The Girl Who Dared to Think 7: The Girl Who Dared to Fight

Sage had moved while I was thinking and was now standing at the top of the stairs leading down from his desk, overlooking the dais. He seemed unfazed by the fact that I hadn’t asked a question yet, and for a second, I couldn’t come up with one. My mind was too fixated on the little cable hanging from the terminal, nearly a foot away from the port on Rose’s hard drive.

Then something hit me. He had said… three hundred years. Granted, he was known for being over a hundred years old, and surprisingly lucid, but that wasn’t what he had said. And he had used Ezekial Pine’s code when he ordered Scipio to seal the room—something that should’ve been impossible, considering Pine was one of the creators of the Tower, and should have been long dead.

Could he be… Was it possible? I looked at his face, trying to find any resemblance to the man whose visage I knew from watching the video of him murdering Lionel Scipio, and trying to kill Leo, the backup version of Scipio. But I found nothing.

I hesitated, and then decided to take a gamble. “You can’t honestly think I’ll believe that you’re Ezekial Pine. You don’t look anything like him.”

Sage barked out a sharp laugh. “Come now,” he replied, taking a step down. “You came to me with the journal you took from my children’s home. The one on plastic surgery. You expect me to believe you haven’t come to the right conclusion already? Or are you just slower than I’m giving you credit for?”

I grimaced at the condescension in his voice, his barb hitting home. But only a little bit. He was right in that I had forgotten about the legacies using an antiquated pre-End medical procedure called plastic surgery, through which people could change their faces. The legacies had used it to keep their people from being discovered, as it overcame the facial recognition software we used with our cameras. But that didn’t mean I believed him about anything else. Sage might be over a hundred years old, but there was no way he was three hundred. Our medical procedures were quite advanced, but nobody in the history of the Tower had ever lived for that long. This had to be a ploy of some kind. Either that, or he was crazy.

For all I knew, he simply had Pine’s original legacy net, and old age had somehow corrupted him into believing he was the former founder.

“Yeah, I’m going to say that’s not possible. What, did you get Pine’s legacy net in the lottery a century ago?”

He merely smiled. “No, nothing like that. My net remains my own; it hasn’t left my head since it was put there. And I don’t mind telling you, but forgive me if it sounds like something out of a bad movie. I invented a serum made of stem cells that prevents my own cells from breaking down. That has kept my body going. Kurt, however, is responsible for keeping me sane.”

“Kurt?” I echoed. Up until yesterday, I had believed that Lacey had Kurt. She had given me one of her legacy nets, which contained significant memories from her forbearers, one of which included stealing Kurt to prevent the enemy legacies from getting him. But she and Strum had both confirmed that the brother and sister team that stole him had been murdered minutes afterward, and that Kurt had been taken.

Instead, Lacey had revealed that she had Tony, one of the two AI fragments that had been unaccounted for.

The AI fragments were remnants of neural scans taken of the Founders of the Tower. Scipio belonged to Lionel Scipio and had been selected as the base for the main AI program, the one that would run the Tower. The others—Kurt, Rose, Jasper, Tony, and Alice—were there to augment his abilities, and represented different aspects of the human psyche. Kurt was a defender, while Rose made up Scipio’s emotional core. Jasper was logic or common sense, while Alice was fear, and Tony was his creativity.

And they’d all been ripped out. Leaving Scipio crippled.

“Yes. Kurt. My neural clone, placed right in my net, some…” He blew out a breath and cocked an eyebrow. “Two hundred and eighty-nine years ago. You see, the nets, coupled with an AI, could keep a human mind healthy for eternity but couldn’t do much about the natural cell degradation that accompanies old age. The serum, however, could, and by pairing them together, I managed to achieve a measure of longevity that eluded humans in the past.”

I scoffed. I couldn’t help myself—it seemed far-fetched.

Sage stopped smiling, his eyebrows rising to his hairline, and he took another step down. “You don’t believe me?”

I laughed, and then seized the opportunity to make a move, turning away from him toward Scipio and walking a few precious steps away from the terminal, as if I were thinking. I already had my question for him—a question only the real Ezekial Pine could answer—but I wanted him to think I was struggling, trying to find a way to disprove his claim.

“I will if you prove it,” I finally said, when I felt I had used as much time as he was going to give me. I whirled around to see his face reflecting surprise, and then took several careful steps forward, angling myself toward the table, and stopping a few feet away from the cable and Rose only when he raised the gun a fraction of an inch. I held his gaze, notching my chin up with more courage than I felt, and snarled, “How did Lionel Scipio really die?”

Sage blinked a pair of wide blue eyes at me from behind his spectacles, and then scratched his chin. “I killed him,” he said after a moment. When I didn’t respond, he added, “I used a plastic bag, placed it over his head, and let him suffocate. Are you satisfied?”

“Not really,” I snapped back, reacting in anger as an icy fear hit me. He wasn’t lying. He was Ezekial Pine. Only he would know how he’d killed Lionel Scipio. “You killed a great man. Why?”

It was his turn to scoff, and he ran a hand through his white hair, shaking his head ruefully. “Because I knew that he had figured out that I was the founder of Prometheus and was planning to reveal it to the council. The man was a blind and arrogant fool. He assumed that we would all be pleased with his little project, and how it was constructed, but he was wrong. He never listened to those of us who questioned him, and ignored our ideas and concerns outright! All to protect Scipio, a creature he had unleashed on us in some blind attempt to change our nature! I’ve spent six lifetimes trying to cleanse the Tower of the taint that is Scipio, and yes, it started with the death of Lionel Scipio. I couldn’t let him stop me.”

“But why?” I asked, unable to stop myself. I was shocked to learn that whatever his plan was, it involved killing Scipio. I had always assumed the legacies wanted to control him, and through him, keep the human population in line using fear. But killing him was insane; he was responsible for keeping us alive, and without him, departments would be incapable of transmitting power, water, or electricity, growing food, or continuing to circulate oxygen. “If you kill Scipio, we all die.”

Sage snorted and waved a dismissive hand. “I assure you, my dear, I have been taking precautions against that, ever since my last failed attempt.”

“Last failed attempt?” I echoed, cutting into whatever he was going to say. “What do you mean?”