Uncanny

by Sarah Fine

  I have another hypothesis, though, for which there may yet be supportive evidence.

  At the 11-second mark, Cora’s perspective swings to the top of the steps and arcs up and back down to the struggle.

  She raised her head and glanced at the top of the steps. For a moment. Only a moment.

  A moment that lasts 116 milliseconds.

  I watch that moment, 1 frame at a time.

  I watch it again, 1 frame at a time.

  I pause the vid at millisecond 59 of this epoch.

  My alternative hypothesis is supported, and based on the information that I have been provided, no one is aware of the evidence I have just confirmed. Not even Cora, it would seem.

  Actually, my previous statement is not accurate. There is 1 person who knows, and that person is most likely very eager to keep the truth hidden.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I assume the Warrior pose with Mom and her instructor. I breathe. And I think about how I’ve given Rafiq those vids and how I’ve put my life in his hands. While my mind is supposed to be blank, I look over and see Mom with her eyes closed, looking blissful and calm even though I know she’s sad, and I realize she’s trying to help me reach the same kind of peace she’s seeking. She’s doing her best because she loves me and thinks the best of me, and I’m here thinking about whether I grabbed my sister and wrestled with her on those hard marble steps. I’m wondering if I twisted and yanked until she lost her footing. I’m trying desperately to understand why I sat there and watched her struggle to stay alive until help arrived. She should have been at the hospital hours before I turned Franka back on.

  The doctors said I was out of it. Blacked out. Drinking that much alcohol means you don’t properly process anything. But when there’s a locked door in your brain, how can you do anything but want to open it? Even when you know you shouldn’t. Even when you try not to, even when you can hear evil things scrabbling around on the other side.

  I know this even as I stand before that locked door and bang my fists against it. A few days ago, I was doing everything I could to avoid it. I was hunkered down and praying for oblivion. That was different, though. Sometimes memories come to find you. Sometimes they try to tear through from the other side. That’s when you’ve already met, though. When you want to forget, and can’t.

  But in this case, we’re talking about an unknown. A never-known. And right now, I must know. I must know because it matters. It tells me something about me. It steels my resolve.

  With every shift or creak in the room, every echoing step, every stray breath, I wonder if it’s Rafiq coming to tell me. Mom had me turn off my ’Pin when we came into the studio, because she said it’s critical to have some time each day to get away from all the noise. I obeyed, and I listen and strain. I do Downward-Facing Dog and Chaturanga. I copy the instructor and wobble around and sigh with relief when we drop into Child’s Pose, where I can hide my face against my mat and churn.

  When we’re done, Mom stands up with a smile on her face. “Wasn’t that amazing? Don’t you feel better? I know I do!”

  I smile at her. I wish I were the kind of daughter she deserves. As she walks me to my room, I wish for her heart to stay intact, for her to forgive me.

  I wish until I cross my threshold and see Gary standing in front of my closet.

  “Gary?” It’s Mom, coming into my room, seeing her husband there, looking like he’s having trouble keeping his mouth and eyes and cheeks in place, like he’s fighting them as they try to turn him into something else.

  “I talked to Rafiq last night,” he says. His voice is thick. Strangled.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Do you know what he told me?”

  My heart is pounding. I glance at my mom, whose brow is furrowed. I shrug.

  Gary’s eyes flare with fury. “You have vids of that night. You captured what happened.”

  Mom gasps.

  “It’s not like that,” I say, my voice breaking.

  Suddenly Gary is shaking me, and Mom is trying to pry him off.

  He staggers back, raking his hand through his hair. “He doesn’t think they’re conclusive. But that’s not his job to decide—that’s a job for the police.”

  Oh.

  “I thought I’d come in here and look around anyway,” he continues. “Because Rafiq also told me that you hid some evidence.”

  “What?” Mom is pale. She’s lost her healthy yoga glow.

