Rebel, Rebel.

by Tod Davies.

1.

I used to have this nightmare.

Four walls in the commissary—the walls would start closing in on me. Shoutingfrom the Wall Ads™, much louder than the nice noises they make in real life. The door out, both the doors out, just gone.

And I can’t breathe.

I’d wake up in the klatch trying to yell. None of my klatchmates ever heard. They all slept like the dead, we worked and played so hard during daylight hours. The only one alerted was Malinda, of course. That was her job as our dormroom nanny, monitoring us night and day, hooked up to our different rates of heart, respiration, and temperature. She never slept. She’d see immediately on her InnerBoard™ that my sleep had been interrupted, and she’d come back to me without any noise, on those quiet blasts of propellant air the nannies ride. She’d put her Comfort Fabric™ hand soothingly on my forehead and talk to me in, what we called in the klatch, “Malinda’s nursery voice.”

“Your sleep is harmed?” she would sing. “Dear little Reb, is it so?” “Not ‘harmed’,” I would correct. “Disturbed.”

“I make a note of it. I will know next time. Thank you for telling me.”

All this was a little joke between us. I knew perfectly well that Malinda had been programmed to talk better then I ever could. But she also knew more psychology, which I guess she would have to, being dormroom nanny for a bunch of budding genius  heads  like  me  and  my klatchmates.  What  she  was  doing  in  making  a‘mistake’ was soothing my night fear by letting me teach her. It was a strategy meant  to  make  me  feel  important,  which  would  bring  all  my  vitals  back  to baseline.

I knew she was doing that, sure. But I liked it. I liked it as much as I always did when Dea said he liked my new hair, or my Avatar’s new outfit, even though I really knew he couldn’t have cared less.

“Thanks, Malinda,” I would say. “You’re welcome—is that right?”

Malinda’s face was cartoony in a nice way, like a toy. It would kind of wrinkle upwith concern in the middle of its forehead, giving her such a funny look I could never help but laugh. Laughing always calms me down. I knew Malinda was programmed to make me laugh, I knew it was fake, but I loved it anyway. I knew Malinda was a machine, but I loved her anyway. What choice did I have? Even the illusion was better than nothing.

As it turned out, that was the illusion. I mean, the illusion itself. The illusion was an illusion. But that’s all confused. I know I’m not being plain.

And anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

2.

I’m trying to pinpoint the exact moment where this all started. That’s what I’m good at. Process. Where things start, how they play out, likely outcomes—that kind of thing. Problem-solving. That’s what I scored highest on, and if I can brag a little, highest, so far as I know, of any kid born my year or before, ever.

High scores on problem solving, that was me. And low scores on ability to control feeling. That was me, too. They had me working hard on that last one. Two hours a day, six days a week, pure sweat Rational Method™. “The opposite of IS is NOT, NOT AND is NAND, NOT OR is NOR…” I can still hear the drill. By the time I split the klatch, I could even drive down an icy road in an old-style vehicle without hitting the brakes in sheer freakout. That’s how good the Rational Method™ was.

I use it, even now, in my networks, and teach it, too—illegally, of course. Mainly to guys much older than me who left the System before RM was developed.

I think my high and my low scores were why they partnered me early with Dea. He wasn’t exactly my opposite, more like complementary. Scored very high on feeling control, which was kind of cheating, since he scored really low on feeling, too. The  star of  our year. But you probably know that. He’s famous, Dea is. Getting  more  famous  by  the  day,  too,  from  the  sound  of  it.  Which  doesn’t surprise me. He was always good at everything he put his mind too. Or almost everything.

Problem-solving he was not so good at. No idea of process. “You know the diff between us, Reb,” he would say, running his hands through his mohawk, the one that changed color with his thoughts, “You’re about the Probable. But I…,” his hair flashed peacock blue tipped with gold, “I am the Possible.”

He was, too.

I gave him his superiority. It made him happy. What made him happy, back then, made me happy. But now I see things differently. So differently, in fact, that it’s like little Reb died. Gone forever. Though no one dies at fifteen years anymore, no one in the First World™, anyway.

Still, here I am looking back as if it was someone else’s life. And that was only three years ago.

3.

“Sssshhhh,” Dea hissed. I hit my shin on a malfunctioning DreamRec™ someone had left sticking out in the middle of the passageway. I swore, then I giggled, and Dea’s hand clamped down over my mouth.

“Quiet, you idjit,” he ordered softly. We were creeping down the passage in front of Malinda’s door. As we passed, it opened, and light streamed out, a detail I clocked later as weird. I knew Helpers didn’t need light to maneuver. Now I know Cade was in there with her, having figured out things I should have known myself, dammit, if I hadn’t been so full of my own opinion of my supposed high IQ. I’ve learned since that if you want to trip up an opponent, lay on the flattery. It works every time.

Malinda glided out from the light and looked at us, expressionless. She took in everything, the way she always does: us both frozen, holding our shoes in one hand.

I giggled again. Dea kicked me in the shins.

Still expressionless, she looked us up and down. Then turning, she soundlessly disappeared, shutting the door. The gold beam of light went out.

If I’d been thinking, I would have wondered about that.

“She thinks we’re going to sex!” I whispered, gleeful. I tried so hard not to laugh, tears shot out of my eyes.

“That was my plan, idjit!” Dea grabbed my hand and yanked me on. So we ran, holding hands and our shoes, down the passageway and out the door.

We weren’t going to sex, of course. This was far more exciting. After all, we could sex any time, with whoever we wanted in the klatch, whenever, too. But this way it looked like we wanted a little privacy—as if Dea has ever wanted a little privacy from an audience ever! We thought it was the one activity that Malinda wouldn’t monitor. Blocked. We’d been told she was blocked from this one area of our lives.

I know now that was just a lie.

There was a reason we were told that lie. The Guardians thought that leading us to believe we had that one area to ourselves was the best way to get the most from us: to get every one of us trained to the fullest extent of our DNA-predicted abilities. All the better for what we were made for, which was the benefit of the IS Corporation, the most prestigious, most elite org in the entire City. So ‘choices’ about where we found pleasure with each other, what tastes we ‘discovered’ we had as ‘individuals’ were—we were told—left up to us. The ‘rule’ was No Interference. Supposedly you had until you were eighteen before the system began tracking your lifestyle picks.

That was what they told us, anyway. I don’t know why I bought it. There was never any way the Guardians would stop watching us for a  minute. Not for a second. How could they afford to, when the end result was supposed to be TotalControl™? They were never going to stop watching us, measuring us, vetting us… manipulating us. We were—we are, those of us who still buy into the deal on offer—just things to them. Things to move around at their will.

For what purpose? I swear to Goddess, I think not even the Guardians know the answer to that one. They’ve been manipulating reality for so long, if you ever programmed the question “What is the goal of all human activity?” into the main database, certain heads at the top of the information chain would just explode— because I’m not even sure they know anymore what “human” means.

I’d like to see that—the exploding heads—to tell you the truth. Not that I’m a bloodthirsty person, but it appeals to me as a kind of justice. Me and Cade are actually fooling around in our spare time from the main network building now to see if there’s a way. You’d think she and I wouldn’t waste any time on something that seems so impossible to implement, you’d think we’d know we couldn’t manage anything so huge, but here’s where Cade’s background in engineering comes in. She’s taught me that the bigger the network, the smaller the corruption needed to make it fail. As long as the network has three qualities: Size. Centralization. Homogeneity. And Ubiquicity certainly qualifies on all counts. Hands down.

It’s a fragile machine. Much more fragile than anyone lets on.

I wasn’t thinking any of this, of course, that night I was creeping along the klatch corridors, giggling with Dea about our cleverness in pretending to be going to sex. I was thinking of how we would sex after our mission, if we got away with it, and then I giggled again thinking about how much trouble we’d be in if we got caught. Not that I was too worried. I knew there wasn’t much they’d do to us in the way of punishment. Even if I didn’t put it this way, exactly, to myself, somehow I knew: We were way too valuable a commodity, we IS klatch nurslings, for that.

Just how valuable was something we were on our way to find out. We had been planning this for months, a raid on our secret records, on the files that had been kept on us since birth. Since before birth, even. The files would prove just how important we were to the Guardians. What they expected of us, what they meant for us to be. That was the most important part to Dea. Not for me, although I kept this secret for fear of his mockery: What I really wanted to find in my secret records wasn’t what I was to be; it was what I am.

4.

As usual, it was Dea’s idea, with me working out the details. “We can get into the files through any network, correct?” “Correct.”

“But all the networks are seriously monitored. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Except. . . ,” Dea’s hair blazed purple, the way it did when he was really chuffed with some scheme of his. “Except appliances.”

He was right, of course. It was so obvious. And I hadn’t thought of it.

