The Girl Who Dared to Stand Read online

  “Prometheus was a group of humans formed in the first few years after the End came, and were primarily in the group that Lionel let in before he had to seal the Tower. Their beliefs centered around the idea that no machine should control them. We discovered their members when they attempted to sabotage the transfer of 2.0 into the mainframe that had been created for him—and several more times, over the years.”

  No wonder there were so many rules and protocols and fears about dissidents. These laws had probably come into being during that timeframe, as a result of Prometheus’s actions.

  And to just kill 2.0 like that… it was incredibly short-sighted on their part. So what was their goal? Why were they doing it? Did they just hate him, or did they have another reason?

  “What happened to them?”

  “Ezekial,” he said simply. “He was the head of security and… he got results. But even then, the last I knew was that they were still around, and a threat. As you heard Lionel say, it was why he kept me, even though all the other fragment AIs were destroyed.”

  I immediately thought of Jasper—although, to be honest, he had been there all along, pressing on the edges of my thoughts while Leo spoke.

  “Did the others have names?”

  “They did, although not all of them chose names to honor their models like I did. Let’s see, there was Rose, Alice, Tony, Jasper, and Karl.”

  My eyes widened, and I stood. Jasper! Jasper was an AI—Grey had thought I was crazy to believe that, and in his defense, it was a little insane. We had both been taught that there was only one, could only be one, and that he was the only thing keeping us all alive. There’d been no reason to even suspect another AI of existing, let alone one that sounded like a gruff old man, but still… I had. Leo craned his head to peer at me quizzically.

  “What’s wro—”

  “Jasper,” I said excitedly. “You said Jasper, right?”

  “Yes, but why—”

  I cut him off again. I couldn’t help myself; I was so excited. “Jasper is alive. Or I mean… I met a program that called himself Jasper inside the Medica. The doctor wouldn’t explain what he was, but Jasper helped us several times, even though what we were doing went against protocol.”

  Leo moved, and he did so with a flash, suddenly going from sitting to standing just inches in front of me. I took a step back at his rapid motion, my heart skipping a beat or two, but he didn’t seem to notice as he crowded closer.

  “You said the Medica, right? That’s what you now call the hospital?” On my nod, his face broke into a smile. “It’s him! It has to be. This is incredible—he’s still alive! You have to take me to see him!”

  “I don’t think I can do that,” I said, amused by the image of trying to pull the terminal up to the Medica with me. “I mean… Can you actually… Is it—”

  “Possible? Absolutely. You can take me with you.”

  I stared at him, confusion radiating from me at his declaration, and his grin deepened. He sauntered over to the wall, where the safe door stood stark and gray against the white wall around it.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t trust us with what was inside there?” I said, moving around the couch as excitement coursed through me, turning my blood electric. This was a safe that had been hermetically sealed for centuries. Who knew what wonders lay within? “What changed your mind?”

  “You’re different,” he said simply, before turning to focus on the safe. The keypad began to glow, and then a green holo-screen emerged over it, showing a series of dials and a keyboard. Leo reached out and twisted the glowing knobs this way and that before inputting a series of commands. I watched, my eyes tracking movements too fast to really remember, but I was impressed at how he was interacting with them.

  “You really look like you’re touching them,” I said, slightly awed at the detail, and Leo smiled, flashing a perfect set of white teeth.

  “I’m actually just overriding it through the computer… the touching is all for show. See?”

  He removed his hands from the dials and keypad, but they continued to move without him.

  It ended as suddenly as it had started, the screen disappearing and Leo lowering his hands. I waited, heart in my throat, as something clicked and the safe door slowly swung open, as if pushed forward by some invisible creature sitting inside.

  I leaned to the side, toward the now-widening gap, breathless to discover what secrets had been held in there for the last three hundred years.

  25

  Two shelves filled the deep space within the safe, both containing objects. There were several folders and data crystals, as well as two additional lockboxes, one as long as my forearm and maybe twice as wide, the other six inches high and twelve inches wide, with a black handle. Both required a key code, which I doubted Leo was going to share with me until he felt he needed to. In addition to those, there was a single blue plastic case sitting on the higher shelf atop a thick stack of files.

  “Take that,” Leo ordered, pointing out the blue case in particular.

  “You sure?” I asked, hungrily eyeing the other objects. “Not a data crystal or a file?” As I spoke, my fingers were already reaching out toward them, to see what they contained.

  “Absolutely not,” he said gruffly. “And keep your hands to yourself. I have to keep the contents protected. Some of them are quite priceless. Now, the blue case,” he insisted.

  I sighed and reached in to grab the small case. I pulled it out and felt the edges, prying them apart. They slid easily, and I looked inside.

  “It’s a net,” I said dubiously, picking up the small white box and setting the plastic case aside. “A white one, which is odd, seeing as all of them are black. But that’s just a stylistic choice.”

  I turned the hard square between my fingertips as I spoke, inspecting it. It wasn’t truly white—the filaments that were wound tightly to form the compressed block were clear, and their density made it seem white.

