The Girl Who Dared to Stand Read online

  Was it possible that there could be two of them?

  “You’re not the Scipio, are you?” I looked around the room, not entirely sure what I was expecting him to say.

  “No, I am—”

  There was a short pop, and then a series of sparks shot out from the wall behind me. I immediately ducked and covered my head, moving away from it. The fountain of sparks died after a moment, and Scipio sighed, the sound distorted by a series of buzzes and beeps.

  “—y power is —etting low. Can y-y-y-you —lp me?”

  His voice, now broken by sharp popping sounds and digital synthesizers, held a note of desperation, barely audible through its broken quality. I bit my lip, hesitating. I was fairly confident that he wasn’t my enemy, but I had no idea what helping him might lead to. I had six other people whose lives depended on me not making a wrong move. I had no idea whether this would jeopardize them.

  “Please.” The word was filled with terror and desperation, and every one of my concerns faded under the urgency there. I was too raw and vulnerable to let anyone else die today. Because that was how he made me feel: like he was going to die if I didn’t help.

  Besides, I couldn’t let anything happen to him—I had too many questions for him. I had no idea what he was, but something told me he wasn’t what I thought, and if I didn’t help him now, I risked losing a potential source of information. Possibly even some sort of bargaining chip or ally. I didn’t know, honestly, but I did know I wouldn’t find out if I didn’t help him now.

  Roark had once told me that the Tower had taught us all not to trust in anything, and that it wasn’t natural. But it felt wrong not to try. I could only hope I was doing the right thing, and not putting us in further danger.

  “Can you tell me what to do?” I asked, already moving over to the wall the sparks had shot out of and trying to spot the problem on my own. Which was laughable, because I had no clue what I was looking for. “And speak slowly. Bad enough I’m risking my life and the lives of my friends on some machine that has pretty much ordered us all dead.”

  “I-I-I have?”

  “Keep on task, you oblivious program. What am I looking for?”

  “Und-d-d-er the –sk, there is-is-is-is pan—”

  I turned and moved over to the desk, getting down on my hands and knees and peering into the dark, cavern-like space beneath. I still had the light that I had been using to see in the ventilation duct I had been crawling through, and I pulled it out and began shining it around. The dust was thick here. I began running my hands over the carpet, searching. There were often small panels in the floors of rooms like this in the Tower, to help distribute the power load, and I figured I was looking for something like that.

  Eventually, my fingers felt a gap toward the back of the desk, and I managed to pinch the carpet fibers between two fingers and lift the carpet up, revealing a small compartment. I had time to see some sort of purple-and-pink light radiating from the hole before I began sneezing—thanks to the dust I had just kicked into the air.

  The first sneeze caught me off guard, and the back of my skull smashed into the underside of the desk, followed by a burst of pain. I backed up and sneezed again, barely covering my nose with my arm. And then I kept sneezing.

  “C-C-Can —ou… Beep —at?”

  His voice was getting worse, and I bit back a snappish retort and pinched my nostrils closed in an attempt to stop the sneezing. There was no time for it.

  “Tell me what to do,” I managed, my voice coming out nasal thanks to my blocked sinus passages.

  “Crys-Crys-Crystal… —maged. Bypass… —cuit and beep the —stal. S-S-Spa— one… —esk. Sec— d-d-drawer.” He broke off with a sputtering sound of tonal sequences playing in the wrong order.

  I blinked back the tears the dust was forcing into my eyes and peered at the front of the desk. There were six drawers in total—three on each side and one in the middle. “Are you joking with me?” I said in frustration. “Second drawer from what?”

  More tonal sequences—none of them discernable—greeted me, and I huffed.

  I jerked the one in the center open first, as it was second from the right, but found nothing but pens and file folders inside. The middle one on the right had several paper files hanging from folders hooked over a rail, and I closed it and reached for the middle drawer on the left. Immediately I was greeted by the feel of objects sliding heavily around, but I ignored them, spotting a long crystal amidst the other odds and ends. I snatched it up, the weight cool and heavy in my hand, and then crawled back under the desk, replaying his garbled transmission in my head in an attempt to unscramble his meaning.

