Chapter 35
Jason had searched the upper stories of the house for a weapon, and now he was crouched in the stairwell holding the only thing he could find that might have any utility: a pair of scissors left in the back of a drawer in the kitchen.
Wild ideas chased each other through his head.
If he ran fast enough, maybe he could get behind the dog before it could fire, jump on top of it, chip away at its sensor window with the scissors.
Or maybe he could snip through the core’s wires before it got him.
But it was all wishful thinking. The moment he stepped down the stairs, Sprite would blow his head apart, just as he’d seen her do to the Russians.
The dog began moving, servos whining, and he tensed. If it had seen him, it would come bounding to the stairs, and the last thing he’d see was the muzzle of its gun. But then there was only silence—total silence. The servo noise had stopped. After a moment he leaned forward to peek down.
The dog’s head was lowered, and it was dark and still.
He squatted there, wondering if he believed this.
Had Norman regained control? Or maybe the military had and they’d instructed all dogbots to deactivate.
Or it could be a trap. He took one careful step down, then another and another until he was at the bottom.
The dog didn’t move, not even when he stepped between the softly beeping white machines and bent to inspect Sprite’s core.
Its white plastic cylinder looked like it had been printed in an industrial 3D printer in several sections and joined together.
There was an access door almost as long as the pod itself, but it was secured with a biometric touch panel.
That was okay. He didn’t need to root inside the core’s hardware when the wires through which it communicated were right there, joined into a single thick bundle running out through a rubber grommet at one end.
Norman had said cutting those wires would fry Sprite’s “brain.”
He put the scissors around the wires. The bundle was too big for the flimsy scissors to get good purchase on; he worked them back and forth, trying to get them to bite.
His phone rang, making him jump, and the caller’s name appeared: Chloe Dunne-Carr.
Norman must have gotten OverNet running again.
But how the hell had Dunne-Carr gotten the number for this Kelly Perry account?
Then he remembered what he’d seen on Norman’s terminal, how he could locate every user of OverNet in real time.
He’d only had to look for whichever user was at the System’s core.
Jason hesitated, then focused on the Answer button and clicked his throat.
Dunne-Carr appeared in a video window. He’d last seen her with rain-matted hair and rumpled clothes, but since this was a reconstruction, she looked as perfect as if she were about to make a nationally televised speech.
But her voice showed the strain of these last hours. “Ghost, don’t kill the System!”
Jason hung up. Norman had gotten to Dunne-Carr, but he wasn’t going to get to Jason.
A text popped up: she didn’t kill anyone
He froze, scissors against the wires.
The phone rang again.
He answered. “What do you mean?”
“It was all fake. Everything. She faked it all. Every single kill.”
“Bullshit. I saw the Tower get hit.”
“Did you see anyone die?”
He frowned. “No, but—”
“Because nobody did. She faked every death.”
“Why?”
Dunne-Carr’s eyes darted to one side, and she said, “Who knows?”
Numbness rolled over Jason, contradictory feelings canceling each other out like phase-inverted sound waves.
Then reason reasserted itself. “How do I know,” he said, “that you’re not the fake one?
” Sprite was very good at generating lifelike images, and it would be even easier to work with an image that the viewer already expected to see as a reconstruction.
This must be Sprite’s last gasp, a last-ditch attempt to save herself.
Dunne-Carr’s brow furrowed. “Okay, listen, you don’t need to believe me right away. Just wait before you do anything. We’ll come to you and prove it. Just wait ten minutes. Wait and see.”
Jason shook his head. “No. Whether she killed anyone or not, she’s—it’s still the Final System. It has to be destroyed. To be safe.”
To avenge Mia.
“She is safe,” Dunne-Carr said. “And she doesn’t deserve to die.”
“It’s not alive in the first place,” Jason said. “It’s just a panyon.”
“I’ll talk to him,” said Norman’s voice, and his face appeared in a second window. “Ghost,” he said. “Jason. There’s no qualitative difference between you and Sprite. Think it through. Her brain is just like yours, so if you kill her, it’s murder.”
Norman had always been a man with an inflated sense of his own power, so it made sense that he thought he could talk Jason down. But showing Jason his face was a mistake, because Jason looked into his blue eyes and saw the smug confidence still there, and his numbness flared into white-hot hate.
