The anger came out of nowhere, so strong that I had to wrap my hands around the seat belt to keep them from wrapping around her throat--and then it drained away, as quickly as it arrived. I felt nothing.
The city rose before us, jagged knives stabbing the gray sky. Jude stopped the car long before we got anywhere near the dying towers. Instead he guided us into the dribbling remnants where the city faded into the wilderness, a kingdom of low, crumbling stone buildings, their roofs sagging or caved in.
"She's here," Jude said.
She could have been anywhere. "How do you know?"
"I know." Jude stopped the car in front of a three-story house that looked no different from any of the others, except for the red streaks of graffiti smeared across the stone like it had been marked in blood. "Rats always go back to the nest."
Zo's eyes bugged as she took in the burned-out cars and broken windows, the clumps of orgs with rotting teeth, rotting skin, rotting faces gathered around fires that stank of rubber and dogshit. I realized this was her first time. The stories had haunted our childhood, tales of men like animals, prowling the streets, blood smeared across their faces like warrior tattoos, long nails sharpened like knives, bodies writhing in the gutters,
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screwing or dying or both at once. For Zo, as it had been for me, the city was a nightmare land, a monster in a bedtime story, the beast that would swallow you whole if you ventured too close. And this decrepit corner of hell was, according to Riley, the worst of the worst: a lawless no-man's-land of the lost and abandoned, the castoffs in a city of castaways, the lowest of human refuse--and the animals who preyed on them. All the lies they told you about the city, Riley had said. That's where they come true .
"You can stay here," I told Zo.
"By myself?"
I had visions of returning to a car set ablaze, or graffitied and crushed, or returning to find the car gone altogether, and Zo--
I didn't let myself imagine any further.
She drew back her shoulders and opened the door. "I'm not scared," she said. "Let's go."
I should never have brought her here.
Jude didn't wait for us to gather our nerve. He had already started toward the house. I could drag Zo back into the car and drive away, taking her somewhere safe. I could protect her, like I hadn't protected Riley.
Or I could follow Jude.
"Let's go," Zo said again. I let her make the choice for me. She took off after Jude, and I followed, leaving the car and any thoughts of refuge behind.
The house looked worse inside than it did out. There was
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no furniture, no light, no visible features but a gaping, splintered hole in the center of the room where the floor had given way. Sari crouched in the far corner, tucked into a blanket, watching the door as if she'd been waiting for us.
She flew to her feet. "I didn't do anything." As she spoke, she backed away, pressing herself against the wall. Jude advanced slowly.
"What did you do to him?"
"You deaf? Nothing."
"Then why run?" His eyes lit on the pile of clothes and electronics she'd snatched from Riley's place.
Sari stepped between us and the treasure hoard. "So?" she spit out. "They don't need it. They've got plenty of credit; let them buy another set of speakers."
"Are we supposed to buy another Riley?" I asked.
She didn't bother to look at me. "What's the bitch talking about?"
"Riley's dead." Jude flattened her to the wall, one hand pinning her wrist, the other at her throat. Zo sucked in a sharp breath, but I didn't move. Couldn't, or wouldn't, it didn't matter. I felt like I was watching them on-screen, with no choice but to wait patiently and see how things turned out.
Sari shook her head. "Fuck you."
"You killed him."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
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"You're machines," Sari said. "You can't die."
He grimaced. "Surprised me, too."
She hit at him with her free arm, but Jude grabbed it. Her wrists were narrow, and he was able to hold them both with one hand. His fingers tightened around her throat.
"You're hurting me."
"Good."
Zo leaned into me. "Shouldn't we do something?"
I ignored her, like Jude ignored Sari's struggling. "What did you do to him?" he said, his voice deadened. He was staring past her, into the wall. Like he was the machine she expected, mindlessly pursuing his mission directive.
"Nothing!" Sari shouted. "She said nothing would happen to him."
Jude threw her to the ground. "Who said!"
"Stop it!" Zo screamed.
Jude knelt over Sari, pinning her down. "Shut her up or get her out of here," he said quietly. "Or I will."
I still couldn't move. Zo shut herself up.
Sari wasn't fighting anymore. She lay on the ground, eyes closed. "He's not really dead, is he?"
"Tell me who."
"Just some lady. She gave me something to stick in that thing he used for backing up."
"She walked up to you one day and gave it to you?"
"She paid me, okay?" Sari snarled. "She had credit and I
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needed credit, and that's it. She told me it wouldn't hurt him. She said you couldn't get hurt."
"She lied."
"How the hell was I supposed to know?"
"What was her name?"
"I don't know."
"What did she look like?"
"I don't remember."
"Tell me something!" Jude drove a fist into the rotting floorboards.
"I think she was one of those Brotherhood freaks, okay? She had one of those robes and everything."
Jude slapped her.
"What the hell--?"
"You killed him!" Jude roared.
Absolute control demands absolute release; that's what Jude had always preached. There were no middle grounds, no compromises, only two opposing states, and a lightning trigger between one and the other. He was always in control, every action deliberate, every decision considered. For Jude, even letting go was a willful choice, a verdict delivered after evaluation of all the options; even that was purposeful.
