The Body Electric - Special Edition (39 page)

going

mad.

Ms. White frames my face with her long, slender fingers. “Ella,” she says. “We have to save you.”

“No,” I say, “We have to save Akilah and Jack.”

But then I realize that the words never left my mouth. My lips are sewn shut, not with thread, but with bee stingers, piercing the soft, pink skin that, just hours ago, Jack kissed.

Ms. White brushes my sweaty hair off my forehead. “Ella, your father was a genius. He developed the nanobots that saved your mother, and the technology that recreated her when she could not be saved any more. He made the first cy-clone. He gave your mother a piece of immortality.”

She peers deeply into my eyes.

“But he was only thinking of saving your dear mother, my best friend. And I loved him for it. But the government… it wants the formula. If they can make cy-clones out of healthy, young people, not people who were already sick like your mother, they can create the perfect soldiers.”

“Ella, dear,” Ms. White continues, oblivious to the one-sidedness of our conversation. “Your father knew what the government wanted. Knew how much the government would pay for his research. And he destroyed it all.”

“And then the government destroyed him.” The words fall out of me, each one escaping my mouth like a tiny bumblebee soaring past my lips.

Ms. White nods. “They killed him before they realized the research they had was falsified and useless.”

I open my mouth, my jaw cracking like plaster. “But they made cy-clones. Akilah.”

“Oh, yes. Your friend Akilah. And dozens of others. But none of them are good. They are poor copies of your father’s original work. The government hasn’t been able to recreate the methods perfectly. Eventually, all these models break. They last maybe one or two years.”

I struggle to move, but can’t.

“I think—I’m just guessing here, but I think that PA Young and the government believes there’s some key hidden inside you.”

That’s what Jack said too, almost exactly.

“If we could figure out the information your father left you—”

I cannot speak, I cannot move of my own free will, but my body shakes violently, my head whipping back and forth,
no, no, no.

Ms. White frames my face with her hands, stilling me. “Perhaps he told you something, some memory you can no longer access.”

I can no longer access Jack
.

Ms. White’s eyes shift back to the reverie chair. “Ella, I think… if we can find that secret inside of you, we… we might just have the weapon we need to fight PA Young and the corrupt government she’s building.”

“Run…” I manage to say.
We have to run.

“Run where?” Ms. White asks, her voice even.

I blink—
the safe house, the android Kim, the lab where Jack kissed me, Akilah strapped to a gurney
—and then I’m back in the reverie chair, Ms. White leaning over me.

“Go…” the word is a struggle to say, almost impossible to hear.

“Go where?” Ms. White repeats. “Go to sleep?”

What? No. That doesn’t make any sense.

Ms. White leads me to the reverie chair. She pushes my shoulders gently, trying to get me to sit down. A bee lands on her face, walking over her eye, trailing its stinger along her lashes.

“I don’t know if this is real,” I whisper, but the sound is lost in the buzzing of bees.

sixty-nine

A hot tear slips down my cheek, and with it, the hallucinations fade.

“Ella?” Ms. White asks. She is the model of concern.

I look down. Without realizing it, I’m already strapped into the reverie chair. I can feel the drying blood from Representative Belles’s gunshot wound on the back of the headrest. I blink and the restraints are gone. Blink again, and they’re back, but they are black and yellow and fuzzy and sting my skin.

“I think I’m going crazy,” I say.

Ms. White blanches. “It’s all the nanobots inside you. You’re getting bot-brain.”

But it’s not the nanobots. The nanobots are a side-effect of being a cy-clone, not the cause of my madness.

“What’s happening to me?” My words come out slow, dripping from my tongue like honey.

Ms. White leans back. Her dress is green—why didn’t I notice that before?—the same poison green as the reverie drug.

“Ella, dear, you know I love you. And your mother.”

I nod. I try to pull away from the restraints on the chair. I can’t see them, not always, but I can feel them.

“But you’re not you any more, are you?”

My eyes widen with shock. I feel as if there are bees crawling under my skin, trying to vibrate their way out.

“You’re a computer. One with a very valuable file locked up inside your mind.” Ms. White steps closer, her eyes wide with sympathy. “I know,” she says gently. Kindly. “I’ve known for a while. It doesn’t matter to me. But I’m afraid of what will happen if we don’t get that file out of you. Ella, I need for you to go into a reverie. I need for you to find the information your father hid inside of you. That’s how we escape this nightmare, Ella. That’s the only way.”

I try to shake my head—
No, this cannot be it, this feels like giving up
—but then I see a figure moving behind Ms. White.

Dad.

You need to wake up, Ella,
he says, but Ms. White doesn’t notice him.

It’s all in my mind.

I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy.

You need to wake up, Ella.

The words are a command I cannot obey.

“Have you ever wondered why you always access reveries through filing cabinets?” Dad asked.

When I access memories, I look through them as if they are a filing cabinet. A system that humans no longer really use—but computers do. Computers like me. Dad… Dad
programmed
me. That’s why I could hack Representative Belles’s computer so easily—because my brain is a processor. It talks to computers as easily as it talks to other people.

Dad
made
me. And he made my brain programmed to discover the truth. The hallucinations, his constant message—
You need to wake up, Ella.
He’s been trying to get me to find the truth for as long as I’ve been made.

