Devil in the Device

by Lora Beth Johnson

  Where she’d killed them all.

  Daphle Hanson, who’d brought her fudge.

  Brooker Jackson, who had three children under five.

  Andra’s father.

  She’d killed him. All of them. And replaced them with AI.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered, her voice rough, and she realized there were tears streaming down her face, though her entire being had gone numb.

  Rashmi curled in the corner farthest from Cruz, chanting to herself. “My memories are real. My memories are real. My memories are real.”

  Andra wanted to snap at Rashmi to shut up. What did her stupid memories matter when Andra had killed hundreds of people, and they were surrounded by murderous AI, the blood of one of their comrades painting the lab around her?

  Andra was jolted by a knocking sound.

  Her heartrate skyrocketed, her palms sweating as she looked around the room for a weapon. The knocking came again. Followed by a whimper.

  It was coming from the cabinet Cruz had slammed as she’d walked in.

  Andra took a single deep breath, steadying herself, then whipped around, locked the door, and strode across the lab. She stepped carefully over the body and blood, and opened the cabinet.

  A woman looked up at her, large black eyes filled with tears, blood streaked across her face.

  Ophele.

  Ophele, who Andra thought was still in a coma, but here she was, hands bound in ’cuffs and a gag around her mouth.

  Andra reached down, hurrying to untie her, and pulled off the gag.

  “He’s AI,” Ophele said, voice shaking. “I don’t know how, but he’s AI. I woke up, and he brought me here, and he said he was going to experiment on me.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Andra muttered, pulling Ophele out of the cabinet and helping her onto the ergo’stool Cruz had just sat in.

  When Ophele saw Cruz’s body, she merely stared blankly.

  “It wasn’t him,” she said, her voice flat.

  Andra swallowed. No, it wasn’t. Cruz had already been dead for some time. Apparently by Andra’s hand.

  There was a knock on the lab door.

  Ophele opened her mouth, but Andra shushed her.

  “They’re all AI,” Andra hissed.

  Ophele’s eyes widened.

  There was another knock, this time more insistent.

  Shit.

  Shit shit shit.

  There was no help to find, no one to tell her what to do. Almost every single person in the Icebox—except for the children, thank god—was an AI.

  The knocking turned into pounding.

  Andra sent a message to Rashmi through their neural connection to be quiet. Her chanting stopped, but her whimpering didn’t.

  Andra wiped the tears from her eyes, took three deep breaths, and stepped over Cruz’s body again. She slipped on his blood, shoe squeaking, but she caught herself on the lab table.

  The knocking came again, but this time Andra opened the door. Just a crack.

  Cristin Myrh was on the other side, her eyes narrowed. Cristin, who had never liked Andra, and made it known as often as possible.

  “Everything all right in there?”

  “Yup,” Andra said. Her heart pounded. “Did you need something?”

  Cristin tilted her head, trying to get a look inside. “I thought I heard a crash.”

  “Oh, yeah, that.” Andra swallowed. “I dropped some chemicals on the floor.”

  “What chemicals?”

  “Dunno,” Andra said. God, why couldn’t she think of the names of any chemicals? “So, it’s too dangerous to come in now, sorry. I’ll get it cleaned up right away. Come back later.”

  She started to shut the door, but Cristin pushed her way past Andra.

  The scientist took in the blood-spattered floor, her decapitated co-worker, Rashmi curled into a ball in the corner, and Ophele crying. Andra held her breath.

  Cristin turned and shut the door, locking it behind her.

  “You have thirty seconds to explain,” she snarled.

  “It was an accident.”

  “That”—Cristin jabbed a finger at Cruz’s body—“is no accident.”

  “I . . .” Andra was coming up short. There was no way to explain this. No way to get out of this, to lie to an AI in Cristin’s body.

  Cristin.

  Who hated Andra.

  Who . . . didn’t trust her.

  Andra cocked her head, narrowed her eyes. “You’re not one of them, are you?”

  “One of who?”

  “I did the procedure on you,” Andra said. “Didn’t I? I thought—”

  Cristin grabbed Andra by the lapels and shoved her against the wall. Ophele let out a brief scream. Rashmi kept muttering to herself.

  “I hacked into the system,” Cristin growled. “Added my name to the list of the upgraded. There was no way I was getting that procedure done. Now I see I was right. What did you do to them?”

  “I didn’t know!” Andra cried.

  Cristin shoved Andra into the wall harder. “Thirty seconds. Now!”

  Andra explained as best as she could, but she was still so confused on so many things. She knew that Griffin’s clone sent her back to Eerensed with a device that was supposed to protect the colonists from pockets but actually converted them to AI. There was no Holymyth, no plan to escape the planet. Only a plan to replace all the LAC scientists with artificial intelligence. A plan they’d just realized two seconds ago.

  When Andra was finished explaining, Cristin let her go.

  Andra didn’t dare move as Cristin started pacing. “Jesus,” she kept muttering over and over, rubbing a hand over her face. “Jesus.”

  Ophele stood staring at the pool of blood on the floor.

  “I knew it wasn’t Cruz,” she said.