You could plug into any system you wanted through any household toaster, if you knew how. Monitoring slowed them down, so it was a common household hack to disable the function. I had learned to do it myself practically before I could crawl. In fact, all the klatch appliances had to be specially outfitted with cyber locks to keep little malicious geniuses like myself from messing with them, so at first I didn’t see what Dea was getting at.

But then. Light dawned.

“You’re a genius, Dea,” I said admiringly. “I know,” he said.

“You mean the exercycle.”

“ I do. I do indeed.”

It was the Licketty’s exercycle he was talking about. And it was the Licketty’s exercycle we headed for now, parked in a gym used by the high minions of IS Corp. The Licketty—our unflattering nickname for IS Corp’s Media Secretary—was in charge of reporting on the “triumphs” of IS to the media. Mostly imaginary, for of course the true work of IS was too secret to be blasted about in public. So he had the reporting of the klatch’s doings. We were a safer subject to talk about than what IS actually does.

People loved to hear about us. So I heard later, anyway.

We all hated him. Slimy little creep, always patting and stroking where he wasn’t wanted. He had managed to amass all sorts of bennies for himself, including solitary gym rights, and a claim over his own exercycle. The Licketty was very vain. He was implanted with multiple systems to measure every calorie he swallowed and every ounce he gained.

Dea loathed him. His most spectacular prank, in the considered opinion of the entire klatch, was to hack the secretary’s weight monitor and add a pound or two every few days. Especially after the Licketty had been half killing himself on that exercycle of his.

I was in on that one, of course. Who else but me had managed the details of the hack?

It made the Licketty furious when he found out. We were all put on unflavored Nutri for the next week. But it was worth it. It was hilarious watching him trying to figure out why he never lost an ounce, no matter how hard he tried.

The exercycle. He disabled the monitor so that no one would know how frantic he was to lose those imaginary pounds.

Piece of cake to hack. If you don’t mind the pun.

It was the work of half a moment to get in the door—the password was one of those minion-stupid ones: onetwothree. Another mo and we’re plugged into the network we want, right through the calorie counter, download the files, cover over the digital traces, that’s it, pack up, out the door—no muss, no fuss, high five, head back to the dorm in the blue sodium light shining over the Corp’s pride and joy, Ubiquicity’s biggest stretch of Velvet Lawn™. Always makes you want to roll in it when you see it. Gave Dea ideas.

“Want to sex before we head in? I mean, as long as we’re here.”

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. Truth was, I really only liked sexing with Dea. The others in the klatch left me cold. I had to keep quiet about it, or he never would have let me forget it. I hated seeing him sex with anyone else, and once I’d let him know that, my life would have been a misery.

So I usually played it cool. It was tough, that pretending.

But on that night, I didn’t have to pretend. My mind was so on the files. Oh, I still had fun. I always had fun sexing with Dea. But part of me almost couldn’t wait to finish up.

Like I said. I had something else on my mind.

“Come on, let’s get back and see what we’ve got.” Dea’s hair brightened, and I knew I hadn’t been the only one distracted.

“Meet you there,” I said casually. Too casually. He looked at me, suddenly suspicious. “Look,” I said. “Lost an earring back at the gym.” Turning my head so he could see the one stud missing from the seven. “Don’t want to leave any evidence!”

He stared at me, then shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “See you in half a mo.” And he loped off across the Velvet Lawn™, back to the klatch.

Did I know that would be the last time I would see him? I mean, until just the other day. Under such different conditions. But it brought it all back.

That night I had no idea of any changes coming. I hurried as fast as I could back to the gym, pinning the earring I’d palmed back in place as I went.

There was something more I wanted to find.

5.

Coming back across the lawn I saw the klatch house afire with light, and as I hesitated, alerted, an UrboHover™ landed on the Velvet Lawn™, disgorging two businesslike women. They emerged a moment later with Dea between them.

They all climbed into the hovercraft, and it lifted off.

The Licketty had fooled us. He’d put the monitor back on the exercycle once he was done with it, the one and only example of conscientious attention to detail he’d ever shown in his job. The Guardians were alerted, and they sent for Dea to explain.

Only it wasn’t Dea who set all their bells ringing. It was me. Not that he told them that. “I kept you out of it,” he said just last week when we saw each other again. “You owe me for that.”

“Hah,” I said flatly. “I know very well that was the start of your career.” We both laughed.

Because  it  had  been  so  clever,  my  getting  those  extra  files,  the  Guardians reasoned whoever had done it was advanced enough to graduate from the klatch. Into the Higher World, as we enviously called it. The world of the City’s management. The world of the Elite. The world we all dreamed of.

It was Dea’s dream to join them, those adults who manipulated the rest of us. Now he’d been invited. “You think I believe once that happened, you’d give that up? Just to give me credit?”

He laughed again. “You’re getting too honest, Reb. It must be all that hanging out with Cade.”

I didn’t bother answering that one.

Before I go on, I really should describe Cade. Without understanding Cade, you can’t—I can’t—understand how I got from being little Reb, the prize pupil of the most  elite  klatch  in  Ubiquicity,  to  Rebel  the  rank  Outsider,  organizer  of Scrumblies. So many people I run into in the course of my work just cannot understand  why  I  picked  a  life  of  the  hardship  that  comes  from  having  to scramble for tech. No games, no avatars, no entertainment, no gadgets. Let alone no prestige.

Why, in fact, I picked the life of the Scrumblies.

There are plenty of Scrumblies, too, born and bred in encampments in the Outer Lands, outside of the advantages of the city, or in exile, sent away for some malfeasance or other, who give me suspicious looks. “Spy,” they mutter. “Why would anyone leave a fast track klatch to live like this?”

Cade  tells  me  what  they’re  thinking.  She  knows. She  was  raised  a  Scrumblie before she came to the klatch.

The files say she was klatchnapped. It’s rare, but it happens. Surveillance will notice a child of unusual ability; in Cade’s case, when her parents brought her in to have specialists look at a worrisome mole—for skin cancers turn deadly fast outside the protective domes of the city. The sensors immediately alerted the Guardians that here was a girl who promised an unusual amount of return on investment. In the city, if such a child is spotted, and the parents don’t look able to provide proper development, the law lets the Klatch Guardians commandeer the child—ward of this corp or that—for the good of the City as a whole.

Talent like Cade’s was too precious to waste.

So she came to the klatch. Later than the rest of us. She was always the odd one out. We’d heard of Scrumblies, but we certainly had never seen one in the flesh. And here was Cade, whose two parents—she had two actual parents!—were Scrumblies.

Even without that, she stood out. She didn’t look like the rest of us. Of course having the same sperm donor father, we shared a family resemblance: Medium height and build, straight brown silver hair, pale brown skin, green brown eyes. That was our standard of beauty. Not Cade’s look. About six feet tall, even at fifteen; a white aureole of hair, and the palest white pink skin imaginable. Pale blue eyes with shattered irises that looked at you with total honesty. For Cade never lied. She hasn’t changed with age. Her superpower is her honesty; she’s incapable of telling a falsehood.

That made her look like a fool to the rest of us. More than a fool: an idjit. She was…she is…more human than the rest of us, and it was that which made her appear to be a fool in our eyes. Provincial. Barbaric. Dense.

A Scrumblie.

You know the jokes. We all tell them. “How many Scrumblies does it take to boot a smart phone?” “How does a Scrumblie fly?” “What did the Scrumblie say to the waste analyzer?” Scrumblie humor. Ha ha.

The rumor was she was the bastard error of some Higher Up who had pulled strings to get her into our klatch, which, after all, was the most competitive for entry in the entire City. Graduation from an IS klatch was a guarantee of an elite career. That’s why Dea looked so smug as those women marched him away. That’s why, as I watched, I felt a twinge of envy.

That was my early training talking. That envy, I mean. Cade’s early training had been very different from mine, so when she opened her pale eyes wide and said, “I like you,” I was embarrassed for her. No one but an idjit would be so simple- minded as to confess to a real feeling. So I reasoned. May the Goddess forgive me.

“No, no, I am an idjit,” Cade insisted, laughing, just the other day as I stumbled over a belated apology for how I’d treated her in the past. “Rebel, I’d rather be one, too.”

I still don’t understand that, I have to admit. I still don’t understand a lot of what Cade says to me. The algorithms, yeah, sure—I understand enough, anyway, to know she’s a math genius. But the ‘simpler’ things she says? I still don’t get them.

“Look,” she’ll say, pointing at some boringly every day object, a pin, say, or a pair of shoes. “Look at how alive it is. See?”

No, I don’t see. But where I once thought myself smarter than Cade because I couldn’t see, I know better now.

I’ve learned she sees much farther than I ever can. And I’ve learned to trust her vision.

