Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“And if I say no?” I asked. “What then?” Even if I could formulate a convincing enough lie about the last several days, how would I remember all of the details on the inevitable second or third time she walked me through it? Why hadn’t I spent the last couple days planning what I would do when I got caught? What had I expected, Riley and I would just go on the run forever, playing house in some urine-stained room on the thirtieth floor of west tower, scavenging for spare power and poking around the network once a year to see whether it was safe to come home?

“You don’t want to test me, Lia.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say I do.” Nothing like a good offense, right? Especially when your defense is nonexistent. “What next, you torture me or something? Violate the HRC?” Even at Helmsley, they’d made sure to teach us about the Human Rights Covenant, supposedly some kind of guarantee that the government would never go psycho again, rounding up people by the hundreds and abandoning them to darkness and pain until they vomited out details of nefarious plots they may—or in most cases, may not—have known anything about. All that trouble, and they hadn’t managed to prevent Chicago or St. Louis or the Disneypocalypse. It turned out that bio-sensors and facial recognition screeners were more efficient than torture.

The government had signed the HRC back when they still ran security, but the secops were all bound by it.

“There you go again, talking about your rights,” the detective said. “ Human Rights Covenant. What makes you imagine you qualify?”

I could tell her the truth, I thought. Not because she scared me, with her sausage suit and empty threats. But because I was tired, and if I could make her believe me, this could all be over.

She would never believe me. That I’d been in the corp-town while, in a stunning coincidence, another mech, one who just happened to have my face, enacted an insane plan I knew nothing about? Odds like that hovered somewhere around absolute zero.

“Do whatever you want,” I said. “I’m a machine, right? Machines don’t hurt.”

“I’m told that’s not quite true,” she said, smiling. Like she was enjoying herself. “But I’m afraid you misunderstand. I’m not threatening you. And certainly—given you have no need to eat or sleep—I’m not going to waste my time by waiting you out.”

“So we’re done here?” Like I had any real hope of that.

“I’m starting to think you’re misunderstanding me on purpose,” Detective Ayer said. A new image popped up on the screen. My sister, Zo. “You don’t care about what happens to you, that’s obvious,” she said. “And frankly, I can’t blame you.” She swept her eyes up and down my body, then shuddered. “Probably just waiting for someone to put you out of your misery.” Another image popped up next to Zo. My mother. “But what if you weren’t the only person at stake?” My father. One big, happy, Lia-less Kahn family. “What if your actions actually had consequences?”

I forced myself to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

“People are dead,” she snapped. “Living, breathing, organic humans are dead. Thanks to you and your friends. Is that a joke to you? Because it’s not to me.” Leaving the screen lit, she retreated to the door. “Your coconspirators are still out there. Which means people could die. And I’m willing to do pretty much anything to stop that. So why don’t you sit here for a while and think about whether you really have nothing left to lose.”

She closed the door behind her. I heard the lock catch. Now they’ll watch me, I thought. Hoping they’ll catch me —but that was where my imagination failed. Catch me what? Monologuing about all my evil plans? Smearing my finger across the layer of dust on the table, letter by letter spelling out my confession? Or did they just hope to catch the exact moment I broke, staring at the faces of my family, imagining what might happen to them if I didn’t give Ayer what she wanted? Strange, the way orgs clung so desperately to this idea that we weren’t human, then ditched it as soon as it was no longer convenient. If I was just a machine, then why would I care what they did to a family that, by their standards, wasn’t mine? And if I did care, didn’t that mean I was human after all?

Apparently not.

It was an empty threat. It had to be. This just wasn’t how things worked. Not anymore.

I stayed in my seat as one hour passed, then another, waiting for Ayer to return. I knew how to wait. Hadn’t I been doing it for days now? Hadn’t I been doing it for months, waiting for something to happen that would change everything? That would fix everything, turn back the clock to the time before I left home, before Auden, before the download? If you’re waiting for something that’s never going to happen—that you know is never going to happen—it shouldn’t count as waiting. But that’s how it felt.

Almost twelve hours passed. When the door opened, Ayer was wearing another, even frumpier suit, blue this time, with the Synapsis label emblazoned in a garish red. New clothes for a new day. And she wasn’t the only one. She set a neatly pressed pile of clean clothes down on the table beside me, complete with a pair of shoes. And not just any shoes I realized suddenly, confused—these were mine .

“You have a visitor,” she said, as the door swung open again.

For a moment I thought I was imagining him. That the pressure and confusion had plunged me into a dreamer flashback, or maybe some kind of wish-fulfillment mechanism had overwhelmed my neural system.

And then the hallucination spoke. “Hello, Lia,” he said, stiff and proper as always. Unreadable. I couldn’t look at him. Not without picturing him the way I’d seen him last, when I’d thought I wouldn’t see him again.

I forced myself not to get up. He wouldn’t want to touch me. But he crossed the room and rested his hands on my shoulders, and his lips brushed the top of my head, and I hugged my chin to my chest and closed my eyes and was sorry and grateful that I couldn’t cry. “Hi, Dad.”

“This is over,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

I glanced at Detective Ayer.

“Don’t look at her,” he snapped. “She’s got no power here.”

“Lia, when was the last time you saw your father?” the detective asked.

“I—” I stopped. Trick question, obviously. But knowing she was trying to trick me into telling the truth wouldn’t help me come up with the correct lie.

“She’s not answering any more of your questions,” my father informed her. “And she’s leaving here with me. Now .”

The detective flushed. “M. Kahn, you understand, there’s paperwork to be completed, and even if everything you say checks out—”

“If?” My father wasn’t the kind to explode. If anything, he did the opposite—as his anger built, he contracted. He fell silent, his face scary white, his voice low, his eyes riveted on the target of his scorn, as if willing his gaze into a face-melting beam. Some people were too dense to notice the shift; true idiots mistook his stillness for passivity. But like Ayer had said before, she could read people, and she read my father. Or maybe she’d read enough of my file to know that a man like him—on the board of several corps, including hers—could get her kicked so far down the ladder that by the end of the week she’d be shipped off to the nearest wind farm to spend her days trolling for power pirates.