Chapter 36

36

“GOOD WORK,” EKATERINA SAID AFTERthe presentation. The message arrived in Kasey’s Intraface with a ding that must have reverberated in Actinium’s, too. Ever since the day on the pier, and more so after building the demo-bot together, their minds had felt connected, and as they parted at their respective ducts, his going down and hers up, she knew they were thinking the same thing.

Oh, what P2C didn’t know.

Yes, the solution was universal. Everyone could and would be put into stasis. Earth would clean itself, and be repopulated—by the ones who could be trusted not to ruin it again. As for everyone else? They could sleep on. Kasey and Actinium would ensure it. It was a simple bit of programming: a perma-lock command on the pod, activated by rank, or whatever empirical measure of planetary stewardship they decided upon. It wouldn’t kill those people—not in the same way they’d almost killed the rest of them, and might yet still if they were allowed to return.

But one thing at a time. First, Operation Reset needed to pass. Seven out of eight eco-cities currently supported it; eco-city 6 was still on the fence. Kasey didn’t blame them. It was one thing to ask your citizens to spend at least 33% of their waking moments in holo to save the world, and another to ask them to sacrifice even more to protect the people who hadn’t.

Meanwhile, the outside territories were much more divided. Delegates from Territories 6, 7, and 11 had pledged themselves to the solution; they’d also charted the highest percentage dead. Territories 1 and 12, on the other hand, mostly unscathed by the megaquake, had pledged zero. Human selfishness at its best. Kasey committed those territories to memory. Info like this could be factored into calculations of who deserved to wake and who, for the sake of everyone else, was better left in stasis.

Granted, they’d all suffer if selfishness prevailed. The solution required a 100% participation rate or none at all. Governments would rather let their people die than fall behind. The deadline for a consensus was just a week away, and with only 57% delegates pledged despite Kasey’s presentations and P2C’s broader maneuvers, Kasey had no idea what else might help.

Ekaterina did. At night, she messaged again, asking if Kasey was willing to present in Territory 4 tomorrow—in person. “You wouldn’t be exposed,” Ekaterina was quick to mention. “But to make inroads among some of these territories, we’re going to have to establish more of a human connection.”

Of course, Kasey thought into her Intraface messaging app, transmitted it, then looked to the night sky beyond the polyglass. She was in the Coles’ unit, sitting on one of their chaises. As her biomonitor reminded her this morning, it was the seventh anniversary of their passing. Seven years since the day Celia had sobbed in her room, and Kasey had violated her brain by trying to cancel her pain. Correlated or not, Celia had spent the next two anniversaries alone. It was only after Kasey committed her second violation by trying to rebuild their mom that Celia stopped avoiding her. Together, they’d gone to the Coles’ unit; Kasey had watched as Celia dusted off the picture of Ester, Frain, and their boy on the coffee table before filling the vase with everfiber flowers. The gesture seemed wasted on the dead, but when Celia did it, it felt right in a way Kasey couldn’t emulate. So tonight, Kasey had come empty-handed. She wasn’t her sister. Wasn’t persuasive or likeable enough.

If Celia were here, the human connection would already be made.

Sighing, Kasey swiped through her Intraface until she came to the folder labeled CELIA. She’d let Actinium keep the physical Intraface—seeing the kernel still unnerved her—but she’d downloaded the memories to her own. Problem was, she couldn’t bring herself to touch the folder icon. She tried to remind herself that memories, Celia’s or not, were just code. Kasey and Actinium needed to analyze as much human behavior as possible to design their secondary barometers. But same as the first time, a force held Kasey back. It wasn’t simply respect for Celia’s privacy. It was dread. Because it was possible to love someone without fully understanding them. Possible to love parts of them, and not their whole. Kasey’s bots had scared Celia. Kasey feared seeing the rest of herself through her sister’s eyes.

Ding!The notification from her Intraface was a welcome distraction. Two blinks, and Kasey was brought back to Ekaterina’s message. Actinium had reacted to it with a checkmark. Kasey waited for his name to turn an inactive gray. When it didn’t, she messaged him privately.

Have you been?

She didn’t need to specify Territory 4; he’d understand the shorthand.

The speed of his reply was strangely gratifying. Once.

What’s it like?

Cold. Dry.

Kasey waited for more. None came. That’s it?

