Crashed

by Robin Wasserman

  Auden pointed a shaky finger at Riley and me. “They broke into a private facility, tried to blow it up, and when that didn’t work, they took an innocent human being hostage. And you want to interrogate me?”

  Ben smiled. “Apparently.”

  “You can’t do this,” Auden said, furious. He was already starting to sound less like the boy I’d known and more like the man I’d seen up on that stage, preaching to his masses. “By this time tomorrow, I’ll make sure the whole network knows that you and your corp have chosen the skinners over the welfare of fellow humans.”

  “Tomorrow’s tomorrow,” Ben said flatly. “I don’t deal in predictions. Tonight, your welfare is in my hands, and I’ll make whatever choices I want.”

  Ben drove his foot into Jude’s side. The body didn’t move. “I can wake him up now,” he offered us. “Or wait until you’re long gone if you’d prefer. Avoid the messy meet-and-greet?”

  Later, I wanted to say.

  “Now,” Riley said, before I could.

  Ben did it himself, accessing a panel beneath Jude’s armpit. Whatever he did next, he made sure to shield it from our view—preserving his trade secrets, the functions of our bodies that we weren’t allowed to know about. Jude’s eyes closed, then opened again, aware. He sat up slowly, shaking away the fog, gingerly testing first his arms, then his legs, then climbing to his feet and staring at us, indictment plain on his face. He took in the scene calmly, without question, as if there could be no doubt as to how events had played out while he was down.

  “Take him,” Ben ordered two of his men.

  It had been part of the deal. I had saved myself and Riley, but I couldn’t save Jude. “We can’t have him running wild anymore,” Ben had told me. “Now that you know what he’s capable of, you should understand that.”

  We didn’t have a choice, I reminded myself. We waited until the last possible minute. We tried.

  “Let me just say good-bye to my friends,” Jude said, imperious, as if he were still in charge.

  Ben nodded, and Jude was released, allowed to approach us, as Ben remained a short distance away, making an ostentatious show of turning his back, leaving us to say our good-byes among ourselves.

  Riley disengaged from my arms, stepping away, meeting Jude alone. For a long moment, they didn’t speak.

  Riley began. “We didn’t want to.”

  “Don’t,” Jude said quietly. He leaned in close, folded Riley into a loose embrace, whispered something in his ear. Riley glanced at me, his eyes narrowed, then backed away, down the wall, to the other side of Auden and as far as the BioMax men would let him go without raising their weapons again in warning.

  He just feels guilty, I thought. He doesn’t want me comforting him.

  I told myself that was it, and that it had nothing to do with the way he’d looked at me before, when Ben started needling me about betrayals.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked Jude.

  “Just the truth,” Jude said.

  Just lies, I thought. And whatever Jude said about me, Riley wouldn’t believe it.

  “I’m not apologizing,” I said.

  “Good. Because I’m not forgiving. Or forgetting.”

  Jude stepped toward me, grabbed my wrist, hard. The BioMax guys approached, but I waved them away. “I was trying to do the right thing,” he said. “One day you’ll figure that out.”

  “You stole my line,” I said, trying to pull my arm away, but he held fast. His voice was angry, but his face was something else. Lost, like I’d stolen something from him, the thing at his center that told him what he was. He yanked me toward him, until his lips brushed my ear.

  “You want to save your precious orgs?” he whispered. “Three minutes, starting now.” Then he dropped my arm and stepped away. “You can do whatever you want with me now,” he called out. “Just get me away from these skinners.” Flanked by an entourage of BioMax thugs, call-me-Ben took Jude’s arm, personally escorting him away. Of course: Riley and I were toys, fun to play with while he had nothing better to do. Jude was the real point, the grand prize.

  One minute passed as a security cadre walked Jude out of the building, as I let his words play through my brain, as, without processing what I was doing, I glanced at Riley—at Riley’s pocket, checking for the telltale bulge of the detonator. It was gone.

  And that’s when I screamed.

