Cruz chuckled and patted her on the back awkwardly. “I’m fine. It was just . . . I’m fine. Help me up?”
She pulled back but didn’t let go of him, dragging him to his feet. He stood clumsily, like a newborn colt, legs shaking beneath him.
“This is . . . weird,” he said, as she helped him back into his ’chair.
He took a huge breath, grinning like a fool, and put his hands out in front of him, taking them in as though he’d never seen them before. They shook as hard as his legs had.
“Well, I look like I’m okay,” he said, his voice gaining strength. He laughed to himself, then seemed to remember something. “But how do we know that it worked?”
Andra shook her head, holding back nervous laughter. She’d almost killed him, and he was acting as though she’d given him superpowers.
“I mean, short of throwing you into a pocket, I don’t know that we can know it worked. We just have to hope that if we ever get in a situation where a pocket is around, that you’ll be safe.”
Cruz’s eyes flicked to the mini’dome. “We can test it.”
Andra followed his line of sight. “No. No no no no. We’re not letting that thing lose. You just almost died because you let yourself upload experimental tech, and now you want to expose yourself to the deadliest tech on the planet? Even if it doesn’t destroy you, it could destroy everyone in this city! Everyone at LAC!”
Cruz’s eyes were alight with amusement. “You got it in there. I’m sure you can do it again.”
Andra swallowed. “It’s different. I don’t reck . . .”
But she did. She knew she could do this. She’d done it before. With Maret. At the Lake. She was in control. She was AI.
Let it free, the voice in her head whispered.
She hesitated, feeling the shiver up her spine. If she let the pocket out and lost control—even for a moment—it could destroy everything. The work’station, Andra’s cot, the piles of tech and discarded clothes. The walls around her. Rashmi, next door. Lilibet, down the hall. It could spread throughout the Vaults, travel through the underground, into the Schism. Take out Eerensed.
But—
This was the only way to know if the anomalizer truly worked. To know for sure if upgrading the colonists’ tech was the right next step.
“Fine.” Andra pushed her sleeves up her arms. “Let’s do this.”
Cruz stood and shook out his limbs, now much more steady and sure. His muscles were tense, but there was an untamed glee in his eyes. He’d always been adventurous in his education, always would push the envelope to learn a little bit more. But this was ridiculous.
“Ready?” Andra asked, her nanos reaching out to the mini’dome.
Cruz nodded.
She lowered the sphere.
The pocket didn’t even hesitate before springing free and shooting toward Cruz.
Andra flinched, reaching out with her mind, gathering all the nanos in the room to her, to envelope the corrupted nanos, ready to neutralize them if need be.
But it wasn’t necessary. As soon as the pocket hit Cruz, it split, rushing past as though he were a rock in a stream. Andra’s eyes widened, and for a second she lost concentration.
“Shit!”
The pocket swallowed her ergo’chair, disappearing it in an instant. It moved on, leaving nothing but less than atoms, scattered in the air. It dove for Andra’s cot next.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
“Focus, Andra,” Cruz said.
She closed her eyes, relieving herself of the distraction of what she could see, and focused solely on what she could feel. Just like that day in the throne room, she could sense the corrupted tech. She felt akin to it, like she could make it an extension of herself, and she did. She wasn’t trying to control the pocket; she was the pocket.
She was the pocket and she wanted to destroy.
destroydestroydestroydestroydestroyNo!
No, she didn’t want to destroy, she wanted to return to the ’dome. To gather all the minuscule pieces of herself and huddle in the safety of the mini’dome. A paperweight on someone’s desk. That’s what she wanted. Simplicity. To be a novelty.
She no longer needed to convince the pocket, but herself. To tamp down that urge to destroy. To be trapped instead.
No, not to be trapped.
To be safe.
To rest.
Not a prison. Protection.
All the pieces of herself gathered and swarmed into the ’dome, sighing as the sphere closed around it.
Home.
//
Home.
“Andra!”
Her eyes flew open as she dove back into her own consciousness.
She was Andra.
She was a pocket.
No.
Remember who you are.
She was Andromeda Yue Watts.
Andra. Andra.
Teenager turned goddess turned AI. She was intelligent and kind and sarcastic. She liked fruit and the color yellow and daisies. She got butterflies in her stomach when boys winked at her. Especially Zhade.
She was herself.
But something inside her felt lost.
Cruz was staring at her, still grinning.
She stared back, breathing heavily.
“Well.” Cruz gestured to the pocket, now back in the ’dome, then gestured to himself, hale and whole. “I guess it worked.”
He stood, his eyes wide and gleaming. There was something about him Andra couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.
Cruz beamed. “Never better.”
PART THREE
LAKE OF FIRE
01000010 01110101 01110010 01101110 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110101 01101110 01110100 01101001 01101100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100110 01110100 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01100001 01110011 01101000 00101110
—Message broadcast in the Wastes surrounding Eerensed, reception unknown
TWENTY-ONE
00110010 00110001
“We should start upgrading right away.”
