Wired (Skinned, Book 3)

by Robin Wasserman

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  picked me. You wanted me to live. And in a twisted way, I guess ... that proves how much you love me."

  This was the tricky part. My father wasn't the touchy-feely type. I let my shoulders slump and tried to make myself look smaller. Weak. "I thought it would be easy to run away. From everything. From you. But now I'm ... I'm so alone. I don't know who I am, if I'm not your daughter." I lowered my head. Let my voice shake. "I don't know how to forgive you. But I don't know how not to forgive you."

  I hugged my arms over my chest and waited, closing my eyes so that I wouldn't have to look at him. A moment later I felt his weight shift on the couch, and then his arms were around me. "I'm here," he said. His hug was as stiff and awkward as ever. "I'm your father, nothing will ever change that. You are my daughter. And I've never been so proud of you."

  If only he knew.

  "I love you," he said.

  That's when I stuck him. It was quick and nearly painless, a sharp pinprick on the back of his neck, where it wouldn't leave a mark, and even as he reached to feel for a bump or a bite, his arm dropped to his side, and then, as the toxin worked its way through his system, he slumped back on the couch, unconscious.

  I didn't ask Jude where he'd gotten the sleep serum, or the microjector. That was the whole point of Jude: He got things. He'd assured me that it was harmless, with no lasting effects. I hadn't asked about that, either.

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  I stood, staring down at my father, his suit rumpled, spittle dripping from the corner of his mouth. Messy and vulnerable, the two things he'd sworn never to be.

  "I could kill you right now," I said.

  His eyes fluttered. Could he hear me? "It's better this way," I told him, hoping he could, even if he wouldn't remember. "I'd rather be a machine than have to walk around carrying your disgusting genes." I had looked like him, that's what everyone had always said. "I'd rather be a machine than be any part of you. I'd rather be dead."

  It was self-indulgent, wasting time like this.

  Not to mention pathetic, giving voice to all the things I was too cowardly to tell him when he was awake. Someday, I promised myself. Then I slipped the ViM from his front pocket and pressed his index finger against the nanotape Zo had given me, recording a fresh, clean print. As a final touch, I propped his head on a pillow, leaving the downer glass overturned by his fingertips. He'd think he slipped into the office to get away from it all, dosed more than he'd planned, and zoned out. If all went well, he'd still be out when we returned, and I could slide the ViM back into his pocket. It would be like nothing had happened.

  Jude said he wouldn't remember any of this, not the dosing, not the conversation that came before it. He would wake up with a headache, wondering how he'd ended up in the office, wondering why he'd fallen so soundly asleep, never

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  remembering the way I'd humiliated myself before him, accepting his pathetic apology. Or the way he'd humiliated himself by believing me.

  I texted Zo to let her know we were ready for the next step. Then it was time for Jude's cue: Ten minutes, I texted him. Then go.

  I slipped back into the thick of the party, swapping facetious small talk with some BioMax functionary whose name I could never remember, trying to follow his boring story of vacationing at some domed golf resort and scoring a hole in one while a lightning storm raged overhead, but all I could think was, Any second now, come on, now, now.

  Now.

  The doors blew open. Jude and his crew of mechs stormed the banquet hall, megaphones blaring the same message as the giant LED boards they carried: SAVONA LIES! The ten mechs elbowed their way into the crowd, hooting and shouting, leaping on tables and chairs and, in one memorable case, the shoulders of a particularly tall and broad corp exec. As they scattered, they released periodic bursts of neon smoke that curled itself into accusatory slogans before puffing into thin air.

  The crowd exploded into a mixture of cheers and boos. There were a few high-pitched screams, some laughter, several panicked calls for security--and a hundred slack-jawed, wide-eyed, mind-blown orgs gaping at the wild mechs, backing

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  away whenever one threatened to come near. BioMax reps scuttled back and forth trying to catch the interlopers, but Jude and his cronies zigzagged through the crowd, using orgs as shields and buffers, leaping over furniture and, when necessary, throwing handfuls of cocktail wieners and popcorn shrimp at their pursuers. It was, in the purest sense of the word, anarchy.

