Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  Sloane rolled her extinguished flashlight between her palms, keeping her head averted from the Temple. “How can there be that many morons in the world?”

  “You know, Savona and Jude aren’t so different,” Ani said.

  “How can you say that?” Brahm asked.

  I knew how she could say it.

  “Jude’s always telling us that we’re not human and we should just accept it, right?” Ani said. “They’re orgs, we’re machines. How’s that any different from what Savona’s trying to say?”

  I’d asked myself the same question.

  “It just is,” Brahm said.

  It was a pathetic answer. But none of us had anything better.

  The Temple defenses were even more meager than Ani let on. Aside from the electrified perimeter, they were nearly nonexistent—no patrols, no guard posts or ID checks. And at the main Temple, nothing but a few easily tricked locks, nothing more than you’d find at the entrance of any organization matching the Brotherhood’s self-description—open, accessible, innocent. Silent and single file, we followed Ani into the building. Instead of taking the moving sidewalk through the silver tunnel to Savona’s staging area, we went the opposite way, slipping through an unmarked door into a labyrinthine zone of beige corridors. I recognized it from my last trip to the Temple—Auden’s office lay along one of these hallways. Maybe he was in there, hunched over a desk, plotting his next strike on the skinners . . . or maybe staring out the window, watching the night, wondering how he’d ended up here. Because that’s what I was wondering, sneaking like a thief, draped in black and raiding a nest of God-fearing vipers who’d prefer me erased, in body and mind. The night had a dreamlike quality, and I half expected to wake up to find that Auden and I had rendezvoused at our favorite grassy hiding spot behind the high school and fallen asleep, dreaming up a new and horrible life.

  But machines don’t dream. Not that kind of dream, at least, the kind that ends in a gasping, blissful, sweat-stained and then I woke up.

  Motion-sensitive lights in the floor cast the hallways in a dim glow as we passed, but apparently, foolishly, weren’t tied into any kind of central security processor. Because the hallways stayed empty, our path to Savona’s office was free and clear. Ani stopped in front of a door that looked no different from any of the others. “This is it,” she VM’d. There was a slim key panel along the frame. She keyed in a code.

  I was wrong, I thought as the door swung open. This is actually going to work.

  An alarm screamed.

  The hallway flashed blue.

  Blue, not red like the corp-town, but for a moment, in the keening wail of the alarm and the faces lighting up in the dark, I was back there again, hearing their screams, though there had never been any screams.

  The Brothers approached from both ends of the hallway and streamed through the open office door. We were surrounded.

  Five of us, ten of them, all in Brotherhood robes. All with guns raised, glinting in the flashing blue light.

  “Don’t you pay attention in church?” Sloane snarled at the one closest to her. “We’re machines. You can’t hurt us.”

  “Don’t test us,” he said.

  “Whatever.” Sloane muscled past the guy and took off running down the hall.

  The gun didn’t make a sound. And neither did Sloane.

  It happened nearly in silence: The guard took aim, depressed the trigger. And Sloane went rigid. Her body convulsed, then thumped to the floor. It convulsed once more, her head slapping against the tile, then lay still.

  “Sloane!” Ty screamed. But she didn’t move to help her. None of us did.

  “She’ll be fine,” the guard said. I had more time to examine his weapon now, and I realized what I’d first taken for an ordinary gun was more like a modified stunshot, like the kind the secops carried. The abbreviated barrel ended in a flat black plate with a narrow blue spark dancing between two metal prongs. “Turns out one little electric pulse is all it takes to temporarily disable your neural systems. I hear it hurts like hell. But you freaks are into that, right?” He scooped Sloane off the floor and tossed her limp body over his shoulder like it was nothing. Then, with a jaunty wave, he carried her down the hall, around the corner, and out of sight. Nine of them left; four of us.

  “So who’s next?” the largest of the men barked.

