“You’re not going alone. I thought I made that clear,” Frees said. Didn’t she ever listen? What was it about this new human that she had such a hold over her already? Wasn’t Arista comfortable here for the time being?

  “And I made it clear I don’t expect you to.” She looked over Frees’ shoulder. “I don’t expect you to go either. I’ve already caused you enough damage, Max. I don’t want to be responsible for any more.”

  Frees turned to look at Max but couldn’t read her face.

  “In case anyone cares, I’ll stay here.” Jill walked over and took Arista’s hand. “Frees can maintain an open comm line with me, in case you get into trouble. I’ll be your cavalry.” She glanced around. “It’s too bad we don’t have a sniper rifle. I’d love to get up on the rooftops to take some pot-shots. Scare the shit outta her a little.” She belted out a full-throated laugh and dropped Arista’s hand, patting her shoulder as she walked past.

  “Now that, I would pay to see,” said Max, the barest hint of a smile on her face.

  “Me too.” Frees hoped Arista was making the right decision. He’d find out soon enough.

  “7:58, right on time,” Frees said as they rounded the corner of West 43rd and Kedzie. In front of them, a large lot stretched out, intermodal containers as far as they could see. The entire area was bordered by an aluminum fence with barbed wire wrapped over it.

  “And why did you choose this place?” Arista asked. They’d called Forsythia back at 6:30 and given her the location. Then Frees had called again at 7:15 and changed it to this one.

  “Flat area, no high points other than the main building over there,” Max answered for him. “She won’t be able to get the drop on us if she brings her own backup.” She paused. “Which I expect her to do. If I haven’t made that clear.”

  “You’ve made it clear.” Arista groaned. If there was one thing she could count on it was Max’s paranoia. Especially when it came to humans.

  They made their way down 43rd until they came to breach in the fence. It hadn’t been repaired in some time and pitched forward in a dangerous fashion. Of course it didn’t matter as no machine would break in unless programmed to. Then the police would be programmed to come in after them and depending on the parameters there might be a longer chase. It all depended on “the plan”. Though, Arista supposed, without Charlie to orchestrate the plan once all of these machines had completed their pre-prescribed programming they wouldn’t know what to do. Things would come to a standstill.

  Frees and Max wrenched the fence apart enough for Arista to squeeze through, then they both followed.

  “Which row?” Frees asked.

  “Over there, row six by the smaller stacks. Just enough to hide us from the roads.” Arista replied.

  “And we’re good as far as surveillance goes?” Frees glanced up, as if looking for an automated drone.

  “Obsidian says there are no patrols scheduled in this area until tomorrow morning.” Arista double checked the schedule she’d downloaded from their contacts at Cadre HQ. Right before they’d destroyed Charlie, Arista had managed to change three of the Peacekeepers who ended up helping them take down Charlie’s superstructure. Every so often she’d check in with their leader, Obsidian, to make sure they would be clear on certain routes when they had to travel. He hadn’t made any changes to the schedule, only monitored what had already been established prior to Charlie’s disappearance.

  But the thing with Peacekeepers was: they tended to surprise you. That was the whole point.

  They reached the meeting point right as Arista’s internal chronometer turned from 20:01 to 20:02. She glanced around, checking the tops of the containers, the sides, all over. A thought occurred to her. “Should one of us—?”

  “Are we clear?” a female voice said from the darkness. Arista stiffened immediately and Frees raised his palm. Max’s knife was already in her hand. Arista didn’t want to guess how hard or how accurately she could throw it.

  “I said are we clear?” the voice asked again.

  “We are,” Arista said. “Are you?” She wasn’t quite sure what was being asked.

  In front of them a figure shimmered into existence as if from nowhere. It took a moment to coalesce but as soon as it did Arista recognized it as Forsythia. She wore the same clothes she’d seen in the holo-projection. Where had she come from?

  “Have you been standing there this whole time?” Arista asked.

  “Not the whole time. I only arrived a few minutes ago.” Forsythia smiled.

  “What is that? Some kind of transporter?”

  “It’s a portable refractor. It bends light around me. Allows me to travel unseen when I need to.”

  “Which means she could have a hundred people around us right now,” Max said, looking around frantically.

  “Trust me, it’s just me. I don’t mean you any harm,” Forsythia said. She reached out with her right hand to shake Arista’s, glanced down, then immediately changed hands. “Sorry,” she said, grasping Arista’s other hand. “I didn’t realize.”

  Arista gasped when Forsythia took her by the hand. It was warm! And slightly clammy, maybe a little sweaty. She’d never felt anything like it before. Forsythia was a real human!

  “I…I don’t know what—”

  “It’s okay,” Forsythia said, releasing her. “I know this must be a shock to you. You’ve been alone a long time.”

  “Yes…well, I mean, not completely alone.” She turned back to Frees and was horrified to see he still had his hand up like he was about to shoot her. Grimacing, she indicated he drop it with a flick of her eyes. She turned back to Forsythia with a smile.

  “No, no, of course. I don’t mean to minimize your friends. You couldn’t have survived otherwise. I just want to tell you how good it is to finally meet you. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  “Tell us how you found us again,” Frees said, his voice stern. He needed to lighten up. This wasn’t the time for an interrogation.