This wasn't.
Zo's nails dug into my arm. It meant do something, it meant stop him, it meant fix this. Or I could stand there and watch Sari die.
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"Please," Sari whimpered.
There was no one to stop him, no one to punish him. It was the city: no rules, no consequences. And if there were no consequences, it was almost like it hadn't happened.
No one would miss her, I thought.
Riley had been her only ally--and she'd erased him.
I'm a machine, I thought, as Jude raised a fist, this one not aimed at the innocent floorboards, but at her face, her soft, pliable, breakable org face, the one that was so good at lying and pretending to be someone else, someone good. I have no soul; that's what they say.
All I had to do was not act. No one would ever know, except the three of us.
"Stop." I didn't know I was going to say it until the word was out of my mouth. "Jude, don't."
He didn't let her go. But his fist dropped to his side.
"She killed him," Jude said.
I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, half expecting him to send me flying across the room. But he didn't move. Neither did Sari, still prone beneath him, waiting for me to decide her fate. I hoped she didn't think I was doing this for her.
I hoped she knew I wanted her to die.
"Don't do this," I said.
"I have to."
"This isn't you."
At that he did shrug me off, weakly, and it was unconvincing
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enough that I tried again, but he grabbed my arm, squeezing tight. "You don't know everything about me."
"He did."
"Shut up."
"Riley told me, that night before the temple, that you couldn't
do ... this."
"He wouldn't have said that."
"He did."
"I can do this," Jude said. "For him."
"This wouldn't be for him."
I felt dirty, invoking him like that. Dirty or not, it worked.
Jude stood up.
Sari didn't wait around for him to change his mind. She streaked past us like a feral cat, disappearing into the shadows. Long, silent seconds passed.
Jude's shoulders slouched. His head lolled on his neck. His arms hung limp at his sides. For the first time it was easy to picture him as he'd been before the download: slumped in a chair, body defeated. Except that in the one pic I'd seen from that time, his eyes had still been alive--something in him had been fighting, strong. Unbowed by its prison of atrophied muscles and sagging flesh. Now, when I tipped his head up and forced him to see me, those eyes were dead.
"You shouldn't have come," he whispered.
I didn't say anything.
"I hate you," he said.
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I put my arms around him, and he let me, and, dry-eyed and heartless and mechanical, we held each other up.
So what do you do?
What do you do when there's nothing to do next? When it's over, when whatever rage and panic drove you from one moment to the next disappears, and there's no more must do this, must go there, must stop him, must save him? When you can't let the day end, because today was the last day you saw him, the last day you heard his voice, the last day he knew? Today, when the sun came up, when you opened your eyes, he was still in the world; today is still a world he knew, and so is still a world you understand. Today he's still an is, his loss something still happening, an unfolding event, a sentence with a question mark; today there's still a what happens next.
What do you do when today ends and you know tomorrow will open on a world in which he's dead? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until he's a thing that once happened, a thing you used to know.
People use words like "unthinkable." But what do you do when the unthinkable happens, and refusing to believe it won't bring him back?
How can anything seem unthinkable anymore, when you're a machine, a living impossibility, a stack of memories in a head-shaped box, when you, the real you, died almost two years ago, just like he did?
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How could you be stupid enough to forget that the unthinkable happens all the time?
Happens to you.
Which is why you should know exactly what to do: what you always do, what you have to do. Nothing. Because reality doesn't need your permission to exist; tomorrow doesn't need your approval to dawn. You go home, to a place that was never your home, with a sister who by her own choice is no longer your sister and a brother whose shared grief makes him family in a way that shared skin, shared circuitry, shared manufacturer never could. You go home and you lie in a bed that used to be his and you think about uploading the way he uploaded, following his lead, wherever it takes you. You think that if you really loved him, you wouldn't hesitate; you would want his infection burning through your artificial veins.
You would, but you don't, and so you close your eyes and are grateful that you don't have to try to sleep with memories of his face burning the insides of your lids, that you don't have to bury your face in a pillow so the others don't hear you sob and scream, that your hands are still and unshaken. You're grateful, for once, that your body can't feel, that the truth stays lodged in your mind, where it can't hurt, that you can close your eyes and shift your consciousness in that familiar, deeply inhuman way, flicking an internal switch. It's not like falling asleep, fading away. It's like one moment you're awake
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and in agony and wondering how long it will be before you forget the sound of his voice.
And the next moment--
You're gone.
When I woke up the next morning, Riley was still dead.
Zo was curled up next to me in bed, her eyes slitted and fixed on Jude. I suspected he had been up all night. Maybe watching me, to make sure I followed through on my promise not to upload a backup, just in case Riley's wasn't an isolated case. Or he just hadn't been able to face the end of the day. Riley's last day.
He sat with his back to the wall, eyes open but darting sightlessly back and forth. It was the telltale flicker of his long lashes that gave it away: He was linked into the network, staring at us but seeing his zone or a vidlife or, for all I knew, the president's latest sex vid. Anything to keep the world away.
