Robin Wasserman - Torn

They’re no different from you, I reminded myself. Same mind, same memories. You used to be an org. Whatever they’re capable of, you’re capable of.

But nothing in me was capable of this.

“I’ve only been here for a few weeks, long enough to get the lay of the land and establish that it’ll serve our purposes.” Jude paused, then added, in a high, squeaky voice, “So where were you before that, Jude?”

“That supposed to be me?” I asked sourly.

“Glad to see you aren’t any less of an egomaniac than the last time I saw you.”

“Jude—,” Riley warned him.

“Kidding,” Jude said. He led us up a wide boulevard lined by rubble. There were no weeds poking from beneath the stones, no trees, no bushes, no green of any kind. “But since you asked: I spent most of the time in Chindia, honored guest of the Aikida Corp.”

Once a small Japanese pharmaceutical corp, Aikida was now the largest bio-and gen-tech corp in the world, with global headquarters in Chindia and a major presence in every developed country except the United States. BioMax, their primary rival, had made sure it would stay that way. That had been one of the primary conditions when the corps bailed out the government and turned it into their own quaint department of civil engineering—preservation of our inviolable corporate boundaries. Since the Bailout no foreign corporation had done business on American soil unless approved by the corp consortium. “What would they want with you? Unless you got a PhD in gen-tech while I wasn’t looking.”

“I’ve got something more valuable than a PhD,” Jude said. When we looked blank, he rapped his knuckles against his forehead. “In here, geniuses. It’s worth millions—and trust me, there’s not a gen-tech corp in the world that wouldn’t pay.”

“So they’re trying to reverse-engineer the download process and you’re their guinea pig?” I asked, surprised Jude would let anyone experiment on him again, no matter the price. “And you’re still in one piece?”

“Funny, you sound disappointed.”

“Honesty über alles, right?” His stated policy, not mine.

“They didn’t touch me,” he said. “They’ve already tried that on other mechs. Stripping them bare—no luck. They wanted something else from me. So we’re going to get it for them.”

I glanced at Riley, who looked wary. Thankfully. At least I wouldn’t have to try to talk him out of whatever insane plan was coming next.

“They need the master code for the brain-scanning program, and the full specs for the neural matrix,” Jude said. “We get it from BioMax, sell it to Aikida, and live happily ever after.”

“What’s with ‘we’?” I asked. “You’ve got your own BioMax connection, as I recall. Get him to give you what you need and leave us out of it.”

“After the incident at the temple, my connections have dried up,” Jude said. “I think I’ve managed to convince them that I’m harmless enough to drop their ridiculous vendetta against me, but I can’t get inside. You can.”

“But why would I? So you can get rich? What do you need money for when you have all this?” I gestured to the rubble.

“I have what I need,” Jude said. “This is bigger.”

“This is pathetic. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but BioMax isn’t out to get us—even you.”

“Now who’s willing to do anything for money?”

“They don’t pay me,” I told him. “I work with them because I want to help.”

“Right, the party line: mechs and orgs together, one big happy dysfunctional family.”

“At least I’m doing something, instead of just whining about how everyone’s out to get me.”

“And exactly what are you doing?” Jude snapped. “Letting them parade you around on the network like a trained monkey? You think playing at being some brainless slut on a vidlife is going to convince anyone of anything?”

“Jude!” Riley’s voice held an implied threat—one I was sure he dreaded carrying out.

“You’re not exactly the target demographic,” I said, evenly as I could.

Jude just laughed.

“Give her a break,” Riley said. “She’s doing what she thinks she has to.”

I didn’t need him to defend me. But I couldn’t help noticing it wasn’t much of a defense.

“Right,” Jude said. “Working with BioMax.” He laughed again.

“You think I’m working for them?” I said.

“I think working for someone implies payment. And the freedom to stop working whenever you want. It implies choice . You have none of that. What you have… call it indentured servitude. Call it slavery. Call it whatever you want, but the fact is, they own you. They gave you that body, and they can take it away.”

“I’m not going to argue.”

That caught him off guard. “That’s a first.”

“They own all of us,” I said. We were at their mercy; we depended on them to honor their contracts, and our existence. “That’s why we have to work with them. Because they’re all we’ve got.”

“No one owns me,” Jude said quietly.

“Sounds pretty. That doesn’t make it true.”

“As usual, your vision is severely lacking.”

“If you mean I lack the vision to see how selling corp secrets to Aikida is going to change anything, then I guess that’s another thing we agree on.”

“We’re not selling them for money,” Jude said.

“So what, then?”

“The only way we get free of BioMax is if we control the means to create new bodies and to download ourselves into them. And to make sure we store the uploaded memories on a server that no one but us has access to. Aikida is going to help us do that. We get them the specs they need; they supply us with our very own laboratory and production facilities, and a skeleton staff of scientists and engineers that can train us to do everything for ourselves. We sign a noncompete with them, to guarantee that we function only in this country, so we don’t interfere with Aikida operations—but beyond that we’re free.”

“And all of this is going to take place…” It was beginning to sink in. Why we were here. Why Jude was so proud of his ghost town.

“Right here,” Jude said. “Ground zero of our independence day. A country of our own, inside the one that doesn’t want us—let them stay on their side of the border, and we’ll stay on ours.”

I didn’t bother to ask about the benevolent dictator who would inevitably be leading this imaginary country of his. Instead: “You’re insane.”

“You see it, don’t you?” Jude appealed to Riley. “We’ve got everything we need here. Space, privacy, an almost completely intact infrastructure. It could be what we’ve always wanted. A place to be left alone.”

Riley’s gaze swept the jagged skyline. He didn’t answer.

“Riley, I was thinking you could take a look at the generators?” Jude said. He’d led us to some kind of power plant. Scorch marks scraped its sides, and one wall had collapsed. “See if I’m wrong about their condition? You know this stuff so much better than I do.”

“Not so much better,” Riley said, obviously pleased by the compliment.

“So much,” Jude insisted. “Take a look?”

“He’s not going in there,” I said, surprised the building was still standing. “It looks like the roof might cave in.”

Riley squeezed my hand. “I’ll be back in a minute.” And then, like we’d traveled back in time six months and nothing had changed between them, he did exactly as Jude said, and stepped inside.

Which left me and Jude alone.

“So you’re lying to him,” Jude said. “Again.”