  And two weeks ago it would have killed me. I stood at the center of the storm, watching Jude tear down everything I'd worked for, knowing it would play on the network for weeks, in constant loops and mashups, the demented mechs bent on sowing destruction through org society.

  Exactly as we'd planned.

  The crowd was too dense for any kind of effective security protocol--and there were too many witnesses for any kind of violence, especially against the very mechs that BioMax claimed to be so desperate to protect. Which was how Jude managed to weave his way through the orgs all the way to the dais at the front of the room. He clambered up on stage and, as the BioMax reps pushed their way through an increasingly uncooperative crowd, unleashed his j'accuse on Savona: a litany of his crimes, a list of every mech who'd been attacked, lynched, battered, bruised by the hatred stoked by Savona and his Brothers. Name after name after name. It was transfixing.

  But I tore myself away. Zo was waiting by the locked door that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, ready to use the

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  security code on my father's ViM to get us through. Jude had provided as much distraction as we could have hoped for. The room was absorbed by his spectacle; no one would notice two girls disappear behind a wall. But something made me pause in the doorway and turn back. From across the room, an island of calm in the pandemonium, Auden was watching. Savona stood by his side, eyes on the stage. The security team had formed a human barrier between them and the rampaging mechs, and I wondered why they hadn't been dragged off to safety. It occurred to me Savona wouldn't have allowed it. What better way to solidify his martyrdom than to stay publicly calm, stoic even, while the mechs did everything they could to tear him apart?

  But I couldn't worry about that now. Any more than I could worry about the fact that Auden was watching us.

  "What?" Zo hissed, when she noticed I wasn't moving. "Come on."

  "Shh!"

  She followed my gaze, and saw him seeing us. Her face went white.

  Auden tilted his head, a nearly imperceptible nod. Then turned away.

  "Shit." Zo's eyes bugged. "We have to call this off. He's going to--"

  "He won't do anything." I yanked her through the door and let it close behind us.

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  "He saw us."

  "He won't tell anyone."

  "So now you're a mind reader?"

  "Trust me," I said, and hoped I was right. "It's fine. He'll keep his mouth shut." Zo didn't ask why I was so sure. A good thing, since I had no answer for her. The truth was, I wasn't sure about anything except that it was probably wishful thinking to imagine Auden would protect us. But I couldn't stop. Not when we were so close. If he sounded the alarm, we would deal. Until then we would keep going.

  It was almost too easy. We were well beyond business hours, the halls were nearly deserted, and I could only trust that Jude was keeping the building's secops plenty busy. On the rare occasions that footsteps seemed to pass too close, the maze of corridors left plenty of options for ducking out of sight. We swept past each automated security checkpoint with perfectly legitimate credentials. Our father's security codes flashed from the stolen ViM and, as we ventured into more protected zones, his fingerprint opened one door after another. The blueprints indicated a server room in the basement where classified information--like technical specifications for the download process--would likely be held. These days nearly everything was stored in a data cloud on the network, powered by thousands upon thousands of servers whirring
away in top-secret locations. It was why you could make a ViM in any shape and size--the Virtual Machine

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  didn't need to hold any information of its own; it just linked you up to the network and you were off. But nearly every corp had its own small server system tucked away somewhere, a skeleton closet for data it didn't trust to the public storehouse. Walled off from the network, forbidden ViM access, safe from prying eyes. Zo had admitted she'd been studying up on hacking this kind of stuff for years, she and her loser friends whom I'd thought spent all their time loitering in the parking lot burning out on dozers--and she was convinced she could find the data and download it.

  But there were no servers in the basement.