Patience, Mizuhara. You’ll suffer it firsthand tomorrow.

A pause in the conversation. Kasey didn’t know what else to say. SILVERTONGUE offered no suggestions. After it kept auto-opening during her presentations, urging her to be more engaging, Kasey had uninstalled it. She had no use for an app that didn’t perceive life-saving information as engaging.

Her heart stilled as Actinium’s avatar pulsed blue; he was thinking again. Seconds later:

Are you busy?

No.Kasey paused. You? Working?:P The emoticon slipped out of her. She considered it, deleted it, and sent the message without.

No.Actinium paused too. Not working.

Kasey could almost see it: the slide and latch of his gaze, his silence a dare for her to comment on his work habits. She could, if she wanted to. She could speak her mind without fear around Actinium now that they’d built something together. They were on the same wavelength—perhaps had been as early as the all-nighter they’d pulled reviewing Celia’s memories, they’d communicated via glances and gestures. They’d streamlined their communication even more since then, and now, staring at the last message from Actinium, Kasey sent him a holo hotspot on a whim. Told herself she wouldn’t be disappointed if he didn’t accept.

Held her breath as the air before the chaise glowed.

For a split second after Actinium holo-ed in, he seemed dazed. Kasey was too. She’d never seen his holograph before and certain details were lost in translation even after she bumped his opacity up to 100%. Like the texture of his hair. It lacked definition, the strands flat and lifeless compared to when the wind had messed it—not that Kasey should have been thinking about his hair at all. She redirected her gaze to the window, throat itchy. Must’ve been the particulates in the unit.

“Do you come here often?”

The pitch of his voice was unaltered, at least. “More often than before,” Kasey said. “Celia used to come for the windows.” It wasn’t lost on her that wherever they went, whenever they talked, they couldn’t escape Celia’s pull. But why would they want to? She was their common denominator. Their compass, setting them on this course. “We argued about it, in the beginning. I didn’t want to visit.”

“Why not?” asked Actinium, sounding genuinely curious.

“It felt like trespassing.”

She didn’t say the owners were dead, or name them. Everyone knew who lived on stratum-100, including Actinium, who scanned the unit and said, “It’s a lot of unused space.”

“My dad insisted it remain uninhabited. In memoriam.” If it sounded elitist, it was because it was. The one and only time David Mizuhara had violated his own principle of space-saving living. “Our families were close,” Kasey felt the need to add, but that portrayed a community of elitists, living as high as their rank. How did they come across to someone like Actinium, whose unit had no fancy furniture or windows for natural light?

“You must think us strange,” Kasey said as Actinium did a slow walk around the unit. “So removed from human nature.”

“What if human nature is the last disease we have yet to eradicate?” Actinium returned to her. The moonlight passed through his person. He left no shadow on the ground.

“A disease,” Kasey echoed as he sat at the other end of the chaise. It didn’t react to his holograph, too dated to receive virtual input. To the furniture, Actinium might as well have been a ghost.

“Think about it,” he said, and Kasey did. She glanced toward the polyglass and considered the sea beyond it.

“The world would be filled with people like me,” she concluded, an honest assessment. “And therefore worse off.”

She offered a smile at Actinium. He didn’t return it. His expression was serious, bordering on severe, and Kasey squirmed, her discomfort taking her back to their first meeting, REM misfire and all.

“Will your cat be okay?” Ekaterina hadn’t mentioned how long they’d stay in Territory 4.

Actinium blinked once, slow. “Jinx will take care of him.”

“And your clients?”

“None of them are as important as this.”

“You won’t miss it?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Kasey asked, and Actinium glanced to the window.

“I’ve never belonged.”

“Same.” She couldn’t decide what was more surprising—his admission or hers.

“I know.” A whisper, barely audible. “Home is where the mind is,” said Actinium, and Kasey froze, her body going hot and cold as she recalled staring at her bedroom ceiling, contemplating the concept of eviction. She’d ironed out the logistics, performed damage control to feel in control, and then none of it had mattered. She’d accepted the deal. Science became her past. Her secret. But she had another secret:

She’d almost chosen eviction instead.

