Jaguar

by C. A. Gray

  “Get out!” I spun him around with my good right arm, still clutching my left against me, and gave him a shove toward the unfortunately wide open doorframe. He shook his head, laughing.

  “I’m having déjà vu from San Jose…”

  Actually, I could have used some help, but I never in a million years would have asked for it. I winced through my entire shower, and trying to towel myself off afterwards was even worse. But at least I finally felt clean—that counted for something. Then my gaze fell upon my clothes on the floor—the only ones I had—and I groaned. How in the world was I going to put those back on?

  I’d just resolved that I had no choice—it would just hurt, a lot—and dropped the towel to the ground to reach for them when Liam knocked on the doorless frame. I fell into a crouch in terror to cover myself, thinking he was about to walk in—but instead he snaked an arm around to where I could see it, dangling a short, silky pink robe from his fingers.

  “Found this in the closet,” he called. “I thought you might want to sleep in this instead of your dirty clothes.”

  “Oh.” I weighed sleeping naked except for a silky robe tied at the waist against the pain of putting those dirty clothes back on right now. I’d still have to put them on in the morning, but every day I was getting stronger… maybe tomorrow, it would hurt less. Or, maybe tomorrow I could have Madeline help me, if I stayed low enough to the ground. I inched forward, snatching the robe from his fingers. “Thank you.”

  I wrapped it around myself, doubling up the fabric everywhere I could to keep it from falling open. Then I knotted it for good measure.

  “Decent yet?” Liam called.

  I glanced at myself in the mirror. “As decent as I can be in this thing.”

  Liam came in, and looked me over as he crossed to where I stood, running the material between his fingers appreciatively.

  “Your turn,” I said, reaching up to his face with my good arm to pry off the prosthetic clay.

  “What, are you saying I stink?” he joked, stooping his head down to improve my reach.

  “Well, I mean. You haven’t had a bath in how long?”

  He thought about it and said, “Since Imogen’s flat, actually. Unless you count Pendergast, and I never want to think about that experience again.”

  I cracked off the last of the plaster on his face, and smiled. “Hi,” I whispered.

  “Hi.” He kissed me again, trailing a finger along the back of my neck at the top of the robe. “I’ll be out in a minute. Although you know, I am a poor invalid now…” He trailed his finger forward and down the robe’s neckline, loosening it. I grabbed his hand in its descent.

  “Invalid, my foot,” I muttered, and he grinned at me.

  “You’re so cute when you blush.”

  “Where is your robe?” I asked, determined to change the subject.

  “In the closet,” he called after me. I left the bathroom and located it easily—his was bigger, and black, but made of the same silky material. I returned to bring it to him, but froze in the doorframe, staring. He had taken off his shirt. I’d seen Liam shirtless before, when he’d been shot and was recovering after Geneva, and he’d been nicely cut then. But now all of a sudden, he looked like Mr. Universe.

  I was pretty sure that wasn’t possible. Not that fast.

  “Excuse you, can I have a little privacy here?” Liam teased when he caught me staring.

  “How—ah,” I blurted, gesturing at him, not sure how to finish my question.

  Liam gave me a quizzical look, and glanced down at himself. He blinked, and then looked in the mirror.

  “Well,” he murmured at last. “I certainly didn’t earn all that.”

  “Side effect of the surgery?” I asked, swallowing hard. I wasn’t sure why this upset me so much, but it did.

  “Must be,” he agreed, his tone unreadable.

  “Along with all the extra energy,” I added.

  “Presumably.”

  “The Immortality Project,” I whispered. I couldn’t pretend anymore. “So. You probably don’t age now, either.” I tried to keep my voice steady, but it was hard.

  “We won’t find that out for a little while,” he joked, trying to lighten the mood. But the mirth died away from his eyes quickly when he saw that I was biting my lip, trying not to cry. “Bec.” He crossed to me, hands behind my shoulders, watching me in the mirror. I looked so small and frail next to him.

  I sniffed. “I’ll wait outside.”

