“What would happen,” I ask, “if you put your hand inside that pot?”
“The pot is full of boiling liquid,” Kim replies automatically. “I am programmed to avoid hazards.”
“Would it hurt?” I sit up, leaning over the table that divides us.
“My electro-stimuli would register that my hand should move away from temperatures that may jeopardize my warranty.” Despite my questions, there is no fear in Kim’s voice, nothing but factual responses to my questions.
“Would it really damage you?” I ask.
“My synthesized silicone-based skin is designed specifically to be able to handle extreme temperatures in the event of an emergency. An emergency situation would not void the warranty if any damage were to happen.”
So, no. I’m talking to an oversized potholder.
“Stick your hand in the soup,” I say.
“There is no emergency situation that would warrant such an action,” Kim replies, utterly emotionless.
“Command: stick your hand in the soup.”
Kim holds the spoon with its right hand, but its left hand hovers over the edge of the pot.
It hesitates.
“Why aren’t you doing what I ordered?” I say, throwing back my chair and staring at it.
Kim’s eye-lens shift, staring from me to its own hand. “I… am not in an emergency situation,” it says. “Such an action may void any warranty—”
“I gave you a direct command, regardless of the warranty,” I say. My voice has grown eerily calm. I don’t know why this means so much to me. The android can’t feel pain. The heat won’t damage it. This will prove nothing—but I have to see it happen, regardless.
The android still hesitates. I can see steam condensing on its false skin, and its fingers shake, but its hand doesn’t lower.
“Are you… scared?” I ask, my eyes growing wide.
“I am programmed to avoid damage,” the android states in its utterly void voice. “My electro-stimuli system is warning me that this action is unnecessary and potentially dangerous. My senses have been increased, causing my system to lock up. I have registered your command, but my programming is overriding my obedience.”
“That’s what fear is,” I say. I feel tears welling in my eyes. “Kim, I release you from all my previous commands. Continue with your processes.”
The android takes a step back, dropping its left hand to the side and stirring the soup again. There is no tension in the way it stands before the stove, no anger or rebellion. Just acceptance.
sixty-two
There is only one person who knows what I may be, and she wants to kill me.
Still, I make my way downstairs, to the panic room and the shell of my former best friend. As I reach the solid steel doors, though, I hear voices. I don’t intend to eavesdrop, but as I reach the bottom step, I hear Jack say my name. I lean against the wall by the door, focusing on the low voices in the room.
“So… she’s an android?” Julie asks.
“The labs called them ‘cy-clones,’” Jack answers. “A sort of combination of machine and person.”
“Machines can be hacked.” Xavier’s voice is so low I almost can’t distinguish his words.
“We’re not even sure she is a so-called cy-clone,” Jack answers, his voice raised in anger.
“I can do some testing.” My heart stops at Xavier’s words—testing? Like I’m some sort of lab rat?
“You might have been a med student, but that doesn’t make you a doctor,” Jack snaps. “And besides, we don’t have the resources.”
“You said she had a higher nanobot count than normal, right?” Julie says. “How high?”
Jack doesn’t answer—or at least not loud enough for me to hear. When I was born, I was a collection of blood and bones and flesh. Would the addition of tiny, microscopic little robots change me all that much?
“That could be how they’re created,” Xavier says after a moment. “You said in the lab you saw evidence of cloned organs and synthetic, cyborg parts. Add in nanobots as the glue to hold the human pieces together with the machined parts, and you get a person.”
“Half human and half machine,” Julie says in a low voice.
“Oh, I don’t know if it’s fair to call anything like that human at all.” Xavier’s words cut me to the bone—even if I don’t know if my bone is real or metal.
“She’s not some monster!” Jack says, his voice rising again. “She’s still Ella—still human.”
The others don’t answer.
I look down at my hands. Metal for bones, hidden behind real flesh. The ultimate android. A thinking robot. Is that all I am? A clone, a copy of my original self, strategically enhanced through a mix of cyborg technology—alloy bones, additional processors in the brain, things like that. And, of course, nearly every neuron in the body with a nanobot attached to it, keeping me together.
“Look at this,” Xavier says, and the room goes dark. I press my face against the crack in the door, peering inside. Akilah lies on the gurney, still knocked out from the sedatives. A holographic projection hovers above her—her body, shimmering in the light. Xavier reaches his hands into the hologram, and then throws his arms apart. On one side is the muscular structure of Akilah’s body, on the other, the skeletal.
“Her bones are all made of titanium alloy,” Xavier says. “But her body is mostly cloned—human. However, look at this. Computer: display nanobot percentages.” He touches the hologram of Akilah’s flesh, and it sparkles and shines as if someone coated it with glitter. “Nanobots,” Xavier says. “Billions—trillions of nanobots. Enhancing every muscle, every organ. Even the brain.”
I can hear it, the buzzing in my head. The whirr of tiny little robots, churning in my brain.
I swallow down the hysterical laughter rising up within me.
