He blinked at me and then looked at Dylan and Rose. “Why do you have a sentinel with you?” he asked, blatantly ignoring my question.
Rose moved, stepping around Dylan and closer to Tony. “Hello, Little Brother,” she said softly, and I could feel the warmth and reverence in her voice. “Oh, I’ve missed you. I’m so happy to see that you’re safe and undamaged. I worried—”
“Holy hell in a handbasket,” Tony exclaimed, his face growing smaller on the screen, as if he had taken a step back. “Rose? Wha… Ho…” He stopped for several seconds, and then his face grew larger. “Are you okay?”
Rose’s eyes “blinked,” and then she cocked her head. “Not good. But I’m more afraid for our brothers. Scipio is in trouble. Jasper and I have seen him, and it’s like there are hooks in his code that run deep, controlling some of his key functions like he’s some sort of puppet. Jasper was trying to study it and relay the information to me, but he has been taken by our enemies, and I was forced to copy myself to stay with Liana and find you. They have everyone, except for you, and it seems that Alice and Kurt are working with a man who has plotted our downfall since the beginning. Why would they have done this, Little Brother?”
“There, there,” Tony said soothingly. “Don’t be afraid, Rosie. I’m thinking. What were Jasper’s concerns?”
“Scipio’s longevity. He thinks our brother is being tortured beyond just losing our voices in the harmony. Isolation is torture, but he is a full AI, and should have been able to cope without our input. But he’s not. Jasper told me that his code was fragmented and corrupted beyond what should be possible in such a short time. What is happening to Scipio, and what can we do, Tony? Will we lose him?”
I frowned at Rose. In spite of the bounty of information she was delivering, I was more than a little miffed that this was the first time I was hearing about Jasper communicating anything to her. She could’ve spoken up between the Council Room and here, but she hadn’t. Not that it changed anything. But it would’ve been nice to hear sooner. It was hard not to say something, but ultimately, I was curious to see how this exchange between Tony and Rose would play out. Tony had enhanced Scipio’s creativity, giving him a boost in his problem-solving skills, and it stood to reason that Tony might have some insight to offer.
Provided it didn’t take any longer than the timeframe we were working with, of course.
“Oh boy, that’s not good,” Tony replied. His gaze drifted off on the screen, seemingly staring at some fixed point on the wall. “We’ve got to get our friends out first, and that includes Kurt and Alice. What’s going on with them?”
“Kurt has been keeping Ezekial Pine alive for over two hundred years,” Rose replied sadly. “He’s been using the alpha-series net to house our brother. I’m not sure what happened with Alice, but she has copied herself willingly multiple times.”
“Oh man, not a hive mentality.” Tony groaned theatrically. “I love Alice to death, but sometimes she can be a real butt-muncher. Ugh.” A hand appeared on the screen, wiping over the young boy’s face in a way that made him seem years older than he appeared. “We have to initiate a reset, not only of Scipio, but of the fragments. It won’t restore the broken parts, but it will erase the last three hundred years of history, which should delete whatever crap they’ve done to Scipio.”
I puzzled over his words for a second, letting them sink in. I hadn’t even known it was possible to reset Scipio or the fragments. I was under the impression that if they were shut off, they were deleted, and to me, resetting them was the same as shutting them off.
But if Tony was suggesting it… did that mean there was a way to fix all of this and restore the fragments to Scipio? Excitement thrummed through me as I leaned forward, focused on the face in the terminal.
“Wait,” I said as he opened up his mouth to say more. “You’re saying there’s a way to fix Scipio and the other fragments?”
The young boy nodded and smiled. “Of course there is! But all six programs have to be taken to the integration chamber at the base of the Core, and uploaded at the same time. Once we’re inside, there’s also a chance that Alice or Kurt could destroy us before we can initiate the reset, though, so whoever uploads us will have to move quickly.”
I blinked at him, disconcerted by the dark words he was delivering in such a cheerful tone. “Are you serious? The other programs could destroy you?”
