The meta rise, p.11
The Meta-Rise, page 11
Po found us. Or maybe my dad. Either way, we’re screwed. And Tellie is going to be so mad at me when she finds out I left Po a note.
I set my fork down. It clinks against the edge of the plate.
“Trout!” they say again, and I realize in an instant it is Po, and he doesn’t sound mad at all, he sounds panicked.
I shove my chair back. Tellie leaps to her feet.
“What’s going on?” Georgette asks, peering out the window. “Who is that?”
“It’s my brother,” I say, and bolt for the front door.
I hesitate on the porch as I scan the horizon for him, unsure of what I’ll find, or if I somehow read his tone of voice wrong and he really is steaming mad.
But what I see at the bend in the road is far worse than a ticked-off Po.
I see him stumbling toward us, LT at his side, and Marsi in Po’s arms, hanging there like an overcooked noodle. Her white shirt is stained dark red, and I know, despite the distance still between us, that it’s blood.
“Po!” I start running toward him with Tellie on my heels.
I skid to a stop on the dirt road, but Po keeps on going for the house. “She’s lost a lot of blood. I’m not a match for her. LT tested me. We patched her up on our way here, but we did a crappy job with what we had.” He doesn’t stop to wait for me. “Does Georgette have medical supplies?”
I have to run harder to keep up with him. I don’t know how he’s managing it with his bum leg. “I don’t know. We just got here.” LT zooms ahead of us to explain to Georgette who he is, and who Po and Marsi are.
“What happened?” I ask Po.
“We were attacked.” He repositions Marsi in his arms. Sweat pours down his forehead. “In the middle of the night. It was an army of robots with Ratch at the forefront. They attacked the Fort first. I wanted to stay to fight, but Marsi . . .” His voice wavers.
“What about Dad?” I ask, my own voice cracking. I’m afraid of what Po’s answer will be, but I have to know what it is.
“He and his team were evacuating the Fort. There’s a hidden emergency exit in the basement. That’s how we got out. They were going to try to evacuate the rest of the city, but I don’t know if they got that far.”
“My mom?” Tellie asks. “What about my mom?”
“She’s fine,” Po says quickly. “She found a cameraman and started reporting.”
That sounds like Mrs. Rix, I think. She wouldn’t stop working even in the middle of the apocalypse. Not when it came to reporting a top story. I just hope she’s careful for Tellie’s sake.
Po hops up the two steps to the porch, gritting his teeth, a pinch of pain at the corners of his eyes. His bum leg must be killing him.
“Go on in,” Linda, the bot, says when she meets us at the front door.
We find Georgette in the library. “Put her on the table here.” She points to the long redwood table where a thick blanket has been spread over the top. LT blasts into the room, his arms overloaded with medical supplies.
Po gently puts Marsi on the table. Her head lolls to the side. Her eyes have been shut since I met Po on the road, and her breathing is super-shallow.
My own chest tightens, and my stomach feels all woozy, like a hundred goldfish are swimming inside.
What if Marsi dies? I don’t know if my brother can handle it. I don’t know if I can.
“I need scissors,” Georgette says. LT hands her a pair and she splits Marsi’s shirt up the middle, exposing her stomach and her blood-stained bra.
“You should go,” Po says, scooting me toward the door.
“But . . .”
“Go!”
I ram into Tellie as we both try to leave the room in a hurry. Po slides the pocket doors shut behind us with a loud bang.
And Tellie and I have no choice but to sit and wait.
PO COMES STUMBLING out of the room an hour later with blood all over his clothes and a dazed look in his eyes. Tellie and I leap to our feet.
“Is she okay?” I ask. “Marsi,” I add, as if he had somehow forgotten who I meant. “What about the blood she lost?”
Po scrubs at his face with one hand. There’s a clean shirt in his other hand. “Turns out your friend Georgette is O positive. She donated.”
“Good. That’s good, right?”
“Yeah. It means Marsi is stabilized. For now.” He rips off his stained shirt and holds it in his hand and looks around for a place to toss it. But there isn’t one, so he just balls it up and stares at it.
“I’ll take care of it,” Tellie offers. Po hands it to her before tugging the clean white T-shirt on. And then he just freezes in place. Not moving. Not blinking. It doesn’t even seem like he’s breathing.
Tellie’s footsteps disappear down the hallway, so the only sound in the room is the ticking of an old clock, the ones with letters for numbers.
“Po?” I whisper.
“I’m glad you weren’t there,” he says, and finally breaks down.
He covers his face with his hands and his shoulders shake and soon he’s sobbing. I swallow the wedge in my throat. I don’t know what to do or say that will make any of this better. If I’d been there when the attack started . . . maybe I could have done something . . . maybe Marsi would be okay.
Po sucks in a long, raspy breath and wipes off his face. “Sorry. Sorry. I just . . .”
I shrug. “It’s okay.” I instantly regret saying it. It’s lame, for one; and two, well, I’ve never seen my brother gear out like this, and I feel like I need something bigger to say. Something that’s important.
Except I don’t have anything. So I just keep my mouth shut.
