Wired (Skinned, Book 3) Read online

  "What's with 'we'?" I asked. "You've got your own BioMax connection, as I recall. Get him to give you what you need and leave us out of it."

  "After the incident at the temple, my connections have dried up," Jude said. "I think I've managed to convince them

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  that I'm harmless enough to drop their ridiculous vendetta against me, but I can't get inside. You can."

  "But why would I? So you can get rich? What do you need money for when you have all this?" I gestured to the rubble.

  "I have what I need," Jude said. "This is bigger."

  "This is pathetic. Maybe you haven't noticed, but BioMax isn't out to get us--even you."

  "Now who's willing to do anything for money?"

  "They don't pay me," I told him. "I work with them because I want to help."

  "Right, the party line: mechs and orgs together, one big happy dysfunctional family."

  "At least I'm doing something, instead of just whining about how everyone's out to get me."

  "And exactly what are you doing?" Jude snapped. "Letting them parade you around on the network like a trained monkey? You think playing at being some brainless slut on a vidlife is going to convince anyone of anything?"

  "Jude!" Riley's voice held an implied threat--one I was sure he dreaded carrying out.

  "You're not exactly the target demographic," I said, evenly as I could.

  Jude just laughed.

  "Give her a break," Riley said. "She's doing what she thinks she has to."

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  I didn't need him to defend me. But I couldn't help noticing it wasn't much of a defense.

  "Right," Jude said. "Working with BioMax." He laughed again.

  "You think I'm working for them?" I said.

  "I think working for someone implies payment. And the freedom to stop working whenever you want. It implies choice. You have none of that. What you have ... call it indentured servitude. Call it slavery. Call it whatever you want, but the fact is, they own you. They gave you that body, and they can take it away."

  "I'm not going to argue."

  That caught him off guard. "That's a first."

  "They own all of us," I said. We were at their mercy; we depended on them to honor their contracts, and our existence. "That's why we have to work with them. Because they're all we've got."

  "No one owns me," Jude said quietly.

  "Sounds pretty. That doesn't make it true."

  "As usual, your vision is severely lacking."

  "If you mean I lack the vision to see how selling corp secrets to Aikida is going to change anything, then I guess that's another thing we agree on."

  "We're not selling them for money," Jude said.

  "So what, then?"

  "The only way we get free of BioMax is if we control the

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  means to create new bodies and to download ourselves into them. And to make sure we store the uploaded memories on a server that no one but us has access to. Aikida is going to help us do that. We get them the specs they need; they supply us with our very own laboratory and production facilities, and a skeleton staff of scientists and engineers that can train us to do everything for ourselves. We sign a noncompete with them, to guarantee that we function only in this country, so we don't interfere with Aikida operations--but beyond that we're free."

  "And all of this is going to take place ..." It was beginning to sink in. Why we were here. Why Jude was so proud of his ghost town.

  "Right here," Jude said. "Ground zero of our independence day. A country of our own, inside the one that doesn't want us--let them stay on their side of the border, and we'll stay on ours."

  I didn't bother to ask about the benevolent dictator who would inevitably be leading this imaginary country of his. Instead: "You're insane."

  "You see it, don't you?" Jude appealed to Riley. "We've got everything we need here. Space, privacy, an almost completely intact infrastructure. It could be what we've always wanted. A place to be left alone."

  Riley's gaze swept the jagged skyline. He didn't answer.

  "Riley, I was thinking you could take a look at the generators?" Jude said. He'd led us to some kind of power plant.

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  Scorch marks scraped its sides, and one wall had collapsed. "See if I'm wrong about their condition? You know this stuff so much better than I do."

  "Not so much better," Riley said, obviously pleased by the compliment.

  "So much," Jude insisted. "Take a look?"

  "He's not going in there," I said, surprised the building was still standing. "It looks like the roof might cave in."

  Riley squeezed my hand. "I'll be back in a minute." And then, like we'd traveled back in time six months and nothing had changed between them, he did exactly as Jude said, and stepped inside.

  Which left me and Jude alone.

  "So you're lying to him," Jude said. "Again."

  "None of your business."

  He raised his eyebrows.

  "This is better for him," I said. "If you care about that at all anymore, you'll trust me."

  "And if I don't?"

  "Should I even bother saying please?"

  "So you're asking me for a favor," Jude concluded. "I knew you finally grew a spine, but the balls must be new."

  "I'm asking for him," I said. "He shouldn't have to know what you forced him to do."

  "Oh, I forced him to shoot me? And set the secops on me?"

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  "Please," I said again, hating that I had to beg. "You're here, you're fine, so--"

  "Stop," he said. "What did you think? That I dragged you here to mess with your pathetic little arrangement? Maybe you think I'm going to blackmail you into helping me with BioMax? I keep my mouth shut to Riley, and you do whatever I say?"

  "I'm waiting."

  "You really think I'd do that?" he asked. He sounded hurt; he'd always been a good actor. "If you knew anything--" He stopped abruptly and changed course. "I really have been watching you on the network. I see what you're trying to do. You might even have helped a bit, here and there. But you've got to think about the big picture. This is a waste of your time--and your rather ample talents. I'm not going to blackmail you into helping me. I don't have to. Because once you think about it, you'll see that I'm right. Anything else is just postponing the inevitable."