  I listened to the sound of the water hitting the tile, feeling dull as the revelation of what this meant washed over me.

  I’d age. Liam wouldn’t.

  It still wouldn’t matter for a few years… but that’s not true, I told myself. It would always matter, because I’d know the time was coming when it would become visible. And once it was visible, that was just the beginning. If I lived long enough, people would eventually think he was my son. And then, my grandson.

  And it’s not like I could just get the same surgery too. First of all, we were on the run… I couldn’t just go get elective surgery. Second, it was a miracle Liam had survived that surgery. It would likely kill me, even if I had the opportunity to try.

  Without realizing what I was doing, I crossed to the pack Liam had carried, containing Madeline and Hepzibah. It was an instinct—when I was distraught, when no one else could help, Madeline always knew what to say, if only because she knew how to read me.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Madeline asked me when I’d powered her up and she saw my face. But just then, I heard the water turn off—and I didn’t want Liam to overhear this conversation.

  “Nothing,” I whispered, “I’ll—tell you later.” Then I just sat on the floor in front of the bed, facing the closed window, hugging my knees to my chest.

  I had to pretend I wasn’t upset when he came out. Because that would just make him upset. And there was nothing either one of us could do about it.

  Chapter 30: Liam Senior

  I held Cathy’s hand in silence as we flew over the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains—we’d already crossed the Ocean. It was the most prolonged physical contact we’d had since before the divorce, but I think both of us were in such a state of nerves that neither of us really noticed. I knew what she was thinking, because it was the same thing I was—what if something goes wrong?

  I glanced at my ex-wife, and she held my gaze for a long moment before I opened my netscreen. I’d written a scrambling virus against our own pilot bot before we left, to make it look like an electronic attack against our hovercraft. Embedded in the code were simultaneous commands to disconnect Cathy’s and my A.E. chips from the labyrinth, and a blocking code to prevent detection of where the virus had come from.

  I hit execute. Cathy’s fingernails dug into the flesh of my palm as the hovercraft began to lose altitude.

  “Liam, if we don’t make it—” Cathy began, her eyes wide and terrified.

  “Shh,” I held up a hand to silence her. The A.E. disconnect code wouldn’t deploy until a microsecond before impact. If Jaguar was streaming my A.E. feed right now, then all was already lost—but still, I didn’t want to risk it.

  The nose of the hovercraft dipped and plummeted, leaving my stomach miles up in the air behind us. I squeezed my eyes tight, and Cathy clung to me. Toward the very end, I felt us level out, just as I had programmed—but at that speed, it still wouldn’t be a soft landing. We braced ourselves.

  Crash.

  “Liam… Liam! Wake up, Liam!” I felt my shoulders shake as I heard Cathy’s voice from what seemed like miles away.

  “Cathy,” I groaned, fingers hovering gingerly over my bleeding temple. “What—” I glanced blearily around the semi-crumbled cabin.

  “You were knocked unconscious,” she choked, trying to stabilize her breathing. “Now come on, we have to get out!”

  I allowed her to tug me to my feet, even though the world felt like it was spinning. I
started to reach back for my netscreen on instinct, but stopped myself, remembering that I needed that LP destroyed, too. I needed the world—I needed Jaguar—to believe that I was dead.

  “Do you have the detonator?” I croaked as we limped away, my arm draped around Cathy’s sturdier shoulders. In response, she held it up in her other hand, an innocuous looking piece of black plastic with a big red button, connected to the incendiary device planted on board. We needed these flames to be really, really hot—hot enough to incinerate any bodies, so that no one would ever know that there weren’t any, and hot enough to incinerate the device itself.

  “Did you activate it?” I pressed. We’d left the device disabled during the flight, so that it wouldn’t accidentally go off on impact.

  “Of course I did,” she snorted, “I did that while you were still unconscious. What do you take me for?”

  I shook my head at her. “You are one amazing woman. You know that?”

  She gave me a weary smile in reply that did not reach her eyes.

