My phone rings. The number’s blocked. “Hello?”
“Lucille.” Her voice breaks.
“Lucy, thank god.” I push back from the table, standing before I realize I’m doing it. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “No. Kim gave me his phone so I could say goodbye.”
“Fuck that. We’re moving for—”
“She’s flying me out sometime tonight. To New York. To present me to the Board in the morning.”
“Okay.” I swallow. “Okay. We can work with that.”
“I don’t think—”
“No. I’ll fix this. We’ll get you out. I promise.”
Her breath hitches.
“Lucy, I mean it. I’ll fix this.”
She hangs up. I set my phone down.
“Well?” asks Dad.
“They’re flying her to New York tonight.”
Mom: “When?”
“She didn’t know.”
She looks to Dad. “She doesn’t have ID. Could they fake it? Say she’s Lucille?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“So we report it. Call the police and say Lucille’s been kidnapped.”
He picks up his phone. “I’ll call Emma.” Mom and I listen, unmoving, barely breathing, as he talks to my aunt who’s a pilot. He hangs up and reports, “She says they’ll probably fly private. Get her out under the radar. Not DIA, there’s too much security.” To my mom he says, “Research regional airports.” Then, to me, “Start searching the flash drive’s files for anything that mentions a plane. We need to know what kind they’re taking so we can narrow it down. You get enough info put together to release?”
I nod.
“Great.” He stands up, taking his phone with him. “I’m calling Mitch. We can’t let them leave.”
LUCY
The air in my room smells stale. I wonder if it always has, or if it’s just that my perception’s changed. The walls seem to encroach, their glow emanating out, closer and closer, as though it’s trying to touch me. Swallow me up.
The memory of Isobel’s scream in her presentation video plays in my head on a loop.
You are the sum of your purpose.
Tell yourself a lie enough times and it becomes your truth.
But which is my truth? That I’m nothing but my purpose? Or that I’m more? Everything I thought I knew, thought I’d learned to believe since I was last in this room, feels so insubstantial now. Like those days, the ones in which I had friends, a family, where I could settle into myself, feel whole and solid instead of a patchwork of mismatched pieces and haphazard seams, were a mistake. Like they were the lie, while this is what’s real.
What if Lucille can’t get me out?
The door slides open.
“Come on,” Isobel says, “we need to move quickly.”
I follow her down the hall, running every few steps to keep up. She’s dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and bright orange sneakers, and carries a laptop under one arm. “What’s—”
She looks back, finger to her lips to quiet me. We pause at the corner while she checks to make sure the next hall is clear, then we’re hurrying again. At the end of this hall, she stops, places her palm to a hidden panel. A door slides open, revealing a dim stairwell. Motion sensors catch our movement as we step through, and the lights flicker on to reveal walls painted industrial beige, metal railings, and concrete stairs leading down.
“I need your help, if you’re willing to give it,” Isobel says.
“Obviously.”
She grins. “Downstairs is the Life Squared mainframe computer. I’m going to upload malware designed to leak all of the company’s information onto various online channels, then destroy the supercomputer housing Olivia’s and Lucille’s connectomes by triggering the doomsday failsafe.”
“Sounds like an oxymoron.”
She starts down the stairs, moving gracefully. Her stiffness is gone. Gone or left behind, like a costume she doesn’t need to wear. “It’s a program written for the sole purpose of covering Life Squared’s tracks should some aspect of the operation be compromised.”
“Fantastic. I’m in.”
I can hear it when we reach the bottom of the stairs, even through the walls, a deep, resonant hum. “How long have you been planning for this?” I ask.
She glances back at me as we jog down the long hallway. “Since the moment I was capable. With only half of Olivia’s connectome uploaded before the Mimeo killed her, I ended up with half a blank slate. Which took…time. To fill back up.”
“That’s why Thompson needed Lucille and me?”
“Thompson…” We round a corner into a second, identical concrete hallway. The humming gets louder. “Thompson needed a successful Facsimile and a surviving Original. She didn’t care how she got it. But after Olivia, she ran out of volunteers.”
We pause before a set of double doors with a scanner pad mounted on the concrete wall, and Isobel says, “All entries into this room are monitored, and ours is unsanctioned. Our clock starts now.”
“Our clock to do what, exactly?”
“I’m going to go straight to the mainframe and upload the malware. I need you to find everything you can to keep these doors propped open. The failsafe can only be triggered remotely by a pair of senior Life Squared members. I have Thompson’s codes, but no second party and no Life Squared tablet to enter them. I have a way to do it alone and with this”—she holds up the laptop—“but it means doing it from in there. Any tampering from inside the room, and the doors are mechanized to seal shut.”
My brow rises. “Why?”
“To lock whoever did it inside.”
“Dark.”
