Torn

10. EMPTY

Of course it was call-me-Ben who came in and found me on the floor, back against the wall, knees pulled up to my chest. It was always Ben, delivering the bad news, delivering the truth, delivering me from evil, Ben, who fashioned himself my savior and all the while, I knew now, was only saving me so I could save him and BioMax, use my face to sell their story, and sell myself out with every word.

I didn’t fight him.

I searched myself, tried to find that certainty I’d had, that it was all lies, a game, that Riley was coming back—but it had slipped away. Truth or lie, the end result was the same: He was gone.

Somehow, I left the room and left the body behind. Small things registered: the pressure of Ben’s fingers on my arm, Zo’s strained grimace, Jude’s blank gaze. Nothing mattered.

Then, somehow, we were in a conference room: Jude, me, my sister, call-me-Ben. Again I had to shrug off the strange sensation that the day was repeating itself, rearranging itself with different places and different players. Jude was like a zombie. Zo told him when to walk, when to talk, pushed him into a chair. I couldn’t look at him, because Jude was unthinkable without Riley, as—no matter how much I’d tried to deny it—Riley was unthinkable without Jude.

“How does this happen?” I asked Ben. Thinking, You did this. We stepped out of line, and you punished us.

Ben held out his hands, encompassing his explanation between them: empty air. “We don’t know. I’m so sorry. This has never—We’ve been caught unawares here, all of us. But I can assure you there’s no need for you to worry—if this was a problem with our software, we would have caught it much earlier than this. No, this had to be some kind of external stimulus.”

“Someone did this to him,” I translated.

“That’s our thought, yes.”

“Someone like you.”

He literally convulsed at the suggestion, his eyebrows flying up as his mouth twisted down and his hands fluttered. Every time I saw him, Ben seemed less and less the preternaturally cool and collected mannequin I’d once known and loathed. His slimy self-assurance had been an almost reassuring constant. I needed it now, something to hate, something steady and immovable to push back against.

“Industrial sabotage,” he said.

“No. You did this. To shut us up, to punish us, I don’t know. Why don’t you just admit it? Why pretend you were trying to help him?”

“I’m not pretending. BioMax has an obligation—I have an obligation—to honor our contracts with our clients. To help them when they come to us. Doctors don’t heal just the people they like.”

“You’re no doctor.”

“Still. What happened in the boardroom has nothing to do with what happens in here. Can you understand that?”

I didn’t know who we were, pretending that it mattered what I thought. As if I had any power. I had nothing.

“And you know very well that certain factions have been researching this kind of disruption for quite a while now,” he continued, when I didn’t respond. “If they’ve succeeded…”

I glanced at Jude, certain his eyes were burning through me. But his head was down, his eyes on the table. Maybe he hadn’t even heard.

Yes, this could have been BioMax striking back against us after we’d had the asinine temerity to show our hand and try to force theirs. But it didn’t make sense—Riley had never been the biggest threat to them; they’d made that very clear in their pursuit of Jude, not to mention their cultivation of me. Shutting him up wouldn’t do anything but inflame us, make us more determined to do… whatever it was they thought we had the power to do. If they wanted to stop us, there were easier ways.

And, as call-me-Ben said, they weren’t the only ones who hated us. I’d seen the lab with my own eyes, the Brotherhood’s attempt to find a way to destroy us. To corrupt not just our brains but the brains stored on the servers; to take care of us—to delete us—once and for all. It was why Jude had been so determined to blow the place up, with its researchers inside.

But Riley and I had saved the researchers, saved Savona and his scientists, set them free.

I had set them free.

Don’t think about it.

“You still aren’t telling me how it could have happened,” I said. “Or even exactly what happened.”

“Think of it as a virus. Something must have been done to his uplink jack. He was clearly in the middle of the process when it happened, and it’s the best explanation we can come up with for how the stored files would also have been corrupted.”

“You’re saying this isn’t random—someone went after him, specifically?”

“Looks like it. The uplinker was most likely sabotaged. The network servers are completely inaccessible, so the damage must have been done on his end. Probably someone close to him, with access to his possessions, someone he trusted. Can you think of any—”

Jude’s chair clattered to the floor. He was on his feet, fists clenched, and then he was out of the room, his footsteps echoing down the hall.

“Where’s he going?” Ben looked bewildered.

I didn’t bother to answer. “Come on,” I ordered Zo. She didn’t ask questions, just ran after me as I ran after Jude.

