I shouldn’t even have been there, out in the city. I would never have been there if I hadn’t been trying to find B.
What’s left of my nervous laughter shrivels up and dies. Jessa’s stops too, fast, when she catches sight of me.
“What is it?”
“You still haven’t heard from B,” I say.
Jessa shakes her head slowly. “I guess she backed out on us. It sucks, but I mean…” She shrugs. “We keep even a tenth of these new subscribers, we’ll probably do okay without her.”
“Yeah. Um. Jessa, about that—”
Rustling from the bunk below. “Oh my god.” My bunk gives a violent shake as Suresh sits up fast. “Oh my god.” His head pokes out, angled up at my bunk. “Mal. This video that’s all over the news. This is yours?”
“Yeah, it is,” Jessa says.
“I, um. I kind of had something of a day.”
“No shit. Wait. Is that 06?”
I nod.
“The real one?”
“Yeah.”
“Give it a second,” Jessa says. “You know 06 doesn’t work alone.”
Suresh’s playthrough of the footage seems to have reached that point already. “Oh no. Oh no. No fucking way. You got both of them?”
“Correction,” Jessa says. “She worked with both of them. Watch on, my friend. All will be made clear in the fullness of time.”
The others are waking up now, whether from their alarms or the general increased noise level of the room. Within a few minutes they all know. I get mobbed, congratulated, fussed over. Tegan sits me down in the only chair while Talya starts a full pot of coffee with Jessa’s water account, and everybody grills me for details while they get ready for work. Was I scared? What made me go back for those people? What are 06 and 22 like in real life? Was 08 there? Et cetera.
I answer as best as I can, which is probably not very. Yes, I was scared. I don’t know what made me go back for them, except that I had time to and nobody else was and they reminded me of when my building came down when I was a kid. (They all nod at that part, knowingly.) No, 08 was not there. 06 and 22 are…
This one gives me pause. “A lot like how they are in-game, really,” I lie. It’s simpler than trying to explain all the things they said and did that I don’t even understand, and I’ve been replaying it all in my head pretty much nonstop since it happened, turning each moment over and over like a puzzle piece I can’t figure out what fits to.
It comes to me that I’m not thinking of 06 and 22 as biotech anymore. That I haven’t done that in a while.
Jessa, actual saint, does not breathe a word about the second video file. I glance at the charging station, where she’s got the panel hooked up already. I reach over, remove the drive, and pocket it. Beyond what’s on my implant, the only physical copy of that second file is on that drive. I’m not letting it out of my sight.
Gradually, one by one, the others start to clear out for work, chores, errands, and so on. I have three back-to-back dog-walking days starting tomorrow, but today my schedule is pretty empty.
Jessa doesn’t work until the afternoon, so we grab breakfast real quick and head up to the gardens. Today’s my turn to pick up produce rations for the room, and I don’t think for an instant I’m done being questioned. Anyway, we have things to discuss. Details to hammer out. I check our page again right before we leave, and my video’s logged another eleven million views since I woke up. We’ve taken on another twenty-six hundred subscribers. More than we had, in total, yesterday. This is certifiably outrageous.
“What do we even do with this?” Jessa asks, like I have given her any reason to think I have enough experience with sudden internet fame to know the answer.
“Keep doing what we’re doing, I guess. Play the game.”
“But what about B? We just overhauled our whole strategy because she was paying us to. You haven’t seriously gone after the boards in like a week. And now she drops us. Do we keep doing the work she’s supposedly paying us for or don’t we?”
I sigh. I have to tell her. We’re partway up the next-to-last stairwell to the roof, so when we make the next landing, I pull her aside.
“I don’t think we’re seeing any more payments from B,” I say.
“Yeah, I pretty much figured it was too good to be—”
“No. I think she…” I trail off, unsure anymore what’s safe to say. Then I realize my footage has gone viral, and whatever comes out of my mouth now is going to be the tiniest drop in the bucket of trouble I may well have just landed myself in.
I take out my lenses, for all the good it’s going to do if they’ve already decided to come after me. Jessa blinks up at me, then does the same.
“Sit down a second,” I say, and then I tell her. Everything. All the missing time that bookends the two files. I tell her about Comforts of Home and the so-called drone strike and how the coffee shop had been straight-up deleted from the world within the span of days, and how I went walking because it was too big for me to process sitting still. She already knows this part, but I find myself telling her about Stellaxis HQ and its grass and its fountains, about 06 and 22 sneaking me in past the security guard, about all those people being brought to Medical against apparent orders. I tell her about 22 sitting me down and feeding me stir-fry and talking weird awkward circles around something, like he was under some kind of fairy-tale curse not to speak of it. I tell her about his hands under the gloves, about the way he speaks of the Director, about the look on his face when I asked if the operatives’ numbers were confusing. How much it looked like it hurt—something they’re doing to him via his implant, probably—for him to act against the company, even in such minor ways as that.