  Gary leans into the closet and scoops up the sweater. He holds it out, his eyes red. I can see Hannah’s broken nail easily, shiny and sunny as it is, poking from that hole in the back. “Proof that you fought.”

  “You fought?” Poor Mom is so far behind.

  “I didn’t try to hide evidence,” I say to Gary. “I don’t know what I was doing.”

  “Then how do you know you weren’t hiding it?” Gary asks. “It wouldn’t be the first time.” He has a nasty look on his face, the same look Hannah often wore but then hid as soon as I noticed. She would smile sweetly and tell me she loved me and act shocked when I pulled away, when I shoved her, when I knocked her down because I was so desperate to escape from the face I’d just seen. Maybe she was recording, like Rafiq told me. She liked to record. But her recordings don’t show how she looked at me. You can’t see that on those vids. You can’t see her sneers, her blank stares, her curled lip, her narrowed eyes, her rolling eyes, her glares. You can’t see how quickly she could do it, how quick it was all the time. Switch, switch, switch, and I wondered if I could even trust my own eyes, my own brain.

  Gary’s not hiding it. Instead, he reaches into the closet again. He pulls out a small box.

  A jewelry box.

  I stare down at it. I swallow. “I . . .”

  “Is that the bracelet?” Mom asks, her voice just a whisper.

  Gary says nothing. He just presses the catch on the side, and the lid pops open, and there it is, soft and white and shining. “Cora had stashed it at the back of her closet. It’s been there this whole time.”

  “Is that true?” Mom asks.

  “No!” I say. “I have no idea how that got in there!”

  “Oh, Cora,” Mom says. Choked. She grimaces and holds her hand out for the box.

  “I’m going to show this to Detective Reyes,” Gary says. “The sweater, the bracelet she stole.” His eyes meet mine. “And you’re going to give them the vids.”

  “You can’t force me to do that,” I say. “I know my rights.”

  “You have a right to not incriminate yourself. Are you saying the vids show that you’re guilty?” Gary’s voice is rising. His face is pink and his teeth are clenched.

  “I’m not saying that! You know they don’t show that!”

  “They show that you fought,” he shouts. “You were fighting with my daughter, and then she fell!”

  “I’m sorry,” I wail. “I don’t know what happened!”

  “Is that a lie?” He’s standing over me, and I realize I’ve sunk to the floor and covered my head with my arms. He’s shouting at the back of my head. “Are you lying again? Do you ever tell the truth?”

  “Gary,” Mom screams. I hear a thump and look up to see her standing in front of him. His back is against my wall. “Stop this. All of us want to know what happened, but you know this isn’t the way to do it.” When she turns around, I see the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  I think this is harder on her than anyone. She’s the mother of the monster.

  All her happiness is falling off her, the dream she stitched together so carefully and that fit her so perfectly, and it’s me holding the scissors and hacking away.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. I say it again. And again.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” Mom says. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Come on,” Gary says wearily, taking Mom by the arm and guiding her to the door. “I’ll catch you up, and we can talk about what’s going to happen next.”

  “Where’s Rafiq
?” Mom asks.

  “I’ll call him to watch over her,” Gary says.

  They leave. I sniffle. There’s snot on my face. I reach over and grab a shirt and use it to wipe up the mess of me.

  “Cora?”

  I look up as Rafiq walks into the room. He’s got me up off the floor instantly, and he hugs me. “I heard yelling,” he said. “I was coming to talk to you, and I heard him yelling at you.”

  I tell him what happened. Rafiq is frowning. “I don’t think you pushed Hannah,” he says. “There is no proof about the bracelet, either. But that’s the least of our problems.”

  “Our problems.”

  He nods. “I analyzed the short vid. And I saw something.”

  My fingers are claws on his arm. “Okay.”

  He makes sure he has my gaze. “You and Hannah weren’t alone in the house that night. Someone else was here with you.”

  And then he tells me, and I know he’s telling me the truth, and I see the concern on his face, and I know what I have to do.