  “Everybody get out!” I shouted. “Explosives!”

  Riley shoved a hand in his pocket. Then he started shouting too.

  The BioMax guys took off running for the exit. Riley ran. I ran. And Auden ran—but only a few steps. Then he stumbled and crashed to the floor.

  One minute left.

  I turned back for him, screaming his name, feeling like I’d been thrown back in time, like the air was water and I was swimming toward him again, the current carrying him away, and somewhere, dimly, I heard Riley shouting for me, and I grabbed Auden’s hands and hauled him to his feet, forcing his arm around my shoulder, forcing him to lean on me, as Riley ran in the wrong direction, not toward the door, but toward me, and then everything got very loud—then very silent.

  Time’s up.

  The explosions were like gunshots, close range, and in their wake the world fell quiet, and the building shook.

  The building shook, and a chunk of the wall blew out, slamming into Riley, knocking him down in a cloud of plaster and twisted steel.

  “Riley!” I shrieked.

  There was no answering call.

  Flames licked the walls, smoke turned the air heavy and opaque, and Auden buried his face in his shirt as we lurched toward the door, gasping for breath. This time I couldn’t breathe for him. I could only get him out.

  The walls were crumbling.

  Riley’s head and torso jutted out from the pile of debris, and he was shouting something I couldn’t understand, arms waving in an unmistakable gesture. Go. Go, get out.

  Get Auden out.

  And that was what I thought, as I turned my back on Riley, as I held Auden up, grabbing on as he slipped away from me, as his head nodded drowsily, eyes clouding and lungs filling with smoke. Not him, not again, I thought, as I stumbled through the smoky black in the direction I imagined the door to be, sound returning to the world in the form of smaller, secondary explosions, ceilings collapsing, equipment imploding, as we pushed through an opening in the wall, into the cool fresh air of night, and left Riley behind.

  No one dies tonight, I thought as the BioMax troops dragged us away from the flames, dragged me away, as I kicked and screamed and lunged toward the flickering storm of fire, and they held me back, because they were stronger. They were in control. And Auden sucked in oxygen as I watched, now silent and still, no breath and no heartbeat, helpless and useless, as a geyser of fire spurted through the roof, and the laboratory— and the machinery and the research and Riley—disintegrated in a crash of thunder and a plume of blue-orange flame.

  FLOATING HOME

  I would be his memory.

  When life isn’t life, death isn’t death.

  No one died that night.

  That’s what I told myself.

  Bodies break. Brains burn. But memories can be stored, and memories are life. An exact copy is the same as an original in every meaningful way. Mechs are minds. Minds are patterns, data. And data is transferable. So when they transferred Riley’s backed-up memories into the new body, it was a logical, inescapable truth: This is Riley. A Riley who had never burned, a Riley who had never set foot onto the Temple grounds, never betrayed his best friend, never disappeared in a storm of fire. Never shuddered at something Jude whispered in his ear or looked at me like I might be the enemy. A Riley who had backed up his neural network one last time, one last night, then ceased to exist.

  He was the same, and he was alive, as if none of it had ever happened—and for him, it hadn’t. A fresh start. A new beginning, same as the old one.

  That’s what I told myself.

  Jude esc
aped in the chaos. No one knew where he’d gone. Including me, though BioMax seemed not to believe it.

  Sloane, Ani, Ty, and Brahm remained at BioMax, under observation. The corp had determined the damage couldn’t be reversed, but refused to terminate their bodies and start afresh until they knew exactly what the Brotherhood had done— and exactly how far they had gotten in their research. Ani and the others were in no discernable pain, were likely unaware of their condition, trapped in a dreamless sleep rather than a waking nightmare. Likely. Less likely, but still possible, they were awake inside their madness. It was a chance BioMax had elected to take, without objection from the mechs’ families, without doubt. Call-me-Ben told me that.

  Studying their condition, prolonging their dead-end lives, was for our own good.

  Ben told me that too.