“When I first read your note,” Po says a minute later, “I was furious. I couldn’t believe you would be so stupid. Running off in the middle of the night, you and Tellie Rix of all people. Neither of you knows anything about Bot Territory!” His voice rises in volume. “Right away I started wondering if you were okay.” He scratches at the back of his head and looks away. “When they attacked, the anger was gone”—he snaps his fingers— “like that. And I was so grateful you weren’t in Line Zero. You could have—” His face scrunches up and he grits his teeth, sucking in air through his nose. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“I’m sorry.” I fidget with the bottom of my shirt. “But . . . we’re all okay now. Marsi is going to be okay. I know it.”
Po nods his head once, but his eyes are glassy again like he’s not sure if he believes me. And I guess I don’t know if I should believe me either.
“How did you find us?” I ask. “Did Vee give you the map?”
“Yeah. She gave me the map on a disposable Link.”
“Did she get out? Is she okay?”
“I think so. I think she was with Scissor.”
“Should we go back?” I take two steps around the red couch between us. “Vee could be hurt. Or Dad could be . . .”
“No.” Po shakes his head. “No way. Not till we hear from Dad first.”
“But—” I start, and he cuts me off real quick.
“Dad gave me a mission, Trout. To find you and make sure you and Marsi were safe. Second to that, LT and I were to make sure Georgette was being guarded. I’ve done all of those things. Now we wait. Dad will get hold of us when he can. And Marsi will be on her feet in a few days. That’s when we’ll leave.”
I sit down on the couch and Po sits at the other end. “What happened to Marsi, anyway?” I ask.
Po’s shoulders sag an inch. “She was shot in the back while we escaped.”
My stomach goes all squirrely, and reminds me that one second we can be happy, and the next could be disastrous.
Maybe I did rush into this mission with Tellie. Maybe I was stupid to risk my life. An image of Ratch comes to mind, followed closely by a snapshot of the exoskeleton robot and the hundreds of spider bots that surrounded us.
Which makes me wonder . . . if Ratch was attacking us in Tallulah, then how was he also attacking in Line Zero?
“Are you sure you saw Ratch at the attack?” I ask.
“Positive. Why?”
I chew at my lower lip, thinking.
“Trout?” Po says.
“Well . . . there’s something I haven’t told you yet . . . about Ratch.”
“Spit it out.”
“He attacked Tellie and me in Tallulah last night.”
Po narrows his eyes. “He what?”
“Which means he was in two places at the same time.”
Po and I think about that for a minute, before Po says, “Someone bought ten thousand illegal ThinkChips on the black market.”
“But not Ratch,” I say.
“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t attached to the purchase.”
“True.”
“Dad thought the extra ThinkChips were going to an army of bots, which maybe was true, but—”
“They aren’t just any bots, are they?”
All the color leaves Po’s face, so he looks like a stone statue of himself as he says, “He’s making clones of himself.”
• • •
Po goes in search of LT, to tell him our theory, while I go in search of Georgette. I find her in the kitchen, hunched over a bowl of steaming soup. She’s paler than when I last saw her, and her eyes look hollow.
“Can I talk to you about something?” I ask her.
She nods and crushes up a handful of crackers into her soup as I relay the conversation Po and I just had.
When I finish, she says, “Interesting,” and that’s it.
“Interesting?” I say. “It’s cracked!”
“Well, I knew right away what Ratch was doing when you told me about the ThinkChips. It’s why he’s after the four of us with the facility codes in the first place. I just had no idea he was making clones of himself. But now that I think about it . . . it does make sense. He’s the most wanted criminal on the continent. Makes it harder to catch him if you don’t know which him is him.”
“Wait.” I hold out my hand. “Why is he after the codes? What’s in the facility?”
I’ve wanted this answer since I knew there was a facility, but now it’s even more important.
Georgette turns her bloodshot, droopy eyes on me. “You mean you don’t know?”
I shake my head. “Should I?”
“Yes. It was your mama who helped create it.”
My ears start ringing. I blink. Frown. “What did you say?”
“Your mama used to work for Cland Industries—the company responsible for creating the very first fully functioning, artificially intelligent robot. And later on, the ThinkChip, and its emergency backup system—your facility. You gain entrance to the facility, you can take control of every ThinkChip in existence.”
My mouth drops open. I try to make sense of everything Georgette just said—Ratch wants to control all ThinkChips, my mom helped create robots—but it’s too much to process at once. My brain feels like a strawberry mashed up in a blender. I can’t think straight, so all I manage to say is, “That’s not true.”
Po walks into the kitchen. I look over at him. I expect him to take my side, to tell Georgette she’s cracked. But he doesn’t. Instead he gives me that look of his that means he’s got a big fat secret. One that he’s feeling guilty for keeping.
“Trout,” he says.
“Is it true?” I ask him.
He exhales and shuffles his feet. “Yeah.”
“How come you and Dad didn’t tell me?”
“Because Dad was waiting for the right time.”
I curl my hands into fists. “When? When I’m fifty years old?”
My teeth grit against each other and I leap from the table. I march past Po without giving him a second glance. I don’t want to be mad at him. It sorta feels like I’m being a baby about it, and heat rushes into my cheeks as I instantly regret storming out of there.