  “This net isn’t like the ones you and your friends use,” Leo explained patiently from behind me. I shifted toward him, turning my back on the remaining contents, though ignoring them was hard. “Actually, the nets you have today are far inferior to ones like that.”

  I looked up from the net and peered at Leo. “How is this one superior?”

  “Well, for one thing, it was designed to hold copious amounts of information about the world before, so that citizens could access anything they wanted to about that world. Based on the analysis I ran on one of the unused ones Quess let me take a look at a few hours ago, these newer ones are actually a lobotomized design. They are highly susceptible to short circuiting, which was one of the things Lionel worked extensively to prevent. In short, they are crude and barbaric.”

  I shook my head, staring at the net. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said, my mind already spotting a huge flaw with his supposition. Nets weren’t designed for data storage, only transmission, reception, and data collecting. They were meant to control, not inform. “If people had had these at any time, it would have been impossible to take them away. People would have complained if the council had just suddenly decided to take knowledge away from them. They would’ve at least passed something down.”

  Then I realized that maybe the citizens of the Tower had after all. All of our knowledge of what the world had been before the End came from stories passed down from parent to child—or from books that had managed to escape confiscation. Now that I thought about it, the council had confiscated the books themselves. Everything—art, history, language, fiction—everything except for the technical manuals. Even the history we were taught was incomplete, or downright wrong!

  I didn’t want to even consider that it had all been done purposefully, but I couldn’t help myself. If it had, it had been executed brilliantly, occurring slowly over the centuries. Something big here, several small things there. Slow, steady, methodical—executing some plan made centuries ago by people long dead, but with the collective will and foresigh
t to forge ahead.

  That wasn’t just dedication: that was devotion. It took a belief beyond reason to carry something like that through.

  And if I considered that it had been done purposefully, and had not been a series of coincidences, then that alone would scare me more than Devon, the Knights, the Inquisition, and Scipio combined. And while it might have been cowardly, I just wasn’t ready to face that potential reality yet.

  Because then I would have to accept that somehow my friends and I had been thrust into the middle of it all.

  “I don’t have all the answers, Liana,” Leo replied. I looked up to see him looking sadly around the room. “These four walls are all I have known since Lionel died. I have no evidence to support the claim—just your word on some drastic changes that don’t honor my creator’s vision of this place. I’ve thought about it for a very long time, and based on what I’ve picked up from you and your friends, Lionel Scipio’s dream has been lost. At first, I thought that there was nothing to be done. As I am now, I could not serve as a backup like he had originally intended. But if Jasper is indeed still alive… then maybe I can.”

  “But why would you want to, especially knowing that they will probably be looking for a way to finish what Ezekial Pine started?”

  Leo smiled sadly. “As Lionel’s creation, I feel obligated to do something to set it right. If this is the same Jasper, then maybe, just maybe there is something I can do to fix the Tower. So it is I who must ask you for your help, really.”

  I breathed in, considering what he was saying. While I still didn’t know where everyone stood on escaping versus staying and fighting to save the Tower, I had an opinion of my own. And truthfully, I would be fine staying to help Leo replace Scipio and restore the Tower to what it had originally been intended to be. If it weren’t for these damned shadow groups. They made what was already a daunting task even harder, and I had to wonder if it would be worth it, in the end. We’d lost so much, and could lose so much more if we stayed and fought.

  And at some very cold, yet practical point, I had to ask myself what the Tower had ever brought me, except for pain and a messed-up childhood.

  But all that wasn’t a reason for Leo not to come with us. After all, Quess had mentioned that Leo could easily access computer systems. Theoretically, of course. But after the Core, it would be nice to have an ace up our sleeves, just in case.

  Additionally, I still had no idea what had happened to Jasper in the aftermath of our escape from the Medica. Our entire plan depended on him being there and being in a position to help us. Which, as long as he hadn’t been discovered helping us the last time, he would be.

  He had seemed confident that he could avoid detection, but with the plan depending on his help, bringing Leo just in case something had happened to Jasper was the best course of action.

  There were cons to bringing Leo—the biggest one was discovery. If it got out that the first version of Scipio was running around, there was a chance that someone from one of these shadow groups would understand the implications of his existence and what he could do to the Scipio in the mainframe, if allowed to.

  Then there was this net. It had been hermetically sealed in a safe, sure, but this net hadn’t been used for three hundred years. While the nets did have a power source that would sustain them, as far as I knew, it would only last for approximately two years un-implanted. Once implanted, it was powered by the electrical activity in the brain, and could continue that way indefinitely. I doubted very much that this one could have survived the test of time.

  Then, assuming that it was fine and working, Leo would presumably be transferred inside – although he had never really said so one way or another. What happened to the virus he was holding at bay? Would it destroy his terminal, or would it transfer along with him? Would he even survive the transfer?

  And then what? What was I supposed to do with him once he was inside the net?

