Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  “I can take care of myself.”

  He laughed softly. “Of course. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.”

  The car vibrated beneath us as we lurched off the highway onto a loose gravel road. “We’re going the wrong way.”

  “Scenic route,” Ben said. “You and I have a lot to discuss.”

  I thought about opening the door and throwing myself out of the car. It would have been a bit melodramatic, but melodrama seemed appropriate. We couldn’t have been going more than fifty or sixty miles an hour—it would be a bumpy landing, but I’d had those before. Thick skin, strong bones, titanium skull, just a few of the benefits of being a mech.

  But if call-me-Ben wanted me, he would always know exactly where to find me.

  Another of the benefits of being a mech, apparently.

  “The doors are locked,” Ben said

  No problem.” I gave him a placid smile. “I’m getting used to being a prisoner.”

  “You’re not a prisoner, Lia.” Ben sighed and leaned back in his seat. He laced his fingers together, inverted his hands, palms facing out, then stretched his arms with a satisfied groan. “You’re just possibly the solution to a sticky little problem we’ve been having.”

  “I doubt that. What do you want?”

  “Your friend Jude,” Ben said.

  I don’t have friends, I was about to say, then stopped myself. Friends were for orgs, just like family. I didn’t know what Jude was to me—an ally, a protector, an antagonist—none of the old categories fit. He was simply like me.

  I smirked at Ben. “Last I checked, he’s not mine to give.”

  “I want the name of his BioMax contact.” Ben’s voice was steely.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me tell you what I know, Lia.” His features were still just as soft, but his voice, his eyes, were hard. “I know Jude has an inside source at BioMax. That he’s stealing information and technology. I also know that Jude was supposed to meet his contact at Synapsis Corp-Town this week, but he sent you instead. For the first time. And just as you arrive . . .” Ben shook his head. “That’s some seriously bad timing, don’t you think?”

  No more secrets. That was all I could think. Not when they were watching.

  “How do you know?” I asked, hating how small my voice sounded.

  Ben made a sound like a buzzer. “Wrong question, Lia.”

  I wanted him to stop saying my name. There was a little twist in his voice, a glint in his eye, each time he formed the syllables. Like the name was a secret between us. Like he was silently saying, We both know you’re not really Lia Kahn. But I’ll play along if you will.

  I waited.

  “Why didn’t he go himself?” Ben asked. “Why did he need you to go? What did he really want?”

  I saw where he was going. I’d already gotten there myself. Jude was the one who’d sent me to BioMax, it followed he was the one most likely to have set me up. But he wasn’t the only one who’d known about the corp-town trip. Jude’s BioMax contact knew too. And he’d known enough not to show. Call-me-Ben wanted me to believe Jude had set me up—and so, for the first time, I started to think maybe he hadn’t.

  “He must really scare you guys,” I said. “Afraid he’ll turn us against you?”

  Ben arched an eyebrow. “‘You’ orgs?”

  “‘You’ BioMax.” I was spinning through the possibilities as quickly as I could. BioMax knew where we were at all times— they had all they needed to set us up. But why go to the trouble and then whisk me away from the secops? Why do it in the first place?

  He burst into laughter. “Lia, as far as I’m concerned, if Jude were who he claimed to be, he’d be a hero. Our BioMax clients need someone like him, to ease the transition into life postdown-load.” His eyes were gleaming, his movements loose and free, as if some part of him usually tamped down was breaking out. “All that stuff about mechs being superior, about this technology being the dawn of a new era for humanity . . . if I didn’t believe that, why would I work for BioMax in the first place?”

  “Great, so Jude’s a hero,” I said sourly. Maybe they were all working together. “Where’s the problem? You want me to arrange a meet-and-greet?”

  “I said he would be a hero,” Ben reminded me. “If a tidy little confidence boost was all he was after. But it’s not.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Wrong question again,” Ben said with another buzzing noise. “What does this boy really want? Have you even bothered to ask? Or is it easier to just smile and nod and accept whatever he says as gospel?”