  "You sure you're reading those right?" Zo asked, snatching the ViM out of my hand so she could see the blueprints for herself. But I hadn't made a mistake: According to the map, we should have been standing in BioMax's main computing center. There were no computers in sight. Instead there was a long stretch of white padded rooms, each with a large window facing the corridor. I felt like I'd stumbled into a mental hospital, except that instead of straitjacketed lunatics, the large cells held machines of various shapes and sizes. Tanks, fighter jets, drones, armored crawlers, none of them much larger than I was--war in miniature. Some were motionless; others wheeled around seemingly at random, bashing into walls and firing blanks at the thick glass. At the end of the corridor we finally found some computers, but instead of massive servers, these were just standard keyboards and screens, some smeared with

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  data, others showing the antics of the imprisoned machines.

  "What the hell is this?" I said, gaping at the strange mechanical lab rats.

  Zo had already pulled herself up to one of the lab stations. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. I couldn't stop watching the machines. One in particular caught my attention: some kind of armored walker about three feet tall, stumbling around its cell like a toddler learning to walk.

  "Lia," Zo said. "You need to see this. Now."

  "What is it?"

  "It's you," she said in a hushed voice. "Well, not you, but ... all of you."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Will you just look!"

  I peered over her shoulder. I read what she'd read. It was a status report, and at first the phrases didn't make much sense. "Rerouted neural pathways." "Reoriented command functions." "Effect of cognitive deficiencies on consciousness." "Subject shows improved learning capabilities with thirty percent of memories intact." But gradually, the meaning became clear, and as I took in the words, the laboratory transformed itself in my imagination. I saw vats of clear fluid lining the walls, and suspended inside of them, gray, pulpy masses with wires snaking in and out. Brains, isolated and nurtured, synapses firing, alive and dead all at once. Imprisoned. I saw a mad scientist's laboratory, death defied, life

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  abominated, nature possessed. I saw myself, and I saw the men who owned me.

  I saw the machines. And they were real.

  The "effect of cognitive deficiencies on consciousness" was, apparently, severe. Strip away a brain's memory, speech, and emotion functions, everything that made a person a person, and you were left with a machine. A machine that, if you programmed it right, would do anything you told it to.

  "Tell me I'm understanding this wrong," I said.

  She didn't.

  "Our uploaded neural patterns can't be accessed by them--by anyone--not while we're still functioning," I said, because that's what I had been told. It was the foundation of the download technology. As long as our brains were active, our functioning neural networks released a signal that prevented the resurrection of any other brain with the same neural pattern. Only one Lia Kahn at a time, that was the hard-and-fast rule. But the neural patterns they were playing with down here were altered, weren't they? Deficient. Which made the signal--and their promises--useless.

  Zo still didn't say anything.

  I couldn't stop watching the machine, the one stumbling on its iron feet.

  I couldn't stop wondering whether it remembered its name.

  "You can't search for yourself," Zo said quietly. "I tried.

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  Everything's indexed by some kind of ID number, not name. If I had more time, probably ... but maybe it's better?"

  Maybe it was better I didn't know whether they'd taken a computer program that, under the right circumstances, called itself Lia Kahn, and crammed it into a steel tank? Maybe it was better I not think about what it would mean, what I would be, if my "significant personality markers" were stripped away, along with "superior cognitive function" and "emotive control." If I was lobotomized, with only an animal intelligence left behind.

  I'd flown in an AI plane. I'd looked out the window, wondering at the technology that allowed it to decide for itself how fast to fly, where to land. I'd seen the headlines on the news zones: the lives that had been saved by the new AI surrogates, compliant mechanical fighters that shot and crushed and bombed and burned on command, that were smart enough to strategize, pliant enough to follow every command. I'd never given much thought to it, how they'd suddenly, magically, breached the artificial intelligence barrier. Because it had nothing to do with me. I was artificial, I was intelligent, I was a machine, yes. But I was different. I was a remnant of something human; I had started life as something else. They were things; they had always been machines.

  That's what I'd thought.

  Because, again, that's what I'd been told.

