by Beth Revis
My hands go unconsciously to my mouth as I gasp in shock, tasting bile. But then my fingers wonderingly explore my face—my face. I’m dead. Right there is my body. But I’m here. Not dead.
Dad wraps his hands around either side of my face and forces me to look at him. “Ella,” he says. “I couldn’t not do it. I had to save you. I had to. But baby, I’m going to make sure you have the truth. And control.” He takes a deep breath. “I am going to make sure you can do what I couldn’t.”
seventy
He didn’t die in an attack from terrorists. He wasn’t killed by a rogue android sneaking into the labs—that was all manufactured. I try to remember the video PA Young showed me—just Dad talking with his colleagues, a brief image of the android, a flash of light. That could be faked. And I fell for it.
Dad didn’t kill me. He saved me.
I open my eyes blearily. Ms. White hovers over me, anxious. “What did you discover?” she asks.
My mouth opens. I try to shift my arms, and realize they are still strapped down to the chair, immobilizing me.
“I discovered that you killed me, you bitch,” I snarl, struggling against the chair.
Ms. White rolls her eyes. “Oh, not this again.”
“Again?” I strain against the restraints, trying to break free.
“I loved your mother. And I love you, Ella. But we’ve had this argument before, whether you remember it or not.”
It’s not until that moment that I recall how my memories have been tampered with, that someone erased Jack from me. And, apparently, more than just him.
“I offered you money. I offered you a home, with me.”
I spit in her face.
“You did that last time, too.” She sounds bored. “It really would be easier if you’d just tell me your father’s method. How did he make you? Did you discover anything new in that reverie? The secrets are locked inside of you, I’m certain of that.”
“I will never tell you anything,” I snarl.
Ms. White calmly rears her cyborg arm up, crashing it against the side of my face so violently that my head snaps back. I taste blood in my mouth. I may be a cy-clone, but her arm is cyborobotic, and it hit me with the force of a wrecking ball.
“You will tell me everything, one way or another,” she says with certainty. “You’re just a glorified computer, and computers can be reprogrammed. They can be hacked.”
Something about the cold, emotionless way she says this breaks me. Hot tears slide down my cheeks, veering down my face at an odd angle since I’m still strapped down to the reclining chair. “Why?” I ask, all my hopes and fears bundled into that one word.
“When your father cured your mother, all he saw was her. But I saw something more. A chance at peace, at immortality.”
I stare at her, horrified.
“Think of how nice the world would be if everyone is a cy-clone. Humans who allow themselves to be gently guided into doing the right thing. Terrorism will be a thing of the past. Anger, hatred—it will all fade away. True equality, true peace, true prosperity.”
“You don’t want citizens,” I say flatly. “You want slaves.”
“Androids are slaves. That’s what the word ‘robot’ means, you know, slave. But—”
I interrupt. “That’s what you want to turn people into.”
“No—no,” Ms. White says, frowning. “Not at all. Cy-clones are not androids. There’s a difference.”
“Not when you control them.”
Ms. White makes a frustrated noise. “Either way, there will be peace. No more threat of war. No more terrorism.”
“No more freedom.”
This is why the government—controlled by Ms. White—was willing to stage the android explosion and wrap it up in the pretense of a terrorist strike. People do desperate things in war. They sell out the causes they believe in, like Representative Belles did, or they take stupid risks, like Jack and the Zunzana. But one of the first things to go in a time of war is simply freedom.
This—this long, long nightmare—has all been about the manipulation. And didn’t PA Young tell me that from the start? I just didn’t listen.
“Your mother and father were so… limited… in what they were willing to do with their technology,” Ms. White says. “I can sell cy-clone upgrades to the rich as immortality. Cy-clones are nearly impossible to kill, and they live much longer natural lives. And of course, the peace and prosperity—not just for me, but for all.”
And then I realize: This is not just about war. This is about the fame, the prestige. My mother never allowed Ms. White to have full access to the reverie system and the formula for the reverie drug. My father blocked Ms. White utterly from his cy-clone research. They may not have known how corrupt she was, or maybe they did and it was too late, but either way, Ms. White has been blocked by my parents. Mom only ever intended reveries to be used to help people relive their happiest memories. Dad only ever wanted to use cy-clones to save Mom. It was Ms. White who saw the advantage of combining the two procedures to develop something that will turn a profit and give her the ultimate control of the entire Unified Countries.
“Ella, you have no idea, no idea at all, how rich war can make someone. I know. I saw what happened to the leaders of the Secessionary War, the ones who made weapons, the ones who fed off the fear of others.”
I stare at Ms. White’s arm. She was in the science labs at the Lunar Colonies when she was my age, just like Dad and Mom were. I usually think of my parents at the colonies in a sort of idyllic way—it’s where they met, where they fell in love. But they were there because they were geniuses in science, and so was Ms. White. My father was a master of robotics, and Mom invented reveries. But Ms. White… Ms. White is where the cyborg part came from.
