Sister of Shadows, page 30
“Show me EGX,” he commanded the pixel wall.
A new rectangle of video popped up next to the first, showing a competing news site.
As he suspected, they were reporting about the interview SNN was currently broadcasting. They showed still images of . . . Jacey . . . and Vin. As he’d expected, they’d place placed them side-by-side next to pictures of Jacqueline Buchanan and Elizabeth Burnell.
These were old pictures of the Progenitors, showing them in their twenties. But their image process computers had found poses nearly identical to the freeze frames.
If one didn’t know better, one might believe them to be the same pictures, simply modified with different clothing and different hairstyles. They were exactly the same faces.
In such a cynical world, such a coincidence would create many crazy theories. That was good. But both networks were certainly already farming out a facial structure analysis to a third-party AI expert. The kind they used in security forensics to identify criminals.
Dr. Carlhagen knew what people were thinking. These young ladies couldn’t actually be young Elizabeth and young Jacqueline. Not without time travel. And no AI would grant time travel as a possibility, so the idea of cloning would be put forward.
And then the cat would be—as the old cliché went—out of the bag. Somebody was making really, really good carbos of famous people.
Dr. Carlhagen didn’t like the world “carbo”, the slang term for clones. It was based on an anachronism, “carbon copy,” which was a form of duplication for typed documents way back in the 20th century.
It meant the clones the world knew were illegal, and not of the quality Dr. Carlhagen could make. Not even close.
Maxine walked in, wrapped in a bathrobe and toweling her hair. She spotted the video of Vin and Jacey and stopped, towel dangling from one hand. “Oh no.”
Dr. Carlhagen smiled. “Oh yes, Maxine.”
“What have you done?”
Dr. Carlhagen smiled. “I suppose I’ve taken over the world. Please sit. I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
She sat. Gone was her usual look of superiority. Gone was the icy and stony expression of disdain. All that showed on her pale, pale face was fear.
“Once we have an understanding, then we’ll call your Colonel Vikisky for an update on his progress toward securing the Scion School on St. Vitus.”
He commanded the pixel wall to return to its view of the island and sea. He would replay the interview with Vin and Jacey later. Probably many times.
“The pill I gave you is an Anti Transfer-Rejection supplement. It was tailored specifically for a hormonal deficiency the AI programmed into you at the time of transfer. You will require one pill per day for the rest of your life. Oh, you can miss two or three days in a row, but you’ll grow increasingly tired and forgetful. But you know how that feels, don’t you? If you still do not take your pill, you’ll deteriorate into a sort of vegetative state. Very drooly, very messy.”
He leaned forward. “Trust me. You don’t want to let it get to that point, because what follows is organ failure and death.”
“Is that the pill I’ve been watching you eat like candy?” Maxine asked.
“No. I don’t require the ATR, for obvious reasons.”
“And so for the rest of my life if I don’t do as you say, you will withhold this supplement?”
Dr. Carlhagen smiled. “I knew you would understand me. But it doesn’t have to be like that, my dear Maxine. I find using it as leverage distasteful.”
“I see.”
She waved at the pixel wall where the video interview had been playing. “I recognized those girls. I suspected Elizabeth Burnell would pop up again. The other girl was Jackie B’s Scion. She is the one you were going to have me overwrite, before you switched her out for this body. And now we have some very recognizable faces being broadcast around the world. Reckless of you, Christof.”
Even in the face of utter defeat, she still had the audacity to lecture him. It made him laugh.
“You still haven’t figured it out, have you, Maxine? I’m prepared to go to the press myself and tell them every single Progenitor’s name. It suits me perfectly now that those two have been spotted in the wild.”
She stared at him for a long time. “If you’re willing to make the Scion program public, you must have the President herself.”
Dr. Carlhagen said nothing. He had no reason to confide anything to her. His silence made her squirm and she stared at him, as if suddenly realizing she’d been sleeping with a monster.