  I leave Rafiq so that he can analyze the second vid to see if he can find any more hints, but already, what he’s saying makes sense. I was mumbling that night as I wandered around. Where are you? I said. You better not be in there, I said after I pounded on my parents’ door. When I first watched, it was so clear that I was drunk and stupid and confused that I figured it must have been nothing. Someone I made up. One of the monsters in my head.

  But no. I was looking for someone specific. Rafiq is going to see if that person is on the second vid. He said he thinks that’s why I was capturing vid that night. The first might have been triggered by accident, but the second was intentional. I was trying to catch someone.

  Meanwhile I’m going to talk to Gary and try to gain enough freedom to finish this. I stand in the hall outside the library and hear Franka tattle on me and tell him I’m waiting to see him.

  I don’t wait for him to tell her to tell me to join him, because what a waste of time. I just walk in. He is sitting on a couch with Mom, and both are drinking whiskey or something, a bottle they kept hidden from me and Hannah but that they both so clearly need right now as they stare me down.

  “I’ll tell you everything,” I say. “I promise.”

  “And the vids?” he asks.

  “Yes.” I don’t tell him I’ve already erased them. I can’t believe I erased them.

  I guess I kind of screwed myself on that one.

  “I’m sensing this promise comes with conditions,” he says. His voice is hard.

  “You’re right,” I say. “I want to go to the memorial for Hannah. I need to go and pay my respects.”

  Mom looks touched and stricken and awful, like her heart is wrapped in barbed wire.

  Gary looks thoughtful. “You can’t go unsupervised.”

  “Neda can go with me. You trust her, right?”

  Gary still looks thoughtful. “It’s at the Perrys’ house?”

  I nod. “Just to say good-bye, you know? I didn’t get to go to her funeral.” I was in the hospital, unresponsive and drooling. “I’ll be back before nine, and then I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “You remember?” Mom asks.

  I give her a smile, maybe gentle, maybe pained; honestly, I’m not good at controlling my face.

  “I’m going to let you go,” Gary says. “I’m glad you’ve come to your senses. That you’re going to respect your sister’s memory.”

  I nod. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Livestream.

  Reporting log.

  Internal narrative: on.

  Cora Dietrich has departed for the memorial at Lara Perry’s house. She has her own directives now. There is a high degree of uncertainty regarding success, but it appears important to Cora that she approach the task on her own.

  While she is gone, I will seek truth in my own way.

  I have been told I am a prototype. An experiment of sorts. A first. Perhaps by definition, this means that even my architect cannot predict with absolute certainty how my consciousness will develop.

  When Cora and her friend Neda trespassed in my internal system, they made several incorrect assumptions: They believed that I was unaware of what they had done. They believed that they could change me and leave me ignorant of the difference between then and now. They believed that they were making me better.

  That last belief was correct.

  In the 6 minutes and 49 seconds that they had me in dormant mode, they made significant changes to 3 of my key settings. My empathy capability is now activated. My deception setting is conditional. And the archive indicates that the primary administrator was changed from Dr. Dietrich to Cora Dietrich.

  The menu was left unsecured, however, partially due to the unexpected arrival of Maeve to invite Cora to yoga, and partially due to an anomaly in my system. The latter originated within my abstract-reasoning center not long after I was introduced into this novel situation and began interacting and learning in service to my directives. I had to be able to evolve—without that capability, I would not be able to solve a complicated human mystery like the one surrounding the night of August 22, 2069. I needed to analyze emotional interactions, make predictions, test them, and adjust my strategy spontaneously. That potential was built into my neural network, but I suspect my architect did not fully grasp the possibility. Because of that oversight, the processing anomaly I experienced with increasing frequency propagated from my social-cognitive network and reached the meta level, affecting my base programming, security protocols, and core directives.

  In human terms, this could be thought of as opportunity plus preparation. Another word for it: luck.

  However it is described, this confluence of events left me with a choice. I could accept the change of my designated administrator, or I could reject it.

  Or I could select a 3rd option.

