She’d been living a lie and avoiding life. The shell she’d crawled into had finally shattered. Echo went over to Jesse then. She ran her hands over his chest, down his arms. The feel of the starched fabric was rough against her skin.

  He pulled her to him then, and she let him. Resting her head against his strong chest, he felt so substantial, but now she saw him for what he was. The world’s most impressive replica. Human beings should not be replicated.

  Jesse took both her hands in his. They stood, nearly face-to-face. There was nothing left of the argument they’d had last time. Only longing and loss and love. All wrapped up in those ever-observant eyes. When she leaned in to kiss him, he pulled away. But she tried again, pulled him to her, and this time, when their lips met, he was as solid and real as she had hoped.

  He stopped abruptly, as if remembering he had somewhere else to be. Shook his head. “My wife.”

  “Is long gone.” Echo said it with a bit more bite than she’d intended. She couldn’t believe it; here she was, ready to give herself to the first man she’d had in longer than she cared to admit, and he was pining over a woman who had been dead forever. Just like him.

  “In your mind, she’s dead. But in mine, she’s still as alive as she was when she stood at my bedside and watched me die. Feels like yesterday.”

  Echo hadn’t considered that. The more she thought she understood about the virtus, the less she realized she did. The man had been imprisoned here with his grief.

  But in the next moment, he surprised her by taking her into his arms. “Why do this? It’s only going to hurt you.”

  Echo responded by unbuttoning his jacket and running her hands over the smooth surface of his chest. “Because I may never get the chance to do it again.”

  The bunk was too small and too firm, but that didn’t matter. They came together in a tangle of limbs, desperate for comfort, for something real.

  While their bodies joined, a hinge unlocked. Echo traversed the contours of Jesse’s mind. Wading through the prefrontal cortex, roaming his dopaminergic pathways, and landing on the hypothalamus. There she stoked the flames of his pleasure, and it became her own, building with an intensity that made everything she’d experienced before pale in comparison.

  She released moments before him and realized he had waited for her. That knowledge should have made her feel something warm and whole. Instead, a quiet sadness crept in. And, judging by the way Jesse looked at her, he felt it too. Their time together was always too short, and now it was slipping away. They lay on their sides watching each other as if trying to store this moment, as if they could stop what would come next.

  Jesse trailed a finger along her arm. “Add this to the list of impossible things you’ve introduced into my life since I met you.”

  Echo exhaled softly, brushed a fingertip across his full lips, as if committing the shape and feel of them to memory. “I could say the same of you.”

  Jesse sat up then. “You have a decision to make.” He moved quickly to get dressed, and Echo did the same. He was right.

  “I’m going to say this because afterward, I don’t want to see you again.”

  Echo tried to interrupt, fearful.

  “I love you, Echo London. You think you feel the same way, but you don’t. You can’t love a replica. I thank you for giving me a second chance to feel. It’s a gift that not everybody gets, and to meet you was the icing on that cake. Do what you have to do, what you know is right.”

  “I will.”

  With an effortless thought, Echo crafted an exit back to herself. As she saw the window closing, Jesse lifted his hand, put on his soldier’s face, and waved goodbye.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Crashing back into a corporeal existence was like squeezing a fat noontime sun into an espresso cup. That was to say, she didn’t fit easily.

  Skin that felt like a suit tailored for someone half her size.

  Her arms and legs responded to her commands, but hesitantly, as if unsure of their loyalty.

  Sensations dull and distant.

  Memories pressing against a sealed panel, willing her to remember, but the code was out of reach.

  A corner of her mind held another option. A doorway that felt welcome and familiar. Unbound. She found herself floating toward it, then stopped. A pull, insistent and strong, back the other way.

  She was in an expansive, light-filled room. The chair, one of four arranged in a circle. Rooms lined the disk-shaped walls. She stretched and banged a shin against a low table. Three items: a glass filled with a clear liquid, a decorative African mask, and a small hand mirror.