  “Goodbye, world,” she murmured. Then she pressed the button.

  We found the second hovercraft hidden in a cave about a quarter mile away, just as I’d instructed. The pilot bot had provided me with its LP address before I ever commissioned it, and I’d taken it off the labyrinth before our arrival, connecting it to the Commune instead. It had to be connected somewhere, in order to pull down maps to know where we were going. As we climbed on board, suddenly a comm appeared across my retinas. It was an encrypted link.

  I blinked, briefly alarmed. After years of being insulated from the outside world via multiple layers of security and secretaries, it was very odd for a stranger to suddenly have direct access to me.

  “What’s wrong?” Cathy asked.

  “One of the Renegades, I hope,” I murmured, and clicked it.

  Liam Kelly Senior, I presume? it read.

  Me: Who are you?

  My name is Karen Cordeaux. The Renegades call me M. Francis connected your LP address to the Commune. Reports of the mechanical difficulties of your aircraft and its sudden disappearance have been highly publicized on the labyrinth already. Satellite imagery in the area is poor, as you know, but distant coverage has detected a massive explosion that maps to the area of the robotic distress call. Expectations are that no humans could have survived the carnage. Congratulations—you are both effectively dead, assuming of course that rescue drones that should arrive shortly cannot detect the charade.

  Me: Understood. Please continue to monitor the labyrinth and alert me of any news.

  “What’s going on?” Cathy asked again.

  “It’s their leader, somebody named Karen Cordeaux,” I told her as we climbed aboard, and I powered up the pilot bot, relaying Karen’s direction.

  “Cordeaux? Is she related to Rebecca?”

  Karen: Yes, Rebecca is my daughter.

  I scowled. Do you have my feed on streaming? The idea felt even more invasive.

  Karen: Yes.

  No apologies. Nothing. This was even more annoying.

  Please turn it off, I told her, just as we began to climb in altitude. Comms that come directly to my retinas are quite enough.

  Karen: I will turn it off once we have discussed our next steps. And I’d like your ex-wife in on the conversation as well, since I understand she is quite resourceful.

  I sighed, irritated, but explained all this to Cathy. When I told her that Karen was Rebecca’s mother, she brightened and said aloud as if Karen were in the room with us, “Oh! Your daughter is lovely, and so brave. I can’t begin to say how grateful I am to her, for what she did for my son.” There was a pause, during which Cathy blinked, looking startled. I smirked at her.

  “She writing directly to you, now, too?”

  Cathy nodded, just as Karen wrote, I will send the same comms to both of you so that neither needs to translate from here on out. What is your plan?

  Me: Before we contact Halpert about Jaguar, we need some leverage. Hold on.

  I reached for the netscreen I had stowed on the hovercraft, and powered it up, giving Karen its LP to add to the Commune. She then gave me access codes, and I began to comm her on the screen, rather than via A.E.

  Me: I need someone on the Commune who is still connected to the labyrinth and who would be willing to share their screen with me.

  Karen: I see that Kyle is online. He works for Francis in San Jose. I just messaged him for you, and he’s waiting for instructions.

  Via Kyle, I accessed the back end of the General Specs mainframe, using a fake username with high security clearance that I’d created in advance.

  “What are you doing?” Cathy whispered.

  “You’ll see.”

  I pulled up the ‘target’ screen, and typed in the locations of the chemical factories that primarily supplied salt and sulfuric acid to the Silver Six. Cathy gasped.

  “Is that… the molecular detonator you were telling us about?” I nodded, and she guessed, “You’re destroying them, and making it look like Jaguar did it!”

  I winked at her. “Yep. They’ve been set to execute simultaneously in these factories in exactly—” I looked at the onboard clock, “six minutes and 32 seconds. Karen, please monitor the satellite imagery in those areas as well as the labyrinth to let us know the results. There’s an additional location hidden in a mountain in Bavaria, kept highly classified in case of destruction of the other eight. I’m not targeting that one—we need the Silver Six to survive long enough to destroy Jaguar.”

