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.
Just not all of her.
After submitting herself to the science sanctions, her biomonitor tweaked and her Intraface modified with trackers, she’d returned home to find Celia waiting for her. The relief on her sister’s face convinced Kasey she’d made the right choice. Without science, her heart was hollow, but Celia’s could beat for the two of them.
How naive she’d been.
Condition two: Lift the sanctions on me.
Her request for a partner had been granted easily. This one, not so much.
“She’s extorting us!” Barry had cried, one raised voice among many in the P2C conference room. “I knew it! Why else would you withhold the solution until now?”
“Because it violates international law,” Kasey had deadpanned. And explained how. And after some debate for the sake of debate, laws, people seemed to realize, would have to be bent. Red tape snipped, regulations loosened. Drastic times called for drastic measures. Kasey didn’t know how to feel about it—that it took the world ending for five years of her life to be returned to her. But what was done was done.