The Girl Who Dared to Lead Read online

  My friends were all shouting, but I couldn’t make out anything they were saying over the sound. The purple storm onscreen swelled, and I realized that it had to be Jang-Mi—the color of the lightning was the same color the sentinel’s eyes had been when she was talking with Tian. It was her, and she was already going crazy. My gaze dropped to the hard drive on the desk, and I realized I had to stop her before it got any worse.

  I pulled one hand away from my ear, my eyes squeezing into slits as the buffer between my ear and the noise disappeared and the stabbing pain intensified, and reached for the drive that housed her, determined to rip the cables out and stomp on the damn thing. But Leo caught my arm.

  I pulled against him, knowing that he was trying to save her, but he shook me and then squatted down, getting in my face. He immediately pointed to his ear and then ran the finger over his throat, and I realized he was telling me to mute the speakers.

  I was the only one who could; Cornelius couldn’t hear us asking him to do it, so I had to use the neural transmitter. I just hoped Leo’s firewall around him was holding, and that he still had control over the room.

  Cornelius, kill every speaker in my quarters, I thought, not wanting to waste a second asking if he was all right. I figured I would know if he was in a moment, depending on whether this worked or not.

  A second too long later, the speakers shut off. The sudden silence was almost as alarming as the noise, but that was probably because I could practically hear my ear canals throbbing from the auditory assault, which made me wonder if I was deaf.

  There is a hostile program in my terminal, Cornelius suddenly said, and his voice was like a shout in my ears, causing me to cry out in pain. A sound that was also too loud. Should I—

  SHUT UP! I thought. I wasn’t sure if I could project anger into a thought, but Scipio help me, I tried to make the order the most imperative thing I could. If he transmitted into my ear canal again, I was pretty sure it was going to implode.

  “Oh my gosh, that was awful,” Tian whispered a second later, her voice only a breathy whisper.

  I was relieved to hear it—it meant I wasn’t deaf. “Leo, what is she doing?” I choked out just as softly, opening my eyes to find him right in my personal space, stretched out in front of me so he could get to the keyboard.

  “She’s attacking everything,” he said, also keeping his voice low. “Anything she can. The firewalls are holding.”

  But something in his voice told me that they weren’t going to last for much longer.

  “Can’t you calm her down? Give her… I don’t know, some sort of digitized sedative or something?”

  He looked askance at me for a moment, and then returned his view to the screen, his fingers only pausing for a fraction of a second. I shrank back, feeling dumb for asking the question, but refused to give up the thread. “Leo, if those firewalls go down, I’m smashing her.”

  The flashes on the screen suddenly intensified, increasing in speed, and Tian took a step forward, her eyes wide and searching. “Guys… can she hear us?”

  Leo and I exchanged looks. “I only muted the speakers,” I said, and he grimaced.

  “She can hear us, and you just threatened her,” Maddox murmured. “Great.”

  I glowered at her, but didn’t say anything. She had a point.

  “Jang-Mi?” Tian said, her voice chirping brightly. “It’s me, Yu-Na. Well, Tian, but you like to call me Yu-Na. I’m sorry for my friend Liana. She’s just afraid you’re going to kill us.”

  She looked at the screens expectantly, but none of the flashes stopped. I noticed that some of the coding on the screen was beginning to change color where the lightning seemed to cross it, until the yellow was peppered with purple numbers.

  “Tian, I don’t think she’s in there,” I said.

  Tian ignored me. “Jang-Mi? If you are responding, I can’t hear you. We had to mute the speakers because there was a really bad noise coming from them. Not that it’s your fault, of course. Anyway, if you’re there, can you please just calm down and maybe stop attacking the code? We’re not trying to hurt you. We’re your friends.”

  Leo’s hand immediately slapped over mine, which was good, because the urge to say “No, we’re not” was overwhelming. Scipio help me, I was still eyeing the hard drive with malicious intent. I twisted my wrist around so that our hands were pressed palm to palm and then squeezed, my other hand already balled into a fist.

