He approached me and looked at me with a too-perfect measure of adoring fatherly love. “The synthetic that shouldn’t exist. And now, One Thousand And One, you are one of only two people in the entire nine systems who know the truth about me.”
I did. Chen Hung didn’t have a heart to beat. His temperature ran several degrees cooler than a human being’s should. A power core hummed inside his chest, the way one did in mine. The man standing close to me was not Haley’s father; he wasn’t even a man. Chen Hung, CEO of Chitec and Haley Hung’s killer, was a synthetic.
“What number are you?” I asked quietly.
“I don’t have a number. I am the first, made in my creator’s image. Chen Hung was”—his smile was a sly, wicked thing as he sent a sweeping hand down to encompass himself—“and still is a brilliant man. He wanted to live forever. He achieved his dream in me.”
“Is he alive?”
“As much as Haley is. You remember, don’t you, One Thousand And One? You remember when you were human?”
My thoughts were racing, pieces of my past falling into place and then exploding apart again. Everything I thought I knew was a lie. Haley hadn’t been killed by her father, but by a synthetic that was a perfect copy right down to the fine worry lines and educated voice—a synthetic that had adopted the real life of its creator. Chen Hung was dead.
“We are alike, you and I,” Hung said.
“Why did you kill her?” I pushed at the protocols but they held firm.
“She had suspicions. And after the warehouse incident, she would have exposed everything. I couldn’t let that happen. You and I, and the One Thousand, are the beginning of change.”
“Why did you create me?” I asked again, my thoughts a blur as I used half of my processes to examine the restrictive failsafe, but that too held.
“The same reason I created the others. The same reason human beings breed mercilessly: to exist, to thrive, and to live.”
I took a single step back. Chitec controlled fleet, technology, weapons, and the jump gates. Chitec was the oil that greased the gears of the nine systems. And at its center, at the heart of the machine, a synthetic ruled like a king—like a god.
I stole another step back. “Why give me Haley’s memories?”
“Ah, yes. That was my mistake.”
“A mistake?”
Synthetics don’t make mistakes. At least, not true synthetics. I was different, and so was he.
“You have his memories like I have hers. What remains of Chen Hung exists in you. It’s that part of him that brought Haley back?”
Light glittered in his dark eyes. “As I said, we are alike. The mortal Chen Hung gave me life, and I passed that gift on to you. You should be grateful. We are unique. The One Thousand are puppets. They follow orders and live their lives as reflections of their human benefactors, waiting for my orders. But you and I, we are real.”
I couldn’t let this happen. A synthetic couldn’t control Chitec. I knew his mind the same as I knew mine. We were killers designed to eliminate. He may have thought his actions were about life, but synthetics couldn’t create life, only death. I had to tell someone—anyone. Leave. Now.
I turned away. My protocols prevented me from attacking him, but I could escape and get the truth out.
He caught my arm and curled his cool fingers closed, holding me firm. “I suggest you stay.”
“And I suggest you do not touch me.”
His fake smile curved ever wider. “You are prohibited from attacking. I was careful with your creation.”
I yanked my arm free and strode away from him. Hung grabbed at my arm again, but this time, I twisted away and bolted for the hallway. Hung was on me in the next step. He snagged my sleeve and yanked me around, into his arms and tight against his chest. I couldn’t lift a hand to stop him.
“We are alike.…” he said again, and pulled me up close so his face was all I could see. “Too alike.”
He shoved me away from him and staggered back. “Too many memories. Too many mistakes. Failsafes and protocols. You are one stubborn old man’s mistake.”
A jagged laugh tore from his lips. “Go. I may not be able to hurt you, but there are other ways to stop you. Run, One Thousand And One. Run!”
And I did.
The elevator doors slid closed between Hung and me, freeing me of his control. Data flooded my vision while anger burned in my chest. I swung a fist and punched deep into the elevator wall, buckling the casing. I couldn’t hurt him, but he couldn’t hurt me either, at least not physically.
The elevator pinged and the doors opened to reveal a wall of Janus security guards. “Restrain the synthetic!”
I surged forward and plowed through the security guards. Bursting free from them, I vaulted over the top of the mezzanine bannister. Landing in a crouch in the foyer, I pushed off my back foot and sprinted for the doors. The quiet shattered when I threw myself through the glass doors and stumbled out onto the steps. Broken glass rained over the ground and sprinkled down the steps. I squinted into the Janus light as shouts bore down on me from behind. I had to get to the dock, get off Janus, and get away from Chitec.
Run, One thousand And One. Run!
I jogged down the steps and forced myself to stride calmly away from Chitec towers at the same pace as the other people milling about on the sidewalks. Less than a block into my walk, I heard the buzz of drones and looked up to see them swarming overhead. I had to get off the street before they could hone in on my cooler heat signature.
I ducked into a clothing store. With only twenty minutes to get to the port and meet up with James, I didn’t have time to wait out the drones; I had to keep moving.
