Crashed (12 page)

"It bothers me."

"But maybe the ends justify the means?" she suggested.

"What ends could justify
that
?"

"You tell me."

We glared at each other. There was no way I'd look away first.

"Let me lay it out for you, Lia," the detective said finally. "It might not be you in that vid. But I think it is. I can read people--"

"I'm not people," I said sourly. "I'm a
skinner
, remember?"

"A skinner who was picked up in a
city
. Tied to a chair by a bunch of city rats? Now tell me, what's a sweet little girl like you do to get the slummers so angry?"

"You'll have to ask them," I said.

Her lips quirked. "I'm afraid they're unavailable for questioning."

I didn't let myself dwell on that one.

"Some people--some
orgs
--don't need a reason to hate me," I said, the "you should know" clear in my voice. "It's enough that I'm a mech."

"Just to be clear: You're refusing to explain your activities of the last three days?" she asked. "You're aware how that looks?"

"Like I care. What I do is my business, not yours."

"Maybe." She sighed, tugging at the cheap material of her corp-provided suit, the wrong cut and a size too small. I could have told her that shoving herself into the beige sausage casing wasn't working and that she should go back to pinching her pennies to save up for her next lipo--lift-tucks and the like were rarer in corp-towns, more of an occasional splurge than a fact of daily life, but no amount was too much to pay to stave off age and fat. Too bad for her, I wasn't really in the fashion-favor-granting mood. And for all I knew, pleasantly plump was the latest trend in her corp-town, the better to make clear you weren't an underfed city rat. Besides, at least she still got to
eat
. Let her deal with the consequences.

"But here's your problem," she continued. "It's my job to decide what's my business. And right now, I say it's you."

"I want a lawyer," I said.

"Tough."

"I have rights," I reminded her.

"Oh, really?" She smirked. "What are they?"

I hesitated. The ins and outs of the criminal justice system weren't exactly a hot topic of study at the Helmsley School. "I know you can't just lock me up here when I haven't done anything wrong. If you won't let me voice a lawyer, at least let me tell someone I'm here."

"And who would that be?" she asked.

"None of your business," I said. Thinking:
No one
. I hadn't talked to my parents in months. So who did I know that could fix this kind of problem.
Jude?

Riley,
I thought. But that was idiotic. How was he supposed to help? Even if it turned out he wasn't the reason I was here?

"Since you seem a little murky on the facts, let me explain them to you," Detective Ayer said. "One: There has been a major attack on a civilian population. Two: There are indications that this may be part of an ongoing threat. Three: I'm empowered to do anything within my means to ensure another such attack doesn't take place. Four: You're a skinner. Not a person. Just a person-shaped box with a computer inside. Boxes don't get lawyers."

"The
government
considers me a person," I said. "Look it up."

"Five," she continued, like I hadn't said anything. We both knew that the government had outsourced all security matters to the corps. Everyone had agreed it was safer that way: The government couldn't be trusted with unlimited power, they'd made that obvious time and time again. But the corps were, in principle, regulated by the exigencies of the market. They thrived when the customer thrived, and mutual self-interest was the ultimate satisfaction guarantee. So now corporate boards made the rules, and the corporate secops carried them out. No questions asked. "No one knows you're here. And until you cooperate with me, no one will."

I crossed my arms. "Is this where I'm supposed to cry?"

I am a machine,
I told myself.
You can't threaten a machine.

"You can do whatever you'd like," the detective said. "As long as you tell me the truth. Let's start with Friday morning. Why don't you tell me everything you did from the moment you woke up."

"And if I say no?" I asked. "What then?" Even if I could formulate a convincing enough lie about the last several days, how would I remember all of the details on the inevitable second or third time she walked me through it? Why hadn't I spent the last couple days planning what I would do when I got caught? What had I expected, Riley and I would just go on the run forever, playing house in some urine-stained room on the thirtieth floor of west tower, scavenging for spare power and poking around the network once a year to see whether it was safe to come home?

"You don't want to test me, Lia."