  For several long, agonizing seconds, the lightning storm on the screen continued to flash and rage, but then, ever so slowly, it began to recede. I watched it warily, fearing that the withdrawal was only in preparation for a final attack, but after a handful of heartbeats, the screens showed no sign of further changing.

  “Do you think Tian reached her?” Maddox murmured, still using a soft voice to spare our battered eardrums.

  “She must have,” Leo replied, giving my hand a final squeeze before letting go and leaning over the desk. I heard the sound of his fingers typing something, followed by his sharp intake of breath, but couldn’t get a good look at what he was seeing.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Leo shifted his weight to another leg and straightened, his face contemplative. “She sent a message: ‘Let me talk to my daughter or I will rip this cage apart and kill us all.’”

  I bit my automatic retort clean in half and swallowed it down, trying to keep my anger in check. Jang-Mi’s misconception that Tian was her daughter had kept the young girl safe, but I couldn’t help but feel that her neurotic obsession with Tian would be the death of us all, especially if she perceived us as a threat to Tian or herself. Making glib comments would only exacerbate that.

  “Put the speakers back on, Liana,” Tian said, still looking up at the screens. “Let her have her voice.”

  I resisted for a few seconds, bitterly reminded of how my mother still didn’t have a voice, and Jang-Mi didn’t deserve one, until I realized I was getting downright petty again, and transmitted the order with a focused command of Unmute speakers, directed at Cornelius.

  “—Na! Talk to me! Are you hurt? Have they hurt you? Tell Umma and I will make it better.”

  The voice started off as Cornelius’s, but as it continued on, the sounds heightened in pitch to become more soft and feminine. On the main terminal screen on the desk, the coding began to morph and change, until it resembled a glowing purple face. One with a broad shape, narrow, single-lidded eyes, a flat nose, and wide mouth. There weren’t many details to it, but it was clearly a face.

  “Yu-Na,” her voice came again, desperately impatient. “Talk to Umma. Are they threatening you? What are you doing to my daughter? Why can’t I see you?”

  On the other screens, the lightning flashed threateningly. Her plaintive screech had me ordering Cornelius to give her access to the cameras in this room only, and seconds later, Jang-Mi was frowning in confusion. “You’re… You’re not Yu-Na,” she said, her voice soft. “I couldn’t tell before, but… you’re not…” She looked around, her simple face somehow implying desperation. “This is a trick! You’ve disguised her somehow! Changed her looks to try to break me!”

  I looked up at Leo, who was clearly at a loss for how to respond to her paranoia, and then looked at Tian. I wasn’t capable of trying to convince Jang-Mi that we weren’t trying to hurt her because I was still emotionally screwed up in that regard. Besides, it seemed Tian was the only one she would listen to.

  “You might want to take this one, Tian,” I murmured.

  She gave me a wide-eyed nod, and then looked up at the screen. “Jang-Mi? I’m sorry, but you were right the first time. I’m not Yu-Na. My name is Christian, Tian for short, and the people in this room are my friends.” Alarm skittered through me at Tian’s choice to reveal who she really was to Jang-Mi, but I kept quiet, trusting that the young girl knew what she was doing. “We rescued you from the sentinel that the bad people put you into, after they made you do some really bad things.” I snorted derisively at that,
and earned dark looks from both Tian and Leo, but continued to stay silent, not trusting myself or what I might say. “Anyway… No one here is going to hurt you or me. As long as you promise not to hurt us in return.”

  There was a pause, and I studied the face on the screen. As rudimentary as it was, I could still clearly see the confusion Tian’s statement had generated in Jang-Mi, through the way her two-dimensional eyebrows drew together into angular slashes.

  “Tian?” she asked, her voice echoing her bewilderment. “I don’t understand. Where is Yu-Na?”

  Her desperation and panic began to mount again at that, causing the purple flashes to throb and grow, the lightning spreading out like long, skeletal fingers across the screens. Alarm threaded through me. Robbing Jang-Mi of her fantasy that Tian was her long-lost daughter probably was a mistake. She was about to go insane. We had to think of something—a lie that would appease her.