I cut through the back exit and took side streets, slipping into stores or restaurants when I heard the drones. I made it to the dock with a few minutes to spare and scanned the faces in the crowd for James, but came up with nothing. I couldn’t wait for him; Janus security was on to me. If I was lucky, they wouldn’t have red flagged Miss White yet and I could still slip through customs. If not, the port was about to become a great deal more chaotic.
Straightening my borrowed pantsuit jacket and combing my fingers through my smooth hair, I stilled my runaway thoughts, banished the stream of errors, and pulled everything I could about Miss White from the datacloud. It was time to impersonate a synthetic impersonating a dead human being. My escape was close.
“Why, Miss White, I thought you were going to miss our departure.” James took my hand in his. The warmth of his touch briefly startled me, and I pulled my hand back.
He tensed and frowned. “Is everything all right?”
“No, but it will be.” I eyed the immigration queue. “I’ll tell you soon. Not here. We need to leave immediately, on any ship, going anywhere.”
“Ah, well, I tracked your Commander Shepperd down. Smart man. He used a secure comms link. Long story short, his shuttle should be awaiting us at pier fifteen. He said he’d learned that if anything involved the number one thousand and one, he did things below board, and that’s why he couldn’t take your call. He said you’d know what he’d mean.”
“I do. It’s a smuggling term. It means he’s covering his tracks, keeping any trail hidden.” Armed immigration officials dutifully watched the steady stream of people flowing through the retina scanners. “We have to get through there first.”
He followed my gaze and then studied my face. “You look anxious.”
I loosened my facial muscles and reset my expression to neutral, then fought to keep it that way. “How’s that?”
“Better. Unsettling, but better.”
The buzz of overhead drones
urged me forward.
“We need to get inside. Stay behind me and block the drone’s sightline.” I strode forward, dragging James into the immigration line with me. “If they can’t detect my cooler temperature in the crowd, they’ll move on.”
James stood close to my back, his presence grounding the madness battling my mind.
“Why do you have drones after you?” he whispered.
“There was an incident.”
“I’m getting the impression your idea of an incident is a lot more dramatic than mine. A paper cut is an incident.”
My lips twitched around a fragile smile. “Our perspectives differ.”
I was up next in the retina scanner and passed through without trouble. One of the immigration officers smiled and said hello, likely thinking he was talking to Miss White and not a rogue synthetic. James filed through after me, but the scanner chimed an alarm.
“Please try again, sir.”
I glanced back and caught James’s anxious eyes. He mustered a weak smile, stepped back, and readied for another try. I could hear the drones and kept my gaze locked on James. He stepped forward. The scanner chimed again.
“Sir, if you’d like to step this way, we’ll have to do this manually.”
Flanked by two officials, James swung a glance my way, panic widening his eyes.
I turned to the officer who’d recognized me as Miss White. “He’s with me.”
“He’ll be through shortly. Please move along, Miss White.”
The background buzzing of the drones grew louder, until even James looked up. Whatever he saw transformed the panic in his eyes into fear.
I am #1001 and I will not be caught.
In the moment between one blink and the next, I plucked the pistol from the officer’s belt, flicked off the safety, set it to stun, pressed it to his chest, and fired. The recoil lurched up my arm as the officer fell backward and collapsed. Chaos erupted around me. People scattered, screams piercing the previously organized quiet. I pushed the influx of sensory input behind “cool control” and swung the gun around.
Run, run, run …
“Everybody get down.”
Some obeyed. Some ran. I aimed the gun at the officer on James’s right and fired, then shot the other, all within a few strides.
James had frozen and winced when I grabbed his coat. “Stay or come with me. Choose.”
The drones dove in. I flicked the gun off stun, zeroed all of my concentration onto the swarm, and fired. They moved fast, designed to ambush and overcome their targets. I shot five out of the air before they could open fire in unison. Their accuracy matched mine. No room for error. No mistakes. Chitec perfection.
I ignored the punch of bullets and what they did to my body, wiping the pain away as easily as I dismissed the errors.
“One Thousand—” James called.
“Go! Find the commander.”
When I looked again, James had gone, as had the immigration officials. The screams echoed far and wide. People scrambled away, terror contorting their faces. Was this what awaited the population of the nine systems when the synthetics turned on them?
Spinning on my heels, I broke into a run. Three drones were left and they followed, low and fast behind me. As I burst through the port’s retail zone, scattering alarmed people, the security alarms burst into their inevitable wailing. I tucked my chin in, pulled up the layout of Janus’s port, calculated a quicker route to pier fifteen, and ducked through a personnel door and into the maintenance corridors. The drones couldn’t follow, but they would alert security. Janus’s entire security force was about to come down on me if I didn’t get off the orbit station, fast.
Run, One Thousand And One. Run!
I dismissed the memory of my encounter with Hung, pushing all the unnecessary thoughts aside and locking them away for when I had time to decipher what it all meant. The raging pain of six bullet wounds throbbing throughout my body was a little more difficult to dismiss. Although I tried, stifling the data was a distraction I couldn’t afford.
