The Body Electric - Special Edition (41 page)

Ms. White stands in front of me. Not the Ms. White from today, or the one from the other reverie, but a Ms. White I recognize from the more recent past.

Angry tears spring to my eyes. “You killed me!” I accuse. “You killed my father.”

Ms. White waves her hand, dismissing me.

“I won’t let you control me,” I say.

Ms. White pinches the bridge of her nose. “I don’t want to control you,” she says. “I just want to get paid. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into you, you know.”

“Dad would never want—”

“Your father didn’t want to die, either. We’ll figure it out, one way or another. Once I have your father’s formula, I’ll give you some of the payout. You can go. You can do whatever you want.”

And the worst part is, I’m tempted.

“If I tell, you’ll go to prison!”

“No, dear, I won’t.” Ms. White looks bored.

“I’ll take Mom and run!”

Ms. White’s bemused smile mocks me. “You can’t run away with your mother. She’s so sick, you see.”
More manipulation, although I had not realized it then.

I swallow, hard.

“I’ll still go,” I say softly.

Ms. White’s eyes widen a little, and then she gets a manipulative, knowing look. “It’s that boy isn’t it? Jack.”

“I love him!” I shout. The feeling wells up inside me, threatening to break through me like a flood.

Ms. White laughs. She laughs. “Well,” she says, “we can’t be having that. If he’s going to encourage you to leave me, I’ll just have to kill him. Like I killed his parents.”

Horror washes over me. She could. She would.

“No!” I protest.

“Really, dear, you’ve given me no other choice.”

“I’ll stay!”

She shakes her head in mock-sorrow. “I just can’t trust he wouldn’t entice you to leave again.”

“He doesn’t entice me!” I shout.

Ms. White looks truly apologetic. “Just by existing, he does,” she says. “He reminds you of freedom, and I can’t be having you thinking that you can just leave me.”

“I won’t,” I whisper. “I swear.”

“Your promises mean nothing.”

I stop, thinking. I am realizing all the power I have, and how it’s all in her hands, as long as she holds Jack’s life over me.

“I know a way,” I say.

The screaming fight at his parents’ funeral. I burn with shame and revulsion at my own actions—but I know the only way to truly keep Jack away from me is to hurt him so bad that he’ll hate me.

“I never want to see you again!” I scream the lie, and I put all my love behind it.

Jack’s plaintive plea. His question.

“Why?”

I sit down in the reverie chair, trembling. Ms. White looks down at me doubtfully. “Are you sure you can do this, dear?” she asks.

I know what she’s thinking. If I mess up, she can just start again, this time with a fresh version of me.

“I can do this,” I say. “I’ll erase Jack entirely.”

“You could just give me your father’s research instead,” Ms. White says.

My eyes burn with fear and frustration. “I don’t know my father’s research!” I plead. “I don’t understand it at all. But if I make myself… acquiescent… I’m like a computer, that’s what you said. You can hack into me. You can find what you need to know. Just… don’t hurt Jack. Let me stay with Mom, and don’t hurt Jack.”

Ms. White contemplates my offer. Dad’s information is hidden far, far into my subconscious, and the only chance she has of hoping to find it is by breaking into my mind. And that will take time.

“I have you, for as long as it takes,” Ms. White says. “That’s the deal. I have you until I have the information inside of you.”

I nod, agreeing. “You’ll make it so I don’t know you’re examining me?”

Ms. White’s emotions bleed through her stony face for just a moment. “Yes,” she says. “I can do that. I can run tests at night, when you’re asleep, or when you’re in reveries.”

I look down at my hands. “Thank you.”

“But if you try to leave me,” Ms. White adds in a terrible cold voice, “I will assume you simply cannot be hacked, and I will perform a vivisection. You know what that means?”

I swallow hard. “I won’t run,” I say.

“If you don’t do this, I know I won’t be able to trust you, that that boy, Jack, is a distraction I must eliminate.” She stares into my eyes. “It will be easy. I want you to know that. He signed up for the military after you broke his heart. Did you know that? I want you to understand how simple it would be to arrange his death. A little friendly fire, a little accident…”

“I can do this,” I repeat.

I open my eyes.

“Hello dear,” Ms. White says, smiling down at me.

“Hi!” I grin and start to take off the electrodes.

“Did you have a nice reverie?”

A small frown mars my blank face. “I don’t… I don’t remember.”

“Are you going to see Jack later?” Ms. White asks.

“Who?” I say.

I did it.

Only one person can alter memories.

Me.

Only one person could have planted the tracker on Jack, left the tracker program in my private files for me to find him. Only one person could have laid down the groundwork for me to rediscover my own past, the past I erased.

Me.

I destroyed my own memories of Jack.

I did it to save him, to save me. But I’m the one who wiped him from my mind.

And it didn’t save him, or me.

seventy-two

I wake up in the reverie chair with Ms. White of today hanging over me, the restraints on my arms. Behind Ms. White, I see my father, smiling, reminding me that this isn’t real, this is all a hallucination, all one more way to try to manipulate my father’s secrets out of me and into her hands.

“This isn’t real, either,” I say, and the restraints melt away. I stand.

“Ella,” Ms. White says, “Don’t you see how much better we can make the world? Give me your father’s formula. If we know how he made you, we can recreate the process, make better cy-clones.”

And I do see—or rather, I hear. I hear the tiniest quiver in her voice.

She’s scared of me.

Despite the bravado, despite her plans, there is one flaw.

Me.

She cannot have her perfect cy-clones without me. No one will sign up to become one if all they see is soulless, empty Akilah as an example of what they would become.

Behind Ms. White, I see my father, smiling, reminding me that this isn’t real, this is all a hallucination, all one more way to try to manipulate my father’s secrets out of me and into her hands.