  “So this is Cruz’s body?” Cristin asked. “But you didn’t actually kill Cruz.”

  Andra swallowed, tears threatening to spill over. “I killed him weeks ago when I did the upgrade. Rashmi killed the AI that was using his body.”

  Ophele’s gaze flicked over to Rashmi. She was now standing in the corner, eyes resolutely on the ceiling, as though she couldn’t handle the sight of what she’d done. The cleaver was still in her hand, drenched in blood.

  “No,” Ophele said, eyes moving from Cruz’s body to the work’-station. “She didn’t.”

  Andra swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “AI are made up of nanos, right?” Ophele nodded to the tech in the room. “And if a computer or ’bot or . . . AI goes offline, what happens to the nanos?”

  Andra groaned. “They disperse and go into the closest piece of tech.”

  Ophele nodded.

  “So he’s still in this room,” Cristin muttered. “Maybe somewhere in the work’station.”

  Ophele put a shaking hand to her temple. “I don’t know. This is all . . . theory at this point, but if his nanos survived what happened to his body, then they may have migrated elsewhere. He’s probably confused, disoriented, if he’s hanging on to sentience at all.”

  “He lied to me,” Rashmi whispered.

  “Okay,” Cristin said, still pacing. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Rashmi whispered back.

  Cristin pulled on her short blonde hair. “We’re surrounded by AI that want to kill us. They were going to do an experiment on Ophele. This was all on the orders of Griffin, who is still out there. And we’re probably trapped in this room with one of the AI consciousnesses.”

  Ophele nodded, calmly, and adjusted her hijab. “Let’s take this one step at a time. We have to work quickly. First we have to clean up this blood and get rid of the body.” She placed her hand over her eyes. “I can’t believe I just had to say that.”

  “Okay.” Andra let out one l
ast shaky breath. “I think I know how we can do this.”

  * * *

  Cleaning the blood was the easy part. The lab was stocked with standard sanitizing and emergency equipment. The body was a different story.

  If Andra let herself, she would break down from the trauma of it all, but she had to get Rashmi, Ophele, and Cristin out of here. Then she had to save all the children. Cruz had said something about how he’d figured out how to do the conversion without her, meaning the children weren’t safe. But before Andra could deal with anything else, she had to disappear a body.

  Oh god.

  “Stand back,” she told the others.

  Ophele led Rashmi to the other side of the room. Cristin took a deliberate step back. Andra gave Cruz’s body one last look, then closed her eyes.

  She usually reached outward, searching for tech she could interface with. But this time, she focused inward, sensing the trillions of nanos that made up her neural network. Andra thought about what Cruz had said—right before Rashmi killed him—that Andra had to embrace her AIness in order to access it. Andra didn’t think she was quite ready for that, especially given where the advice came from, but she would accept her AIness. Accept that the artificial part of her was just as much her as the human part was. Andra didn’t feel the light and knowledge that came with her AI state, but she did start to feel more connected with the nanos inside her. She could sense each of them, see their purpose and origin. If she concentrated hard enough, she could make out the difference between the nanos that were truly her, truly hers, and the nanos she’d picked up along the way. The data Rashmi had transferred to her. The memories from Dr. Griffin. And there, in her healing tech, was a pocket of nanos that was different than the others.

  Because they had been created to destroy.

  She called them forth, gathering them into a cloud outside of her body. Even with her eyes closed, she could see them. They were no longer the dark color of the corrupted tech of the pockets. Instead, they were the translucent glisten of the nanos inside her. They were different now, but they still remembered.

  Destroy, a voice inside her said, and she agreed.

  Destroy, she commanded the nanos.

  They hesitated. This was no longer their purpose. They were now meant to heal, not destroy. But they understood what they needed to do. And they followed Andra’s command and consumed the body of the boy on the floor before returning to their host.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Andra, Rashmi, Cristin, and Ophele left a pristine lab and walked through the tent city that was now a nest of AI, pretending to be the humans whose lives they’d stolen.

  “Act natural,” Andra whispered to Rashmi.

  “I don’t know how,” Rashmi whispered back, her blood-splattered clothes covered with a lab coat.

  “You both should leave,” Ophele said. “Cristin and I can handle this.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Cristin muttered.

  Andra flashed Ophele a look. “We’re not leaving you. Besides, you don’t know how to get to safety from here.”

  Ophele didn’t argue, and Andra realized it was because she was relieved. Even the adults in the room were scared.

  There were a cluster of classroom tents a few rows down. Of the fourteen hundred people who had woken, about seventy of them were children. They were distributed into four classes, so there were at least four teachers. All of which were now AI.

  “I’ll take the high school,” Ophele said. “Rashmi, can you handle the youngest ones?”

  Rashmi nodded timidly.

  “Ugh. I guess I’ll do older elementary,” Cristin said. “They better behave.”

  “And I have the middle grades,” Andra said. “Remember. Speak confidently. Walk calmly. Believe you know what you’re doing. People see what they want to see, unless you give them a reason otherwise.”

  Ophele nodded. Rashmi swallowed. Cristin scowled.

  “See you on the other side,” Andra said, and entered the middle grades tent.