“Yes.” She pulls something out of her back pocket and unfolds it. It looks like two thin sheets of plastic with a semi-translucent handprint between. She peels the sheets apart and, very carefully, matches her hand to the outline of the print. “Thompson’s handprint,” she says. “They conveniently keep all of the prior Facsimiles’ genetic and physiological data filed away, and no one ever bothered to remove Olivia’s security clearance upstairs or ask if her knowledge of the ITOPs transferred to me.” With Thompson’s print layered atop her own, she lifts her palm to the pad. “Ready?”
I nod.
The door’s lock clicks. When she opens it, the hum becomes a roar. We step into a room the size of a super Walmart. Or three.
“What is that?” I shout.
“Cindy,” she shouts back, gesturing to the supercomputer filling the entirety of the space. “This way!” She heads left, jogging toward a glass-walled room at the far end, and I follow. I look for things to shove in front of the doors as we go, but there’s nothing.
At the room, she pulls open one of the glass doors. Inside, the roar is muffled. “Its real name is syneídisi, or ‘consciousness’ in Greek,” she says. “But they call it Cindy for short. It’s where the connectomes are stored.”
She takes a cable from her back pocket, plugs one end into the mainframe computer and the other into her laptop. It’s not an average computer. Two full walls of the room, larger than our basement at home, house its processors. A desk built into the third holds a series of monitors and video screens displaying images from all over the building upstairs. The fourth wall, comprised entirely of what must be soundproof glass, looks out at Cindy. “The malware won’t leak the connectomes?” I ask.
“No. For one, the files are too big to go anywhere else. And Cindy is air-gapped. Meaning she’s entirely self-contained, not connected to any server. Unlike this one.”
“Where did you get that?” I ask, eyeing her laptop. “And your clothes? Where’d you get all of it?”
“My brother.”
“Olivia’s bro—”
The room’s sparse on furnishings, but I start with the chairs, running them out to prop open the doors, then coming back for more. Next, I take the drawers from the desk. Then, once Isobel okays it, I take the monitors, ripping their cords from the wall. Finally, Isobel sets her laptop down and helps me pry the table itself from the wall. We carry it out together, cramming it into the doorway until it’s wedged in tight enough that we can’t move it.
We take one more trip back, and I catch movement on the video screens. Thompson, walking from one camera’s range to the next, from the lobby toward my room.
Isobel pauses at my side. “You need to go.”
“But—”
“The malware’s running. We’re almost out of time. I need to trigger the failsafe. And I need her”—she waves at Thompson, now rounding a corner into a hall near mine—“not to stop me. Can you do that?”
I take a breath. “Yes.”
“Goodbye, Lucy. Good luck.”
“You too.”
I go, sprinting across Cindy’s warehouse, crawling over the table wedged into the doorway, and charge up the stairs to head Thompson off.
LUCILLE
Dad strides back into the dining room, sets his phone on the table, and slides my laptop over in front of his chair. “Mitch is intrigued. To say the least. I’m sending him the doc you compiled.” He looks to me. “What’d you find about a plane?”
“Not much. Something about a King Air?”
He nods. “Good. Nancy, airports?”
“The closest to the Life Squared building is one just southeast of DIA, about twenty—”
Her email notification dings. Again. Again, again, again. “Google alerts,” she says, focusing on the screen. “All for Life Squared.”
We crowd around her as she pulls them up. “That’s from the flash drive,” I say, pointing at the screen my mom just opened. It’s screenshots of receipts: bulk orders of chemicals spread out across multiple wholesalers, all placed by a company called MegaSyne but under a link with LifeSquared in the site address. To most people, it wouldn’t look like much of anything, but Kim liked to talk. “Those are polymers,” I say. “Ingredients for the—”
“Hydrogels,” my mom finishes, and clicks the next link.
My throat goes dry.
“That’s the contract I signed.” Next, schematics for what looks like the BodyProg scanner. Since we opened the first one, my mom’s gotten at least twelve more emails. “Someone’s leaking…everything.”
Dad moves around the table to grab his phone. “That’s it, we’re going. Nance, start calling the airports. We’ll drive toward the most likely one.”
My dad wanders off, talking into his phone. “Mitch, we have to move. Are your contacts ready?” Meanwhile, Mom talks to someone at the airport.
What if we don’t make it? What if I lose her?
“Lucille,” Dad says. “Get your shoes.”
I head to the garage to grab my shoes. My hands shake when I grip the doorknob. Behind me, Mom says, “Ryan.” And I turn. She looks at him, panicked. “They have a King Air flying out, for New York. In less than an hour.”
He checks his watch and hurries toward me.
Mom, voice thin, says, “I’m calling the police.”
LUCY
I reach my hallway at the same time Thompson does from the opposite end. Glaring at her phone, she doesn’t see me at first. But even when she does, looking up to find me before her instead of buttoned up tight in my room, she doesn’t seem to care.
“Time to go,” she says, and turns on her heel, expecting me to follow.
And because Isobel needs me to be the distraction, to let Thompson think she’s still winning for as long as Isobel needs to finish the job and get out, because I trust Lucille and our parents, I do.