  “Did you say bypass the circuit?” I called, peering into the small rectangular hole I had opened in the carpet. The inside was lit with pink-and-purple glowing lights, and as I leaned farther over it, I could make out intricate lines of power moving around each other in some unknown pattern, all of them leading to a groove in the floor—where a long length of crystal jutted out.

  The flashes of bright white light emanating from the crystal were blinding, and cut into the soft blue and purple of the power lines. As I inspected it, though, I realized it was damaged, a deep crack running down its side. The whole thing was barely holding together. It looked like it was on the verge of exploding, with sparks of electricity forming around and over the crack. It was definitely time to get it out of there.

  I sniffed and inched closer, just as Scipio’s broken voice began to give more directions.

  “—low the bea… Beep. Beep. —lip the swi—… —place… —stal… Beep.”

  “Not. Helpful.”

  I puzzled over what he was saying, wincing every time the crystal in the floor flashed and flared violently. Follow the secondary line of power—that part was easy, and I followed it back to where it was diverted from the main line.

  “Lip the swi… lip the swi…” I repeated under my breath, trying to understand.

  I bit my lip, studying the area underneath the beam of energy. It took me a moment, but finally I noticed a switch right next to the beam, partially hidden under the overhang created by the floor. That must have been what he was talking about. I flipped it carefully, taking pains not to interrupt the stream in any way, and immediately the crystal stopped glowing. But the slot it was inserted into kept glowing, showing that the circuit was still holding a charge and not interrupting the power flow. It wouldn’t work for long—only a minute or two—before the main circuit overloaded. So I had to move quickly.

  Reaching in, I grabbed the fractured crystal and yanked it out. I knew it was going to be hot, thanks to some pretty boring apprenticeship classes I had taken with Zoe, but it was like putting my hand on the surface of boiling water. I dropped it almost immediately, and luckily had been yanking it with enough force that it cleared the hole and tumbled end over end before rolling to a stop on the carpet, little wisps of smoke coming off of it.

  I jammed the new crystal into the slot and then flipped the switch, reconnecting the circuit.

  There was a crackle, followed by a surge of power, and a searing hot tongue of fire licked a fiery brand over my chest and shoulder. I flew back, caught in an arc of power. I hit the bookcase and doubled over, dazed and confused, and trying desperately to catch the breath that had been stolen from me.

  “Oh, that is so much better,” a soft voice announced from directly above me. “That crystal had been growing less and less stable for years, and I had to shut down some of my more… frivolous systems to keep from overloading it, so thank you. I finally feel as if I can breathe again.” The voice paused, and then drew closer. “How rude of me! You look hurt. Are you okay?”

  I became aware of something glowing beyond my eyelids, and managed to pry them open.

  A man’s face hovered just inches from my own, the planes of his face glowing as if built from pure white light, and as my eyes tracked down his vibrant form, I realized that he was suspended in the air, floating over me.

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  I screamed instinctively and lashed out with my fist, aiming for his jaw. But when my fist made contact—or rather, should have made contact—my arm punched through as if nothing were there, while his face did not change or move a muscle.

  My eyes bulged as I watched it happen, my brain unable to comprehend exactly what I was looking at. He stared at me through eyes that glowed bright blue, and then pulled away, floating upward. My arm still hung in midair where I had been holding it, and I slowly lowered it, gaping at him.

  “Who… what…” I fumbled, trying to settle on one question while fear of any answer kept my tongue partially paralyzed.

  The man of light blinked at me, and the corners of his lips quirked downward. His mouth moved. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  It was Scipio’s voice. It was him. I had done something when I changed out his power crystal, and this was the result. Now, evidently, he could make himself appear out of thin air.

