“Third One?” Rashmi asked.
Lilibet darted to her side.
All Andra could do was shake her head. “I . . . I’m a . . . I was . . .”
But she couldn’t say it. Couldn’t tell them that this body wasn’t hers.
She’d known it was a possibility, but she hadn’t let herself think about it. And when she’d seen all the cloned bodies Griffin kept, Andra had secretly hoped that’s what she was. But she wasn’t an AI in a cloned body. She was an AI in a stolen body.
She pushed Rashmi and Lilibet away and clicked on the next memory.
It bloomed around her.
She had tried re-creating what Alberta had done. She wanted to understand her daughter. But she couldn’t create True AI—like Andra. The best she could do was a standard AI—artificial intelligence in a robot body. It didn’t help her understand Andra at all. Instead, it helped her understand herself.
She was never completely sure she’d done the right thing. Andromeda wasn’t the child she’d given birth to. That child had died. And replacing her now felt wrong. But Andromeda was Isla’s daughter in her own right, and if she hadn’t agreed to Alberta’s idea, she would have never known Andromeda.
Could a decision be both wrong and right?
Whatever the answer, Isla never wanted her daughter to discover what she was. She was a gentle, sensitive child who felt out of place already, and it would destroy her. She was becoming dangerously close to discovering her identity though, as she grew closer to the standard AI Isla had created.
So Isla tried to dismantle it, but it fought back, giving her a scar she would bear for the rest of her life. Andromeda had cried for days.
“It’s just an AI,” Isla had told her. “Not quite human.”
Not like you, she’d meant. You’re human. So you can’t be AI.
Andra was crying. Vaguely, she felt Lilibet and Rashmi surrounding her, patting her back, holding her hand. But she couldn’t stop. She opened the next memory.
Alberta woke her, told her nine hundred years had passed and only a fraction of humanity was in stasis. The rest had lived through hell, their descendants forced to survive a destroyed Earth. Alberta was living among some of those descendants. She had a child now.
“Is he a human?” Isla had asked. “Or did you create another AI?”
Alberta shrugged. “He was born biologically. But he’s mine, so who’s to say? Probably a little bit of both.”
He’s mine, so who’s to say?
That was when Isla realized what Alberta was.
Artificial intelligence.
It took very little digging to discover Alberta’s real plans: to replace humanity with AI.
“I’m saving humanity!” Alberta argued when Isla confronted her about it. “Me, Rashmi, your daughter, we’ll be the first in a new species of human!”
Isla was good at training her face, but she couldn’t stop the fear she felt.
Alberta’s offer to create Andromeda hadn’t been out of sympathy for a grieving mother. And there was no grand plan to save humanity. There was only a plan to become humanity. To restart the human race with artificial consciousness.
Only, that would require getting rid of humanity completely. A failed experiment. A trial gone wrong.
“AI have all the intelligence of humanity without the baggage,” Alberta had said. “Without the anger and hate and fighting. AI are the best of humanity. And better than humanity. A new humanity.”
Isla had done her best to smile and pretend like she understood. Like she agreed. But after, she’d sneaked into the city where Alberta lived. The one where she was apparently worshipped as a goddess. First, she set up a firewall on the LAC annex to protect the colonists. If Griffin ever tried to wake even one of them, two things would happen. One: all the colonists would wake. There was strength in numbers. And two: a tech shield would cover the entire city, searching for and destroying Alberta’s tech signature.
Then she stole her daughter’s cryo’tank and hid it in a remote village a few miles east.
“I love you,” she said to her sleeping daughter. “And I’m sorry. For everything. Remember who you are. Learn, adapt. Survive, and then live a life worth choosing. That’s what it truly means to be human. To decide your fate, as those Eerensedians say.”
As she prepared to upload a few of her most precious memories into her daughter’s brain, Isla wept.
Andra rushed back into herself, falling to the ground, her body wracked with heavy sobs.