Because I knew where he was going. I’d made the same connection. Someone Riley trusted, even if no one else did.

Sari.

We caught him before he had time to drive away, and threw ourselves into the car before he could lock the door.

“Get out,” he said.

“I’m coming with you,” I told him.

He didn’t argue.

I didn’t ask where he was taking us. I assumed he knew exactly where to find her. As Jude was so quick to boast, he knew things. The car turned in a familiar direction, and I curled up with my back to Zo and my forehead against the window. Whatever she did, I couldn’t see, didn’t care. I didn’t understand why she was still there, following us from one nightmare to the next, why suddenly every time I turned, Zo was there, the hole I’d finally gotten used to suddenly filled. Like she could wake up one day and decide to be my sister again. Suddenly I hated her, for being able to come back, disappear and resurface and disappear again, whenever she chose, when Riley never would again.

Zo had barely known Riley, and for most of the time she’d known him, she’d hated him, just for being a mech. She’d been part of the Brotherhood, even if she’d helped us in the end. Was that supposed to absolve her? Was I supposed to forget?

The anger came out of nowhere, so strong that I had to wrap my hands around the seat belt to keep them from wrapping around her throat—and then it drained away, as quickly as it arrived. I felt nothing.

The city rose before us, jagged knives stabbing the gray sky. Jude stopped the car long before we got anywhere near the dying towers. Instead he guided us into the dribbling remnants where the city faded into the wilderness, a kingdom of low, crumbling stone buildings, their roofs sagging or caved in.

“She’s here,” Jude said.

She could have been anywhere. “How do you know?”

“I know.” Jude stopped the car in front of a three-story house that looked no different from any of the others, except for the red streaks of graffiti smeared across the stone like it had been marked in blood. “Rats always go back to the nest.”

Zo’s eyes bugged as she took in the burned-out cars and broken windows, the clumps of orgs with rotting teeth, rotting skin, rotting faces gathered around fires that stank of rubber and dogshit. I realized this was her first time. The stories had haunted our childhood, tales of men like animals, prowling the streets, blood smeared across their faces like warrior tattoos, long nails sharpened like knives, bodies writhing in the gutters, screwing or dying or both at once. For Zo, as it had been for me, the city was a nightmare land, a monster in a bedtime story, the beast that would swallow you whole if you ventured too close. And this decrepit corner of hell was, according to Riley, the worst of the worst: a lawless no-man’s-land of the lost and abandoned, the castoffs in a city of castaways, the lowest of human refuse—and the animals who preyed on them. All the lies they told you about the city, Riley had said. That’s where they come true.

“You can stay here,” I told Zo.

“By myself?”

I had visions of returning to a car set ablaze, or graffitied and crushed, or returning to find the car gone altogether, and Zo—

I didn’t let myself imagine any further.

She drew back her shoulders and opened the door. “I’m not scared,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I should never have brought her here.

Jude didn’t wait for us to gather our nerve. He had already started toward the house. I could drag Zo back into the car and drive away, taking her somewhere safe. I could protect her, like I hadn’t protected Riley.

Or I could follow Jude.

“Let’s go,” Zo said again. I let her make the choice for me. She took off after Jude, and I followed, leaving the car and any thoughts of refuge behind.

The house looked worse inside than it did out. There was no furniture, no light, no visible features but a gaping, splintered hole in the center of the room where the floor had given way. Sari crouched in the far corner, tucked into a blanket, watching the door as if she’d been waiting for us.

She flew to her feet. “I didn’t do anything.” As she spoke, she backed away, pressing herself against the wall. Jude advanced slowly.

“What did you do to him?”

“You deaf? Nothing.”

“Then why run?” His eyes lit on the pile of clothes and electronics she’d snatched from Riley’s place.

Sari stepped between us and the treasure hoard. “So?” she spit out. “They don’t need it. They’ve got plenty of credit; let them buy another set of speakers.”

“Are we supposed to buy another Riley?” I asked.

She didn’t bother to look at me. “What’s the bitch talking about?”

“Riley’s dead.” Jude flattened her to the wall, one hand pinning her wrist, the other at her throat. Zo sucked in a sharp breath, but I didn’t move. Couldn’t, or wouldn’t, it didn’t matter. I felt like I was watching them on-screen, with no choice but to wait patiently and see how things turned out.

Sari shook her head. “Fuck you.”