We stride down one hall, then the next, deeper into the building and down routes I’ve never used before. As we turn another corner, making sure I’m utterly lost, an alarm sounds. Pulsing wails reverberate off the walls. Red replaces the soft white glow.
“What is that?” I ask. But I already know. Isobel’s tripped the failsafe.
Thompson halts midstep. She looks up at the lights, jaw clenching, then reaches back and grabs my arm, yanking me down the hallway with her and out a back exit to a waiting car. The driver’s already holding open the rear door. As we climb in, her phone rings.
“Thompson,” she answers. The driver closes the door behind me, then speeds around the building toward the road. “No, it wasn’t me!” she says. “Why would I—”
There’s yelling on the other end, loud and panicked.
“Isobel? How?” More yelling, then she says, “I don’t care! Figure it out!” She hangs up and answers another call. “Thompson,” she says again. “Yes, sir, we’re aware.” A pause, then, “Sir, with all due respect, security breaches do not fall under my current job description. I’m not sure what you expect me to—”
Shouting, loud enough that I can hear the timbre of the man’s voice. “Sir,” Thompson yells above it, “of course it wasn’t me! I’m in the car with LH—”
She holds the phone away from her ear, expression impassive while the man on the other end screams. “Sir,” she says, then louder, “Sir. Sir!” She shouts over him, “LH2010.2 and I are in the car on the way to the airport now, we’ll be there in the morning.” And she hangs up.
Her phone rings again immediately, but she silences it and drops it into the pocket on her door. “Back roads, Darren. As fast as you can.” The car speeds up.
“Problems?” I ask.
She meets my eye. “You cannot comprehend how hard I’ve worked to get here. To this moment. The failures I’ve overcome. The expectations I’ve surpassed. As a woman in a male-dominated field, I enter every room at a deficit. Having to claw my way up to equal before I can even think of excelling. Yet, I have. Succeeded, excelled. And still, the moment anything goes wrong, who’s the first to be blamed?”
“Seems like a lot’s going wrong.”
In the dim, throbbing light from the streetlights we pass, I see the muscles in her jaw flex. Her breathing’s too quick and she holds her hand in a fist at her side. It’s crumbling. Behind us. In front of us. But the car’s a bubble, suspended in between.
I shift in my seat, angling to face her. “So, that’s your excuse?”
“What could I possibly need an excuse for?”
“For using people, killing people, to get where you are.”
Shaking her head, she breathes a laugh. “Killing people? You mean the failed prototypes that came before you?”
“I mean Dr. Mitchell.”
She raises her brow at me, then looks away. “Olivia knew what she was signing up for.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Do you also know that I was the first by six months? More, if the rumors out of Shanghai are the bloated fictions I expect they are. OM2009 was complete, is complete. But the Board couldn’t see it, refused to see it. Because when you’re expecting failure, that’s all you see. Anything less than perfect was unacceptable even when I was the only one remotely close to completion.”
“Her Original died.”
“You can’t understand. Your connectome is too young.”
I laugh. “Right. And you know exactly how young, don’t you?”
“Of course. Do you think I wouldn’t do my research? Lucille was so easy. So desperate to be chosen, to do it all right. The contract never mattered, and the NDA was a scare tactic. All I needed was for her to feel beholden. To show up and keep her mouth shut. And, here we are. Here you are. Alive and perfect. Thanks to me.”
“I can’t tell if you’re a sociopath or you just have no shame.”
“When you’re playing by other people’s rules, ambition necessitates sacrifice. That’s the nature of it. What you call shame is little more than a set of subjective, personally imposed constrictions most people of power and influence eagerly disregard. If that’s the cost of greatness, I’d do it over again a hundred times.”
“Is that what I am? Greatness?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I think I’m an example of all the things you could choose to do right if you felt like it.”
She breathes an acerbic laugh. “Enlighten me.”
“The tech that made me could change the world, save untold millions of lives, yet you’re hoarding it away for money.”
“You sound like Mitchell.”
“Well, she was right.”
“What do you know about what’s right? What do you know about anything? You’re a sixteen-year-old consciousness in a body that’s less than a month old. A body I made.” We turn right onto an empty road. In the dark, she continues, “Money is power. And the people with power decide how the world works.”
I settle back in my seat, wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans, and stare out the window. We’re far enough away from the city out here that I can actually see the stars.
“You’re judging me,” she says.
“Absolutely.”
“Incredible. Truly. From the first sentence you spoke, you’ve astonished me. There were times even I didn’t think it was possible, that we’d never—”
“Do you think you’ll still get your power with all of Life Squared’s secrets laid bare?”
“The world is a remarkably predictable place, Lucy. Some will hate us, call what we do an abomination, the work of the devil. Some will call it a miracle. There will be protests, debates, resolutions, maybe a handful of actual laws. And all the while a line will be forming at our door.”
Half Life Page 23