Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(80)
“Young man—”
“Kellen.”
“Fine, Kellen. I have been building speaking machines for longer than you’ve been alive. Early AI work was all about communication. Besides, if I hadn’t boosted my com’s signal with this submarine’s communications gear, your dolphins might never have heard me, and then where would we all be?”
Kellen didn’t know about the geezer, but if the dolphins hadn’t felt like chitchatting tonight, he would be in a nice warm car sleeping off a shitty day in the arms of the woman he loved. Given such an alternative, he couldn’t say he preferred being here instead. Talking to a regretful old genius about how they were about to commit high treason.
“So you heard our planning just now,” he said. “Find any weak points?”
Vallejo smiled. “I’m not a tactician on my best days, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t listening for strategy. I was listening for her voice.”
“You mean Mari’s?”
The old man shrugged. “Not because I care about the abomination, mind. Only she reminds me of who I used to be, who she used to be. It’s different, listening when she doesn’t know I can hear. I’m not trying to get her to do anything in particular; I’m not trying to fit her into any schemes. I’m just listening to the cadence, the accent. Her voice is made of memories.”
Huh. Figure Vallejo to have the soul of a poet, underneath all those schemes and sins. It wasn’t Kellen’s place to judge, but the old dude was looking rough around the edges, like maybe regret had started gnawing at him. If the pattern held, guilt would work its way in soon, and what would that even look like, Damon Vallejo on some kind of atonement spree?
Probably pretty dang beautiful. Though it would be a hard sell to the folk he’d wronged. Especially Miss Mari.
“Look, I been meaning to ask you some things,” Kellen said, nudging their conversation closer to where he wanted it. “Things I need to air out real good before I let you anywhere near Angela again.”
Vallejo turned away from the disemboweled electrical panel. “Ask me anything you need to.”
“Why’re you helping us?”
“Easy and already answered. Freedom. That explanation isn’t working for you?”
“Not really, considering you tried to kill my best friend’s partner.”
Vallejo narrowed his eyes. “I’m guessing the friend you’re referring to is Heron Farad?”
“The same.”
“Ah.” He looked down at the pliers. “I have explained my reasons for shooting the clone. And you will note that none of those reasons required me to kill her. I meant to disable her, keep her from running, and lure Heron out into the cloud. I accomplished those things.”
“Yeah, I hear you about them reasons, but the fact remains that you shot her. You hurt her. Your own kid. Now how you gonna convince me that my Angela will be safe with you trottin’ around free? Give me one reason why I shouldn’t keep you locked up in here until we settle in a port.”
Vallejo put the pliers on the floor and turned to face Kellen straight on. He narrowed his eyes, but not to make them mean. Maybe just to make them see.
“My own Mageda, my wife, was a member of the Athanatos consortium, just like Ezekiel Medina and Daniel Ashe Neko,” the old man said, “and I loved her anyway, so I know how this happens. I know how it feels to love above your station. There’s no shame in following a woman to the raggedy ends of wisdom. Or beyond.”
“So the shame comes in later, then,” Kellen said, “like when you kill a few million people? That when it happens?” Lord, he would never do in politics, in her world. Honesty had too firm a hold on him, and he couldn’t make it shut up. Not even when wheedling and soft words would do a much better job.
“For what it’s worth,” Vallejo said, “the weather-control foglet program behaved unpredictably. It was supposed to have repaired the drought in south Texas.”
“Well, if the opposite of drought is Noah-level flooding, you really knocked that one out of the park.” It was obvious but needed saying.
Vallejo stared down at his hands, streaked with grease. “You are young yet, but someday, you might look back along the path your life has taken and regret,” he said. “The next generation will be the breakthrough, Mags and her cronies insisted, super intelligent, the true immortals. She was so certain. She’d run the genomes, you see, and her data had never been wrong, at least not about something so important. She was what we used to call a control freak, and I indulged her, even when she insisted on growing a clone of our daughter, even when she started experimenting on herself. Fatally, as it turned out. There were so many places in our story where I could have stopped her. Where I could have saved her.”
“Is all this somehow supposed to convince me to stop Angela from going through with her coup?”
“I’m not telling you to do anything, Kellen. I’m only telling stories.” He rubbed one hand against the other, but the stains remained. “As it happened, Mageda’s analysis was off only fractionally. Our Marisa was not the harbinger of humanity’s future after all, but Zeke and the others were convinced that her child would have been. Angela Neko’s, I mean.”
Kellen’s body wanted to cringe away, wanted to sit smack on the floor and let itself be squashed by the weight of what Vallejo was saying. Those consortium fuckers had run genomes on her, presumably matching her up with Daniel Ashe. Was that why they’d arranged the marriage in the first place? For babies. For her babies.