“You killed him.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

“You’re machines,” Sari said. “You can’t die.”

He grimaced. “Surprised me, too.”

She hit at him with her free arm, but Jude grabbed it. Her wrists were narrow, and he was able to hold them both with one hand. His fingers tightened around her throat.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Good.”

Zo leaned into me. “Shouldn’t we do something?”

I ignored her, like Jude ignored Sari’s struggling. “What did you do to him?” he said, his voice deadened. He was staring past her, into the wall. Like he was the machine she expected, mindlessly pursuing his mission directive.

“Nothing!” Sari shouted. “She said nothing would happen to him.”

Jude threw her to the ground. “Who said!”

“Stop it!” Zo screamed.

Jude knelt over Sari, pinning her down. “Shut her up or get her out of here,” he said quietly. “Or I will.”

I still couldn’t move. Zo shut herself up.

Sari wasn’t fighting anymore. She lay on the ground, eyes closed. “He’s not really dead, is he?”

“Tell me who.”

“Just some lady. She gave me something to stick in that thing he used for backing up.”

“She walked up to you one day and gave it to you?”

“She paid me, okay?” Sari snarled. “She had credit and I needed credit, and that’s it. She told me it wouldn’t hurt him. She said you couldn’t get hurt.”

“She lied.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know?”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Tell me something!” Jude drove a fist into the rotting floorboards.

“I think she was one of those Brotherhood freaks, okay? She had one of those robes and everything.”

Jude slapped her.

“What the hell—?”

“You killed him!” Jude roared.

Absolute control demands absolute release; that’s what Jude had always preached. There were no middle grounds, no compromises, only two opposing states, and a lightning trigger between one and the other. He was always in control, every action deliberate, every decision considered. For Jude, even letting go was a willful choice, a verdict delivered after evaluation of all the options; even that was purposeful.

This wasn’t.

Zo’s nails dug into my arm. It meant do something, it meant stop him, it meant fix this. Or I could stand there and watch Sari die.

“Please,” Sari whimpered.

There was no one to stop him, no one to punish him. It was the city: no rules, no consequences. And if there were no consequences, it was almost like it hadn’t happened.

No one would miss her, I thought.

Riley had been her only ally—and she’d erased him.

I’m a machine, I thought, as Jude raised a fist, this one not aimed at the innocent floorboards, but at her face, her soft, pliable, breakable org face, the one that was so good at lying and pretending to be someone else, someone good. I have no soul; that’s what they say.

All I had to do was not act. No one would ever know, except the three of us.

“Stop.” I didn’t know I was going to say it until the word was out of my mouth. “Jude, don’t.”

He didn’t let her go. But his fist dropped to his side.

“She killed him,” Jude said.

I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, half expecting him to send me flying across the room. But he didn’t move. Neither did Sari, still prone beneath him, waiting for me to decide her fate. I hoped she didn’t think I was doing this for her.

I hoped she knew I wanted her to die.

“Don’t do this,” I said.

“I have to.”

“This isn’t you.”

At that he did shrug me off, weakly, and it was unconvincing enough that I tried again, but he grabbed my arm, squeezing tight. “You don’t know everything about me.”

“He did.”

“Shut up.”

“Riley told me, that night before the temple, that you couldn’t do… this.”

“He wouldn’t have said that.”

“He did.”

“I can do this,” Jude said. “For him.”

“This wouldn’t be for him.”

I felt dirty, invoking him like that. Dirty or not, it worked.

Jude stood up.

Sari didn’t wait around for him to change his mind. She streaked past us like a feral cat, disappearing into the shadows. Long, silent seconds passed.

Jude’s shoulders slouched. His head lolled on his neck. His arms hung limp at his sides. For the first time it was easy to picture him as he’d been before the download: slumped in a chair, body defeated. Except that in the one pic I’d seen from that time, his eyes had still been alive—something in him had been fighting, strong. Unbowed by its prison of atrophied muscles and sagging flesh. Now, when I tipped his head up and forced him to see me, those eyes were dead.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered.

I didn’t say anything.

“I hate you,” he said.

I put my arms around him, and he let me, and, dry-eyed and heartless and mechanical, we held each other up.

So what do you do?