People confused Kasey when they invariably violated the properties she ascribed to them. But science was different. Science didn’t blindside her; it outsmarted her. It didn’t try to understand her, but Kasey understood it. With science, she felt safe. But with Celia, too. Two choices and only one, Kasey had realized, would be seen as normal. For Celia, she’d tried to be normal. For Celia, she’d stayed, and it’d been the easiest and hardest decision she’d made, eleven years old now feeling like yesterday, as Kasey trembled, breath coming quick. She heard her name and glanced up, saw Actinium’s gaze, across a chaise on which he did not exist, but he did to Kasey. He’d articulated a feeling Kasey had lived, and for moment, Kasey wished he were here.

Wished she could actually feel the hand he’d placed on her shoulder.

Then she shook her head. Stood. “I should go. Pack. Early start.”

She wasn’t sure what she was saying; Ekaterina hadn’t even sent them the itinerary.

Actinium had the grace to nod and stood himself. “Until tomorrow.”

He logged out, leaving Kasey alone.

She sat back down on the chaise. Breathed deep, oxygenating her blood. Her heart pummeled her chest with the strength of two; she dismissed it. This was just a part of the journey, of becoming more human as she avenged her sister.

She swiped back to Celia’s memories, pushing Actinium out of her mind, and opened the folder, then the subfolder labeled XXX that she hadn’t reviewed before.

It expanded to three hundred memories of all the boys Celia had loved and been loved by.

Kasey closed it, heart pounding again.

Think outside the box.There had to be a way to understand her sister’s relationships without reviewing every memory manually.

She began to develop an algorithm that would match biomonitor data to memories by date, and then narrow the memories down to the ones that corresponded with oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin spikes, the respective hormones for socialization, motivation, and goal achievement. Of the memories left, Kasey filtered for people, prioritizing recurring faces. She hit RUN. The algorithm spit out the top five results.

Her own name and face topped the list.

Strange. Stranger still was how Actinium was not in the top five, which included Leona, or the top ten, when Kasey expanded the parameters. At number twelve was Tristan. Dmitri, number seventeen. By number fifty, Kasey, perplexed, searched directly for Actinium among the netted memories.

0 RESULTS.

Kasey ran the program again. Same result—zero.

She did a face search through all of Celia’s memories.

No saved ones of Actinium.

The unit suddenly felt colder, though the temperature in the corner of Kasey’s gaze stayed the same. An insidious thought zapped her; she located Celia’s memories of the time they’d gone to the sea. She rewatched it, laser-eyed, went as far back to the memories from their childhood, when Genevie had been alive, watched those too, pulled up the biomonitor data on the day Genevie had died, and found the neurotransmitter spike that corresponded with the adjustment she’d accepted on Celia’s behalf. Her panic abated. The memories were real. The biomonitor data was real. The facts were real and they were as followed:

Celia had been poisoned.

She’d gone to the hospel. She’d left by sea. The evidence for that was all there.

Then where was Actinium? The boy who’d sat across from her on this chaise? Who’d been in this unit just moments ago?

This unit.

Time slowed. Stilled.

Reversed its march.

Actinium had holo-ed here. Via Kasey’s hotspot. But a hotspot was nothing more than a tether, allowing people to holo to your location. It had nothing to do with access permissions, permissions being nonapplicable to public domains, but this was private. And not Kasey’s home. Had it been, Actinium holoing in would have prompted ACCEPT GUEST to appear in her Intraface, like it had at her party. That Kasey hadn’t been given the option meant one of two things: Either Actinium had hacked his way in, or …

A chill filled Kasey’s bones.

… or he wasn’t a guest. In this unit.

This unit that belonged to the Coles.

There was only one way to confirm.

Actinium was good at hacking. But so was Kasey. Finally free to use every trick she knew, she peeled back the layers of Actinium, rank 0. She stripped him down to the boy behind the identity, the same boy in the picture frame atop the coffee table, whose face did exist in Celia’s memories, and Kasey’s, too, but seven years had changed it, aged it, and left it utterly unrecognizable.

---

Ekaterina sent the itinerary at midnight. By then, Kasey was far too deep down the rabbit hole to reply.

She reviewed everything she could get her hands on. The media coverage of the copterbot crash. The report from the forensics lab. The cambot footage of the departure: Genevie, Ester, Frain, and the Coles’ son, a ten-year-old boy, waving at the crowds on stratum-100 before they boarded the copterbot. Kasey studied the clip again and again, until she found it.

