Nexis

by A. L. Davroe

  Quentin shrugs, his left eye twitching in pain as the gesture pulls at his wound. Gus grimaces and reaches for Quentin. “We need to take care of your wounds.”

  Quentin steps away from him. “Not now. Let’s do what we have to do and rendezvous with the others.” He reaches down and pulls out a revolver. “Here.” He shoves it into my hand.

  I examine the revolver, still warm from being pressed against his skin. I’ve seen it so many times in Nexis, used it so frequently, that it’s like an appendage. I never thought I’d see it again. “I,” I start. “I don’t know how to use a gun.” I look up into Quentin’s eyes, but he glances away.

  He reaches out and takes the gun that Gus offers as a replacement, then pulls me off to the side, lowering his voice so Gus can’t hear him. “You remember asking why you knew how to use a gun in Nexis?”

  I don’t respond. I’m too busy staring at him in confusion. How does he know something so specific about the game?

  He continues speaking. “You knew for the same reason I knew. Proficiency with weaponry was hardwired into your head.”

  “What?” I breathe.

  He looks down, checks the ammunition. “Your mother and my mother. They both programmed us to be exactly as they needed us to be, Ella.”

  I look back down at the revolver. I remember what Uncle Simon had said about my parents training me. Is it possible that my mother uploaded certain proclivities into my subconscious? It makes a horrible kind of sense. But, if proficiency with a firearm is one, what are the others?

  Part of me wants to tell myself that I can’t do this, but another part knows I can’t afford self-doubt. I need to get to my house. I need to get Meems. I have no way of knowing if she is all right or if she went mad like the other androids. She could be hiding behind the door, waiting to strangle me. But I have to know. If she’s all right then I’m not leaving without her. She’s all I have left.

  I release the safety on the gun and look up. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  We snake through the city, running shadow to shadow, guns upraised and at ready as if this is part of Nexis and we’re just on another playing field. Except this is real. If any of us get shot there’s no second life. But the streets are quiet, filled only with the moans of the dying and the trickle of blood and hydraulic fluid rushing down the pavement. The scent of singed flesh and the metallic tinge of blood and oil hang heavy in the air. Everywhere I look, there is a body. As expected, there are more dead Aristocrats and Disfavored than robots. Many Aristocrats are in their nightclothes, their bodies shattered from having been thrown out a window by some trusted domestic android.

  We can see flashes from above—pods zipping on the hover-way, glass shattering and raining down from above, people screaming. But it’s all above. Down here on the ground, where the robots and the machines made our lives so simple, it’s quiet. They, like the Disfavored, have opted to climb up in the world.

  We reach my housing block without incident. My building doesn’t look good. I didn’t really expect it to; we lived so close to the wall, and our housing unit is so near to ground level. All the windows have been shot out, the holo-screen for the back garden is shattered, and the front door is ajar. The Disfavored have already been here. I run forward, “Meems,” I scream.

  “Ella!” That’s Quentin.

  I can hear them pursuing after me as I slip thought the door and run through the front hall. Most of the lights have been shot out, the art broken to pieces. There’s one light on at the very top of the stairwell, across from my room. “Meems?” I call again as I take the stairs two at a time.

  As I pass the second landing, I hear a door hiss open behind me. I whip around, expecting Meems, but all I see is the gun in the Disfavored’s hand and a flash as he releases a round in my direction.

  Behind the Disfavored, Gus’s gun is up and firing back, his reflexes inhuman, but not before a shot gets me in the leg. The circuits in the prosthetic limb sizzle as the laser fries them. My whole leg goes stone still, and I tip to one side, tumbling down the steps.

  “Elle.” Quentin grabs my arm, hauling me up, before I can really gain momentum and hurt myself. Despite his wound, he grits his teeth and lifts me into his arms, carrying me the rest of the way, Gus at point—kicking down doors and scanning rooms before we pass. As we reach the top landing, Quentin lets me down.