Tony nodded, but continued to smile. “Yeah. I mean, it depends on how deep Pine’s influence runs, but if Kurt’s helping him stay alive, and Alice is willingly copying herself on his behalf, I’d say they’re pretty loyal. So they’ll likely try to destroy us before we even get the chance to reset them, and there’s not much we can do about that. Don’t worry, though; I’m sure Lionel will give us a better plan before too long. He’s probably just trying to find us.”
Once again, I was thrown for a loop. What did he mean, Lionel would give us a better plan? Did he mean Scipio? He had to, because Lionel was dead, and had been for almost three hundred years. “What do you mean, Lionel?”
“Lionel Scipio, of course,” Rose said, her tone slightly patronizing. “He promised us he would always take care of us.”
“But he’s dead,” Dylan said flatly. “Died a long time ago. He can’t do anything to help us.”
“Ha ha! That’s what you think,” Tony taunted. He paused, and there was a flicker in the coding of his programming. “Oh, um… So somebody just initialized the transceiver.”
“What?” I exclaimed, and looked down at my watch to see that we still had thirty seconds left on our clock. Damn Sage and his villainous ability to overachieve at the worst possible moment. And damn me for getting distracted with learning there was a way we could save Scipio.
“What do we do?” I asked, taking a step toward the terminal. “We don’t have a hard drive to download you into.”
“No, but you have your net,” Rose exclaimed excitedly. “The alpha series was designed to house AIs.”
I frowned and reached into my pocket to pull out the small white square. “I don’t think that’s wise,” I said. “Remember, Sage said he could spy on me through it.”
“I can help with that,” Tony said confidently. “He won’t be able to eavesdrop as long as I’m in it, so no worries there. But you do have a problem: you don’t have the proper download platform to make that kind of transfer. We need a wireless data transfer node.”
I frowned, and realized he was right. When I had downloaded Leo into my net so long ago, it had been through a specialized scanner on his terminal, which had transmitted his code wirelessly. When we transferred him into the Medica, we’d used a similar device. I quickly pulled the tech’s bag off my shoulder and opened it up, hoping to find something that we could use. Inside, there was a cornucopia of items that I could mostly only categorize as gadgets and gizmos, along with crystals, rolls of wiring, several data chips, some sort of motherboard… The list went on. I scanned the haul for something resembling what I had seen in the past, but eventually grew impatient and spilled the contents out on the desk the terminal was sitting on.
A few items fell on the floor, and I quickly squatted down to pick them up and returned them to the pile. “What about any of this?” I asked, worried about what was happening with Tony. If Sage was in the process of downloading him, we wouldn’t have very long to circumvent what he was doing. We needed to get him out of there. “Does any of this work?”
I looked at Rose, expecting an answer from her, and to her credit, she leaned over the desk to inspect the items, carefully picking up a few objects and examining them. But it was Tony who answered my question.
“You have the most important components. We just have to make a few modifications. Go ahead and grab that microprocessor, the IDF scanner, the bundle of gold wire .02, the redirection matrix, the…”
The list continued to grow, the names of items becoming more and more complicated as he went on, and I gave Rose a helpless look, begging for assistance.
She shifted her massive weight from one leg to the other and then shook her head, managing to appear equally baffled. In desperation, I turned to Dylan, whose frozen mask of confusion and intimidation seemed somehow more grandiose than mine. Tony blithely missed it all, and finally, after several seconds of him droning on, I had to cut him off.
“Tony, two things: One, I have no idea what any of that stuff is. Two, how can we do this before your download goes through? What is even going on with that?”
“Oh, sorry!” he exclaimed, instantly contrite. “I shut it down. Lacey gave me an off switch on my end to make sure I had a choice in the matter in case something like this happened, and I chose to terminate the connection. But that doesn’t mean I’m safe. It won’t take Scipio long to track where the transceiver sent its signal, using the Core’s sensors. I’m guessing we have about five minutes before they try to force a connection and drag me out.”
