Counterpart (27 page)

If not for the automatic shutdown command installed in every single one of the Russo machines, and the fact no one actually died in the phony assault, we might have had an inter-resistance crisis on our hands.

As it happened, the New Soviets claimed the entire thing was orchestrated as a test to identify any weaknesses in McKinley's security and emergency-response protocols. To avoid being caught off guard again, they said. The council came back with a severe reprimand, which I was forced to deliver personally, but if Hawking and her lot thought mere words were going to do anything, they were sorely mistaken. The Russians took the rap on the knuckles we gave them with a smile. They weren't wrong, after all. Our response had been pathetic.

Nevertheless, once the dust settles, the council accepts my proposal to send Camus to Russia. In exchange, several high-ranking diplomats of the Soviet's choice will be invited to visit McKinley. The trade is my idea, a way to soothe any nerves about us loaning one of our finest councilors, but in private I still can't help thinking of it as the setup for a future hostage exchange.

At least now things should calm down,
I think. I hope.

I'm wrong.

Two days after Camus leaves for Yakutsk, Zelda calls me down to Military, saying I'd better come quick because Councilwoman Hawking has, and I quote, “lost her damn mind.”

The request immediately makes me hot with fear. I begin to worry Renee has changed her mind, and decided to retract the not-guilty verdict she and the council rendered only three days ago. At the time, everyone agreed: I had no choice but to kill my clone. Despite a few questions raised during the autopsy regarding the location of the knife wounds, it was a clear case of self-defense. My own injuries testified to the struggle, and Sandra Westen's death drove the final nail into Crazy Rhona's coffin. I was innocent. I am innocent.

But now that Camus is gone, I've lost one of my strongest advocates and anything could happen. The political winds changed once; they could do so again. I thought the absence of my lover would strengthen me, but I've never felt more vulnerable.

“It has nothing to do with you,” Zelda replies impatiently, when I bring up my concerns. “Not everything is about you. Now, get down here.”

I make it down to the military level in record time, but still Zelda rushes me before I even reach the door to her lab. “About time,” she says, as if I took hours instead of minutes. She paces in front of me, arms flat at her side, glancing back at the door unhappily, like a predator watching another, bigger, badder predator digest its hard-earned meal. “You need to get in there and talk some sense into that woman, or I swear to God, Long, I won't be responsible for my actions!”

“Calm down. Tell me what's going on.”

She stops pacing. “I was in the middle of putting together a prototype of this new EMP device Clarence and a few other technical engineers helped design, when—”

“Clarence designs EMPs?”

“A lot of our old stuff doesn't work against the machines; we're constantly having to update and revamp, but we got a lot people from Churchill who used to work for some of the top research and development labs in the U.S. and Canada. Ulrich helps out now and then, too. He doesn't have the technical background, but he offers practical advice for field application.” She looks at the door again. “Anyway, we were working when Hawking burst in and demanded to see Dopey.”

“Who?”

“The doppelgänger machine, as you call it. But that's a mouthful, so I shortened it. You're welcome.”

“To Dopey? You have to see how that's offensive…”

“Stay on target, Long.” Zelda resumes pacing, glaring at anyone who passes by us too closely in the hall. “Hawking said she needed to ask the machine some questions—about where it was built, why it was built, if it knows of any other clones, where the higher echelon might be storing them. I told her it wasn't going to work. Only its default state would know any of those things, and I can't return it to that setting without a repeat of the IC lab. Having your thoughts in a machine's body causes it understandably to lose its shit. Hawking didn't care. She gave me the order, and told me to get out. I haven't been able to gain entry because I no longer have high-enough clearance for the room. It's my own damn lab!”

I look at the soundproofed, potentially blast-proof door.
Renee, what are you really after?
“She's inside with the machine now? Alone?”

“Orpheus is with her.” Zelda scrunches her face. “I'm guessing she thought she could play the family card and I wouldn't say boo about what she's doing.”