What do you do when there’s nothing to do next? When it’s over, when whatever rage and panic drove you from one moment to the next disappears, and there’s no more must do this, must go there, must stop him, must save him? When you can’t let the day end, because today was the last day you saw him, the last day you heard his voice, the last day he knew? Today, when the sun came up, when you opened your eyes, he was still in the world; today is still a world he knew, and so is still a world you understand. Today he’s still an is, his loss something still happening, an unfolding event, a sentence with a question mark; today there’s still a what happens next.

What do you do when today ends and you know tomorrow will open on a world in which he’s dead? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, until he’s a thing that once happened, a thing you used to know.

People use words like “unthinkable.” But what do you do when the unthinkable happens, and refusing to believe it won’t bring him back?

How can anything seem unthinkable anymore, when you’re a machine, a living impossibility, a stack of memories in a head-shaped box, when you, the real you, died almost two years ago, just like he did?

How could you be stupid enough to forget that the unthinkable happens all the time?

Happens to you.

Which is why you should know exactly what to do: what you always do, what you have to do. Nothing. Because reality doesn’t need your permission to exist; tomorrow doesn’t need your approval to dawn. You go home, to a place that was never your home, with a sister who by her own choice is no longer your sister and a brother whose shared grief makes him family in a way that shared skin, shared circuitry, shared manufacturer never could. You go home and you lie in a bed that used to be his and you think about uploading the way he uploaded, following his lead, wherever it takes you. You think that if you really loved him, you wouldn’t hesitate; you would want his infection burning through your artificial veins.

You would, but you don’t, and so you close your eyes and are grateful that you don’t have to try to sleep with memories of his face burning the insides of your lids, that you don’t have to bury your face in a pillow so the others don’t hear you sob and scream, that your hands are still and unshaken. You’re grateful, for once, that your body can’t feel, that the truth stays lodged in your mind, where it can’t hurt, that you can close your eyes and shift your consciousness in that familiar, deeply inhuman way, flicking an internal switch. It’s not like falling asleep, fading away. It’s like one moment you’re awake and in agony and wondering how long it will be before you forget the sound of his voice.

And the next moment—

You’re gone.

When I woke up the next morning, Riley was still dead.

Zo was curled up next to me in bed, her eyes slitted and fixed on Jude. I suspected he had been up all night. Maybe watching me, to make sure I followed through on my promise not to upload a backup, just in case Riley’s wasn’t an isolated case. Or he just hadn’t been able to face the end of the day. Riley’s last day.

He sat with his back to the wall, eyes open but darting sightlessly back and forth. It was the telltale flicker of his long lashes that gave it away: He was linked into the network, staring at us but seeing his zone or a vidlife or, for all I knew, the president’s latest sex vid. Anything to keep the world away.

I poked Zo. “I know you’re awake.”

For a moment she didn’t move, like she could fool me. Then she threw in an admirable pantomime of “waking up.” “I am now.”

“Uh-huh.”

She jerked her head at Jude. “Can he hear us when he’s doing that?”

“With perfect clarity,” Jude said, gaze still blind.

Zo flinched at his voice. I wondered how long it would be before she stopped seeing him the way he’d been in the city, like an animal.

“Get up,” Jude said abruptly, closing his eyes in the long, slow blink that I knew would disconnect him from the network. “We’ve got a problem.”

I almost laughed.

He smiled weakly. “I mean a new one.”

It was the lead story on every news zone. Ben’s virus analogy had been more apt than he knew: Riley was patient zero. The infection had spread through the system, and any mech who connected their uplink before word got out had been wiped. Backing up, the process that was supposed to be our ticket to eternal life, now meant death. The permanent, org kind, from which we were meant to be exempt. Jude was already flying across the network, checking in with every mech he knew—and too many of them didn’t answer. The rest of us—the “lucky” ones—were dying too, just more slowly. The virus had wiped out our stored backups, and obviously we couldn’t make more. These bodies were now all we had.

It was strange, this sudden awareness of vulnerability. It was supposed to be the reason the orgs hated us, the reason there would always be an us and a them. They died; we didn’t. And now that we were just like them, it meant… nothing? Meant only that now they had the opportunity to get rid of us one by one. Vids popped up of flash mobs surrounding mechs, dismantling them piece by piece, a helpful how-to of the unmaking of a person. Like the virus, or whatever it was, had granted ultimate permission, had turned us from a threat into a target, literally overnight, even though nothing had changed except our mortality, except the fact that erasing us now meant erasing us for good.

“That’s what this is,” Jude said, still inhabiting some other plane of preternatural calm. “Genocide.”

