The door opened for Joel. As she entered, his content shimmered down from the ceiling. The room itself was blank, aside from a vintage lucite desk, a white tulip chair, and something on a white marble pedestal, shrouded with a square of blue velvet. The crystal ball. For a terrible moment, Hwa had the urge to look into it again. See how it worked. Figure out the trick to it. Because it had to be a trick. A special effect. A prop. It could not be real.
Her hand dropped. No. Not again. She had things to do.
She took a seat at the desk. In a groove inset into the top of the desk was a single stylus. It was very light, and etched with the image of a serpent with a crown on its head hatching from a large egg. It was made of bone.
DANIEL SíOFRA, she wrote on the desk.
Síofra’s profile effervesced into the air. It was far more detailed than anything Hwa had access to. Performance reviews. (“Mr. Síofra seems very concerned with learning proper procedure in all things; he prides himself on knowing the best way to accomplish any task.”) Pictures of him at every Lynch event with highlights of who he’d spoken to and for how long. Long logs of bio-data: heart rate, brainwaves, temperature, sleeping patterns, calories in, calories out.
Brain scans.
X-rays.
Images of a burned body.
Hwa covered her mouth to keep the moan inside.
“We did our best with him.” Hwa whirled. There in the door stood Zachariah’s softbot. It glided in, buoyant, deflated arms trailing at its sides. “Yes,” it added, after a pause for breath in the other room. “I can direct this device from my ventilator.”
Hwa looked around the room. Shit. “I was just—”
“You were curious about Daniel. That’s natural. A young woman like you. He’s very attractive.”
“It’s not like that,” Hwa said.
“He keeps a close eye on you, too. A little mutual surveillance is,” another pause for breath, “only fair.”
Hwa swallowed. There was nothing for it. Short of asking the old man if he’d blown up the Old Rig, she would never find the answers she was looking for this way.
“Sorry about this. It was stupid. I shouldn’t have done it. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She stood up from the desk, put the bone stylus back, and made for the door. The softbot swerved in front of her. She wondered what it would take to puncture it. She’d played with a hugbot, once, during the process of diagnostic therapy for her seizures. It was a tough old thing, built to take a beating, and this looked much the same. It regarded her with soft blue eyes. They spun independently of each other.
“What did you think you would find here, Miss Go?”
Without meaning to, Hwa glanced at the images hanging and twisting in the air above the desk. The specs of machinery. Two deep brain implants. Neural mesh along his spinal column. Labs on chips synthesizing custom drugs on demand. As she watched, the implants and the mesh and the chips faded away, replaced by the original scans of his injuries. Then they assembled themselves. The machines inside him built themselves up, then rebuilt him from within. She watched his metamorphosis over and over. It was total, and it was magnificent. Whoever Síofra was before, Lynch had put him back together piece by piece, including large segments of his brain. And they’d built him better than he was before.
“I was just thinking,” she said carefully, “how much we could have used this kind of technology when the Old Rig blew up.”
“Yes, that was tragic,” Zachariah said, with the softbot’s gentle voice.
Hwa swung her gaze back to him. “My brother died that day.”
“I know,” Zachariah said. “And I am sorry.”
Hwa’s lips felt hot. Her throat began to close. “What are you sorry for?”
The softbot’s limp arms filled slightly and rose in an approximation of a shrug. “At my age, the list of my regrets is much too long.”
“Do you regret not buying this town sooner?”
Both the softbot’s eyes brightened and dilated. She was being focused on. She stared hard into the blue light.
“Did you want to buy it, sooner?” she heard herself ask. “Before the Old Rig blew up?”
From the other room, she heard a rough, awful sound. Laughter. Dry and dying and slow. Zachariah could barely breathe. But he could still be amused. The softbot’s head manifested a giant happy face.
“Pay no mind to gossip, Miss Go,” Zachariah said. “This city was already dead long before that day. Now it is resurrected. Much as our friend was,” a wet, sucking breath, “ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago? Not…” She forced the words out. “Not three?”
“Oh, my dear Miss Go.” One of the softbot’s arms filled and rose and gestured at Síofra’s profile. “Mr. Síofra is very special to me. My hopes for him are quite high. I would never allow him to risk his life in any meaningful way. Not after I invested so much in building it.”
One of the arms slithered over her shoulders. “My hopes for you are similarly high.” He breathed, and the tubing of the softbot’s arms curled around her neck. The pressure was very gentle but very real. Her neck and throat were still sore enough to magnify it. “You are two of a kind, you and he. A man without a past and a woman without a future. You want to have a future, don’t you, Miss Go?”