The Girl Who Dared to Stand

by Bella Forrest

  “You’re a good brother. But you tell anyone I said that, and I’ll deny it.”

  Shut up. Mercury wants to know what happened during the meeting.

  “Unfortunately for Mercury and the rest of my friends, I’m not talking about it, per the other party’s request.”

  Are they that paranoid?

  “They are indeed,” I replied. “Sorry, big brother, but this time I can’t. Especially not through a net call.”

  I see. What do they want from you?

  “Alex,” I said in warning. “We are not talking about it. Now, what is going on with Maddox? I assume that’s why you’re netting.”

  And because I missed you, but that’s beside the point. Liana, the Inquisition found out who Maddox is and reached out to Devon.

  The rock that had been forming in my stomach over the last few hours dropped, and I sat forward, swinging my legs out of the hammock. “How did he react?”

  He didn’t believe it at first. He demanded to see the report, and they sent it to him through his pad. Once he got over his initial shock, however, he wanted her moved immediately into his care. The Inquisition refused to do it immediately, but agreed on two in the afternoon tomorrow. They’re doing the transfer on the Bridge of Heroes.

  The Bridge of Heroes. That was perfect for what we were planning. It was wide, well-trafficked, and had dozens of statues lining its sides, giving the team that went to injure Maddox plenty of cover. Depending on the size of the weapon Zoe and Quess developed.

  “Thank you, Alex. I’m so glad you were able to get this.”

  Me too. I feel awful about what happened. It was our plan, and we failed you. I failed you. I’m so sorry.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I said automatically. “You couldn’t have known there was going to be anyone in that room during that time.”

  Doesn’t matter. I hope you get your friend back, Liana.

  “Me too.” I dropped to the floor. “Thanks again for this, but it means we don’t have a lot of time, so we should get started.”

  I know. Please be careful, Liana.

  “You too, Alex. I love you.”

  I love you.

  The buzz in my skull dissipated, signaling that he had ended the net, and I relaxed slightly. I slipped out of the hammock, taking a moment to switch off the anchor before moving around the room to wake Grey and Eric up and usher them into the workroom.

  Tian I left sleeping. She needed it after all of the emotional turmoil over the last few days.

  The three of us moved into the open space where Zoe and Quess were working on their device for hurting Maddox. The two had their heads close together, with Quess holding a light while Zoe tightened a screw of some sort as she peered through a magnifying glass.

  “How’s it going?” I asked softly, and the two started, both straightening and looking at me as we filed in.

  “Good,” Quess said. “I think we’re onto something here. I take it we have a time and location?”

  I nodded. “Two p.m. Tomorrow, on the Bridge of Heroes.”

  “Gross,” Zoe said, and I smiled. She and I both hated the Bridge of Heroes, but for two totally different reasons. To me, it was a monument created by the council, to glorify the egos of the council. For Zoe—it was a waste of resources. Either way, it was one of the many things we mutually hated, and doing so made us even closer.

  “That’s still where it’s happening. Do you think this thing will be up and running by then?”

  “Should be,” Quess muttered. “We need to go scavenge a few more parts, but they’re easy to find, so it shouldn’t take long.”

  “Good,” I replied.

  My sleep-deprived mind fumbled for something else to add, even as a yawn split my mouth wide open, and I suddenly remembered the other mental note I had made for the day.

  “Now we need to decide who’s going where,” I said. “I’m going to the Medica—I have to. There’s a chance Jasper won’t work with anyone who isn’t me.”

  Silence met my comment, and Zoe was the first to break it. “I’ll go to the bridge,” she announced into the quiet room. “Make sure it’s done and on track.”

  “I’ll go with you, too,” Eric said to Zoe, a smile playing on his lips. “Keep you from getting hurt. Keep you out of trouble.”

  I nodded at them and looked at Grey.

  “I go where you go,” he said simply—but it wasn’t simple, and I immediately flushed bright red in pleasure.

  All around me, everyone erupted into a collective “Awwwwww,” and I suddenly wanted nothing more than for all of them to just mind their own business.

  “I’m going with you, too,” Quess said after the moment had passed. “You might need me to hack into their programs to move around.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, but something bothered me deeply as everyone volunteered. “What about Tian?” I asked. “Are we going to leave her alone?”

  Quess hesitated, and then lowered his eyes. “We can’t take her with us, but we need everyone else if we’re going to have a shot at this.”

  I looked over my shoulder at Quess, and then back to Tian. “Will she be okay?”

  Quess hesitated before replying, “She’ll hold up. She’s strong, and she’ll understand that it’s for Doxy.”

  Quess was right. I hated it, but I couldn’t deny it. His questions were more than valid, and without any viable proof one way or the other in regard to Jasper—or Leo—it was all hands on deck to get Maddox out.

  Tian would be okay for a few hours by herself; I was sure of it. All the same, telling her could wait until we were closer to the time we had to leave. I wasn’t about to wake her now.

  “All right,” I breathed. “Plan in place. Now, let’s get a list going with what we need to make it happen, as well as any other thoughts or ideas you might have on potential problems so we can get ahead of them.”

