Robin Wasserman - Torn

Zo insisted on accompanying me to the corp headquarters—to wait outside, she said, just in case. I let her. When we arrived, I discovered I wasn’t the only one who’d brought moral support. Riley was already there—with Sari. I gave him a thin smile and ignored the barnacle. Zo followed suit. But Jude, when he showed up a few minutes later, took a different tack. “What’s with the skank?”

She had an arm around Riley but kept her eyes on me, smiling, and I knew the pose was for my benefit. He’s mine now, that arm said. He may not know it yet, but I do, and now you do.

“She’ll wait outside,” Riley said.

Jude scowled. “She doesn’t belong here.”

“You want to kick out the orgs, why don’t you start with her?” Riley nodded at Zo.

“It’s not because she’s an org,” Jude said. “And you know it.”

“I brought her. She stays.” Riley leaned in and whispered something in her ear.

Was he doing it to hurt me? The thought was nearly unbearable. But not as bad as the alternative. That he’d brought her because he wanted her here. “Let’s go,” I said.

Sari gave him a quick hug, and a kiss on the cheek. “For luck,” she chirped.

Zo caught my eye and blew me a kiss. “For luck,” she said, a drop too sweetly.

At least I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving Zo out here alone with Sari. My little sister could fend for herself.

I’d been in the conference room before, the one reserved for very rare face-to-face meetings of the top BioMax executives and their favorite cronies. And I had met M. Poulet before, the chief operating officer, the highest ranking BioMax figure willing to show his face to the public, though it was a poorly kept secret that every corp kept its ultimate rulers hidden. For our purposes Poulet was BioMax, and despite the fact that he was built like a walrus, with a mustache to match, I’d never seen anyone face him with anything less than poorly disguised terror. Jude, Riley, and I sat on one side of the long table; Kiri, call-me-Ben, and M. Poulet sat on the other. Three of us—three of them. It didn’t feel like an even match.

“Here’s what we know,” I began. It had been surprisingly easy to convince Jude that I should be the one to speak. No doubt because I’d make a convenient scapegoat when we failed. I doubted any of us had much hope that this was going to work. But I didn’t let it show.

I projected the basics onto the ViM embedded in the conference table. Files popped up, and photos of the corridors we’d seen. This was it, I thought. There was no more hiding now, and no more pretending to buy the crap that BioMax was selling. Which meant they wouldn’t have to pretend either. If this body broke, they were the only ones who could fix it, or replace it.

But that mattered only if I let myself care.

“You’re stealing downloaded neural patterns, lobotomizing them, and turning them into cyber slaves.”

I waited for them to deny it.

Call-me-Ben shifted in his seat—that familiar org weakness, the inability to keep his feelings, his guilt, his surprise, to himself. But the other man, M. Poulet, didn’t move. His gray, stony face betrayed nothing. It was Kiri who reacted, pivoting between the two of them, obviously waiting for a denial of her own. She didn’t get it.

“This is true?” she exclaimed, rising to her feet. “You’re actually doing this?”

“ We’re doing this,” M. Poulet said calmly. “Or have you forgotten who deposits the credit in your accounts?”

“No,” Kiri said, “I didn’t sign on for this. Lia, trust me, I didn’t know.”

I was concentrating on keeping my own reactions under wraps. So I couldn’t admit I believed her—and I couldn’t reveal my relief.

M. Poulet looked at her like she was exuding a bad smell. “If our discussion is making you uncomfortable, you’re perfectly free to go. You can drop off your security credentials on the way out.”

I didn’t expect her to actually go . I appreciated the moral outrage, just not as much as I would have appreciated the moral support. She didn’t ask my opinion. Her chair scraped back, the door slammed, and then she was gone. Call-me-Ben looked perturbed; M. Poulet looked bored. “Can we get back on track, please? We’re well aware of your hijinks at our recent event, and your intrusion into private property. But we’re willing to overlook it. Keep it between us, as it were.”

“Private property?” Jude said angrily. I hoped it was for show, because if his real emotions were bleeding through, then he’d been thrown more off balance than I thought. “You want to talk about private property ? How about the theft and destruction of our private property? Are we supposed to overlook that? While you kill us off one by one? ”

“We’re doing nothing of the sort,” M. Poulet said, indignant.

“You’re stealing copies of our brains,” I said quietly, before Jude could fire back. “And then you’re stripping them. There are people in those machines. Don’t you get that?”

“They’re not people.” It was the first time Ben had spoken. He leaned toward me, elbows on the table, his best earnest expression fixed on his face. “That’s what you’ve got to understand. Without the crucial subroutines that control emotion, memory, all the things that make a personality, these are nothing but arrays of electronic data. There’s no consciousness.”

“How do you know? What if they can still think? Or feel?”

“They can’t. They’re machines, computers. Nothing more.”

“Did you join the Brotherhood while I wasn’t looking?” I snarled. “Because your Savona impression is awesome.”

“This technology is a miracle,” Ben said, eyes shining. “It’s brought you—all of you—back from the dead. And that’s only the beginning . We’re talking about the fusion of man and machine—the possibilities of this technology are limitless.”

He didn’t have much future as an evangelist. Though even Rai Savona lacked the rhetorical prowess to gloss this over.

“We’re not technology. We’re people.”

“ You’re people, yes—but we’re not talking about you. How does it hurt you to donate a copy of your brain to a good cause? How does it change anything to know that a copy of some of your synapses is helping protect the nation or heal the sick? How does that do anything to you, except perhaps make you proud?”

“Funny,” Riley said softly. “Almost sounds like we volunteered.”

“If this is such a wonderful advance for orgs and mechs alike,” I said, “then why keep it a secret?”

“You see how you’ve reacted,” Ben pointed out. “We needed to ease the way. Help people understand. Once they do—”

“Enough,” M. Poulet cut in. “We don’t have to defend ourselves to…” He flicked a hand at us. “These.” He stood up and pushed in his chair, as if to say, Meeting’s over . “I would think that with popular opinion of you and your kind at such alarmingly low levels, you’d have better things to worry about than trivia like this. I’d suggest you focus on the bigger picture here.” “Trivia like you turning us into war machines?” I said, disgusted.

“Lia, enough,” Jude said. “They obviously didn’t come here to reason with us, and we didn’t come here to reason with them.”

“Ah, finally,” M. Poulet said. “We get down to it.”

Jude stood up too. A beat later Riley and I joined him on our feet. Only Ben stayed seated, looking bewildered about how the meeting had slipped out of his control. “You’re going to stop this,” Jude said. “Stop abusing the stored copies. Stop experimenting on us like we’re animals. And then you’re going to give us the means to store our own uploads, and to repair and replace our own bodies. You’re going to set us free.”