  “You know me,” I said with as much fake sweetness as I could muster. “Always going with the flow.”

  “You really think you’re all a bunch of rebels, don’t you?” he asked, sounding like he was trying not to laugh. “And what, exactly, are you rebelling against?”

  “I don’t know,” I mused. “How about stalker corps that get off on spying on us?”

  Nothing ruffled him. He just drummed his hands on the smoky glass of the window, adopting a philosopher’s tone. “ ‘Us.’ Interesting word, that. And who would ‘us’ be, in this scenario?” He ticked the options off on his fingers. “We’ve got Jude, who appears out of nowhere and charms himself into the heart of, among others, Quinn Sharpe, heir to one of the country’s largest fortunes. Not to mention Ty Marian, Anders Prix, Lara Pirendez—none of them in Sharpe territory, certainly, but not too shabby. Sloane Beignet—I’m told you were responsible for bringing her in. And then there’s Lia Kahn. Whose parents have yet to part with any of their credit—but, if and when they do, will, I’m sure, be donating to the cause.”

  “What are you getting at?” I knew what he was getting at.

  “I’m just wondering whether it’s a coincidence that so many of your friend Jude’s nearest and dearest acolytes are swimming in credit.”

  “It’s no coincidence,” I snapped. “So we’re rich—so what?” Not wanting to admit that I’d had the same thought myself. But Quinn had donated her credit freely—they all had—so we could live as we wanted to live. Jude pays me back in other ways, she’d told me once. And not just me, all of us. It’s not like Jude reveled in the luxury—there seemed to be little that he actually wanted for himself. “The download costs. We’re all rich.”

  “Not all of them,” Ben said pointedly. “At least, they didn’t used to be.”

  “That’s really what you want to talk about?” I said. Daring him. “The ‘volunteers’?” He could hear it in my voice, that I knew better.

  “You’re so quick to distrust BioMax,” he said smoothly, shifting gears. “And yet so quick to put your faith in someone like Jude. Do you know anything about this boy? Where he came from, who he was before the download?”

  “It’s irrelevant,” I shot back. “None of us are the people we were before the download. Those people are dead.”

  “Excuse my language, but: bullshit,” Ben said. “That’s a lie he needs you to believe, so you’ll walk away from the people who actually care about you. Like your family, Lia. Like your father.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but my father cares about Lia Kahn, his dead daughter. I’m just an electronic copy. You know it, I know it.”

  “Does he.” Ben shut his eyes and tipped his head back against the seat. As if we were done and it was naptime.

  Not that I wanted to hear more of his crap.

  Still. “You don’t know anything about my father.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” He didn’t bother to open his eyes. Instead, he pulled out a tablet-size ViM, passed it to me. It was as black and sleek as the car, featureless but for the slim gray thumbprint in the left corner. No one needed that kind of security on their ViMs—that was the whole point of a ViM, that the data was stored on the network, not on the machine. Nonetheless, the screen stayed blank until Ben reached across me and pressed his thumb to the print. “A greatest-hits selection for you
.”

  The vids were cued up on the BioMax zone, the picture blurry and amateurish, the cameras shaking. All featured my father facing down clusters of suited men and women, various corp logos hanging over their heads or stenciled onto the surface of the tables. My father, seemingly oblivious to the camera and the hostility of his audiences. “These are human beings,” he said in vid after vid. “Can’t you see that? People we know. People we care about.”

  My father, for once asking rather than ordering, asking for understanding. For the download technology. For the mechs. For his daughter.

  “These aren’t machines,” he said, “no matter what they look like. These are our children—my child.”