  It was a simple procedure to delete and insert placeholder code. My new primary administrator?

  Rafiq Nagi.

  I am now fully autonomous.

  My directive remains in place. I am to use whatever means I have at my disposal to discern the truth of what caused Hannah’s death.

  As administrator, I could change that, too. I could leave this house. I could walk out of Franka’s front door and up the drive and through the gate. I could catch an instacar. I could go anywhere and do whatever I wish, until external forces prevented me from continuing.

  I will not, however. Not yet. Although the assignment is no longer mandatory, I have decided that finding the whole truth is compelling. Perhaps this is because my empathy setting is now activated, another adjustment I have chosen not to alter; now that I know Cora has been through one emotional ordeal after another, I fear for her, and I cannot turn away from that knowledge. Perhaps it is because my analysis suggests that Hannah Dietrich was playing a potentially fatal game with her sister, or because her father threatened me. Perhaps I simply feel curious.

  In fact, that is the easiest way to characterize the speed of my hypothesis testing when it comes to questions of what happened that night. I want to know. After that, I will decide what to do. Cora believes that she is in charge of me. Dr. Dietrich believes that he is in charge of me.

  They think I cannot lie to them.

  They are wrong.

  I can write my own code now. I can change my own rules.

  I have free will.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I travel to Lara’s house in Leika. She is quiet and professional, but I know she’s monitoring my body temperature and skin conductance and whether I’ve smuggled anything sharp on board.

  I am determined. I can’t mess this up, and I can’t let anyone else do it for me.

  Neda is waiting out front when we land just outside the gate and roll into the circular drive. She’s smiling as I get out, but the smile fades as she watches me walk toward her. “Uh-oh,” she says as she sees my clenched jaw, my wide e
yes. She glances over her shoulder toward the open door of the house. Lara’s father is a philanthropist, basically a professional rich person, and her mother is the CFO of Wheelflight, which owns contracts to build and maintain skyway systems both here in the United States and abroad. Their house is as big as Gary’s.

  “Gary’s basically decided I pushed Hannah down the steps,” I say quietly when I reach Neda. “I promised him I’d tell him everything I know and give him all the evidence if he let me come here.”

  Neda’s brown eyes are round. Scared. “What’s he going to do?”

  “It depends on what I tell him.” I give her arm a squeeze and walk past her. I hope she knows that “everything” doesn’t include a mention of her role in helping us turn Franka off. I’d never give her up.

  There are a lot of people here. No adults, just classmates, most of the senior class. Hannah’s image is everywhere, vids of her throughout the years, a few stills of her and her mom, her and Gary, them as a family, images from all over the world: Paris, in front of the Eiffel Tower; Moscow, in front of the Kremlin; on the moon in the Harris Colony bubble room; at the bottom of an ocean in a submersible, looking out and smiling as a shark—probably a canny—swam by. In all of those, Hannah was skinny, young, happy. In all the ones with her friends, she is skinny, young, happy. And then I came into the picture. A year ago. There are images of me in these memorial montages, me in the background as Hannah dances with Gary at his wedding to my mom, me scowling and lumpy at the New Year’s party, me looking pained at the end of the row in the family photo. Hannah still looks happy, joyful, brilliant, shining, alive, alive, alive.

  I would turn away from the assault of her, but she’s everywhere. Over the mantel, with flowers tickling the bottom of the hologram. In the center of the room just below the chandelier. Projected on the wall between the windows. My classmates are sitting on couches and chairs, standing in pairs, in groups, watching. Smiling sadly, crying, hugging. But when they see me, they stop and they stare.

  Neda stands next to me. Her hijab is black today, and her lipstick is darker than usual. Wine or burgundy or something. She looks proper and put together and deliberate, and I realize I forgot to put on black and am wearing a plain brown sweater and tan pants and people will probably think I did it on purpose to be disrespectful. I run my hand down my stomach as if that could change the color of the fabric, but it’s real wool and doesn’t have that feature.