Very well. He’d be a monster in her eyes. He’d be a monster to the world. It mattered very little what people thought of him.
He was doing what needed to be done. The world had showed itself incapable of addressing its problems. No form of government yet invented truly worked.
Democracy did not solve anything until it faced a crisis. Tyranny ate itself up with corruption.
The Kille-Tine asteroid and the rising sea levels and the incessant wars and the plague had proved that humanity was unable to prepare for catastrophe.
What the world needed was an all-powerful, incorruptible man like Dr. Carlhagen to make the hard decisions.
He would dole out immortality to those in power in return for obedience. Many millions would probably have to die to bring things back into balance. Much wealth would have to be confiscated. Resources reallocated. Nations and religions alike would have to be erased from human memory.
Billions would revile him. All would fear him.
He would save humanity, preserve it for a million years. And no one would thank him.
He accepted that.
“I know what you’re thinking, Maxine. You’re on the verge of making a scene. You’re almost ready to stand and shake your fist at me and shout that you’d rather die than serve me. But as I said, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can still wield immense power in this world. More than you’ve accumulated in all your years of public service. You’ve killed three men with your bare hands in just the past two days. Surely you won’t balk at the bloody work ahead of us.”
She dropped her face into the towel. Her fine white hair had already starting to dry, and it tumbled over the towel like an avalanche. Giving vent to her anger and fear, she screamed into the towel and stomped her bare feet on the carpet.
Once this fit passed, she dabbed her tears away and cleared her throat. Slowly, she straightened her shoulders and collected herself.
Finally, she raised her eyes to meet his. “I’m sorry for putting Livy into cryo, Dr. Carlhagen. Would you like me to go reverse the process?”
That was more like it.
Not that Dr. Carlhagen trusted her one centimeter. She’d be a model assistant, but she’d be looking for an angle. Mostly she’d be trying to find ways to secure a lifetime’s supply of her ATR supplement.
That was fine. Dr. Carlhagen could lead her down a hundred false paths in her hunt for freedom. In the meantime, she would do his bidding.
“I accept your apology, Maxine. But now that she’s in cryo, she has to stay for a while. It’s a stressful transition and pulling her out before her body and mind have had a chance to recover would be very risky.”
“Who is she?” Maxine asked, voice full of desperate curiosity. “Who is that girl’s Progenitor?”
Dr. Carlhagen smiled. “Go get dressed. You need to prepare yourself to call Colonel Vikisky.”
Disappointment showed for a moment, but she stood immediately to obey his command. “Yes, Dr. Carlhagen.”
“You may call me Christof. When we’re alone together.”
He admired her lithe figure as she walked toward the bedroom. Now that they had come to an understanding about his place of power, he found her more alluring than before.
She would live, he decided. For now.
Once she was out of his sight, he commanded the pixel wall to show him the entirety of the Vin and Jacey interview. When the interviewer asked her about her resemblance to Jacqueline Buchanan, Dr. Carlhagen smiled.
Yes, the cat was out of the bag.
But Captain Wilcox could hardly swoop in and snatch her up now. It was clear the reporter was more interested in Jacey than in Vin. The girl would be under constant observation. Surveillance would be a better term.
Lazarus appeared on another section of the pixel wall. “Sir, you have a call at your holodesk.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s the President of the North American Union. Gauging by her facial organization and a complete audio spectrographic analysis of her speech, it is 87% likely she is in the emotional state known as anger.”
Dr. Carlhagen smiled. “And if it isn’t anger? What other emotion might it be?” He knew damn well, but it was a good test for an AI still trying to learn such subtleties.
“It is 13% likely she is in a state of fear.”
Yes. That was it.
Still smiling, he hefted himself from the sofa and headed to accept a call from the president.
63
Like a Kick in the Chest
In dry clothes and now reasonably clean following a douse of saltwater pulled from the sea, Humphrey felt almost human. If he could get a few nights sleep and some big meals in him, he might actually begin to think straight again.