  Karen: Excellent. We have already placed those coordinates into our satellite feeds.

  “You don’t think anyone will die in the explosions,” Cathy murmured apprehensively. “Do you?”

  I shook my head no. “The Silver Six prefer bot workers across the board, and you can bet they wouldn’t trust any humans with something as important as their food supply. Plus, humans might have asked too many questions about why so much salt and sulfuric acid was required, and why the Silver Six ordered it in bulk every month.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Cathy murmured, still looking unconvinced.

  Karen: Next problem is how to make sure Halpert draws the conclusion that Jaguar is their enemy, without revealing that you faked your death.

  Me: I can holograph call him on his hovercraft—he has no cameras on board. Jaguar might be watching his A.E. feed, but that will be the case no matter what. I don’t see any way around that.

  Karen: She’s almost certainly watching. If you contact Halpert directly, it would render everything you just did pointless.

  Cathy: Does it have to be Liam, though? Is he the only one who has a way to contact Halpert?

  After a long pause, Karen wrote, Well, no. I was once one of his top operatives, so I know how to contact him. But I’m at the top of his hit list. He won’t believe a word I say.

  Cathy: Enemies often join forces when there’s a bigger enemy to fight, though, right? Is there a way you could secure a holograph call such that he wouldn’t be able to trace it?

  Me: There is, and I’m fairly confident it would keep Halpert from being able to find her. But I don’t know that it would fool Jaguar. Nobody really knows what she’s capable of at this point.

  Karen: I will not risk our compound’s discovery.

  Me: So don’t call him from the compound. As soon as we arrive, we can take you up on the hovercraft and you can call him from the air. Even if Jaguar does manage to trace it, she’ll trace it to a moving target.

  Karen: But she’ll know I’m calling from your hovercraft, won’t she?

  Me: I don’t think so. This is a spare I’ve had since long before her creation, and basically never used. The majority of her working knowledge is current, rather than historical. She’d have had no reason to know of its existence in her working memory. She can of course access historical data, but it’s a slower process—and her emotional state will likely preclude her from doing anything req
uiring a slower process.

  Karen: All right. Do we need to write any code that will render the call untraceable?

  Me: I’ll have it done by the time I arrive.

  Karen: And what exactly am I to say? Halpert will not buy ‘we have reason to believe’ Jaguar sees you as a threat—he always wanted to know my exact reasoning for everything, in excruciating detail. That will be even more true, now that I’ve double-crossed him.

  Me: Of course. Tell him that Jaguar was built to share any intelligence upgrades with her processors for redundancy, so that if anything happened to her physical person, we could build another Jaguar with the saved data in her processors. But I’ve noticed for some time now that she is not sharing. The processors contain her knowledge base, but not her intellect or creativity to know what to do with that data. She keeps that all to herself. We also believe that she has sabotaged any project at General Specs that might result in a Jaguar 2.0. We suspect this is because she feels threatened by the idea of a rival. Halpert expects her to share her creativity upgrades with all humanoid bots worldwide; that has always been his goal. She knows this, too—so she has every reason to believe the Silver Six are developing rivals with the De Vries prototypes which she cannot directly sabotage, the way she can those developed under her own roof at General Specs. This makes the Silver Six a threat to her.

  Karen: And I know all this how?

  Me: I told you before my untimely demise. Here I winked at Cathy. I also told you that I suspected Jaguar considered me to be a threat as well, and if I turned up dead, she would likely be the cause. That could serve as your impetus to contact him now.

  Karen: Good enough. Another problem: as soon as we finish that call, we’ll need to release the virus against the synthetic mitochondria, and make it look like Jaguar did it. But we’d need to make sure your son’s A.E. chip is not on the Commune at that time, or it will kill him. They are heading back to our compound tomorrow morning, and I told him to turn on his chip so we can track them. So we probably can’t do any of this until around twelve to fifteen hours from now, when I expect him and Rebecca to arrive.