Then, even though it feels like some kind of betrayal to do so, I tell her what happened in the elevator after I took my lenses out. Because whatever I’ve landed in, she’s in it now too. She deserves the whole truth, at least the wholest one I can access.
It doesn’t take as long as I thought it would. It felt bigger, holding it in my mind.
She sits and soaks it in, then sits with it a little longer.
“Forty-eight what?” she asks at last, although her eyes know the answer. Forty-eight kids like Elena. Like whoever 22 and 06 and all the others used to be. Would have continued to be. Forty-eight kids orphaned by this endless corporate war, just like me and Jessa and pretty much everyone we know.
“Fuck,” she says, realizing she doesn’t need me to spell it out for her. “Fuck.”
I nod. I don’t know what else to do.
“When your building came down,” I say at last, and pause so she can steady herself before following me down that particular traumatic rabbit hole, “did the rescue people take you to a big room somewhere? Bright lights? Full of kids?”
“Yeah. There was this woman asking me questions. Then she gave me a cookie. Why?”
“I think they all went there. When their buildings came down.”
Her face creases. “You lost me. All who?”
“The operatives. Elena and all of them. Back when they were still kids.” She opens her mouth, probably to tell me I’ve lost my fucking mind, but I steamroll over her. “When I was in the sublevels at HQ, it kept reminding me of something.”
“Mal. I don’t know where you went, but where they took me back then was an empty room. There was nothing there. I don’t even mean, like, nothing distinctive. Just empty.”
“Empty and white, with bright lights, and a ton of kids running around. No adults, except the ones asking questions. Right?”
She nods.
“Me too. Probably everyone else our age in old town, if we ask around. Why not the SecOps kids?”
“So they were kids now? You’ve decided?”
“I don’t know for sure. I’m starting to think so.”
“Where is this coming from all of a sudden?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When I was in the sublevels with 22 and 06, there was a smell in the air. Yo
u know, like a hospital smell or a library smell, you’d know it anywhere? The smell of that basement was like nothing I’ve ever smelled anywhere else. Except once. It was reminding me of something, the whole time I was there. I didn’t place it until later, while I was trying to fall asleep. But then I did, and the memories all came flooding back. It was like I was there again.”
She’s gone quiet, wide-eyed, waiting for me to finish.
“I think those forty-eight missing kids got picked, and we didn’t make the cut. But we all started out in that room.”
If she was quiet before, it was nothing to this. It’s a full minute before she speaks. “I’ve never been glad about being rejected for something before,” she says, her lighten-the-mood tone falling utterly flat. “Can you imagine if we—”
Of course I can. A few days ago, the possibility would have been intriguing. But I’m rapidly being made aware that there’s nothing glamorous here. Just shit and lies the whole way to the horizon. “Yeah,” I say. “We’d be dead.”
“Yeah,” Jessa says. “I guess we would.” She stares at nothing for a moment, shakes it off. “So it wasn’t us. Then who was it? The other thirty-six.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But what we do know is that they did number the operatives consecutively. Or the kids who would have been operatives, I guess, if all of them had survived.”
“But that makes no sense.” Jessa is almost visibly squirming, chafing hard against this abrupt rearrangement of her whole heart’s mythology. “Okay. Look. So they announce the SecOps program and the creation of the operatives on January 1, ’26 under the New Year’s Initiative, and they send them to the front. The media has been all over them ever since. We’re talking eight years. Where have these other three dozen kids been hiding? Why don’t we know about them? The media coverage just ignored them for some reason?”
She pauses like she’s done, but no. If there’s a topic Jessa will keep on warming to until she’s practically incandescent, it is this. “Besides, the company makes millions of dollars off SecOps merchandise.” She lifts the front of her 02 t-shirt away from her body in illustration. “You’re telling me they had the opportunity to make four times the profit, and they just, what? Chose not to?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think it’s that. I mean, think about B’s picture. Elena was, what, seven or eight when she lost her family? And the operatives don’t appear in the field until they’re twelve or thirteen?”
“17,” Jessa reminds me.
It takes me a second to realize she’s not talking about their age. “17 is an outlier whichever way you cut it,” I reply. “He didn’t die in the field. He didn’t survive long enough to be deployed. Nobody ever saw him in person. Hardly anybody even knew about him until they put them all in the game, and then he got added to the next wave of marketing.”
“So they’d have one that younger kids could relate to,” Jessa says impatiently. “Expand their marketing base. 17 was a ‘tragedy that forged the path for the project’s optimization.’ ” This with actual air quotes. “You forget who you’re talking to.”
“Now the first to actually be killed in action was—”
“38,” Jessa says. “I’ve done my homework, Mal. You can’t tell me anything I—”
“She was, what, thirteen? Fourteen?”
“Thirteen.”
“And how long between general deployment and 38’s death?”
Jessa visibly runs the numbers. It doesn’t take long. “Almost a year and a half. Sixteen months and a few days.”
“Okay, so. Bear with me here. They take kids Elena’s age. Our age, when the company pulled us out of our buildings and put us in that room. Sevenish, eightish. These kids get their ink—01 through 48—and disappear into the Stellaxis labs for about five years. Something happens to most of them in there. Whatever got 17 gets them, too, maybe. With me so far?”