  She swallowed against a parched throat, then downed the water in sloppy gulps. The mask raised a spark of recollection, but it was as slippery as a bar of soap in a hot shower. Anxious fingers grasped the mirror instead. Seeing the familiar contours of her own reflection cleared the fog.

  So, like water from a faucet, she filled herself up again. First, a trickle of sensation in her feet. She wiggled her toes. Her legs and arms. The cascade entered her extremities and, with it, the return of familiar aches. And then her mind lurched.

  Walter. She’d said his name aloud, but there was no answer. In a final feat of mental dexterity, Echo settled herself in again.

  Echo London and another presence, like a symbiont. That was the word that surfaced. Ivan Oliphant’s vision and experiment, proven in the overlapping thoughts of herself and Ada. Slowly she came back to herself. From head to toe, every inch stirring, reawakening, remembering.

  Echo shrugged off the blanket that had been draped around her and came to her feet.

  Ivan was dead—at least she thought he was. The possibility that he was working with someone else urged caution.

  “Walt—” She stopped herself. It felt like her scalp tingled with the lights she’d first seen on the white mask. The sensation was definitely a warning that told her to be quiet. She listened for sound, anything at all that would signal what was going on and where whoever waited for her was. All she heard was the distant whir of Walter’s robots cleaning someplace in the building.

  Echo slipped out of her shoes and left them there. Scanning the area, she decided it might be safest to take the back stairs. But of course, that was exactly what they’d expect her to do. Instead, she headed straight for the main staircase. Head on a swivel, she was moving in that direction when one head, then two, crested the top stair.

  A chill ran down her spine, and Echo was snared in place. A fish on a very capable hook. How? She thought she’d destroyed him.

  “Welcome back,” Ivan said with a grin. It was just him and Detective Reid, whom she guessed was no more a detective than she was. Walter was nowhere in sight.

  That initial fear dissipated like a foul smell, chased away by rage. She was about to ask about Walter but once again stopped herself. If Ivan didn’t know he was here, or had been here, all the better for him. How had he survived? Then she realized that like everything else in the virtual space, death wasn’t real.

  “Gotta admit, I didn’t peg you for the murderous type,” Ivan said. In a final parody, he wore a T-shirt that said Freedom Now. “I’ve been watching you, though, and the intelligence has brought out some latent anger in you. Probably pushed you over the edge. Something to tweak with the next test group.”

  “What now?” Echo got straight to the point; why dance around it?

  “I did . . . I do still consider you a friend, you know. Even after what you tried. I get it. Change is hard. But you felt exactly what I did. We’re better together. Humanity in its current form has maxed out. We can’t go any farther without help. And we saw what happened to the intelligence unchecked. The only path forward is fusing. We get the best of us with the augmented brainpower and all the other sensory and physical advantages. It makes sense. Admit it.”

  “That isn’t for either of us to decide in a vacuum,” Echo countered. “Did it ever occur to you to ask?”

  “Would you have said yes?”

  Echo sneered.

  “Thought not.”

  “In your mind, maybe even his”—she stopped and indicated Reid with her thumb—“you thought you were doing the right thing. But what if it went wrong?”

  “You refused UBI and the IQ test, but I had other ways to determine your fitness for the experiment.”

  Echo raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s simple. I watched you for years and I listened. You either showed or said everything I needed to know. You’re worse than an introvert. You’re a recluse, ascetic by choice. Your own father can barely tolerate you. If things went sideways, I’d have very little to explain. That . . .” He turned to Reid. “That is the look of someone for whom the pieces are starting to come together. And it’s coming together so quickly because of the gift of AI that I granted you.”

  Echo wanted to claw his eyes out.

  Ivan giggled. “And me.”

  It was all so easy to see now. He’d been planning this since she started working here. Maybe he, the administration, had tapped her beforehand, while she was still at the Lewis branch.

