Robin Wasserman - Shattered

“I don’t.”

“Trust me .”

He laughed. “I don’t do that either.”

“Then trust me ,” Riley said. “I was there, I saw it. Whether it’s a setup or not, that part’s real: They’re experimenting on them.”

“They opened up their brains,” I said, wishing I could talk about it without seeing it, without imagining that it was happening to me. “And Zo said there’s… damage.”

“You start treating people like toys, playing with their insides, there’s always damage,” Jude said darkly. He swept his arms out to his sides, carving an angel in the fresh powder.

“I just don’t get the point,” Riley said. “They’ve got to know whatever they do to us, we can download from storage.”

I’d spent the last day thinking of little else, and I was afraid I understood what Savona was trying to do—afraid because it seemed like it could work, and because it was smart.

Auden’s kind of smart.

“What if he’s going after the backups?” I said. “Wipe those out, and he can do whatever he wants with our bodies.”

“The backups are stored on the central servers,” Jude pointed out. “The same ones that store all the network data. They’re impossible to get to. You’d need an army.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”

“And neither is Savona,” he shot back. “So where does that leave us?”

“With the daily backups,” I said, and here’s where it got scary. “What if he’s trying to find a way to get to the storage servers through us ? We access the server every time we do a memory dump. If they could find a way in through that…”

Jude looked thoughtful; Riley looked stricken. “We have to get them out,” he said. “Now.”

Jude packed a handful of snow into a tight snowball, tossing it up and down as he thought everything through. Then he smiled. “No, we don’t.”

“Aren’t you listening?” I shouted. It felt like there should be an echo in a place like this, filled with so much emptiness, but my voice was just carried away by the wind. “We have to help them.”

“I didn’t say we wouldn’t help them,” Jude said. “Just that we wouldn’t get them out.” He threw the snowball up as high as he could. It fell apart in midair, showering us with snow. “Think about it: We have two objectives, right? Rescue our friends—and destroy the lab.”

He said it like it was obvious. “I don’t know,” I said.

“If you’re right, and they’re working on a way to wipe us out, then we have to stop them,” Jude said. “So unless you want to change your story, and now you think the org was lying…”

“No.”

“Then we have to get rid of the lab. So we do them both in one shot. Look, they’ve got heavy security in place, and if the hostages are… damaged , that means they might not be able to run, or walk. Or even understand what’s happening. How do you expect the three of us to get in and get out—get all of us out, without getting caught ourselves?”

“Maybe I could convince Zo to help with the—”

“No. No orgs. If we do this, we do it. We don’t rely on someone who can screw us over at the last minute. Ruin everything.” He shook his head. “But I don’t see how we get them out—get past the guards, the fence, the security AIs. Maybe we can get ourselves in. But we’d need more firepower or… I don’t know, more something to get everyone out.”

I don’t know —it was a phrase I was pretty sure I’d never heard him say before. Perfect timing for the all-knowing Jude’s knowledge to run out. “It doesn’t have to be just the three of us,” I said, afraid I already knew exactly what he’d think of that. “Plenty of other mechs would—”

“I can’t trust anyone,” Jude said, his voice laced with steel. “Not anymore. I trust Riley. Riley trusts you. But that’s it. We’re done.”

“Just get to the point,” Riley said. Something in his voice made it sound like he already knew where Jude was headed.

“After what’s been done to them, we don’t even know if they can be fixed,” Jude said. “What we do know is that they’ve got perfectly good, intact copies in storage. If something happened to their bodies, they could just be downloaded again. Start fresh. So we make it happen. We don’t rescue them—we destroy the lab, and we destroy them with it.”

Riley was nodding.

Just one problem. “How do we get out?”

Jude shrugged. “Same way we get in—it’ll probably be easier, all the Faither freaks running around trying to save their precious lab. They won’t even notice us. And if that doesn’t work…”

“What?”

“We go out the same way the others do,” Jude said. “Destruction. Download. Simple.”

Right. Simple. Just blow up our friends—and ourselves along with them. Die, and wake up miles away in some BioMax lab with no idea how we ended up there. Shoved into new bodies, and forced to pay whatever price for crimes we couldn’t remember committing. If anything went wrong… But that’s not what you’re afraid of, I told myself. No more avoiding the truth.

Death meant nothing anymore. But I was still afraid of it.

“Even if we could do it…” I hesitated, unsure how to put words to what I was feeling. The idea made sense… but it felt wrong. “We just let them die?”

“It’s not death,” Jude reminded me. “It’s just their bodies, not their minds. Their minds are safe in storage.”

“ Copies of their minds,” I said.

“You’re a copy,” he pointed out. “Feels real, though, doesn’t it?”

I am what I remember, I told myself. I am what I think. How I think.

And all that was bits of electronic data, coded into a computer. It didn’t matter if the data was in my head or on a server. It didn’t matter which head the data was in, or how many times it had been duplicated. Maybe I wasn’t an exact copy of the old Lia Kahn, because you always lost something going from analog to digital, from org to mech. But the next me would be just as mechanical as this one. The next me would be a perfect replication. The next me would be me. And if it was true for me, it was true for all of them.

“We do it this way, they start fresh,” Jude said. “Whatever Savona’s done to them, they won’t have to remember it. It’ll be like none of this ever happened. And Ani… who knows when she last backed up. It could all disappear.”

And she could come back like nothing happened, I thought, hearing in his voice how much he wanted it.

“I have a guy who can get some explosives,” Jude said. “Riley and I know how to rig them.”

Like it was just a trivial errand, a grocery list. Pick up apples, two pounds of chicken… and enough explosives to blow up a secret laboratory and everything inside.

“We get in, blow the lab, get out—if we’re lucky, no one will even know we were there. As a bonus, it looks like the Brotherhood blew up its own hostages. Can’t hurt with public opinion—and since there’s nothing we can do, yet , about the Synapsis attack…”

There was something surreal about this whole thing. Like I’d become someone unrecognizable; we all had. But: “It actually sounds like it could work.”

Riley frowned. “You’re not saying all of it,” he told Jude.

Jude wasted half a second on a wide-eyed Who, me? stare, then gave in. He never said no to Riley, not in the end. “You said they’re never alone in the lab?” Jude asked me.

I nodded. “As soon as they’re done with the experiments for the night, they take the mechs back to the Temple, string them back up on the posts. Zo says there are usually people in the lab working all night—” I finally got it. “No. No, we get them out first. Sound some kind of alarm. Send a warning. Something.”