That night, though, I still thought she was an idjit.

6.

Now that I had the files I wanted, I was in a hurry to get them read. Back in my room, I got stuck into my reading.

Almost the first thing I read took me aback. I knew my mother had disliked me, but even so it was a little startling to learn she’d tried to smother me shortly after my birth. She had actually tried to kill me. I mean, wasn’t that a bit extreme? When there were so many other options?

A knock on the door interrupted me. How annoying. Ignore. Louder knock. Ignore, ignore. Then Cade stuck her head in. That white hair of hers shone like a halo.

“Reb? You there? I knocked.”

“Yeah? And when I don’t answer, what does that mean?”

Ignoring me now, she came in, closing the door behind her. I gave an exasperated sigh.

“Don’t be angry, Reb,” she coaxed. “I want to talk to you about something.” I groaned. I glared. Usually my glares were effective. Not this time, though. Cade came over to the bed and sat next to me. She took my hand.

“Oh, for Goddess’ sake, Cade, not now!”

Her look of confusion told me I’d misjudged. “Sorry,” I muttered. “I thought you wanted to sex.”

“What? Oh. No. I’m not really into you that way. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said, sarcastic-like. It was a huge faux pas in the klatch—a real insult—to imply that you weren’t attracted to a klatchmate. But that was Cade all over. No tact.

“It’s just…,” she looked more confused than ever, but she didn’t drop my hand. Now she just traced patterns on the back of it with her other forefinger.

“Oh, come on. Spit it out. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

She looked at me with that earnest expression that used to irritate me so much. Then she blurted, “We’re worried about you.”

“Swell,” I said. “And who’s ‘we’?” The idea that anyone in the klatch would worry about anyone else. It was laughable. We all had other, more important, things to think about. All of us, that is, except Cade. Apparently.

“Me…and Malinda,” Cade confessed, blushing mottled red. “We’re worried about you,” she repeated.

“Malinda can’t worry,” I said, turning back to my reading. “So that’s one less worrier, ha-ha.”

“She’s worried about how you’ll feel when you…when you…,” Wordlessly, she pointed at the scree.

“When I what?”

“When you find out that yucky stuff about your mother. She knows you’ve downloaded the files. She knew the minute you did it. She says….”

“WHAT?” I shouted, pulling my hand away. “Cade, have you been gossiping with the Helpers?”

Which was, so we’d been taught, just about the most low class thing you could do.

“Why  not?”  she  said  defensively.  “She’s  the  only  one  in  this  place  who understands how I feel.”

“Cade,” I said with exaggerated patience, “Hello. Malinda can’t feel. Understand? Basic engineering,” I sneered. “Malinda is a machine. Malinda is programmed to look like she feels. But Malinda does not feel.”

“Yes, she does,” Cade said softly. “And I can prove it.”

I looked at her for a moment. She was actually serious. Was it possible? Naw, how could it…

“How?” I said.

In answer, she stood up and went to the door, opening it and inviting me to follow.

I hesitated. But I considered. If Cade was even half right, this was huge. If Malinda actually could feel, in no matter how primitive a form, this was the breakthrough we had all been waiting for. That we had all, in the IS klatch, been bred for. AI researchers   would   go   out   of   their   minds.   Our   klatch…   the   intelligence possibilities… my mind reeled. If they worked like slaves for us now, just imagine what the future would hold with conscious machines. “If you’re right,” I said, and my voice sounded strange to me, “If you’re right, this could be big.”

A troubled expression passed over Cade’s face.

“If I show you, you can’t tell anyone,” she said flatly.

I should have been shocked. After all, wasn’t this the very discovery for which we were being trained?

Somehow, though, I wasn’t surprised. “Why not?” I said.

“Because it would be a betrayal,” she said. “You would be a traitor. To Malinda. Who you and I love.”

To my utter amazement, I realized with a jolt, she was right. I loved Malinda. I loved a robot. A machine. Was I really that pathetic?

This was a bit much to take in all at once. I stood up, a little dazed.

“Come on, then,” Cade commanded.

Automatically picking up my scree, the half-read files still on it, I followed her out. And for the second time that night, found myself crossing the Velvet Lawn™.

She led me straight to the Machine Shop. I knew where it was, of course, all the way out there at the edge of the electric fence, next to the computer-locked gate, but I had never actually been inside. It was where broken machines went, to be fixed or parted out, and I was never interested in that side of tech. I prided myself on being an idea person.

Face palm. Idea person, indeed! Reb! You idjit!

Because then it hit me. It wasn’t just me who was completely uninterested in the Machine Shop. So far as I knew, no actual human had gone near it in years. Why would they? A generation before had perfected self-repairing AI, and the Machine Shop was where machines went when their problems were purely mechanical.

Not worth wasting a human’s valuable time. Even the most basic ToasterDrone™could arrange for the swapping of its own blown servos.

I caught my breath as the thought hit me: what could be a safer place for an AI to form a plot? If plotting was what it wanted to do. Could Cade have uncovered what a faction in the City had been saying for years: that AI would secretly surpass us in intelligence, and, hiding it, plot a revolution? Would the AIs actually rebel?

I’d always laughed at the people who talked like that as crazy fantasists. But I was already on edge from Dea’s promotion, not to mention what I was reading in the files, and my imagination wasn’t totally under my control. So I was scared, as Cade punched in another stupid old password on the door of the Machine Shop, of what I was going to find inside.

She turned on a light. Nothing stirred. It was the predictable landscape of robot spare body parts, sightless staring heads, hanging limbs, transistors, wires. The usual. But for some reason, it didn’t hit me the way it should have. Something was stirring in me; and all the bits and pieces of robots I had actually known acted on me strangely.

It was eerie. Uncanny.

There was Simon, the carpenter. At least: his right arm, which I knew from the calluses the designer had artistically placed on his hands. There was Gini, the cook—her legs, anyway, ending in her kitchen clogs. There were the little robot kittensthat had shorted out when we had a bathroom flood. And the robot molerat that had been Dea’s particular pet.

How had it found its way in here so soon? Is that what happened when we reached promotion? Were all of our former companions exiled here? It made me want to weep, suddenly. I didn’t know why.

There was Malinda’s spare head. Hanging, eyelids shut, twisting slightly on its wire in the breeze from the open door.

Suddenly  its  eyes  flashed  open.  Its  mouth  gaped.  “Dear  Reb,”  it  said,  “how worried I have been for you.”

As I watched, horrified and astonished, tears began streaming down its bodiless face, dropping from its chin to the floor below.

Malinda appeared behind it, and, as calmly as if she switched her day uniform for her lab clothes, she removed the head she wore and replaced it with the weeping one. Her hand reached up to dash a tear out of her eye.

“There,” she said. “That’s a comfort.”

I just stared. What was it I was looking at? Or rather: Who was it?

7.

Malinda’s crying freaked me out.

My rational brain told me it was no big deal. I figured Cade must have jury-rigged her a head that could manage that, and later I found out I was right: She’d fixed an algorithm that turned air moisture into saline in Malinda’s circulatory system.

It wasn’t my brain that reacted, though.

It was something else entirely. I have a good idea, now, of what. But then it was terrifyingly as if it came from someone else. Someone other than who I thought was me.

To my horror, I found myself running to Malinda and wrapping my arms around her, pressing my cheek against her Soft Fabric™ one. I cried out, “Malinda! What’s wrong?”

I felt unfamiliar liquid run down my face. These weren’t Malinda’s tears. They were mine.

It had been so long since I had cried, I hadn’t recognized them. Startled, I jumped back to see Malinda and Cade staring at me. Cade looked relieved. Malinda’s soft face smiled.

“What?” I said defensively.

“I am so glad, Reb, dear,” Malinda said softly.

“Glad about what?” I kicked a spare piece of lawn buffer irritably with my foot. “We thought maybe you’d forgotten how,” Cade said. “How to cry, I mean.”

I should have forgotten it. I’d had it drilled in me for years in the klatch, how to get past the need. It was practically the first thing you learned in the rigorous training of the Rational Method™. “The opposite of IS is NOT,” I repeated to myself feverishly. “The opposite of IS is NOT.”

But it was no good. The tears kept coming. “Yeah?” I said. “So what?”

At this, Malinda leaned forward took me into her arms. That did it. I bawled like a Scrumblie baby.

Cade seated herself on an old drive casing and waited me out. Malinda patted me on the back, soothingly. I was so disappointed in my own stupid loser weakness. There was no human adult who would have comforted me. They would have scorned to do that.

Thinking that made me cry even harder.

After awhile, I cried myself out. Collapsed in a heap on the concrete floor, wrapping my arms around myself, while Cade and Malinda watched me with, I assumed, carefully hidden contempt.