  “It didn’t start here, though. I spotted you long ago,” Ivan said, confirming her suspicion. “The idea for the library is at least a decade old; you have to know that. I think you do. You helped me. I knew I’d need someone on the inside, no pun intended, to make this work.”

  “You’re a monster,” Echo said, and it felt inadequate. Ada coursed through her, and her mind raced with possibilities. How was she to stop him? It wasn’t like the movies. She didn’t have a gun or a club or a poison dart. Killing in the virtual world felt nothing like the possibility of the real thing. Desire and will were totally different from commitment, and as much as she wanted to make him pay for what he’d done, she didn’t know if she was capable.

  “Oh, come now,” Ivan said, waving a hand at her in dismissal. “Get over yourself. Like those virtus you love so much, you have a part to play in this chapter of our history. You’ll be famous.”

  “Famous?” Echo was incredulous. “If you think I’d want to be famous for anything, let alone what you’re trying, then you never knew me at all.”

  “Want is irrelevant when it comes to the greater good, and make no mistake, we are the greater good.”

  Echo snorted. “I already feel like less of myself than I was before you started tampering with me.”

  “That, my girl, is likely just the beginning.”

  “All that talk about mandates on checking out the virtus—you made that up, didn’t you?”

  “It sucks, okay? But think about it. Human evolution stalled after Homo sapiens. Think about what this will mean. I’ve already got the high-IQ individuals identified through the UBI exam. Surprising how easy that one was to pass off. I thought people would balk more, but they’re just sheep, and the lure of free money was enough to satisfy them. We are the test cases. I know now that I can lead them. This is the only way that we survive. Nice try at the TV station too. Thing is, I can’t allow you to go spouting off until I’m ready.” Ivan stopped, an odd glint in his eye. “I took everything I learned from you and created my own instance. I daresay, I’ve bested you. You can create and traverse the milieus, but I control the objects within. I’m so much more than you.”

  Echo heard the implied threat. She tilted her head. “You think so?”

  “Think?” He laughed in her face. “Try ‘know’ on for size. And it’s clear to me now that you don’t want to join me on this leg of the journey. That, my compadre, is why you’ll be spending eternity in there, with your friends. I’ll have a press conference, dab at the corners of my eyes at the appropriate times. Your disappearance will become one of the city’s great mysteries.”

  At first it felt like a gentle tug, like a child pulling your hand to get you to go in another direction. Then the tug became more insistent. Echo was being drawn back into the virtus’ world. She staggered and collapsed, her mind already beginning to pull away from her body.

  Stop. She issued the command in her own head. Stay here.

  Panic rose as she felt her flesh still yielding. Through a fog of terror, Echo did something risky. She cordoned off that part of her psyche that was fighting to remain whole and launched a counterattack.

  Check in and archive virtual personage Ivan Oliphant.

  Ivan jerked. His eyes grew wide with shock. She saw Reid reach out to steady him. Ivan’s mouth worked, but nothing came out. And all the while, Echo knew she was fighting a losing battle. Only, if she was going down, she was going to do everything in her power to take this sociopath with her.

  She felt him then, in the virtual world. Felt herself coalesce there. What was left of her body, she knew more than saw that it lay sprawled. Her face pressed against the cool bamboo flooring.

  Ivan was there with her in that space that he had created to imprison her. She latched on to him, mentally and physically.

  But in the physical world, she saw something horrifying. Ivan couldn’t speak but managed to raise a hand and point directly at her. Reid let him go and turned to stalk toward her inert form.

  She redoubled her efforts to trap Ivan. But then she made the agonizing decision. She let him go and redirected her attention toward fighting for herself. Come back. But Ivan was right; he was stronger.

  Reid had reached her then and, after lifting her limp body in the air, was hauling back his fist for a punch when Walter appeared.

  Echo fell again and felt herself being stretched and pulled away, helpless to stop it. Just when she was beginning to think that maybe it would be better this way, Ivan stopped.