  “It’s just a hologram,” he said, when I still failed to say anything. “I can turn it off if you want, but Lionel liked to look me in the eye when he spoke to me.” His mouth tipped upward as his eyes turned distant, locked in the grip of a pleasant memory. “He said he liked to take my measure, and it took him three times to explain that he didn’t mean he wanted my specs.”

  “Specs?” I asked. He seemed harmless enough, but I was still trying to overcome the fact that Scipio had a body. Not a physical one, sure, but a facsimile of one.

  I imagined he would have been handsome, if he didn’t glow so much. As it was, the details were fuzzy: glowing blue orbs for eyes, his head topped with a thick mass of inky, blue-black hair. Everything else was lost under the brightness.

  “Specifications? My… um… system parameters? My emotional emulator and core processes?” He cocked his head at me, and when I didn’t respond, he sighed and rounded his shoulders downward. “Lionel always told me that I shouldn’t talk about those things, because it reminded people I was a machine, and not a person.”

  I considered that for a long moment. The interactions I’d had with Scipio made it seem like he was anything but a person, and couldn’t care less about what anyone thought about him. But this version seemed to care; he seemed… disappointed by it, and that gave me pause. It was at odds with what I knew about Scipio. I needed to know more—so I could understand why he seemed so different.

  “Are you a… person?”

  He stiffened—or rather, the hologram stiffened—and I started to feel less afraid and more… fascinated. His responses were so real that it was like I was talking to a living entity, and not just a program. I didn’t know if the Scipio from the Core had a hologram of himself, but I had to imagine that it didn’t act like this, even if he did. I started to pick myself up off the floor, my joints and body still aching from the sharp shock I had received.

  “I guess it really depends on how you define ‘person’,” he said after a pause. “I don’t have an organic body, if that’s what you mean. But… is that what makes you human?”

  “Pretty much, yeah,” I replied, dusting off my clothes. I caught a glimpse of him looking away, and upon closer inspection, realized that my answer had saddened him. His mouth was turned down in a frown, and his eyes held the look of a man who hadn’t heard anything he didn’t expect, and yet was still disappointed to have heard it. Like me, whenever my parents reacted in exactly the way I knew they would, and never in the way I needed. It made me feel bad. “I’m sorry, it’s just that… people don’t view AIs as people, pretty much for that reason alone.”

  “And you believe everything that everyone else believes?” He didn’t ask it maliciously, but rather with pure, unadulterated curiosity.

  My immediate thought was, Of course not, but I let it stew for a moment, knowing myself well enough to realize that it was more reflexive than anything else. I really hadn’t thought about the issue of sentience before, but it had never been presented to me in such a way. In school, we were taught that Scipio’s personality matrix was a complex thing, and that the levels of complexity were what made him human-like, but never human. And for many, that made him a god of sorts.

  I didn’t view Scipio as a god, but I wasn’t sure that I could view him as human, either. He had always felt like a machine to me, his demeanor icy and pragmatic. But people seemed to like that, too, saying that our emotions were the enemy of survival, which was why humanity needed his coldness to guide us.

  But that meant he did things that were inhuman, to my mind. He initiated quarantines of entire departments if there was a biological threat, and wouldn’t open the doors until he determined the threat had passed. If there was a catastrophe, he would seal the department it was in before people had a chance to escape.

  To me, he wasn’t a person. And he never would be.

  On the other hand, he was the only full AI I had any experience with, and it didn’t seem fair to judge this one before I even got to know him.

  “Not exactly,” I decided to reply. “But I think that’s a conversation for another time, if I’m honest. Please can you explain to me what, exactly, you are?”

  His eyes studied me. And suddenly I felt very much like the frog we’d had to dissect for the Medica apprenticeship lessons. Pinned down and exposed. The only difference was that the frog we’d used in class had been dead. I, however, was very much alive—and didn’t like the sensation.

  Not to mention how bright he was. I kept trying to meet his gaze, but the two glowing orbs were hard to look at, and there were no details for me to focus on—just an infinite bright glow in the shape of a man.