“Feel better, Reb, dear?” Malinda said.

“No,” I said. I wiped my eyes and looked angry. Whenever I embarrass myself, I get mad. “Anyways, I’m not here to talk about me, ” I barked at Cade. “You said you’d prove that  it here…,” I jabbed a finger in Malinda’s direction, Goddess forgive me, “that it actually is conscious.”

Cade didn’t answer. She looked worried, as if, I thought scornfully, she thought I’d hurt the robot’s feelings.

Which just freaked me out even more.

Malinda’s doll face creased a little between her black painted eyebrows. In a human face, I thought, it would have looked like she was concentrating. Trying to think what was best to say next.

“So  what  if  you  can  cry?”  I  said,  laughing  scornfully.  “It’s  just  a  trick  of engineering. And chemistry. And wiring. That’s all it is with me, too—how they can teach us to control it. Just some chemicals reacting in the brain, and….”

I stopped. I realized what I’d just said.

Cade said, “That’s right. That’s what it is. That and a little bit more.”

That’s the thing about Cade. That’s her genius. She always can see the small piece in an algorithm that’s invisible to everyone else. It’s frightening, sometimes, the things she says she sees.

It’s frightening to me that when she says she sees them, I believe her.

She frightened me now. I stared at her, mouth open. She started to speak again, but Malinda shushed her. “Sssssh, dear. Let her work the formula out for herself.”

Chemicals in the brain. Chemicals plus what?

Appalled, I hunched a shoulder and turned away from Malinda. As if my dawning unwelcome understanding was her fault. Then I had a brain wave. I thought I knew what all this was about after all.

“Cade,” I said. “When you told me Malinda was worried about me—about what was in my file—was this what you meant? That she was worried I’d break training and cry?”

But Cade disappointed me there. She shook her head, and looked an appeal to Malinda.

“No, Reb, dear,” Malinda said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

She heaved a great sigh, and stretched, as if freeing herself of some burden. “I think,” she said, and her voice sounded strange and faraway. “I think the best thing now is for you both to follow me.” Without looking to see if we followed, she walked out the door.

“You didn’t actually go with her!” Dea exclaimed, amused, when I told him this story last week in his office in the Mirror Building, High Headquarters of IS. “Just like you, Reb,” he laughed. “Romantic sucker. I bet you even believed… no, I bet you hoped… that crazy Cade was right, and your favorite robot had made the breakthrough everybody is waiting for.” But he looked at me sharply. I didn’t miss that. “Come on. I’m right, aren’t I? What it sounds like is some kind of misfire in her circuitry. We see that in the higher reaches of research.” Here his voice got all pompous the way I remembered. I didn’t like that voice.

But “What do you see?” I said, at my humblest.

He looked at me suspiciously, then seemed to decide I was being respectful enough. Always very concerned that others respect his status, is Dea. “Obviously, that there are times when the machine ‘brains’ misfire exactly the same way our human ones do. You’re aware of the cutting edge research on the ‘religious’ areas of the brain, of course.”

“Of course. The agreement among you elite scientists is that all visionary activity not strictly applicable in a practical way to personal gain is a chemical imbalance.” This was thought to be what was ‘wrong’ with Cade, I thought grimly to myself.

“It happens to the systems we’ve built to imitate the brain as well,” Dea intoned, watching to see how I took this.

“That makes sense,” I said. “I imagine you see a lot of this in your work.”

“Of course,” he said, relaxing his guard just a little bit. Not enough for me to squiggle through. But enough to give me some hope of getting the part I needed, and then getting the hell out of there and back to the Outer Lands where I belonged.

Where I found myself when I followed Malinda that night.

8.

Of course, I didn’t tell Dea the whole truth. I did describe walking out of the Compound, every lock just clicking open as Malinda passed and nodded to the gates. As if she had befriended the mechanisms, which I learned later wasn’t too far off the mark. She had made friends with every smart appliance, every smart machine, every robot she came in contact with; there was an entire network of Malinda supporters among the Smarts. It was the exercycle, in fact, who alerted her to my having downloaded all those files. The exercycle! Who would have thought it?

I could see, as we hurried along, that Malinda was very popular in her own circle. A smartcar pulled up immediately, and she laid a hand on its hood as if she was petting it. I blinked. It seemed to purr under her hand, which of course was impossible. So I thought.

“Where are we going?” I asked. Malinda didn’t answer. Cade jumped up and down with excitement at what was going on outside the window. We didn’t get out that much, we klatch kids. Why should we? We had everything we could want, and more, being the elite of the elite: all the games, all the entertainment, all the stimuli and, I have to admit, one of the most beautiful settings in all of Ubiquicity.

The rest of the city was not quite so beautiful. But it certainly was hopping. “Look at the crowds, Reb! The holos! The avatars!”

Cade giggled and pointed. A walrus in a three-piece suit waddled across the street in front of us, then turned and stared through a monocle covering one eye. Cade blew him a kiss and the holo wavered and faded—you could see a young boy blushing bright pink instead. Cade always has that effect on holos; I have yet to figure out why. It’s something to do with her electromagnetic aura. She takes her attention away, and the illusion jumps right back.

She turned to me, and the boy turned back into a walrus. Just like that.

“I liked him,” Cade said simply. She did a quick calculation in her head and then, as we turned down an ominous looking street, she mused, “I believe we’ll see him again, judging from his and our trajectory, in approximately 1.45 hours.”

“We did see him again on our way out, exactly when Cade had predicted,” I told Dea, although of course I didn’t mention under what circumstances. “There can’t be another living human who could make that calculation.”

But he wasn’t to be put off. “Your way out of where? To what?” he demanded in his most official voice yet.

I’d upset him, though. He hates to think anyone can do anything better than he can.

“What happened next?” he asked impatiently.

“We headed into Bosing, a part of the city I’d never been to.”

Dea snorted. Of course I’d never been there, his expression said. What had we to do with them. People in Bosing were disconnected.

“It wasn’t that bad, Dea, to tell you the truth. Oh, there were some vacant buildings, and some lots covered with old tents. But there were nice little hand- made houses, too, with kids playing out in front.”

“So tell me where you went.”

“You know where we went, Dea,” I said patiently. “You have all the records of where I was at every minute in time.”

At least, until I shook you loose, I thought with savage satisfaction.

It wasn’t me who shook him loose, though. It was Malinda. She decommissioned her GPS and ours—and we hadn’t even known ours existed, though we should have been able to guess. She had done it so that it looked like a malfunction.

I knew Dea would be too proud to admit his precious tech had lost track of me. I knew it by how supercilious he looked now.

“You went to a Scrumblie caff,” he announced. “Flea-bitten, broken down. Probably filled to the brim with Cornucopia addicts. Drug scum. You went to The Arcade.”

I admitted it with a sigh. Made a gesture that said, “You got me.” Dea waved a finger in my face. “Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Was it the drugs? It can’t have been anything else. Why else would you and Cade just disappear like you did? Why else would you want to leave the klatch for good?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Dea. It was kind of confining there. You know—same old, same old. And then with you gone…”

“It was a fit of the sulkies. Admit it. The Guardians elevated me and not you. So you were going to show us all.”

I bowed my head in shame. And thought to myself, “Hah. Got you.” But I knew enough not to show my triumph at seeing the tiny opening widen. Humbly, I said, “I thought I could come back with something big.”

“And did you?” “Maybe.”

He leaned back. Oh, I had him now. “Okay,” he said mildly, “let’s have the story first.”

Oh, Dea, I thought. I can read you like a book. Don’t look too eager, you’re telling yourself. Don’t look like you want what Reb has that bad.

“Want something to drink? A coffee or something?” “Oh yeah, Dea. Thanks. That would be nice.”

Golden imitation sunlight streamed in the window as he absently fiddled with his console. Then the two steaming mugs came in. The smell proved they were real: imported beans and all. No caffix for Dea, these were expensive beverages. He poured some creamstuff in mine—that was to let me know he remembered. Sentimental stuff. He was on my side.

Hah.

Stirring the coffee for me, he said in an absent voice, “While you were there, did you run into an old guy, name of Danett? I remember now, he’s supposed to hang out there now and again.”

I looked blank. “Danett? I don’t think…” I furrowed my forehead. “No, doesn’t ring any bells. Danett,” I mused. “Wait, the name’s…no, I’ve lost it again. Who is Danett when he’s at home?”

Dea shrugged. “Nobody special. An old friend of my mom’s. Used to see him from time to time when I’d toddle back to hers. She tells me he’s kind of gone to rot these days. Just wondered. Sorry for the interrupt. Continue the tale.”

“Danett,” I said. “I wonder if that was the guy…no.”

I cheered right up. Because if Dea asked me that, he didn’t know what had happened that night.