There will be terrorism. Ms. White and the android explosion has seen to that. And that terrorism will make people scared, and that will make them get reveries, and that will make them accept the procedure to become cy-clones. And Ms. White will pull all the strings. She will manipulate the entire country… the entire world… right into the palm of her hand.
“And in the end,” Ms. White says, “wouldn’t I deserve it? This war really will end all wars, and we’ll have world-wide peace.”
“A brainwashed peace,” I say.
Ms. White waves her hand as if this doesn’t matter. “It’s so simple. Make a war, make some money. End the war, make more money. Give people the chance to live in utter bliss. Peace and prosperity.”
I don’t know which she wants more: world peace, or a throne of gold. But either way, she’ll get them both. “Don’t try to dress this up as nobility,” I snarl.
“What did you think?” Ms. White says. “That this was some elaborate action-thriller? You against the world, you versus the big, bad government? I have news for you, dear. It’s never the government that’s evil. It’s not like the world is divided up between good and bad like that, and no one cares if you’re willing to fight the good fight, because there is no good fight in the first place. It really is as simple as this: we do what we have to in order to get what we want.”
“And you want money.”
“Gobs of it. Don’t you?”
“Not at this price.”
Ms. White shrugs. “And now we are at a crossroads—and a decision.”
“A decision?”
“Actually, it’s more of a final chance. You see now, don’t you, Ella?” Ms. White asks softly. “Give me your father’s formula. If we know how he made you, we can recreate the process, make better cy-clones. Ones that will last longer, ones that will work perfectly. None of the ones we’ve made so far have been as successful as you. None are stable.”
I think, then, of the flash of reality I saw in Akilah’s eyes. Ms. White believes that all the cy-clones she has made so far are breaking down, but maybe they’re just breaking free.
“Let me go,” I growl, jerking my arms and legs against the restraints futilely. Because the only thing I know for c
ertain now is that I cannot let Ms. White have the information she wants.
“If you tell me your father’s method of making cy-clones,” she says idly.
“I thought you said you could hack a computer,” I say bitterly. Because isn’t that all I am to her? A computer?
“What do you think I’m doing?” Ms. White says, dosing me with more reverie drug.
seventy-one
When I open my eyes, I am standing in the reverie chamber. My body is on a chair—not struggling against restraints, but asleep. I know, even though I cannot see, Ms. White is plugged into the other chair.
None of this is real. We are in a reverie. We’ve been in a reverie the whole time, ever since I “woke up.”
When PA Young broke into the reverie chamber, she took Jack, and she dosed me with the drug. And then someone strapped me into the chair. And Ms. White plugged herself into the other chair, the one Representative Belles had been using. And from the moment I “woke up” to right now, I’ve been inside Ms. White’s reverie. She’s been manipulating me, tricking me, trying to find a way to discover whatever the hell it was my father hid inside me.
But now that I know I’m in a reverie, I can see through the fabric of lies she’s woven around me.
I understand now, in a way I did not before. This is all in my head.
Including Dad, who is standing beside me.
“I tried to save you,” he says.
“I know.” And I do. All that he did for me, all of it, was just to save the people he loved. Mom. Me.
He made sure I had access to the memories I would need. The hallucinations I had in the reveries before—it was me, trying to access the hidden parts of my mind. It was Dad, protecting me. When I needed the information, he tried to help me get it. The images of him in the reveries were files of himself he saved in my mind.
He hid the truth inside me.
“Truth lies in the heart of fortune,” he says.
But that is not one of his sayings. Dad was always full of pithy saying—Eyes are the window to the soul; Get knocked down twice, stand up three times—but “truth lies in the heart of fortune,” wasn’t one of his sayings.
It was just the thing we printed on his tombstone.
We. Mom and me.
But. Mom was sick. When Dad died. She couldn’t do anything.
I arranged the funeral.
I picked the tree—a holly—to commemorate Dad. I picked the casket he was cremated in. I picked the songs played at his funeral.
I picked the memorial engraved on his plaque.
Dad’s been giving me clues this whole time. The bees, the hallucinations. I didn’t know what I was before, and, just as Kim had automatic defenses to prevent it from sticking its hand in a pot of boiling soup, I had unconscious automatic defenses to keep me from learning the horrible truth about myself. Only in moments of panic and fear did my true nature shine—the way I attacked Jack when I first saw him without really knowing anything about self-defense, the way I never let my mind really question how I could do reveries and no one else could, the way I had the strength to save Mom and myself when Rosie blew up, the way I could hold my breath forever. My true nature flickered if I needed it, just on the edge of my consciousness.
And when I started to question it, when I came a little too close to the truth… my mind and body fought me, too. The seizures, the hallucinations. All designed inside my head, like a choreographed dance, showing me just enough to find the right path to the truth.
But that clue—Truth lies in the heart of fortune—that was left for me, by me. Dad was dead. He couldn’t tell me that secret.
I grip the little fortune cookie charm I wear around my neck—the one Dad gave me, the one I always wear. I remember putting a digi file of Akilah and me playing when we were younger into the locket.
Truth lies in the heart of fortune.
