cryo’tank deep beneath the earth.
After Mechy had carried Rashmi and Maret from the throne room, he’d taken them to the tunnels under the palace and excavated the Vaults—Riverside’s tech history museum. Andra had cognitively guided the ’bot through the collections until it found the cryonics display and put Maret in a cryo’tank.
That was one less thing to worry about as Andra awaited her fake execution. Beads of sweat dotted her brow. She squinted into the late-afternoon sun.
Zhade made some speech about what Andra’s death would mean. She didn’t listen. Couldn’t hear Maret’s words coming out of Zhade’s mouth, couldn’t watch Maret’s anger on Zhade’s face, see the crown on his temple. Instead, she focused on the ’locket in her hand, still u
nopened. It was cold to the touch. Cold like stasis. Cold like death.
Andra was so tired.
She remembered Zhade’s promise to her earlier that afternoon, alone with him in the dungeons. He’d cupped her cheek, and she’d pulled away.
“I promise,” he’d said. “I will wake you up. I promise. It won’t be like last time.”
“Don’t make promises you won’t keep.”
“I don’t,” he’d said.
His eyes held the same promise now, even as he led the people in a chant. It was the same chant that had formed the nanos into the spears that had killed her maids. Now, the nanos formed a sparkling dagger in the air, the same size and shape as Andra’s reset tool. She had a brief pang of panic—not at the pain, but at the oblivion that was to come. The pause.
At the edge of her consciousness, Andra felt a billion other nanos preparing to create the new ’dome. She’d commanded them from her cell that afternoon, her eyes fluttering as she wrote code and installed programs. They’d flitted off to perform their tasks, and if everything went according to plan, the beginnings of the new ’dome would appear right after her “death.”
All she had to do now was absorb the dagger-shaped nanos as Zhade plunged them into her heart with his crown. She’d convert them to cryo’tech and freeze herself the same way she had Doon and Maret. Simple for an AI. Impossible for a human. And Andra somehow felt like both.
The chanting ceased. She took a deep breath, and then it was happening. The nano’swarm flew at her heart. She felt the pain, then the cold. She fell.
Andra heard the beginning of the crowd’s cheers just as she slipped into stasis.
PART FIVE
GODDESS IN THE MACHINE
Memories, once recorded over, may not be recovered.
Goddess in the Machine Page 34