Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 24
"Diane." He chose his approach. "I know you have — history with him."
"Come on, Rand." Her voice was even. "This isn't about history."
"I'm not saying it is. I'm just —"
"He's one of us," she said. "Not them. I know he's a Relic, technically, but he's —"
"Different?" Rand offered.
She looked straight ahead and didn't answer, which was its own answer.
Rand let the silence breathe for a moment. "He's not different, Diane. And I think that's exactly what's bothering you. He's the same as them. Lucid enough to hold a conversation with, capable enough to plan a small thing and execute it — but somehow off, in the same way they're all off. Whatever the System took from them, it took from him too."
She nodded. He saw the beginning of something at the corner of her eye and squeezed her hand, and a cool gust came off the plain beyond the city's edge and moved across the rooftop, and he let it pass without comment.
"These Relics," he said slowly, working it out as he spoke. "Their memories were taken, but that alone shouldn't change what they are. Memory and personality aren't the same thing. You can remove what a person remembers without changing who they are — at least theoretically. And these people were leaders. Independent, driven, competitive. The best their respective fields produced, by the System's own assessment. If anyone in the world should be ungovernable, should refuse subordination, should push back against a Josiah Crane telling them what to do — it's the people standing in that square."
"But none of them —" her voice had a tremor in it, the tremor of adrenaline finding its exit after being suppressed for an hour.
"I know," he said. "None of them are. They're passive, they're directable, they operate on external input rather than internal drive. Which means the System didn't just take their memories. It took something else as well. Something more fundamental." He paused. "And Myers is the same."
She absorbed this without speaking.
"I kept thinking it was something Crane did," Rand continued. "Some management technique, some specific authority he'd established. But seeing the crowd when Crane disappeared into it — the way they just deflated, lost their direction — that's not cult behavior. That's not even good charismatic leadership. That's something engineered." He looked at the city below them, at the small figures moving through the streets with the unfocused drift he'd been noticing since they arrived. "The System did this to them. All of them. Including Myers."
"How?" Diane asked.
"I don't know yet. But the scraping process — the way it's evolved, the mobile deployment, what Rand described about the deactivation drones — the System has had years to refine what it does and what else it can do while it's doing it." He shook his head. "What I want to know is whether it can be undone. Whether there's a version of these people still in there, underneath whatever was layered over them or removed from them, that could be reached."
"Rand, the System —"
"I know. I know it's not going to cooperate with its own reversal. But there has to be something. Some mechanism, some pathway. It's a program — a fantastically advanced program, a program that has been developing itself in ways we didn't anticipate and can't fully map — but it's still a program. Programs have architecture, and architecture has seams."
He looked at her. The light had shifted slightly, the sun climbing, and it caught the line of her face in a way that he registered with the specific awareness of someone who had been looking at the same face for years and still found it capable of producing a response in him that bypassed analysis entirely. There was a bruise forming where Crane had hit her, dark against her jaw, and it produced in him a feeling that he recognized as rage in a cold, collected form — the kind that didn't want to express itself immediately but intended to express itself eventually.
She turned and met his eyes. Something shifted in her expression — a recalibration, a moment of actually seeing him rather than looking in his direction.
"There is something," she said. "And that's why we're not leaving yet."
"Myers?"
"Yes, but that's secondary. Crane."
Rand straightened slightly. "What about Crane?"
"I'm going to kill him."
The words were quiet and specific and arrived without the emotional inflation that those words usually arrived with. Not anger, not a threat. A stated intention, the way you stated a route or a time.
Rand looked at her. "You're going to kill him."
"For what he did to us. What he was about to have them do to us." She didn't gesture, didn't raise her voice. "He needs to die, Rand. He's been orchestrating something, and it centers on Myers, and the direction it's heading is Myers dead or Myers in the hands of people who will use him and discard him."
"Giving him to the Unders."
"The Unders will kill him. You know that. And we need him alive. So Crane has to go, we get Myers, and we move." She looked at him directly. "Stand up for yourself. For us. Stop calculating and decide."
Rand felt the familiar sensation of watching Diane at work — the specific thing she did where the argument was correct and the delivery was strategic and he was aware of both simultaneously, aware that he was being moved toward a conclusion she'd already reached, and found that the awareness didn't change the destination because the destination was right.
"You're playing me," he said.
"Rand —"
"I know you, Diane. I've known you long enough to know when you're building toward something and using me as the last brick." He said it without heat, because there was no heat available for it — just the affectionate exasperation of someone who had long ago made his peace with the fact that the woman he loved was considerably better at certain things than he was, and that one of those things was managing conversations toward their correct outcomes. "I also know when you're right."
