The Similars (The Similars #1)(72)

Underwood, I think. He’s talking about his expulsion.

“The research center was brought under scrutiny for many years and, eventually, was closed to students and mostly shut down. I was determined to film inside and thought I’d have to break in, but my key opened the door. Which is how I discovered our holograms. A room full of stored holograms, accessible via each student’s key? Talk about an exposé! I wanted to uncover everything about how the keys worked and expose the Darkwood administration for keeping this from us. For tracking us—our GPS, our medical stats, our pasts—without our explicit permission.”

It takes me a moment to process what I’m hearing. Oliver was in the hologram room. Oliver saw what Maude and I saw. GPS data. Medical stats. Last year. Before the new keys were issued. Which means that wasn’t a new feature of the new keys. Our old keys must have had all that tracking too. We just didn’t know about it. And neither did our parents, if they only recently signed waivers permitting the school to keep tabs on our whereabouts. The administration was spying on us without anyone’s knowledge. I look at Maude, and we both raise our eyebrows.

I turn my attention back to Oliver.

“I had a coconspirator. A teacher who knew what the administration was doing and agreed that it was wrong, who would have been pleased to see Darkwood’s underbelly exposed.”

A teacher? I wonder to myself. Was it Mr. Park?

“This teacher gave me the technical help I needed to get started, as well as a pass to access the hologram room that couldn’t be traced to my key. I went there nearly every night, after everyone else had gone to bed. I spent hours there, trying to break into the system. It took me weeks to crack the code. I’m not a programmer. Sure, I took computer science as an elective and could dabble in JavaScript, Rust, and Julia. But the hologram system was complex. It took me some time to get in and unlock my key, and, subsequently, all the others.”

I don’t have to wonder why Oliver never told me he was doing any of this. For the last few months of school, we were barely speaking. After his confession, after he told me he wanted to be more than friends, I shut him down.

“Imagine my surprise, when—after gaining full access to the system—I saw my birth certificate and discovered that my father was John Underwood. I recognized the name instantly. I knew he had been in the Ten with my mother and stepfather. I also knew he was Albert Seymour’s half brother. What I didn’t know before was that Underwood and my mother had had a relationship. My mother had never spoken about it, nor had my stepfather. I grew up thinking of Booker Ward as my father, and I never really questioned who my biological father was. It had never mattered. Maybe I was afraid to ask questions that could hurt my mother or Booker. I don’t know. But that changed the moment I saw the name on my birth certificate.

“So I tried to access Underwood’s hologram. I hadn’t tried calling up the hologram of a former student, but I could tell that the data was in the system. That every student, past and present, who ever had a key, had a hologram stored there.

“It took another week before I could gain access to other people’s profiles. But my assumptions were correct: Underwood had a hologram in the system, even though he hadn’t attended Darkwood in more than two decades. I was nervous to call up my biological father’s hologram. He wasn’t pictured in the Ten portrait, so I had no idea what he looked like. My searches online had been futile, almost as though someone had erased all evidence of him. And then, when the data appeared—there was no image. No ‘John Underwood’ hologram, only words and numbers streaming across my view space.

“I assumed it was a limitation of the old system and didn’t give it any more thought. The data was what I needed. I dove into my father’s medical statistics and his test scores, which were top-notch. All that digging, and I learned something about the man, but not nearly enough. Test scores didn’t tell me who he was. Why was there so little information about him, and no photographs? That’s when I made the discovery that changed everything.”

I stiffen. Is this when he will reveal the secrets behind his note? Behind why he left us? He’s so in control, so alive in this recording. What happened?

“I was scrolling through the reams of Underwood’s data when I came across a stat I hadn’t noticed before. Vital signs. Current vital signs. Blood pressure, resting heart rate… These weren’t stats from Underwood’s childhood or even his early adulthood. They were current. They were from the present.”

I tense. Current vital signs? How could that be?

I turn to Maude, flabbergasted. “Underwood is alive? If what he’s saying is true, the keys keep recording our information even after we leave Darkwood. How?”

Maude considers this. “It could be a signal transmitted from an implanted chip in our bodies. One that continues to send data back to its base…”

“Even decades later?”

“It’s possible.”

“It became abundantly clear,” Oliver goes on, and I focus my attention back on him, “that my father was—is—still alive. And yet, every article I could find reported that he had died in a car accident. That was the story my mother had told me. But these vital signs could only mean one of two things. They were either fake, or the man had never died.

“I had what felt like a million questions, from how this technology worked to the people it kept tabs on. I decided not to go to my mother, for a whole host of reasons. Instead, I decided to confront the one person who might actually know the truth about Underwood’s story—his half brother, Albert Seymour. My uncle.”