Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(35)

And yet, they aren’t children, are they?

I leave them in the garden, alone and completely, wonderfully together. I steal down the polished white halls with their softly glowing lights. I press my fingers to my smile and realize I’m happy for them. And I sneak back to my room and slip between the sheets and close my eyes and sigh at the sweetness of it all.

I dream then.

I dream I have what they have.

Hours later, I’m woken by voices. Urgent. Plaintive. Crying?

I hear a knock.

Something is wrong.

Marie is outside my bedroom when I open the door. Alex is in Tania’s arms. Olivia is there, too, cheeks damp with tears. I paw dreams the color of an old sky from my eyes and speak a question I don’t really want an answer to.

“What’s happened?”

“Mother just told us,” Alex says, his voice like a ghost’s.

“Told you what?”

“Raphael is dead,” he whispers.

A punch to my stomach. I actually gasp at the pain of it, my hands pressed to my heart as if that might stop the ache.

“Dead?” My eyes fill to the brim. “How?”

Marie shakes her head. Tears spilling from her lashes.

“He … he killed himself, Ana.”

No.

No, my name is …

… What

is

my

name?





1.11


CINDERS

There’s no chance for us to say goodbye.

Apparently, only real people get funerals.

I sit on Marie’s bed and weep with her, our battered copies of Pinocchio between us, and we hold each other as if we were drowning. I remember the almost-boy I adored smiling at me in the library with his sad eyes and wonder if there was something I could’ve done. Something I could’ve said.

Anything.

I’ve never known anyone who died before.

If he wasn’t a real person, why does this hurt so badly?

It’s been days since “the incident,” and the lifelikes have disappeared. We don’t know if we’ll ever see them again. And though we’re forbidden to go there, after Marie and I have cried ourselves dry, I ride the elevators to my father’s office, near the top of Babel Tower. An image of Myriad appears on its plinth, wings rippling, its face like stone.

“YOU CANNOT ENTER, MISTRESS ANA,” it says.

“You can’t stop me, Myriad,” I reply.

I storm down the corridor toward Father’s office and I hear raised voices through the closed door. A multitude, shouting all at once.

“… shouldn’t have been possible!” I hear my father cry.

“Exactly, Nic.” The voice belongs to Doctor Silas. “The Third Law states that a robot must protect its own existence unless such action countermands the First or Second Law. It should be impossible for a lifelike to self-terminate!”

“We’re sure the Raphael unit was responsible for its own destruction?”

I recognize that voice. Lila Dresden, chief financial officer. She has dark eyes and a perpetually worried expression. I rankle to hear her call Raph an “it.”

“We have footage of it stealing the accelerant,” Doctor Silas replies. “We have a record of the fire safety systems in the atrium being tampered with. Now the garden and the Raphael unit are ashes. It also painted a note on its habitat wall.”

“Saying what?”

“‘This, I choose.’”

I feel sick. Holding my belly and squeezing my eyes shut to rid myself of the image. He burned himself in the garden, where we couldn’t watch him die. The same place I’d seen Gabriel and Grace only hours before.

Poor sweet Raph …

“The fire meant total cell destruction,” Doctor Silas reports. “No regeneration. The unit wanted to be thorough. Leave no trace of itself.”

“We can rebuild him,” my father says. “Another, just like him. It only takes us a week to replicate a new shell now. Less if we already have the pattern on file.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise, Nic,” says Doctor Silas.

“I agree,” says Dresden. “This incident calls the entire lifelike program into question. I’ve had other reports of disconcerting behavior. Duplicity. Manipulation. Doctor Silas isn’t the only member of R & D who’s troubled. We need to stop and reassess. I’m going to put it to the board that we bring the 100-Series offline until we get to the bottom of this.”

“They’re not toys,” my father says, voice rising. “Bringing them offline would mean erasing their personality matrices. We’d be back to square one.”

“Nic,” Doctor Silas says, his voice soft and calming. “The program means just as much to me as it does to you. But if the lifelikes aren’t bound by the Third Law, who’s to say whether they’re bound by the First or Second? Do you really want them running loose in here? You want them around your children?”

“They are my children!” Father roars. “And none of you understand what they represent. They’re the next step in our evolutionary path! Stronger! Smarter! Better!”

“That’s exactly our point, Doctor Monrova,” Dresden says. “One can’t help but question the wisdom of creating machines that are physically superior to their creators, yet emotionally subjacent. The lifelikes are possessed of an adult human’s capacity to feel, but they lack a lifetime’s experience in dealing with those feelings. Frankly, they’re dangerous. This incident with Raphael proves it.”