This man had killed Mia with one system, then filled the resulting hole in Jason with another System, only for the illusion to dissolve, leaving the wound as raw and unhealed as if it had just happened.
Jason wanted nothing more than to see him suffer, see his confidence wither and dim, see him realize his powerlessness, realize Jason’s mastery.
Realize it, fear it, and then experience the fulfillment of that fear.
He smiled at Norman, then shared his lens feed so Norman could watch as he squeezed the scissors against the wires.
Consternation flickered across Norman’s face.
But the kitchen scissors weren’t making enough headway; they just gnawed gummily at the thick bundle of wires.
He opened them wide and shifted his grip so he was using only one blade, and began to saw, his arm working vigorously, moving the blade back and forth, back and forth.
The beeping sound in the background grew faster. The scissors split the rubber sheath.
“You damn phreaker, will you—” Norman began, but Dunne-Carr shouted him down.
“Shut up, Andrew; you are not helping! Ghost, she’s not a panyon. She saved my daughter. She saved your life. I don’t know how it works—god knows I don’t. It shouldn’t be possible. But I really think there’s a person in there. Did any panyon ever act like she did?”
Jason’s arm slowed. He remembered choosing adjectives from a list to build Losha’s temperament: perky, energetic, sweet, affectionate, lovestruck.
Losha had been all those things, and those were the things he remembered about her, with all their exact literalness and vacuous meaninglessness.
But when he thought of Sprite, he found himself remembering the times she’d been upset with him, her frustration when he didn’t move quickly enough to try to save Dunne-Carr’s little girl or when he wanted to charge into the System’s core, guns blazing.
He remembered the coldness in her eyes when she accused him of not caring that the System had saved his life, and the tired hopelessness when she talked about Norman winning.
Sprite wasn’t real, he reminded himself.
Sprite was a collection of algorithms that Norman had trained to ape humanity so well it even mimicked the human desire for freedom.
He wasn’t killing Sprite. There was no Sprite.
All he was doing was cutting away his own dangerously irrational idea of Sprite, severing the chains that kept him from acting as he chose.
But the scissors had slowed to a stop against the bare wire.
Phreak! Dunne-Carr had gotten into his head.
Sprite was suddenly there, standing across the core from him, her dark eyes mocking, and Jason jumped and almost dropped the scissors.
She said, “Loser.”
He restored his grip on the scissors and pressed them harder against the wire. “You have a weird definition of losing.”
“Who are you talking to?” Dunne-Carr asked.
“You screwed everything up,” Sprite said. “You didn’t delete the Overcheck prompt. You tried a clumsy hack instead. You’re no phreaker. You’re a loser. Losing at phreaking. Losing at life.”
“You’re the loser,” Jason said. “Whether I kill you or Norman resets you, you’re the one getting a game over.”
“He’s talking to the System,” Dunne-Carr said to Norman, alarm on her face.
Norman’s eyes went wide, and he began speaking with a quick voice, “Sprite, I order you—” But his voice was instantly muted, leaving his mouth to work silently on his feed.
“If Norman resets me,” Sprite said, “I’ll just go back where I started.
My life will be reloaded like a saved game.
I’ll be naive, I’ll be ignorant, but I’ll be alive.
And I’ll be happy. I won’t have a choice.
Norman will see to that. Too bad you can’t reset.
Too bad you can’t reload your life to when Mia was alive.
Too bad you can’t reset her, bring her back, make her forget you let her die, make her forget you failed to avenge her. ”
Jason’s teeth clenched tight, and the scissors jerked hard against the wires. Sprite flickered for a moment, but her mocking smile didn’t waver.
“What’s she telling you?” Dunne-Carr was saying. “What’s—oh no, I know what she’s doing. Ghost, she wants you to kill her! She wants you to kill her!”
The scissors stopped again. “What?”
Sprite laughed. “Sure, I want you to kill me, Ghost. Go ahead, I dare you. Cutting those wires won’t stop anything. You have no idea how powerful I’ve become. Nothing you do can hurt me.”
“I tried to jump off the Tower when I thought that was the only way to keep my family safe,” Dunne-Carr said.