He’d have to settle for the handful of crackers he munched as he paced on the bridge. As for sleep, that would have to wait.
The bridge felt very cramped now, as the holodesk took up a lot of space.
Sensei stood like a statue, staring out the front windows. He’d removed the baggy overalls and hadn’t said a word since the boarding party left. Occasionally he’d throw a side-eye glance at Orson, which always made the lump of a man shiver.
Humphrey leaned against the map table and watched Summer as she finished connecting the network to the holodesk. Just getting the monstrous mahogany thing in position had taken five Scions and both of Orson’s men. It now stood pressed against the closet door. The two AI servers were stacked on top of it and the genius Spider was busily stripping and connecting wires to the back of the boxes.
“We don’t have a call address for Elizabeth,” Summer said as she worked. She was wearing that weird hat with the leaping deer embroidered on the front. Her black hair was jammed up inside, apparently to help keep the back of her neck cool while she worked. Elias hovered next to her, handing her tools and occasionally sharing melty-eyed glances with her. “So we’ll have to wait for Jacey to call us. In the meantime, I think I can get—”
Summer flew backward and landed on her butt, hat flying off her head and hair spilling over her face. A tendril of smoke drifted up from the back of one of the server boxes.
Elias was kneeling next to her in a second, grimacing against the pain from his gunshot wound. “Are you hurt?”
“What happened?” Humphrey demanded. He went to the server to inspect the damage.
“I got the wires crossed or something. The electronics should be fine.” She accepted Elias’s help as he lifted her to her feet. “That was like a kick in the chest.”
Summer stuffed her hair back in the hat and jammed it onto her head. She gave the offending server a rueful glare then dove back into fiddling with it.
Humphrey left her to it. “Orson, what’s our distance from the first island?”
Aphrodite’s captain hunched on his chair, shoving spoonfuls of soup between his beard and mustache. “Fifty miles southwest of our current position. It’ll be dark before we get within sight of the closest one.”
Humphrey studied the map. The three islands were each roughly twenty miles apart. Their course would take them to the middle one. If that one wasn’t Elizabeth’s island, he’d have to choose one of the others. But if Summer could get Vaughan started back up and onto the holodesk, they might just get the exact location and save a lot of pointless wandering.
Wanda pushed through the door with Bethancy in tow. She scanned the bridge, then turned to leave.
“Who are you looking for?” Humphrey asked.
“Leslie. I can’t find her anywhere. Her Nine needs some discipline. Grace and Suki took all of Bethancy’s clothes and soaked them in seawater, then stuffed them in her bunk. Dajeet is trying to keep them in line, but they won’t listen to her.
Sensei turned around. “When did you last see Leslie?”
Wanda shrugged.
Humphrey said, “She was in the stairwell a while ago, sleeping.”
“She isn’t there now,” Wanda said. “Can you just put Dajeet in charge for now?” She was looking at Humphrey.
It struck him as ridiculous that he would have any say over who led the girls’ Nines. But Wanda was looking at him with a great deal of expectation.
“You’re serious,” he said. “Shouldn’t Sensei tell them?”
Sensei answered without turning around. “They’ll listen to you.”
Wanda’s green eyes were locked on his. She’d given up on the ponytail, maybe to let her hair dry following the soaking in the engine room. Her mass of her red curls stuck out in all directions, giving her the wild look of a woodland nymph. “Of course they will.”
Bethancy held the door for him and Wanda as they left the bridge. She gave him a weird look, sort of a knowing smile.
Wanda led the way, and Humphrey did his best not to pay too much attention to her shoulders or slim waist. Or anything else.
He repeated Jacey’s name in his head, pictured her face. He’d loved her most of his life, and now that they were together he had no intention of betraying her.
Yes, he was drawn to Wanda. There was nothing wrong with that. It was natural. And he knew that intense experiences tended to draw people together. That had happened between him and Jacey.
Wanda pushed through the doors to the outer deck. She told Bethancy to run ahead and make sure all the girls in Girls’ Hold knew Humphrey was coming, as some had been out of their uniforms to let them dry.
