Crashed (32 page)

"Riley!" I shrieked.

There was no answering call.

Flames licked the walls, smoke turned the air heavy and opaque, and Auden buried his face in his shirt as we lurched toward the door, gasping for breath. This time I couldn't breathe for him. I could only get him out.

The walls were crumbling.

Riley's head and torso jutted out from the pile of debris, and he was shouting something I couldn't understand, arms waving in an unmistakable gesture.
Go. Go, get out.

Get Auden out.

And that was what I thought, as I turned my back on Riley, as I held Auden up, grabbing on as he slipped away from me, as his head nodded drowsily, eyes clouding and lungs filling with smoke.
Not him, not again
, I thought, as I stumbled through the smoky black in the direction I imagined the door to be, sound returning to the world in the form of smaller, secondary explosions, ceilings collapsing, equipment imploding, as we pushed through an opening in the wall, into the cool fresh air of night, and left Riley behind.

No one dies tonight,
I thought as the BioMax troops dragged us away from the flames, dragged me away, as I kicked and screamed and lunged toward the flickering storm of fire, and they held me back, because they were stronger. They were in control. And Auden sucked in oxygen as I watched, now silent and still, no breath and no heartbeat, helpless and useless, as a geyser of fire spurted through the roof, and the laboratory-- and the machinery and the research and Riley--disintegrated in a crash of thunder and a plume of blue-orange flame.

FLOATING HOME

I would be his memory.

When life isn't life, death isn't death.

No one died that night.

That's what I told myself.

Bodies break. Brains burn. But memories can be stored, and memories are life. An exact copy is the same as an original in every meaningful way. Mechs are minds. Minds are patterns, data. And data is transferable. So when they transferred Riley's backed-up memories into the new body, it was a logical, inescapable truth:
This is Riley
. A Riley who had never burned, a Riley who had never set foot onto the Temple grounds, never betrayed his best friend, never disappeared in a storm of fire. Never shuddered at something Jude whispered in his ear or looked at me like I might be the enemy. A Riley who had backed up his neural network one last time, one last night, then ceased to exist.

He was the same, and he was alive, as if none of it had ever happened--and for him, it hadn't. A fresh start. A new beginning, same as the old one.

That's what I told myself.

Jude escaped in the chaos. No one knew where he'd gone. Including me, though BioMax seemed not to believe it.

Sloane, Ani, Ty, and Brahm remained at BioMax, under observation. The corp had determined the damage couldn't be reversed, but refused to terminate their bodies and start afresh until they knew exactly what the Brotherhood had done-- and exactly how far they had gotten in their research. Ani and the others were in no discernable pain, were likely unaware of their condition, trapped in a dreamless sleep rather than a waking nightmare.
Likely.
Less likely, but still possible, they were awake inside their madness. It was a chance BioMax had elected to take, without objection from the mechs' families, without doubt. Call-me-Ben told me that.

Studying their condition, prolonging their dead-end lives, was for our own good.

Ben told me that too.

And when they woke up in new bodies, they wouldn't remember any of it--they wouldn't be the same mechs who'd gone into the Temple and hung from those posts, so what did it matter what happened to them in the meantime? If the memories would eventually be ground into dust along with the bodies, then maybe it was as if it hadn't happened at all.

* * *

For mechs, even the earliest involuntary volunteers, a new body to replace the old was part of the deal. It was the BioMax guarantee, and so far, the corp had always honored it.

But they didn't have to. It was one of the things I hadn't thought of before, had just accepted, because my new body, and the one after that and the one after that, was already bought and paid for, and because my father sat on the BioMax board. But I thought of it after the explosion, with Riley's body gone and his mind sitting in storage--I let myself think about what would happen if BioMax reneged, because it was easier than thinking about where Riley was now, whether his mind was somehow alive in the storage server in the same way it would be in a body, or if he was just gone, erased from the world, until they brought him back.

We have no control,
Jude had said, naming, as was his compulsion, a truth it would have been easier to ignore. Alive only as long as they let us live. Just another funny little perk of mech life: Machines were objects, and objects had owners.

Which meant Jude had been right. BioMax wasn't the enemy, yet. But it would be, eventually, inevitably.

And eventually, inevitably, we would find a way to reclaim ourselves.

In the meantime, the corp delivered our bodies. Riley was slated to get another generic model, a duplicate of the one he'd lost.

