Lauren Miller - Free to Fall

“I love you” came out instead of “I promise.” Laying her hand on my knee, she managed a weak smile.

“I love you too.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” North said gently, his thumb hovering over the record button. His voice sounded funny, as if his throat were as knotted as mine. Dr. Tarsus nodded. North hit record.

“Free to fall,” she said hoarsely, a shallow breath between every word. Her eyes fluttered shut and she shook her head. “I’ll try again,” she said, wheezing, and tried to inhale. “Free. To. Fall.”

My heart sank. I had very little experience with voice recognition software, but I suspected the voice would need to at least sound like the person it was supposed to belong to. Try again, I begged her silently. A few moments passed. What little breath she had was rattling in her chest.

I took her hand and squeezed it. Her lips formed the word go . Soundless, but as commanding as her voice had ever been. We both knew I had no other choice. As I knelt and kissed her cheek, the tears I’d been holding back spilled over, dampening her face. “Thank you,” I whispered. “For everything.” She smiled, the sweat on her face glistening in the flicker of North’s torch. Then her face went slack and she was gone.

Neither North nor I spoke as we made our way to the stone wall.

“Don’t use your fingers,” he said when the stone facade retracted, bathing us in fluorescent light. “Fingerprints.”

I nodded and touched the glass with the knuckle of my thumb. The screen lit up with twelve boxes again, but the first four numbers were different this time.

I’d written the first fifty numbers in the Fibonacci sequence on the inside of my forearm in preparation for this moment—North’s idea—and 10,946 was the twenty-third number on the list, which meant that the next eight digits were 6, 1, 7, 7, 1, 1, 2, 8. I typed them as fast I could.

As soon as my knuckle hit the eight, the glass door slid open with a whoosh of warm air, just like in my simulation. I followed North inside the small chamber. A few seconds later the glass slid shut and the stone facade retracted back into place, concealing us. He pulled out his phone and stepped up to the microphone.

“You think it’ll work?” I asked him.

“Maybe,” he said, but he sounded doubtful. He tried the first recording first. I knew before I heard the words access denied that we were screwed. Not even I would’ve recognized her voice if I hadn’t heard her record it. The second recording was even worse.

“Damn it,” I whispered, and squeezed my eyes shut. I waited for the Doubt to give me guidance, but I heard Dr. Tarsus’s voice instead.

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

My eyes sprung open. “North,” I said urgently. “The audio recording—the one Tarsus made—it’s still on your phone, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“She said free to fall. In the recording. Toward the beginning, I think.”

North was already pulling up the file. He nudged the track bar to the right and pressed play. Dr. Tarsus’s voice—her regular, healthy voice—filled the small chamber.

“It’s right after that,” I told him, and he bumped the slider forward.

“It’s how we’re made I suppose” came her voice through the tiny speaker . “How did Milton put it? ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ The choice was ours, and we chose ourselves.”

North slid the track bar back and lifted his phone back up to the mic. As he held down the record button, I held my breath. It sounded just like her, but was the intonation right?

Please let it work, I prayed.

“Look,” North said suddenly, pointing at the control panel I’d seen in my simulation. One by one, the green lights were turning red. “That’s a security panel. Each of those lights is connected to a camera. I think they’re going offline.” A few seconds later there was a loud clang as steel slid against steel and the vault door disengaged.

We were in.

Part of me was still expecting to see workers inside, doing their thing, but North was right. The massive blue-lit space was completely empty. And loud. And freezing . I closed the door behind us, but not all the way. I had no idea how it opened from the inside, if at all.

North was tugging on a pair of gloves. They were thin, with rubber pads on the fingertips. “Hacker hands,” he explained, yelling over the hum of the machines. “No prints.” Seeing the gloves reminded me that this moment, or some version of it anyway, had always been part of our plan. But instead of reassuring me, it only emphasized how far we’d veered off course. I blinked quickly, afraid of what I’d see behind my eyelids if they stayed shut too long.

“I thought the servers didn’t go offline until midnight,” I said as I followed him between rows of servers toward the terminal. The floor beneath us was made out of some sort of metal mesh. I could see smooth gray concrete several feet beneath it.

“They don’t,” North replied, touching the keyboard in front of the terminal to light up its three screens. “Which makes it harder, but not impossible, to hide our tracks.” The screens were locked, with a login box at the center of each one.

“Now what?” I started to ask, but North had already bypassed the login screen. He was typing at lightning speed, not glancing at his fingers once as lines and lines of computer code appeared on screen. His eyes kept darting from screen to screen as he opened and closed about a thousand different windows. Hunting for the Lux program code. What if he couldn’t find it?

I started to pace.

“Rory,” I heard North say.

“What?”

“Stop pacing. It’s stressing me out.”

I sat down on the grated metal floor behind him. “I just feel so useless right now. What can I do to help?”

Without taking his eyes off the screens in front of him, he reached into his back pocket and handed me his iPhone. “Find us some good music.”

Hours passed as the music played. North hummed a little as he worked. I was quiet, watching the back of him, waiting for the click click click ing of fingers on keys to go quiet. Finally it did. It was after eleven.

“Rory,” he said urgently. I was tracing the squares of grating beneath me with my fingertips. “I’m in the algorithm. I need you to check my work to make sure I got the changes right.”

I scrambled to my feet. There was a string of words and symbols in a box on the center screen. “Uh. I have no idea what any of that means.”

“I know that,” North said, sounding testy. I looked at him then and saw how tired he was.

“What can I do?” I said.

“Read it out loud,” he told me, closing his eyes. “My eyes are swimming, I can’t even see it anymore. Just read exactly what you see.”

He kept his eyes closed the entire time I read it, his brow furrowed tight. When I got to the end, the muscles in his face went slack.

“North?”

Several seconds passed. My heart sank to my knees. I said his name again, quieter this time, almost a whisper.

“There was a fifteen-minute period about an hour ago when I was convinced it couldn’t be done,” he said with his eyes shut. “The algorithm was too nuanced to just do a one-to-one exchange of the inputs, not without driving people’s cars into one another or risking mass suicide.” Mass suicide . At the whim of an algorithm, no less. I pictured that dopey smile on Beck’s face as he interacted with Lux and shuddered. “I couldn’t see a way around it,” North said. “I was ready to give up.” He opened his eyes finally and looked at me.