“She's obviously never had siblings,” I joke, though neither have I.

“Yeah,” Zelda says absently. I can tell, beneath the anger, she's worried. About her brother, or her pet machine?

“All right. Stay here.” I apply my hand to the identification scanner and the door slides open, as it should. Whatever she might believe about herself, Hawking's not at the top of the totem pole yet.

“Like hell,” Zelda says and pushes past me, heading inside.

Her lab isn't as state-of-the-art as the chem labs on Biology, nor as large as some of the training rooms on this level, but instead reminds me of a simple mechanic's shop. Everything is metal and concrete, yet strangely, almost impossibly, clean. There isn't any grease on the floor. No gasoline vapors cloud the air. Where there are wires, she's used cords to keep them together and untangled, and with the exception of the tools she was using before Hawking interrupted, everything appears in its rightful place. The last time I visited, I was too tired—not to mention slightly traumatized, carrying the head of my machine twin under my arm like some barbarian trophy—to appreciate how organized the space is. It subverts the image I've always held in my head of Zelda as a messy robotics genius. In reality, she's anything but slovenly.

Which is why I can't help but cringe as “Dopey” writhes on one of Zelda's work tables, knocking off two pairs of pliers and a screwdriver, sending the latter spinning across the floor. Lefevre is holding the machine down, while Hawking leans over it, speaking in the firm voice of a schoolteacher. I can barely hear what she's saying over all the flailing and the machine's—laughter?

“Councilwoman,” I say sharply, at the same time Zelda says, “Get out of my lab.”

I shake my head at her, and surprisingly, she backs off, slouching back against one of her stations with arms crossed.

Renee straightens slowly, turning toward us with forced dignity. Behind her, Dopey—
great, now Zelda has me thinking it
—continues to cackle maniacally, hardly pausing to breathe. Obviously she doesn't need to breathe at all; I find it interesting the machines programmed that behavior into her, along with the appearance of blinking. It's almost as if they want her to seem as human as possible. Then again, they didn't bother to dress her metal skeleton in any kind of synthetic skin or clothing, so who knows what the higher echelon is thinking.

“Miss Lefevre,” Hawking says. Dopey momentarily hits a high note, causing us all to flinch, before her voice plummets to low, ragged sobs. Her emotions are all over the place, though I don't blame her, given the artificial condition of her body.
It,
I mentally correct myself.
It it it.
“You brought the commander. How enterprising.”

“What do you think you're doing?”

“What someone should have done the moment we acquired this piece of technology.” She pats a wrinkle from her blouse, trying to look casual. But I notice the way her hand flutters near her throat, and her chest heaves rapidly, as if she's trying and failing to take in enough air. Even leaving aside any personal ethics regarding torture, merely interacting with the machine would be a disturbing experience for anyone, even her. “Captain Lefevre, keep it still.”

“It's suffering,” I say.

“Hardly. It's a machine. It doesn't feel anything.”

“Come on, Renee. I probably have more reason that anyone to hate this thing, but even I can acknowledge it's more than just spare parts. It can think. Reason.” I recall its warning when the alarms went off, and its cold metal fingers on my arm. It tried to keep me away from danger. “Maybe even empathize. We don't know—”

“It's an act!” Hawking explodes, flying toward me like shrapnel, all sharp tones. I have a weird instinct to duck away, but I stand my ground, even as she gets near my face. “Haven't you asked yourself why? Why would the higher echelon build such a thing, if not to use it against us? We're predictable as apes. Our base instincts lead us to care about anything even remotely anthropomorphized. We can bond with a stuffed animal if it's given a name and personality. It's a game we play with
children.
Tell me. Are you a child, Commander? Will you be fooled by a little playacting?”

Now that we're parted by a mere foot, if that, I notice the sweat on her brow, the moisture on her upper lip. She looks unwell.

“Renee, are you all right…?”