Cruz circled the meeting table in Andra’s room, holding a tablet in one hand, the ’displays flipping so fast it made Andra’s sight blur. Ever since his upgrade, not only had he been immune to the pocket, but his ’implant worked better, faster. He could interface with almost anything in the Vaults with a thought.
Lilibet watched, concern written on her face. She’d shown up shortly after Cruz’s ’implant had been converted, asking if Andra had seen Kiv recently. Then she’d stayed to ask Cruz all sorts of questions about life a thousand years ago, and what Andra was like before stasis. Cruz answered as best he could, and even asked Lilibet questions in return. But he was obviously distracted by their discovery about the upgrade.
Lilibet was excited to hear about the new magic too. At first.
Like Cruz, she was looking at a holo’display, but unlike Cruz, she was flipping through the code slowly with her finger. Andra wondered if she should fit Lilibet with an ’implant so she could interact with the data as easily as Cruz.
“I don’t reck this isn’t bad magic,” she said. “The stitches seem . . . confusing.”
Cruz smiled, a patronizing look Andra had never seen on him before. It wasn’t that he’d been mean to Lilibet; quite the opposite. He seemed fascinated to meet one of the descendants of the humans that had survived. But it was obvious that despite her being born nearly a thousand years after him, he saw her as primitive.
It annoyed Andra, and at first, she was convinced that the Cruz she’d known would never act so superior. But hadn’t Andra acted the same
way when she first awoke? Hadn’t she looked down on the Eerensedians’ culture? Cruz would have to learn, just like Andra, that just because they did things differently, it didn’t make their way wrong.
“Of course it seems confusing,” Cruz said, condescending smile still tacked to his face. “But that’s only because there’s a lot of code. Once the upgrades are done, we can go over it together, if that’s something you’re interested in.”
“Neg, I purpose . . .” Lilibet said, still biting her lip.
“What is it, Lilibet?” Andra asked.
“It’s mereish . . . when I do stitches and make a mistake, I return to the mistake and redo it. But I sole return as far as the mistake. This ’ppears to tear up the full pattern and restitch it. From scratchings.”
Andra nodded. “Cruz and I talked about that. It’s based off of a code that does that, but it doesn’t actually wipe everything. It just . . . invades everything? Invades sounds really negative, but it’s not in this case, I promise.”
“But that might be why it nearish killed Cruz.” Lilibet struggled with his name, trying to fit in the Eerensedian /y/ before the [u] sound and getting tangled with the /r/. “It . . . took all the stitches away for a moment, and maybe it shocked him. Likeish dunkings in the River Sed in midnight. Maybe there happens a better march for this. I could—”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Cruz said, but it was clear he only understood about half of what Lilibet had said. “People can undergo a little bit of a shock to their system if it means they’re immune to the anomalies.”
“But what if you were just lucky?” Andra asked. “What if their trust wavers for just a moment, and the full update doesn’t go through and they don’t come back?”
Cruz nodded, thinking for a moment. “It’s not so much you they have to trust. It’s the update. It’s unfortunate you have to be literally tied to this, since they don’t know you very well, if at all.” Cruz sighed, running his fingers through his curls, his mind still flipping through the data on his holo’display. “They have to see the procedure completed successfully several times. Then they’ll trust it.”
“How will we make sure that the first few times are successful?”
Cruz shrugged and met Andra’s eyes with a smile. “Easy,” he said, and Andra knew she wasn’t going to like what he said next. “We start with the people who trust you the most.”
* * *
“I still think this is a bad idea,” Andra said, following Cruz to her family’s tent. “They just found out that our entire relationship was a lie that my dead mother fed them. I doubt they trust anything about me.”
Cruz walked with his hands in his pockets, his stride long. “Familial relationships evolutionarily have a strong trust bond. Even when that trust is broken, it takes a lot to sever them completely.”
Andra ducked under a ’drone that zoomed toward them, heading for another part of the Icebox. “Is that one of the things you were supposed to teach Rashmi and me as our socialization technician?”
It took Andra a moment to realize Cruz was no longer walking beside her. He stood paused in the middle of the main aisle, the cavernous space seeming to swallow him, the cryo’tanks that still held colonists rising up around him. He wiped his hands on his pants as though they were sweating.
“Listen, Andra, I’m sorry. I remember—”
Andra waved away the apology. “No. I’m sorry. You were just doing your job.” She tilted her head. “And apparently doing it very well, seeing how attached I am to . . . our friendship.” She wanted to bring up the relationship he’d had with Rashmi, but she wasn’t sure she could handle talking about that right now. Besides, it would lead Cruz to ask questions about where the other AI was, and Rashmi had asked to be left alone. “Why aren’t you calling me Andie? Why Andra all of a sudden?”
The worried lines on Cruz’s face vanished, replaced by a mischievous smile. “I thought you hated being called Andie. But I can, if you want.”
Andra crossed her hands in front of her. “No, no, no. I’m glad you’ve finally seen reason.”
She gave Cruz a faint smile.