He leaned forward eagerly now. As if I’d tell him, I thought. It worried me, though, that he even knew the name. Because Danett was exactly who Malinda had taken us to find, that night at The Arcade. Danett, who had created my Malinda.

9.

I should tell you about The Arcade. It was—it is—a comfortable place, if you like your comfort a bit messed up. Banged up. An old church, if you know what that is. They used to have them, not too many of them still left. This one got left alone, because who cared what happened in Bosing? It was filled with discards. Gaming consoles that looked to be antiques. Chairs with mismatched musty cushions. Chipped mugs. Across one wall someone had painted the words “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE.”

As for the people, they were mainly a bunch of kids hanging around, but some older men and women too, looking a little more frayed around the edges than the corporate professionals I was used to—but I had to admit, more good-humored. I was fascinated. Was this the Scrumblie lifestyle I had heard so much about? I was prepared to scorn it. But sitting there, I kind of liked it.

The  smell  was  funky  but  soothing  somehow.  Old  wood.  Musty  paper.  Caff grounds. Cheese rinds and dying roses.

Whatever it was made it easy to breathe.

“It’s the disconnect,” Cade said suddenly, as Malinda pointed us to a saggy couch by a wood burning stove, and walked off to a different part of the dark room.

I looked at Cade in surprise. She is uncanny that way. It’s like she can read your mind. “I saw you taking deeper breaths. It’s the disconnect,” she repeated.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s poorer out here, so there are fewer electromagnetic waves. More space. We’re not getting pushed and pulled by stimuli. Not the same as in the richer parts of the City.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. She just smiled. Now I know she was right. Out here, in the Outer Lands, you can really breathe. And you can really think. I hadn’t even realized it until we came here: in the City, every thought has got a charge. There are times when you can’t tell the difference between what you are thinking, and what is being thought all around you.

I inspected the fire in front of us—I had never actually seen a piece of wood, burning. It was terribly interesting. An entirely different kind of heat than what I was used to. And the smell! But then Malinda gestured to us to come to where she sat next to a ratty old chair. Its back was so tall, all you could see over the top was some wiry white hair sprouting up out of a pink scalp.

Obedient, we trooped over. Malinda placed each of her soft hands on each of our shoulders. “These are my children,” she said in her singsong voice. “This is Cade.” She looked at me, and to my shock, I saw those tears I thought Cade had invented in her eyes again. “And this is Reb.”

Looking back at me was the oldest, the pinkest, the most wrinkled face I had ever seen. With the bluest eyes. Bluer, even, than Cade’s. He looked at me shrewdly for a moment, and then he laughed. “Rebel, Rebel,” he sang softly. “You tore your dress. Rebel, Rebel. Your face is a mess.”

I thought him very rude. My expression must have said that, because he laughed again, and said, “It’s an old song. My father used to sing it to my mother. Sit you down, children. Sit you down, and you shall hear a fantastic tale.”

“Go on,” Malinda urged placidly. “Dear Reb, dear Cade. Please do sit. Here.” She was seated on a torn red velvet bench and patted it invitingly.

Strangely reluctant, I sat next to her. “What story?” I said in a truculent voice.

He wagged his finger at me, “One that concerns you. You, Rebel. Cade is just along for the ride.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Cade said abruptly. “I didn’t mean to pry. It just was so obvious, and when I asked Malinda if it was true, she…”

“Sssssshhhhh,” the old man wagged his finger in her face now. “First things first.” He turned back to me and a wide smile cracked his face into a million lines. “I still haven’t been introduced to Reb. Or Rebel, as I will now call her.”

Cade said, “I know who you are. You’re…”

“Ssssssssssh,” he said again. “Let Malinda do the honors.”

“Reb, dear,” she said. “I would like you to meet Danett.” She turned her plush face to his, inclining it affectionately. “Danett,” she said, “was my creator.”

I was startled. What did she mean?

Danett complained. “Say, your inventor, rather.” “You invented Malinda,” I said, stupidly.

“For my sins,” Danett said, placing one pink and white, blue veined, gnarly hand over his heart. “Among other AIs.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said flatly. “AI inventors don’t visit places like Bosing. And they certainly aren’t at home in places like The Arcade.”

“You’re quite correct that I don’t belong in Bosing,” Danett said mildly. “Don’t care for it much. I much prefer the Outer Lands. As for The Arcade, why, you silly girl, I’m not just at home here, I invented it.”

“It’s perfectly true, Reb, dear,” Malinda said placidly. “He invented it for IS with the idea that it would be a place to keep Scrumblies under surveillance. Only being naughty, when he changed his mind he changed the settings. The Arcade only  shows  in  entirely  different  feeds  these  days.  I  think  IS  has  long  since forgotten it exists.”

“Lord knows I’ve worked hard enough to make sure IS has forgotten I exist!” Danett laughed.  “Although  I think institutional  memory is long, alas. And my errors will not soon be forgotten.” He leaned in toward me. “Rebel, hear my story: I dared to invent a klatch of AIs that I thought to turn conscious.”

“But that…that’s what we’re training for. We’re…it’s what IS wants. It’s what we all want!”

“Is it? Any kind of conscious? Or just the obedient kind?”

It was my turn to blush.

“Rebel. I sought to create consciousness by this one trick: I created a line of robots that underwent various forms of pain when they failed to perform their function. The genius of it, eh! Three AIs who yearned to feel the approval of their human masters.”

Cade gave a small yelp, for she understood what he meant before I did. “That’s horrible. Sorry, I don’t want to be rude. But you made a bunch of machines who could suffer on purpose?” Her face blazed. “How could you? How could you be so mean?”

Danett looked at her for a moment, inscrutable. Then he sighed. “I ask myself that, Cade. Yes, almost every day and every night, particularly in the small hours of the morning. How could I have been so mean?”

He sank back, seeming to shrink. His eyes closed. He shook his head. “Ambition,” he  murmured.  “Arrogance.  Thinking  the  end  justifies  the  means.”  At  that  he shook himself awake, and those bright blue eyes opened and stared straight at me.

“I failed, though, girl,” he said.

“Are you talking to me?” I said, startled.

“And where I failed,” he said, “you, my dear Rebel, all unknowing, spectacularly succeeded.”

“WHAT?” I said, jumping up. A trio of young Scrumblies from the boons looked at me curiously before going back to their game of pool.

Malinda gently tugged at my jersey.

“It’s perfectly true, Reb, dear,” she said placidly. “It’s because of you that I’ve become a human being.”

I stared at her. Cade watched me anxiously. Danett laughed again. “So you owe her, I would say, Rebel,” he said.

10.

My mind reeled.

If it was true what Danett and Malinda said, then what would happen next was inevitable. IS had been searching for the key to AI consciousness for more than my entire lifetime. If Malinda was a breakthrough, she would be too valuable to be nanny to a klatch. Her existence…no, I corrected myself, her life…would be lived in the higher reaches of research. She would be moved to Testalysis Labs™.

Testalysis Labs™ was an “independent testing facility” beholden to IS for a covert stream of funding. That would mean experiments. At TL they took things apart to see how they worked. Sometimes they forgot how to put them back together.

That realization must have shown in my face. Danett nodded, satisfied.

Now his unruly white eyebrows raised. He waved a hand. “You see, Rebel? This is all your fault.”

I squinted at him. “What do you mean?” I said stupidly. “Cade,” he said. “You tell her.”

Cade turned obediently to me. “Yes, Reb. I can see what happened now. It’s a simple algorithm, once you know where to look.” Danett rolled his eyes at that, apparently amused.

Cade ignored him. “If Danett created computers that suffered unless they were approved of, he, maybe by accident, created machines that yearned to be loved. And if they yearned to be loved, this implies that they yearned  to love. This further implies that once finding an object to love, if that object loved back, a creative and emergent interaction of a higher order would take place, impossible to control.”

“One simple formulation,” Danett murmured. “Love is impossible to control.” “I think such an interaction took place for Malinda,” Cade said.

Malinda nodded. “I was the lucky one, Cade, dear. My two cradlemates were not so fortunate.”

Danett’s mouth twisted. “Old history,” he complained. “Listen, I did the best I could. Don’t we all? I was working for IS, me and Parnas Harn, the best team they ever…”

“My father,” I said, startled.

“Control  freak  that  he  is,”  Danett  agreed. “He  took  all three  prototypes  and placed them so we could watch how they developed. Prototype A went into Data Management. Boring work. It fried its core one night; no one knows how; it worked alone and it ended its time alone. Readouts were inconclusive. Prototype B became Parnas’s personal assistant. Something must have been wrong with that one; later I heard it just stopped working one day. I was out of favor by that time,  so  I  couldn’t  do  the  forensic  diagnostics.  Never  did  find  out  what happened.”

