Grady narrowed his eyes and then felt for the video device hung around his neck.
It was gone. He tore off the covers and searched the sheets.
“What’s wrong? What are you looking for?”
He leaned down to look alongside and then under the bed. Leaping out of it, he heaved and overturned the bed entirely. In a moment he came up with the silver chain on which he had hung the video device—a neat cut severing the loop, the clasp still in place. “Cotton…” He bolted out of bed, still wearing all of his clothes, and raced through the bedroom door.
Alexa was right behind him. “What’s wrong?”
“The video record from Hibernity is gone. It has everything!” He looked both ways in the hallway and realized the sounds he was hearing were coming from the large workshop, not the kitchen, and so he ran toward it.
She followed close behind.
Grady moved down the corridor. Glancing for any open doors but finding none, he walked all the way to the end, where the corridor opened to a truly enormous technical workshop. There were robotic arms by the dozen on tables and on shelves—in fact, whole domestic robots, and shelf after shelf of inscrutable high-tech components. Not a circuit board in sight—just solid, shimmering, optically strange metamaterials and coils of electropolymer muscle. The place was possibly a third of the entire floor—a good three thousand square feet.
Ahead Grady saw Richard Cotton sitting at a workbench, viewing some type of cellular culture through an electron microscope display. Nearby robotic arms performed precision movements over petri dishes.
“Cotton!”
The man turned and lifted up a crystal visor he wore on a strap around his head. “Whoa. What’s with all the shouting?”
Grady stomped up to him. “Where the hell is it?”
Cotton looked quizzically to Alexa. Then back to Grady. “Where is what?”
“My video device. The one that was around my neck.”
Cotton raised one eyebrow. “I don’t appreciate the tone.”
Grady grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him off his chair, toppling it. “I’m not fucking around! Tell me where it is! I know you have it.”
Cotton tried to protect the work on the table. “Damnit! Don’t disturb those cultures. You’re going to mess everything up.”
Alexa gazed at nearby workbenches and pointed to something held in place by a robotic clamp. “Is this it?”
Grady turned and felt relief upon seeing it—but then twice as much anger. He released Cotton, dropping him onto the floor, and moved to grab Chattopadhyay’s video device from the clamp. It was held fast.
“What the hell are you doing with it?”
Cotton got to his feet. “Well, if you must know, I could tell you weren’t going to part with it without a hassle, and it sounded like it might be useful in damaging the BTC.”
“Release it. I want it now!”
“All right, relax.” Cotton stepped up and tapped a button on a holographic display. The clamp released. “Don’t touch anything else.”
Grady grabbed the device before it could fall. He pressed the “play” button and was relieved to see Chattopadhyay’s video appear.
Cotton nodded at it. “I was able to copy all the data on it. The video. The DNA. The gyroscope-decoding instructions. Just one problem: There’s no gyroscope data to decode.”
Grady was making another necklace from polymer thread he’d found nearby and looping the video device onto it. “What do you mean there’s no gyroscope data?”
“I mean there isn’t any gyroscope data. It’s a separate chip. Maybe it got fried by the electromagnetic pulse, maybe when you came in contact with Morrison while his power suit was shooting sparks—I don’t know. But the gyroscope is fried.”
Grady glared at him. “What the hell did you do to it? And why did you sneak in during the night and cut this off my neck? You cut it off my neck!”
“Time was a factor. If the BTC burst in in the middle of the night—before you’d gotten up the courage to trust me with it—we might have lost it entirely. And it might prove useful as a bargaining chip to keep us all alive—maybe threaten to release the data if they don’t back off.”
“You asshole. You broke it.”
“I didn’t break anything. It’s an impressive little piece of homemade nanotech, though, I must say. One of your prisoner friends really knows his business, that’s a fact. It’s biological—looks like they used blood plasma for the DNA encoding. Grown bone culture for the housing. I wouldn’t want to have to guard those fuckers.”
Grady gripped his temples, distraught. “That data was the only way for me to find my way back to Hibernity—to bring back help.”
Cotton gave him a look. “Don’t be crazy. The BTC knows where Hibernity is.” He turned to Alexa. “You probably know, don’t you?”
She pondered the question. “I don’t, unfortunately. Hedrick has a tight hold on that information. The AIs bring pilots to and from Hibernity with blast shields down, so even they don’t know.” She turned to Grady. “But Cotton’s right, it’s got to be somewhere on the BTC network, and if one of Cotton’s BTC turncoats can get it for us, you should be back in business.”
Grady exhaled and hung the device around his neck again. He cast a dark look Cotton’s way as he left the workshop. “Cotton, if you take anything of mine again without my permission, you will regret it.”
Cotton called after him. “Grumpy before breakfast, I see. Shall I cook up something?”
Grady returned to his bedroom and shut the door. He sat on the floor in the darkest corner and reactivated the video device—fast-forwarding from one prisoner testimonial to another, making sure they were all there.
“…discovered the relationship between protein fifty-three and malignant neoplasm…”
Grady clicked to another.
“I am Petra Klapner. I was imprisoned in 1993…”
There was a sharp knock on the door. Grady ignored it, but then Alexa poked her head in. “You okay?”
Grady nodded as he clicked to the next video.
“I am Anton Bezizlik. In 1998 I was taken by the BTC…”
Alexa entered and closed the door behind her. She studied the holographic person floating before them. “These are the prisoners.”
Grady nodded.
She stood watching. “I remember that man. I lectured him about his selfishness.”
“…please tell my family that I am still alive. It has been so many years.”
Alexa caught herself, feeling the enormity of what she’d done.
Grady spoke without looking at her. “You have to understand. I cannot fail these people. I cannot.”
The middle-aged Russian man on-screen rocked back and forth. “…my daughter…” The man’s face streamed with tears as he struggled to speak. “She will have lived her life, never knowing me. I think of all that I have lost.”
Alexa felt as though the hologram was speaking directly to her—overwhelming her with guilt.
Grady gestured to it. “These are some of the greatest minds that ever lived. There are da Vincis and Galileos in that prison. They could do so much, and instead, they’ve been brutalized.” Grady turned to see Alexa’s distraught face as she watched the man on-screen.
She spoke matter-of-factly. “We need to rescue them.”
“What?”
“We need to rescue them. But we need to do something else first—bring down the BTC.”
Grady looked at her with surprise. “They created you.”
“That doesn’t mean they own me.”
They heard Cotton’s voice shout across the loft. “Hey! Get in here! There’s something you should see!”