For once, J.J. had ignored her.
Sergeant Macy puts her pudgy fingers on the inside of Mikky’s wrist. “Your heart rate is twenty-two beats per minute. You’re in phenomenal form.”
I’ve been training, too, and over the past few weeks, I’ve gained weight and lean muscle—if J.J. told me to run up that mountain again, I could actually do it this time.
Not that I would.
But no one bothers about me anymore. They only care about the Hu-Bot, who can run up that mountain carrying a truck on her back. I watched her do it.
I leave Mikky and Macy to their little self-congratulation session and go hunker down with my quantum computer. I found it in the trash, mangled as hell, but I managed to coax it back to life.
But either the Q-comp doesn’t work the way it used to, or something’s going on with the cloud. Because I can’t ever seem to access anything but war memories: bright, raw jolts of pain. Chaos. Death.
When I spend too long with it, I feel the memories clawing at the backs of my eyeballs when I try to sleep. I feel like the hurt might pull me to pieces.
But still I keep trying.
“Where are you going, Six?” Mikky calls after me.
“What do you care?” I mumble.
“I’m trying to be nice!” she yells.
Damn her superhearing.
“Don’t bother,” I say, louder this time.
She gets this sad expression on her face, and I feel bad for a second. But then I tell myself that her sadness is just part of a computer program.
I’ve got this little spot near the edge of the compound, in the back of an unused storage shed. I go there and lie down on a pile of burlap sacks and try to search for answers.
How did we get into this mess—and how can we get out?
Soon I’m lost completely in the neural interface of the cloud, my eyelids fluttering and legs twitching. My mind’s in another time and place.
Then someone cuffs me in the side of the head.
And I find J.J. crouched next to me, looking poisonous. “What the hell was that for?” I demand, sitting up and rubbing my sore temple.
J.J. juts his chin at the Q-comp. “How’d you get your grubby little hands on that, thief?”
“I’m not a thief, Gramps,” I say snidely. “It’s my computer.”
J.J. snatches it away and turns it over in his hands, squinting suspiciously. “Macy said it was beyond repair.”
“Yeah, well, Macy’s an idiot. I fixed it.”
J.J. cocks his head and makes a face, like it’s completely inconceivable to him that I could actually do anything right. I guess I learned a few things in dumb-dumb school after all.
I put my hands on my hips. “Seriously, what does that redheaded hulk even do for you besides stand around and kiss Hu-Bot ass?”
J.J. scoffs. “I suppose you think someone should be kissing your lazy ass instead, just because you made some minor repairs? MikkyBo is a triumph of human engineering.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a miracle of life,” I counter. Stupid, I know—but so what.
“A miracle?” J.J. laughs. “You, little Six, were a mistake.”
I suck in my breath. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He smiles scornfully. “The birds and the bees, child. Let’s just call you an unhappy accident.”
Though my stomach feels like it’s just sunk down into my knees, I stand up. “I don’t care what you say—I’m here now. And, you and me, we should be on the same side! Which means you should stop being such a major prick. So you built the first Hu-Bots, and they were your babies—whatever! Once they practically wiped out our entire species, you’d think you would wake the hell up!” I think I see a twitch of pain pass across J.J.’s face, but I blink and it’s gone.
I press on, wanting to hurt him. “Mikky came here hunting you. And you treat her like she’s your family. Or even better: like she’s some kind of savior!”
“She is!” J.J. hisses. “She has the exact specifications and abilities that we need to win our fight. Hu-Bots aren’t evil, you ignorant girl. They simply need deprogramming. And once they get it, Mikky will lead them. We just need more time.”
I look at him like he’s crazy—because, obviously, he is. “What the hell are you talking about?”
J.J. shoves me toward the door. “Enough living in the past. If you’re as smart as you seem to think you are, maybe it’s time you used your skills for something besides tweaking a memory bank into a glorified video game.”
He’s got me by the collar now, and he’s hauling me along.
“Maybe,” he huffs, “it’s time you tried something a little more advanced.”