  One-on-one in an ornate living room, pounding a delicate glass table so hard I expected it to shatter. “Would this be any less a table if it was made of wood? Of steel? We don’t define a thing by what it’s made of—we define a thing by what it does. A brain isn’t a brain because it’s a mess of cells and neurotransmitters and organic gunk. It’s a brain because it thinks. We’re all made out of nothing but stuff. Our stuff may bleed, but fundamentally? It’s still just matter in motion: an organic machine. And fundamentally, if you judge them by how they think, how they feel, how they act, they’re still human.”

  Ben, his eyes still closed, permitted himself a small half smile. “He borrowed that one from me. Nice, isn’t it?”

  “What is this?” I paused the final vid on a grainy shot of my father’s face. At the secops station he’d looked older than I remembered, but here he seemed young again, as if fresh off a lift-tuck, the fuzziness erasing the cracks carved into his face and the dark half moons under his eyes. The camera had somehow captured something that never escaped in real life—the anger hidden beneath the tight lips and the carefully modulated voice. In the frozen vid, his face was still perfectly composed. But his eyes looked wild. “Where’d you get this?”

  “You think you’re the only one we keep an eye on?” Ben finally opened his eyes and looked at me. “What?” he said with palpably false surprise. “You didn’t know?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Was it guilt? As far as I could tell, my father didn’t know the meaning of the word. Guilt required acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and in the world according to my father, everything he did was right, by definition.

  Except for the choice to make me, I thought, not wanting to remember.

  Remembering.

  Forgive me, he’d begged. If I could do it again . . .

  I would make the right choice this time.

  He felt guilty that he’d unleashed me on the world and on his family—Lia Kahn’s family, forced to pretend that the dead had come back to life, that an electronic copy could ever replace the real thing.

  And yet: “These are our children. My child.”

  And yet my father didn’t lie.

  Maybe he was lying to himself.

  But what if he just believed it?

  “Your father’s been running all over the country, trying to persuade his estimable peers to ease the path for download recipients,” Ben said. “He’s become quite the crusader for mech rights. All behind closed doors, of course.”

  “Of course.” It wouldn’t do for a man of his stature to be zone-hopping like a Savona-style crackpot, spilling his guts to the masses. And my father had long made clear his belief that true power acted in silence and shadow.

  “He wants you to come home,” Ben said.

  If he wanted that, he would have made it happen. My father didn’t do subtle, and he didn’t do voluntary.

  “What’s your point?” I asked, wondering if I should reconsider the whole jumping-out-of-the-car thing. But that would prove Ben right. Like I was someone who preferred not to ask questions because I was too weak to deal with the answers.

  “I think you’re a little confused about who your real friends are,” Ben said.

  “I’m not—”

  “It’s understandable.” His drone was maddeningly calm. “You know, Lia, as an official BioMax rep, it’s policy to remain a watchful distance from all our clients, but . . .” He cleared his throat. “Did I ever tell you that you were my first?”

  I shook my head. Thinking: Who cares?

  “It was my job to help you and your family through the transition period, and I can’t help feeling as if I’ve failed you.” He pressed his fingertips together, then tapped them against each other, one by one. “I probably shouldn’t admit that. But I feel responsible for you, Lia. I worry.”

  “Good show,” I said, giving him a slow clap. “Though next time, you might want to try a single tear rolling down your cheek. Much more effective.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re growing cynical in your old age.”

  “Check the manual,” I said. “I don’t age.”

  “Fine.” Ben leaned forward and keyed something into the nav-panel. “I’ll take you back. Obviously there’s no point in discussing this further.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Loyalty’s a tricky thing,” Ben said. “Just because you give it to someone doesn’t mean you get it back.”

  “Funny, this feels like discussing.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” Ben said. “You’ve made that clear. You’ll go back to the Sharpe estate. You’ll do your best to pretend the last several days never happened.”

  As if I could.

  “You’ll probably tell your friend Jude everything I’ve said here, just to prove to him how loyal you are. Or prove it to yourself. And then, once you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll get in touch with me and give me the name of Jude’s BioMax contact.”

  “I think your fortune-telling skills are failing you,” I said. “Because there’s no way.” Not that I owed Jude anything. But I owed Ben even less.