Actinium’s secret to surviving the accident that’d killed everyone else.

Her brain, kicked into overdrive, began to shut down nonessential functions. First to go were emotions. She could get upset, or she could get answers to her questions, too many of which relied on Actinium’s cooperation. Back in the Mizuhara unit, Kasey drafted several messages, deliberating over her tone. Sent none come afternoon. Departure time. She set off for P2C headquarters. She’d confront him in person. A perfectly logical plan—assuming they’d be on this trip alone.

“Meridian?” Of all the things Kasey had prepared for, this was not one. “Why are you here?” she asked, brain ejected out of autopilot mode and forced to assess this new confounding variable standing outside of P2C headquarters.

I could ask you the same, said the sour look on Meridian’s face. She was clearly prepped to travel, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. “Officer Trukhin invited me.”

Ekaterina.Kasey opened the itinerary she’d been sent and read it in detail—down to the note about adding personnel that could be viewed as grassroots support by the Territory 4 locals.

“She asked if I’d be interested in presenting a variation of my solution.” Meridian went on, right as the copterbot descended. “Yes, you heard right. Mine. I submitted it.” At that moment, Actinium arrived. Meridian pointedly refused to look at him, reserving her glare for Kasey. Then, with a turn of her heel, she proceeded to climb into the copterbot.

You don’t know what you’re getting into, Kasey wished she could say. Could not, of course, or confront Actinium. Could only take the seat between the two of them. To her right was a boy who knew her, knew their true agenda, but who had hidden himself. And to her left was a girl who thought Kasey’s worst crime was hogging the solution when it was so much worse. Yes, with Meridian here, Kasey finally confronted how her and Actinium’s vision for the world would be viewed by outsiders—as a crime. Immoral and unforgivable.

And now she couldn’t even trust the person who was supposed to be her partner.

The 3,000 km flight was too silent and too long, then too short after they touched the ground. From the copterbot they were ferried to a car—an antique driven by a live chauffeur. Heat roared from the vents to combat the outside freeze. A polar vortex had taken up permanent residence over the northeastern territories after the arctic melt, and beyond the car windows laid a world stark and bleak, sun radiating in a barren sky, clouds dispatched by high concentrations of atmospheric carbon. The roadside crowds were the only sign of life, and the throngs densified as they neared the embassy.

The car pulled into park.

“Good luck,” Ekaterina messaged as Kasey secured her breathing mask. It couldn’t protect her from the dry-ice air, an assault on her lungs the second she stepped outside, into the blinding flash of cameras. Behind an orange barricade, reporters in the flesh pushed and shoved for the best angle. Citizens, some with masks and some without, held up signs criticizing the government’s megaquake response. The expressions on their faces were somber—save for one group of men, women, and children, waving at them.

“Meiran! Meiran!”

Meridian waved back. Her relatives, Kasey realized, tensing at the sight of their unmasked faces—right before all the faces in the crowd glitched into Celia’s, eyes blacked out by block letters.

IF PREMIER DU COULDN’T SAVE 1.5MIL LIVES

DON’T EXPECT THE ALIENS TO SAVE YOU

The image overlays vanished by the next blink. Meridian’s relatives became Meridian’s relatives again, but their smiles were gone.

Meridian appeared just as stricken. “What was that?”

“An Intraface hack,” Actinium answered.

Kasey checked her files. Everything was still there, including her few stored memories of Celia. The hackers must have accessed them to generate the faces.

The ache in her chest reawakened, and as the premier greeted them inside the embassy, a marble room with tall windows, her second heart pulsed. Who Actinium was didn’t change what’d happened to Celia. Didn’t change the amount of energy being used to warm this room, and how much more people had to pollute just to solve problems produced by pollution. “Aliens,” the protestors called them. Was it because they lived in the sky? Because they’d come down to subjugate them to another way of life? Would people ever willingly give up their freedoms for the good of others? Kasey wondered as attendants led them to the auditorium, in which they were to present the solution. Or did their family members first have to die?

Ding.A message from Actinium. Are you okay? he asked, and Kasey almost flinched. As if he could claim to care.

And as if she should care. Who did you see? she wanted to ask him. Your parents?

A moment alone, without Meridian, was all she needed.