CHAPTER 62
THE UNCONSCIOUS HU-BOT’S feet hang six inches off the end of the table, and I’m so nervous, I keep knocking into them.
“Calm down, kid,” the lab tech, Isaiah, says. “You’re going to be fine.”
It’s time you tried something a little more advanced, J.J. had said. And so here I am in a paper mask, a sterile gown, and surgical gloves.
Getting ready to perform android brain surgery.
In case I needed more proof of J.J.’s insanity: Here it is. Right here, right now.
I poke the Hu-Bot’s unmoving arm. “What makes you sure this thing isn’t going to wake up any second now and destroy us?”
Isaiah laughs. “The Hu-Bot wants this, remember? He came to us to get deprogrammed.”
“How do they find the lab, anyway? The capital’s been hunting J.J. for years.”
“These ‘disappeared’ Hu-Bots have an underground network to help others like them if their commitment to deprogramming is proven beyond a doubt. We make sure they lose their tracking collars before they’re brought here, of course. The procedure also installs behavioral code to make them sympathetic to our cause, so there’s no chance of a spy.”
I just can’t wrap my head around this. Isaiah says that hundreds of Hu-Bots don’t like their current system specifications—or their current leadership’s policies toward humans. And supposedly we’re going to help them. But it’s all top secret, and no one ever tells me anything in any detail. So color me frickin’ confused.
“I don’t want to drill into someone’s head,” I say. “Not even a Hu-Bot’s.”
Isaiah sighs. His patience with me is wearing thin. “We’re not lobotomizing them,” he tells me. “Our technology is much more advanced.”
“Yet somehow you can’t find a long-enough operating table,” I mutter.
Instead of cracking me upside the head the way J.J. would, Isaiah just smiles. At least I think he does, behind his mask. “The procedure is actually quite simple. First you take this computer chip, like so…”
He places a tiny metal chip, no more than four millimeters square, on the Hu-Bot’s forehead, right at the hairline. A second later, tiny toothlike ridges jut out of the chip, and then the thing burrows down through the Hu-Bot’s bioskin.
“Holy shit! Where’s it going?” I almost shout. The only sign of the chip is a tiny, bloodless incision—as if the Hu-Bot had just gotten a paper cut.
Isaiah watches the chip’s progress on a small, gray screen. “It goes to the Hu-Bot version of the hippocampus, which is one of the centers for memory. It will locate the neurostimulator and shut it down. It’s simple optogenetics.”
“You lost me after hippocampus,” I say.
“Optogenetics is when you use light to regulate neural activity: in other words, it’s mind control,” Isaiah explains. “The premier’s henchmen use it to deal with ‘deviant’ Hu-Bots. They encrypt their stored data and implant false memories. But our chip turns off their controlling device.” Then he looks at me more seriously. “Optogenetics is not the only way the premier has been controlling the Hu-Bots, but it’s one method we know how to combat.”
“What about OS Empathy?”
“We upload that later,” Isaiah says. “They need recovery time; otherwise we risk system overload.”
&nbs
p; I glance down at the tall, impossibly muscled Hu-Bot on the table. “Not as tough as you think you are, huh?” But of course he doesn’t answer.
At the next knocked-out Hu-Bot, Isaiah holds up a pair of tweezers. “You want to try?”
My fingers feel fat and clumsy, but I manage to get the chip where it’s supposed to go.
Then I watch as Isaiah types code into what looks like a souped-up Q-comp. “Now I’m debugging the memory archive,” he tells me.
I’m plenty familiar with memory archives, so I watch Isaiah carefully. All around us, unconscious Hu-Bots lie on cots like overgrown dolls.
Except one.
There’s one who’s looking right at me.
I jump back, knocking into an IV stand. “What the—?” I gasp.
The Hu-Bot blinks at me with large blue eyes. I can’t tell if it’s a male or a female. It’s big and muscular, but it has long eyelashes and painted fingernails. Then its eyes shift away from me, taking in the 3D-printed polymer bones, the tissue growing on nanowire lattices, the extra Hu-Bot arms lying on a shelf.
I gotta admit: it’s a little grisly.