Her mother . . .
Her mother had loved her. Had saved her. Griffin had woken Isla thinking she would help her overtake humanity simply because her daughter was AI. But Isla had chosen to fight instead. To hide Andra. To tell her the truth.
Andra didn’t know what happened after that last memory, but she was suddenly certain that it hadn’t been desert pirates that had killed Isla Watts.
“Are you evens, Andra?” Lilibet asked. “What can we do? Are you evens?”
Andra sucked in a ragged breath. She wiped away her tears.
Her mother had saved her. Told her to remember who she was, decide her fate. That was the only way to be human.
But Andra wasn’t just human. And it would take all of her to finish what her mother had started and save humanity.
She stood, shakily, and nodded her thanks to Rashmi and Lilibet.
“I’m evens,” she said. “And I have a plan.”
FORTY
00110100 00110000
“Sorries, you want to do what anow?” Skilla asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
It hadn’t been easy to get Skilla into the Vaults. They’d used the ’bot that had helped carry Zhade back from the palace to widen the passage Doon had taken. But it was still only big enough for one person at a time, and terribly unstable. Andra was sure one wrong step would bring the whole palace down on top of them.
Skilla had managed to crawl her way in though, and now she sat across from Andra, leaning back in her chair, fingers steepled in front of her. Lilibet stared at a tablet in front of her, flipping through files of the Vaults’ schematics. Xana was watching Dzeni bounce Dehgo on her knee, and Rashmi was curled in on herself, humming. Several holo’displays rose from the table in the middle of Andra’s room, one showing blueprints of the Vaults and the surrounding tunnel system, another displaying the palace, yet another the pocket outside the city.
“I want to convert the pocket to our side,” Andra said.
Xana and Dzeni shared a glance. Rashmi winced. Lilibet didn’t look up from her tablet.
“You want,” Skilla said slowly, “to take the magic that has destroyed the Hell-mouth, terrorized the Wastes, and forced us to live inside a magic bubble, and what? Turn it good?”
Andra stuck out her bottom lip. “I mean, technically, they were never evil. They were just following a code of amoral values which happened to demand that they destroy everything they touch, but other than that, yeah . . . I want to turn them good.”
Skilla raised a single eyebrow. “Is this because of the pocket pet you used to have? Where is it anyway?”
Andra hesitated, biting her lip. “It’s . . . inside me.” She grimaced.
Xana jumped into motion, stepping in front of Dzeni and Dehgo. In one swift movement, Skilla pulled the battle-ax from her back holster.
“Get out of her, Devil,” Skilla sneered.
Andra rolled her eyes. “That’s not . . . I’m not possessed. This is me talking. Right now. It’s Andra. I just kind of . . . absorbed and assimilated the pocket. Or, it chose to be assimilated, I guess.”
“What the sands are you convoing?” Xana asked.
Andra told them about her near death at the hands of one of the Guv’s guard. About the pocket coming to her aid, saving her by allowing themselves to be converted to healing tech. That the nanos fr
om the pocket still lived inside her, as part of her, because they had decided their fate, instead of following their programming. They could be given sentience, by giving them a choice.
Everyone but Rashmi, who was now curled tightly against Lilibet’s side, stared blankly at her.
“I don’t like this,” Skilla said. “If the pocket can transform itself into healing magic, what’s stopping it from transforming itself right back?”
Technically, the pocket inside Andra had changed back, briefly, but Andra didn’t want to tell them about how she’d used it to destroy Cruz’s body. But even after using the nanos in that way, they had immediately reverted back to their healing protocols.
“I don’t think the nanos want to change back. I think they like their new role.” Andra shrugged. “As much as nanos can like anything.”
Skilla picked up the tablet projecting a ’display of the pocket and opened her mouth, probably to argue some more, but Xana cut her off, modded eye zeroing in on Andra. “How would you do this exactish?”