I poked Zo. "I know you're awake."
For a moment she didn't move, like she could fool me. Then she threw in an admirable pantomime of "waking up." "I am now."
"Uh-huh."
She jerked her head at Jude. "Can he hear us when he's doing that?"
"With perfect clarity," Jude said, gaze still blind.
Zo flinched at his voice. I wondered how long it would be
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before she stopped seeing him the way he'd been in the city, like an animal.
"Get up," Jude said abruptly, closing his eyes in the long, slow blink that I knew would disconnect him from the network. "We've got a problem."
I almost laughed.
He smiled weakly. "I mean a new one."
It was the lead story on every news zone. Ben's virus analogy had been more apt than he knew: Riley was patient zero. The infection had spread through the system, and any mech who connected their uplink before word got out had been wiped. Backing up, the process that was supposed to be our ticket to eternal life, now meant death. The permanent, org kind, from which we were meant to be exempt. Jude was already flying across the network, checking in with every mech he knew--and too many of them didn't answer. The rest of us--the "lucky" ones--were dying too, just more slowly. The virus had wiped out our stored backups, and obviously we couldn't make more. These bodies were now all we had.
It was strange, this sudden awareness of vulnerability. It was supposed to be the reason the orgs hated us, the reason there would always be an us and a them. They died; we didn't. And now that we were just like them, it meant ... nothing? Meant only that now they had the opportunity to get rid of us one by one. Vids popped up of flash mobs surrounding mechs, dismantling them piece by piece, a helpful how-to of the
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unmaking of a person. Like the virus, or whatever it was, had granted ultimate permission, had turned us from a threat into a target, literally overnight, even though nothing had changed except our mortality, except the fact that erasing us now meant erasing us for good.
"That's what this is," Jude said, still inhabiting some other plane of preternatural calm. "Genocide."
We watched the story unfold on the news zones, scrambled to track down the mechs we knew, and didn't speculate about who was behind it. Partly because we'd already settled on the Brotherhood as the most likely suspect; partly because we were afraid they weren't acting alone. If any of this was BioMax's fault, if this was retribution, then that made it our fault. That made Riley our fault.
The BioMax connection surfaced within the hour, an hour that felt like a week, barricaded in that tiny apartment, poring over the vids, just like old times at Quinn's estate, when we'd locked ourselves behind electrified walls and try to decipher who hated us and what they planned next.
It came in as a joint announcement, simulcast to all the major news zones and dumped into the personal zones of me, Jude, and probably any mech they could track. Rai Savona and our old friend M. Poulet, appearing side by side, faces somber and pale. "When I founded the Brotherhood of Man, I did so to elevate and illuminate, to remind the human race of our unique destiny in God's plan."
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Zo snorted. But it was a mark of how serious things were that Jude held back whatever retort must have been on his tongue. I did the same.
"I blame myself for this tragedy," Savona continued. "A tragedy born from the mind of an unstable teenager."
No.
"I felt I had to atone for my own m
istakes, and so I allowed myself to overlook the zealot hiding in our midst. I ceded control to a very young, very damaged boy--I gave him a platform and a voice, and I have only myself to blame for his wrongheaded actions."
"The Honored Rai Savona came to us with his suspicions, and our investigation confirmed them," M. Poulet said. "Auden Heller masterminded the release of an insidious virus directed at download recipients, or mechs, as they often refer to themselves. We're doing everything we can to apprehend Heller, and our brightest minds are at work on the virus. In the meantime we implore the public to be respectful--"
"Respectful," a pretty word for "not murderous, bloodthirsty, and mad with a furious skinner bloodlust."
"--and we assure all download recipients that the problem will soon be taken care of. But we remind all download recipients that this is a very serious matter. As of now, forty-seven erasures have been confirmed. Several hundred clients remain unaccounted for. The source of infection appears to be the uplink connection, so this is crucial: Do not upload your backup 242memories until we have this problem solved. More information will follow, as soon as we have it."
Forty-seven "erasures." I wondered if they'd all gone by accident. Or if some had been left behind, like me, and just decided it would be easier to let the virus run its course.
It seemed they'd come to the end of the script, when Savona leaned in and grabbed the microphone, eyes burning into the camera lens. "Auden, if you're out there, if you're listening to this, please come to me. I understand, son. You've been hurt, you wanted to lash out and hurt them back, but this is not the way. Come home to the Brotherhood, and help us fix this. Save yourself."
"He's lying," I said.
"Obviously," Jude said. "This has Savona's stink all over it."
"No, I mean, he's lying about Auden."
"Don't you ever get tired of defending him?" Jude asked. "The guy shot you. What else does he have to do to convince you he's not on your side? He thinks you're the freaking devil."
"And you think he is. So you're not exactly objective on the subject."
"And you are?"
"I'm not defending him," I said.
"Really? Because it sounds like--"
"I'm not defending him for his sake. The more we know about what's going on, the better chance we have of stopping it."