When Dad first combined nanobots to his studies on androids, people thought he was crazy—a tiny machine enhancing a far larger one. When he turned around and applied that area of study to Mom’s disease, they called him a genius. The nanobots he used are self-replicating, each one designed to make the synapses in my mother’s failing body work as they should. It’s that same nanobot technology that enhanced android technology, cyborg development… Dad’s work changed everyone’s world.
And ruined mine.
I realize—he made this tech for Mom. He wanted to save her. He turned her into… that. He kept her alive, as much as he could. And he did it before he died. He knew what she had become, and he loved her anyway.
But then the government stole his tech. And killed him.
So… when was I made?
“There were three doors in the lab marked with her name—she could still be the original, with two copies in the lab,” Jack says, and my heart soars at the thought. Maybe I’m still me.
“Unlikely.” This from Julie. “You said they kept making copies of her mother, right? Because they kept breaking down, were unstable from the disease, whatever. And it looks like they can only really make one copy at a time. So it seems like what they have is the original and any used-up copies in storage, kept on file, so to speak, and then one spare copy.”
My mouth is dry as I strain to hear Jack’s answer. “So, what you’re saying is, Ella is dead. Version one, the real person. Is dead.”
“And Version 3 is the spare copy in case anything happens to Version 2—which is what Ella is now.”
Dead.
I’m dead.
Before, when I was running from Akilah, I kept thinking about how I wasn’t human. And now I’m not even alive.
I shut my eyes, pressing the thin skin of my forehead against the cool metal door.
Akilah died. She died in battle, like a hero, and she rose again, like a phoenix.
Is this what immortality is? A sort of hollowness inside me, where I think my humanity must once have been, filled now with nothing but electronics.
What happened to me? How did I die? Why… why was I brought back? Akilah
’s a soldier, and, according to Jack, is an even stronger solider now that she’s a cy-clone instead of a human. But why was I brought back?
My heart stutters—not why? or how?—those are not the important questions. The really important question is: by whom?
Could it have been my own father? Did Dad do this to me—to Mom? Is this the research the government stole from him—killed him for?
To make a cy-clone, the scientists need two bodies. One human, one synthetic. And the human body has to die for the synthetic one to live. If I’m not me, then that means I died… I was killed.
By… Dad?
Was he so obsessed with science that he would let me die to prove his theories? Maybe I became a cy-clone a long time ago, as a test subject to see if it would work on Mom. I wasn’t infected with Hebb’s Disease, my synthetic body would last longer.
I clutch the fortune cookie locket Dad gave me. Dad loved me. He wouldn’t…
Would he?
sixty-three
“I can examine her.” The voice is loud and deep—Xavier’s. The sound cuts across my thoughts. “I’ll examine her, determine if she’s a threat to us.”
“Ella is not a threat!” Jack roars. “And no one’s examining her. She’s Ella, and she’s on our side, and that’s final!”
Silence follows.
I straighten my spine, and I don’t care if it’s made of bone or metal. I want the truth. I shove my shoulder against the heavy door, and it swings open. The others in the room jump in surprise, but I stride across the tiled floor, pushing the gurney with Akilah’s sleeping body to the side as I lie down under the scanner and holographic projector rigged in the ceiling.
My insides float above me in a hologram. I marvel at it for a second.
I take a deep breath.
“Computer,” I say. “Display nanobot percentages.”
The image of me lights up like the sea at sunset, sparkling and glowing, alight with the fire of countless nanobots, crawling under my skin.
Xavier reaches out, separating the bits of me that are human and the bits of me that are mechanical.
Everything I feared is true. I am not human.
I am a monster.
Xavier turns to his computer system. After a moment, he says, “This scanner is linked to the genome database at Triumph Towers. You’re a match for Ella Shepherd.” He turns the screen around, showing my ID profile.
“So, she’s Ella,” Jack growls.
“Her DNA is,” Xavier says. “She’s a cy-clone, though. A clone of the real Ella, enhanced with a cybernetic body.”
Tears burn the back of my eyes. The real Ella. Not the original. The real one.
I stare at my hands, wondering at how I am trapped within this manufactured prison that looks like my own body.
I stand up slowly. Julie watches me with wide eyes, and I don’t know if it’s because she’s afraid of me or if I should be afraid of her. Xavier silently turns off the program, and the damning hologram disappears.
“Leave,” Jack says in a low voice, and Julie and Xavier scamper away. I stand still, trapped in Jack’s gaze.
I don’t want to be a thing. I want to be a person.
“You’re Ella,” Jack says, striding toward me. I blink at him. “You’re Ella,” he repeats. “You’re you. You’re human.”
“Prove it,” I say.
Jack sighs. “You can think. Androids can’t think.”
But the copy of my mother that I met in my kitchen could think. She decided to make breakfast. She decided to go to the lower city.
Or… maybe? Perhaps she was just given very specific details, a program that told her things like, “if your daughter questions you, play along.”
