Three hours didn’t sound like a lot of time, but apparently it was all we had.
The others—four men, Tommy, and Darlene, who would be our ride—waited in the car, all dressed in matching black caps and shirts. I felt like we were a baseball team from back before sports like zero-gravity basketball had taken over, and I was tempted to slap my crewmates’ shoulders.
I climbed into the back with Mrs. Alvarez and strapped in. Squeezed together like that, with her on one side of me and a stranger on the other, our tension was physical: knees shook, hands played with loose threads and cracked tight knuckles, and feet tap danced on the carpet below. The man next to me, the one with the beard, kept taking deep breaths in and out like a drowning fish. Heeeeee-hoooooo, heeeeee-hoooooo. I wanted to tell him to stop, but I was afraid he’d stop breathing altogether.
“Let’s go,” Tommy told Darlene.
Since none of them could use smart watches or any of the other smart phones without getting arrested, we used an old-fashioned map, so frayed and torn there were whole neighborhoods missing, to navigate to the Investor’s address. Tommy was in charge of directions, and he imitated a robot’s voice as he called out turns. In 2.7 miles, please turn left at Randolph Street. It was unsettling how like a robot he sounded, but then I remembered that I was in the presence of a kid who’d spent a majority of his time on earth “talking” to computers.
The longer it took to get there, the more I worried.
“We’re doing the right thing, right?” I whispered to Mrs. Alvarez.
“Of course, mi hijo.”
She seemed confident, but I wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t explain it, but I had this terrible feeling in my stomach—not that something would go wrong, although I was worried about that too, but that we were the ones doing the wrong thing.
“There it is,” Tommy finally said.
Ahead of us, through the windshield, was a huge silver skyscraper. From the side it had no windows, and when we got to the back, the same thing was true. There was only one door set right into the metal casing of the building, which, according to our plan, would open once it scanned our faces.
“Keep this near you,” Tommy told Darlene as he handed her a smart watch. “It’s clean, but after we use it, we’ll need to toss it out the window so no one can trace it to us. I have one too”—he held up his wrist—“so I’ll call when we’re done.”
“Be safe, honey.” Darlene leaned over the armrest and planted a kiss on Tommy’s cheek. Surprisingly, he let her—perhaps, deep down, he was just as nervous as we were.
We filed out of the van, and Darlene drove away as soon as my feet hit the pavement. Her headlights were visible for a few blocks, but then she disappeared from sight. Even though I knew she was our ride home, I had this terrible feeling I would never see her again. The night was warm, but I shivered.
“Follow me,” Tommy said. I noticed then that he had another book bomb tucked under his arm—probably to blow up the repro machine after we used it and removed the technology.
We followed him to the door, where a facial scanner unfolded from the side of the building like a leaf unfurling from the side of a plant and waved in front of Tommy’s face. It did the same for the rest of us, and when it came to me, I winced even though the light it ran over my face was painless. Its blank glass face paused longer than it had for anyone else, as though it sensed my lack of confidence.
“Welcome,” the machine said at last.
The door in the side of the building swung up, allowing us to enter below its raised hull. Immediately I noticed the dead air of the building and the utter silence that lived there. Tommy put his hand to his lips to indicate we should stay quiet, and we did the same to those standing behind us.
The lobby was empty except for a single desk with a “sleeping” robot collapsed on the marble slab. At opening time, the robot would spring to life and start its tireless inquisition of visitors: “How may I help you? May I ask who you’re here to see? Let me check on that for you.” The answers would translate into emails sent to the appropriate parties, who could either agree to meet with their visitor or schedule a meeting at a different time through their system-shared calendars. Every business worked this way now, including what had been the HORUS headquarters, though this robot seemed even more advanced than the others. Though it wasn’t a humanoid—the government had outlawed such practices after a humanoid experiment had killed its lookalike creator and lived his life for seven months before the man’s wife realized something “wasn’t quite right”—it had humanoid qualities, from the arch of its back to its strands of metal hair.
We moved past the reception desk and into a blank gray hallway, at the end of which waited an open elevator. Like my mother’s open arms, something seemed suspicious about the way it waited patiently for us to enter, even though open elevators were the norm. Customer polling had apparently shown a 10 percent increase in customer satisfaction when an elevator door was already waiting for them, leading stores to add way more elevators to increase these chances.
Inside the elevator Tommy hit a button that said thirty.
“This floor requires approval,” the elevator informed us. “If you are floor-thirty approved, please state your name clearly and present your eyes for a retinal scan.”
“Tommy Platt,” Tommy enunciated. Then he moved his face closer to the screen that listed the floor we were on, which must have served as a dual-purpose retinal scanner.
“Welcome, Tommy Platt. You are approved.”
The elevator hummed to life, and soon enough we ascended at an uncomfortable rate. Most people were fine with elevators like these—or rather, they were too used to them to know any better—but they had always made me feel a little bit sick. I preferred the elevators in Jesse’s BB, old and rickety but always moving at a comfortable pace.
