At first Abel feels flattered, but then he remembers that Noemi needs his former knowledge in order to destroy the Genesis Gate. He is only of use to her intact.
“Are you kidding?” Virginia laughs at them. “I wouldn’t erase Abel even if you both begged me to. This work—what Mansfield did in here—I know I don’t understand it yet, but it’s too important to ruin. What he accomplished with you goes beyond anything I thought cybernetics could do.”
“What do you mean, precisely?” Abel says. Mansfield never explained, in-depth, exactly what the differences really are.
Abel has never been troubled by what humans would consider existential crises: He knows what he is, who made him, what his duties are in the world. He’s never had to ask himself the same questions about meaning that so haunt humans. But if he is something more than a mech—if his existence has some other, greater meaning—
“You’re amazing. Like, above and beyond any other mech I’ve ever seen.” The enormous grin on Virginia’s face isn’t as self-satisfied as before. Abel searches for the right word to describe her and comes up with awestruck. “Your mental processes are complex enough to be human.”
“What?” Noemi steps closer to them. She braces herself against one of the graffiti-covered worktables, as if she expected to fall. “What does that mean?”
Abel would like that answer himself. Although he already understands the objective importance of this news, he knows he will need to fully digest this information later, after he is not so overcome with pride.
Every excellence within Abel is proof of his father’s love.
Virginia shrugs. “Abel, you have an incredibly intricate operational cortex. Honestly, your capabilities are so overdeveloped they’re counterproductive. Like, you can doubt your own choices, can’t you? I bet you can.”
“Sometimes,” Abel says.
“See?” Virginia points at him. “Other mechs can’t do that. Doubt holds people back. Mechs are supposed to fulfill their task no matter what. No way Mansfield did that for no reason, or only to prove that he could. Abel… you were designed for something specific. Something extraordinary. You really don’t know what it is?”
“No, I don’t.” But he senses Virginia’s right.
A great mystery lurks within Abel even now, one planted by Burton Mansfield long ago, waiting to be revealed.
21
IF NOEMI WERE GOING TO DESCRIBE CRAY IN ONE WORD, it would be claustrophobic.
The spacedock and surrounding shopping center had an airy feel—an accomplishment of lighting and design Noemi hadn’t appreciated when she was there. By now, though, she’s spent hours either in an underground river or here in the Razers’ hideout. She doesn’t like all this stone surrounding her, looming overhead.
A memory flickers back into brightness: her and Esther, running through one of the meadows surrounding Goshen, the town where the Gatsons live. The high grasses had danced in the strong breeze, swishing and swirling around them like green ribbons. Above stretched a vast blue dome of cloudless sky, marked only by white birds flying toward the cool mountains of the east.
What Noemi would give for one more day with Esther, beneath that infinite sky.
But Cray’s not all bad. When she can forget the weight of the rock looming over her, the Razers’ hideout feels pleasantly cozy. Personal decorations that can’t be handmade are considered wasteful on Genesis, so Noemi’s never been able to string colored lights along her ceiling. She’s never collected brilliantly colored flags to hang from archways. Although the Gatsons had a hammock in the backyard, she never imagined putting one in her own room.
She glances at the hammock, where Abel lies asleep. (I should regenerate, he’d said, smiling and settling into the hammock with hardly a wobble. Then he had closed his eyes and gone to sleep that instant.) Noemi finds it hard to look at him for long.
It unnerved her when she saw him peel back his own flesh to reveal metal within. All the mechs she’s killed in combat, and yet only now it bothers her to see them bleed.
Mechs are just machines. Flesh and blood may have been coaxed into surviving around that structure, but deep within they are only things. At least, they’re supposed to be.
But Abel—Abel seems different. Noemi isn’t asking herself whether he’s a machine or a man; she has begun to believe that he’s both. But to what extent? Is the human side of him only a trick, a shadow of Burton Mansfield himself, placed there as testament to both his genius and his ego? Or is there more?
Whatever he is, he was designed for a purpose—something important, something great. Something neither she nor Abel knows.
Noemi takes a deep breath and lets that question go. She’ll wrestle with that later.
On Genesis they were taught that Cray was a planet of cold, cerebral people who valued analysis above emotion. Maybe it had been, thirty years ago. Now, it’s home to Virginia and her friends, who are… many strange things, but hardly cold.
“Did you pull up any Mansfield papers in the last ten years?” Virginia says through a bite of the sticky bun she’s munching on. She’s sitting cross-legged on a brightly colored cushion, talking to her friends via several live screens.
Ludwig—the blond guy, who seems to be handling his part of the conversation while lying down in bed—shakes his head no. “It’s like he vanished. Like he disintegrated. I don’t know what happened to Burton Mansfield, but the galaxy’s greatest cyberneticist wouldn’t just stop researching for no reason.”
“Or maybe it’s just because the man’s in his eighties.” That’s Fon, the athletic girl with five piercings in each ear. “He’s not old enough to have taken ReGen when he was young. That means he’s pretty fragile by now.”
“They would’ve given him some!” protests Kalonzo, the youngest of them. “Somebody like Mansfield—they want him to live a double life-span. Triple!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Virginia says. “The plant they extracted it from went extinct, and they never synthesized a substitute, so how exactly do you think Mansfield’s supposed to have taken ReGen when he was born a decade after they stopped selling it?”
This ignites a debate between the four of them, three of whom firmly believe ReGen remained available through back channels for years after it supposedly ran out. They each have elaborate, arcane theories to explain exactly what those channels were, who controlled them, how long the supply lasted, and whether some people might still be taking a drug that slows the aging process so dramatically some people lived to be two hundred.