Andra sighed. “So, cards on the screen, this is all banking on the gamble that my AI nanos have stronger programming than the pocket nanos. Which, you know . . . maybe? I’ve been converting nanos this whole time, whenever I need to replenish them, but this would be on a much larger scale. When I was injured, my nanos’ need for healing outweighed the pocket’s need for destruction, so the pocket was able to be converted.”
“You aren’t going to injure yourself again, are you?” Lilibet asked, finally looking up from her tablet.
Andra pointed at her. “Good question, and hell no. I’ve been stabbed enough to last a lifetime. But Griffin created the pockets accidentally by trying to create more AI. So, since AI tech and pocket tech are similar, as long as my code is stronger, I should be able to override the pocket protocols and convert them to my own tech. I can send a command to the pocket that should override its programming to destroy everything, and replace that with a directive to only destroy the AI.”
“You’re going to kill them?” Rashmi whispered, white hair falling into her face.
She didn’t want to kill the AI. They couldn’t help what they were, hadn’t asked to be given sentience. But as long as they followed Griffin’s plan to overtake humanity, they were a threat.
“I . . . only if I have to. I’m going to give them a choice.”
“A choice?” Lilibet asked.
Andra nodded. “If they really want to be human, then they have to decide their fates. They can either stand down and live with humans, or they’ll be destroyed.”
“And how would you destroy them?” Xana asked.
“By letting the pocket assimilate them by force.”
Lilibet frowned. “So, they’d become part of this . . . big benevolent pocket you created?”
“That won’t work.” Skilla scowled, shifting forward in her chair. “You told us yourself that AI are immune to pockets. They can’t be destroyed by them.”
Andra pursed her lips. “Theoretically, the pockets choose not to destroy AI, because AI and pockets have such similar tech signatures that the pockets believe they’re the same. Think about it. There has to be a limit to the pockets’ destructive instinct, otherwise they would have destroyed each other and gone extinct centuries ago. It’s a choice they make not to destroy themselves. And I’m guessing they can choose the opposite, especially if they become . . . a part of me.”
“You’re guessing?” Xana asked. “Theoreticish?” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Evens, this plan happens full bars bad magic.”
“No, her theory is sound,” Rashmi said, her eyes growing clearer. “If the nanos of the pockets become hers, she can convince them to change their protocols, if her programming is stronger. But I’m sensing a complication.”
Andra nodded. “Yeah . . . in order to strengthen my code, this is going to require . . . a lot of power. I mean. A lot. More than I have. When I was injured, my nanos’ call-for-help program was amplified by the dire need to address my wounds. But that wouldn’t be enough to convert the entire pocket at the city’s edge. So I’m going to have to borrow the amplification. And the only thing with enough energy—”
“Is the rocket,” Rashmi finished.
Andra nodded, then blinked, and shook her head. “Well, yeah, the rocket, if I want to fry my brain. That would overpower me in a second. I was thinking of the ’dome.”
“Oh,” Rashmi whispered. “That makes more sense.”
Dzeni sat forward, Dehgo asleep on her shoulder. “And let me do some guessing. It won’t be as easy as mereish sneaking you to the gods’ dome ring.”
“Nope.” Andra let the P pop. “Because geniuses that we were, we constructed a remote ’dome hub inside of the palace cathedzal.”
Xana lifted an eyebrow. “We?”
“I,” Andra corrected. “I was the genius that put the controls in the palace. But the power in the ’dome should be able to amplify my tech signature to reach the pocket and convert it.”
Skilla groaned, tossing aside her tablet. “This is the best plan you could imagine? Are you mereish going to run for it and hope you get there before you’re caught?”
Andra picked at one of her fingernails. “Well, we can use the passage that goes up to the First’s suite, but it’s really unsteady right now, so only a few of us can go. And then there’s the problem of getting to the passage, so I’m going to need a distraction.”
Skilla huffed out a laugh. “The Schism.”
Andra nodded.