She looked at him with the expression that lived between I know and don't push it.
"The System," he said. "Any plan we make —"
"It will already have accounted for it. Myers said the same thing, before Umutsuz." She paused. "That's why the plan can't be a plan in the way we're used to thinking about plans. If we sit on a rooftop and architect something, the System's already seventeen steps ahead of us. The only way to work against something that can model any plan we're capable of making is to not give it a plan to model against." She looked out at the plain beyond Relica's edge. "Which means we work with the System, not against it."
"With it," Rand said. "And how does that look?"
"We bring Myers to Paris. To the ICPL. After we handle Crane."
It landed the way she intended it to land — final, clear, the only answer that made the necessary sense.
"You weren't for this before," he said. "When the three of us were arguing about it —"
"I wasn't against it either. I was measuring. You know how I work." She glanced at him sideways. "I was also aware that leaving at that precise moment was going to get us killed, which none of us needed. Timing matters."
The thought of Lansing arrived without warning and sat in his chest with its full weight. He absorbed it and moved forward, because there was nothing useful on the other side of dwelling in it right now.
"If we find Myers and get clear of this city," he said, "the System will know we're heading to Paris. It'll know as soon as we start moving in that direction."
"It'll know we're going somewhere. It won't know why. That's the distinction." She shifted, looking back toward the square's direction, listening for anything the ambient sounds of the city might tell her about whether the immediate area was stable. "Getting to the ICPL isn't something the System can prevent, even if it wanted to. It doesn't have a mechanism for that kind of physical intervention — not directly. And our intentions when we get there aren't something it can read from our trajectory."
"When I thought about Paris, I thought about Myers shutting it down," Rand said. "Is that still the plan?"
Diane was quiet for a moment. A real pause — not a rhetorical one, not a space she was filling with calculation, but genuine consideration of a question that didn't have a clean answer.
"It might be part of it," she said. "But it's not the first priority after Crane."
Rand waited.
She turned and looked at him. Her voice dropped to a level that was barely louder than the wind coming off the plain.
"I want to talk to it," she said.
Rand looked at her face and found it completely serious.
"To the System."
"Yes."
He stayed with that for a moment, turning it over, finding the edges of it and what lay past them. "You want to have a conversation with the most advanced artificial intelligence ever produced, which has been developing itself in secret for the better part of two decades and currently manages the infrastructure of the entire world."
"Yes."
"At the ICPL in Paris."
"With Myers as the access point."
Rand looked out at the city around them — the mismatched rooftops, the improvised architecture, the people moving below them who had been the best the world produced and had been reduced to something that required external direction to sustain forward motion. He thought about what the System had done to them, and to Myers, and to the shape of the world that everyone still living in it was trying to navigate.
He thought about what you said to a thing like that.
"Okay," he said.
Diane nodded once, as if the conversation had arrived where it was always going to arrive and she'd simply been patient enough to let it get there.
"Then we need to find Crane first," she said.
"Yes," Rand agreed.
They sat for another moment on the rooftop, in the morning light, listening to the city below them do whatever it was doing without them. Then Diane stood, and Rand stood beside her, and they started moving again across the rooftops toward whatever came next.
RAVI_
"When were you going to tell me you were a badass?"
Ravi asked it as they moved, his voice low, his eyes doing the work of tracking the terrain ahead while some other part of his brain processed what he'd just watched happen in the tent. Ary had held up a hand at the perimeter line — the invisible boundary where the camp's built environment gave way to open ground — and only then turned to face him.
"Need-to-know basis," she said. "Survival, and all that."
"Right." He looked at her. "Well. Thanks."
"Don't mention it." She turned back to the open ground ahead of them. "You ready?"
"Just run?"
"Head for the hills. Grouse is going to be furious that you're not still in that chair. You're the last leverage he has for getting to Myers Asher, and losing you twice is going to create a problem for him." She glanced back, a quick read of the camp behind them. "He's got the war with the Relics to focus on — that's his primary operation and he can't let it slip. But he'll send men after us anyway. To maintain the appearance of control, at minimum."
"Ready when you are," Ravi said.
She was already gone before he finished the sentence.
Ary hit full speed in approximately two strides, the acceleration of someone who hadn't been building up to it but simply deciding to do it, and Ravi's legs took a half-second longer to receive the message and comply. He ran, forcing his body to close the gap, the wounds in his side registering their sustained objection to everything he'd asked of them in the last hour.
"Second perimeter checkpoint is about two hundred feet ahead," she called back, not slowing, not looking at him. "They've already picked us up on the cams — don't stop, don't look for it, just keep running."
He didn't respond. Talking cost air, and air was currently a limited resource.
