If only he knew.
“I love you,” he said.
That’s when I stuck him. It was quick and nearly painless, a sharp pinprick on the back of his neck, where it wouldn’t leave a mark, and even as he reached to feel for a bump or a bite, his arm dropped to his side, and then, as the toxin worked its way through his system, he slumped back on the couch, unconscious.
I didn’t ask Jude where he’d gotten the sleep serum, or the microjector. That was the whole point of Jude: He got things. He’d assured me that it was harmless, with no lasting effects. I hadn’t asked about that, either.
I stood, staring down at my father, his suit rumpled, spittle dripping from the corner of his mouth. Messy and vulnerable, the two things he’d sworn never to be.
“I could kill you right now,” I said.
His eyes fluttered. Could he hear me? “It’s better this way,” I told him, hoping he could, even if he wouldn’t remember. “I’d rather be a machine than have to walk around carrying your disgusting genes.” I had looked like him, that’s what everyone had always said. “I’d rather be a machine than be any part of you. I’d rather be dead.”
It was self-indulgent, wasting time like this.
Not to mention pathetic, giving voice to all the things I was too cowardly to tell him when he was awake. Someday, I promised myself. Then I slipped the ViM from his front pocket and pressed his index finger against the nanotape Zo had given me, recording a fresh, clean print. As a final touch, I propped his head on a pillow, leaving the downer glass overturned by his fingertips. He’d think he slipped into the office to get away from it all, dosed more than he’d planned, and zoned out. If all went well, he’d still be out when we returned, and I could slide the ViM back into his pocket. It would be like nothing had happened.
Jude said he wouldn’t remember any of this, not the dosing, not the conversation that came before it. He would wake up with a headache, wondering how he’d ended up in the office, wondering why he’d fallen so soundly asleep, never remembering the way I’d humiliated myself before him, accepting his pathetic apology. Or the way he’d humiliated himself by believing me.
I texted Zo to let her know we were ready for the next step. Then it was time for Jude’s cue: Ten minutes, I texted him. Then go.
I slipped back into the thick of the party, swapping facetious small talk with some BioMax functionary whose name I could never remember, trying to follow his boring story of vacationing at some domed golf resort and scoring a hole in one while a lightning storm raged overhead, but all I could think was, Any second now, come on, now, now.
Now.
The doors blew open. Jude and his crew of mechs stormed the banquet hall, megaphones blaring the same message as the giant LED boards they carried: SAVONA LIES! The ten mechs elbowed their way into the crowd, hooting and shouting, leaping on tables and chairs and, in one memorable case, the shoulders of a particularly tall and broad corp exec. As they scattered, they released periodic bursts of neon smoke that curled itself into accusatory slogans before puffing into thin air.
The crowd exploded into a mixture of cheers and boos. There were a few high-pitched screams, some laughter, several panicked calls for security—and a hundred slack-jawed, wide-eyed, mind-blown orgs gaping at the wild mechs, backing away whenever one threatened to come near. BioMax reps scuttled back and forth trying to catch the interlopers, but Jude and his cronies zigzagged through the crowd, using orgs as shields and buffers, leaping over furniture and, when necessary, throwing handfuls of cocktail wieners and popcorn shrimp at their pursuers. It was, in the purest sense of the word, anarchy.
And two weeks ago it would have killed me. I stood at the center of the storm, watching Jude tear down everything I’d worked for, knowing it would play on the network for weeks, in constant loops and mashups, the demented mechs bent on sowing destruction through org society.
Exactly as we’d planned.
The crowd was too dense for any kind of effective security protocol—and there were too many witnesses for any kind of violence, especially against the very mechs that BioMax claimed to be so desperate to protect. Which was how Jude managed to weave his way through the orgs all the way to the dais at the front of the room. He clambered up on stage and, as the BioMax reps pushed their way through an increasingly uncooperative crowd, unleashed his j’accuse on Savona: a litany of his crimes, a list of every mech who’d been attacked, lynched, battered, bruised by the hatred stoked by Savona and his Brothers. Name after name after name. It was transfixing.
But I tore myself away. Zo was waiting by the locked door that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, ready to use the security code on my father’s ViM to get us through. Jude had provided as much distraction as we could have hoped for. The room was absorbed by his spectacle; no one would notice two girls disappear behind a wall. But something made me pause in the doorway and turn back. From across the room, an island of calm in the pandemonium, Auden was watching. Savona stood by his side, eyes on the stage. The security team had formed a human barrier between them and the rampaging mechs, and I wondered why they hadn’t been dragged off to safety. It occurred to me Savona wouldn’t have allowed it. What better way to solidify his martyrdom than to stay publicly calm, stoic even, while the mechs did everything they could to tear him apart?
But I couldn’t worry about that now. Any more than I could worry about the fact that Auden was watching us.
“What?” Zo hissed, when she noticed I wasn’t moving. “Come on.”
“Shh!”
She followed my gaze, and saw him seeing us. Her face went white.
Auden tilted his head, a nearly imperceptible nod. Then turned away.
“Shit.” Zo’s eyes bugged. “We have to call this off. He’s going to—”
“He won’t do anything.” I yanked her through the door and let it close behind us.
“He saw us.”
“He won’t tell anyone.”
“So now you’re a mind reader?”
“Trust me,” I said, and hoped I was right. “It’s fine. He’ll keep his mouth shut.” Zo didn’t ask why I was so sure. A good thing, since I had no answer for her. The truth was, I wasn’t sure about anything except that it was probably wishful thinking to imagine Auden would protect us. But I couldn’t stop. Not when we were so close. If he sounded the alarm, we would deal. Until then we would keep going.
It was almost too easy. We were well beyond business hours, the halls were nearly deserted, and I could only trust that Jude was keeping the building’s secops plenty busy. On the rare occasions that footsteps seemed to pass too close, the maze of corridors left plenty of options for ducking out of sight. We swept past each automated security checkpoint with perfectly legitimate credentials. Our father’s security codes flashed from the stolen ViM and, as we ventured into more protected zones, his fingerprint opened one door after another. The blueprints indicated a server room in the basement where classified information—like technical specifications for the download process—would likely be held. These days nearly everything was stored in a data cloud on the network, powered by thousands upon thousands of servers whirring away in top-secret locations. It was why you could make a ViM in any shape and size—the Virtual Machine didn’t need to hold any information of its own; it just linked you up to the network and you were off. But nearly every corp had its own small server system tucked away somewhere, a skeleton closet for data it didn’t trust to the public storehouse. Walled off from the network, forbidden ViM access, safe from prying eyes. Zo had admitted she’d been studying up on hacking this kind of stuff for years, she and her loser friends whom I’d thought spent all their time loitering in the parking lot burning out on dozers—and she was convinced she could find the data and download it.