  I sat back and listened as my team began to speak, pleased that things were coming together so quickly. Now, we just had to make sure everything went smoothly, and then we’d be home free, with Maddox, and soon.

  24

  I rose from the vent in time to see the beams of incandescent light spinning from emitters positioned around the office, resulting in the familiar glow and shape of Leo. He smiled at me, his bright blue eyes glowing in pleasure, and I felt my own smile coming to my lips. No matter how many times I entered this room, Leo never failed to greet me, reminding me of a dog, suddenly excited to find their human had returned.

  “Liana,” he greeted me. “How did your mission go? I’ve been quite worried.”

  “Have you?” I asked, surprised and then slightly amused. “Do you mean to say you care about what happens to me?”

  Leo’s cheeks colored, and he made a show of looking away before reluctantly meeting my gaze. “Of course I do,” he replied simply. “You’re the first person who has talked to me in a long time. I’d go back to being alone if anything happened to you or your friends.”

  There was a note of sadness there that pushed the levity away, and I instantly felt sympathy for him. “Then I hope nothing happens to us.”

  He smiled, his whole face brightening in pleasure. “So, tell me about the mission. What did the Core look like?”

  I hesitated. “Honestly? It reminded me of a prison. Lots of dark colors, doors with no handles, lots and lots of security. The mission didn’t go very well.”

  “What happened?”

  Even though we had a plan to fix what had gone wrong, I felt a pang of sadness and guilt as I replied, “Maddox,” before sitting on the couch and pressing my hands to my face. I wasn’t crying, but I was emotionally drained. “She got taken,” I said, lifting my head and pushing through the exhaustion. Leaders didn’t get to be tired. “We have a plan to get her out, though.”

  Leo looked mildly surprised as he leaned back, one hand coming up and over the back of the sofa as if he were leaning on it, even though he had no weight to support.

  “You do? So
fast?”

  “We have a friend in IT,” I said, thinking of Mercury and Alex. “He managed to find out that the Inquisition was transferring her, and got us a time and a place.”

  “The… Inquisition?” I looked back from where my gaze had drifted down to the table, to see his brows screwed tightly together. “What does a religious order based primarily in Spain have to do with anything?”

  “Spain?” I asked. It was my turn to be confused. “What’s Spain?”

  Leo cocked his head at me, and then a moment later we were both smiling.

  “Spain is a country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,” he said. I blinked at him. His words still made no sense to me, and he took pity on me. “It’s another land from long ago, very far away from here, across a body of salt water. How do you not know this?”

  “How would I? We only talk about the past—pre-End times—in terms of how the Tower was constructed, and then the history of the Tower itself, every big event that has occurred in the last three hundred years. I know some things from books I’ve read, but I haven’t read many.”

  “What have you read?”

  “Oh, I don’t know… Charlotte’s Web is my favorite, but there were a few things I didn’t understand.”

  “Like?”

  I considered it, and then remembered a word that Wilber had used. “What’s a ‘truck?’ I gathered it was somehow used for transportation, but I can’t seem to picture it.”

  Leo gestured with his hand, and an image appeared a foot or so in front of him. It was long and rectangular, with four black wheels at the bottom. There was a box attached partway back from what I guessed to be the front, due to the large pane of glass on the top half. There was more glass on the sides of the box, and two black nubs where I assumed the doors were, based on the gaps in the metal. I didn’t see a knob for opening it, but there was something flat and black on the inside of where the door was cut out.

  “It’s ugly,” I blurted. “How does it work?”

  “A truck is a type of vehicle, similar to a car,” he explained carefully, dismissing the image. “I confess, I have only seen them in pictures, but Lionel loved driving. That’s what it’s called when you make the vehicle move. Anyway, cars were pretty much configured the same way, in that they had four wheels, a tank for fuel, an engine to make the wheels roll, and controls to make the vehicle turn and speed up or slow down.”

  “Fuel?”

  “Ah, I understand your ignorance on that subject, because Lionel wanted everything to be run off of clean energy. There was a period of time when mankind used fossil fuels to power everything, but those were difficult to collect, and were not in infinite supply. It also caused havoc at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when scientists were calling for new forms of clean energy to prevent climate change before it hit critical mass.”

  He stopped, and I scooted forward until I was on the edge of my seat, eager to hear and learn more about the world before. When nothing followed, I asked, “Did it work?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. This was all around the time of the End, so some information was, understandably, lost.”

  “Did Lionel know the End was coming?”

  “Of course he did. He even tried to put a stop to it. But it didn’t matter: Nobody would listen. After a while he just gave up and moved on to doing what he could about it.”

  I sat back and considered this. It answered a question I’d had about the mind behind the Tower, but it wasn’t satisfactory. It didn’t explain what exactly had happened, or what Lionel had supposedly been trying to stop. It only confirmed that I was right in that he had known it was coming.

  “So what happened?” I asked, helpless to stop my curiosity.

  Again, Leo shook his head. “I don’t even think Lionel knew when it started. He had disconnected from the rest of the world to spend every waking moment on this place. We just knew it had happened. The people who had been hired to help construct this place were the first residents, and Lionel let in as many as he could before he had to seal the rest out.”

