by C. A. Gray
Me: If we wait that long, Halpert and Jaguar may communicate with one another, and it would be too late. Look, we should arrive at the compound in an hour and twenty minutes by my estimation. We’ll get there, take you up, make the call, tell them Jaguar plans to release a virus, and let them stew on it for a bit. As soon as Liam is safely back, then we’ll release it.
Karen: Dammit, why aren’t Liam and Rebecca online? We need them to leave now! If Rasputin has time to get all his medical bots working on an antidote to the virus before we release it, it will be useless to us!
Cathy: Can we pick them up on our way?
Karen: If we’re waiting to call Halpert until you arrive and can take me out on the craft, then I don’t think we can afford the delay. It’s already been too long as it is.
Cathy: Okay, what about Francis and Larissa? I looked at her quizzically, and she continued to Karen, If they’re still en route to your compound, can they pick up Liam and Rebecca?
Karen: Hmm. They could, except that we don’t know where Liam and Rebecca are, because they’re offline. But… wait! Madeline is online! There was a pause, and then she wrote, Okay, I just routed Francis and Larissa to Madeline’s location, and sent Madeline a message to tell Liam to stay off the Commune. She hasn’t replied yet; she’s probably in sleep mode. Once she tells us that he’s gotten the message, and after I contact Halpert, then we can release the virus.
Me: How long does it take the virus to do its work?
Karen: We’ve only tested it on one humanoid bot so far, but it took her about twelve hours to die.
Me: It won’t take twelve hours for them to aim the AMDr at Jaguar, and that’s all we need them to do—they just have to make that connection themselves. I say the minute Madeline says that she’s delivered the message to Liam, release it, even if we’re not at the compound yet. That will make Halpert that much more receptive to your message when you do call, since he otherwise might suspect that you’re the real enemy.
Cathy: How close are Francis and Larissa to Madeline’s signal?
Karen: He said they were approximately thirty minutes out.
Me: Okay. So get the virus ready for release in thirty-five minutes, or as soon as you hear that Liam’s all clear, whichever comes first. If all goes well, you can make the call to Halpert within another half hour after that—presumably just long enough for them to figure out something is wrong. Which means I need to sign off now and get this code written.
Karen: See you in an hour and twenty minutes.
I closed the Commune screen and pulled up a coding screen instead. I honestly felt a bit apprehensive—I’d been in upper management for so long that I hadn’t done any actual programming in years, prior to today. Before I could get to work, Cathy gently lifted my hands from the keyboard, took them in both of hers, rotated them up, and kissed my palms.
“For luck,” she whispered.
Chapter 31: Liam (Junior)
I got out of the shower and tried not to look in the mirror as I toweled off. But at last, I couldn’t help it—it was like I’d been body-swapped or something. I looked freakishly awesome. In not a good way.
A cold pit of dread pooled in my stomach, as I glanced at the doorframe to the rest of the suite. Rebecca clearly feared my apparent immortality, and frankly, so did I.
Forever, I thought. Forever was a long time.
I tried to imagine it, but couldn’t. Thousands of years in the future, generations after everyone I knew and loved was gone…
Stop it. I shook my head to clear it. I was borrowing problems. Just because I looked like a bodybuilder all of a sudden didn’t mean I was immortal. It just meant… the nanobots had reshaped my body mass a little. That was all.
I pulled my robe off the hangar Rebecca left for me and cast one more glance at my own reflection, frowning. Then I left the bathroom and found her staring out the window, arms wrapped around herself. Madeline was out of the backpack and beside her, but she neither spoke nor moved, so I assumed she was still powered down.
Best to be direct, I decided. I slipped my arms around her from behind. She jumped a little, and turned around to face me. Her expression was desolate. It broke my heart.
“Bec—”
“But it won’t matter for awhile, right?” she blurted.
I bit my lip and shook my head. “It won’t matter to me, ever.”
