The Ones We're Meant to Find(85)

“I’ve developed bots that know exactly how to stop yours.”

So? Kasey almost asked. You don’t get to choose who wakes and who doesn’t. Only I can. Without Kasey, in fact, no one would wake—

No one would wake.

Stop her, stop her bot from waking her, and everyone would stay in stasis.

It’d be a world without people.

“You can’t stop my bots.” Kasey was glad for her naturally monotone voice; it gave nothing away, none of her horror or disgust or shame. She was wrong. He had changed—from a monster to something worse. “Kill them, and they’ll just regenerate.”

“There are other ways to sway a person from their course,” said Actinium.

“Are you speaking from personal experience? Because I don’t think I swayed you from yours.”

At that, he grinned. The nerve! He took another step forward, and Kasey instinctively reacted with another backward one. Except there was no more pier behind her.

Just sea.

Her center of gravity tipped. The sky spun overhead—and stilled as something caught her around the waist.

“Others might believe there’s power in a single step,” murmured Actinium, the cadence of his breath brushing Kasey’s ear. Her eyes widened. His warmth was real. So was the brace of his arm. The press of his chest. “But most choices are made before you reach the edge.”

He released her, and stepped back. As he did, his figure shimmered. His opacity increased to 100% as he turned off the illusion filter he’d set upon himself. He had calibrated it to match Kasey’s Intraface presets perfectly, tricking her, fair and square, into thinking that he’d come as a holograph when really, he was here. Physically here.

In the flesh.

She could kill him. He could kill her. This close, he could have shot her point-blank.

Why hadn’t he?

“I know your mind as well as you know mine,” he said, but did she? Why would he give up the element of surprise? Where was the benefit to offset the risk? Surely, any moment now, he would reveal his true hand.

But as Kasey’s brain fired through the possibilities, all Actinium did was turn away.

“We’ll see who wins, in a millennium,” he said, walking back down the pier. Something shimmered at the end of it, concealed by the same illusion tech Actinium had used on himself.

A copterbot.

The sight of it restarted Kasey. She whipped out the REM she always carried with her and fired.

Missed.

Her next shot hit the copter, denting it, but the paralysis effect was negated on the inanimate object. Actinium dove in and the copterbot rose.

It vanished with a wink.



* * *



Back in her unit, Kasey stood in her airshower. After a few minutes, she switched to aqua-mode.

It was one of the few luxuries she allowed herself. Celia had been right; air didn’t come close to the cleansing effect of water. At the end of a long day, sometimes a hot shower was what Kasey needed to feel reborn.

But today, no matter how scalding the temperature, she couldn’t seem to sanitize her skin. It only reddened, and her blood heated with it.

If she’d realized he was real from the start, Actinium would be captured by now. If she’d been faster, sharper. If she’d had better aim—

Most choices are made before you reach the edge.

Without toweling off, Kasey sat at the foot of her stasis pod, rubbing the C tattooed around her right wrist as she deliberated.

The average person in her position, with conventional morals, would notify the Worldwide Union of Actinium’s newfound—or rather, never-forgotten—intel. Having devoted the last few years of her life to studying them, Kasey was capable of average human behaviors. She could lay bare her past relationship with Actinium, if asked, even if it meant losing her authority as Chief Science Officer. That wasn’t the reason for her reservation.

Wasn’t the reason why the doubt seeped in.

People are the disease, Mizuhara.

Just as Kasey knew typical human behaviors inside and out, she also knew the typical pitfalls. The logical fallacies. The bias for certainty. Introduce any possibility of the solution being compromised, and Operation Reset would be canceled at worst, stalled at best. The suffering would be protracted for who knew how long while the world redoubled its efforts to catch Actinium. He’d win at his own game simply by eluding capture.

What a nuisance. He ought to have just killed her. Why didn’t you? Kasey thought.

Her own brain conjured Actinium’s response. For the same reason you didn’t kill me.

Jaw tensing, Kasey stood up and faced the interior of her stasis pod. Its high-shine finish reflected a woman who’d successfully convinced her species to follow her to the depths of the sea.

But she wasn’t one of them. And unlike the girl she’d been, she’d stopped wishing to be. This was who she was.

She had her worldview, as did he.

She had her bots. He had his.

It would be his hypothesis versus hers.

Let the experiment run, she could almost hear him say. If you trust yourself.

And not tell the rest of the world? It’d been seen as gambling with lives. But not all gambles were reckless. Her labs had put her bots through every simulation imaginable, for a success rate of 98.2%. The average population might not have been able to tolerate a 1.8% chance of failure, but Kasey could. Probability was on her side.