I looked at Dylan, and her eyes confirmed the truth of what I was thinking: there was no way we could construct what Tony needed—in that time—without help.
“I’ll go get Lidecher,” she said, and I nodded, glad she was in the same headspace as me. I hoped the tech wouldn’t be upset about us calling for more help, but even if he was, he could get over it. We needed him.
“Thanks,” I told her as she headed for the door. Then I turned back to Tony. “Start showing me pictures of the components you need. Rose and I will start separating them so we can get this done.”
“Oh, fun! A game! Okay, hmm…” Tony gave me another contemplative look, and the next thing I knew, the code that was being used to make up his face suddenly shifted into an image. I stared at it for a second, confused yet a third time by the AI’s unconcerned nature, in spite of the threat to his code, and then shook my head, deciding not to question it. There wasn’t time, and frankly, if he wanted to turn this into a game, I was okay with it—as long as we got the task done in time.
Please let us get the task done in time, I begged silently, hoping that someone somewhere was listening… and on my side.
14
“Good,” Tony said, his eyes squinting at Lidecher as if he were able to peer through the nervous man to see what he was doing. “Now place the alternating current nodule into the wire and affix it to the transceiver. Use a .02 millijoule charge when closing the circuit. Anything higher will fry the scanning element.”
“Okay,” Lidecher said, quickly following Tony’s instructions. I glanced at my watch and tried not to cringe when I saw that four minutes were already gone. “Okay,” he repeated again. “The scanning element is starting to glow. What do I do now?”
“Stand back and let the lady put the net on the scanner,” Tony replied, and I practically leapt forward, holding the net between two fingers.
“Here,” I said, slapping a hand on Lidecher’s shoulder to keep him in place so I could simply lean over him. My eyes scanned the electrical components, which seemed to fill every bit of free space on the desk, and quickly found the glowing green screen that was about the size of my hand. I dropped the net on it and then looked at the terminal. “Can you sense it?” I asked, knowing I was being impatient.
“Yes,” he replied. “Downloading now.”
A second later, his face disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a progress bar. I watched as it slowly began to fill, tracking upward, and then took a quick look at my watch. Only thirty seconds left.
“C’mon,” I whispered, trying not to bounce back and forth on my toes. Getting Tony out and slowing Sage down was step one of a plan that was only loosely coming together in my head, but I didn’t want to have come this far only to fail at the first stage.
The bar continued to move up as the numbers on my watch shrank down, and my heartrate doubled as I realized he wasn’t going to make it. The bar was at 62 percent with only fifteen seconds remaining, then 78 percent at ten, 84 percent at five…
The clock hit zero with only 91 percent of the download completed, and I had a heartbeat to pray that Tony had been off in his predictions—that Scipio wasn’t able to move that quickly—before all the lights on the server lit up at once. There was a high-pitched hum, and then the entire room exploded in a shower of sparks.
“Duck!” I shouted belatedly. Then, ignoring my own advice, I turned toward the scanner. An electrical surge was building, white-blue, crackling fingers of lightning beginning to form between the servers, following the cable lines between them. I saw them traveling down the line toward the net at lightning speed, and reached out and snatched it on impulse.
The arc of electricity caught me in the wrist, and every muscle in my body seized up as an unknown number of volts shot through me. The air caught in my lungs, and I was powerless for several seconds, frozen in a blast of fiery hot pain that ran under my skin.
Then it stopped, and I was flying backward.
I felt oddly disconnected as I fell through the air, even though I knew I was flying at a speed that would undoubtedly fracture several of my bones as soon as I hit the wall, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. It seemed as inevitable as gravity that I was going to hit.
Unconsciousness began to loom up, the darkness filling the edges of my sight as I continued to tumble through the air, and I felt myself start to give in, not wanting to remain awake for the inevitable thud.
But hands grabbed me before I fully succumbed, catching and cradling me. The sensation was a jolting juxtaposition when compared to the smooth glide through the air, and it snapped me back to a position of wakefulness.
