“Ella,” Jack whispers.
I ignore him, fascinated by the skeleton. One arm dangles off the table, and I pick it up, slipping my fingers through the cold, metal bony fingers of the hand of this strange creation.
“Ella,” Jack says.
I turn.
He stands in front of a low vat covered in a clear glass top. The vat is filled with a clear liquid that might be water, but it’s what’s inside that stops me in my tracks.
At first I think they’re jellyfish. Even though the bodies are too bulbous and defined to be jellyfish, there are long tentacles come off each spherical, floating object, drifting down to the bottom of the tank. But then I see the single heavy, long tentacle coming out from the center of each of the things, and I realize what they are.
Brains.
They’re beige and pink, with tiny lines of blue veins. I always imagined brains as gray and mushy, but these are firm, bobbing along in their vats. The spinal cords—which I’d mistaken for tentacles—reach straight down to the bottom, where they’re plugged into metal tubes and clamped in place. All along the spinal cords are tiny tufts, almost like sea anemones. As I watch, I see little white sparks of electricity flickering between the nerves, traveling up the spinal cord and flashing in the brains like lighting. When I lean down closer, I notice small microchips embedded into the wrinkles of the brains. I wonder, if I put the brains under a microscope, if there would be nanobots connecting the synapses. It’s an eerie, creepily beautiful image of the biological blending with the mechanical.
“This is impossible,” Jack says. “Your dad—Dr. Philip tried for years to clone or manufacture a human brain, but he said it was impossible.”
I turn around slowly, drinking in everything. The metal skeleton, the vat of brains. Beyond them, a wall with tiny refrigerator doors, each one labeled with a different organ. A smaller vat in the corner filled with long strips of beige material and labeled simply, “syn-skin.” A cabinet with a sign on it that says, “flesh stimulator.” Pipes run along the ceiling, leading to the giant tube in the center of the room. They’re labeled with different versions of nanobots: NB-126, NB-252, NB-378.
“All of this… It’s all the pieces of a human,” I say in a hollow voice. Bones of metal, fake skin, cloned organs. Piece them together, and you have a Frankensteinian monster.
I touch the glass of the tube, wondering at the android that’s stuck inside it. No—not an android. A cyborg-clone, according to the label on the door. A cy-clone. Representative Belles learned about cy-clones, and his mind was troubled by what he learned. Maybe that was the real reason why he came in for a reverie, to forget about whatever cy-clones really are, and how they’re made.
A terrible thought floods my own thoughts: did Dad have something to do with this?
“Hey, Ella,” Jack says from across the room. I walk over to him—he’s scanning the information in the interface system, documents and images flashing on the monitor screen as he selects information to copy and send to the Zunzana computers.
“They’re working on a rush order,” he says. “Yesterday, there was an order for a ‘new one.’”
“A new what?” I ask.
Jack shrugs. “‘A new one,’ that’s all it says. And this model needs a remote kill switch, and some other features, like an increased amount of some sort of chemical compound called PHY-DU5.”
I voice the thing we’re both afraid of saying. “Is this what Akilah is?” I ask. “Some sort of man-made monster? And my mom?”
Jack whirls around. He looks me right in the eyes. “No way,” he says. “You said it yourself—you can’t make a brain think. Look at those.” He points to the vats of brains. “Do you think you could just pick one of those up and stick it in that skeleton and make it think for itself? Science has come far, Ella, but you can’t just manufacture this.”
I stare down at the vat. Despite the flickers of electricity, there’s no evidence that these brains can think, even with the microchips.
As we leave the room, I’m filled with an unexplainable sense of dread. I glance back behind me. Even though the skeleton is made of nothing but metal, it feels as if it’s watching me, mocking me.
Jack slides the door shut, and the last image I have of this strange room is the flickering sparks of electricity pulsing through brains that cannot—cannot—think for themselves.
Jack latches on to my arm and drags me to the lab marked “Reverie Transfer.” I think he’s afraid I’m going to wander into the other labs, but he shouldn’t worry about that. I can’t shake this feeling, a sort of ominous déjà vu, from my shoulders. I’m definitely going to be glad when we can escape this lab, but I’m getting my answers first.
On the far wall of this lab are a series of small, square doors, each neatly labeled with a few words I cannot read from here. The little doors are made of heavy steel, with a locking metal handle. They stack one on top of the other, like morgue doors. This room is cooler, and I think, judging by the condensation near the wall, the little rooms behind the little doors must be refrigerated.
In the center of the room is a reverie chair—a pair of them, connected by wires, much like the two reverie chairs in Reverie are connected, although our second chair is hidden in a different room. These reverie chairs look old and uncomfortable, none of the plush lining or little comforts we have for our clients.
One chair is empty and shiny, newly polished. The only flaw in it is a small, misshapen hole in the center of the chair back that looks a bit like a bullet hole.
The other chair is not empty. A body is slung across it, arms and legs dangling lifelessly. The head is tilted back, almost falling off the back of the chair. But there’s not a full head, not on this body. There’s a gaping hole, and through the flesh and metal, I can still see the whisper of a spark in my mother’s mechanical brain.
fifty-seven
I hear a buzzing in the back of my head.