  “We’ve been monitoring the Cadre for a while now. When we saw Charlie was offline we knew something major had happened. After we pieced together what happened from various sources, we found your call to your mother, Arista. It was in the communication logs.”

  “I knew it. I knew we should have thrown—” Frees began.

  “No, don’t worry,” Forsythia said. “We deleted the information as soon as we found it. The Peacekeepers hadn’t seen it yet. And now they won’t. Though I think it would have been a stretch imagining they would have found it in the first place.”

  “You never know,” Max said. “They’re designed to be unpredictable.”

  “You told me you could give me answers,” Arista said. “Where is the colony? How many people live there? Is that where I’m from?”

  “Three hundred meters beneath the surface of the Earth, over seven hundred, and yes. Keep going,” Forsythia said.

  Arista was taken aback by her candor. She had come from the colony. Was that where she’d been born? Did that mean she had human parents too?

  She couldn’t stop herself from trembling with excitement. “What happened to me? Why was I abandoned?”

  “You weren’t. Let me just put your mind at ease. You were in an accident. The ship you were on had a fire, and there was an explosion. You were thrown from the ship mid-flight. Everyone thought you were dead. When we went back to search for your body, we couldn’t find you.”

  “Why didn’t you keep looking? Why did you leave me?” She was desperate now. All of this information coming so fast was like a sledgehammer to her brain, but she couldn’t quit asking the questions. She needed to know.

  “We did keep looking. But with your built-in dampener it was impossible to find you. We couldn’t scan for life signs because you don’t show any. We looked for years. And there seemed to be traces of you popping up in places, but never the same one twice. Such as Jill, for example. By the time we’d logged her as autonomous you were long gone and we still had no way to find you, or even know what you looked like. If you hadn’t destroyed Charlie there’s a good chance we never would have found you.”

  “Do I have…family? Back in the colony?”

  Forsythia screwed up her face. “Unfortunately your birth parents died when your ship eventually crashed. I’m very sorry.” She moved to place a hand on Arista’s shoulder, but then seemed to think better of it and stepped back.

  “What were their names?”

  “David and Jessika. I didn’t know them personally but from what I understand they were good people.”

  “Do I have anyone else?”

  Forsythia shook her head. Arista’s shoulders slumped. Back to square one. Finding out she had family only to discover they were long dead. It was almost worse than not knowing. At least when she didn’t know there had always been a glimmer of hope. A glimmer that had just been unequivocally stamped out.

  “What do you want with Arista?” Frees asked. Arista barely heard him.

  “I need her help. Charlie wasn’t the only AI in the Cadre. He was only one part. We have to eliminate the others.”

  SEVEN

  The words took a moment to penetrate her brain. She was still thinking about her parents—her real parents—burning to death in a fire. Just like the one she’d witnessed as a kid, when they’d had to leave the farm. What a horrible way to die.

  “This has to be a joke,” Frees said, snapping her back to reality. Forsythia’s words caught up with her.

  “I wish it were. But no, the worldwide Cadre is made up of three different members who split their duties to maintain control over society. It wasn’t just Charlie’s ‘plan’, it was the amalgamation of their cumulative efforts. Charlie was only one-third. Unfortunately the Cadre has built in redundancies and removing one member from the equation is not enough to disrupt the system. A second member needs to be eliminated. We predict the third member will manage to maintain control for a short time, but like a bridge with most of its supports removed, eventually the system will collapse.”

  “Charlie told us about others. He said he was the first of three. And that’s what you want,” Frees said. Arista still couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Another AI like Charlie? She thought he’d meant he had underlings or some kind of subordinates. She didn’t think it meant there were more AI’s out there. Did that mean there were more humans in captivity? She couldn’t go through that again. Not again.

  “We want the same things you do,” Forsythia said. “With the AI’s in control and directing this society, we are trapped within the colony. Safe, yes. But trapped all the same. Once the AI’s have been disabled or destroyed, we will be able to emerge and re-integrate into your world. And if that isn’t possible, maybe just carve out a small area somewhere we won’t bother you. All of that can be decided later. What is most important now is removing the second Cadre member before they implement additional redundancies.”

  “Why us?” Arista asked, her voice smaller than she’d intended.

  “Because you have been the only ones to successfully do it so far. We have tried other methods and none have ever worked. They were either too dangerous or they would expose us, neither of which we could risk. With only seven hundred of us, we are something of an endangered species. We can’t afford to lose anyone. But you,” she looked directly at Arista. “You managed to do what no one else ever could. And we need you to do it one more time. I need you to do it one more time.”

  In the corner of her vision, Frees bristled but it barely registered. There was no way she could ever do what she’d done at Charlie’s again. Did Forsythia even know he’d had humans in captivity? And if he was only one-third of an overall equation, it was likely the others had humans at their disposal too. She considered asking Sy if she knew about the captured humans but that would only expose her already-precarious position. She didn’t need this woman to completely shut her out, not now, not when she was so close to reconnecting with her own kind. She needed to find out if Forsythia knew about them without giving herself away. Because if she didn’t know about them, Arista wasn’t about to confess what she’d done. Not to the first human she’d ever met. Whatever happened, Forsythia could never know the truth.

