Robin Wasserman - Torn

“Why? According to you, you didn’t do anything.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry,” he said. “I hope someday you’ll understand that.”

Here’s what Ben would never understand: When I woke up in the hospital that wasn’t a hospital, facing the doctor that wasn’t a doctor, unable to speak, unable to move, the mirror reflecting a fright show with dead eyes and exposed skull, he’d been the one to tell me the truth of what I was, and he’d been the one to roll me into that silvery morgue to see my hollow, ruined body, the body he’d taken away. Whatever happened next, whatever role he had or hadn’t played in setting up the car accident, in lobotomizing our stored neural patterns, in manipulating and lying and plotting a mechanical genocide, it would never matter. He was the face of what I had become, the face of BioMax, the face of death. You don’t try to understand the Grim Reaper; you don’t forgive.

You turn your back on him—knowing there’s nothing left he can do to you—and go inside.

It was strange to be back in the house, my second homecoming in six months, and like last time, much as I wanted the house to feel like a prison, it felt like home. The same overwrought antiques, the same stiff chairs and couches that screamed Don’t sit on me! lest some disastrous spillage occur. The same virgin-white rug that had never felt the touch of a shoe. The only difference: my father, slumped on the gray love seat, his head down but eyes unmistakably fixed on the door, my father, who was always in motion, consumed with impossibly important business, planted there like a piece of furniture, posture sagging and defeated. My father, around whom the world turned, sitting on the sidelines, making no move to interfere or even react to my arrival; my mother barely acknowledging his presence. I was almost sorry I hadn’t been around to watch him adjust to his new domestic reality. I suspected he was wondering if, back when he’d had a choice, he should have just opted for prison. Losing a daughter was one thing. Being bossed around by my mother? For him that would surely be intolerable.

My mother and the guard flanked me on either side as we trooped up the stairs.

“Lia.” I thought I heard my father’s voice trailing behind me, but it could have been my imagination, and I didn’t look back.

“This is for your own good,” my mother said. “You’ll thank me some day.”

“Been reading from the parental-cliché handbook again?”

“Put her in there,” she told the guard, gesturing to my room. Jude was already inside.

“You can’t make me want to be your daughter,” I told her. “You know that. You can keep me prisoner here as long as you want. It isn’t going to change anything.”

“You are my daughter,” she said, cold and calm. “Whether you want to be or not. So consider yourself grounded.”

She brushed her lips against my cheek, lightly enough that I barely felt them, quickly enough that by the time I thought to push her away, she was gone. The guard shoved me into my bedroom, then switched the room into lockdown mode, sealing us in. The setting had come standard with our security system—drop-down bulletproof shutters over the windows, network jammers, electronic locks, all designed to turn your average everyday bedroom into a prison. Designed for keeping burglars out—used most often, in our house at least, for keeping unruly daughters in. Zo had lived half her life in lockdown mode, but it was a new one for me. Still, I’d heard Zo complain enough to know that throwing my weight against the door or clumsily trying to pick the lock with a paper clip wasn’t exactly going to cut it.

Predictably, Jude had his head buried in one of my drawers, but at least he wasn’t pawing through my underwear. “Find anything you like?” I asked.

“Nothing that’s going to get us out of here,” he said, rapping a fist against the window shutter.

I unfolded the paper Ben had given me, scanning the dense chunk of file names and techno jargon for something that would make sense. This is where you’ll find him .

I’d seen this kind of thing before, when Zo had hacked our father’s ViM to try to get us some answers. It seemed like a million years ago, but I recognized the way the file names were diagrammed into decision trees, branching across the page.

It was a map, I realized—and then realized I’d seen many of these file names before. It was a fragment of the network hierarchy of the internal BioMax servers. The secret, isolated ones that stored brains ready for stripping and dehumanizing, for loading into BioMax’s “intelligent machines.” And one of the file names was circled, a meaningless string of numbers. I knew, from our BioMax break-in, that the lobotomized brain patterns were stored by ID number rather than name. This one was 248713, and there was a second file marked 248713b. But it was the original that was circled in red, with Ben’s handwriting beneath it: intact.

I handed the page to Jude. After all this time, it still seemed strange that my hands weren’t trembling. Because my brain felt like it was vibrating inside my head, bouncing off the inner walls of my skull in sync with the seconds ticking by, time running out. “Tell me if that means what I think it means,” I said, and watched him run his eyes down the page, tried to mark the exact moment he saw what I’d seen, and understood.

He saw it. Then he said what I couldn’t, because I was afraid to believe it.

“Ben gave you this?” he asked.

“He said… he said, ‘This is where you’ll find him.’”

“Riley,” Jude said. “They stored a copy of him.”

The paper floated to the floor, and Jude looked down at his hands, as if his fingers had acted of their own accord. He didn’t move to pick it up; he didn’t move at all. “He’s still out there, somewhere.”

I nodded.

Somewhere a circuit board, an electronic file, bits and bytes, somewhere ones and zeros, flipped in a precise order, the billions and trillions of quantum qubits that made a life, trapped inside a computer, trapped underground, trapped.

But alive.

We couldn’t save him.

Not yet.

Riley was the one variable in all of this that wasn’t teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Safe—or relatively so, in a database, free-floating in the ether—Riley could wait. I didn’t want to let myself believe it was true, because if Ben was lying, if I let myself hope and then had to lose him all over again…

But once the idea was in my head, I couldn’t get rid of it. The idea of Riley being gone forever had been the impossibility; this last-minute reprieve felt inevitable. His death had never been real.

This had to be.

“You think he’s aware?” I said. “His mind’s all there. How do we know he’s not trapped in there, afraid and alone? How do we know it doesn’t hurt?”

“It doesn’t,” Jude said. “He’s not.”

“But how do we know ?”

“We have to believe it,” Jude said, sounding like a deranged Faither. “Because if we don’t…”

Then we wouldn’t be able to leave him there. For just a little longer, I promised him. Until we fix everything.

Like there was much chance of that happening while we were locked up in my bedroom behind bulletproof windows and network jammers. If my mother didn’t want us out, we weren’t getting out. My father had spent years turning the Kahn house into a fortress. I’d always taken his word for our security and its necessity, never worrying that the barbarians would break down the gates, never chafing against his boundaries from my side of the wall. I’d been the good girl, and good girls didn’t know how to break out of bedroom prisons.