I had a better idea.

* * *

"This is important to you," my father said.

I nodded.

We met in his office, at my request, to make it clear this wasn't a homecoming, the prodigal daughter returns. This was a transaction. Or it would be, if he granted my request.

"I assume it's important, or you wouldn't have come to me," my father said.

I nodded again. Because if I had lied, acted repentant, he would have known.

"It won't be cheap," he said. "This is a lot of credit you're talking about here."

I knew that. More credit than Quinn had been willing to spare--though these days, Quinn wasn't much in the mood for handouts. Not for me, at least. As far as she was concerned, Jude and Ani had both abandoned her, leaving me behind as an unwanted consolation prize. She hadn't thrown me off the estate, not yet, but she was doing a pretty effective job of freezing me out.

"And what do I get in return?" my father asked.

"Whatever you want," I said. "I
will
pay you back someday." Somehow.

He didn't even pause. It was like he'd been waiting for me, like he knew I'd eventually need something big, so big that I'd be willing to do anything in return, and he was ready. "I want you to come home. To stay."

"Okay."

I didn't pause either.

I wasn't there when Riley woke up in his new body. And I didn't visit him in rehab as he learned how to use it.

I left him a message on his zone, explaining what had happened, how he had ended up on the thirteenth floor of BioMax, waking up all over again. Except I didn't explain all of it, or really any of it. I told him we had gone through with our plans, that we had rescued our friends, that no one had died. That the lab was destroyed and he'd been caught in the explosion.

That I would tell him more when I saw him. And I would see him, I would come to visit, if he wanted me to.

I promised him that, although I couldn't imagine going back to the thirteenth floor--much as I couldn't face the thought of sitting by a bed, next to another broken body, another person that I'd left behind. But I would have come, if he'd asked.

Don't,
he'd texted me, when he finally woke.
You shouldn't have to be here. Or see me like this.

And for one month, that was all I heard from him.

One month, back at Chez Kahn, removing the metallic streaks from my skin and hair, trying to fit the org mold so I could live an org life, pretending that nothing had changed, that I didn't notice the way my mother always left the room moments after I entered, or that my father no longer gave me orders, like ordering me home had emptied him of commands, or like as long as I was there, he no longer cared what I did. Zo and I lived under a wary silent truce, circling each other like caged animals, exhausted but afraid to sleep lest the other strike. She'd left the Brotherhood--I learned this from her zone, not from her. Neither she nor my parents ever spoke of her time at the Temple. But a frost had congealed over her relationship with my father. Now he watched her from a safe distance, just as he watched me, maintaining a careful formality when circumstances forced them together. We coexisted without comingling, one big happy family of strangers.

I left the cat with Quinn. He'd be happier there, without the stench of orgs to shatter his feline composure. And whatever comfort he might have been to me, nuzzling his wet nose into my synthetic flesh, I didn't need and I didn't deserve. Until Riley was made whole again, I wanted to be alone.

It took months to adjust to the first download, teaching your brain to accommodate itself to its new surroundings. But subsequent downloads, in most cases, were easier. Your brain was already wired for mech life. It knew how to flex the artificial muscles, it knew how to work the artificial larynx and maneuver the artificial tongue.

Ben gave me reports: Riley was awake one week after the download, mobile the week after that. Talking no more than was required, spending his days in his room, scanning the net-work for accounts of the Brotherhood raid and the explosion, to fill the hole in his memory, the empty space left behind. But I'd scanned the network too and knew what he'd find and what he wouldn't. I had to make sure he was safe from the truth.

He wouldn't find what he wanted on the network--he would have to come to me.

One month later, he did.

We met by the flood zone. I got there early, stared out at the calm blue-red surface, imagining the sunken city that lay rotting below. I'd forgotten about the crowds at the Windows of Memory, and the way the orgs would glare at me as I slipped through, shrinking away from any accidental touch. The restrictions on mechs had loosened slightly, thanks to an upswing of public support after the Brotherhood's role in the Synapsis attack had been made public. Not that the Brotherhood lacked its fair share of conspiracy nuts, now flocking in even greater numbers to the Temple's doors. Savona was presumed dead in the explosion, martyred to his cause, slain by his mechanical enemy. I was convinced he'd just gone to ground, waiting for the optimal moment for his triumphant resurrection.