  “Forsythia,” Arista began slowly. “Who are these other members? Where are they?”

  She glanced down at her arm then back up. “Sy, please. It’s less of a mouthful. Only my mother calls me Forsythia anymore.”

  “Sy.”

  “Trymian, who is located in London. And Hogo-sha in Osaka, Japan. Based on our information, the AI in Japan will be the easier target of the two. Trymian has shielding we haven’t figured out how to penetrate, but Hogo-sha is much like Charlie. Relatively unguarded and easy to access.”

  “Japan!” Frees said. “That’s on the other side of the world! We can barely get across this city without being seen. How are we supposed to make it to another continent?”

  Sy smiled. “Don’t worry about that, I’ve got you covered there. Much like Charlie, Hogo-sha has a Gate built directly into his main facility. It is simply a matter of re-routing the Gate you used to get to Charlie, which I suspect was the one over at the production facility.”

  “How do you know that? And how do you know about the Gates?” He asked, raising his voice.

  “We’ve been keeping tabs on the machines’ technology. Site-to-site gate transportation is something that could be a threat to us. But fortunately there needs to be an entrance and an exit Gate in order for the system to work. It isn’t like they can just transport someone into the middle of nowhere. Yet. They haven’t managed to develop it that far.”

  “And how exactly do we re-route the Gate?” Max asked. Arista was just happy the others were taking on the burden of talking; she was doing good to remain standing. It was all so much to take in. More Cadre members, the other side of the planet, changing the Gates; she’d had no idea. And here she thought she’d been handling things pretty well.

  “I’m good with machines,” Sy said. “I’m confident I can figure it out. I already know the location of the exit gate. From what we can tell they are all customizable to multiple locations.”

  Frees turned to Arista. “Can I speak with you a moment, please?”

  “Sure.” She wasn’t focused at all. It took her a moment to realize he meant alone. “Oh. Okay.” She turned to Sy. “We’ll be right back.”

  “Of course. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Frees whispered to Max, “You’ll keep an eye on her?”

  “Always.”

  Frees led Arista back down the way they’d come, to the end of the shipping containers. “I don’t like any of this. She has way too much knowledge for someone who complains about being cut off from the world.”

  “You heard her, they monitor the Cadre communications. You think she’s lying?”

  “I think something is off. You’re the only one who can take down the AI’s? The humans obviously have resources. She seems well fed and well educated. That image refractor means she can travel anywhere without detection, better than you can. And you’re telling me they don’t have the capability to do what we did almost by accident?”

  She pinched her face together. “Then why else would she ask? Why wouldn’t they have done it by now? What were they waiting for?”

  Frees looked back over to them and Arista followed his gaze. Max stood, rooted to the spot where they’d left her, staring down Sy hard. Sy, to her credit, didn’t seem to mind. She’d leaned up against one of the shipping crates and stared off into the distance.

  “There is something wrong about all of this. We can’t trust her,” Frees said.

  “If we can’t trust her—if I can’t trust one of my own kind—who can we trust? Machines with shotguns who want to blow my head off?” She gestured with her hand, flipping it back and forth.

  “They’re not all like that.”

  “Yeah, but they could be. Who’s to say the next one I change doesn’t come at me with an ax? At least with her we know she’d never do anything to hurt me. We’re an endangered species, remember?” Saying it aloud felt good. In a way, Sy had validated Arista’s existence, proven she wasn’t just a random anomaly. She had a purpose.

  But she still had her reservations. She wanted to help Sy and the other humans, but if it meant killing any more of her own people…

  “Even so, we need to be cautious. I don’t think we should do anything until we’ve had some time to validate her claims for ourselves. And even then I’m not too keen about going back into another Cadre stronghold.”

  “You heard her, she only needs me to go. You can stay here, safe and sound,” Arista said, heat in her voice. Her face had grown very hot. Maybe because it felt like Frees was attacking her humanity.

  “You know I won’t let you go alone. Not into something as dangerous as that.”

  “Yeah? Is that because you still need me to enact your grand plan? Or some other reason?”

  He didn’t respond, only looked away, unable to meet her gaze. Frees still just saw her as a means to an end. He couldn’t allow his precious cargo to be injured. Not if he wanted to free his people.

  “I don’t want to keep her waiting.” Arista turned away from him and headed back to the others. Sy perked up when she approached and Arista felt a flutter of gratitude from deep within somewhere. Something strong, like the pull of two magnets. “Can you give me a little time to think about it? It’s a lot to take in all at once.”

  “Yes, I understand. You need time to process. But we need to act quickly. It took me a while to filter through everything and find you. Hogo-sha may be working on new defenses as we speak. We’ll want to get you there—if you decide to go—soon.”

  Arista rubbed her temple. “In the meantime, you can come back with us. We have—”

  “Um,” Frees said, stepping up. “I don’t think so.”

  Arista turned to him, frowning. “Why not?”

 

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