  “Can you please… Can you do something about how bright you are?” I asked, when the discomfort became too much to bear.

  “Oh! I didn’t even realize. One second.” A heartbeat later the glow dimmed, and I looked back up at him. He now looked… normal, really. As if I could reach out and touch him with one hand.

  The blue orbs faded so that they formed natural-looking irises, while the dimmer setting revealed high cheekbones and a straight, strong nose. He was wearing what appeared to be a version of the uniforms we assigned to each department, but an older version, with weird shoulder pieces that looked like a giant grub had latched onto him and decided to die there. Unlike the Tower uniforms, however, his was purple and black, and was glowing lightly, the seams of it brighter than the rest of him.

  “Thank you,” I said, realizing that I should at least be polite. “Now… my question, if you don’t mind?”

  “Oh, well, that’s easy. I’m the first version of the Scipio program to be developed, and it’s because of my program that the later version of Scipio exists.”

  Of course. That explained so many of his incongruities that it had to be true. I mean, of course Scipio had a previous version. I had learned enough from my twin, Alex, to know that every program ever written went through several rounds of what he called “beta testing” before it was introduced into the system. It made sense that Scipio had gone through the same process.

  “So… are you like a backup? In case the main AI goes down?”

  Scipio studied me for a second. “That’s classified,” he said.

  “By whom?” I shot back, arching an eyebrow. “Lionel Scipio is dead, so unless you’re being controlled by something…”

  His brows drew together, and I saw a flash of pain on his face when I mentioned the death of his creator. But he pushed it aside quickly. “You’re right, of course,” he replied, folding his arms across his chest. “And no, I’m not a backup.”

  It made sense—if he was a backup, they would have kept him in the Core, not where people could get in and tamper with him. This place was sealed away, but not well enough to justify keeping him here alone. He was interacting with me as well—something I’d imagine the IT would strictly prohibit.

  Still, why wasn’t he the backup? And what was he doing here?

  I opened my mouth, ready to ask, when a distant scream, significantly muted
by the distance it traveled and the walls in its way, caught my ears. It was coming from the vent, and I quickly crossed over and knelt down in front of it. I could hear more panicked voices echoing loudly, and although I couldn’t make out what they were saying, they were full of fear. It was my friends. And they were afraid.

  My heart flared, certain that it was Devon, and I pushed through the vent just as Scipio said, “Wait, where are you going?”

  “My friends are in trouble,” I replied, not stopping. “I’m going to them.”

  Whatever his reply was, it got lost in the sound of the vents rattling as I began to crawl my way through, following the sounds of screams.

  I quickly reached the junction where I had left my bag, and began pushing it forward, following the shaft toward the sounds of panic and fighting. I rounded the corner and saw light ahead. A dark shadow crossed over it, followed by Grey’s grunt of pain.

  Tian screamed, a high, shrill sound, and I gritted my teeth and used the palms of my hands on the thin sheet metal to drag myself forward, pushing the bag ahead of me with my chest and shoulders.

  The bag fell out of the opening and onto the floor first, and I followed quickly, rolling to my feet into what appeared to be madness.

  The room was small—maybe fifteen feet by ten feet wide—and had a thick water pipe running through it. The walls were the same slatted grate that seemed to make up the walls and floors of the outer shell of the Tower, and a dirty yellow light emanated through the ceiling tiles, dimly lighting the room. My eyes darted around, finding my friends in various forms of combat.

  Four creatures the length of my arm were attacking them. Their bodies were a carapace of blue-black shine, the mouths divided into four flaps that opened to reveal ring after ring of sharp teeth—which appeared flat, but were razor sharp.

  I recognized them instantly, having been called in with Gerome and several other Knights whenever a nest of them was found. They were rust hawks, parasitical insectoids that had somehow evolved to eat metal. They were attracted to rust, but once they found a source, they didn’t discriminate—they’d eat either rusted or clean metal for days until nothing else remained.