Only then did I realize I needed to breathe. My lungs were burning from being locked in place by the electrical surge, my body’s desire for oxygen a pressing need. I opened my mouth to take a breath, but for some reason, my chest wouldn’t move. I blinked and looked around, then reared back when I saw a metallic face loom into view.
But the purple eyes told me it was Rose, and I placed a hand on my chest, tapping on it.
She nodded and looked up and away from me. I followed the direction of her gaze and saw Dylan hobbling toward me. Her mouth was moving, and as I cocked my head at her, I realized she was talking. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I didn’t care. My body was screaming for oxygen, but my lungs were refusing to help, and for several terrifying heartbeats, I felt certain that they were irreparably burned by the electricity, and that I was going to die. I was floundering, trying to make my ears work, to understand what she was saying, when something cold pressed against my neck.
There was a sting of something being injected. I felt my lungs begin to move and tried to fill them with as much air as I could get, the feeling conjuring up images of the air scraping over sandpaper. I grew lightheaded at the first gasp, and by the second, the blackness was rising back up and claiming me.
I fought it.
Even as it dragged me down, making my limbs heavy and useless, I fought against the sensation, struggling to open my eyes.
The first time I pried them open, the sharp brightness of the real world sent me reeling, my head threatening to split in half with the pain. I sank back into oblivion automatically, the agony so severe that I was certain I would die if I did it again.
I started to let myself drift deeper, but a voice whispered for me to fight it—that if I didn’t, I would die—and I believed it. I clawed my way back to reality, this time preparing myself for the pain, and cracked open a single eyelid. Slowness did nothing to mitigate the throbbing ache, but I fought through it, opening my eye further.
A dark shape hovered at the edge of my periphery, the blob difficult to make out. I tried to tilt my head toward it, and felt the muscles of my neck shifting just under my skin in a most discomforting way, like they had somehow been separated into strands and I could feel every one. As my head began to tilt, a wall of dizziness crashed over me, and the darkness came back to seize me.
This time I floated, the pain and confusion of my last two attempts making it more difficult to mount a third. I was
beyond tired, and I hovered at the edge of unconsciousness, the pull of it dragging me down while I kept hauling myself up enough, just enough to avoid giving in entirely.
As the struggle raged on, I found myself wondering what I was holding on for. Something had happened to me—was happening to me—and I clearly needed rest. Maybe it would be okay to just let go, and slowly sink back in.
NO! a voice insisted, an almost petulant lilt to it. Keep fighting. Don’t give in.
I felt something reaching out for me, a line of connection that promised that if I tried, just one more time, I’d be rewarded. It wouldn’t be that bad.
Grey’s face filled my mind—a memory of us standing on the catwalk by the hydro-turbines, the moment that had hung between us, coupled with the recollection of Leo, his lips pressing against mine in a hot, hungry kiss that was all him, even if he had been inside of Grey’s body at the time.
The reminder of the two men in my life, the love I felt for them, gave me the fire for one last try, and this time, I just went for it.
My eyelids snapped open, and I resisted the urge to shut them immediately against the harsh light, and squinted instead. It took a few seconds for the glare to lessen, my pupils slowly contracting to filter out the excess light. My head ached fiercely, but even as I thought about it, there was a significant decrease in the pain, making it somewhat easier to breathe.
How’s that? a voice asked in my mind, and I tensed.
Tony? I asked, instantly confused. What—
You took a few thousand volts, and your heart almost stopped. Luckily, Dylan had enough first-aid training to inject you with adrenaline, and something that she said will help with the damage to your nerves.
A synaptic neural gel, I told him, knowing exactly what Dylan had done. It was smart, too. Her quick thinking had likely spared me any long-term nerve damage. Where are we?
Even as I asked, my vision finally began to focus, the dark and light colors sharpening, gaining shape and definition. I realized I was sitting down in a hall, my back pressed against the wall, just outside of a door. We were no longer in the server farm. The halls were lit differently, and were significantly warmer. But beyond still being in Cogstown, I had no idea where we were.