Robin Wasserman - Torn

But I tore myself away. Zo was waiting by the locked door that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, ready to use the security code on my father’s ViM to get us through. Jude had provided as much distraction as we could have hoped for. The room was absorbed by his spectacle; no one would notice two girls disappear behind a wall. But something made me pause in the doorway and turn back. From across the room, an island of calm in the pandemonium, Auden was watching. Savona stood by his side, eyes on the stage. The security team had formed a human barrier between them and the rampaging mechs, and I wondered why they hadn’t been dragged off to safety. It occurred to me Savona wouldn’t have allowed it. What better way to solidify his martyrdom than to stay publicly calm, stoic even, while the mechs did everything they could to tear him apart?

But I couldn’t worry about that now. Any more than I could worry about the fact that Auden was watching us.

“What?” Zo hissed, when she noticed I wasn’t moving. “Come on.”

“Shh!”

She followed my gaze, and saw him seeing us. Her face went white.

Auden tilted his head, a nearly imperceptible nod. Then turned away.

“Shit.” Zo’s eyes bugged. “We have to call this off. He’s going to—”

“He won’t do anything.” I yanked her through the door and let it close behind us.

“He saw us.”

“He won’t tell anyone.”

“So now you’re a mind reader?”

“Trust me,” I said, and hoped I was right. “It’s fine. He’ll keep his mouth shut.” Zo didn’t ask why I was so sure. A good thing, since I had no answer for her. The truth was, I wasn’t sure about anything except that it was probably wishful thinking to imagine Auden would protect us. But I couldn’t stop. Not when we were so close. If he sounded the alarm, we would deal. Until then we would keep going.

It was almost too easy. We were well beyond business hours, the halls were nearly deserted, and I could only trust that Jude was keeping the building’s secops plenty busy. On the rare occasions that footsteps seemed to pass too close, the maze of corridors left plenty of options for ducking out of sight. We swept past each automated security checkpoint with perfectly legitimate credentials. Our father’s security codes flashed from the stolen ViM and, as we ventured into more protected zones, his fingerprint opened one door after another. The blueprints indicated a server room in the basement where classified information—like technical specifications for the download process—would likely be held. These days nearly everything was stored in a data cloud on the network, powered by thousands upon thousands of servers whirring away in top-secret locations. It was why you could make a ViM in any shape and size—the Virtual Machine didn’t need to hold any information of its own; it just linked you up to the network and you were off. But nearly every corp had its own small server system tucked away somewhere, a skeleton closet for data it didn’t trust to the public storehouse. Walled off from the network, forbidden ViM access, safe from prying eyes. Zo had admitted she’d been studying up on hacking this kind of stuff for years, she and her loser friends whom I’d thought spent all their time loitering in the parking lot burning out on dozers—and she was convinced she could find the data and download it.

But there were no servers in the basement.

“You sure you’re reading those right?” Zo asked, snatching the ViM out of my hand so she could see the blueprints for herself. But I hadn’t made a mistake: According to the map, we should have been standing in BioMax’s main computing center. There were no computers in sight. Instead there was a long stretch of white padded rooms, each with a large window facing the corridor. I felt like I’d stumbled into a mental hospital, except that instead of straitjacketed lunatics, the large cells held machines of various shapes and sizes. Tanks, fighter jets, drones, armored crawlers, none of them much larger than I was—war in miniature. Some were motionless; others wheeled around seemingly at random, bashing into walls and firing blanks at the thick glass. At the end of the corridor we finally found some computers, but instead of massive servers, these were just standard keyboards and screens, some smeared with data, others showing the antics of the imprisoned machines.

“What the hell is this?” I said, gaping at the strange mechanical lab rats.

Zo had already pulled herself up to one of the lab stations. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. I couldn’t stop watching the machines. One in particular caught my attention: some kind of armored walker about three feet tall, stumbling around its cell like a toddler learning to walk.

“Lia,” Zo said. “You need to see this. Now.”

“What is it?”

“It’s you,” she said in a hushed voice. “Well, not you, but… all of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Will you just look!”

I peered over her shoulder. I read what she’d read. It was a status report, and at first the phrases didn’t make much sense. “Rerouted neural pathways.” “Reoriented command functions.” “Effect of cognitive deficiencies on consciousness.” “Subject shows improved learning capabilities with thirty percent of memories intact.” But gradually, the meaning became clear, and as I took in the words, the laboratory transformed itself in my imagination. I saw vats of clear fluid lining the walls, and suspended inside of them, gray, pulpy masses with wires snaking in and out. Brains, isolated and nurtured, synapses firing, alive and dead all at once. Imprisoned. I saw a mad scientist’s laboratory, death defied, life abominated, nature possessed. I saw myself, and I saw the men who owned me.

I saw the machines. And they were real.

The “effect of cognitive deficiencies on consciousness” was, apparently, severe. Strip away a brain’s memory, speech, and emotion functions, everything that made a person a person, and you were left with a machine. A machine that, if you programmed it right, would do anything you told it to.

“Tell me I’m understanding this wrong,” I said.

She didn’t.

“Our uploaded neural patterns can’t be accessed by them—by anyone—not while we’re still functioning,” I said, because that’s what I had been told. It was the foundation of the download technology. As long as our brains were active, our functioning neural networks released a signal that prevented the resurrection of any other brain with the same neural pattern. Only one Lia Kahn at a time, that was the hard-and-fast rule. But the neural patterns they were playing with down here were altered, weren’t they? Deficient. Which made the signal—and their promises—useless.

Zo still didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t stop watching the machine, the one stumbling on its iron feet.

I couldn’t stop wondering whether it remembered its name.

“You can’t search for yourself,” Zo said quietly. “I tried. Everything’s indexed by some kind of ID number, not name. If I had more time, probably… but maybe it’s better?”

Maybe it was better I didn’t know whether they’d taken a computer program that, under the right circumstances, called itself Lia Kahn, and crammed it into a steel tank? Maybe it was better I not think about what it would mean, what I would be, if my “significant personality markers” were stripped away, along with “superior cognitive function” and “emotive control.” If I was lobotomized, with only an animal intelligence left behind.

I’d flown in an AI plane. I’d looked out the window, wondering at the technology that allowed it to decide for itself how fast to fly, where to land. I’d seen the headlines on the news zones: the lives that had been saved by the new AI surrogates, compliant mechanical fighters that shot and crushed and bombed and burned on command, that were smart enough to strategize, pliant enough to follow every command. I’d never given much thought to it, how they’d suddenly, magically, breached the artificial intelligence barrier. Because it had nothing to do with me. I was artificial, I was intelligent, I was a machine, yes. But I was different. I was a remnant of something human; I had started life as something else. They were things; they had always been machines.