My eyes open wide. I know what I have to do. I have to wake up.

And then Ms. White puffs the reverie drug into my eyes, and I fall instantly asleep.

I am standing in a room—the laboratory under Triumph Towers. I stand on the other side of the frosted glass door that leads to the lab marked
Reverie Transfer.
Through the glass, I can hear people shouting.

One of them is my father.

“NO!” he bellows. “It’s unethical, and I will not do it!”

Something nudges me in the back. I turn and see Ms. White. But not the Ms. White who I just found in the reverie chamber. This is Ms. White from last year, with last year’s haircut. She’s calmly holding a gun, the barrel of it resting against the small of my back.

“Go on in, dear,” she says kindly.

My legs tremble as the door slides open. My eyes go to my father. I see the fear in his face, anger. Defeat.

Ms. White pushes me forward, and I stumble into the lab.

“Ella, baby, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Dad says. “I didn’t know…”

I look frantically around the room. Perhaps if I could make a weapon… One wall is covered in unlabeled morgue doors, many of which are open and empty. The desk to the side of the wall is bare, except for a microscope and several glass vials marked “Phydus Prototypes.” Perhaps I could smash one over Ms. White’s head…

Ms. White pushes me into the reverie chair standing in the center of the room. It’s connected to another reverie chair, but that chair is empty.

“Philip,” Ms. White says genially. “We’ve tried negotiating with you. We’ve tried bribing you. I want you to know that, really, this is your fault.”

She raises the gun to my head. I can feel the hard metal rim of the barrel pressed against the thin skin over my skull. She pushes the gun against my head so hard that I’m forced back against the chair, my skull trapped between the metal chair back and the metal gun barrel.

“Jadis, please!” Dad says. He’s begging.

“Will you give us the formula and procedure notes you used to transfer your wife into a new body?”

“My wife—your friend!”

Ms. White nods. “My friend. The one who never shared her reverie formula with me. The one who won’t go public with the mental spa. The one who only gives me a salary, not a true partnership.”

“You love her! You’re Ella’s godmother, for God’s sake!”

Ms. White shows no emotion on her face. “Loved, Philip,” she says. “I loved her. But she’s a shell of who she was now. I gave her everything, even my right arm. But I’ve learned. If I want anything, I have to take it for myself.” Ms. White presses the gun against me harder, and I cannot bite back a whimper of pain.

“Would it help,” Ms. White continues casually, “if I told you that we know most of the formula already? We know that the transfer only works in a clone of the same person—we can’t swap bodies. We know that the percentage of nanobots in the clone must be high for the transfer to work. We know that clones have the ability to be enhanced with cyborg parts and are stronger, faster, and smarter than their original counterparts, and have the potential to live longer. As long as they’re not already afflicted with Hebb’s Disease, of course.”

She snaps the fingers on her free hand, and someone I can’t see walks to the back wall. I can hear a door zipping open, the metal slab sliding out, a thud of a body, a grunt of someone picking it up. Ms. White slides the gun down the side of my face, forcing my head to turn to the left and watch as a perfect copy of myself is dumped gracelessly into the reverie chair beside me. The replica-me has glassy eyes and her head lolls listlessly as a scientist I don’t recognize straps her body into the reverie machine.

“Thank you, Dr. Simpa,” Ms. White says absently.

I stare at the body on the chair. She’s empty. A shell of a person. Made up of cloned material, but also cyborg parts, metal and wires and computers beneath skin and flesh. Ms. White wants to force Dad to move me, the real me, into this manufactured replacement body.

“If I give you the formula, I’m handing you the most effective weapon the world has ever known,” Dad says hollowly. “You’ll make perfect soldiers. This would be more devastating than Einstein’s formula for the atomic bomb.”

Ms. White stares at him blandly. “I won’t do any of that. I’m just selling the formula. I don’t care what they do with it.”

Dad shifts so that he can meet my eyes. “Ella,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

And I know he won’t do it. He won’t trade me for the whole world.

Ms. White slides the gun down the side of my face, into the hollow between my collarbones, pressing the metal barrel painfully into my chest, resting over my heart.

“Last chance,” she says idly.

“I can’t,” Dad whispers. “Ella, I’m sor—”

Ms. White pulls the trigger.

Everything goes dark, and then I open my eyes.

Dad leans over my body. “Ella?” he asks. “Are you in there?”

I nod my head, then look to the right.

I am dead in the chair beside me. There’s a hole in my chest, and blood, so much blood, and too-white bone, and murky grey-ish pink bits of me dripping from the chair.

My hands go unconsciously to my mouth as I gasp in shock, tasting bile. But then my fingers wonderingly explore my face—my face. I’m dead. Right there is my body. But I’m here. Not dead.

Dad wraps his hands around either side of my face and forces me to look at him. “Ella,” he says. “I couldn’t not do it. I had to save you. I had to. But baby, I’m going to make sure you have the truth. And control.” He takes a deep breath. “I am going to make sure you can do what I couldn’t.”

seventy

He didn’t die in an attack from terrorists. He wasn’t killed by a rogue android sneaking into the labs—that was all manufactured. I try to remember the video PA Young showed me—just Dad talking with his colleagues, a brief image of the android, a flash of light. That could be faked. And I fell for it.