Robin Wasserman - Shattered

I waited.

“Why didn’t he go himself?” Ben asked. “Why did he need you to go? What did he really want?”

I saw where he was going. I’d already gotten there myself. Jude was the one who’d sent me to BioMax, it followed he was the one most likely to have set me up. But he wasn’t the only one who’d known about the corp-town trip. Jude’s BioMax contact knew too. And he’d known enough not to show. Call-me-Ben wanted me to believe Jude had set me up—and so, for the first time, I started to think maybe he hadn’t.

“He must really scare you guys,” I said. “Afraid he’ll turn us against you?”

Ben arched an eyebrow. “‘You’ orgs ?”

“‘You’ BioMax .” I was spinning through the possibilities as quickly as I could. BioMax knew where we were at all times—they had all they needed to set us up. But why go to the trouble and then whisk me away from the secops? Why do it in the first place?

He burst into laughter. “Lia, as far as I’m concerned, if Jude were who he claimed to be, he’d be a hero. Our BioMax clients need someone like him, to ease the transition into life postdownload.” His eyes were gleaming, his movements loose and free, as if some part of him usually tamped down was breaking out. “All that stuff about mechs being superior, about this technology being the dawn of a new era for humanity… if I didn’t believe that, why would I work for BioMax in the first place?”

“Great, so Jude’s a hero,” I said sourly. Maybe they were all working together. “Where’s the problem? You want me to arrange a meet-and-greet?”

“I said he would be a hero,” Ben reminded me. “If a tidy little confidence boost was all he was after. But it’s not.”

“How would you know?”

“Wrong question again,” Ben said with another buzzing noise. “What does this boy really want? Have you even bothered to ask? Or is it easier to just smile and nod and accept whatever he says as gospel?”

“You know me,” I said with as much fake sweetness as I could muster. “Always going with the flow.”

“You really think you’re all a bunch of rebels, don’t you?” he asked, sounding like he was trying not to laugh. “And what, exactly, are you rebelling against?”

“I don’t know,” I mused. “How about stalker corps that get off on spying on us?”

Nothing ruffled him. He just drummed his hands on the smoky glass of the window, adopting a philosopher’s tone. “‘Us.’ Interesting word, that. And who would ‘us’ be, in this scenario?” He ticked the options off on his fingers. “We’ve got Jude, who appears out of nowhere and charms himself into the heart of, among others, Quinn Sharpe, heir to one of the country’s largest fortunes. Not to mention Ty Marian, Anders Prix, Lara Pirendez—none of them in Sharpe territory, certainly, but not too shabby. Sloane Beignet—I’m told you were responsible for bringing her in. And then there’s Lia Kahn. Whose parents have yet to part with any of their credit—but, if and when they do, will, I’m sure, be donating to the cause.”

“What are you getting at?” I knew what he was getting at.

“I’m just wondering whether it’s a coincidence that so many of your friend Jude’s nearest and dearest acolytes are swimming in credit.”

“It’s no coincidence,” I snapped. “So we’re rich—so what?” Not wanting to admit that I’d had the same thought myself. But Quinn had donated her credit freely—they all had—so we could live as we wanted to live. Jude pays me back in other ways, she’d told me once. And not just me, all of us. It’s not like Jude reveled in the luxury—there seemed to be little that he actually wanted for himself. “The download costs. We’re all rich.”

“Not all of them,” Ben said pointedly. “At least, they didn’t used to be.”

“That’s really what you want to talk about?” I said. Daring him. “The ‘volunteers’?” He could hear it in my voice, that I knew better.

“You’re so quick to distrust BioMax,” he said smoothly, shifting gears. “And yet so quick to put your faith in someone like Jude. Do you know anything about this boy? Where he came from, who he was before the download?”

“It’s irrelevant,” I shot back. “None of us are the people we were before the download. Those people are dead.”

“Excuse my language, but: bullshit,” Ben said. “That’s a lie he needs you to believe, so you’ll walk away from the people who actually care about you. Like your family, Lia. Like your father.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but my father cares about Lia Kahn, his dead daughter. I’m just an electronic copy. You know it, I know it.”

“Does he.” Ben shut his eyes and tipped his head back against the seat. As if we were done and it was naptime.

Not that I wanted to hear more of his crap.

Still. “You don’t know anything about my father.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” He didn’t bother to open his eyes. Instead, he pulled out a tablet-size ViM, passed it to me. It was as black and sleek as the car, featureless but for the slim gray thumbprint in the left corner. No one needed that kind of security on their ViMs—that was the whole point of a ViM, that the data was stored on the network, not on the machine. Nonetheless, the screen stayed blank until Ben reached across me and pressed his thumb to the print. “A greatest-hits

selection for you.”

The vids were cued up on the BioMax zone, the picture blurry and amateurish, the cameras shaking. All featured my father facing down clusters of suited men and women, various corp logos hanging over their heads or stenciled onto the surface of the tables. My father, seemingly oblivious to the camera and the hostility of his audiences. “These are human beings,” he said in vid after vid. “Can’t you see that? People we know. People we care about.”

My father, for once asking rather than ordering, asking for understanding. For the download technology. For the mechs. For his daughter.

“These aren’t machines,” he said, “no matter what they look like. These are our children—my child.”

One-on-one in an ornate living room, pounding a delicate glass table so hard I expected it to shatter. “Would this be any less a table if it was made of wood? Of steel? We don’t define a thing by what it’s made of—we define a thing by what it does . A brain isn’t a brain because it’s a mess of cells and neurotransmitters and organic gunk. It’s a brain because it thinks . We’re all made out of nothing but stuff . Our stuff may bleed, but fundamentally? It’s still just matter in motion: an organic machine. And fundamentally, if you judge them by how they think, how they feel, how they act , they’re still human.”

Ben, his eyes still closed, permitted himself a small half smile. “He borrowed that one from me. Nice, isn’t it?”

“What is this?” I paused the final vid on a grainy shot of my father’s face. At the secops station he’d looked older than I remembered, but here he seemed young again, as if fresh off a lift-tuck, the fuzziness erasing the cracks carved into his face and the dark half moons under his eyes. The camera had somehow captured something that never escaped in real life—the anger hidden beneath the tight lips and the carefully modulated voice. In the frozen vid, his face was still perfectly composed. But his eyes looked wild. “Where’d you get this?”

“You think you’re the only one we keep an eye on?” Ben finally opened his eyes and looked at me. “What?” he said with palpably false surprise. “You didn’t know?”