"For the sake of argument, let's say I do." Nothing like a good offense, right? Especially when your defense is nonexistent. "What next, you torture me or something? Violate the HRC?" Even at Helmsley, they'd made sure to teach us about the Human Rights Covenant, supposedly some kind of guarantee that the government would never go psycho again, rounding up people by the hundreds and abandoning them to darkness and pain until they vomited out details of nefarious plots they may--or in most cases, may not--have known anything about. All that trouble, and they hadn't managed to prevent Chicago or St. Louis or the Disneypocalypse. It turned out that bio-sensors and facial recognition screeners were more efficient than torture.

The government had signed the HRC back when they still ran security, but the secops were all bound by it.

"There you go again, talking about your rights," the detective said. "
Human
Rights Covenant. What makes you imagine you qualify?"

I could tell her the truth,
I thought. Not because she scared me, with her sausage suit and empty threats. But because I was tired, and if I could make her believe me, this could all be over.

She would never believe me. That I'd been in the corp-town while, in a stunning coincidence, another mech, one who just happened to have my face, enacted an insane plan I knew nothing about? Odds like that hovered somewhere around absolute zero.

"Do whatever you want," I said. "I'm a machine, right? Machines don't hurt."

"I'm told that's not quite true," she said, smiling. Like she was enjoying herself. "But I'm afraid you misunderstand. I'm not threatening you. And certainly--given you have no need to eat or sleep--I'm not going to waste my time by waiting you out."

"So we're done here?" Like I had any real hope of that.

"I'm starting to think you're misunderstanding me on purpose," Detective Ayer said. A new image popped up on the screen. My sister, Zo. "You don't care about what happens to you, that's obvious," she said. "And frankly, I can't blame you." She swept her eyes up and down my body, then shuddered. "Probably just waiting for someone to put you out of your misery." Another image popped up next to Zo. My mother. "But what if you weren't the only person at stake?" My father. One big, happy, Lia-less Kahn family. "What if your actions actually had consequences?"

I forced myself to laugh. "You're kidding, right?"

"People are dead," she snapped. "Living, breathing,
organic
humans are dead. Thanks to you and your friends. Is that a joke to you? Because it's not to me." Leaving the screen lit, she retreated to the door. "Your coconspirators are still out there. Which means people could die. And I'm willing to do pretty much
anything
to stop that. So why don't you sit here for a while and think about whether you really have nothing left to lose."

She closed the door behind her. I heard the lock catch.
Now they'll watch me,
I thought.
Hoping they'll catch me--
but that was where my imagination failed. Catch me what? Monologuing about all my evil plans? Smearing my finger across the layer of dust on the table, letter by letter spelling out my confession? Or did they just hope to catch the exact moment I broke, staring at the faces of my family, imagining what might happen to them if I didn't give Ayer what she wanted? Strange, the way orgs clung so desperately to this idea that we weren't human, then ditched it as soon as it was no longer convenient. If I was just a machine, then why would I care what they did to a family that, by their standards, wasn't mine? And if I did care, didn't that mean I was human after all?

Apparently not.

It was an empty threat. It had to be. This just wasn't how things worked. Not anymore.

I stayed in my seat as one hour passed, then another, waiting for Ayer to return. I knew how to wait. Hadn't I been doing it for days now? Hadn't I been doing it for months, waiting for something to happen that would change everything? That would
fix
everything, turn back the clock to the time before I left home, before Auden, before the download? If you're waiting for something that's never going to happen--that you
know
is never going to happen--it shouldn't count as waiting. But that's how it felt.

Almost twelve hours passed. When the door opened, Ayer was wearing another, even frumpier suit, blue this time, with the Synapsis label emblazoned in a garish red. New clothes for a new day. And she wasn't the only one. She set a neatly pressed pile of clean clothes down on the table beside me, complete with a pair of shoes. And not just any shoes I realized suddenly, confused--these were
mine
.

"You have a visitor," she said, as the door swung open again.

For a moment I thought I was imagining him. That the pressure and confusion had plunged me into a dreamer flashback, or maybe some kind of wish-fulfillment mechanism had overwhelmed my neural system.

And then the hallucination spoke. "Hello, Lia," he said, stiff and proper as always. Unreadable. I couldn't look at him. Not without picturing him the way I'd seen him last, when I'd thought I wouldn't see him again.