“Remember the plan,” Tommy said under his breath. “As soon as we get up there, we plug the USB in, tell it to spit out repros of Jesse and Georgia, and get the hell out of here, blowing up the machine in the process. Do not, under any circumstances, touch anything else or do anything else that deviates from the plan. Got it?”
We all nodded.
“Good.”
The elevator settled onto thirty with a quick shake, and then the doors opened. I’d expected to see a whole floor of gadgets, but there was only one machine in the whole room: a large glass case and accompanying computer with a bunch of wires and pipes strung between them. Below them, under a sealed floor, was some kind of large machine that had to be the power source.
Only when I did a full 360-degree turn did I notice the two bodies frozen in upright positions with matching wires attached to their heads. They were in two large freezers made of the same silver material as the other machines, just waiting for our program to reanimate them. I walked over and put my hands to the portholes where Georgia’s and Jesse’s faces were, and for a second, I could actually feel them. Or at least I imagined I could.
“Let’s get this over with and get out of here,” Tommy said as he walked over to the computer, set the book on top of the machine, and plugged in the USB.
I started to remove my hand, but something stopped me. Of course, later, I would acknowledge that the voice I heard was just my own voice; I would acknowledge that Jesse was dead, and that nothing but a repro machine would ever be able to bring him back again. But at that moment, standing in the middle of the largest, most dangerous company in the world, I swore I heard him speaking directly to me inside my head.
I heard him speak one word, over and over again.
No.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Maddy
“STOP!”
The voice sounded too loud, too distant to be mine. But it was mine, and before I knew it, I was next to Tommy, my hand reaching for the USB stuck in the computer.
“What are you doing?” he asked, and his hand slapped at mine. “If you remove that the wrong way, you could wipe the whole program.”
&
nbsp; I was going to tell him that’s what I was trying to do, but I didn’t get the chance. The panels I’d thought were the walls swung up to reveal several HORUS men in their white uniforms, accompanied by the Investor, who stood between two of his men with Long John on his shoulder. All of the guards had guns trained directly on us, or, more specifically, on Tommy and I.
“Maddy would know,” Long John said in greeting, and the phrase made me shudder.
“Indeed he would,” the Investor said. “Such a smart young man. Only you would realize that we were never going to let you leave with our repro program.”
Tommy moved toward the USB, but the sound of safety releases clicking off many guns stopped him.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” threatened the Investor. “If you comply, I may just bring you back as a repro, engineered to serve my purposes but otherwise your obnoxious little self. Your grandma will have someone to kiss, even if it’s not quite you at all. But make one more move toward that program, and I swear, I’ll have you blown to bits.”
“Fine.” Tommy took a step back and pressed into my side. I thought he was just afraid, but then I felt something slip into my pocket.
“Grab the program,” the Investor ordered, and several of his guards stomped their way over to the repro computer and took the USB out. In the meantime I felt in my pocket and found another, identical USB waiting there.
“You didn’t think I’d just plug in the real program without checking the machine first, did you?” Tommy whispered under the cover of heavy boots. “I had to make sure the Investor hadn’t set up a copy system to replicate the programing.”
Now I had the only copy of the repro programing in the world, but what was I supposed to do with it? The Investor was going to kill us or, in the best-case scenario, imprison us and then reproduce us for his own purposes, and he’d find the program on me either way. There wasn’t anywhere to hide it—we were in a completely empty room, after all—and there wasn’t anyone to pass it off to. Mrs. Alvarez was the only other person who might figure out what we were up to, but she was standing at least ten feet away, back toward the elevators with the other hackers.
The pressure sat on my chest and stayed there. I tried to breathe slowly, to stay calm, but how could I when the fate of everyone in that room rested on me?
Then I remembered the book. Lying on top of the repro machine’s computer, the bomb hid in plain sight, tempting someone to set it off. For some reason I hadn’t noticed the cover before, but now that I was standing so close, I could read the words, and what they said made the pressure in my chest increase even more.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
A case for artificial wombs, am I right? I heard Jesse’s voice in my head, and the sound brought tears to my eyes. You know… because the women are only allowed to have kids and nothing else…. He rambled on as I inched closer to the book. Artificial wombs…. Get it?
“Where do you think you’re going?” the Investor asked.
“The book… it was a gift from Jesse. I just thought maybe I could hold it when… you know….” I was already crying, which made my act even more believable.
“We humans are so sentimental,” the Investor said as a guard placed the fake USB in his hand, but he waved me away with the other, and I picked the book up before he could change his mind. Then I hid the USB in my palm, removed it from my pocket, and placed it gently inside the back pocket of the book.
I wasn’t sure where the detonator was, but after feeling around for a few seconds, I found an indent in the spine. I nodded to Tommy, and he nodded to the others, who had been watching from near the elevators. One of them pressed the down button, and time seemed to stand still as we waited for the familiar ding of the elevator bell.