“No? Not even when I’m withered and gray, and you still look like a superhuman twenty-five year old? Not when I’ve been dead for a century and you’re still—”
“Stop.” I cupped her face in my hands, resting my forehead on hers. “We have no idea what the long-term effects of this surgery are. It’s brand new! For all we know, it could still fail, and I could drop dead tomorrow.”
She snorted. “What a comfort!”
“Rebecca…”
“I want to grow old with you, Liam.”
That did it. I could feel the tears burning my own eyes, and a lump formed in my throat. Why did she always have to wait to say these things until the worst possible moments? She went on in a strangled voice, “But I guess that was never gonna happen anyway.”
“It still might,” I managed to whisper. “Maybe the synthetic mitochondria will succumb to entropy just like human mitochondria, and I’ll grow old just the same.”
“Man! If we’d just gotten to Pendergast a little faster…!”
“Hey,” I tilted her chin up to look at me, swallowing hard and trying to smile. “We have right now. Let’s not let tomorrow ruin it. Okay?” She gave me a shaky smile back, and I added, trying to make my tone sound light, “And, technically, we’re still our honeymoon…”
“Except that neither of us actually said ‘I do,’” she pointed out, trying halfheartedly to tease back, “being as you were unconscious and all.”
I lowered my lips to hers, brushing them just slightly and savoring that little sigh she couldn’t seem to help. I murmured, “I’ll say it right now. How about you?” I moved to her neck, kissing a trail down to her shoulder, where I just inched the robe a little further for each kiss. Now she let out a sharp inhale, but I wasn’t sure how to take it—excitement, or fear?
Plus, she hadn’t replied, even in jest. She was frozen. I stopped, and rested my forehead on hers again. “Sorry.”
“For what?” she asked, breathless.
“You’re not ready for this.” Not that I was planning on taking it much further tonight anyway—unless she’d said ‘I do’ back to me, in which case, well… but she had almost no experience, and I knew we were already way past her comfort zone.
She blinked at me, and I thought I could see the wheels turning in her head before she set her jaw, trying to seem brave. “What if… what if I say I am?”
I gave her a sad smile and slid the robe back up her shoulder. “This isn’t how it should be for you,” I murmured. “You’re the kind of girl who wants the big wedding, the white dress, the ring—the whole bit. And I want you to have all that.”
I didn’t immediately understand the look of hurt that flashed across her face. She took a step away from me, blinked, and concluded, “With… someone else.”
That caught me off guard. “What? Hell no! With me! But, I don’t think you’re ready to be married at all.” I searched her face, to make sure I was right. “And you’re definitely a wait-for-marriage kind of a girl.”
She looked disappointed, but when she didn’t argue, I knew I’d been right to stop. I stepped toward her and wrapped my arms around her. She clung to me fiercely, too.
“E-hem.”
The tinny sound came from our feet, and we both jumped apart—it took me a second to realize it had come from Madeline.
“I’m sorry!” Rebecca squeaked, “I forgot she was on…”
Madeline cut in, “Francis says that he and Larissa are on their way to pick you up in the hovercraft. They’ll be here in approximately thirty minutes.”
I gave a short
laugh. “Figures. Impeccable timing, as always.”
“Oh, and under no circumstances should Liam reconnect to the Commune.”
“Why not?” Rebecca asked.
“Because the Renegades are about to release the virus.”
Chapter 32: Francis
As soon as I signed off with Karen and set our course for Madeline’s signal, I sent a comm to both Madeline, and to Liam and Rebecca’s offline netscreen. Then I added, “Also, Liam: I’m nearly certainly I’m your missing brother Brian.”
But before I could hit send, Larissa slapped my hand away and scolded, “Francis! You can’t put that in a comm!”
I blinked at her. “Why not? The information remains the same, regardless of the communication medium.”
“Just—trust me, okay? This needs to be in person. After you sequence that swab and find out for sure.”
I sighed, exasperated. I still didn’t see why, but there was no point in arguing about it. We set our course for Madeline’s signal via the Commune, and then fell silent as the craft made an about-face.
Finally, Larissa asked softly, “So… do you remember anything? About before?”