We are in a reverie, and I am in control of the dreamscape.

“My father knew what you were, and he hid his research in the only place he knew you couldn’t get to. Inside of
me
.”

“Give it to me!” Ms. White screams, rushing at me.

But I just shut my eyes.

Ms. White tricked me into believing a reverie was real. And it was smart of her to make me think that. Because if there’s one thing I can control, it’s reveries.

I open my eyes. Ms. White stands before me, her face pale. I reach out and touch her forehead. “Time for you to open up to me,” I whisper.

Her mind fights, but it is no match for me. Her memories spill out around us. Ms. White’s mind swirls with thoughts—some of them no more than nebulous feelings, like guilt or love—some more distinct. Memories of me—as a baby, growing up—flicker in and out, like lightning behind a storm cloud.

“Did you ever really love me?” I wonder. Images rain down. All those times Ms. White urged me to go to college—part of it was manipulation. But part of it was a wish for me to escape. And when she saw me with Jack, there was, hidden beneath waves of grief and sorrow, a very small part of her that wished she could let me go, that didn’t want to use me in her plot.

But there is a hollowness inside of her, and when she saw the chance to bridge it with money and power and control, she took it.

Jack.
I can’t save Ms. White—I can’t save Mom or Dad. But I can still save Jack.

“Time to wake up,” I say, and I slam the heel of my palm against her forehead.

This is real. I am in the reverie chair from before, and it feels like the dream, but this real. I try to stand, but there are straps here, too, holding me down. I feel my jaw clench. As if mere straps could restrain me.

I’m not human.

I’m better.

I lift my arms, and the straps snap away. Androids, followed by PA Young, pour into the room. They move as one, arms outstretched to hold me down, but my body is programmed with knowledge I’m not aware of. I let it take control. I strike and kick, punch and hurl, and the androids lie around me like more debris.

PA Young shifts her position, ready to strike me. “What are you doing?” I scream at her. “How can you be on Ms. White’s side with this? You ended the Secessionary War—surely you can’t—”

She doesn’t speak; she just attacks. I race across the room, yanking out a piece of metal from the debris made when PA Young first broke into the room, and I slam it against her back, making her fall to one knee. I use the momentum to swing up, aiming for her head, but she dodges away, and I just clip her shoulder.

The sharp metal rips her silk blouse to shreds, slicing through the exposed skin underneath—the skin, and the glint of wire and bone mingled with blood and flesh. Sparks of electricity shoot through the pool of red blood dripping down her arm.

PA Young curses low under her breath.

I move instinctively, twisting the metal around her arm, winding it back, and bending it as if it were twine. Before she can move, I rip off a piece of the reverie chair and wrap the steel around her ankles. I may not be able to defeat a cy-clone, but I can at least capture it.

As I stand panting over the struggling form of the Prime Administrator of the entire Unified Countries global government, Ms. White calmly walks into the room.

“Even her?” I gasp, pointing.

“Don’t you remember our talk with her, when you first met her at Triumph Towers? She said everyone has to pay a price for war. That was her price: becoming a cy-clone.”

I wonder how it happened. Did PA Young volunteer herself for this? Did she allow herself to die, for the chance to be immortal, in its own limited way? Did she know Ms. White would be able to control her like a puppet? Or did Ms. White force her to change?

“You’re getting better,” Ms. White says, surveying the damage I’ve done. “I did not expect you to wake from that reverie, or do all this. Your father would be proud.”

I narrow my eyes. She is
not
allowed to speak of my father, never again.

She knows I’m a cyborg-clone. She knows that my bones are made of metal, my flesh enhanced with nanobots. She knows I could snap her like a twig.

But she strolls into the room as if I was as harmless as I once thought myself to be.

My hands clench around a part of the reverie chair I just awoke from, and the metal gives way, crumpling like tinfoil.

I will
crush
her.

I will watch the life flicker out of her like it faded from the shadow of my mother.

“It was so much easier when your mother was here,” Ms. White says. “You really did have a blind spot for her. You were willing to stay without question, and you slept so soundly while I did my tests on you every night. We’ll just have to find another way. Eventually, I will discover your secrets. Perhaps a vivisection, as I promised. Perhaps first with that boy you like, just for fun.”

My fists clench. “You can go fu—”

Ms. White cuts me off. “Ella, dear, you know the great thing a computer can do, besides being hacked? It can be controlled.”

She raises her arm and slides her fingers over her cuffLINK.

My muscles goes rigid, but my body thrums with some sort of energy I’ve never felt before.

“I control you, Ella,” Ms. White says. “It will be easier for both of us if you accept this now.”

I try to shake my head
no!
But I can’t. I try to run away. But nothing inside me moves without her permission.

Ms. White sighs, sorrow in her eyes. “I don’t want to do this, darling. You’re like a daughter to me—or, at least, you were, before you became something not quite human. It—it hurts me when you have to be reprogrammed, when we have to modify you into something more compliant.”

Ms. White stands up. Despite the fact that I am entirely immobile, she draws closer, so that our faces are mere centimeters apart. She stares into my eyes, as if she can see an answer within them. And then she leans back, resignation smeared across her face. When she speaks again, she has the slow drawl of someone who’s hiding her pain behind mockery.

“It will be tedious if, from now on, I am forced to control you in this way. It hurts you, I know, and it’s extra work for me. And I
do
care about you, darling, of course I do. Your cooperation will make our future much better. Cyborg-clones that acquiesce have a much better life. Just the same as people that do.”

I struggle to just open my mouth and shout at her, but I cannot even twitch. My automatic functions—my heartbeat, blinking, breathing—that all happens. But even though I feel as if my heart should be racing, I can feel that it’s not. I wonder if that’s a part of her control too. If she could force it to stop, just with a command from her cuff.