  Gus crowds him, yanking up my dress, desperate to find my injury. When he sees my damaged leg his hands go still and he stares, eyes wide and disbelieving. Not at the wound, but at the band where the prosthetic meets the flesh.

  I hunch my shoulders, feeling sheepish. “Guess you know where that mod chip went.”

  He drops his hands and lets out a long slow breath. “Guess so.”

  Seeing that Gus isn’t going to tend to my wound, Quentin squats down and puts his hand on my bare skin—the part that’s still there—and examines my leg under the harsh glow of the one remaining light in my house. “It doesn’t look too bad. We can change out some of the circuitry; that should fix it. Do you have a soldering iron and some extra parts?”

  I nod, happy that he seems to know how to handle this. “There should be some extra parts in the case.” I’d forgotten Quentin was actually intelligent. Or maybe I never even realized it. He’d always just been eye candy, the attractive boy in school. But he was attending the most prestigious school in Evanescence. I scoff. “I always thought you got into Paramount because you were the President’s son.”

  He smiles to himself and shakes his head. “It’s good to know those engineering classes are paying off. Where’s the case, Elle?”

  I frown at him. Elle, huh? And engineering? It doesn’t mean anything; Gus went to the same classes as Quentin. They’re both trained as Engineers. And Gus must have talked about what he did in the game with Quentin. He must call me Elle outside the game. It only seems natural. It makes perfect sense, Quentin must know everything about what Gus and I did in the game. I blush a little, hoping Gus hasn’t told him everything, but if he’s so specific as to mention my confusion at knowing how to use a firearm, I doubt he excluded much. “In the lower storage facility.”

  He nods to Gus, who is still staring at my injured leg, and heads back down the stairs.

  I tip to the side and try peeking around the doorframe, hoping I can see if Meems is inside.

  “Here,” Gus grunts. Stepping forward, he drags me to my feet and puts my arm over his shoulders. He helps me into the room where I stop cold.

  Meems is on the floor. Dead. She looks like someone threw her into a trash compactor and then the shredder. I wouldn’t even recognize her save the torn uniform and the color of those lifeless blue eyes.

  “Meems,” I whisper, the strength suddenly gone from my whole body. I collapse against Gus, and he lets me down gently.

  “Holy Hell,” he whispers. “What the heck happened here?”

  Holy hell indeed. My eyes linger on the desk and the bank of servers. They’ve been completely destroyed. There’s holo-glass and chips and wires all over the floor, sparks winking in and out, glinting off exposed silicone disks.

  I swallow hard. “Can I have a minute?”

  “Uh, yeah, take all the time you need.” Gus leaves me on the floor where I stare for a very long time at nothing in particular and everything all at once. Numb.

  Something twitches in the darkness, clanking gently against the glass. It’s Meems. “Meems,” I yelp crawling toward the largest chunk of her body. The skin of her chasis has been torn and two of her limbs thrown away from her body, the wires and plasticky sinew still attached. I look into the mush of synthetic muscle, stainless steel bones, ball joints, and hoses, searching for a sign of life, determined that I didn’t just imagine movement. I shake her. “Meems?”

  Her head ticks in my direction, and an eyelid flaps over one cracked glass eye. “E-e-e-e,” her mechanical voice hiccups a
nd skips, “ah-ah-ah.”

  “Shhh,” I whisper, rocking her. “It’s okay, I’m going to fix you. You’ll be all right.”

  Erratic, her hand twitches at my side, the wild fingers grasping before the limb shoots up between us, knocking me backward.

  “N-n-n-oooo,” she wails.

  I scramble back to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here. It’ll be okay.” I grab her clawing hand and hold it to my face, hoping she can sense the warmth of my skin. I want her to know I’m here, want her to feel how very much I love her. “Meems,” I whisper. “We’ll be okay. I’m going to fix you, hold on.” I pivot toward the door. “Quentin, hurry up.”

  Her head jerks back and forth, back and forth, all the while the wires disconnecting and spitting against the rug. Death throes. “Har-har-harit-t-tant-st-sts. D-Die.”