  "That's your pitch? I'm going to help you because it's the right thing to do?"

  "This is my pitch: Korinne Lat. Mara Wells. Portia Bavanti. Tyler--"

  "What's your point?" But I knew. I knew those names as well as he did.

  "Mechs who've been attacked," he said. "Mechs who've been ambushed or lynched or kidnapped by orgs. And those are just the ones we know about, because why bother to report

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  a crime that's not a crime?" As I'd learned my first month at BioMax, org-on-mech violence increased by 230 percent when mech attacks were officially declared consequence-free. Kicking and punching and strangling a machine were deemed to be property damage, and the mechs had no owners who could sue. (As several corp-controlled courts had ruled; a machine could not own itself.)

  "Jude, I know all about--"

  "And I could keep going," he said, loudly. "You want more names? How about the names of the mechs who've lost everything because the corps have confiscated their credit and shut down their zones? Because mechs are no longer officially living people under the law; we're things. With no standing. No rights."

  "Like I don't know that."

  "You know, but you still have somewhere to live. You have a father to buy you things. You don't know what it's like to--"

  "You think I don't know?" I shouted. "I know exactly how many mechs are getting hurt every damn day. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I'm working with BioMax. I'm trying to fix things. I'm trying to change them. So what are you doing? Hiding out like some kind of end-of-the-world nutcase, waiting for us to get so desperate that we throw ourselves on your mercy? Great plan, Jude. How could I ever have do
ubted you?"

  He didn't look at all surprised, or even disappointed. "Eventually you'll see you're fighting a losing battle."

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  "Enjoy the wait."

  "Frankly, I don't have time for it. So I've got something to speed along your comprehension. Or at least your willingness."

  "Finally." Because clearly, everything else had been preamble, priming the pump. This, whatever it was, would be why we were really here. "Tell me why I'm going to help you."

  "Because it will hurt your father."

  "Maybe you should pay closer attention," I said. "My father and I are fine. I have no interest in hurting him."

  Jude's hand shot out and grabbed mine before I could pull away. He pressed something sharp into my palm. I assumed it was a dreamer, the tiny cubes that offered mechs a hallucinatory escape from the world. Jude had offered me my very first one in exactly this way. But the object was the wrong size and lacked the dreamer's distinctive etchings along the edge.

  Jude was still gripping my hand. "You may not want to hurt him yet," he said. "But trust me, you will."

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  SACRIFICE

  "You'd be a lot more tolerable if you'd just own your inner bitch."

  It was a flash drive. Nearly archaic, used only for the kind of data you couldn't trust to transmission over the network and so reserved for hand-to-hand exchange. The drive had Chinese ideograms scratched across its length, which I assumed meant that Jude had picked it up during his stint at Aikida. Or at least that he wanted me to think so. I slid it into my pocket before Riley could see, and resolved not to think about it again until I was alone.

  Which came sooner than I expected. Nested in Riley's arms, my head safely cradled on his shoulder as the car carried us through the pitch-black night, I didn't watch the nav screen or chart the twisting roads as we swept past. We stopped in an empty lot, the Windows of Memory glowing in the distance, the poisoned sea still a dark hole in the night. My car was waiting.

  "You okay to drive home alone, or you want me to follow you?" Riley asked.

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  I had assumed we would go back to his place. Talk about what had happened.

  Or not talk.

  "I'm okay," I said.

  He'd been quiet the whole way back--uncharacteristically so, even for him. I couldn't tell whether he was disappointed because reuniting with Jude hadn't lived up to his hopes, disappointed in me for not sharing his enthusiasm, or just lost in thoughts that he'd decided weren't fit for sharing.

  I wasn't expecting to be able read his mind, but I should have at least been able to guess at how he was feeling--either that, or I shouldn't have been afraid to ask.

  He opened the door for me. I crawled across him, then paused, half in and half out of the car. "Unless you want me to come with you," I offered. "We could go to your place and--"

  "It's a mess," he said quickly. Then darted forward and gave me a kiss. It felt perfunctory. "Good night," he said, and then I was out of the car and he closed the door and I was alone.

  He waited until I got in the car, which was normal. Then he drove away before I did, which was not. But it meant I didn't have to wait any longer. I pulled out Jude's flash drive, half tempted to toss it out the window. But Jude didn't make empty threats, and he didn't lie. He would hit you with the truth, at least the truth as he saw it. Which meant there was something on the drive that I needed to see, even if it aligned with his agenda.

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  I took out my ViM and uploaded the data to its temp memory storage. Virtual Machines were little more than conduits to the network, not meant for personal storage--under normal circumstances everything got uploaded to my zone and stored on the network--but sometimes you wanted to keep something isolated from the network, to keep it close or erase it for good. Jude's flash drive carried only a single file, an accident report about a crash that had happened a year before. My crash. The process had been standard, under the circumstances: a cursory joint investigation by the car corp and my father's lawyers, to determine liability and assign blame. The report had been compiled while I was still an unconscious lump of wires and synflesh in the BioMax rehab facility, but I'd seen all the details later on, forced myself to read through the series of catastrophic system failures--the shipping truck's chip malfunction, the hole in the sat-nav system, the malfunctioning of my car's backup detection system, a series of minimally unfortunate events culminating in an extraordinary one.