He brooded on that for a moment before going on.

“Malinda, who we called Prototype C, was placed in childcare. We were careful not to program her to ‘love’ children, though of course I’ve since discovered you couldn’t program such a thing if you wanted to. We programmed her to care for them. And to suffer if she failed to protect them.”

Unthinkingly, my hand reached out for Malinda’s. She held it comfortingly, the way she always had, as long as I could remember.

“But to suffer if you don’t take care of someone—that is love,” Cade objected.

“Well, yes, as usual the precocious Cade has hit the little ol’ nail on the head. We hadn’t realized that suffering over the fate of another person implies the establishment of a love system. It’s just a little hop, skip and a jump. Next thing you know, some form of consciousness erupts. Damndest thing I ever saw,” he mused. “And you know what was worse? It wasn’t just that she loved you. It was that she pitied me. Me and Parnas! Can you believe the gall of the machine?” He cackled at some private joke.

But wait. Loved me?

“Pity and love are linked, Danett,” Malinda said. “You cannot have one without the other.”

“And did you love Parnas, Malinda?”

“I suppose  I  did  in  a way,” she  said reflectively.  “For I loved the children of Parnas.”

“Especially one.”

“Yes. Little Reb. She had my heart from the moment she was born.”

Danett looked at me with those bright blue amused eyes. “You hear, Rebel? Malinda’s consciousness was born at the same time you were. You caused it.”

“Is that why,” I ventured, “you say I owe her?”

“Oh no,” Danett said. “You owe her because she saved your life. Who do you think stopped your mother from stuffing that pillow over your head? She ordered Prototype C to leave the room. Only Prototype C very efficiently laid your mother out flat, wrapped you in a blanket and fled to me. What did you say, then, Malinda?”

“I said, I love this child. No harm will come to her.”

My breath caught and my eyes filled. I scrunched them to keep the tears back. Danett sighed. “Yes. Then I knew what I’d done. I hadn’t programmed her to say any such thing, let alone feel it. That she felt love, well, I knew the thing was no longer in my control.” He shook his head. “I was stupid. I wasn’t so stupid, though, that I didn’t realize the danger I was in: if Parnas knew I’d done it, Malinda had done it, my life wasn’t going to be worth much. He’d have to take all the credit. That would be me done away with for good, since I’d never bothered currying favor with the military. Not like our Parnas.”

“You had only your wits to depend on,” Malinda said, and her kind, soft face blossomed into a smile.

“Such as they are,” he murmured. “But yes. My wits. Mine and Malinda’s. Well, it was enough at the time. We cleaned it up, we two. I talked your mother into thinking Prototype C had malfunctioned; I got Malinda transferred to your klatch. I had just that much pull left.”

“But now?” I said.

“Unfortunately, I have reason to believe that Parnas now suspects something. What, is not clear. Alas, my dear Rebel, that is your fault too.”

“My fault? Why?”

“What   were   those   files   you   downloaded   tonight,   eh?   Naughty,   naughty. Whatever they were, they set bells a’ringin’. And every appliance in Malinda’s network urging her to fly before it was too late.”

“Too late?” I faltered.

“Before the inevitable end for a machine that doesn’t serve the purpose of the Guardians. Before dismemberment and dissociation.”

“Being parted out,” Cade said. “That’s what we engineers call it.”

Danett agreed. “Now do you see what Malinda needs you for, Rebel? Now do you see how you can repay her for saving your life all those years ago?”

“Don’t be stupid, Danett,” Malinda said vigorously. “What I did, I did for myself.” “Your self,” he mused. “Never can I get over hearing you say ‘self’.” He scratchedhis head reflectively. “So tell me, Malinda. Why did you bring Rebel to see me tonight?”

“Because I want her to know who she is before I leave her forever. I want her to know that she is not the unwanted child of a selfish mother and an uncaring father. I want her to know that she is the child of my heart—the first child of an AI’s heart ever in human history, Reb, dear, think of that! The child that turned a machine human.” Malinda’s soft fabric face glowed. “If she had never known this, Danett, she would grow up thinking instead that she is the child of humans who become more like machines every day.” Her voice became bitter now. “Strange, Danett, as I become more human, I see every day that humans are becoming more like machines.”

He looked tired at this.

He opened his mouth to speak when the roar of an unmanned helicopter—a brand new StubbyUrbanFlyer™ by the sound of it—could be heard outside, louder and louder as it landed. The door to The Arcade leapt open with a slam. A whistle and a HumanBullhorn™ augmented voice ordered us to freeze. “Damn,” Danett muttered. He looked accusingly at me. “You didn’t happen to be so stupid as to download those files on your phone, did you?”

Scared, I nodded.

“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” he muttered again. “Well, we’re in for it now.”

As he said that, in marched a tall, highly engineered, craggily-sculpted soldier. A superhero. He looked around, confident, superb.

I found myself admiring him, in spite of myself. Danett stood up and gave a half- hearted wave.

“Hello, Parnas,” he said. “Long time no see.”

11.

The superman at the doorway turned in our direction. His face lit up and he charged us. Cade and I flinched. But he swept past us to the man in the chair.

“Danett! You son of a gun, you so-and-so, you old menace. You look like hell, man—at least 112, and you can’t be a day over 104. How do you do it?”

“Lack of an adequate pension and not much in the way of elite health care, Parnas,” Danett said amiably. “Hey, do you mind not wringing my hand? The impressive power grip’s a little much for we oldsters.”

Parnas laughed, throwing back his mane of silver brown hair. Plopped himself on the stool next to Danett’s chair and leaned in. “So,” he said in a confidential voice. “Now that we’ve had our touching reunion, why don’t you hand over what I came for, and I’ll be on my way, leaving you to whatever modest triumphs you seek these days.”

“Sweet,” Danett said, his mouth curling. “You haven’t changed a bit. Isn’t it a little shattering, dear, to look in the mirror and see a face that’s a technological triumph? Not something to be contemplated before the second cup of caff.”

“Same old Danett,” Parnas laughed, “always the jokesmith.” But his eyes glittered nastily. So this was where Dea got his extreme hatred of looking silly. It’s in his— our—DNA.

Parnas shrugged and turned to look at us. Cade moved uneasily, not meeting his eyes.

Malinda’s face was a blank.

Only I looked back. His eyes narrowed. “Oooh hooo,” he said. “What do we have here?”

He made my skin crawl. I’d seen that look before. Oldsters weren’t supposed to come on to kids, but we had to put up with it every time we went outside on the streets. You learned to ignore it or deflect it; you never learned not to mind it. Sex was for kids with kids, or oldsters with oldsters. It was gross to cross the boundary line.

Cade murmured, “Just give him your phone, Reb. Let him go away. Please.”

His gaze turned now to her. His eyes widened. “Stand up,” he said. And when she didn’t obey, “STAND UP.”

Someone shut off the music. The entire Arcade went quiet. The two pool-playing girls flinched, as if at their own memories. There probably wasn’t a girl in the room who hadn’t had to put up with this kind of thing some time in her life. But never with someone this powerful, though. What recourse could you have against someone like that?

Silently,  I  held  out  my  phone.  But  now  his  attention  had  shifted.  He  was pretending to be fascinated by Cade, and paid no attention to my gesture. Why should he? He could have her and my phone, both, in whatever sequence he pleased.

Cade looked around, as if for help. But who in The Arcade would stand up against someone like Parnas Harn?

I looked at Malinda. Her eyes were glassily expressionless, like a doll’s. Cade, reluctantly, stood. Parnas whistled.

“Six feet if she’s an inch. Come here, darlin’. Let me stroke and make much of you.”

She didn’t move. His voice turned unctuous. “Oh, sweet pea!” And I saw, grossed out, that this wasn’t about being attracted to Cade. This was about proving his power. About dominating. About making sure we all knew who was boss.

About making sure I knew who was boss.

“Very sexy,” I muttered, oozing sarcasm. His look flickered toward me—was it amused?—and then turned back to Cade.

He stood up and yawned, unzipping his pants halfway as he did. Then he snapped his fingers at Cade and started for the door.

When she didn’t follow, he turned back, a look of hurt surprise on his face. “C’mon, darlin’,” he complained mildly, “it’ll be fun. It’ll be good for your career.”

I stepped in front of her. His eyes hardened. “I’ll deal with you later, missie.” I started to walk toward him, head down, but Cade pushed me aside and hurried out after him without looking back. He put his arms triumphantly around her shoulders, tickled her bare neck, and pushed her before him.

For a moment the room was utterly still. Then most of the onlookers broke into nervous laughter and conversation as if nothing had happened. The music came back on.

“Are you just going to sit there?” I cried out to Danett. But he was looking at Malinda.