  “No,” I wail in protest, clutching her hand. “No. You’re going to live. We’re both going to live. I love you too much to let you die.”

  Her head stops jerking, and she looks at me again. “L-l-luuhh?”

  I nod and touch her face with my free hand. “Yes, love. I love you, Meems.”

  The muscles around her mouth twitch upward, trying to smile for me. “Meems-loves-Meems-loves-” Her hand opens on my cheek. “Loves, Eh-eh-la-ah-ahhh-ni-ni-ni.”

  I smile back at her, tears falling. Then her hand slips away, and she spasms one last time. “Meems,” I shriek. “Meeeemmmsss.”

  But she doesn’t respond. Desperate and determined as a madwoman, tears blurring my vision and fingers shaking, I wrench through her biomass, ripping out wires, tossing handfuls of it off to the side. It’s just a body. The real Meems, the Meems I love, is deep inside. When my hand closes over the tiny little chip that encloses Meems’s personality program and memory bank, I let out a sigh and start laughing, hysterical. I laugh so hard that I begin sobbing again.

  I pull the burned chip free and hold it to my chest, letting the ichor of Meems’s insides drip down my arms as I cry for my surrogate mother and rock myself through the pain of all this horror and loss.

  The chip is fried. Meems is gone. I will never be able to bring her back. As I look around the room, taking in the destroyed console, I see the shattered frames that once housed my parents’ smiling faces, and I hear the devastation outside the walls of my own home.

  This is my inheritance, another lesson, another truth.

  At its root, this destruction isn’t from technology. It’s from humans. Technology is our tool. We made it, and we control it. And this is the consequence of using tools we don’t understand.

  While I’ve learned to love the beauty of the natural world, there is still unforgiveable ugliness inside nature’s most prolific creature: the human. That’s something I never focused on enough. How much of my fear of my own internal destroyer drove me to plant that virus? Was I only seeing the things I feared in myself reflected in those around me? Am I a self-fulfilling prophecy?

  It’s not just a matter of making humans love the beauty of their bodies and the world around them. It’s also a matter of making them love the beauty inside themselves and others. I understand that now, though I have no idea what to do next.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Post-American Date: 7/4/232

  Longitudinal Timestamp: 3:02 a.m.

  Location: Dome 5: Evanescence

  Light flickers against my drawn eyelids. Despite the din outside of our housing block, I hear a strange new sound. Something like a low, persistent hiss. A dragon’s hissing exhale. I open my eyes and blink against the new gray-white light. All around me the shattered nano-glass is coming to life with static—each piece like its own tiny sheet. The holo-screens have popped up, some lopsided and others distorted, because their projectors have been knocked off their stands. Everywhere it’s fuzzy black and white, and the hissing noise is deafening.

  With a bright white flash, the screens clear, revealing a pair of hands fidgeting with a lens, adjusting it for clarity. It’s the same image in all the screens, hundreds of pairs of hands reaching out. I tip my head, trying to make out the picture in the largest of the screens. The hands draw away in the next moment, and there’s a face of a woman. Me. No, my mother. She smiles demurely into the camera and dances away for an instant before the image moves once again to her sitting with a small child.

  “Do something for the video.” The voice behind the camera is my father’s.

  My mother grins and laughs a little, like this is a game. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Sing for us,” Dad commands.

  My mother waves her hand in dismissal. “No, I’m a terrible singer.”

  “Your voice is lovely.” Dad’s words are warm and serious, laced with the same kind of tone Gus uses on me. “Come on, Cleo. Please sing for me?”

  Mom rolls her eyes and fights her laughter as she fidgets. “Okay, okay.”

  She turns to the small child and tucks her legs underneath her, giving the child her full attention. There’s affection in her eyes, something I’ve only ever wished for in a mother. “Okay, Ella, we’re going to sing for Daddy. You ready?”

  The child looks up at the camera, and I realize belatedly that it’s me. That chubby, curly-haired thing is me, and I’m with my parents. Swaying, I grin at the camera; I’m so young I can barely hold myself upright.