  I performed the equivalent of a mental double-take, my mouth going dry. I looked up at Leo, my eyes wide. The entire time I had been trying to understand this net, it had just now occurred to me that I would have to implant it in my skull.

  “Wait… if I transfer you to this, does… does that mean that one of us would need to implant you into our brain?” I couldn’t keep the alarm out of my voice, and as soon as the words were out, I immediately felt concerned that I had offended him.

  The corners of his lips twitched, and then curled up and broadened into a smile. Rich laughter erupted from him, and I narrowed my eyes as the hologram doubled over, clutching his stomach as if I had just told the funniest joke in the history of the world.

  I crossed my arms and waited for his laughing fit to die down, and even though it was irritating to be laughed at, I was both awestruck and amused at how human he seemed. I wasn’t sure who Lionel had really been, but if his neural clone was any indication, he’d been a decidedly optimistic person.

  After a few seconds, Leo’s laughter died down to chuckles and he righted himself, dragging a finger under his eye as if to wipe away a tear.

  “Nothing like that,” he chuckled. “I mean, it is theoretically possible, but Lionel says I shouldn’t talk about it because humans would find the idea absolutely repulsive, and I can see it now. Your face…” He laughed some more, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “All right, I get it—nothing so intrusive,” I said. I paused for a moment, returning to my earlier thoughts, and let the humor between us fade a little while I prepared my next volley of questions. “What will happen to the virus when you put yourself into the net? Will it ruin your terminal, come with you, or something else? Could transferring hurt you at all?”

  Leo immediately sobered as he considered my questions, some of the elation chased from his face. He nodded, as if reaching some internal decision.

  “The virus will remain behind. I can set redundant programs up here to keep the computer on, as well as a few automated programs to keep the firewall intact in my absence. It won’t hold up for long, but it will survive for at least a few days. As for the transfer—I have done this before, Liana. Lionel used to take me with him on many of his walks around the Tower, so I could learn and grow through his experiences.”

  “The Tower has changed,” I pointed out. “Dramatically, if everything you’ve told me is to be believed.” He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, I quickly added, “Not that I don’t believe you—it’s just hard wrapping my mind around the fact that everything I have been taught wasn’t exactly right.”

  Leo stared at me, his mouth still open and ready to deliver whatever he had been about to say earlier, and he slowly closed it. “Even if the Tower has changed, I would still like to see it. I am adamant about going to see if this Jasper is the Jasper.” He smiled, sadly this time. “It’d be nice to know that I’m not completely alone.” I gazed at him, trying not to let my face crack into a concerned frown, and he added, “Please. If I could, I would just go on my own, but unfortunately, I was not born human. I lack the appendages to even carry myself there.”

  I let out a breath, then pinched the bridge of my nose between two fingers and began to massage. I wasn’t annoyed. Well… not with him, and not at his insistence on going. His argument was sound, and he knew the dangers.

  No, I was annoyed at myself. Even though I was pretty certain he’d be useful, I wasn’t entirely convinced it was a good idea. Not because we didn’t need him—there were certainly a hundred things that could go wrong with our slap-dash plan to free Maddox, and having him around could help mitigate them. But because I wasn’t sure he could count on us to help him restore the Tower.

  Yet, I couldn’t tell him that, and it was his fault, with that sad, helpless look on his face. I realized then that no matter how hard and practical I tried to be, I was always going to have a soft heart. His helplessness called to me more than any reason or logic could.

  I had a feeling my friends weren’t going to like my decision, but I was making it
nonetheless. I wasn’t going to hide it from them afterward, but I couldn’t say no to him. I just had to make a few things clear to him first.

  “You know I can’t commit us to helping you long term, right?”

  Leo’s face reflected no small amount of surprise, and he blinked a few times, before saying, “But you’ve mentioned it several times.”

  “I know that,” I said with a nod. “Because we have been considering it. But our original plan, before we ever met you, was to escape. That plan still might be our goal, once we find some time to sit down in a group to talk about it.”

  “I see.” Leo stared off into the distance, and then nodded. “I understand. Although, before you decide, I would like to request that you give me a chance to formulate an argument to persuade you into helping me.”

  It was an easy enough request. “Done,” I said. “Although, can I be honest?”

  “Of course. I would hope you’re always honest with me. Like right now, I appreciate that you told me that. You didn’t have to—you could’ve just brought me along to be of use if needed, and then told me afterwards. Much like my creator, I like knowing things upfront and in advance, and you respected me enough to inform me beforehand. I thank you for that.”

  I was both flattered and embarrassed by his gratitude, and it was hard not to blush, but I managed, somehow, to accept the compliment. “You’re my friend,” I informed him. “I don’t like to lie to my friends. Not when I can avoid it.” I paused, taking a moment to backtrack to where we had been in the conversation before Leo had segued, and realized that whatever I had been about to say wasn’t important.

  Helping Maddox was. “So, is there anything I need to know about the net? Like, what I should do with it?”

  Leo laughed, his eyes twinkling in merriment. “Do with it?”