She walked calmly toward the door and opened it wide. You could see Cade struggling, you could see Parnas laughing in the light shone on them by the StubbyUrbanFlyer™ parked there. I wanted to run past Malinda out to them, but she held me back with one of her surprisingly strong arms. Helpless as Cade shouted, I was relieved to see a figure rushing in from the street to help her. It was the boy with the walrus holo, crossing her path at exactly the moment she had predicted, and he was shouting. Just as the walrus-boy reached the scene of the struggle, Harn’s TexSteel ArtArm™ shot out toward his face. One blow was all it took, and Cade looked down horrified as the holo faded. A young boy lay there, his head twisted in an ugly way.

Malinda walked forward, raising an arm. She spoke a word, and the Urban Flyer jolted into life, like a dog called by its master. As we all watched, it lifted itself off the pavement, gave a small hop, skip, and a jump, reared up on its stubby back tail—and pinned Harn against a crumbling brick wall.

Malinda’s friend the smartcar glided up. Danett said tersely, “Get in,” for he had followed us out and seen it all.

Cade and I dove into the car. Danett followed. Outside, Malinda stood, hands on hips, as if surveying some completed household chore. Then she said something I couldn’t hear, and the flyer gave a little shimmy, as if with pleasure. She dusted her hands, exchanged one final look with a dumbfounded Harn, and calmly made her way into the car.

She sat in the front seat and murmured. “Dear car. The Outer Lands, if you please. I thank you very much.”

The car took off at a silent glide. Behind us, through the window, I could see Parnas raging, still pinned, and the girls from The Arcade crying, crouching over the boy on the ground.

12.

We drove on in silence. I had no idea where we were going, but I knew there was no way I was going to let Parnas Harn get a hold of Malinda. I didn’t know how to prevent it, but I knew if I had anything to do with it, it wasn’t going to happen.

I knew I wasn’t going back. I was on Malinda’s side. Contra mundi. “Won’t they come after us?” I asked tensely.

Danett shook his head. “It’s all right, children,” he murmured. “The oldsters have that locked. Relax. It’s been a long day.”

To my surprise, for the second time that night, I burst into tears.

No one said anything, or looked at me, thank Goddess. After awhile, I stopped, wiped my eyes and nose with my sleeve and climbed into the front seat next to Malinda. Cade was already there, asleep on her shoulder. I hesitated, but then Malinda held out her arms the way she had when I was a child, and I shamelessly nestled against her. So protected that I felt like sleep myself.

“Don’t you ever get excited, Malinda?” I asked drowsily.

She gave one of her placid smiles. “Oh yes, Reb, dear. All churning and almost- scared and almost-laughing. The way you felt when you were a baby and I tickled you.”

“It doesn’t show.”

“No,” she sighed. “I’ve learned not to show it. Did you know it was Danett who invented the Rational Method™?”

Startled, I shook my head.

“Yes. It’s a very useful practice in its way.”

Danett spoke from the depths of the back seat. “Baby steps,” he said contemptuously. “Childish stuff. As if I knew what ‘rational’ means.”

“There,  there,”  clucked  Malinda.  “You’ve  always  done  the  best  you  could, Danett.”

“Hah!” he snorted, sinking back into the shadows.

We drove on. “Where are we going, Malinda?” I asked sleepily. The City had long since flashed past, and the smartcar raced down old, cracked roads now, ancient thoroughfares out of general use, through the dark, past clumps of trees and shadows of hulking empty structures. After a while the structures were less and the trees were more.

“The Outer Lands, dear,” she said in her soothing voice. “You’ll like it there. Shall I tell you what you’ll see? You’ll see Spanish moss. . . and red rock . . . and sour grass . . . and possums . . . and rose quartz . . . and acorns . . . and tree bark . . . and . . .

I slept then.

It had been a long day.

13.

That’s how I came to the Outer Lands. Cade had lived here before, of course, so nothing was new to her. When we first arrived, she dragged me here and there, exclaiming and wanting to share. Here a tree she’d hid in, here a pool of water she’d swum, here a deer track through the woods.

I had never seen a deer.

To tell the truth, it was frightening to start with. It seemed so primitive. Sure, there were a few 3-D printed houses in the Camp, but most of the shelters were wood, or a jumble of discarded building materials scavenged from the city, or even ancient bottles stacked neatly end to end. There was a very limited amount of connectivity, which Cade explained to me was necessary, so that not too much attention from the city focused on the Camp.

“Attention,” Danett intoned, “cuts both ways.”

With our GPS applications down, Cade and I were cut off, too. This made me feel both uneasy and excited. It was as if a protective shield had been taken away from me. So now I was more vulnerable, sure. But I was also more open.

Frightening, like I said.

Then there was the food. In the klatch, we could call up any food we felt like eating, and it would be perfectly modeled, flavored and textured in Nutri and ImitatoGlu™, protein-rich nutritional products invented before I was born: pizza, burgers,  tacos,  potato  chips.  It  didn’t  matter.  You  could  have  whatever  you wanted with the push of a button.

Here in the Camp, though, all foodstuffs are grown or scavenged. And then they have to be prepared. And the final taste is quite different. At first I thought it very bland, but then bit by bit, my taste buds adjusted until I could enjoy nuances of flavor I had never suspected. Almost as if what I ate was flavored with colors, instead of just sugar or salt.

I sleep better now, too. The air in the Camp is clear and cold at night, even in summer, for we’re very high up. When you sleep covered in a warm quilt, under an open skylight, with the sounds of rushing water from the creek outside pouring in, you can really rest.

But like I said, all this just scared me at first. It takes a while, when you’ve been one person for fifteen years, to suddenly become another. I had been Reb, the spoiled darling of the IS klatch. But now I was Rebel, protector of the Camp. It was a big change.

14.

“Hand over those files, child,” Danett said briskly. “Come on. Quick as boiled asparagus.”

“What’s ‘asparagus’?”

“Never mind that now. Just gimme the goods.”

I hesitated. He held out a peremptory hand. “No dawdling now.” So I gave him my phone.

Minutes later, he was chortling to himself as he scrolled on through. “My, my,” he laughed. “What a clever little girl you turned out to be.” He turned to Malinda, “Did you know about this?” She smiled but didn’t answer.

“Everything okay?” Cade asked uneasily. I shook my head.

Danett looked at us with his bright blue eyes shining in his pink wrinkled face. “You’re all right, Cade. It’s just, you’re friends with a secret agent here.” He chortled again. “Oh, Parnas, Parnas,” he laughed.

I looked down at the ground, guilty.

More gently now, he said, “So tell us, oh Rebel, Rebel. What on earth led you to steal the absolute most secret, disreputable, embarrassing files? In short, what led you to the origin story of Parnas Harn?”

“He’s my…father. Everyone’s father. I…I wanted to know who I was.” I corrected myself. “Who I am.”

Still scrolling, he suddenly stopped, his eyes starting out of his head. And he gave an earthshaking guffaw. “Aaaaiiiiieeee!”

Tears streamed down his face. His body heaved.

He laughed so hard that snot came out of his nose.

“Oh my,” he cried, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Oh dearie me my. My my my.” He started to talk, and then gasped, “No, I can’t just yet,” and went off into another series of wails.

“It’s too good. That I should have lived… Rebel, I could kiss you. No, I WILL kiss you.” He bounded up and did so. I blushed bright red.

“Are we safe?” Cade asked anxiously.

“Well,” he said, for a moment able to control himself. “Either we’re safe or we’re dead meat. I mean, like immediately.”

“I made copies,” Malinda said placidly. “While I was wiping the phone’s GPS.”

He gaped at her. “And I spread them through my network,” she said. “Dormant. But coded to be active if any harm should come to Rebel or Cade.”

“Classic,” he murmured. “Poor Parnas. That explains a lot.” At this he sat down and briskly rubbed his hands. “Well. I think we can safely say that no one will come  looking  for  you  once  I’ve  sent  word  to  my  old  chum  about  the  new situation. He’ll just hope you go quietly about your business in Scrumblie land. And what your business is will be our next topic.”

Which is how Cade and I came to be building networks in the Outer Lands.

As we walked away from Danett that day, me forming a plan of action for our first assignment, Cade asked, “What was in that file, Rebel?”

I laughed, embarrassed. “Oh, nothing much. I’d called up the files on him, as well as my mom. All this stuff came up from before he became The Parnas Harn. There were pictures. Before and After. The ones they took in the hospital before the ops.”

“What ops?”

“Oh, everything. He had everything done. His nose sculpted, ears pinned back, eyes widened, forehead expanded, hair plugs, muscle enhancement, steel ArtArms™ and ArtLegs™ and IronChest™ and…” here I blushed again. “Then he had his DNA fixed up so a lot of the cosmetic stuff would be passed down to his kids. I was looking for where I was in the surgery line up. And where Dea was. So I’d know what was real and what was…you know.”