  My mother holds out her hands, drawing the attention of my child-self back to her. I’m mesmerized by her—by those beautiful outstretched hands. And then my mother begins to sing.

  “The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout.” As she sings she makes complicated hand gestures, upward and finger-to-finger in a way that makes the child on the screen giggle and scream with delight. “Down came the rain and washed the spider out.” Her fingers wriggle down and crash against the carpet. My child-self flaps her arms in approval. “Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.” The fingers move above her head and form a circle. My child-self claps in admiration, making my mother’s gray eyes smile as she moves to make the final finger-to-finger gesture again. “And the itsy-bitsy spider went up the spout again.”

  The screens go white, the brightness casting a ghostly pallor over the decimated remains of Meems. In the background my mother’s song repeats itself. As she sings, another video starts. It’s the video in the last code my father gave me—a magnificent golden bird, perched on a lotus, unfurling its wings, taking flight, and then bursting into flames. As the ash rains down, tiny silver threads begin weaving back and forth across the screen until I can read one single word. Persevere. From the ashes at the bottom of the screen, a tiny sprout begins to grow.

  Fresh tears sting my eyes as the plant grows strong, blooms, and from its petals springs the bird once more. Only to take flight and burn up all over again.

  Gus bursts in through the door, startling me. For a moment he takes in the screens on the floor and then he glances up to me, crying again. He lets out a long, slow breath, his eyes showing the pain he feels for me—with me. “Come here.” He holds his arms open as I struggle to my feet and hobble toward him, my feet crunching over broken circuitry and shattering nano-glass into dust. He folds me into his arms and holds me for a long moment.

  The reel of my mother singing starts up again.

  “The itsy-bitsy spider…”

  “You need to see this,” he whispers into my hair as he turns me away from the room and toward where Quentin is standing staring through the frame where the hall window used to be. Even here the bird continues its cyclical death, and the word “persevere” litters the hall floor.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  Quentin glances over his shoulder. “It’s a phoenix.”

  Phoenix. I’ve read about those. A creature that rises from its own ashes. A beauty born from destruction. That was my father’s hope, that’s why he watched the Disfavored. Because they kept trying, despite the
odds. My father’s very last message to me—ringing true, even after the destruction of the Anansi Virus.

  As I come to stand beside Quentin, my eyes go wide with wonder. “Down came the rain…” Written across the sky, across every building face, across the hovering holo-screens, and the billboards, and the windows of every building, are my father’s word to me. Persevere.

  Standing here, I can hear the echo of my mother’s beautiful natural voice blaring from every speaker in the city. “Out came the sun…”

  The phoenix bursts upward, stretching toward the sky.

  I lean in to Gus and smile to myself. “Gus?” I whisper.

  I may have destroyed the world, but I shouldn’t fear the destroyer inside.

  He tightens his arm around my waist. “Hmm?”

  Because sometimes you have to destroy in order to create.

  “I know what I have to do.”

  And sometimes the most beautiful things can rise from the ugliest of ashes.

  “And the itsy-bitsy spider crawled up the spout again.”

  Acknowledgments

  First, of course, is my mother, who raised me to believe I could be anything if I tried hard enough, was the first to tell me that I had talent as a writer, and then later sat and listened to me gush about my pieces for hours without complaining. Mom, you’re my hero and my greatest supporter, and I’ll love you forever!

  Abby, you started me on this crazy writing path by convincing me to write a Dragon Ball Z/Digimon mash-up fan fiction—it was pretty silly, but I found my core through that stack of papers, and I’ll treasure that story always.

  Tamora Pierce, I don’t know if I would have discovered my love of the book without you. You’re the first author I read whose work I could not put down. Your books drove me to sit down and write beyond fan fiction with a friend and opened a hundred-thousand worlds to my mind.

  My fans deserve a giant bow. You, ladies and gentlemen, keep authors sane and on track. There is no way for any author to express her thanks for your insatiable appetites except give you more, and I promise to do just that.