  There were eighteen kids inside, sitting in rows of ’desks, and Andra zeroed in on the back of her brother’s head. The teacher paused, looking up from a holo displaying lecture notes about the postal raids of 2103.

  Apple cheeks, perfectly gelled hair. A professor jacket with elbow patches.

  Her father.

  Rather, the AI inside her father’s body.

  “Dad,” Andra breathed.

  Her father smiled an unfamiliar smile, and Andra didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it before. The person looking at her through her father’s eyes was definitely not her father.

  She swallowed. “Dad, I . . .”

  “Andromeda! Thanks for stopping by my classroom. Did you need to chat about something?”

  The tenor, the rhythm of the words were all her father, but now that she knew the truth, there was no escaping it. His smile was a little too forced, his voice a little too sharp. Her father was dead. She’d killed him. And his corpse was standing in front of her, animated by an AI she had placed there.

  “Andromeda?” her father asked, frowning.

  “Andra!” another voice said, and Oz popped up from his chair, running over to her and wrapping his arms around her.

  She had to get him out of here, had to get them all out of here. She pasted on a smile and looked into the eyes that had once belonged to her father.

  “Hi, Dad.” The words tasted bitter. “Cruz sent me to gather up all the children to start the tests for their upgrades.”

  The smile on her father’s face froze. “Did he? That’s surprising.”

  Andra cleared her throat. “Well, you know Cruz. He gets excited about things and wants to get started right away.”

  “Can it wait? We’re in the middle of a lesson.” He gestured to the holo’display, which cast his face in an eerie glow.

  Andra bit her lip. “Um, sorry, Dad, no. Cruz already has the equipment set up.”

  “Maybe I should talk with him. See if we can reschedule.”

  “He’s . . . really busy right now. I don’t think—”

  “Let me just check.” The AI reached for a tablet on a nearby desk.

  So quickly she almost didn’t realize she was doing it, Andra sent her nanos to disrupt the signal.

  Auric frowned, looking at the blank tablet. “That’s funny. Andra, can I see you outside?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Andra said through a forced smile.

  She bent down and kissed the top of Oz’s head.

  “Get everyone out of here,” she whispered into his hair. “Find Acadia.”

  She felt Oz nod against her.

  With a deep breath, she straightened and followed Auric out of the back tent flap.

  It was sheer luck that they couldn’t see where the other children were congregating from here. Fear and grief coursed through her as Auric turned toward her.

  “What are you doing, Andromeda?” he asked. It was a tone she’d never heard in her father’s voice before, forceful and demanding.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “It’s the upgrade. Just like we did for you.”

  Auric studied her. “You’ve been against upgrading Oz’s ’implant from the start. What changed your mind?”

  Andra took a steadying breath, sending herself into an icy calm. “Cruz told me the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  He was staring into her, and it took every bit of willpower not to shake and cry and run.

  “The truth about the upgrade.” Andra tried to stand taller. “I know. I know that you’re now AI, like me. And I know that Dr. Griffin is coming here soon, and she wants everyone converted before she arrives.” Andra swallowed. “Even the children.”

  The AI in Auric’s body stared at her for a moment, expression tense.

  Andra held her breath.

 
Then his mouth spread into a smile. He clasped Andra’s arm as though they were colleagues.

  “I’m so glad, Andromeda. I’m so glad you . . . understand. I was worried, but . . .” He let out a breath and looked directly into Andra’s eyes. “I know I’m not your father, and I would never want to replace him. But his memories—they’re still here. I can feel his love for you, how proud he was of you, especially at the end. Those feelings . . . they’re mine now.”

  Andra forced herself to smile. “I . . . thank you . . . It’s good to know . . . that there’s still a little piece of him left.” Her voice was barely audible.

  Auric laughed. “I’m just glad you approve. That you’ve finally joined us.”

  Andra’s smile hurt. “Well, I am one of you, after all.”

  * * *

  Andra didn’t release a breath until they were all back in the Vaults.

  Ophele started shepherding the children through the lobby. They were staring, gaping. Many of them had visited this place on school trips, and thought they’d left it behind for a different planet. They called questions to Ophele, who was just as in shock as they were.

  “What is going on, Andromeda?” a voice said.

  Andra turned to find her sister, a scowl painted on her face. Acadia was one of the few adults not converted to AI. The reason being she didn’t trust Andra, so Andra was scared the process wouldn’t work. Thank god for Acadia’s bitchiness.

  “It’s a long story,” Andra said. “I promise I’ll explain, but I have some things to do first.”

  “Are we in danger?” Oz asked, appearing at her side and slipping his hand into hers.

  Andra thought about denying it, but Rashmi and Lilibet were working to barricade the entrance to the Vaults behind her, the lobby echoing with the sound of furniture scraping across the floor, and lit by the glow of security holos.

  “Yes,” Andra answered. “We are.”

  “Where’s Dad?” Oz asked. “Why couldn’t he come? Is it a body-snatchers situation?”

  Andra shook her head, letting out a hysterical laugh. “Actually, yeah. It is kind of like that. And I promise, Ophele will explain everything, but you have to go with her right now.”