I forced myself not to get up. He wouldn't want to touch me. But he crossed the room and rested his hands on my shoulders, and his lips brushed the top of my head, and I hugged my chin to my chest and closed my eyes and was sorry and grateful that I couldn't cry. "Hi, Dad."

UNSAID

"That's what happens when your whole life is an oxymoron."

This is over," he said. "You're coming with me."

I glanced at Detective Ayer.

"Don't look at her," he snapped. "She's got no power here."

"Lia, when was the last time you saw your father?" the detective asked.

"I--" I stopped. Trick question, obviously. But knowing she was trying to trick me into telling the truth wouldn't help me come up with the correct lie.

"She's not answering any more of your questions," my father informed her. "And she's leaving here with me.
Now
."

The detective flushed. "M. Kahn, you understand, there's paperwork to be completed, and even if everything you say checks out--"

"If ?"
My father wasn't the kind to explode. If anything, he did the opposite--as his anger built, he contracted. He fell silent, his face scary white, his voice low, his eyes riveted on the target of his scorn, as if willing his gaze into a face-melting beam. Some people were too dense to notice the shift; true idiots mistook his stillness for passivity. But like Ayer had said before, she could read people, and she read my father. Or maybe she'd read enough of my file to know that a man like him--on the board of several corps, including hers--could get her kicked so far down the ladder that by the end of the week she'd be shipped off to the nearest wind farm to spend her days trolling for power pirates.

"I didn't mean to question your integrity, M. Kahn," she said tightly, each word clipped and precise.

"Much as I appreciate that heartfelt sentiment, your superiors aren't relying on my word," he said. "They're acting on the records of BioMax Corp."

"Just a coincidence that you sit on the board," she mumbled.

"What's that?" my father snapped. "Speak up."

Her shoulders slumped. "Nothing."

"Fortunately for all of us, I suppose, the decision is out of your hands," my father said. "Your superiors haven't seen fit to question the material supplied by BioMax, so unless there's something else . . . ?"

Detective Ayer turned to me, and her defeated expression regained a little of its spark. "You didn't know, did you?" she asked.

"Didn't know what?"

"That your alibi was out there, ready and waiting. That you could have ended this farce before it started."

"Maybe I just enjoyed your company," I said, pride overcoming curiosity.

She shook her head. I could see from her expression that she knew she'd be crazy to push the issue--and she was going to do it anyway. Her last stand. "I don't think so. You asked how we tracked you down. Don't you want to know?"

"Lia, we're leaving," my father said. Like I was still his perfect, darling daughter, who lived in the bedroom down the hall, said please and thank you and of course, yes, whatever you want, Daddy, like I hadn't seen him on his knees praying to a God he'd never believed in, wishing that he'd had the strength to let me die.

He'd done me a favor, convincing me once and for all that I wasn't the same person anymore, no matter how much we both might have wanted it. I'd done him a favor in return: I left.

"No. I want to hear this." Knowing that he was my only option, that if he changed his mind about rescuing me and left me here, here is where I'd rot. Knowing that if I said one more
yes
and walked out the door with him, I'd keep walking, straight to the car, then to the house, to the old bedroom and the old life, the one that didn't fit me any better than all the old clothes in Lia Kahn's closet, custom-tailored to a body that was now a pile of ashes in some biowaste landfill.

"BioMax is tracking you," Detective Ayer said. "BioMax knows where all you mechs are, every minute of every day. Took a couple days to get them to release the data, but once they did, we would have found you anywhere."

Relief, that was first. No one had turned me in. Riley hadn't betrayed me. Relief, and then disgust--with BioMax, and with myself for not figuring it out.

My father's face was as blank as mine.

"That's your big secret?" I said coolly. "You think I didn't know that?"

As an org, I'd been good at bluffing; as a mech, I was a pro. Empty expression, inflection-free voice--Ayer would never know how much she'd thrown me. "Seems like you're the one who's been wasting time. All that data and you still can't figure out who attacked the corp-town? What kind of detective are you anyway?"

