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.
It hadn’t always been. The first bots had deviated from their programming one in five times to choose their own freedom. Not everyone was as socially driven as Kasey had assumed. It took a certain kind of person to carry out the mission to termination, a person powered by the need to be needed, who took shelter not in a house but in a heart. Celia was that person, Kasey realized, when she ran the chip of her sister’s memories through the simulation generator. She’d accepted her terminal prognosis, in part to avoid condemning herself to a lifetime in a pod and in part to prevent Kasey from podding herself as well. To this day, Kasey disagreed with the decision. Found it extreme and rooted in Celia’s own biases. But her sister was only human, as prone to harmful beliefs as much as the next person. It’d taken Kasey a while to come to terms with that—that Celia’s fear of letting her loved ones down could be considered a flaw. She had her own insecurities, just like Kasey, and a million facets that Kasey, too blinded by the brightest ones, only saw after her sister was gone.
But better late than never. Once Kasey accepted that she and her sister were equals, she knew what she had to do. With her blessing, her lab had abandoned programming the bots with generic memories and used Celia’s directly. It was the logical choice, eliminating replication errors, and even provided Kasey a bit of illogical comfort. She trusted Celia. They might not have been “joined at the hip,” to use the language of normal people, but their bond could bridge any distance of minds or millenniums.
Yes, Kasey now thought to Actinium. She believed in herself. Believed in the perfection of her design.
Like everything else, though, it’d taken time, and the last six years had exacted their toll. Had Celia been alive, she would have been horrified to see the state of Kasey’s hair, buzzed to save on the upkeep, and her living space, spartan as a space station, and her nonexistent social life. But Celia also would have been proud. As Kasey came to understand her sister’s every side, she realized Celia had never been scared of her bots. She was scared that she’d failed Kasey, been absent when Kasey, unaware of it herself, had needed a sister most.