  And when they woke up in new bodies, they wouldn’t remember any of it—they wouldn’t be the same mechs who’d gone into the Temple and hung from those posts, so what did it matter what happened to them in the meantime? If the memories would eventually be ground into dust along with the bodies, then maybe it was as if it hadn’t happened at all.

  • • •

  For mechs, even the earliest involuntary volunteers, a new body to replace the old was part of the deal. It was the BioMax guarantee, and so far, the corp had always honored it.

  But they didn’t have to. It was one of the things I hadn’t thought of before, had just accepted, because my new body, and the one after that and the one after that, was already bought and paid for, and because my father sat on the BioMax board. But I thought of it after the explosion, with Riley’s body gone and his mind sitting in storage—I let myself think about what would happen if BioMax reneged, because it was easier than thinking about where Riley was now, whether his mind was somehow alive in the storage server in the same way it would be in a body, or if he was just gone, erased from the world, until they brought him back.

  We have no control, Jude had said, naming, as was his compulsion, a truth it would have been easier to ignore. Alive only as long as they let us live. Just another funny little perk of mech life: Machines were objects, and objects had owners.

  Which meant Jude had been right. BioMax wasn’t the enemy, yet. But it would be, eventually, inevitably.

  And eventually, inevitably, we would find a way to reclaim ourselves.

  In the meantime, the corp delivered our bodies. Riley was slated to get another generic model, a duplicate of the one he’d lost.

  I had a better idea.

  • • •

  “This is important to you,” my father said.

  I nodded.

  We met in his office, at my request, to make it clear this wasn’t a homecoming, the prodigal daughter returns. This was a transaction. Or it would be, if he granted my request.

  “I assume it’s important, or you wouldn’t have come to me,” my father said.

  I nodded again. Because if I had lied, acted repentant, he would have known.

  “It won’t be cheap,” he said. “This is a lot of credit you’re talking about here.”

  I knew that. More credit than Quinn had been willing to spare—though these days, Quinn wasn’t much in the mood for handouts. Not for me, at least. As far as she was concerned, Jude and Ani had both abandoned her, leaving me behind as an unwanted consolation prize. She hadn’t thrown me off the estate, not yet, but she was doing a pretty effective job of freezing me out.

  “And what do I get in return?” my father asked.

  “Whatever you want,” I said. “I will pay you back someday.” Somehow.

  He didn’t even pause. It was like he’d been waiting for me, like he knew I’d eventually need something big, so big that I’d be willing to do anything in return, and he was ready. “I want you to come home. To stay.”

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t pause either.

  I wasn’t there when Riley woke up in his new body. And I didn’t visit him in rehab as he learned how to use it.

  I left him a message on his zone, explaining what had happened, how he had ended up on the thirteenth floor of BioMax, waking up all over again. Except I didn’t explain all of it, or really any of it. I told him we had gone through with our plans, that we had rescued our friends, that no one had died. That the lab was destroyed and he’d been caught in the explosion.

  That I would tell him more when I saw him. And I would see him, I would come to visit, if he wanted me to.

  I promised him that, although I couldn’t imagine going back to the thirteenth floor—much as I couldn’t face the thought of sitting by a bed, next to another broken body, another person that I’d left behind. But I would have come, if he’d asked.

  Don’t, he’d texted me, when he finally woke. You shouldn’t have to be here. Or see me like this.

  And for one month, that was all I heard from him.

  One month, back at Chez Kahn, removing the metallic streaks from my skin and hair, trying to fit the org mold so I could live an org life, pretending that nothing had changed, that I didn’t notice the way my mother always left the room moments after I entered, or that my father no longer gave me orders, like ordering me home had emptied him of commands, or like as long as I was there, he no longer cared what I did. Zo and I lived under a wary silent truce, circling each other like caged animals, exhausted but afraid to sleep lest the other strike. She’d left the Brotherhood—I learned this from her zone, not from her. Neither she nor my parents ever spoke of her time at the Temple. But a frost had congealed over her relationship with my father. Now he watched her from a safe distance, just as he watched me, maintaining a careful formality when circumstances forced them together. We coexisted without comingling, one big happy family of strangers.