  "Why do they need so many?" I asked dully. According to

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  the records, they'd downloaded more than a hundred of us into various prototypes. Why not lobotomize one brain and download it into everything? More efficient--still evil.

  "I think ..." Zo hesitated, as if understanding it somehow made her complicit. "I think it increases the chances of success. Different neural patterns adjust better to different machines. Some don't work at all."

  "So this is their testing ground." I turned back to the video feeds of the padded cells, watching the stumbling machine and remembering what it had been like for me at the beginning, learning to walk. Training my brain to control the artificial body. They'd scared us into cooperating with the tedious rehabilitation process, making it all too clear what would happen if our neural patterns failed to adapt. We'd be frozen, unable to move or speak or see, trapped inside a head with no window to the world, no control. Buried alive inside a mechanical corpse.

  "They let them learn," Zo said, "give them commands, see what happens, and when they find a neural pattern that works--"

  "Payday." I backed away. "Can you deal with this?" I asked. "Download whatever you can to your zone, get some pics, evidence, whatever--"

  "I got it," Zo said. She didn't ask what I'd be doing while she got stuck with all the work.

  I returned to the corridor. To the cells. I stood at one of the windows, watching a miniature tank ram itself into a wall, over

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  and over again. I tapped at the glass, but nothing happened. I don't know what I was expecting--it wasn't an animal.

  It. I was thinking like them.

  But it wasn't an it.

  It was, had been, a he. Or a she.

  Maybe it had been someone I knew, maybe even--

  Maybe it didn't matter. It wasn't a person inside that tank. It was electronic data, some of which happened to resemble the data inside our heads. It was bytes of information, flickers of light. Nothing more. It didn't have any effect on us. Its existence was irrelevant.

  But if it was nothing, just an imperfect copy, just data, then so was I. And if I was a person, a someone, then maybe so was it. Thinking and feeling at some primal level, dumb and mute and trapped, a slave to a stranger's commands.

  Zo came up beside me. She didn't speak, and knew better than to touch me. We stood side by side. "I don't know what to do," I said.

  "You will."

  170r />
  JUMP

  We were supposed to be a fairy tale.

  Jude didn't believe it, not at first. We had to show him the files we'd hacked and the vids we'd taken, and even then, I could tell, he wanted to think we'd somehow gotten ourselves turned around, stumbled into an alternate realm with no bearing on the real world. It was the first time I'd ever seen him underestimate the boundaries of org depravity.

  On its surface this was less brutal than the antiskinner attacks and lynchings, less bloody than the corp's initial foray into the download technology, its path littered with the corpses of unwilling "volunteers." But I thought I understood Jude's uncertainty and--though he never would have admitted it--his panic. Because this was coordinated and systemic. For all we knew, it was the reason BioMax had pursued the download technology to begin with. Certainly, supplying the military industrial complex paid better than a semihumanitarian mission to heal the broken children of the wealthy. Not to mention the domestic-sector applications, which we'd all

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  seen. Which we'd all--the self-revulsion at this thought was overwhelming--used without a second thought.

  "How could I be this stupid?" Jude said, as we huddled in his car and told him everything.

  "How were you supposed to know?" I asked. "I worked there, and I didn't."

  "Exactly. Stupid."

  I wasn't going to fight with him, even if it would have been easier. "You're right. We were stupid. Now what?"

  "You're asking him?" Zo said.

  "I should be asking you?"

  "Since when do you ask anyone?"

  I wouldn't have thought I had to remind her that things changed.

  "Bossy big sister doesn't exactly translate into fearless leader," Jude said.

  "Asshole. I got us this far, didn't I?"

  "With my plan," he pointed out.

  "My execution."

  "Congratulations," Zo said. "You're both equally useless."

  "This doesn't have to change anything," I said. "We can still sell the info to Aikida."

  Jude frowned. "And let them do the same thing?"

  "So we go public," I suggested. "This has to be illegal."