Meanwhile, Auden had taken over, promising a kinder, gentler Brotherhood of Man. But he hadn't done much to stop the Brotherhood's unofficial campaign of persecution against mechs all over the country or the official one still being waged in the back rooms of every corp, as they inched forward, lockstep, in defining us out of existence.

Everything will make sense again when Riley's back,
I had promised myself.
We'll know what to do.

But when he appeared on the horizon, inching his way down the hill with the tight, cautious steps of someone still uncertain of his control over his body, I just wanted to run away.

The custom body had been made to fit precise specifications, the face molded to match a pic on file at BioMax, stored alongside all the other physical and mental attributes of their initial slate of "volunteers." It wasn't a perfect replica--from a distance he looked like the boy in the picture, but as he drew closer, it was easy to pick out the tight and smooth synflesh, the unnatural combination of grace and awkwardness in his step, the lifeless eyes. He would never be mistaken for an org-- but maybe, looking in the mirror, he would no longer be such a stranger to himself.

Like he was a stranger to me.

This is Riley,
I told myself. The
real
Riley.

But it wasn't. The deep-set brown eyes, the lips that curled up instead of down, slightly oversize ears and a slightly under-size nose, a square chin with a shallow cleft at its center, rich brown skin stretched taut across thick muscles, a crease in his forehead where his eyebrows knit together in concern. He was a stranger.

He drew closer, and I searched for something familiar, some ghost of the Riley I knew, in the way he walked, the way he held himself, some trace of Riley in his smile, in his eyes.

But there was nothing.

And when he reached me, and it was too late to run, and he said my name, that was different too. A differently sized throat, differently shaped mouth, differently spaced teeth--it meant different acoustics, and so a different voice. This one was lower, made him sound older, but there was almost something melodic about it, like he was singing as he spoke. Not that it mattered. A voice wasn't a soul, it was just a set of vibrations in the air, just physics. As his body was just a machine, his features just molded plastic. None of it should have mattered. None of it was
him
, except the patterns inside his head, the data arranged into feelings and memories--but that was nothing I could see. Nothing I could touch.

He reached for me, and without thinking, I pulled away.

In that moment, I finally understood what had happened after my accident, why my friends, my boyfriend, my family, couldn't see that beneath the wiring and the synflesh I was still
me
, no matter how I looked, no matter how I sounded. Because knowing something to be true is different than believing it.

This is Riley,
I told myself. But you can't force yourself to believe.

"What is it?" the stranger asked in a stranger's voice.

I shook my head. What if I couldn't do it? What if I just walked away from him, like everyone had walked away from me? What if, after helping him destroy his best friend, I left him alone?

He held out his hand, palm up, an invitation. "It's still me," he said.

I put my hand on his, palm to palm.

"It's still us," he said.

His arms felt different around my body. We didn't fit together the same way, folded into the same curves and hollows. He was taller, slimmer. Even his lips were the wrong shape, the wrong size. But his hands cupping my face, slipping down my neck, my back, different and the same, all at once, and the feel of someone holding me up, a chest to lean against, a hand to hold--it was still him.

It was still us.

"Tell me what happened," he said when we lay in the damp grass, in each other's arms. "Help me remember."

"BioMax lied," I told him, launching into a well-rehearsed narrative. "They didn't wait for my signal--they just showed up, busted us as we were laying the explosives. The explosion was an accident."

"Jude wouldn't have done it," he said. "Not in the end. We would have talked him out of it. I wouldn't have let him do that to himself."

"I know. He's your best friend," I murmured, and tightened my grip on his hand.

"He'll make contact when he can," Riley said. "When he needs us. He knows we'll help. He'll be back."

I hope not,
I thought.

Because if he came back, then Riley would have to know what we'd done. Except that
this
Riley hadn't done anything. He'd committed no betrayal, and given the opportunity, he might have chosen differently. In that one way--
and
only
that one way,
I told myself--the old Riley was dead. I'd left him behind and watched him die. This new one couldn't be held accountable for someone else's sins; this Riley was innocent.

It's not a lie,
I thought, telling him a story of what should have happened, where he was a hero and Jude was still his friend and happily ever after was still in reach for someone, someday.
It's a gift.

I would be his memory.

"It seems like a long time ago," he said as we stood at the edge of the water, clothes in two neat piles on the ground, feet bare. "Since we were here."