  Walter and Reid stopped.

  The People’s Library was a quiet library. It was one of the things that Echo loved most about the place. But the unmistakable sound of madness brewing wound its way up the stairs.

  Echo ricocheted back into her body with a snap that left her momentarily disoriented. Walter shoved Reid and came over to help her up. The four of them, unlikely as they were, walked over to the massive window and glanced outside.

  What Echo heard next, from herself and from the others, were sharp, fearful intakes of breath.

  Chapter Fifty

  “Looks like those old analog cameras worked out pretty well after all,” Walter said.

  Ivan and Reid exchanged confused glances. But Echo knew. The backpack. Walter had planned this all before they’d even left his home. He pointed then, first, to a camera taped so inelegantly to the wall just above their heads. Then to another aimed directly at the seating area. His genius was completed with a third and final camera angled to catch the entire floor from its vantage point near the staircase.

  “What have you done!” Ivan shed his calm veneer. He and Reid sprinted toward the stairs.

  She and Walter pursued, more out of curiosity than anything else. As they leaped down from the last step and dashed outside, they stopped.

  On the billboard screen overlooking the park, the whole scene played out on repeat. Ivan, Reid, and Echo. Audio on full blast. His twisted plan, his sneering face on display for everyone to see. Just then, Walter nudged her and pulled her back.

  The normally tranquil lawn space was erupting with the fury of a people fooled and manipulated at the hands of a duplicitous government once again. UBI, the fall of AGI, it had all been a lie. Human beings were the most advanced species on the planet, and that, in the end, that constant quest for more and better, was what may have caused its own undoing this time.

  Echo and Walter retreated to a recess at the corner of the building, unable to tear themselves away from the scene unfolding before them.

  Groups of fights and scuffles were breaking out like volcanic eruptions. A horde of teens was running around, yanking out large tufts of grass, for no reason at all other than they needed a way to expend their anger. Echo watched in morbid awe as another swarm erected a hasty effigy of the Human.exe logo and set it on fire.

  And all around them, scenes of turmoil played out like a bad film. A piercing scream drew Echo’s gaze up the hill. Reid was nowhere in sight, but Ivan hadn’t gotten far. It was only the T-shirt that confirmed it: glimpses of the blue fabric in between the fists and feet of the mob that had surrounded him.

  His face, his voice, had been his condemnation, and the mob was enacting its own version of justice. Echo didn’t bother feeling sorry for him. When the sounds of sirens finally came to them, she and Walter retreated to the library again.

  With the door closed, Echo turned to Walter. “I’ve got to get it out of me.”

  Worry furrowed his brow. “But do you know how to do it safely?”

  “It’s never been done before, but lately, I’ve become quite the trailblazer.” Echo tried to sound lighthearted, to ease his fear, but she couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “Maybe we should get you to a hospital,” Walter said, shaking his head. “I can’t stand here and watch . . . I don’t . . . I won’t know how to help you if . . .”

  Echo gestured outside. “They’ve probably been overrun already, and I’m not sure fighting my way through that crowd is a better option.”

  When Walter looked like he was gearing up to try to stop her again, she said, “I’m going to try.”

  Instead of going to her office, or her favorite pod, last one on the right, where she used to talk to Jesse Cooper, Echo sat right there, beneath the big brass clock, and took out her own virtual knife.

  A very real possibility asserted itself into Echo’s thought stream—the odds that removing the intelligence, no, the artificial intelligence, would kill her, or, worse, leave her in a condition that would make death a preferred state of indifference. Echo was still seated on the floor, attempting to seem like she was in total control. Before the pairing, her back and knees would have been screaming at her to get the hell up, but now, she was able to pinpoint those centers of the mind that controlled pain and tell them to sleep for a bit.

  Oh, what a thing to give up.

  “All I need you to do is watch that door,” she told Walter, but he looked noncommittal.

 

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