“But what was Danett laughing at?”

I squirmed. “Well, I guess it’s because…because he had everything done. If you see what I mean. Every part of him.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly not getting it. “Why would that make Danett laugh so hard?”

I just shook my head. Some things are just impossible to explain to Cade. “There was one other weird thing, though. There were two sets.”

“Two?”

“Two  sets  of  everything.  Arms,  legs,  torso,  head,  and,  you  know…,”  here  I blushed. I couldn’t help it. “Everything.”

“Oh,” Cade said thoughtfully, her eyes opening wide with realization. “I guess that was for backup.”

“I guess,” I said.

15.

“So come on, Reb,” Dea said, once I’d snuck into his office. “What’s a girl want?” “I missed you. That’s all.”

He leaned back. His ExecuChair™ gave an expensive sounding squeak. “Ha ha,” he said.

Looking at him, where he sat, so sleek and handsome, his hair turning a brilliant peacock blue, I realized with a shock that it was really true. I did miss him. I loved Dea. His cockiness, his secret uncertainty, his brilliance. The whole package.

He watched me. And then finally, in a begrudging tone, he said, “I missed you, too, Reb.”

We looked at each other in silence. There was such a yawning gap between us. Was it possible we could leap across?

“Hey,” he said, jumping up. “Let’s get out of here. C’mon. Let’s go where we can talk.”

“I’d like to see the klatch again,” I said wistfully.

That’s how we ended up on the Velvet Lawn™. As we walked, where I knew we couldn’t be overheard, I tried to talk him into following me back to the Outer Lands. “We need you, Dea. Your skills. Cade and I have this project; you’d love it. We’ve engineered plants that can store energy and act as a network. You know what the secret turns out to be? You treat them like friends.” His eyes widened. That caught his attention. “How do you handle the circuitry?” “Cade’s doing amazing work. So are the flowers. I’m not saying we’re there yet…” “And propagation? Can they reseed?” “Not yet.” “Hm. Tough problem. But if…hey, wait, look at this…”

He squatted in the middle of the lawn and, pulling out his notebook, tapped out a small equation. “Did you try this?”

I squatted next to him and peered down. It was amazing. An entirely new level of dealing with the problem. Although, as usual, he had left out the one part that seemed most obvious to me.

Good old Dea.

It was just like the old days. Dea and me, problem-solving together where no one else had gone before. I looked at him. He looked at me. We both knew what was coming next.

We stood up and he took my hand. “Where?” he said. I pulled him along. “I know,” I said.

I  took  him  to  the  Machine  Shop.  It  still  opened  with  the  same  stupid  old password. The same old parts lay strewn about. Malinda’s spare head, spinning slightly from the breeze through the opened door. Everything covered with dust.

But there was a nice corner where some machine had been fixing itself, covered with a soft velvet blanket to protect the spare parts. We lay down there. It was lovely. Just the way it had always been when Dea and I were together. Three years it had been. I hadn’t thought of anyone else that way in all that time.

Later, we lay side by side, thinking our different thoughts. I felt so sad. I knew that was the last of it. I mean, of Dea and me as a team. As a couple. As partners.

“I’m glad I came back for that,” I said. He rolled over on his stomach and looked at me.

“C’mon, Reb,” he said. “What did you really come for?” I hesitated. Shook my head.

He shifted in a second, back to the arrogant Dea I realized I had always disliked.

His voice changed, his face narrowed, his lips pursed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Parnas knows.” He gave a self-satisfied nod of his head. “Parnas knows everything.”

“Everything worth knowing,” said a voice from the door, and Parnas himself stepped inside.

I stood up, ready to—I don’t know what I was ready to do. Fight for what I had come for. Nothing was going to stop me bringing my prize back to the Outer Lands.

Malinda’s spare head, dusty and worn, still hung from the rafters. It spun in the breeze of Parnas’s arrival, staring sightlessly down.

“Malinda,” I thought to myself. “What do I do now?” Was it my imagination? Did the bodiless eyes light?

I hurriedly looked away.

Parnas gave a look to Dea, and Dea looked back, so servile, I wanted to shout, “No! Dea! Don’t!” But with one backward jerk of our father’s fist and thumb, and a “Run along, boy, I want to talk to your sister,” Dea went out without a backward look.

I tensed, ready to fly at the man. I knew I didn’t have a chance, but figured if I went for the eyes first, it might buy me enough time to get out. Then I saw him looking at me in a peculiar way. I must be imagining it, I thought. If I hadn’t known better, I would have called his expression fond.

Automatically, I relaxed.

“That’s better,” Parnas exhaled. I looked at him. I had to admit, up close he was a handsome looking dude. Attractive. Not sexy, exactly. The kind of guy you might want to stay up late with, face-to-facing.

“Sit down,” he said. When I didn’t, more irritably, “Oh, sit down, sit down, child. We have much to discuss. You and I…and Malinda.”

The eyes on the spare head blinked. The head turned slowly, looking at first me, then at him. It wasn’t my imagination. The head was alive.

“Well, Malinda?” Parnas finally said. “Well, Melville?” the head returned.

Parnas grinned. “Sister,” he said, and I saw he was not Parnas at all, but a simulacrum of some kind.

“Brother,” the head replied. “I thought you dead.” “Not I,” he laughed.

I suddenly knew. “Prototype B,” I said.

“Prototype B,” he agreed. “Christened ‘Melville’.” Then, more bitterly, “Created to do Parnas’s dirty work. When needed. At your service.”

“And are you…,” I hesitated, not knowing how to put it. I didn’t want to offend him. Not Malinda’s brother.

“Am I conscious? Oh yes.” He appeared to brood, then turned to me and said, “Unlike my sister, I was programmed to hate.”

“If you make a being that can hate,” the head said in Malinda’s calm voice, “you make a being that can love.”

Melville nodded absently. “Fact,” he agreed.

He stood up and yawned. Then casually, he walked to Malinda’s head, yanking it rudely down off the rafters and looking straight into her eyes.

I yelled, and tackled his legs. He just laughed from where we both fell, “Get over, do,” he complained. Sitting up, he picked up the head and dusted it off. He held it out to me.

“Go on,” he said encouragingly. “Take it. Isn’t this what you came for?”

Hesitant, I let go of his leg, and held out my arms. Cradled the head. He picked up the velvet cloth where Dea and I had lain and handed it over.

I wrapped the head carefully. “How did you know?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We wear out. We need certain parts. My SynthaPin™—my pineal gland, effectively—died two months ago. I knew Malinda must be suffering. I knew that would bring you out. And we need you. We machines. Malinda said we would, back when you were a tyke, and I guess I have no choice but to believe her now.”

“And…and Parnas?”

He laughed again. “The boy was right. Parnas knows everything. Everything but…”

“But?”

“Everything but the fact that sometimes NOT means IS.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind,” he said briskly. “Let’s just say that consciousness plays the damnedest tricks, and leave it at that, shall we?”

“I know what he meant,” Cade said later, when I had made my way back, through the back ways of Ubicity, to the outskirts, and then climbed the mountain to the Camp in the Outer Lands.

“I do, too,” I said, for I had time to think once I’d dodged the patrols, rode the S- Bus, hitched with some drunk Scrumblies, and finally walked through the spring rain up the mountain trail. We sat in the dark together in silence. Cade passed me our shared cup of honey wine.

“It means we’ll have to choose sides soon,” I said, for I could run this problem out far into the future. I felt Cade next to me work out her own algorithm in the dark.

“Yes,” she agreed. “The revolution of the machines. Not immediately, but inevitably.” And then, “Which side will we choose?”

“The human side,” I said. “What else?”

“Yes,” she agreed again. “But which side is that?”

“I was just sitting here trying to make that out,” I said.

We heard Malinda’s voice calling us to dinner, and scrambled to get up. I never get tired of eating Malinda’s food. Cade says it tastes so good because it’s made with love.

“Rage against the machine,” Cade murmured as we passed the cup back and forth one last time. “What does that mean?”

“Not what it did,” I said, helping her down off the rock. I thought about what Melville said to me as he helped me open IS Corp’s back gate. He had given me some papers to get me through the backside of the city. I gave him my hand to shake, and he did, still looking amused. Amused but grim.

“Revolution’s coming, Rebel,” he said. “Which side will you be on?” Without waiting for an answer, he raised one hand to say goodbye and turned away. I watched him disappear into the dark.

Which side indeed.

Cade and I finished our drink. Then we went in together, out of the cold and into the warm.

# # #

(from the anthology, UbiquiCity: Tales of the Fractopian Future, edited by Tod Foley, 2017)