I glanced up at her, my skin prickling. I didn’t much want to answer the question, but found myself doing so anyway. “My memories are not a total blank, but they’re indistinct. Dream-like. There are no specifics, other than factual data. Which I suppose was programmed in after my surgery, and cannot therefore be entirely trusted.”
“Do the facts match up with the hazy memories you do have, from before five years ago?” Larissa prodded.
“Can one compare facts with dreams?” I replied rhetorically. “The only thing I know for sure about—‘before’—was the depth of my hatred for bots. But I could never remember why. It was my only clue.” I glanced up at her. I’d never told anyone this before. “That’s why I joined the Renegades.”
“You thought if you followed the same path you’d been on before, you might remember who you were,” Larissa finished for me, her eyes brimming with sympathy.
“Yes,” I agreed abruptly, looking away. The sympathy irked me.
I needed to change the subject. I reached for the netscreen once more, found Liam Senior’s LP address that I’d entered earlier, and turned it on ‘streaming’ mode.
Senior was on his hovercraft, beside Cathy. He had a coding screen up, and typed frantically. I frowned, parsing the code in a few seconds before I realized what he was trying to do.
I already wrote that, I commed him.
I could see Liam Senior visibly jump, and a hand fly to his chest.
“What?” cam Cathy’s voice off-screen, sounding very on edge.
“More people directly tapping into my feed,” he muttered, and to me he said, “Who’s this?”
I hesitated. I almost said Brian. But instead I wrote, It’s Francis. It looks like you’re trying to write location blocking code. I wrote that already, to keep anybody from tracking the location of those propaganda films the Renegades released. Hold on… I searched my netscreen, found it, and sent it over. Here you go. What are you trying to block?
“Your M is going to contact Halpert instead of me,” Senior explained out loud. “We need to block the location she’s calling from, which will be my hovercraft.”
I shook my head and frowned, comming back, No good. Halpert knows she’s a traitor, but he trusts you. It needs to come from you.
“Yes, well, at the moment Jaguar thinks Cathy and I are already dead. If I comm Halpert, she’ll know I’m not.”
You couldn’t have faked your deaths after talking to Halpert? I wrote, exasperated. Honestly. Didn’t anybody think?
“If I had, Jaguar would have known instantly that we’d faked it. Much too coincidental,” he said. “Look, I think Karen’s warning will work, because Halpert will understand that the Renegades see Jaguar as an even greater threat than they are, and also that we’re powerless against her. I doubt he’d ever consider giving us credit for vaporizing the chemical factories and releasing a virus that can kill them. Especially not if he thinks I’m dead too—then the only person who could have directed the AMDr at General Specs is Jaguar.”
I blinked. The AMDr? You mean the Advanced Molecular Detonator?
“Check the labyrinth!” Larissa gasped, watching and reading over my shoulder. I pulled up the Commune screen again and found Matt the Moron online. With a few keystrokes, I convinced him to share his screen with me and searched. Sure enough, the top news articles were all about possible terrorist strikes against several major chemical factories around the world—“believed to be the work of the underground organization that calls itself The Renegades.” Only just below that was “Tragic hovercraft accident kills Liam Kelly Senior, CEO of General Specs.”
“They already think we’re the ones that bombed those factories,” Larissa groaned.
“No, the media thinks it was us,” I corrected, “because it’s fashionable to pin everything on the Renegades. But Senior’s right: Halpert will recognize the weapon, and he’ll trace it to its source. Whether he thinks it came from Jaguar or not hinges on how well Senior faked his death.”
“Also, tell Liam to stay off the Commune the second you see him,” Senior said aloud.
I know, M told us, I commed back, we already sent the message to Madeline.
“Well tell him in person too, and let us know as soon as you do. We need that virus released ASAP.”
Chapter 33: Jaguar
She knew it. She knew Liam Senior couldn’t be trusted.
