Chapter 49 #2
I stop. I’m remembering something else now. The doctor with the mustache. The one who leaned over me just before the anesthesia took hold. The one who said—
“I’m sorry.”
“Nate?” Mia’s grip on my shoulders tightens.
“There was a doctor. Right before the procedure. He looked at me and he said ‘I’m sorry.’ I thought I dreamed it, but—” I press my fingers against my temple, trying to hold myself together. “He was real. And he knew. He knew what they were about to do to me.”
I pause and look at both of them. “They killed me. On that table. They killed me.”
My vision is starting to blur, the room wanting to spin.
“I’m not me.” The realization is a physical thing, a weight crushing my chest. “I’m just—I’m a copy. A fucking copy running on hardware, pretending to be a person.” I shake my head as the horror consumes me. “I’m…dead.”
“No.” Mia’s hands move to my face, forcing me to look at her. Her eyes are fierce, shining with unshed tears. “No, Nate. You are a person. Whatever they did to your body doesn’t change who you are.”
“I’m not human!” I yell at her, the terror pouring out of me. “I’m not a fucking human anymore! I’m dead, they fucking killed me. I died and they…I…”
March 15, 2038.
The day Nate Whitaker died.
The day I was born. This version of me. This thing that walks and talks and feels and bleeds but isn’t really alive, not in any way that matters.
“I remember my whole life,” I whisper, staring at my arm, at everything that’s wrong. “I remember all of it. Even the parts I don’t want to remember. But was that me? Was that really me, or was that a dead man whose memories I inherited like—like a hand-me-down coat?”
Neither of them has an answer for that.
We stay there for a long moment, the three of us, in a sterile room on a remote island, surrounded by the wreckage of everything I thought I knew about myself.
Finally, James clears his throat.
“I should close the incision,” he says quietly. “The tissue will heal quickly, faster than human tissue would, as you know, Nate. But it needs to be sealed properly.”
I nod. I don’t have the energy to do anything else. I am both boiling with anger and grief, and yet numb to the core.
As James works, stitching my artificial flesh back together, I stare at the ceiling and try to find something solid to hold onto. Some piece of myself that still feels real.
Mia’s hand finds mine again. Her fingers intertwine with mine, warm and alive and human in a way that I’m not.
She’s human and I’m not.
I’m not anything I thought I was.
“We’ll figure this out,” she says. “One step at a time.”
I glance at her and to her credit she’s still looking me in the eyes, she’s still here beside me. She’s not on the other side of the room dry-heaving because she discovered she was fucking a robot this whole time.
“But why not tell me?” I say. “Why not just say, hey we killed you and we downloaded your consciousness and uploaded it into this new body?”
Mia squeezes my hand. “Do you really think that would have been a good idea?”
“They were ensuring the experiment was a success,” James says.
“Had they told you the truth from the get-go, it wouldn’t have been.
You’re probably the only person in existence that this applies to, but it can’t be an easy thing to reconcile with your own death.
It would have made you unpredictable from the start.
You might have been suicidal. Perhaps you never would have retained any of your humanity had you known you weren’t human.
They needed to keep up the charade and never tell you the truth, that’s why they went through so much trouble to ensure your body was exactly the same as before and why it needed to behave exactly as a human body does. ”
The use of the word human, over and over, and how it no longer applies to me scrapes away at something inside me. Is he right? If I had known I had died and was no longer human, would I have started to act decidedly inhuman?
“The tattoos should have been the first indicator,” I say.
“What tattoos?” Mia asks.
“I had a few tattoos,” I explain. “Got one when I was a teenager, the rest when I was in the army. After that final procedure, when I woke up, the tattoos were all gone. They’d told me that Vanguard couldn’t have tattoos, so they used lasers to remove them…”
And I just believed them. But how could I have ever believed the truth?
James finishes the stitches and steps back. “You should rest. The body—your body—will need time to recover from the trauma, even with accelerated healing.”
“I don’t want to rest.” I sit up slowly, looking at the bandage on my arm. Underneath it, wires and metal and god knows what else. “I want to make them pay.”
James and Mia exchange a look.
“You said that Project Prometheus involved trafficked people, that they were doing consciousness transfer on them to, what? Create an army? Well, we can’t let that happen.