Judging from her expression, the kind that wanted to violate the Human Rights Covenant and throw me into the wall. But she behaved. "BioMax doesn't archive its tracking data," she said tightly. Apparently my father wasn't the only one who could release his bottled up anger word by bitter word. "They can only tell us where you
are
, not where you
were.
"

Lie,
I thought. BioMax would never collect the information just to throw it out. Ayer didn't seem dumb enough to believe the line, but maybe she was smart enough to know it was all she'd get.

What else was BioMax lying about? Was it just a GPS tracker, or could they see what I saw, hear what I heard? Could they somehow know what I was thinking? My brain was a computer, after all--a computer they'd built. Shouldn't it have occurred to me that they could read it as easily as I could read the network? That maybe they could write over it as easily as I could update my zone?

"Did you want to hear the rest?" Ayer asked, giving herself away with an inadvertent glance at my father. Because he'd given the secops something they didn't have, I realized. Evidence that had convinced them to let me go--evidence that shouldn't have existed.

"BioMax feeds the tracking data to my father," I said flatly, confirming the guess with one look at Ayer's face. My father remained unreadable. "They may not archive it, but he does."

The detective looked disappointed that I wasn't freaking out. She didn't know him like I did. You didn't say no to my father--if the information existed in the world, it was only a matter of time before he claimed it for himself.

"And according to him, you've spent the last several days at home with your family." Detective Ayer smiled coldly. "I just can't understand why you wouldn't have mentioned that yourself, saved us both all this trouble."

"I'm sure there are lots of things you don't understand," I said. "You must be used to it by now." I could feel my father's eyes on me, sense his approval.

"Unless there's anything else, we'll be going now," my father said. "Once you apologize to my daughter for wasting her time."

Detective Ayer looked like she'd rather die. "If you come across any information about the attack, I hope you'll come to me," she said. "We
do
intend to solve this case."

"I hope you can," I said. "Oh, and apology accepted."

The clothes felt wrong, like they belonged to someone else. Which they did. They'd come from a dead girl's closet. But I put them on anyway, grateful to trash the city rags. I laced up the dead girl's sneakers. And let the dead girl's father take me away.

My BioMax rep was waiting for us in the parking lot. Just as repulsively handsome as I remembered, even in his tacky suit with its thermo-pulse lapels and gold net-links at each cuff. The first time I met Ben, I'd fixed on the dimpled chin and the full lips, instinctively turning on the flirt even though I was stuck in a hospital bed unable to do anything but blink--and even though, at the time, my skull was stripped bare to expose the tangled mess of circuitry that lay beneath. That was back when I thought we were on the same team, still members of the same species. Before he leaned in close, gave me that sickly fake grin, and said, "Call me Ben," my first tip-off that he wasn't a doctor or a savior but just some guy who wanted to sucker me into trusting him. Even though I saw him every time I went into BioMax for a checkup or repair, I could never be bothered to remember his last name. Call-me-Ben it was. And now, apparently, we were on the same team again.

"Good to see you again, Lia," he said. "Though not under these circumstances."

"Seems like you've been seeing me nonstop," I snapped. "So you like to watch? Seen anything you like?"

Ben raised his eyebrows at my father. "She knows?"

"She knows," I said.

"We don't
watch
," Ben told me. "We keep track of where you go, but that's it. No spying."

I rolled my eyes. "Right. That's not spying at all."

"It's precautionary," he said. "To make sure none of you get into any trouble. Like, say, wandering into a corp-town that's about to become the site of biological warfare."

"What'd you do?" I asked my father. "Pay him off to give the cops fake information?"

"BioMax is not in the business of violating its clients' privacy," Ben said stiffly.

"Especially not if it would prove your clients are a bunch of terrorists," I guessed. "You know who attacked that corp-town, don't you? And you're protecting them."

"We're protecting all of you," Ben said.

"You're protecting your
investment
."

"You don't want to become an object of fear and hatred."

"I didn't want to become an object at all," I snapped. "But no one asked me."

"Enough," my father said. He didn't have to raise his voice. "Ben, thanks for your assistance. Now, if you wouldn't mind . . ."

"Of course," Ben said smoothly. "I'll be waiting in the car."