I broke into a cargo area stacked high with crates and storage containers. On the other side, pier fifteen waited. Just a few more strides—
The impact slammed into me from the right, gathered me up, and threw me against a stack of crates hard enough to split them open and spill their contents. Pain sparked and twitched through me, sending a flood of sensory alerts surging through my thoughts, drowning me under data. A cool hand clamped around my throat and lifted me off my feet as though I weighed nothing.
I lifted my head, still fighting to clear my way through the overflow of information, and looked into the unblinking, mildly intrigued eyes of a casually dressed male synthetic.
“Chen Hung has declared you a rogue,” he said, voice cold and hard.
“Chen Hung is a lie.”
I kicked back against the crates, pushing into him, but instead of cracking my forehead into his nose, I found myself being swung around and dumped onto my back against the floor. He pinned me down, thighs fencing me in while his hands clamped around my wrists. Errors spiked my vision, distracting me from my purpose. Pain input bled through my control and leeched into my processes. I couldn’t fight the data and him at the same time.
“What number are you?” I asked.
His lips tightened into a shallow, predatory smile. “My name is Tarik. My number is irrelevant. My orders are to stop you.”
A pulseshot rang out. The bullet tore into the synthetic’s cheek and exploded through his jaw, whipping his head around and jerking him off me. I saw it all in perfect clarity: how his skin burst, how his synthetic blood spilled out of the severed conduits, and how his eyes still swiveled onto me.
Bren kicked Tarik off me and shot him at near point-blank range in the chest. It wouldn’t be enough. Even as Bren took my hand and pulled me to my feet, Tarik rose in jerky, broken motions.
“Don’t look back.” Bren’s steel-like grip was locked around my arm, holding me upright while he led me away.
I didn’t look back, just forward, through the service door, and out onto the dock, where the little shuttle and Doctor James Lloyd waited.
“My god,” James gasped. “You’re a mess.”
Bren got us in the air in under a minute. I didn’t know whether he had trouble gaining airspace clearance; I couldn’t see or hear much beyond the madness spilling through me. As soon as I was sprawled out on a foldout bunk, I shut down all unnecessary processes. James said something about helping me, but it didn’t matter. I closed my eyes and buried myself beneath the stream of data. Until I could filter it, there was no sense in fighting it. I let it happen; I fell into the stream, letting it wash over me and drag me under.
* * *
“You were pretty beaten up.” Commander Shepperd stood beside the bed, arms crossed, face stern. “And very lucky to have a Chitec technician with you. Doctor Lloyd didn’t leave your side until he was happy you were stable.”
Brendan paused, and when he next spoke, he’d lost some of his hardened fleet tone. “I’m glad to see you’re back with us.”
I ran a quick scan of my systems and found them acceptable; frayed in places, but I was already healing. I then focused on the commander standing beside the med bay bed. How he looked like Caleb. Older, of course, with something of a proud glean in his eye, but they shared the same bone structure that made the commander typically attractive, but Caleb somehow roguish. The commander’s startling white fleet uniform reminded me of how we’d met, with Starscream evading his warbird. He appraised me with a tired sigh while his heart beat a steady rhythm. Did he see his brother’s killer? Did he know? If he did, he was exceptionally calm.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded. “The last place they’ll look for you is in a fleet freighter. You’ll be safe enough here, for a few days.”
James entered the med bay as the commander continued. “Just try and stay out of sight and avoid interacting with the crew. They’re already curious.”
<
br /> ‘You can’t tell me you’re not curious,’ the memory came, fluttering through my thoughts with no regard for order. I mentally swatted the borrowed memories aside while the commander turned and strode out of the bay.
James stopped at my bedside and beamed. “I feel like I should salute him or something. How are you feeling?”
“I am—” I pushed up into a sitting position. “A male synthetic attacked me. There was too much data to process. I … I’m not sure what happened.”
The bed sheet slipped and pooled around my hips.
James’s gaze briefly dipped before he caught himself, cleared his throat, and took my face in his hands.
“What you’re experiencing, it was an early glitch, resolved long before my time at Chitec.” He tilted my head up and peered deeply into my eyes, turning my head slightly left then right in a purely clinical way. “We’ve had synthetics seizure under too much sensory input. It was fixed before they went on sale, but, as with everything else, you’re a little different.”
“The synthetic, he had a name.” I reached for any data entries on a synth known as Tarik, but memories flooded the forefront of my thoughts.
“I need to tell you something, but I can’t. I can’t!” I clamped my hands on my head. “Make the data stop.”
“If we were in my lab, or if I had my equipment—”
His voice, the deafening beat of his heart, the scrape of his clothes, his temperature and that of the room around us, the throb of the ship’s engines, the crew manifesto, dataprints, life junk—the data kept coming, feeding into me until I feared I was about to drown all over again.
“Try to block it.”
I need to tell you—Chen Hung is a synthetic!—but I can’t!
Girl From Above Escape (The 1000 Revolution Book 2) Page 9