  We'd gotten a tidy sum from both the car people and the trucking corp, not that we needed either. The principle of the thing, my father had said. Compensation for pain and suffering. I didn't ask: his, or mine?

  I'd studied the report, memorized its key phrases, enjoying the way the legalistic terms sapped the color from what had happened. In the report there had been no pain, no suffering, no imprisonment beneath twisted metal, listening to flames

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  crackle, sirens whine, breathing in the smell of burning flesh. The report was life reduced to its bare essentials, to yes and no, this happened and this did not, life reduced to a schematic of ones and zeros, just like me.

  I knew everything about that report.

  Which is why I immediately recognized that this wasn't it.

  It started off the same, with the description of the circumstances of the accident--and, of course, the results. The itemization of injuries to the org named Lia Kahn and her vehicle. It was the "causes" section that read somewhat differently. No "mechanical failures." No "inescapable misfortune." And no failure of the truck's guidance system.

  In this report blame was assigned: to my car. And the anonymous person who'd tampered with it. If this report was correct, the accident hadn't been bad luck or bad machinery or bad karma. It hadn't been an accident at all.

  But ... if this report was correct, then what had happened to it? And where had the other one come from?

  Living as a mech, I'd come to understand that some things could be true and not true at the same time; some things could contain their own opposite. But this wasn't one of them. If one of the reports was true, it meant the other was a lie.

  I turned on the car and directed it toward home. Watched the night flow past. It was like I could feel him drawing closer, pulling me in. My father, my protector.

  I went home because there was nowhere else to go. I went

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  home to him because I had to know. My father had given me that first report. He had described the circumstances of the accident, filled in the portions that my trauma-scattered brain couldn't remember. He had been my memory.

  Kahns don't lie. It had been a family rule for as a long as I could remember. But I was a Kahn, and I lied all the time.

  My father's study was forbidden territory. But my father was asleep, along with the rest of the house. And the ViM embedded in his desk would supply direct access to his zone. Whatever he knew would be buried there, somewhere.

  I slipped out of my shoes and padded silently into the room, easing the door shut behind me. It creaked softly, and I froze. But there was no noise from the rest of the house.

  I hadn't snuck in here since I was twelve, the night my father had confiscated my new pink miniViM--consequence of some petty and long forgotten trespass--and I'd decided to confiscate it back. I'd been caught, of course. Then yanked off the ground, carried up the stairs, tossed into my room, and grounded for a month.

  I swept a finger across the screen to switch it on. The screen remained blank, save for a password request and a small white box, exactly the size of a thumbprint.

  I'd expected the password protection; that wasn't unusual, especially when it came to someone as paranoid as my father. He had an assortment of passwords he used for various

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  functions, and I'd figured out most of them over the years, so I had been reasonably sure I'd be able to crack this one. But I'd never heard of thumbprint security on a private ViM. And I had no idea how to get past it. Which meant I had to get my answ
ers some other way.

  Or just drop this altogether.

  "I must still be asleep, because obviously I'm dreaming this."

  I flinched, nearly knocking a glass picture frame off the desk. It wasn't a photo of Zo and me--since the accident, all photos of his daughters had been quietly but thoroughly expunged from the house. The face in the glass was our mother's, years younger, her smile shockingly real.

  Zo stood in the open doorway, backlit by the hall light, her shadowed face unreadable. "I know Daddy's golden girl would never sneak into his holy sanctum. Invasion of privacy? Violation of the sacred Kahn Family Law?" She shook her head. "Clearly I'm hallucinating."

  "Shhh! Please."

  "Right." She wasn't whispering. "Wouldn't want to wake him. Wonder what he'd say."

  "When I told him I caught you sneaking through his stuff? Yeah, I wonder."

  "Like he'd automatically believe you over me? Like you're so trustworthy and I'm so--"

  "That's not what I meant."

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  "Yes it is."

  Yes, it was. But I hadn't meant to mean it.

  "And you were right." She laughed. There wasn't much humor in it. "You know, you'd be a lot more tolerable if you'd just own your inner bitch." Zo stepped into the office. "Like you used to."

  "I was not a bitch!"

  Now she laughed like I really had said something funny. "Right. And neither was I."

  "Well ... I wouldn't go that far."

  "I blame genetics," she said. "Look where we came from." Zo joined me at the desk, peering down at the blank ViM screen. "So, what are we looking for?"

  I didn't answer--I was stuck on that word, "genetics," the one that seemed to imply, in her mind, some common thread linking us together.

  "Well?" Zo prodded. "Or should I call our father down to help?"

  "No!" She'd said "we." It didn't guarantee I could trust her, but it meant I could try. "There's something on there that I need to find out."

  "I'm going to need more details, if you want me to find it for you."

  "No point," I said. "He's got a thumbprint lock."