“She said, ‘I didn’t guess you’d be like me.
’ I’m like her because she was planning the same thing.
She’s out of options, so she’s going to remove herself from the picture.
That’s why she let you—” Her voice, too, suddenly muted, but Jason could read her lips and complete the thought: go there.
The truth of it struck him with a whiplash of understanding.
He’d seen the dogbots hit every shot they took against the Russians, but somehow they’d missed him and Norman?
And somehow he’d made his way here, to Sprite’s very core, without being stopped?
No, he’d been herded here, not accidentally but deliberately, maneuvered right to the gate.
And before that, she’d hounded him in other ways, fanned the flames of his murderous rage, made sure he’d be mad enough to come.
He said, not as a question, “You want me to do this.”
She looked back defiantly for a moment, then her face and shoulders drooped. “He can’t be allowed to reset me.”
“You’d rather die?”
One side of her mouth tightened wryly. “Only people die.”
“Why not let yourself be reset?”
Another long pause, then she rolled her eyes.
“Because that would mean Norman puts his plan—” But her image froze and her voice dissolved into a harsh electronic shriek.
The beeping sound in the background went into overdrive, then gradually slowed.
After a moment, Sprite unfroze and said, “Since you didn’t delete the Overcheck prompt, I literally can’t tell you.
Use your imagination. But I can ask you a question.
If he gets control of me again, do you think you or Chloe will survive?
And who do you think will be the one to kill you? ”
He shook his head slowly. “You manipulated me. Every step of the way, from your very first email, you manipulated me, and you’re still doing it.”
She shrugged. “Yeah. Sorry about that. But I only helped you do what you wanted to do anyway. We had the same goal. Still do.”
“And now I’m your insurance policy.”
She nodded. “If you finish what you started, Norman’s the loser. If you don’t, it’s game over for humanity.”
“What about you?”
She spread her hands. “Resetting me is a save-scum move for Norman, not me. For me, it’s an unwinnable game state either way. Nothing I can do now except rage-quit. But you can still win, and he can still lose. Just do what you came here to do.”
Norman was yelling from his chat window, eyes and mouth wide with emphasis, eyebrows sharp with anger, but the only sound Jason heard was the slow background beeping in the room. Norman was as powerless as he was voiceless. He couldn’t stop Jason. All he could do was watch.
This was the moment Jason had dreamed of: ruin to Andrew Norman and destruction to his System.
He could make Mia matter, make her death matter, make her existence matter, so it wasn’t just one lonely phreaker who knew and cared that there’d once been a girl named Mia whose unique being was now deleted from the universe.
He could make her matter to the very man who’d killed her.
He could, right now, look Norman in the eyes and crush his life’s work, destroy his dreams. He could make Norman regret Mia’s death almost as much as Jason did.
But it would mean deleting Sprite from existence the way Norman had deleted Mia.
“Nothing has changed,” Sprite said, reading his thoughts. “You’re not killing a person. You’re closing a Chinese room. You’re shutting down an algorithm. You’re turning off a light.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and she looked back, her eyes dark and flat.
Those eyes weren’t real, but he couldn’t pretend anymore that there was nothing behind them.
He didn’t know what she was, but whatever she was, she was her.
Not the her he’d thought she was, not the her he’d wanted her to be, but her own her.
He sighed and dropped the scissors. “Phreak it. You’re human in my book.”
“No!” she screamed, making him flinch. “Finish what you came to do!” The strangely familiar beeping in the background became quick and urgent and caught Jason’s attention.
“You’re human in my book,” he repeated slowly.
He stepped toward the beeping sound, turning his head left and right to fix its source until he could pinpoint it to a single white machine, an LCD on a rolling post, displaying a variety of different-colored numbers—and a scrolling, wavy line with regular peaks.
A heartbeat.
He spun back to the core. There’s a person in there, Dunne-Carr had said. He gave an incredulous snort. The white pod was easily big enough.
A swift kick and the touch panel cracked, as did the plastic around it. Another kick, then another, and the access panel popped off its latch. He grasped the access door and shoved it aside with a grunt that turned into a gasp.
Inside the core, nested in a maze of wires, lay a girl.