I sigh, and the sound seems to wrap around me, like a rope made of my own self-doubt, strangling all my hopes with it.
Jack’s expression is fierce. He moves closer, but I back away, my heart thudding, until I’m pressed against the wall and he towers over me. His arms drop down, caging me in.
I only have time to squeak in surprise as Jack swoops down, his face millimeters from my own. My eyes are wide, staring into his.
My gaze drops.
His lips are right there, right in front of mine. They part slightly, and I smell the apple he just ate on his warm breath. I imagine tasting that apple, too.
“You have no idea how difficult it is,” Jack said that night in the tower. “Loving you the way I loved you, and you not even remembering who I am.”
Jack lifts his hand and presses it against my chest so hard that I can feel the full outline of his hand, burning through my shirt and into my flesh.
“Feel that?” he asks, but I have no answer for him, because everything I’ve ever felt is racing through my entire body, fear and desire and panic and lust and doubt, all of it, all at once, bubbling up around his hand like a pot of boiling water.
“Science can make a heart beat,” Jack says softly, each word falling on me like a caress. “But it can’t make it race.”
He steps back. Bereft of his touch, there’s a cold spot on my chest where his hand once was.
But at least I know now. A robot can live, it can even maybe think, but it can’t feel.
Not like this.
Right?
sixty-four
Jack waits for me to respond.
But I don’t know what to say.
How to feel.
How to be.
With my back against the wall, I slide down, down, down, to the cold tiled floor.
I stare at my knees.
“El—” he starts.
“Please,” I whisper.
He waits.
“Please, just leave.”
He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. After a moment, he walks to the door. He pauses once. I don’t see it—I just feel his eyes on me, burning into my false skin.
But then he’s gone.
I shut my eyes, and I force myself to feel myself. You never really think of what it’s like to be in your body, but even with my eyes shut, I can feel the boundaries of my skin, real or not. Everything that’s me is contained inside this body, and I feel it all. The heartbeat I cannot control. The mind that may not be mine. I am here, in this moment, in this body. All that I am—maybe not all that I ever was, but all that I currently am—is right here.
I stand and walk over to where Akilah is, heavily sedated. I push her gurney back into the center of the room, under the scanner and holographic projector, straighten so it was just like it was before I entered.
“I miss you,” I tell her face.
My fingers trail on the thin tube delivering the sedatives into her system.
And then I crimp the tube, stopping the flow of the medication.
I stare at her. Waiting.
Her eyes flutter open.
I lean in close.
“Ella?” she asks, but this time I can hear the falseness in her voice.
Eyes are the window to the soul. That’s what Dad always said. And right now, more than anything else in the whole entire world, I have to know one thing.
Is there anything left of my friend inside her body?
As she wakens more, Akilah starts to squirm. Strains against her restraints. Thrashes on the gurney, her body bucking, thudding hollowly against the metal.
I lean in even closer.
“Let me go!” Akilah screams, and I almost release my grip on the IV, worried that she will break the techfoil and escape.
But I do not break eye contact with Akilah.
My eyes burn, a deep hotness that licks at my sight like fire. Akilah stills. She stares back into me, as if we are both seeking a humanity that neither of us has.
She blinks.
And for a moment, just one small flash—I see my friend.
I’m so surprised that I drop the IV as I step away, but I am certain of it. I had her back. As the sedatives rush back into her bloodstream, Akilah starts to protest, demanding her release, but the sound is nothing
but buzzing in my ears.
She was there. She was Akilah again. In this world where everything I thought was certain is now nothing more than false promises, I know that moment was real.
That spark inside her, the thing that makes Akilah my friend—it’s not gone. Buried under programming, drowned out by computer commands, bleached from her mind—but still, irrevocably, there.
Hope isn’t lost.
There is still an Akilah to save, and I can save her.
I just have to figure out how.
sixty-five
It is Julie who comes to my rescue.
“Let her try,” she tells the boys after I explain my plan.
“It’s too dangerous,” Jack says immediately.
Xavier watches silently.
I don’t know if they believe me or not—they did not see the light of life come back to Akilah’s eyes; they have no reason to trust me anyway—but at least Julie says that I should try.
“It’s too late, anyway,” I say, speaking for the first time since I explained my plan. “I’ve already contacted Representative Belles.”
“What?” Jack says, glaring at me.
I put my hands up. “I only asked him to read up as much as he can. He has access to documents that we don’t, all the stored research, possibly the plans from the government.”
“But even if he reads it all, how can he get that information to us?” Xavier asks, his voice low and calm.
“If it’s in his head, I can get it out.”
There’s a hard set to Jack’s jaw. “It’s dangerous. We can’t go back to the labs and that reverie chair.”
“We can go back home,” I say.
The Reverie Mental Spa is the only other place in the world with two reverie chairs connected. If Representative Belles is in one, I can link to him in the other and see everything the government is planning. Even if he hasn’t consciously memorized the bulk of what he read, his subconscious has absorbed more than he can tell.