The Ones We're Meant to Find(55)
“Kay?” My voice sounds weak, weaker than it did after Hero choked me. Dread swirls in my stomach, gathering speed like it’s going through a drain. “What’s … happening…”
34
“… IT TERMINATES.”
The bot had found her. Once they refined the design, it’d do more than that. It’d take her out of stasis. Then it’d be up to Kasey, or whoever was designated as “re-habitator zero,” to wake everyone else up after confirming the habitability of outside conditions.
The bot’s job was done.
And so with a whir, it powered down.
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“CEE.” ALL MY OTHER SENSES are fading, but I can still hear her crystal clear. “You should understand by now.”
She takes a shaky step closer. My fingers and toes go numb, as if in response. I can’t move anything but the muscles in my face as she stops half a meter away and says, “You’re not really human.”
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again—
“I know something happened to me.” Something that explains how I washed back ashore, alive, after rowing Hubert out for seven days, and how my eyeballs didn’t burst from the pressure of diving to the bottom of the sea. How Hero could have come back to life.
But none of that changes what Kay means to me.
“And I know I might not be…” human, not human “… like you,” I gasp, unable to choke out the words. I’m not like you. Not as smart as you. Not as strong as you. “But I’m still your sister, Kay.”
“My sister is Celia.” She doesn’t say it cruelly, just as a matter of fact. “And Celia died a long time ago.”
Died.
I swallow the obscene amount of saliva pooling in my mouth and almost gag as it slithers down my throat. “Then who am I?”
She glances over me, quiet. “You’re artificial intelligence prototype-C.” When I don’t react, she sighs, as if she was trying to spare me. “A bot.”
The words glance off me, missing the mark. I shake my head. I know what a bot is. A bot is U-me. I’m not U-me.
“When you couldn’t see in color,” says Kay, “that was because you hadn’t yet unlocked your next level of self-actualization. And once you saw in color, you felt a stronger pull to the sea, yes?”
No, I try to say, but find that I can’t. Can’t seem to lie, because yes, the day after my world filled with color, I did wake up in the sea.
“It’s a part of your programming. As a built-in safety, you’re drawn to all bodies of water, not just the ocean.”
Which would explain my jumping into the pool—no, stop.
“We designed you to be mechanically hardier than a real human for sustainability reasons, but you experience the same pain and psychological trauma. And while your intelligence is set to the fiftieth percentile, you possess an internal search engine that allows you to learn new skills in the absence of external models.”
Say something to make her stop. “But my memories … all my memories. Of you. Of us…”
“Seventy percent were Celia’s, retrieved from her own brain.”
“Seventy?” The number feels wrong in my mouth, too precise and too incomplete.
“Five percent had decayed with time,” says Kay, as if memories are made of wood. “Ten percent, we enhanced.”
“We?”
“My team and I.”
A team. Multiple people, privy to things inside of my head. I want to crawl out of my skin. “So you … built my memories.” Like a boat? A raft?
“Coded them,” corrects Kay, and then before I can even ask, “all but for fifteen percent. Overall well-being improves when your brain is allowed to fill in the gaps, in whichever way is best suited for your circumstances.”
It sounds smart and logical and like gibberish. “But why? Why give me these…” memories. No, they can’t be memories if they’re manufactured. “Why give me this at all?” If I’m not her? Denial chills my spine. My need to find Kay is real. Our kinship, our bond. My memories are real, and this … this whole situation is fake. A dream. I’m not here. I’m still on the island, still Cee—
“Deep breaths, Cee.”
Fuck it, I don’t want to—
I start taking deep breaths.
As I sit, locked in my own skin, Kay looks over me. Her face goes mask-still, but her eyes give her away. I see the calculations being conducted in them. She’s weighing the costs and benefits. Choosing between what makes sense—
She sighs.
—and what will make me happy.
“Cortisol, negative one point five.”
The fear bubbling in my stomach calms to a simmer.
Kay sits at the foot of the casket, covering the holograph projector. The translucent numbers and graphs between us vanish. We’re eye level now, and Kay makes sure to look at me as she speaks.
“I know these three years haven’t been easy for you, Cee. So allow me to explain. You were designed to find me.”
She goes on. She talks about a time when Earth was failing, its air, water, and land poisoned by humankind. Scientists came up with all sorts of ways to clean things up, but every innovation had an unforeseen side effect. Some of what she says rings true within me, and I know I must have a buried memory to match. But when she gets to the megaquakes and the casualties, numbering in the hundreds of millions, the ringing stops. I guess that’s where my—Celia’s memories end.