She cuts me short with a little wave. “You said Miss Lefevre discovered coordinates written into the machine's code. It must have some idea about what they're regarding. Failing that, it must know where it was manufactured, where it comes from. Perhaps it was produced in the same location where your clones are being held. This information could be crucial to solving all our problems, and regaining our allies' trust. We can't continue to take the blame for these ambushes. The name of Rhona Long is losing its value as currency.”

“Why don't we tell them the machines are manufacturing the footage?” Zelda points out. “It's a good story.”

“Because then they will surely never trust another transmission from Rhona Long again.”

“I'm Rhona Long,” Dopey interrupts, lifting its head to look at us, blinking sedately. Its calm is even more troubling than its mania. “
I'm
Commander Rhona Long.
Com-man-der.
Don't you know what that means? It means I'm in charge here. I'm running this base. And I demand you let me go, at once.”

It holds our stare for a long moment. Then it throws back its head, producing an image of fresh tears on its digital face, and laughing, like it's told some horribly clever joke.

“It's insane,” Lefevre says, his mouth twisting in distaste.

“That's what happens when you shove a human mind into the body of a machine,” Zelda says. “It's not alive, not dead. It can't make sense of such a contradiction. Who could?”

“It has some of my oldest memories,” I tell Hawking, although she should already know, since I briefed the council on it days ago.

Dopey sings in the background, reacting to my words.
“Memories, all alone in the moonlight
…”

“You heard it just now. Crazy or not, it believes it's me. To make it continue like this is cruel. Besides, it's unlikely the machines would have given it any compromising data, or—Zelda, can't you do something about that?” Dopey's still singing and its fraying my last nerve.

“I was waiting for you to ask.” Zelda snatches one of the small devices off her desk that she used to shut down the machine when I first brought its head to her.

“Don't you dare come another step,” Hawking threatens her. “I'm not finished.”

“Renee,” Lefevre says. “Perhaps we should listen to the commander.”

“I'm not,” she repeats crisply, “finished. The machines may not have programmed it with the knowledge, but if it can think and reason, as you argue, it might have picked something up along the way. Or some other clever programmer could have slipped in a clue, just as they did with the coordinates.

“Tell me, machine, do you know where Rhona Long's other clones are being kept?”

Dopey hesitates, appearing to think. “I remember…there was mist.”

“Mist?” Hawking replies.

“Swirling mist upon a vast glassy lake.”

“Son of a bitch,” Zelda says, shaking her head, but is unable to keep herself from smiling. “It's singing
Phantom of the Opera.
Were you ever in a musical, Long?”

“Unimportant,” Hawking says. She marches back over to the table and leans over the machine, grabbing its featureless skull, forcing it to regard her. “Do you think this is a game?”

“Take me out to the ballgame, take me out with the crowd.”
Dopey sings without heart, almost as if it's afraid.

“I will have you taken apart piece by piece if you don't cooperate.”

“Renee…” I try to step in.

“I will have you melted down, while you are still wired for whatever passes for a consciousness.”

“O Canada, our home and native land
…”

“Councilwoman—” This from Lefevre.

“Or I could simply leave you on, forever. You will never know another moment of rest from the horror of what you are. Do you understand me? I will leave you to rot inside this metal corpse, inside your own mind.” She pauses only a moment, lowering her hand to her stomach, and for a moment I think she might be sick, but then she recovers. “What's more, I will have Camus visit you. Watch his disgust, machine, and know what you are to him. Nothing.”

“That's enough!”
I shout, but at the same time, the machine jerks against Lefevre.

“I remember, I remember,” it says, appearing momentarily lucid. Its gaze strains at the corners of its eyes. I think it's trying to see me, or Zelda. Impossible to tell which. “I can't stop remembering. I'm trying, but I can't…”

“The songs!” I realize suddenly. “It's trying to cooperate, but the higher echelon must have installed some kind of censor to protect its secrets. It's routing around the censor by using lyrics instead of speech. Like a musical game of charades.” I look at Dopey. “Is that right?”