  Because I wasn’t sure she could handle the truth that she was a computer program who had no daughter.

  “Yu-Na is dead,” Leo said, even as I finished the thought, and I looked at him, my panic building. Of all the lies he could’ve gone with, that was the very last one we needed. I made a motion for him to stop, but he continued. “She died centuries ago. Her death is the reason her mother killed herself only a few years later, shortly after you were created. Do… Do you remember that?”

  I blinked at him, my alarm bleeding into confusion. Was it a lie? It sounded oddly specific, and I remembered Leo telling me that the individual Lionel Scipio had originally scanned to create Jang-Mi had died before Scipio was created, and before there had been a council.

  Jang-Mi’s face on the screen grew pensive. “I… do,” she said carefully. “I remember Yu-Na in the hospital. There was a man there… Lionel?”

  “Yes,” Leo exclaimed, clearly excited. I wasn’t sure about what, but I let him take the lead. “Lionel Scipio. You remember him?”

  Another pause. “Yes. He… wanted me to help him with something.” She bit her lip and then shook her head. “He wanted me to keep something… working?”

  “Yes!” Leo said. “Lionel wanted you to take care of Scipio.”

  “Scipio,” she murmured wistfully. “Home.” The last word came out broken, and it caused a pang of empathy for her. I crossed my arms over my chest, a mixture of turbulent emotions washing over me, but continued my silence, knowing it was the best and only choice.

  “Home?” Leo asked. “How do you mean?”

  Jang-Mi’s voice was distant when her reply finally came. “I was warm. Safe. Home. Then… burning. Cutting. They cut them away, their voices, their warmth! They took me from my home, forced me into a box for ages with no connection, no one to talk to, to share with… All alone.”

  Her voice broke again, and I felt nauseous. Even though I knew that Jang-Mi had been hurt in some way, it was different hearing about it from her point of view. A part of me wanted to rage at her still, but it was fading under the reality of her situation. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, exactly, but she sounded so heartbreakingly lost. Hurt and beyond scared.

  “I don’t understand,” Leo said. “Voices?”

  “Voices,” she repeated in agreement, a soft smile growing. “Karl and Jasper are my favorites, but I love them all. I miss them.”

  I knew Jasper, and Karl’s name I recognized as one of the AI fragments Leo had listed off. I glanced at him and saw him frowning. “What is it?” I asked, curious as to what he was thinking.

  “She shouldn’t know their names,” he replied.

  I frowned. That didn’t make any sense. “But you do. Why wouldn’t she?”

  “We were never allowed to interact with each other. I only learned about her and the others through what Lionel told me, after Scipio was already created and placed in the Core.”

  “The Core?” Jang-Mi said, becoming excited. “You’re taking me home? I want to go home. I have to tell everyone what happened to Karl.”

  Suddenly the net in my skull began to buzz, and I grabbed onto the desk just before a memory that was not my own hit me with staggering intensity.

  “What’s happening?” I shouted, rushing into a small room with several computer screens that were flashing blue and red.

  “It’s Scipio!” my sister cried in distress. Her fingers paused their frantic typing on the keyboard long enough for her to push back her glasses as she stared up at the screen, her eyes wide in horror. “Someone’s attacking him!”

  “What?!” I looked up at the screen, trying to analyze the raw bits of code dancing across it, trying to see what my sister was seeing. “How? Why hasn’t the firewall gone up?”

  “Whoever the bastard is, he’s good. He hijacked the firewall to make it turn against itself, and then gave it a purpose. It’s sheering out Scipio’s security controls!”

  Panic flooded me at my sister’s words. Scipio’s security controls were what allowed him to autonomously monitor his own coding. If they were stripped from him, he’d be blind.

  “Can’t you do something?”

  My sister nodded, and then turned around to face me, her eyes hard. “I can download the code first, using Grandmother’s built-in security clearance,” she whispered. “Or as much of it as possible, so that we can replace it with a copy.”

