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

Sage smiled and said, “Requiem Day, my dear. It remains an important part of the process. And as for the why, do you really have to ask yourself that question? Look at what he’s done to us. You have no idea who you are or where you come from. That you are descendants of a once-great people who led the world in military strength and touted a shining democracy that no one could compete with! We were the inspiration for thousands of other people, showing them how to be, how to act, how to achieve. We had ambition and purpose—right up until the end. But instead of choosing to keep our history and culture intact, Lionel stripped it all away from us! Forced us to focus only on life inside the Tower, and not the sky and land beyond.”

My skin had started to crawl when he mentioned Requiem Day, one of the darkest chapters in the Tower’s history, in which Scipio had gone offline for several long days and nights, casting the population into extensive darkness. Everyone had been told it had been an accident, an unforeseen problem, but he was saying that he was responsible for it. And that it played into his plan of killing Scipio. But as he continued talking, the crawling sensation switched to a writhing one. His philosophy of keeping the past alive was something that I myself had wondered about. How many times had I questioned the decisions to keep the past hidden from us, or lamented how much humanity had sacrificed in moving to the Tower?

But what he was talking about was madness. Destroying Scipio would only destroy the Tower. And more than that, he was the reason I didn’t have a true view of what the Tower should be like to begin with. My perceptions of Scipio and his control had been manipulated by the changes Sage had made to the Tower over the centuries. He’d stripped people of their legacy nets, as they recorded the memories of each generation, and then modified the ranking system, changing it from a way to monitor citizens’ happiness to a way to punish them. He’d transformed it into a system where the lower you were, the more you were stigmatized, until you either improved… or fell low enough that you were executed. Leo had told me Lionel’s dream had been nobler than that, and he had been appalled at the changes that had been made over the centuries.

And Sage was behind them. I couldn’t agree with his ideology, because he’d already corrupted the system before I was born. Instead, I was angered by it. He was just some old man who was clinging blindly to a past ideology, getting people killed in the process.

“You’re insane,” I said. “And if not insane, then just selfish. People are dying because of what you’ve done to Scipio and the ranking systems—all because you didn’t agree with Lionel’s ideals and dreams for the future?”

His face hardened and he looked away for a moment before taking another step down the stairs, shaking his head, and I slid a few more inches forward, keeping my movements slow. I was within grabbing distance of the cable, but if I reached out now, it would be too obvious. Not to mention, the tension of the room had ratcheted up several degrees, given my last statement.

“Ideals?” He scoffed. “He tampered with his own thrice-damned experiment, for crying out loud! When he scanned me, Kurt’s full memory of me saving my team during the war involved me making a decision to never let situations like the one my team and I had almost died in happen again! He said my ambition was like a poison to the personality, and stripped it away from Kurt, without consulting any of us, before declaring his own neural clone’s program the winner of the selection process. He castrated Kurt so that his precious AI could win, because he didn’t have faith in anyone but himself leading the Tower forward! Our psyches weren’t pure enough for his little project. And when I protested, he accused me of only having my own interests at heart.” He snorted derisively and ran a hand through his hair, his gun still trained on me, right over the wooden rail running along the stairs. “And then to top it off, he made his little experiment inescapable! You don’t think he knew that even after the radiation storms had dissipated, the radioactive byproducts from the Tower’s operation would permeate the land around us, making it impossible to leave? He was keeping us from escaping, from exploring, from creating empires! All so he could prove that humans could live in peace together, as long as they were working for the so-called common good!” He snorted derisively, shuffling down another step. “Yet they still killed each other. They still stole and hurt each other. Requiem Day proved that.”

I frowned as he continued making his way down the stairs, trying to make sense of what he was saying. It was like he was talking in circles, blaming humans for their behavior inside the harsh system he had created, and then using that behavior to justify killing Scipio. Yes, he made some sense when he talked about the land around us being toxic. I had assumed it was an accident, but it seemed like a pretty big oversight by someone as smart as Lionel. But instead of letting us find a way to adapt, or using the Patrians to escape, he’d focused instead on killing Scipio and ending everything. All because he felt Lionel had robbed us of our ambition.

“Your logic is a little warped,” I spat at him, unable to keep the ire out of my voice. “You made the changes to the system that make us desperate and afraid. You’ve conditioned us, more so than Lionel or Scipio could, and then you blame us for how we react in life-or-death situations, as some sort of justification for what you’re doing to Scipio! It’s madness!”

He rolled his eyes. “Is it madness to want more for the Tower? Our ambition was stolen from us, neutered by Scipio’s very design. Yes, they made him capable of keeping us alive, and finding ingenious ways of doing it, but they didn’t give him the most important trait humanity has to offer. The ability to grow! The desire to explore and understand the world around us! No curiosity, no drive—just heads down, plodding forward like sheep. Well, I say enough is enough! We deserve better than that!”

“And what, you’re going to fix it by killing Scipio?” I shot back, taking a step toward him, placing my hands on the table—on either side of Rose’s hard drive—and leaning over it. My finger brushed against the cable, but I ignored it, holding his gaze and making my scorn shine through. “News flash: The systems are dependent on him being in the Core. Without him, our water, our air, our food, will stop! We will die, and it will all be your fault.”

Sage smirked. “Actually my dear, it will be your fault. Or at least, that will be the last message Scipio gives before he gasps his final breath. And as for the rest of it, you shouldn’t worry so much about that. I’ve been cultivating Scipio’s replacement for years, but unfortunately, you’ve forced me to accelerate my plans—the second time I’ve had to do that in twenty-five years, I might add—and I’m worried he’s not quite ready. That, and you haven’t exactly given me enough time to make the remaining fragments more accepting of him, but no matter. Adaptability has always been one of my specialties.”

My skin crawled as I realized he was talking about the visit from the group of survivors—the Patrians—and their first visit a little over twenty-five years ago. I had met their direct descendants only a few days ago, and my twin brother Alex was with them now, negotiating refugee status on behalf of the people I had been protecting from Scipio. I had known the event was significant to the legacies, that they had accelerated their plans in some way shortly after that, and he had just confirmed that. Still, it was a hollow victory. I still didn’t fully understand why their presence had caused him to panic. It wasn’t like they had been in a position to attack us at that point. Their culture was being devastated. We could’ve helped them in some way, and in doing so, found a way to free ourselves of the prison Sage seemed to despise.