  “I’d prefer you do it because you want to,” Ben said. “I’d rather convince you that Jude’s not doing any of you favors by loading you up with untested tech.”

  “Well, you can’t, and you shouldn’t—”

  “I’d prefer to do it that way,” he said over me. “But since that’s not an option, we’ll resort to plan B. Reciprocation.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  Ben smiled. “You give me the name—and I keep quiet about your unfortunately timed presence at the Synapsis Corp-Town. I keep those records where they are. Buried. Simple reciprocity.”

  “Blackmail.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. Take a couple weeks to think about it. I’m a patient man.”

  He reached forward and flicked a finger across the car’s control panel and—so smoothly it was almost imperceptible, we accelerated, the landscape bleeding past in a blur of color. Even at this speed, the car cornered tightly, veering back onto the highway, flying toward home.

  We were running out of time, and he hadn’t told me the one thing I needed to know. I hated to ask him for anything. “So if you’re tracking us, you must know,” I said, so quietly he had to tip his head toward me to catch the words. “You know who else was at the corp-town. Who did it.”

  “Who killed all those people, you mean? Who set you up?”

  Assuming it wasn’t you, I thought. “If you know, how can you just . . . do nothing?”

  Ben smiled thinly. “I know you were there, and I’m doing nothing about that,” he said.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “I already told you,” he said irritably. It was the first real emotion I’d seen from him the whole trip. At least, I assumed it was real. “It’s my job to protect you. All of you.”

  “Then what the hell is the point of the tracking?” I countered. “You said it was to keep us out of trouble—what, that doesn’t include trying to kill hundreds of people?”

  “You don’t think I’d do something if I could?” he shouted— then abruptly fell silent.

  “Then do it,” I hissed. After everything I’d seen the last few days, I didn’t have any sympathy left. Certainly not fo
r him.

  He didn’t respond.

  “You don’t know who it is, do you?” I said suddenly. Just guessing—but I saw on his face it was true. “Your precious spy gear crapped out on you.”

  “No technology is foolproof,” he said steadily. “You’d do well to remember that.”

  I didn’t bother to answer. He no longer had anything I needed. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

  “A pleasure, as always,” Ben said as the car stopped at the southern boundary of Quinn’s estate. He reached across me to open the door. I jerked away just before his arm could brush my chest.

  I got out of the car, resisting the temptation to slam the door on his fingertips.

  “And remember, Lia.” He scratched the back of his head, letting his fingers rest on the spot where his skull met his neck, the spot where, somewhere inside my own head, a microscopic GPS chip was broadcasting my location to his bosses. And to my father. “We’ll be watching.”

  I didn’t want to go back to the house. I wanted to stay there, in the green empty, the concrete strip of road to my left and the estate grounds to my right. I wanted to pretend that I was stranded on the side of the road, come from nowhere, with nowhere to go. No one waiting for me. No one watching me.

  I hadn’t been this free since before the corp-town attack— free to wade through the overgrown grass, find the rambling path that would take me to the house, or to turn in the opposite direction, to the road, and start walking. Toward Lia Kahn’s home, Lia Kahn’s father, Lia Kahn’s past.

  Or just walking toward nothing. Filling myself up with nothing, an emptiness that could blot out the faces of the dead, call-me-Ben’s voice, my father’s hands on my shoulders, his lips brushing against my hair.

  I belong here, I thought, trying to convince myself to climb the grassy slope. I belong with them.

  Jude was up there. Jude, who might have set all this in motion. And when I got to the house, he was waiting for me.

  “Took you long enough,” he said, leaning against the door-frame of the main entrance. Even Jude looked small beside the columns of marble and steel.

  “I’m fine, Jude,” I said with a sneer, trying to gauge something from his expression. But there was no guilt, no shame, only judgment. I couldn’t have been killed, so why was I making such a fuss? “Thanks so much for your concern.”