Once Bethancy was gone, Wanda stopped Humphrey with a gentle hand on his. He took hold of it, a reflex more than a conscious choice. He let it go just as quickly. “Wanda. This can’t happen.”
“I know. I’ve told myself that a thousand times. I know I don’t compare to Jacey. Nobody does.”
She was right. She didn’t compare to Jacey. Any more than Belle compared to Jacey. Or Orson. That did not mean she wasn’t beautiful or desirable. She was different.
When he didn’t say anything, her jaw tightened. “I don’t know what I was expecting by talking to you.”
He wanted to comfort her, but he knew he couldn’t touch her. If he did, he would embrace her. Then he would kiss her. He hated himself for it. He hated his weakness. Hated the situation that they were in. And in truth he was angry. At Jacey.
She had left him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel something here. Between us. But it just can’t be. I won’t betray Jacey.”
She wiped at her eyes, but he didn’t see any tears. “That doesn’t help,” she said, laughing, though her voice broke. “It just proves how good and honorable a man you are. Besides, I would never betray her either. She is my sister by any definition other than biology.”
She had called him a man. He’d never thought of himself that way before. Nor had he ever considered himself honorable. He was Dr. Carlhagen’s Scion, after all. Genetically bad.
“The Scions need your leadership, now more than ever.” Wanda started walking again and Humphrey walked next to her, keeping enough distance their hands didn’t touch by mistake. “Leslie is not cut out for leading her Nine. I don’t know what it is. Maybe Belle crushed her spirit. Maybe her Progenitor was a flake. Who knows? But Dajeet can do it, with my help.”
“And what do we tell Leslie when she comes out of hiding?”
“That she shouldn’t have been hiding.”
Girls’ Hold was oddly quiet when Humphrey followed Wanda down the ladder. Wanda’s Nine stood in ordered ranks alongside their bunks. Leslie’s was huddled around Dajeet, most wearing plaintive faces as if they’d just been told to run ten miles.
Humphrey stalked toward Dajeet, arranging his face to convey extreme annoyance. “Dajeet, what is the problem with your Nine?”
It felt very odd to address Dajeet in that tone of voice. But not much odder than referring to the Nine as hers.
The girl was a Snake, after all, just recently turned fifteen. Dajeet was petite for her age, and if he hadn’t known her, he would have guessed she was a year younger. That was until you looked in her eyes, which reminded him of Mother Tyeesha’s eyes. In fact, Mother had always called Dajeet an “old soul,” whatever that meant.
Her uniform was spotless and her hair—as black as her eyes—was pulled into a tight ponytail. She stood at attention. “We were waiting for Leslie’s direction.”
“If she’s not present, you are in charge. I’m surprised your Nine has forgotten that.”
“We haven’t forgotten,” Grace said, indignant. She was an extraordinarily tall Centipede of thirteen, whose arms and legs were thickly muscled. She understood the irony of her name, and had showed early on that she would not accept any jibes about it without brutal retaliation.
“Then why is it Wanda’s Nine is in order and Dajeet’s is not?”
Grace clamped her mouth shut.
Humphrey raised an eyebrow at Dajeet until she caught on. She clapped her hands and called roll: “Vestana, Christina, Chloe, Suki, Grace, Dansha.”
The girls moved to their spots, hands automatically going to their sigil pins and checking to make sure they were straight. A few who were wearing their hair down were bundling it into regulation ponytails.
Humphrey noted that several in Wanda’s Nine had not bothered to do so. He couldn’t blame them, since Jacey had stopped wearing hers back.
“Would you like to join me on inspection?” Dajeet asked him.
“No.” He turned on Wanda. “Your Nine is not complete.”
Wanda stood at attention. “Jacey’s location is unknown. She will not be joining us. Livy has been abducted by Dr. Carlhagen. Summer is on the bridge attempting to connect the AI servers.”
