The Ones We're Meant to Find(49)
A lull, as people absorbed this information. Then came the surge.
“Is everyone in a pod?”
“How will we ascertain outside conditions?”
“You say Operation Reset will erect habitability barometers around the world,” someone said—the only one, apparently, who’d bothered reading their press release. “And that once certain conditions are met, the pods will transport everyone to the surface. But how can you be sure of those conditions? One thousand years is a long time.”
Finally. A worthwhile question. Because the person had a point: Barometers only measured what they were programmed to measure. Even if correct levels of sunlight, water, and minerals were recorded, humans were finicky. One oversight—a new species or disease—could mean the difference between survival and extinction.
There was only one way of knowing habitable for sure, and it called on Kasey to break the law a second time.
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IN THREE COUNTS, HE REACHES the mattress boat. It’s faster than I can react.
Too fast.
That’s what gets to me. Not the fact he swam the whole way, or his ability to find me at all, but his unnatural speed. His hands clamp onto the mattress’s edge, his fingers white against the hunter green, and I can’t move. I’m paralyzed as he claws onto Genevie. She lurches, and my legs crumble. I collapse as he stands, water pouring off his person and pooling around his feet.
“H-Hero?”
He steps forward. I scuttle back, hand colliding with an object—the oar. I seize it by the paddle and stand as he takes another step forward. I shove the handle between us, gaze finally rising to his face— His blue eyes are unblinking.
This isn’t the boy who cleans the house and grows the taros, who walked Genevie the mattress boat with me and showed me the stars. He’s wearing an M.M. sweater, sure, and he has the hair and lips and eyes. But this isn’t my Hero.
This is the boy who tried to kill me on the shore.
“Don’t move!” The wind steals my voice, but it doesn’t matter; he can’t hear me. Can’t see me. Just takes another step forward, crossing the midpoint of the mattress. Genevie sinks lower into the water. “Don’t come any closer!”
One more step, and the paddle knocks into his chest.
He stops.
Everything stops. My breath. My heart. The sea itself, even though I know that’s impossible. The sea is unending.
So is this moment, right before he lunges.
22
IT BEGAN WITH A SEED. Celia had planted it, and for two years after Genevie’s death, it grew inside Kasey before germinating on a day like any other: lunchtime, eighth grade, Kasey eating alone in the alcove where the cleaningbots were stored while her peers navigated cafeteria waters she didn’t care to swim, and the question flitted through her mind—why? Why didn’t she feel drawn to the same things as her peers? Why was she different?
What’s wrong with you?
She set to find out.
She’d been eleven years old. Top of her class, and the youngest, but not exactly well versed in international law. She saw nothing scandalous about her project. Humans already came in more forms than flesh, such as holographs, and DNA could be recoded to enable processes like photosynthesis. What did it matter if other functions were coded too? If the Intraface didn’t just supplement the brain, but supplanted it?
A lot, according to the Ester Act, passed precisely to draw a line between humans and machines, a boundary arbitrary to Kasey but intuitive to her fellow peers. They must have stumbled across her project because one day, the cafeteria went quiet when Kasey entered. She got in the protein cube line; someone moved away. “Deviant,” muttered the person behind her. Kasey ignored it. She advanced through her day as usual—until Celia appeared.
“Show me,” her sister ordered before Kasey could ask why Celia, a freshman in the adjacent secondary school, was waiting for Kasey outside the science team lab during fifth period.
“What?”
“The … thing you’ve been working on,” said Celia. “Or say it’s a rumor. That it’s not true.”
Saying so would have been untrue, so Kasey showed her sister, leading the way to the cleaningbot closet in the basement of the school.
Celia had taken one look at revamped model-891 and spun on her. “Why?”
Celia had rejected Kasey’s solution to her pain before but that was because Kasey hadn’t addressed its origin. “We could bring Mom back, if we had her memories.” As holoing and GMO procedures demonstrated, people remained people so long as they retained their brains.
“And why this?” Celia cried, pointing at revamped model-892.
“It’s me.” An upgraded version, with behaviors and thoughts more closely aligned to the average person’s. The only thing left was figuring out how to code reactions to novel situations. As a part of her research, Kasey had been studying facial expressions for weeks. Now it came in handy, enabling her to identify the emotion on Celia’s face as horror.
The magnitude of her error finally dawned on Kasey, if not its nature. That would be announced to her minutes later, when word finally reached P2C authorities and school security came to remove Kasey from the premises.
Suspended at home, she awaited her fate. Eviction seemed likely. She envisioned it to prepare for it, eliminated her fears one by one. Then David Mizuhara struck a deal with P2C: Kasey could stay.