  I left the cat with Quinn. He’d be happier there, without the stench of orgs to shatter his feline composure. And whatever comfort he might have been to me, nuzzling his wet nose into my synthetic flesh, I didn’t need and I didn’t deserve. Until Riley was made whole again, I wanted to be alone.

  It took months to adjust to the first download, teaching your brain to accommodate itself to its new surroundings. But subsequent downloads, in most cases, were easier. Your brain was already wired for mech life. It knew how to flex the artificial muscles, it knew how to work the artificial larynx and maneuver the artificial tongue.

  Ben gave me reports: Riley was awake one week after the download, mobile the week after that. Talking no more than was required, spending his days in his room, scanning the net-work for accounts of the Brotherhood raid and the explosion, to fill the hole in his memory, the empty space left behind. But I’d scanned the network too and knew what he’d find and what he wouldn’t. I had to make sure he was safe from the truth.

  He wouldn’t find what he wanted on the network—he would have to come to me.

  One month later, he did.

  We met by the flood zone. I got there early, stared out at the calm blue-red surface, imagining the sunken city that lay rotting below. I’d forgotten about the crowds at the Windows of Memory, and the way the orgs would glare at me as I slipped through, shrinking away from any accidental touch. The restrictions on mechs had loosened slightly, thanks to an upswing of public support after the Brotherhood’s role in the Synapsis attack had been made public. Not that the Brotherhood lacked its fair share of conspiracy nuts, now flocking in even greater numbers to the Temple’s doors. Savona was presumed dead in the explosion, martyred to his cause, slain by his mechanical enemy. I was convinced he’d just gone to ground, waiting for the optimal moment for his triumphant resurrection.

  Meanwhile, Auden had taken over, promising a kinder, gentler Brotherhood of Man. But he hadn’t done much to stop the Brotherhood’s unofficial campaign of persecution against mechs all over the country or the official one still being waged in the back rooms of every corp, as they inched forward, lockstep, in defining us out of existence.

  Everything will make sense again when Riley’s back, I had promi
sed myself. We’ll know what to do.

  But when he appeared on the horizon, inching his way down the hill with the tight, cautious steps of someone still uncertain of his control over his body, I just wanted to run away.

  The custom body had been made to fit precise specifications, the face molded to match a pic on file at BioMax, stored alongside all the other physical and mental attributes of their initial slate of “volunteers.” It wasn’t a perfect replica—from a distance he looked like the boy in the picture, but as he drew closer, it was easy to pick out the tight and smooth synflesh, the unnatural combination of grace and awkwardness in his step, the lifeless eyes. He would never be mistaken for an org— but maybe, looking in the mirror, he would no longer be such a stranger to himself.

  Like he was a stranger to me.

  This is Riley, I told myself. The real Riley.

  But it wasn’t. The deep-set brown eyes, the lips that curled up instead of down, slightly oversize ears and a slightly under-size nose, a square chin with a shallow cleft at its center, rich brown skin stretched taut across thick muscles, a crease in his forehead where his eyebrows knit together in concern. He was a stranger.

  He drew closer, and I searched for something familiar, some ghost of the Riley I knew, in the way he walked, the way he held himself, some trace of Riley in his smile, in his eyes.

  But there was nothing.

  And when he reached me, and it was too late to run, and he said my name, that was different too. A differently sized throat, differently shaped mouth, differently spaced teeth—it meant different acoustics, and so a different voice. This one was lower, made him sound older, but there was almost something melodic about it, like he was singing as he spoke. Not that it mattered. A voice wasn’t a soul, it was just a set of vibrations in the air, just physics. As his body was just a machine, his features just molded plastic. None of it should have mattered. None of it was him, except the patterns inside his head, the data arranged into feelings and memories—but that was nothing I could see. Nothing I could touch.

  He reached for me, and without thinking, I pulled away.