Jessa gives a kind of diagonal nod, like she’d really rather be shaking her head no instead. “I’m listening.”
“Okay. They get their forty-eight kids, they do whatever to them to turn them into what they are. But only eleven of them end up living long enough to send to the front. Nobody tells us about the rest. Who they are, how they died, nothing. I mean, this is a giant corporation we’re talking about. They probably get written off as nonviable materials or something. And then the others, the ones who lived long enough to get sent out into the field, they get announced in the New Year’s Initiative, they show up in their little uniforms with their swords and guns, and they unleash all hell on the Greenleaf army.” I fold my arms. My hands are shaking. “I mean. I don’t know how much of that is right, but you have to at least admit it would explain a lot. You know?”
“Well, I mean. This all is assuming that B was right.”
“B for-real disappeared,” I say. “You weren’t there. That coffee shop was like erased from the fabric of reality. There was no trace of it. And there was no trace of any drone strike either. That building was pristine, okay? And then the way 06 and 22 were acting…”
I ever get out of here, 06 whispers sadly in my head, I might just take you up on that.
“There’s something going on,” I say. “I think B was right. I think they took Elena and they took the rest of these kids and they did something to them to turn them into what they are now. If they were just made like that in the first place, grown in some tank with a computer for a brain, 22’s hands wouldn’t look like they do.”
“Which is how exactly?”
“It’s hard to explain. I only saw it for a second.” Then I realize. “It’s in the video. Take a look yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you. When B met with us, you were the skeptical one, remember? You thought it was conspiracy theory bullshit. But I mean. I saw your video. There’s something about that place.” She sighs. “I wish you’d been recording at the coffee shop. What used to be the coffee shop. Whatever.”
“Maybe someday we take a bus out there and you see it for yourself. But it’s just another copy/paste of the one downstairs.”
“Maybe I’ll go check out the company HQ while I’m at it,” Jessa adds. “See if they have any hospitality left over for me. I could do with getting in on all this mythical free water and actual food.”
“Yeah, well, unless the planets magically align and give us another day where 06 and 22 are in a position to actually ask for our help while their boss is out of town, we’re not getting back in there in this lifetime,” I say. “But yeah. There’s something about that place. 06 and 22 pretty obviously want out. But I think they’re stuck there.”
The phrase intellectual property throatpunches me all over again. You can’t go where you want if you don’t have rights. Which you don’t if you’re not human.
Or if someone has convinced the rest of the world that you aren’t.
Jessa chews all this over. She gets up and starts pacing back and forth on the landing, running her hands through her hair. Then whirls on me. “Okay. Say B’s right. Say you’re right. Say it’s all true. What do we do? Lie low until this blows over?” She gestures frustration. “Whatever this even is? I don’t want to get disappeared!”
“No,” I say slowly, realizing the answer aloud. “We do the opposite. We stay visible. We keep as many eyes on us as possible. B kept her head down, and look at what happened to her. We have a lot of attention right now because of the video. Millions of views. Thousands of new subscribers. But that probably means we have other attention too. The kind we don’t want. All the security cameras at company HQ will have picked me up. I don’t get the impression the operatives usually bring in random people off the street for dinner.”
“You really think they’re going to try to…” Jessa knots her fists in her hair. “To do to us what they did to B?”
“I have no idea. But I think we need to do whatever we can to make that really, really awkward for them.”
“We go big,” Jessa says,
nodding thoughtfully. “I can do big.”
“We go big,” I agree. “We double down. We don’t drop our guard. And we don’t stop until we get the fuck to the bottom of this.”
“Sure, but. This is some random viral video we’re hanging all this on. Nobody’s going to remember it in ten seconds. Half these new subscribers are probably going to bail when they see that our regular content is, um… less exciting. Unless you’re planning to document more war zone field trips.”
We both know that’s beyond unlikely. Yes, the circumstances aligned to land me with the only footage of that operative/mech showdown, but that was the kind of luck you run into maybe once in all your days. Next time it’d probably be me getting my lenses gassed and brought to a hospital. Or killed. Or disappeared.
“No,” I say. “I think we go back to what we know. Except this time we do it better.”
“The game?”
I look at her.
“But if B’s not—”
“I’m not talking about B. I’m talking about going legit. I’m talking about—”
“The boards,” Jessa finishes for me. “That’s nuts. We can’t bring it to those people, they’ll paste us. We’ve tried it before. It ended how it’s always gonna end.”
“It’s millions of subscribers if we can pull this off,” I say. “Millions and millions of views. Not just once but consistently.” I start counting on my fingers. “Consistent visibility. Consistent pay. We drop all our other jobs and focus on this. Bring in a few of the others, I don’t know. Put together an actual team.”
“There are definitely a few people in our room who’d be happy to help out with that,” Jessa says. “Especially if this turns out to be an actual conspiracy. Oh my god, they’d shit.”
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