  Next was Brahm, without warning. A different guard, barely pausing to aim, flicking his gun at Brahm like he was making a conversational point. Brahm collapsed, his body shuddering and shaking for several moments before going still. His eyes were open. I knelt, wanting to . . . I didn’t even know. Cradle his head, maybe. Just touch him. Make sure he was still alive.

  Not that there would have been any way to prove it. No pulse. No breath. Just a body with a deactivated brain.

  “I wouldn’t,” the guard closest to me said. “Charge might still be live. And it’s not your turn yet.”

  At his words, Ty lunged at her guard, fist making contact with the guy’s bulbous nose. She made it about ten steps before the shock took her down.

  Unlike the other two, she screamed.

  “I’m not going to run,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.

  “Not her,” Ani said. “That was part of the deal.”

  She wasn’t talking to me.

  “What deal?” But as I looked back and forth between them, as I took in the expression on Ani’s face—nervous but not scared and not surprised—the way the guards parted to make way for her, the way they lowered their weapons, all except the one who kept pointing his gun at me, I got my answer. Guess you’ll finally have to admit you were wrong, I said silently to Jude. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to hear it. “Stupid question, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ani said, not particularly sounding it. “I didn’t think you’d volunteer to come. You didn’t even think this was a good idea.”

  “Imagine that.” I wanted to shake her. I thought I’d been suspicious, but now I knew I hadn’t doubted her, not really. I’d thought the Brotherhood was setting her up. The thought of her working with them disgusted me. It was inconceivable that she’d changed this much, equally unlikely that this had been the real her all along. There was no reality palatable enough to accept.

  I was no better than Jude, I thought. Blind.

  “Is this really worth it? You hate Jude this much?”

  “This isn’t about him,” she snapped.

  “Right.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Then make me.” I glared over her at the guard holding the gun. It was strange, how many of these I’d faced since becoming a mech. Before the download, guns were just something slummers played with in cities and whatever random countries were still playing their ridiculous war games. Now I could stare at one and pretend not to care.

  “What we’re doing is wrong,” Ani said. “What we are is wrong. It’s not our fault—we didn’t ask to be this way. But we have to accept the truth. We don’t belong here. We’re wrong.”

  “Don’t tell me you actually buy that bullshit.”

  I shouldn’t have let her come back here, I thought. Not by herself.

  Quinn and Jude left her broken—and I left her alone. Too busy with Riley to see that she was getting sucked in. Too busy, too obliviously happy to notice that she was drifting away.

  “I told you before,” she said. “Brother Savona, Auden, Jude, they’re all saying the same thing. We’re machines. But that’s what Jude doesn’t get—what none of you get. Machines are supposed to be things. Not people. We don’t belong.”

  And there it was, the answer to the question she’d fired at us before, the difference between Jude and Savona. Both of them believed we were machines. Both of them believed we shouldn’t pretend to be human. But Jude believed we were something new, something of value, something alive. Savona didn’t.

  “You can’t actually believe that about yourself,” I argued. “These people think you don’t really think for y
ourself, or feel. You know that’s wrong.”

  Ani smiled sadly. “They programmed us well,” she said. “They fooled us into believing we were real. But we’re not. We’re computers. Copies of dead people. Everything about us is a lie.”

  “It’s not too late,”I said, VM. Knowing it was. “We can still get out of here.”Knowing we couldn’t.

  “Enough,” she said, nodding at the guard aiming at me. I braced for the shock. Nothing to fear. Just a little pain, and not very far to fall.

  I’m not afraid of the dark.

  But he didn’t fire. Instead he grabbed my shoulder.

  “He’ll take you outside,” Ani said. “Go back to Jude, tell him that if he cares about the others, he’ll stay away from us. Tell him that even if he doesn’t care, he’d better stay away. This is just a taste. He can’t beat us.”

  “Us?” I asked incredulously. “You think you’re one of them? These orgs are just using you!”

  “I’m a machine,” Ani said flatly. “That’s what I’m built for. And besides, I’m used to it.”

  “Come on, skinner,” the guard grunted. As he yanked my arm, the hood slipped from his head. And I saw his face for the first time.