What if…what if there are people out there who had this done to them and they don’t even know it?
What if there are people who do know it and are trapped in different bodies.
We can’t just…we can’t just let Global get away with this. We can’t let Julia…”
“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” James says carefully. “We need to take our time to figure out the scope of this.”
“No, we need to head back to New York and I’ll find Julia and rip her head off myself.” I push myself off the table, testing my legs, finding them steady despite everything. “We expose what Global Dynamix has been doing, and we burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.”
James lays a careful hand on my shoulder.
“You aren’t going anywhere yet, Nate. Please.
You can’t just go and start a war without being prepared for one.
They have Paragon, who is fully synthetic, no humanity in him whatsoever, and probably calibrated to be stronger than you.
They might have more than one of him by now, waiting in the wings.
And they might have ways to control you that you aren’t even aware of. ”
“Yeah, well, whatever kill switch or failsafe they had, it didn’t stop me from ripping Conrad Marsh apart.”
He sighs tiredly and I suddenly realize how late it is, how exhausted he and Mia must be. “Be that as it may, we haven’t even tapped into the other problem of yours, that voice in your head.”
Fuck. The programming that’s still there, still whispering, even now, though now the voice seems to delight in my discovery. Maybe James can figure out how to remove it. Maybe he can’t. But either way, I’m done being controlled.
Somehow, I know that’s easier said than done.
“You’re going to need to lay low here for a few days while I run more tests, see what I can do with that brain of yours,” James says. “Should be easier now that I know it’s a true computer. We can start now, if you’d like.”
“Don’t you need sleep?” I ask.
He grins. “Not when I have tea and the world’s greatest scientific breakthrough in my lab. I’ll be right back.”
He exits the room, leaving Mia and I alone. She’s still holding my hand, still at my side. It does something to my heart, makes it melt slightly, except every time I’m having some sort of emotion, I feel I have to second guess myself.
Is this real? Is any of this real?
I don’t even have a heart.
“Did you suspect? Did you know, deep down?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “You’ve only ever been human to me, Nate. You still will be.” She rubs her lips together in thought, then manages a quiet laugh. “I mean, how could I have ever thought otherwise? I’ve swallowed your fucking cum.”
I manage a smile that I don’t feel. “I’m guessing they didn’t make it taste like ice cream.”
“No, they did not.”
My smile quickly fades as the gravity of the situation descends once more. “How am I supposed to…live like this?” I pinch my eyes shut in frustration. “Fuck, can it even be called living if I’m not alive? I’m fucking dead Mia. They killed me for their own personal gains.”
“I know,” she says softly. “But for what it’s worth, you are alive. Your consciousness is what makes you you. It’s part and parcel with your soul, and that’s something that doesn’t die. That’s still here, still alive. Still Nate Whitaker.”
I dare to glance at her, feeling so much shame, this strange shame of being a lie. “Doesn’t this change everything? For you? For us?”
She swallows delicately and gives me a small smile.
“Things between us have changed a million times over since the day we first met. This is just another bump in the road that we’ll navigate before things change yet again.
” She gestures at us. “I mean look at us. A poisonous spy and a bloody robot? No wonder shit hasn’t been easy. ”
“It was easy, for a bit,” I say to her, hopeful. “Wasn’t it?”
Her mouth turns down at the corners. “It was never easy, Nate, even when it felt like it. We didn’t really have a chance until now, when we both learned the truth, about who I am, about what you are.”
“But what if your father was right, about why they didn’t tell me I was a fucking robot? What if me knowing even now means my humanity will be chipped away until there’s nothing of the real me left?”
I’m fucking immortal now. What does that even do to a person?
“I won’t let that happen,” she says. “I’ll keep you in bloody line. You know I’m good for it.”
I stare at her and reach up, cupping her face with my hand, running my thumb over her lips. She flinches, just slightly, and my heart sinks, knowing that there is a part of her that is afraid of me, still. Maybe even more than before. She’s just so good at putting on a brave face.
I’m not human, I think to her but I don’t say. I don’t know what I am. And I don’t know how I’m ever going to come to terms with that. I don’t know what that means for me and the rest of this so-called life.
I don’t know how I’m going to survive this.
And I don’t know how she is either.