But for now:

Yes, she replied, before stepping onto the stage to tell more lies.

---

A moment alone, Kasey quickly learned, was as scarce as clean air on this trip. P2C, with their trademark efficiency, had scheduled back-to-back events. After their presentation, they were to visit a hard-hit midland Territory 4 hospel. They would be delivered by fueled plane; the 2,000 km flight would be the equivalent of Kasey’s carbon emissions for the last five years.

Whatever it took to appear accessible.

As they crossed into the countryside, Kasey snuck a sideways glance at Actinium. Territory 4 was where the crash had happened. What was he thinking? Feeling? His mind grew more unknowable to her by the minute, like the terrain below as night crept over it. Then the plane dropped in altitude, bringing the land into grotesque focus. The midland basin, a natural fortress since antiquity, had been transformed into a death trap. Mountains had bulldozed over villages, trees torn out of the ground like bones through skin, and in places, the crust itself had fissured. Scars of hardened lava wormed through the land—more than Kasey had ever beheld. Celia might have seen beauty. Kasey only saw only a brutal reminder of a world untamed by its human owners, if they even deserved the title. For all their innovations, they were microscopic, a fact that became painfully apparent when they landed outside the hospel.

Another misleading term.

Eco-city hospels were all like the one Kasey had stormed into: calming sanctuaries built to maximize the human experience. This hospel, constructed to treat victims of radioaxon poisoning from a compromised fission plant, 20 km north, was as flimsy as a pop-up market and loud as a factory, its only product being death. Trucks emblazoned with the Worldwide Union symbol rumbled through the dirt. Personnel—including members of the Territory 4 defense force—rushed down barely set tar walkways. In the eco-cities, there was one doctor for every hundred citizens. Here, whatever the ratio was, it didn’t seem like enough. Medics certainly couldn’t be spared for PR, and the one assigned to them was red in the face and arguing with the P2C camera crew when Meridian, Actinium, and Kasey reached her. She looked to be around Celia’s age.

Like Celia, she wore no antiskin.

This wasn’t the island. Wasn’t shielded. A gurney rattled by them, bearing a body covered by a sheet, and Kasey’s mouth dried. “Where’s your antiskin?” she asked the medic.

“Ran out.” Then the medic turned her attention back to the crew—“One tour, that’s it”—but the crew’s attention had swiveled to Actinium. Everyone stared as he unzipped and stepped out of his antiskin.

He placed the protective gear into the medic’s hands.

The cam swung back to Kasey before she could recover. The unspoken cue lingered.

I’d never put you in danger, Actinium had promised. So had Ekaterina. You won’t be exposed. But vows were human constructs. They died out here, in the wilderness.

Kasey should have been prepared.

She took off her antiskin, flesh crawling as it came into contact with air. Her biomonitor warned her of the toxins entering her system. Only for a little while, she told herself.

Just this once.

Meridian started to unzip hers.

Just one swim.

Her fingers, Kasey noticed, were shaking.

One more trip—

“Don’t.”

The boom and camera swung Kasey’s way.

“We’re being filmed,” Meridian muttered beneath her breath. Kasey didn’t care. She was well aware of the price she and Actinium would have to pay to make others do the same. But Meridian didn’t have to be caught in the crosshairs, and Kasey was relieved when the medic interrupted them.

“We done here?” The medic strode down the tar walkway and shouted “Come on!” when they lagged. “I don’t have all day!”

They followed the medic into the arm of a ward, the narrow path tiled with cardboard and deconstructed crates. PVC strips, held together with duct tape, formed the walls around them, rippling as they walked. The air grew acrid with the smell of waste, human and chemical, and Kasey, who’d barely survived stratum-22, was woozy by the time they reached a series of plasterboard doors set into the walls, leading presumably to patient rooms. In the back of her mind, she understood she couldn’t face other humans like this. If she vomited on camera, it’d completely undo the point of the visit.

“Wait—” she started to say to the medic, and broke off at the bang. It came from one of the plasterboard doors as it fell down and a man burst out, a bundle in his arms.

He ran straight into the wall.

The PVC rippled, absorbing the impact. But Kasey couldn’t absorb what she was seeing. She stared as the man rammed into the PVC again, as if expecting it to yield. The duct tape held.

And so he turned, and charged toward them instead.