Ding.
Through the glass peephole, I stared directly into Jesse’s eyes.
I love you.
Then I pressed the button, put the book back on top of the machine, and ran.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THE SEARCH robots found the remains of many guards, the Investor, Georgia Reed, and one unidentifiable boy in the wreckage of the headquarters. Police had swarmed the building almost immediately, and we’d all been herded into separate vans, where we’d been questioned about terrorist affiliations, the Investor’s projects, and most importantly, what we had been doing blowing up a building at 3:00 a.m.
“What were they doing in there?” the same policeman who had arrested me two days earlier, Officer Connor, asked as he kept his stylus poised on his electronic notebook.
“What can you tell us about the mysterious boy in the Investor’s lab?” another policeman asked, again getting no answer.
None of us mentioned the repro tech, but luckily, there was enough evidence to prove that the Investor was obviously funding many illegal experiments, even without witnesses. I was questioned the most, being the son of one of the Investor’s affiliates and the boyfriend of Georgia Reed, but no matter how many questions they asked, my answer was always the same: complete and total silence.
“Can’t you at least confirm your name?” a desperate officer asked after the other two had given up on me.
I couldn’t.
“Or your home address? You must remember that, right?”
I didn’t.
Everything was numb. Whether from the explosion, which had sent ash flying down the elevator shaft and out the door when we emerged thirty floors below, or from the ringing in my ears, or from the shock of losing not just one but two people I loved in a matter of seconds, or from—worst of all—the fact that I’d been the one to sentence them to death, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted to walk back into that building and follow them, just like I had the year before.
“Let me see him,” a woman’s familiar voice yelled from outside the van.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but Madison is a key witness—”
“He’s a child,” the woman argued, “and not just any child, but my child, mi hijo.”
The officer must have given her a funny look—everyone knew my parents—because Mrs. Alvarez whispered an explanation that I couldn’t quite hear. Somehow she must have charmed him, because a few seconds later, he unlocked the door.
“Thank you, Officer,” Mrs. Alvarez said politely as she stepped into the van and closed the door behind her.
Even in the dim van lit only by a small ceiling light, I could tell her eyes were red and puffy from crying. I expected her to start talking right away, but she didn’t, and her silence was almost worse than anything she could have screamed at me. I had just killed her son, after all, and I knew she probably wished I was the one who’d been blown up—just like I did.
“It should have been me.” I surprised myself by saying it out loud.
“No.” Mrs. Alvarez took my chin in her hand and forced me to look at her. “Don’t you ever think that, ever. You did what you had to do—what not many people would have been able to do.”
“But I… I killed him.”
“You did what was right, not what was better for you. Do you know how many people would have been able to do the same in your situation?”
I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
“Besides, it’s what Jesse would have wanted you to do. When you yelled ‘No’ when Tommy plugged the USB in, I could have sworn I heard Jesse talking, not you. He loved you so much, Maddy, and he would have done anything for you—you know that.”
“I know. But I never got a chance to tell him….” I couldn’t say it, not without crying.
“It’s okay, mi hijo. He knew.”
I broke down then, and we cried together, just like we’d cried the first time Jesse died.
This time, however, there was no bringing him back.
Epilogue
Maddy
“WE GATHER here today to honor and pay tribute to the life of Jesse Alvarez, to express our love for him, and to offer comfort to his family and friends, who are deeply affected by
his passing.” The funeral officiant, an elderly man with small spectacles, peered at the group comprised of Mr. and Mrs. Alvarez, Uncle Ric, Cousin Maurice, and me, and then cleared his throat nervously. Mrs. Alvarez had told me he was the only one she’d been able to pay off to secure a secret plot of land and hold an unofficial service, completely off the books, and we’d all made the drive back to Hidden Treasure Campground for the occasion, along with a plain stone with Jesse’s name on it, in order to say our last goodbyes.
I stood in front of the grave site with a bouquet of white daisies in my hands, and Mrs. Alvarez stood on my right with her hand clutching my arm. She kept squeezing it, and I kept squeezing my flowers, even as they wilted in my sweaty palms.
“We will now hear from Madison Stone, Jesse’s boyfriend, who would like to say a few words.”
I took the slip of paper from my shirt pocket and unfolded it. Mrs. Alvarez gave my arm one last squeeze and then pushed me forward gently so that I was in front of Jesse’s family, facing them.
“I tried to write something,” I said, my eyes down on the paper, “but I couldn’t. Jesse meant more to me than anyone in the world, and no words could possibly express that. So I found a poem called ‘Death is Nothing At All’ by Henry Scott Holland that I think he would like, and I’m going to read it now. Hopefully it says some of the things I can’t.”
My voice started off soft, but it grew louder with every word:
“Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.
Call me by my old familiar name,
Jesse 2.0 Page 15