“Watch out!” a high voice said, and Andra ducked instinctively, sensing the ’drone heading right for her.
She and Cruz hit the floor just as it zoomed overhead, ruffling their hair.
“Sorry,” Oz said, holo’control bouncing wildly in his hand as he ran toward them. “Sorry, I didn’t see you. But I’m getting better, aren’t I?”
The ’drone came to rest in his hand, and a huge smile spread across his face. Cruz helped Andra to her feet.
“You are getting better,” Andra said. “Last time, you didn’t apologize for hitting me.”
Oz rolled his eyes and bumped into Andra in some semblance of a hug. “Where have you been? Dad said you needed time to yourself, like when you used to stay in your room all day. But I’m bored, and Dad said we can’t wake my friends yet.”
Andra ruffled his hair. “You could play with the kids who are already awake.”
Oz wrinkled his nose. “They smell like synth.”
“So do you.” Andra kissed the top of his head.
“Do not!” Oz said, and started running toward the family’s tent. “Race me!” he called over his shoulder. “Come see the fort I made!”
Andra followed at a normal pace, and Oz ran down the main aisle toward the tent city.
Cruz chuckled. “We could always upgrade him first.”
Andra froze, heart plummeting. “No.”
He frowned. “Why not? He trusts you completely. The upgrade would go smoothly.”
“Even if it did, I’m not putting him through that if I don’t have to. You . . . you looked like you were dead, Cruz. And before, you were in so much pain. And Ophele . . . No, we’re not upgrading Oz.”
Cruz was quiet for a moment.
“We’ll have to eventually,” he said softly.
Andra gave him a smile she didn’t feel. “Maybe by then we’ll have an easier way to do this.”
“And if we don’t?” Cruz took Andra’s hand. “Griffin is the smartest person ever to live. If there was a way to do this without it hurting, she would have thought of it. Look, maybe you’d be saving him a little pain, but he wouldn’t be safe from the anomalies.”
Andra looked away. “He’s safe down here.”
“For now,” Cruz said.
Andra didn’t respond, just extricated her hand from his grasp and headed toward her tent.
After a moment, Cruz sighed and followed.
When they arrived, Andra’s dad was sitting on his cot in his old professor clothes, replete with patched elbows. There was stubble on his head and chin, and he stood as soon as he saw Andra. Before she could say a single word, he wrapped her into his arms.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice shaking, and she was surprised to realize he was weeping.
Her father was prone to crying. It didn’t matter what, whether it was a moving sim or a holiday ad or when he would lecture about the postal raids of 2103. He expressed his emotions freely and often, so they never overtook him, never overwhelmed him.
But now he seemed to be amazingly and thoroughly overwhelmed.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said through racking sobs, his tears tangling in Andra’s hair. “I love you.”
She let her arms go around him and patted him on the back.
“It’s okay, Dad. It was a shock, and finding out about Mom—”
“No.” Auric pulled away, cupping her face in his hands. “It’s not okay. No matter what. You are my daughter. And nothing—nothing—will ever change that. Remember that.”
Andra nodded, the back of her throat closing and tears stinging her eyes. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d needed to hear those words.
“Thank you, Dad,” she choked out. “I love you too.”
She buried her face in his chest, and together they cried.
* * *
Andra didn’t know how long they stood like that, but when she finally pulled away from her dad, she noticed that Cruz was a few meters away laughing with Oz. Acadia was nowhere to be found, as usual.
“So what’s this again?” Auric asked, twirling the anomalizer in his hand. It twinkled darkly in the dim light of the tent.
“It’s just like . . . an upgrade tool, but for our—your ’implants. Griffin figured out a way to adapt your tech to help you survive . . . an atmospheric anomaly on the surface.”
“So why do you want me to go first?”
“Well, because it requires . . . trust.” Andra bit her lip. She was asking her father to trust her, but she wasn’t being completely truthful with him. About the manner of her mother’s death. About where and when they were. About the full reason they needed the upgrade.
“Trust?”
She scratched behind her ear. “Yeah, I guess the ’implant is too entuned to your neural pathways, and . . . we tried it on one of the LAC scientists. She didn’t know me, and . . . well, it was a miracle she survived.” Andra’s chest tightened. “Then Cruz figured out that the neural connections on the trust pathways had to remain open during the upgrade, or else the—”
Auric waved his hand. “None of that technical stuff, I get enough of that with your mother.” He looked away. “Or I did.”
Andra blinked back tears. “I, um, I tried the procedure on Cruz. He knows me and trusts me, and trusts Griffin’s tech. It worked fine on him. He thought if the people could see it work a few times, they would trust the tech, and we could do the upgrade on all the scientists.”
Auric nodded. “Of course. I’m ready whenever you are.”
Andra put a hand on his arm. “It’s not that simple, Dad. It . . . it’s going to hurt. A lot. It doesn’t just shut down your ’implant, it shuts down your brain. Just for a moment. I know you just woke up, and Mom, and then there’s what I am—”
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