“Don’t engage!” shouted the medic.

Meridian flattened against the wall. Kasey stumbled to the side.

Actinium didn’t move. His head snapped up when the man was almost upon him.

His fist cocked back.

Later, Kasey would try to sequence the memory. The initiation. The escalation. What came first—the punch that slammed into the man’s face, causing the bundle to tumble from his arms, or the knife, flashing in the man’s hand? But this moment, like everything else about the trip, would resist her. It followed no order but nature’s disorder.

Meridian screamed. The medic cursed, and called for guards. Two ran in and tackled the man as Kasey ran to Actinium and tried to hold him back. He wrestled in her grip. She wasn’t prepared for his resistance—or his elbow, the bony end bucking free and swinging into her nose.

The gush was immediate. Warm. Kasey let go. Her attention fractured to the bundle on the floor—antiskins, scattered and now splattered with red—then to the cowering crew, cameras still rolling, and through the blood pooling in her mouth, she managed to shout, “Cut!”

---

The medic wouldn’t even look her in the eye when she handed Kasey gauze for her nose.

Meridian had been hysterical. “Are you sick?” she’d screamed at Actinium. “He was stealing some antiskins! Big deal!”

Actinium hadn’t said anything. He looked as he did now: head bowed as he sat on the crated-bench, hair fallen out of its carefully combed style, a visor around his eyes, each hand a fist over his knees, knuckles blanched while Meridian railed.

“Meridian … please,” Kasey had said, which provoked Meridian more.

“Oh, so I’m the problem now?”

She’d stormed off. Maybe Kasey should have followed her, and left Actinium alone, but something compelled her to sit beside him on the bench. She’d stayed until her nose stopped gushing five minutes later, though the silence didn’t break, and she couldn’t find a way to wipe the blood from his shirt so it, too, stayed. Red against white, like when he’d smashed the glass, except then, Actinium had been in perfect control. This time, she’d seen something rabid in his eyes. Had the chaos of their surroundings infected him? Or was this who he really was?

“You need to tell me the truth,” she finally said. A message came from Ekaterina. She ignored it. She’d tried to be as motionless as Actinium, as if sharing his stillness could allow her to share his state of mind, but he was a black box to her. “Who are you?” she pressed when he didn’t reply.

Why is it that I can trust you one moment, and be hurt by you the next?

Silence. Then, in a voice that rasped: “I think you already know. Say it,” he ordered, when she did not.

Kasey swallowed. The sound boomed in her ears. “Andre Cole.”

“A dead person.”

“You never got on the copterbot.” Kasey adopted the same pose as Actinium, her hands on her knees and eyes to the ground. Her voice dropped. “You built a bot.”

The departure footage had given it away. When Ester dropped her purse before boarding the copterbot, Andre Cole hadn’t moved. Not even to blink. Reactions to novel situations. The hardest bit of programming to get right. No wonder Actinium hadn’t been repulsed by her violation of the Ester Act; he’d beaten her to it. Constructed his model with a degree of finesse that was admirable, even if his deception was not.

“A dead person who violated his parents’ act,” Actinium revised. His gaze was still hidden from her when Kasey glanced over. “Doesn’t that disturb you?”

“No,” she admitted. “Not as much as you not appearing in any of my sister’s memories.” She drew in a sharp breath. Her nose throbbed. “Why?”

Why did you lie?

For a long time, Actinium did not answer. “My intentions shouldn’t matter.”

Logically, they shouldn’t have. Intentions, good or bad, didn’t impact people. Consequences did. It was the consequences of someone’s actions, well-intentioned or not, that’d killed Celia.

But Kasey wanted to know. It defied logic. Caring for Actinium, despite the high probability he’d lied to her in other ways too, defied logic. “How did this world wrong you?”

“In the same way it wronged your sister.”

“The crash was an accident.”

They’d shared silences before. Comfortable ones. Pained ones.

This silence was humid, a calm before the storm.

“An accident.” Actinium’s shoulders began to shake. Kasey tensed; she wasn’t good with tears. Then he lifted his head, and she realized he hadn’t been crying at all.

“That’s what my parents would have wanted you to think.” His lips were slashed between a laugh and a wince, his black eyes aglow with pain. “No, Mizuhara. Call it for what it was: murder.”