  Leo’s narrative of events was both enlightening and foreign, and painted a picture of Lionel Scipio that I had never considered. In my mind, Lionel had always seemed more villainous than heroic. Granted, that opinion had slowly begun to change as I learned more and more about him, but it was hard getting over my initial prejudice. It was one I had been cultivating my entire life, and was not easy to let go of. Every time someone used his name, Scipio, the nets, the ranking system… all those elements of control would flash through my mind with a deep-seated hatred for their creator.

  Only the ranking system wasn’t in his original design, and had been added later. The nets had been modified from their original design—one that was supposed to grant knowledge and monitor our emotional state to make sure we weren’t succumbing to depression. And, according to all evidence, it wasn’t 2.0’s fault he was acting crazy.

  So then, who was behind all these changes?

  The thing I kept coming back to was the mysterious war between groups within the Tower itself. One of them must have done something, something drastic, to make Scipio 2.0 want to implement the ranking system. Could it just be that they had fed him false data until he chose such an extreme course of action, or had they taken over his system and made him agree? In either case, why would they go to such great lengths just to kill ones? What could they possibly hope to gain?

  “You’re deep in thought,” Leo remarked, and I looked up to meet the flickering blue of his eyes. “What are you thinking about?”

  I gazed at him, thinking about the video he’d shown me of Ezekial Pine murdering Lionel, and then his attempt to murder Leo. They had mentioned a name: Prometheus. Maybe understanding how one of the first of these groups had come into existence would tell me what I needed to know about the newer ones. They had to be related in some way.

  “Leo, in the video you showed us, they mentioned something called Prometheus. What exactly is that?”

  His brows furrowed, and he gave me another considering look. “Why do you ask?”

  I quickly explained to him about the secret groups that had been battling for control over the Tower, and what the legacies were and what they wanted. The more I spoke, the more alarmed he became.

  “This is terrible,” he said, almost frantic with frustration. “Lionel always worried there was a way to exploit us, but…” He met my gaze, his eyes brimming with fear. “What if they hurt him?”

  “Him? Do you mean 2.0?”

  “Yes, I mean 2.0! He’s still an AI! For someone to tamper with his code…” He shuddered, as if the very thought repulsed him, and I felt sickened as I realized that tampering with an AI’s code would probably feel a lot like I’d felt about being on the Medica’s pills to correct my ranking. And how I’d felt after I stopped taking them: scared, confused, unable to remember what had happened over the last week. And… violated. Like someone else had slipped into my body and used it as a puppet.

  I suddenly found myself wondering if that was the correct analogy. I could imagine it was, but I wasn’t an AI, and I had no basis for comparison. And that made me curious.

  “Leo… can you feel pain?”

  He nodded, and then froze as if reconsidering. “It’s not exactly pain as you see it, but it doesn’t feel good. Every time Lionel modified or altered some of my coding, it was… uncomfortable. I could imagine it would feel like someone manually repositioning a muscle fiber over your bones. It drags across, and you can feel every bump and imperfection in your bones as it is moved.”

  I immediately made a face, repulsed, and shook my head. “Too graphic,” I said, and he gave me an innocent shrug.

  “You asked.”

  I rolled my eyes and tried to remove the image from my head and focus on the conversation. “So… Scipio 2.0 is being tortured?”

  Leo nodded. “If what you’re saying is true.”

  I paused. “You know we’ve discussed maybe finding a way to
put you into the Core and replace him, right?”

  Leo hesitated, and then shrugged. “I know that, but as I’ve told you, my programming isn’t the same.”

  I frowned, looking at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well…” He paused, the holographic representation of him looking like it was deep in thought. “Scipio 2.0 is an amalgamation of six other programs, each of them modeled after one of the department designer’s brain patterns. I was based on Lionel’s, of course, but there were others.”

  My mind reeled at the news, and I sat back. Once again, the Tower had stolen some pretty important parts of our history and seemingly eradicated them. Six AIs. Lionel had made six AIs. What had happened to them? Were they still alive?

  Then I remembered Ezekial telling Lionel that the other “ones” had been shut down, and I guessed that meant they weren’t around anymore, considering he’d tried to eradicate Scipio as soon as he was done killing Lionel.

  “There were six other AI programs? And they were all put together to create Scipio 2.0?” At his nod, I speared him with a beseeching look. “Why six? And how come you are the only one to survive?”

  “We were all presented with disaster models. Scenarios in which a computer fed us every feasible situation, running us through hundreds of years of what-if scenarios to see where we were best equipped. When a program failed, the strongest parts of their programming were harvested to be introduced into the winners.”

  “They killed them?” I asked, my eyes bulging.

  “No, not exactly. It’s more complicated than that. Let me try to condense things as much as possible. I lasted until the end, but there were a few that thought Lionel had rigged the test in my favor.” I arched an expectant eyebrow at him when he stopped speaking, and his eyes widened in alarm. He immediately waved his hands as if to dismiss the very idea. “Lionel was a scientist; he wasn’t in this for the ego or the fame. He was in it for the survival of his race. But this does relate to Prometheus.