Jack looks around for something to cover my mother’s doppelganger body with, but there’s nothing there, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen it. And it’s not my mother. But I’ve still seen it.
I can smell it now. A sort of sweet scent, with a rancid edge.
Rotting meat.
“We should go,” Jack says immediately. He’s speaking so fast. I can barely keep up with his words.
“Why are there two chairs together like that?” I ask. Connected reveries are rare; Mom only theorized about them. I thought the mental spa was the only place to have some. Everything feels slow, like I’m sloshing through water. There is something… something important. I just… I can’t seem to think.
I feel like I’m missing something.
“Your father was working on a theory of your mother’s—at least, he was before he fired me. Using reveries on androids, trying to find a way to make them really think. Judging from this and the vat of brains, it looks like the UC has continued his research.”
I start, then look guiltily at Jack. I only understood half of what he said. “Do you hear that?” I ask, craning my head, listening.
Jack stares at me. The lab is eerily silent.
“Never mind,” I say. “It was nothing.”
“Anyway,” Jack says slowly, still staring at me oddly, “your father thought zzz that it might be pozzible to tranzfer thought through something like reveriez. He’d zometimes experiment, putting an android zzz in one chair and a perzon in the other. Put them both in reveriezzz, and zee if any intelligence could be tranzferred. Ella?” Jack snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Are you zzz listening?”
“The buzzing,” I say softly.
“What?” Jack asks. But I can barely hear him.
The buzzing is so loud.
I clamp my hands over my ears.
It’s still. Zzz. So. Zzz. Loud.
“Ella?” Jack asks. Or, at least, I think that’s what he asks. I can’t hear him. I can only see his mouth open and close around the syllables of my name.
“Whe
re are the bees?” I ask loudly. Jack clamps a hand over my mouth—I don’t know why he thinks I am too loud. I could barely hear my own voice, the buzzing is so deafening.
Jack mouths something else, but I can’t hear it. Juzzzt buzzzzzzing.
I whirl around. How can there be this much buzzing, and no sign of bees? They must be everywhere… but I can’t see them at all.
Jack grabs my shoulders and spins me about. He opens his mouth.
Bees pour from it. They swarm in front of his face. They knock against his teeth. They crawl up his nose, over his eyeballs.
I scream and fall back. The bees follow me. I swat at them, waving my arms about and taking the lab coat off, trying to beat them away. They ignore me entirely. I can feel their heavy bodies against the bare skin of my arms. Their pointy, sticky feet prick my clothes, snagging in the threads. Their slightly fuzzy bodies leave goose bumps on my shoulders.
They crawl over me, their wings beating against my skin. They crawl through my hair. I bend over, scratching my head with both hands, trying to get the damn things out, but there are more bees than I have hair, bees, bees, everywhere beezzzzz.
Jack grabs my wrist, crushing the bodies of bees between our skin, and jerks me forward. It does no good—the bees follow. I squirm, twisting around, swatting at the bees everywhere.
Jack throws me into the reverie chair—the empty one, not the one with a body in it.
He lowers his face in front of mine. He speaks—I cannot hear his words, not through the sound of the bees, but I can see his lips form my name.
A bee lands on his lower lip. I watch, eerily fascinated, as the stinger punctures the pink skin. The bee jerks, leaving the stinger in Jack’s lip. The bee falls against Jack’s teeth, drops from his lips to the ground, where its body is swallowed up by the thousands of bees swarming on the cold tile floor. The floor used to be white, but now it is black-and-yellow, swirling, whirling, massive bodies of bees writhing along the ground, crushed under Jack’s feet, smeared into the tile as more bees swarm over the dead ones.
Hands grip my chin, turn my face.
Jack’s mouth is open so wide that I think he’s shouting, but there’s no point. Can’t hear anything, not over the buzzing, buzzing, buzzbuzzbuzzbuzzing.
I’m screaming. When did I start screaming? Opening my mouth left space for the bees to get in. They dive-bomb down my throat, scratching the sensitive flesh of my mouth with their stingers, their thin little legs getting stuck between my teeth. I claw at my mouth, trying to get them out, and then firm hands pull my arms away from my face, and they’re strapped down, held against the metal arms of a reverie chair—how did I get in a reverie chair?—and I turn my head, and there’s the other reverie chair, the one with the dead body of the thing that looks like my mother, and I can’t get away because I’m strapped down, and the bees are too heavy anyway, their bodies piling over mine, pressing me down, and I can’t breathe.
And then one of them stings me.
A giant one, with poisonous green venom.
No.
Not a bee.
A needle.
Not venom. Reverie drug.
The bees melt like candle wax into the shape of a man. Jack stands before me, holding a needle. I look down at my arm.
He drugged me.
I slip into a reverie.
fifty-eight
The buzzing bees are softer now, in the background, like music.
“Ella.”
I am still strapped down in the reverie chair, but there’s nothing in the dreamscape except the darkness and my father.
“Where am I?” I ask.
Dad bends over the chair and starts to loosen the straps. I rub my wrists. My mouth is sore. I touch it gently and can feel the raised skin of my own clawing.