He calls after me once, but he doesn’t follow, and I think he knows that I just need a second to go over the new information.
I find a quiet, empty space in the back of Georgette’s house and curl up, letting the anger wear off. I don’t know how long it takes—maybe an hour. Maybe two. And in that time, I realize, just like Marsi said, that I can’t blame Po for everything. Dad should have been the one to tell me about Mom. Po was just trying to follow Dad’s orders.
Fact is, though, no one talks about Mom, and now I’m starting to realize just how much I don’t know her. What else did she do before I was born? Did she ride hoverboards? Did she like climbing as much as I do?
What would she do if she were here now?
Even though I didn’t know her, I bet when she helped make the first bot, she wanted them all to be good. Which makes me wonder again how any bot can become good or bad. Bots are more like humans than we think. Not all humans are good either, and there are a million different reasons why they become the way they are.
I think about Ratch in the factory, watching his friend Mel die in his arms. I think I’m starting to understand him a little bit more.
I COME CRAWLING OUT of the hole I hid in and find Po right away beside Marsi’s bed.
He’s hunched over on his chair, elbows on his knees, staring at Marsi like he can make her wake up with the power of his brain.
“Hey,” I say.
He jumps. “Hey. I didn’t hear you come in.”
I shrug. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“It’s cool.”
I come around the bed and sit in the other chair in the corner. I try real hard not to look at Marsi, because I don’t want to remember her this way, weak and injured. I want to remember her as the happy, smiling Marsi.
“Sorry about earlier,” I say, keeping my voice low. “I’m okay now.”
Po raises his eyebrows. “Was that an apology?”
“Yes.” I sigh. “You don’t have to be a jerk.”
He chuckles. “I’m not. Well, okay, maybe a little.”
We sit there for a minute, then Po says, “If you ever want to talk about Mom, just say the word, okay? I’ve been keeping Dad’s secrets for a long time.” He sighs. “I’m not saying Dad is wrong, but when it comes to Mom, I want you to know everything from now on. You have the right to know her.”
“Thanks.” I pause. “Do you miss her? Mom?”
“All the time.” He rests his head on the back of his chair. “When she was pregnant with you, her and Dad were redoing one of the bedrooms for you. She picked out a gray color for your walls. Dad spent an entire weekend painting the room. Then Mom decided it was too much like a prison cell, so then she did blue and said it was too sad. I remember her and Dad arguing about it, because he was tired of painting.
“So I got this grand idea to help them, and I got my crayons out and colored all over the walls.”
Po lets out a laugh. “Dad was mad. Like spitting mad. Mom made him leave. ‘Take a walk, Robert. I got this handled.’ I thought Mom was going to take my toys away or something. Or ground me. Instead, she picked up one of my crayons and drew a turtle on the wall. I just stood there like an idiot until she looked over at me and said, ‘Come on, Mason. Let’s finish what you started.’ She never, ever got mad at me. Like, she didn’t have an angry bone in her body.
“When Dad came home, he just shook his head and grabbed a crayon and started drawing. It was hard to stay mad when you were around her.”
I’ve never heard that story before. And Dad said we moved right after Mom died, so I was too young to remember the room.
“I wish you could have known her,” Po says. “You know . . . like really known her. She was amazing.”
After a minute, Po reaches over and pats my arm. “At least we got each other, ya? Where would I be without my weetle Trout?”
I grunt. “Ha. Ha. It’s not like I’ve got anything special about me, though.”
“Oh, little bro.” He gets up, shakes out his leg, and starts hobbling out of the room. “Someday you’re going to realize just how special you are.”
• • •
I find LT sitting on Georgette’s roof.
“How’d you get up there?” I call to him.
“There is a rain collection barrel on the southwest side of the house. I used it to hoist myself up.”
I go up the same way and sit next to LT, arms folded around my knees. “Hey,” I say.
“Hello.”
The sky is a knot of dark clouds. The air smells wet and heavy.
“Marsi looks like she’s doing better,” I say after a minute of silence.
“Yes. Her heart rate is returning to normal. I can hear it even now. She will be fine. I am confident.”
“That’s good. Po’s worried, you know.”
“I know.”
We watch an owl zoom past. LT turns to me when the bird is out of sight. “I overheard your conversation with Georgette and Po.”
“About Ratch’s clone army?”
LT makes a noise that sounds like a snort. “Yes, but that is not what I was referring to. Perhaps we can discuss Ratch’s overzealous plans for world domination at a later date.”
I laugh, even though it’s not really that funny when you think about it.
“I meant the conversation about your mother and father,” LT continues. “Specifically, about the facility. Now that you know what is inside it, I feel it is time I tell you everything. Particularly how, exactly, Ratch and I came to save your father.”
“Okay.” I get a knot in my chest that tells me maybe this isn’t good news. “I’m listening.”
“When the war first broke out, robots worried the UD would use the ThinkChip facility to dismantle us. It was a realistic possibility. Thankfully, the government lost control of New York quickly, so they were unable to reach it. Ratch and I formed a plan: Find out whatever we could about the place. If we could reach it first, then we would be safe.
