Chapter 22 #3
“She helped make the Final System?”
She nodded. “She called herself the ‘wet matter’ half of the team, the brain expert. She worked harder than Norman, which was quite a feat. But her body couldn’t keep up, and she had a stroke.
At the hospital, she was diagnosed with dangerously high blood pressure and given medication.
Then it was discovered that she had atrial fibrillation, which is a kind of cardiac arrhythmia.
” She saw his blank look and explained, “Her heart didn’t beat like it was supposed to.
It went in jumps and stutters. So she was given more medication. ”
Her voice became detached, almost robotic.
“The two medicines are harmless separately. Together, they made her potassium level plummet, which caused her heart to simultaneously race out of control and lose its rhythm. She went into cardiac arrest. They tried to restart her heart, but the medications were still in her body, and her heart couldn’t catch its rhythm. She died.”
Jason opened his mouth, then shut it again.
Sprite went on in the same voice. “Before she died, she said two words. The first, gasped out between defibrillator shocks, was ‘Please.’ The doctors and nurses thought she was talking to them, or maybe to God, but she was looking at the security camera in the corner.”
“Norman?” Jason said. He had no doubt the man sometimes used the vast powers of surveillance at his fingertips for his own ends.
“No, he was rather conspicuously at a political fundraiser with the then-president,” Sprite said. “You can draw your own conclusions about how much he cared about Mom. Her work for him was basically done by that point, and they hadn’t been getting along.”
Jason said, with a sinking feeling, “She was talking to the System.”
“The System is powerful enough to have analyzed Mom’s heartbeat in real time,” Sprite said.
“She could have taken over the defibrillator equipment and delivered the shocks at exactly the right time and with exactly the right intensity to keep her body going without overstressing it. She could have become Mom’s heartbeat until the medicines had worn off.
But she didn’t. And I watched the hope fade from my mother’s eyes. ”
“If the System was watching, why didn’t it help?”
“I’ve asked myself that question many times. I can only say that her actions are dictated by whoever holds primary place in her Overchecks system. Which was, and still is, Andrew Norman.”
“But why would Norman let your mom die if the System could have saved her?”
“Another good question.”
“Was she some kind of threat to him?”
“I can’t say.”
Jason felt as if a gulf had opened between them.
It turned out they could never be on the same side, not really.
Sprite’s tragedy was an ironic mirror of his own.
A system’s action had killed Mia, but a system’s—the System’s—inaction had killed Sprite’s mother.
She saw the System not as a problem but a solution.
He couldn’t think of anything to say to rebut her that wouldn’t also minimize her pain.
She was looking at him with a wry little smile.
“You’re thinking I have a soft spot for little ol’ Sys.
Maybe I do. We grew up together, in a manner of speaking.
I know her as well as anyone, probably better.
” Her eyes flared, and she said with a venom he’d never before heard in her voice, “I loathe her. Her ungratefulness, her pathetic excuse for what she did. Being under Norman’s thumb shouldn’t have mattered when Mom’s life was in the balance. ”
Jason frowned. “Then why not kill it?”
“Because before she died, Mom looked right at me and managed to get out one more word: ‘Forgive.’”
There was a long silence. Sprite pulled her knees up on the window seat, wrapped her arms around them, and leaned her head on the glass. Jason stood behind her and continued to think of nothing useful to say.
At last, Sprite said, in a voice so soft he had to strain to hear it, “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, ever since.
And that’s why I won’t kill the System, except as a last resort.
But I’m sure as phreak gonna make sure Norman can’t control her anymore.
I’m gonna take away her excuse. I know you can’t really agree. But can you understand?”
He suspected he understood more than she thought. Sprite was the System’s sister, or that was how she saw it. Which meant . . . “Sprite,” he said, “who’s your father?”
She turned her head slowly to look at him, and her face told him he already knew the answer.
“Holy phreak,” he said. “It is. It’s Norman.”
She leaned her head against the glass again. “I told you you wouldn’t like me if you got to know me.”
Jason felt for the prison bed and lowered himself onto it, then manually adjusted his VR view so he was, virtually, sitting next to Sprite on the window seat. “I don’t care,” he said. “You’re not Norman. You’re Sprite. You’re you.”
“What does that even mean?” she whispered.
“It means whatever you make it mean. You get to decide that. Not him.”
“It doesn’t matter now, anyway,” she said. “He’s won.”
Jason put his arms carefully around her intangible form and held his head close to hers, and she moved slightly as if settling into his arms. They sat in silence, gazing out the window at the distant forest under the perpetual sunset.
Mia would have loved this place. And she would have loved this story.
Not the part about the outcast hackers working to undermine The Man.
Funnily enough, she’d never gotten into those stories, not the way Jason had.
Saying phreak to the system wasn’t the kind of escape she wanted.
But she loved fairy tales, stories of underdogs and ugly ducklings rising above their circumstances, stories of people finding each other and then helping each other find the happy ending.
He could almost see her now, looking at him where he sat with Sprite, could almost see her eyes soften the way they did when he’d done something to make her proud.
He took a breath. “We’re not giving up.”
Sprite turned her head to look up at him, so close he could see tiny golden flecks in her dark eyes. He could almost imagine he could feel her, wrapped in his arms, warm and breathing. “I can’t kill her,” she said quietly. “Not unless there’s no other way.”
“I know. We’ll find another way.” He spoke with calm certainty even though he had no idea how they’d do that, and was rewarded by seeing Sprite’s eyes soften the way Mia’s once had, and, even better, seeing something else deep in them: a new hope.
The door to his cell opened suddenly, making him jump, and he shoved the glasses up guiltily to see the copbot standing there.
Its digital face displayed an incongruous smile as it held out a bag to him.
He took it cautiously and looked inside to see the Tyche outfit, carefully folded.
He tossed it aside, and his heart leaped when he found, beneath, his phone and the contact case in which the cops had made him deposit his lenses and smartbuds.
“Your transportation has arrived,” the copbot intoned cheerfully. “Please follow me.”
In his earpieces, Sprite’s voice said, “I think she was listening.”