“You are in a reverie chair,” Dad says.
“No, I mean… where am I now?” I look around me. I’m in a reverie; this is a dreamscape. This isn’t the lab. Jack’s not here. Just me and the chair and Dad.
“Where do you go when you enter someone’s reverie?” Dad asks idly, as if the question were rhetorical.
“I enter their mind.”
Dad looks off into the blackness of the dreamscape. “You enter someone else’s mind. Someone else’s memories, someone else’s dreams.” His eyes turn to focus on mine. “I suppose you’re in someone else’s mind right now.” He giggles. “Which means you’re not in your right mind.”
I stand up—not only is the reverie chair hard and uncomfortable, but I want to get some distance between myself and this dream of Dad.
And then what he’s said hits me. I’m not in my mind at the moment—I’m in a reverie, dreaming someone else’s dream. But the person—the thing—the thing that looks like my mother—in the other chair isn’t alive. All that was left was a few electrical sparks in a rotting body.
“Is this what death looks like?” I mutter to myself.
“Depends on what you think death is.” Dad sounds cheerful now, like the man I remember before we moved to the city, before he started working with the government.
“I don’t understand you.”
“You—your thoughts, your being, your self—are right here, correct?” Dad waves his hands in front of me. Of course I am not really here—I’m in a chair in a lab with Jack. But I am also here, in a dreamscape with Dad. “Which part of you is you—that body you left behind, or the girl in front of me now?” Dad asks.
I think about it a moment, then say, “I guess me. Here. Now. A body isn’t a person. A person is…” I struggle to answer him. It’s hard to put it in a definition. But I think about the digi file Jack showed me, of Akilah’s death. Even on a screen, I could tell the difference between Akilah alive and Akilah dead. Dead, she was empty. She was nothing. She was like she was in the tunnel. A shadow of herself. She wasn’t her body.
Dad grips my shoulders, his fingers pressing into my skin. “Remember that, Ella. That part is important.”
“What part…?” I ask, but Dad releases me so suddenly that I’m left breathless.
He spins away from me, and I hear his voice, heavy and sad. “Ella, you have to wake up.”
I march over to him. “You keep saying that!” I scream at him. “But what do you mean? What am I supposed to wake up from? What do you really mean?”
Dad takes my former place in the reverie chair. He looks up at me.
He looks so tired. Wan.
His cheeks are sunken. His eyes are red-rimmed. His lips are cracked.
He looks dead. Almost.
“You were my key. I hid the truth in you.” As he talks, the flesh falls away from his face, until there are gaping holes where his cheeks should be, his clacking teeth visible.
I start to cry. The tears are hot and burn my cheeks as they fall. They remind me of the bee-stings.
“When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t cry.”
The buzzing grows louder. It’s not background music any more. It’s the sound of me losing my mind.
“I’m going crazy, aren’t I?” I whisper. The fear of it dawns on me like a horrific revelation. Before, in the lab. There were no bees. I realize that now. There were no bees. Just me. Crazy me.
Or… maybe I’m not going crazy. Maybe I’m some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I’m just breaking down.
I’m not sure which way is worse.
Dad laughs. As he does, the rest of his skin and flesh cracks and falls away from his head, exposing his grinning skull. His eyes roll in their sockets, then fall, dangling from a string of red vein. The veins snap and his eyes splatter on the ground.
“You’re not in your right mind, dear,” he says. “No, no, no, you’re not.”
And he still laughs. He laughs until there’s nothing but the noise of his teeth clacking together and the never-ending sound of a million bees buzzing in my ears.
And then—
—Silence.
Dad fades away. The reverie
chair disappears.
There’s just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead.
And, just as I’m starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn’t soft; it’s not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark.
I don’t know why—it makes no sense, the way dreams often don’t—but I want to touch the light.
So I do.
The light arcs from the corner of the dreamscape, connecting with my fingertips. It burns me up inside, lightning bouncing around my organs, pinging through my blood.
I hear a voice. A voice I know, a voice I love.
“Mom,” I whisper.
And there’s something within me, some indefinable knowledge that I cannot explain, but when the light answers me, saying my name, I know that it’s my mother’s voice. My mom. My real mom—not the thing that looked like Mom, the thing that wore her face and sounded and smelled and seemed like her.
This is my mother’s voice.
“Ella,” she says again, the word resounding through my soul.
And then I realize: something’s wrong.
“Mom?” I ask. My voice crackles with fear and electricity.
“I held on as long as I could,” my mother says. “But you have to let me go now. Let all of me go. Because there’s nothing left. Not here. Not anymore.”
My eyes snap open. Jack stands over me, concern etched on his face. “Ella?” he says, and I know he’s saying my name to see if I can respond, to see if I’ll answer him with screaming or a buzzing sound.
“I’m fine,” I say, even though I’m really not.
fifty-nine
Mom used to say that the thoughts in our heads were nothing more than electrical impulses. I remember Dad and her talking about this over dinner. It frustrated Dad that the human brain can fire electrical sparks and think, but that the electricity he’d pump into an android brain would never give it independent thought. The body isn’t that different from a machine. Humans and androids both run on electricity.