We walked. In silence, at first, until Ben was out of sight. The secops headquarters looked like a silver pyramid that had been smashed with a giant sledgehammer, leaving behind a crushed jumble of razor-sharp points and jagged edges. The planes of the building jutted at awkward angles, so that wherever you stood, it appeared ready to topple over on your head. Covered in silver-plated panels, it likely gleamed in the sun-- but on a day like this, like most days, the sky a swirl of murky grays, it nearly faded into the clouds.

We kept the station at our backs, and instead wandered through its carefully groomed gardens, which burst with the bright purples and pinks of tropical flowers, genetically coded to survive the cold. It was something I never would have noticed before the download, the way the flowers looked wrong, almost plastic, sprouting from the frost-tipped grass. My father stopped abruptly, staring down at a large pink blossom the size of a fist, its stiff petals barely flickering in the breeze. For a moment I thought he was going to pluck it--ill-advised as that would have been, given the fact that despoiling private gardens was illegal and this garden happened to belong to the secops. Besides, what would my father want with a flower?

Finally he looked up from the flower--to me. I didn't like it. It was too easy to imagine what he was seeing, the machine that usurped his dead daughter's life. The mistake.

In his eyes I wasn't some wondrous machine, a marvel of modern technology. I wasn't a mech, I was a
skinner
. A
thing,
just like the Brotherhood of Man said, the thing that the people in the corp-town and the city saw when they glared at me, the thing, the
object
, with the unnatural gait, the unblinking eyes, the man-made brain.

In his eyes I wasn't a miracle. I was a desecration.

His hair was a different color than the last time I'd seen him, black instead of his natural blond. He was a vain man, but not about his appearance--that was my mother's domain, and I could only assume that, as usual, she'd decided to mod her look and changed his to match. It made his skin look paler, throwing the lines ridging his eyes and mouth into sharp relief; past time for another lift-tuck.

There had been a time, when Zo and I were kids, that our mother had insisted we all conform to some Kahnian Platonic ideal. Blond hair, blue eyes, Zo and I with identical waves in our shoulder-length manes, our honey-haired mother towing our father like an accessory, the two of them looking enough alike to be siblings. It was popular in those days, families looking alike, parading their designer genes like a uniform, but Zo and I put a stop to it as soon as we were old enough to fight back. It had been years since the two of us had been a matched pair, and my mother had given up trying to keep pace. But she'd never before picked a look so drastically un-Kahn. Although--given the metallic purples and silvers glimmering across my body--I wasn't looking very Kahn myself these days.

No one watching us together would guess we were father and daughter.

"Do you mind if I . . . ?" He broke off, then folded me into an awkward hug, his body stiff and unyielding against mine. Or maybe it was my body that was unyielding, my arms that stayed at my side. "That's from your mother," he said, letting go, staring at the stupid flower again.

"Oh. I guess, give her one for me too?" It was hard to imagine. The last time I'd seen them touch, I was lying in a hospital bed. I couldn't remember the time before that.

"You could do that yourself," he said.

So we were done with small talk and onto the main event. "I'm sorry," I said.
I'm not sorry.
"For leaving like that."
But not for leaving.

"Without saying good-bye?" he asked. "Or telling us where you were going? Telling us
anything
? Yes, I guess you would be sorry."

Now I was the one staring at the ground. "It was easier that way."

"For you," my father snapped.

"Sorry," I mumbled again.

"Your mother thought . . ." He shook his head. "You know how she gets."

I tried to catch his eye, hoping for a smile. It was one of the things that brought us Kahns together--me, my father, and Zo, at least. We all knew how my mother got. But he wouldn't look at me.

"But you knew where I went," I said. "Because you've been watching me."

"Can you blame me?"

"I had to leave," I said.

"I realize you think that."

"This is better."

"I realize you think that too." He frowned. "Though I can't say I understand why."

I wasn't about to tell him what I'd seen, that I knew he felt obligated to treat me like a daughter and pretend everything was the way it used to be, even if it was tearing him apart. My father didn't do weakness. Another reason my leaving was a gift to him. "How's Zo?" I asked instead.