“The procedure doesn’t hurt,” I reassure the Hu-Bot, lining up the chip, the anesthetic, and various tools on the sterile table next to me. “Just a little pinch.”
The Hu-Bot nods. “I know. But last time I was reprogrammed, it backfired. I got addicted to Killer Films.”
The voice sounds male, I think. “We’re deprogramming you. Getting your brain to how it was before.”
“Glitches and all?” the Hu-Bot asks excitedly.
I hesitate. “If by glitches you mean human feelings—then yes, I guess so.”
The Hu-Bot relaxes. I’ve got the gas mask ready to go when it says, “I want feelings… but I don’t want to feel sad about her death anymore.”
“Whose death?” I ask.
“My sister’s. MikkyBo’s.”
I drop the gas mask to the floor: It’s the Hu-Bot’s brother.
After the shock, bitterness fills my throat. Unlike my brother, this one loves his sister. So who’s the human now?
PART THREE
CHAPTER 63
“THAT’S A FILTHY human habit, you know,” I say.
Mikky stops biting at her fingernails and sticks her tongue out at me.
“Very mature, Mikky,” I say sarcastically.
“Thank you, Six,” she says, mimicking my voice. Then she giggles like a schoolgirl.
Turns out OS Empathy has its upsides, including an actual sense of humor. Pretty soon I start to laugh, too. We’re waiting in the barracks for J.J. to pick us up for an assignment, but he’s taking his sweet time, as usual.
“Where is that old man, anyway?” I complain as my stomach growls loudly. “We’re missing breakfast because of him, and I’m starving.”
Mikky shrugs. “You can have my portion at the next meal.”
Oh, right, she doesn’t even need to eat. I remember looking into the windows of that Capital Center restaurant with Dubs, a lifetime ago. Looking at the silver-haired Hu-Bot carefully placing the slice of steak in her engineered mouth. Dubs staring, longingly.
I roll over onto my stomach to keep it quiet. Mikky, always industrious, is sitting on her bed, sewing up a hole in one of her two shirts. “What’s your favorite food?” I ask idly.
A smile curves her lips. “Ice cream. Butter pecan.”
I groan. I can’t remember anything about ice cream, but I know it was damn good.
“What’s yours, Six?”
“I can’t remember,” I grumble. “But I’m sure ice cream would’ve been up there. And cake,” I add, remembering the Q-comp scene of my sixth birthday.
“My brother used to love chocolate cake,” Mikky says, a little sadly. “Before he disappeared.”
I don’t say anything. I jam my fist into my belly to make it shut up.
Luckily, J.J. is honking his jeep outside. Soon we’re bumping along an underground tunnel, but he won’t tell us where we’re going. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he growls, looking grim and determined.
He’s got a thing for secrets lately.
My secret is about Mikky’s brother-turned-sister. How he—I mean she—woke up sobbing and talking about revolution, and how J.J. hauled her away “for further testing.”
I’m forbidden, “on pain of death,” to say anything to Mikky about any of it. She doesn’t know I’ve operated on any Hu-Bot, let alone one related to her.
A tiny spider crawls on the door next to me. I grin and pick it up. Mikky’s looking way too serious, so I drop it on her arm. “Look, a new friend.”
She glances at it and screams, her shrieks echoing off the walls of the tunnel. I crack up, because the sight of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall android scared of a freaking spider never gets old. After her initial shock, she can’t help laughing, too.
J.J. turns around to face us, his brow dark with anger. “Stop,” he hisses.
Mikky and I freeze. “Sorry, sir,” she whispers.
J.J. takes a deep breath and tries to calm himself. “Tonight we are going to a secret meeting. The danger is incalculable. Do you know what that word means, Six? It means Shut up and pay attention, because if you don’t, you’re dead.” He pauses. “We all are.”
He stares at us for another minute and then turns around and starts up the engine. We bounce along again.
We’re definitely not laughing anymore.
After driving for another few minutes, we come to a dead end—an enormous pile of rocks blocking the tunnel. I feel a surge of hope: We took a wrong turn! We’re lost!