Jaguar scanned the halls of General Specs, looking for someone to whom she could gloat. She seized an engineer by both his shoulders as he passed her by in the hallway, her grip surprisingly strong. His name was Herman Lockhart, and he was in his forties with a bit of a gut hanging over his trousers. Herman generally averted his eyes whenever Jaguar was near, but this time he was forced to look at her.
“I was right!” she crowed, gleeful. Then, just as suddenly, she scowled and nearly shouted, “I was right!” She shoved Herman as she said it, and he stumbled backwards, unable to conceal his alarm. “Do you know what I was right about, Herman Lockhart the Third, second son to Herman the Second and Georgia Lockhart, living in 2021 East Avenue, Flat 24 with your cat Moppet?”
Herman now looked like he might lose bladder control. “N-no, Jaguar. What?”
“I was right that my father is a Renegade! And do you know how I found out?”
“H-how?”
“I watched him board his hovercraft in London with his ex-wife, Cathy, and head across the Pond.” She said Cathy’s name with a sneer. “His ex-wife, whom he’s supposed to despise with every fiber of his being! Convenient that they started haggling over additional alimony just before their Renegade son Liam Junior got sprung from Pendergast, isn’t it? Oh, and get this, Herman: he knew I’d be watching. Of course he knew. So do you know how he tried to cover his tracks? He and Cathy both sent comms to their attorneys saying that after ‘spending so much time together,’ it made them realize how much they ‘missed each other,’ and they were going to try to ‘work things out!’” She used air quotes for each absurd phrase, tossing her head back and roaring with derisive laughter. “As if I would ever be fooled by such a ploy. So do you know what I’m going to do, Herman?”
Herman shook his head vigorously that he did not know.
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Jaguar gesticulated with her pointer finger in his face, her lips curled in a vicious smile. “I’m tracking his flight pattern. He’s over the Americas now. I’ll bet he’s going to the Silver Six to try to get them to fight against me. I’m—”
She stopped talking abruptly, as she received her next batch update from her processors around the world. Jaguar blinked, confused. The update contained a comm sent by Senior’s pilot bot: Mayday, engine failure. Will attempt to land in the Appalachian mountains. Send help immediately. Then another call, as the bot’s LP, and
Senior’s, and Cathy’s rapidly lost altitude. Mayday, mayday!
Then all three LPs vanished from the labyrinth.
She was silent for a very long time—so long that Herman’s curiosity eventually overcame his fear.
“W-what is it?” he stammered.
“He’s dead,” she murmured. It took a second for the emotion to catch up to her. When it did, it overwhelmed her body in undulating waves, and she crumpled to the floor.
“Jaguar?” Herman whispered.
“He’s dead!” she wailed, “My father is dead!”
Now she had the attention of every engineer on the floor: they stared, and they began to whisper. Liam Senior? Their CEO? Was it possible? The whispers turned to gasps as they accessed the labyrinth and confirmed the news, with distant satellite imagery of a fireball ballooning up to the heavens. Jaguar, meanwhile, pounded the ground with her fists, her sobs devolving into screams.
“How dare he?” she shrieked. “How dare he die like that?”
None of the engineers moved, growing more alarmed about Jaguar’s demonstration than about the news itself. But six minutes later, she stopped crying abruptly as she received her next update.
The cameras from all three of the world’s major chemical factories had simultaneously gone black. External cameras in the surrounding areas showed her why: they had all been vaporized.
Only two weapons capable of such a thing existed on earth. One was in San Jose, in Halpert’s own headquarters. The other was on the General Specs Innovation Park grounds. Instantaneously she pulled up footage of both weapons from moments earlier. The AMDr in Halpert’s headquarters was cold. But the AMDr on property emitted radiant heat, consistent with recent activity.
Those factories were the major hydrochloric acid suppliers for humanoid bots around the world. They did not supply her anymore—Jaguar gleaned her energy from multiple sources such as ambient heat, solar power, static electricity, and occasionally normal food, since she’d recently decided to become a connoisseur—but those outside the robotics team who built her might not know that. Even if they did know, perhaps the perpetrators intended to target the Silver Six and their ilk, and not Jaguar herself.