  I knew that face.

  At the Brotherhood rally, I had seen them in the crowd, faces of the corp-town dead, the old woman, the mother. The child. And I had assumed I was imagining it. Like I’d imagined Zo—except Zo’s face had turned out to be real.

  But here was the guard, with the same shaggy eyebrows, bulbous nose, scruffy chin, a face I’d seen only for a second in real life—but I’d watched those vids over and over again. I’d memorized the faces of the victims.

  I knew that face.

  “I know you.”

  He turned his face away and let go, jerking his head. Two of the other guards flanked me and seized my arms, holding me in place. I kicked at them, no longer caring about their guns or the electric charge that could leave me twitching on the ground with my friends. I drove my foot into a shin, slammed my knee into a groin, and the grip on my left arm loosened. I yanked my arm free, whacking the guy in the face. Something hard and sharp cracked across my shoulder blades, and as I lurched forward, a fist caught me across the chin. I went flying backward, my head slamming back against the wall. “Stay down!” the guard shouted as I slumped to the floor. “Last chance. Then we shock you and dump you on the highway.”

  The man, the one who was supposed to be dead, stood frozen a few feet away, watching.

  There was pain—in my head, in my back, on my face— artificial nerves alerting me to damage, neural impulses flashing a message that radiated across my body: Broken.

  But it was the kind of damage that would heal, and it wasn’t the kind of pain that made anything clearer. Instead, the opposite: Everything faded away, blotted out, everything but the face of the dead man. “You were there,” I said quietly. Then again, shouting. “At the corp-town. You’re supposed to be dead.” But he was finally backing away from me, into the darkness.

  I didn’t follow. Because I was on the ground. Because even if the pain was all fake, as fake as everything else, it hurt. Because of the guns.

  The gun that slashed through the air, so fast I hadn’t seen the guard raise his arm, only saw it coming at me, then felt it smash my face, smash my head back into the wall with another resounding crack. I raised my hands over my head, squeezed my eyes shut. Couldn’t stop the next blow, striking the side of my head, knocking me flat. I curled tight in a ball, knees drawn in, head hunched against my chest, fetal and helpless against the kicks and blows. A boot driven into my stomach, my skull, the soft exposed flesh at the nape of my neck, crunching against my spine.

  “No!” Ani screamed. “Stop!”

  “That’s for the kick in the balls, skinner,” the man grunted.

  I waited for another blow, but it didn’t come.

  And when I opened my eyes, the guards had retreated, lined up a safe distance away, weapons aimed. Ani knelt at my side. “You’re fine,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”

  I touched my fingers to my face, lightly, half expecting to feel a crater of dented flesh. But mech bones were tough. My face was still there. I was still there.

  “Just get out of here, Lia,” Ani pleaded. “They won’t hurt you if you just go.”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’s ready to go just yet.” Rai Savona melted out of the shadows, his black eyes flashing with the pulses of blue light. “If you don’t mind stepping into my office for a moment?” he said politely, as if I’d arrived for a business meeting.

  Ani’s eyes narrowed, accusing. “You said she’d be safe.”

  “And you thought you could trust him?”I VM’d, disgusted.

  “She’ll be with me,” Savona assured her. His voice was the same one, honeyed and smooth, that he’d been using for years to woo Faithers. His eyes were the same ice. “What could be safer than that?” I followed his glance to the guards, whose weapons were still at the ready. Whose eyes were on Ani.

  She grabbed my arm, trying to hoist me off the ground.

  “Get off.” I knocked her away. I didn’t need her to lean on.

  One step at a time: I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, waited for the world to balance. I imagined I could feel my brain knocking around loose in my head, wires frayed and jangling. But that was an indulgence. That was the ghost of org weakness, refusing to die. I was a mech, and I was intact. I rose to my knees, planted one foot on the ground, then, with effort, pushed myself upright on two feet. Gravity defeated.

  Ani wouldn’t look at me. Savona wouldn’t look away. “If you’re done with the melodrama, we have a few things to discuss.”