Skilla crossed her arms. “Soze, we no longer need the rocket, but we do need . . . a militia.”
Andra bit her lip. “Yeah, so . . . good call on that.” She gave her a thumbs-up.
Skilla shook her head and scowled again.
Andra hesitated. “There is . . . a problem with my plan.”
The general’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, one problem!”
“There are . . . three full sets of memories inside me. Mine, Griffin’s, and Rashmi’s. Well, the memories of the person Rashmi used to be. For an AI—well, for anyone really—our experiences, our memories of those experiences, shape who we are. I am me because of my memories. I’m not Griffin or Rashmi because . . . those memories that I have of their experiences are . . . filed in a dormant part of my consciousness.”
Rashmi looked up from Lilibet’s shoulder, already understanding where this was going. “No,” she whispered.
Andra grimaced. “This jolt of energy. It’s going to . . . send me into a state . . . Well, I’m going to be more AI than human. Like when I removed the Crown or took out Maret. No parts of my brain will be dormant. I’ll have unfettered access to everything stored in my matrices, including Griffin’s memories and Rashmi’s memories. They will . . . become my memories. My experiences. I’ll be just as much them as me. Their truths will be my truth, and with all that power coursing through me . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know who will be walking out of that room.”
Xana sat forward. “What?”
“It may be me. Or, it may not be. I might be the old Rashmi, with her . . . inhumane tendancies. Or I might be Griffin and want to use all of your bodies as hosts for AI. I could be all three. I . . . I really don’t know. So, Skilla, you need to be there, and you need to be ready to kill me.”
Skilla blinked and let out a laugh without humor. “Soze, let me full comp. Firstish, you’ll use our militia as a distraction soze you can sneak out through the tunnel that may or may not collapse at any tick. Then, you’ll sneak into the palace and mereish hope you don’t get caught by Meta, who is wearing the Crown and working for Griffin. Then, you’ll use the power of the gods’ dome to amplify your magic to overpower the magic of the pocket and convince it to take out the gods. And if it doesn’t kill you, we may have to because you may come back as a murderous demon.”
“Uh . . . Yeah, that�
��s . . . that’s basically it.” Andra put away all the grief and pain from the last few days and summoned all the enthusiasm she could muster. “All right, who’s with me?”
FORTY-ONE
THE RUNAWAY
Zhade couldn’t sleep.
In the cell with his brother, he passed bells beating back the thoughts in his head that weren’t his own. He was filled with memories that he recked he’d never experienced but felt too real to him. Each wearer of the Crown had filled it with their own hate and despair, and those feelings increased with each bearer, a magical feedback loop of emotions that Zhade had never felt before.
He heard Maret moving round the cell. It was against his instinct to have his back turned to his brother, but something told him he wouldn’t attack. He too had the remnants of the Crown’s poison in his head. Zhade had never felt the familial tie that bonded them, but now they were connected by something greater. They were both sons of the Crown.
He couldn’t let this happen. Couldn’t let it take him over. This wasn’t him. This despair. This hate. He was Zhade. He was certz of himself. He liked to laugh. Firm, to hide his fear, but he also mereish liked to feel joy. He never gave up. He lived four years adesert with his best friend, looking for the Goddess. He’d found her.
Then he’d manipulated her, hurt her, betrayed her, destroyed Eerensed, abused his position of power. The guilt was unbearable, but Andra was right. He wasn’t allowed to mereish give up. He had to at the least try to atone for all he’d done.
He had to have memory of who he was.
He was in love with a goddess. She was kind and caring and charred and brill, and he wasn’t full good for her, but he wanted to try.
Before, that had purposed becoming a better person. Now, that purposed finding a way to rid himself of the darkness inside him, the darkness that didn’t belong to him.
He was Zhade.
He was Zhade.
He was Zhade.
The sound of a door sliding open jerked Zhade out of his trance. He lifted himself out of bed to see who their visitor was.
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