But… I’ve never actually looked at the fortune cookie locket for… a long time. I don’t recall ever opening the locket. Every time I came close, I would have a piercing pain in my head or a seizure or a hallucination, and I would forget.
I don’t have pain now.
I know what I have to do. To find the last secrets in my mind, all I have to do is open my locket. Open the secret I hid for myself. I slip my fingernail in the crack around the edge of the metal fortune cookie. It pops open, and a single, scrolled piece of paper flops into my hand.
I tremble as I slide apart the tiny scroll. A bot code is written across the front in black ink, one designed to automatically launch a program when it’s linked to my eye bots.
“The eyes are the window to the soul,” I whisper, staring down at the code. A tiny spot in my head between my eyebrows starts to ache with a sharp pain that quickly fades to throbbing.
And then everything shifts.
My brain is a computer, and nothing on a computer is ever really erased. In the darkness, I see a filing cabinet.
A plain filing cabinet with a hand-written label in green ink. JACK TYLER.
Standing on one side of the filing cabinet is my father. In his hand is a silver key.
“You locked away my memories of Jack?” I ask.
Dad hands me the key. “I couldn’t have,” he says.
And then I realize: that is true.
I met Jack—I dated him, I fell in love with him—after Dad’s death.
No.
I stare down at the silver key.
No.
No.
I couldn’t have.
Only one person can alter memories.
I slide the key into the lock, and the drawer slips open easily. The memories spill out like photographs, moving in quick scenes. An awkward meeting. First kiss. Last fight. Then I see the one that’s all black, sucking away the light of the others like a black hole.
I touch it and slip into a memory so visceral that it feels as if I’m living it.
In my hand is the open fortune cookie locket. I look up, having just experienced the memory it hid.
I had done this before—I had sought the truth, and I had found it. That was one more thing, like Jack, that I forgot about.
Ms. White stands in front of me. Not the Ms. White from today, or the one from the other reverie, but a Ms. White I recognize from the more recent past.
Angry tears spring to my eyes. “You killed me!” I accuse. “You killed my father.”
Ms. White waves her hand, dismissing me.
“I won’t let you control me,” I say.
Ms. White pinches the bridge of her nose. “I don’t want to control you,” she says. “I just want to get paid. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into you, you know.”
“Dad would never want—”
“Your father didn’t want to die, either. We’ll figure it out, one way or another. Once I have your father’s formula, I’ll give you some of the payout. You can go. You can do whatever you want.”
And the worst part is, I’m tempted.
“If I tell, you’ll go to prison!”
“No, dear, I won’t.” Ms. White looks bored.
“I’ll take Mom and run!”
Ms. White’s bemused smile mocks me. “You can’t run away with your mother. She’s so sick, you see.” More manipulation, although I had not realized it then.
I swallow, hard.
“I’ll still go,” I say softly.
Ms. White’s eyes widen a little, and then she gets a manipulative, knowing look. “It’s that boy isn’t it? Jack.”
“I love him!” I shout. The feeling wells up inside me, threatening to break through me like a flood.
Ms. White laughs. She laughs. “Well,” she says, “we can’t be having that. If he’s going to encourage you to leave me, I’ll just have to kill him. Like I killed his parents.”
Horror washes over me. She could. She would.
“No!” I protest.
“Really, dear, you’ve given me no other choice.”
“I’ll stay!”
She shakes her head in mock-sorrow. “I just can’t trust he wouldn’t entice you to leave again.”
“He doesn’t entice me!” I shout.
Ms. White looks truly apologetic. “Just by existing, he does,” she says. “He reminds you of freedom, and I can’t be having you thinking that you can just leave me.”
“I won’t,” I whisper. “I swear.”
“Your promises mean nothing.”
I stop, thinking. I am realizing all the power I have, and how it’s all in her hands, as long as she holds Jack’s life over me.
“I know a way,” I say.
The screaming fight at his parents’ funeral. I burn with shame and revulsion at my own actions—but I know the only way to truly keep Jack away from me is to hurt him so bad that he’ll hate me.
“I never want to see you again!” I scream the lie, and I put all my love behind it.
Jack’s plaintive plea. His question.
“Why?”
I sit down in the reverie chair, trembling. Ms. White looks down at me doubtfully. “Are you sure you can do this, dear?” she asks.
I know what she’s thinking. If I mess up, she can just start again, this time with a fresh version of me.
“I can do this,” I say. “I’ll erase Jack entirely.”
“You could just give me your father’s research instead,” Ms. White says.
My eyes burn with fear and frustration. “I don’t know my father’s research!” I plead. “I don’t understand it at all. But if I make myself… acquiescent… I’m like a computer, that’s what you said. You can hack into me. You can find what you need to know. Just… don’t hurt Jack. Let me stay with Mom, and don’t hurt Jack.”
Ms. White contemplates my offer. Dad’s information is hidden far, far into my subconscious, and the only chance she has of hoping to find it is by breaking into my mind. And that will take time.
“I have you, for as long as it takes,” Ms. White says. “That’s the deal. I have you until I have the information inside of you.”