  “After you,” I said, forcing myself not to stare in the direc-tion that the dead man had disappeared. That wasn’t important now. What mattered was getting through this, and getting out.

  Except I no longer believed that was going to happen.

  Ani touched my arm. “Lia—,” she began and stopped. She just stared at me, eyes wide.

  I waited.

  Nothing.

  I shook my head, then followed Savona into his office. Left her behind.

  Savona’s office was nothing like Auden’s. The latter had been simple, almost austere, its only ostentation the antique desk at the center of the room. Savona’s desk was twice the size and state-of-the-art, a wide, nearly transparent slab with network vids and zones dancing across its surface. The walls were illuminated with pics of Savona with his wealthy patrons and starving acolytes, interspersed with golden plaques and tributes. I was surprised he hadn’t equipped the room with the same glowbars that lit up his stage, so that he could labor beneath a golden aura.

  The door locked behind us with an audible click.

  “Taking a risk, aren’t you?” I asked. “Trapping us in here alone together? My body’s replaceable. How about yours?”

  “I don’t expect you to attack me. You’re too curious about what I have to say.” He settled onto one of the couches and gestured for me to take a seat on the other.

  I stood.

  “If you think you can turn me like you turned Ani—”

  “Not worth my time,” he said. His dark eyes gave nothing away. There was something familiar in his expression, I thought. It was the lazy pleasure of a cat batting a mouse between its paws, gauging whether the rodent would be more fun dead or alive. “Now, don’t you have a question for me?”

  “I don’t need to ask you anything,” I snarled. “I know what you did.”

  “Oh, really?” He chuckled lightly. “I highly doubt that.”

  “That man out there—”

  “Jackson?” Savona’s lips widened into a predatory smile. “Good man. Works himself to the bone in the Synapsis mining operation.”

  “He’s supposed to be dead.”

  “His lovely wife and four children will be disappointed to hear that,” Savona said wryly.

  “How?” I asked. “That’s all I want to know.”


  “Why should I care what you want to know? If I’m this diabolical genius you imagine, do you expect me to just confess?”

  Mostly, I didn’t expect that I’d be leaving the Temple any time soon. I imagined myself locked in a room again, access to the network jammed—maybe my own brain jammed, neural network overwhelmed by high-voltage shocks, lying on a dirty floor, eyes open, brain closed, hidden away long enough that anyone who might care to look for me would forget to bother.

  But without hope, there’s no point in fear.

  “Deny it all you want,” I told him. “But I’m going to find out what’s going on. What you did.”

  “You saw what was done to your friends,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “But you’re not afraid.”

  “Machines don’t feel fear,” I said. “They don’t feel anything. Remember?”

  “I seem to recall your father’s a rather powerful man,” he said. “Maybe you suspect he won’t allow anything bad to happen to you. You’re thinking to yourself that your skinner friends know you’re here, and if I attempt to hold you here, your loving father will intercede.” He gave me a thin, knowing smile. “Or maybe you expect your poor friend Auden will save you.”

  “You don’t know me very well,” I said coldly. He wanted an unfeeling machine? He could have one. “So I should probably mention that I hate people telling me what I’m thinking.”

  “Hate’s such an ugly emotion.”

  “Funny, then, that you spend so much time spreading it around.”

  “I wouldn’t expect something like you to understand the nuances of human emotional experience.” The preacher tones were back. “The Brotherhood of Man is an organization of love. We embrace that which is noble in the human spirit. Ours is a mission of purification and distillation. Elimination of corrupting elements and parasites clinging to the social organism.”

  “But you don’t hate,” I said sarcastically. “Because that would be wrong.”

  “I’ve told you before, Lia,” he said. “I bear no ill will against you—any of you. Not every problem is its own cause. Hating the symptoms won’t help us cure the disease.”

  “Tell me whatever it is you want to tell me, or let me out of here,” I said. “Since I can’t actually die of boredom, my options are pretty limited.”