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no problem missing a potentially deadly meeting,” I say to Mikky.
But Mikky says nothing. She watches her beloved J.J. as he gets out of the jeep and heads toward a side passage I didn’t see before. He stops, and then he motions me forward. “You go first,” he says gruffly.
Damn. Not a wrong turn after all.
I glare at him for a second. Then I step into the narrow tunnel. Ahead is only darkness, and I can hear my heart pounding. I count twenty steps, then thirty. I stumble.
When I emerge into sudden light, I’m blinded. And all I can hear is screaming.
CHAPTER 64
MY FIRST INSTINCT is to run. I whirl around, hoping to dive right back into the safety of the tunnel—but then I realize something that stuns me.
The shrieking noises aren’t screams of terror. They’re shouts of happiness. Of welcome.
“Six!” “Sixie-girl!” “Holy crap, you’re not dead!”
Somehow, we’ve tunneled underground to the Reserve. I’m home.
Trip runs up and throws her arms around me, laughing and crying at the same time. And here in this giant underground room, I see so many familiar faces I didn’t think I’d ever see again: half-drunk Toothless Ten, greasy Em Four, still in her filthy apron… Even nasty Zee Twelve looks almost happy to see me.
I start rushing around the room, high-fiving everyone, my throat already hoarse from yelling. I’ve totally forgotten about the whole incalculable danger business. Then J.J. steps out from the tunnel—and the room immediately goes quiet as a graveyard.
I’m shocked to see the unruly, anti-authoritarian Rezzies sitting down on the floor like good little schoolchildren. What’s going on?
Trip pulls me down next to her as J.J. steps up to a makeshift podium. I notice something’s wrong with her hand. “What happened to your fingers?” I ask quietly.
“Shut up,” she whispers. “He’s going to speak.”
Big deal, I think. I hear the old fossil speak every day. Six, get off your lazy butt! Six, you sorry excuse for a human. Etc.
But there’s a different light in J.J.’s cold blue eyes. His jaw is set; his shoulders are thrown back. He looks ten years younger and ten times more imposing. I look around for Mikky, but I don’t see her.
J.J. waits, letting the tension in the room build. Trip holds her breath like she’s been waitin
g for this moment her whole life. Does she know what’s going on? Because I sure don’t.
J.J. suddenly slams his fist down onto the podium. Everyone starts. The noise reverberates around the room. “My fellow humans!” he shouts. “The time is now.”
The time for what?
J.J.’s icy, brilliant eyes scan the room. “The time has come to change—or perish.” The room is absolutely still now. It’s like no one’s even breathing. “We need discipline. Each and every one of you—every man, woman, and sniveling child—must become strong. Fearless. Single-minded!” He pauses, letting this sink in. “And together we are going to take down the Central Capital!”
For a moment, the room keeps its hush—and then it erupts in cheers. “Destroy the Bots!” “Annihilate the skin jobs!” “Long live humans!”
I’m on my feet, waving my arms and yelling, “Fight! Fight!” like I’ve been possessed. My heart’s pounding with excitement. Who knew the old dog had it in him?
“Silence!” J.J. screams, and quickly we all sit down again. Suddenly we’ll do anything he tells us to. “Together we will make the Hu-Bot leaders kneel and bow down before us!” He stands even taller now. Power flows from him like electricity. “You will not all fight, but you must all be soldiers. Do you understand me? That means hiding when it is time to hide. It means stealing when it is time to steal. It means killing when it’s time to kill. It means standing with your fellow humans and believing in yourselves and each other. It means never giving up the fight until your brave human hearts stop beating! Do you understand me?”
“Yes!” the room cries as one.
And for the first time in months, I feel something like hope. I remember all those times I bowed down to the black limos, aching to revolt. Wanting to stand up and scream, Don’t bow down—FIGHT!
And now, finally, I can. We can.
J.J. pounds the podium again. “We are all soldiers!” he yells. “And we will join together with others who share our cause!” He stops and pivots to the wall behind him, facing the opening where we came in. “And now there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” He beckons—and Mikky steps out of the shadow of the tunnel.