We watched the story unfold on the news zones, scrambled to track down the mechs we knew, and didn’t speculate about who was behind it. Partly because we’d already settled on the Brotherhood as the most likely suspect; partly because we were afraid they weren’t acting alone. If any of this was BioMax’s fault, if this was retribution, then that made it our fault. That made Riley our fault.

The BioMax connection surfaced within the hour, an hour that felt like a week, barricaded in that tiny apartment, poring over the vids, just like old times at Quinn’s estate, when we’d locked ourselves behind electrified walls and try to decipher who hated us and what they planned next.

It came in as a joint announcement, simulcast to all the major news zones and dumped into the personal zones of me, Jude, and probably any mech they could track. Rai Savona and our old friend M. Poulet, appearing side by side, faces somber and pale. “When I founded the Brotherhood of Man, I did so to elevate and illuminate, to remind the human race of our unique destiny in God’s plan.”

Zo snorted. But it was a mark of how serious things were that Jude held back whatever retort must have been on his tongue. I did the same.

“I blame myself for this tragedy,” Savona continued. “A tragedy born from the mind of an unstable teenager.”

No.

“I felt I had to atone for my own mistakes, and so I allowed myself to overlook the zealot hiding in our midst. I ceded control to a very young, very damaged boy—I gave him a platform and a voice, and I have only myself to blame for his wrongheaded actions.”

“The Honored Rai Savona came to us with his suspicions, and our investigation confirmed them,” M. Poulet said. “Auden Heller masterminded the release of an insidious virus directed at download recipients, or mechs, as they often refer to themselves. We’re doing everything we can to apprehend Heller, and our brightest minds are at work on the virus. In the meantime we implore the public to be respectful—”

“Respectful,” a pretty word for “not murderous, bloodthirsty, and mad with a furious skinner bloodlust.”

“—and we assure all download recipients that the problem will soon be taken care of. But we remind all download recipients that this is a very serious matter. As of now, forty-seven erasures have been confirmed. Several hundred clients remain unaccounted for. The source of infection appears to be the uplink connection, so this is crucial: Do not upload your backup memories until we have this problem solved. More information will follow, as soon as we have it.”

Forty-seven “erasures.” I wondered if they’d all gone by accident. Or if some had been left behind, like me, and just decided it would be easier to let the virus run its course.

It seemed they’d come to the end of the script, when Savona leaned in and grabbed the microphone, eyes burning into the camera lens. “Auden, if you’re out there, if you’re listening to this, please come to me. I understand, son. You’ve been hurt, you wanted to lash out and hurt them back, but this is not the way. Come home to the Brotherhood, and help us fix this. Save yourself.”

“He’s lying,” I said.

“Obviously,” Jude said. “This has Savona’s stink all over it.”

“No, I mean, he’s lying about Auden.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of defending him?” Jude asked. “The guy shot you. What else does he have to do to convince you he’s not on your side? He thinks you’re the freaking devil.”

“And you think he is. So you’re not exactly objective on the subject.”

“And you are?”

“I’m not defending him,” I said.

“Really? Because it sounds like—”

“I’m not defending him for his sake. The more we know about what’s going on, the better chance we have of stopping it.”

“Except we don’t know that Savona’s lying just because you feel it. There’s a little difference between a fact and a wish.”

“So you’re saying you think Auden’s behind this?” I asked him.

“Honestly?” Jude paused. “I don’t think that twonk could plan a picnic, much less a genocide.”

“So—”

“So who cares? Either Savona’s telling one lie, or he’s telling a bunch of them. It’s beside the point.”

He was right. The point was someone trying to kill us. BioMax, according to the private messages it had sent out to its mech mailing list, was working to “contain” the problem and “strongly suggested” that all download recipients report to a facility they’d designated as Safe Haven, to protect us from org violence and any further attacks while we were in such a “vulnerable state.”

A state no more vulnerable than any orgs on any given day, but somehow it felt like walking around with a knife at our throats. Because what if this was just phase one? Org viruses mutated; maybe this one would, too. Maybe in its next variation it would kill us where we stood. We drew power from a wireless grid—if they could hack the servers, no reason to think they couldn’t hack the grid, too. Poison us from afar. They’d wiped out our backups—wasn’t the obvious next step to eliminate us once and for all? I didn’t see how any Safe Haven could keep us safe from that.