He ran and he thought, because thinking was something he could do while running, and the situation required it.
He wanted out. He wanted to be clear of all of this — the camps, the Unders, Grouse, the war that was apparently in the process of starting somewhere in the direction they were running away from. He wanted the hills and the anonymity of open terrain and the uncomplicated logic of a life organized around only himself.
He wanted away from her.
The problem was the wanting. It had the specific quality of wanting that he'd learned over years to distrust in himself — the pull toward something he could already identify as complicated and costly, the kind of wanting that persisted despite the evidence against it. She'd gotten him captured. She'd led him and Solomon directly into the hands of people who'd had specific intentions for them, intentions that had cost Solomon everything he had. She'd done it deliberately, with full knowledge of what she was delivering them to.
And she'd also kept him alive when she didn't have to. Had inserted herself between him and outcomes that would have been worse, in ways he was only partially able to reconstruct. Had killed two men in a tent with the efficiency of someone for whom it was not a moral crisis but a technical problem, and had done it specifically to get him out of the chair and out of the camp before Grouse arrived.
He thought about what he would have done, in her position. If their situations had been reversed — if he'd been the one with something to trade, something Kellan wanted, something that required him to deliver specific people to a specific place at a specific cost.
The answer arrived before he'd fully framed the question.
Absolutely. Without hesitation.
He'd done worse things. He could name them in order if he needed to, though he didn't. The accounting of his own decisions was not something he spent time on in general, because time spent on it was time not spent on whatever the current situation required. But he knew the ledger existed and he knew what was in it, and this particular entry — trade people you barely know to save yourself — would not have registered as a difficult line item.
He'd run from things his entire adult life. Not literally, not always, but in the more fundamental sense of declining to be present for consequences he'd helped create. The pID hack. His family. A dozen smaller things that had compounded into the person he currently was, which was a person running through the desert with bullet holes in his side next to a woman he couldn't trust and couldn't leave.
He made a decision, somewhere in the middle of the second hundred meters, that he was going to stop doing that. The decision arrived with the simplicity of things that had been forming for a long time and finally said themselves: no more running from the things he'd helped create. Whatever he'd put into motion — the hack, the cascade of consequences that had followed it, the specific grief it had produced in specific people — he was going to be present for the working-out of it. Not because he'd suddenly developed a taste for accountability, but because he was tired of being the person who hadn't.
Ary angled left, heading for the line of rocks that split two of the larger hills down their shared center. Ravi recognized the instinct behind the choice — the natural channel created by the erosion between them, difficult terrain that would slow pursuit but that they could navigate faster than people who didn't know it. He followed her left without breaking stride.
The boulders began before the incline did, spilling out onto the flat desert in the way of things that had been coming apart slowly for a very long time. Ary moved through them with a fluency that was difficult to watch without becoming slightly annoyed — springing over the smaller ones, reading the gaps between the larger ones before she reached them, adjusting her path with the micro-corrections of someone whose body had fully integrated the task. She didn't slow down. She didn't look for footholds so much as find them, the movement having a quality that suggested she'd done this kind of thing — not this specific terrain, but this specific type of problem — enough times that it had stopped requiring conscious navigation.
He found himself wondering about the CVE. The Cardio-Ventricular Enlargement had been a market phenomenon when it first arrived — a procedure that increased the heart's output capacity and expanded the arterial pathways feeding major muscle groups, essentially giving the recipient an engine upgrade for sustained physical performance. Prohibitively expensive. Restricted in practice to the people the System had selected as test subjects, the small category of Current brokers who'd been assigned the elaborate performance of watching computers run themselves, and — he'd learned from Solomon — Hunters.
Solomon had the CVE. That had been evident from the first hour of walking with him, the man's stamina operating at a level that didn't map to age or visible conditioning alone. If Ary had it as well, if she'd been enhanced the same way —
She reached a perch high on the rock channel, a natural shelf where two large boulders had come to rest against each other in a way that created a surface with a clear view down the slope and out across the valley floor. She stopped and waited, her chest rising and falling with somewhat more emphasis than her usual stillness, which was the only concession to the run she appeared willing to make.
He arrived beside her and did not make a similar concession. He let his hands go to his knees and focused on breathing until breathing was something he was doing rather than something happening to him.
"We'll stop here for a minute," she said. "I need a break."
He looked at her. Not a drop of sweat visible on her face, her respiration already moderating toward something that sounded functional. He looked at his own hands on his knees and said nothing.
They rested in the way of people who were resting for operational reasons rather than mutual comfort, the silence between them carrying the accumulated weight of everything that had happened since he'd found her behind a boulder in the dark and made a decision about what kind of person he was going to be.
He thought about Solomon.