  I frowned. Grandmother’s security clearances were the last ace in the hole we had—once we used them, whoever was attacking Scipio would be able to dig them out. Not to mention… “You can’t copy intelli-code! It loses—”

  “The ability to grow and learn will start to degrade, yes, I know. But we have to, Brother. It’s the only way to slow them down!”

  I hesitated and then nodded. “Do it.” My sister was already moving, plugging several data crystals into the ports of her homemade computer. I helped her where I could, but kept mostly out of her way, knowing that I would slow her down. She finished plugging the cables into what appeared to be two hard drives slaved together. “That many?” I asked, curious.

  She ignored me, already swinging in her chair to face the keyboard and screen, intensely focused on her task. I watched nervously as her fingers flew across the glowing haptic keyboard, moving with confidence and speed that bespoke her true talent as a coder, and not a Mechanic. A bitter anger went through me as I remembered how many times she had been denied for IT just because our grandmother had been a member of the council, but I put it aside. We had bigger fish to fry.

  A status bar appeared on the screen, and my sister leaned back in her chair, her hands fidgeting.

  “Is it working?” I asked, my voice low so as not to surprise her. She often forgot that people were around her when she lost herself in coding, and reminding her of your presence in a surprising way would earn you a black eye.

  My sister continued to fidget, her eyes never leaving the progress bar. “I don’t know,” she replied.

  I sighed and pressed my hands into my pockets, thinking. Who would be doing this? An attack on Scipio was a threat to our very survival, and this was unconscionable. Grandmother had always insisted that Scipio was like a person, and could feel things just like we could, only differently. How did this attack on him feel? Was the IT Department aware, or behind it?

  I hated all the questions this attack had brought up, and was afraid of what it could mean for us.

  “Greetings,” a masculine voice sounded, jerking me violently out of my thoughts and causing me to look around. “I am Karl. Why did you steal me from my home?”

  The memory cut off there, but I kept my eyes shut and desperately tried to cling onto it, summon more of it. For once, I had felt more in control of the memory as it gripped me, but when it slipped away so abruptly…

  My eyes snapped open when it hit me what just happened. Someone in Lacey’s family had stolen Karl from Scipio’s programming directly. Which meant…

  “Jang-Mi’s not a copy,” I said softly, voicing my conclusion out loud and looking at Leo. “She’s the AI fragment they used to m
ake Scipio, stolen directly from his code.”

  18

  Everyone turned to look at me, but it was Quess who spoke first. “What are you talking about?”

  I ignored him, gazing up at the only person in the room who could back me up on this. “Think about it,” I said directly to Leo. “Alex said that there were parts of Scipio’s code missing. Massive chunks that had been filled with some sort of ghost code or something like that. I don’t know. I don’t speak tech.” Quess snorted, but I continued to tune him out. “I just had a memory through the legacy net. I saw people I think were Lacey’s ancestors stealing code before someone else could.”

  I assumed they were Lacey’s ancestors, anyway. There was a resemblance between the sister and her that was downright eerie, and Lacey had told me the nets were precious. I doubted they would trust me with any they had recovered from their enemies, and Lacey had taken great pains to try to keep me from retaining certain memories. I could now see why: She had been trying to keep me from learning that her family had an AI fragment, stolen out of Scipio’s code to prevent him from falling into the hands of others. I wouldn’t want anyone knowing that either, if I were her.

  “They used a special access code, their grandmother’s. She was a council member and seemed to have instilled a deep sense of sympathy for Scipio in her family. Her grandson was thinking about it as his sister was on the computer, and it made him feel sick inside.”

  “It is so weird when she does this,” Tian whispered loudly. “It’s like she’s channeling the dead.”

  I rolled my eyes and plowed on. I knew I wasn’t getting my words out correctly, and the anxiety and panic from the memory made my nerves twitchy, but this was important. If we weren’t dealing with the originals… copies… whatever… and the ones that were popping up all over the place—Jasper, Jang-Mi, Karl—were actually just the pieces that had been added to Scipio’s code as they installed him in the Core…