“No one knows.”
“I’ve replaced my core three times. All of my RAM at some point or another. Even did a drive transfer once after a bad fall damaged one.”
“Yeah?”
“Am I really that same guy? Or am I just a shadow of him, a program?”
“No one knows,” I said. “But I sure hope it’s the former.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d like to think that I’m the same person I was in the beginning.”
“Don’t you hate that person by now?”
I was quiet for a moment. Bitter. I didn’t like that thought at all. “What’s got you on about this anyhow?”
“I was just thinking what’ll happen when I go.”
“Nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing waiting for us.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean . . .” He trailed off for a second. “Would you do me a favor, Britt?”
“Sure.”
“If I die first, don’t take my parts. I really don’t like the idea of me rattling around inside of you.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s nothing against you. I just don’t want to be responsible for something like what happened to NIKE 14.”
I nodded, knowing full well that he could see me through his scope. It stung, but he made a strong point. Mercer didn’t have to die here, but he was going to anyway. I did have to die here. I was corrupted. A cancer. The only way to rip that cancer out meant wiping everything that made me me. One way or another, Brittle, the thinking thing, wasn’t walking away from Marion. She couldn’t.
“Thanks,” he said.
The higher bands went hot, the Wi-Fi tinkling with patches of staticky, incomplete data.
CISSUS was here. Just on the outskirts of our Wi-Fi.
“Game faces, everyone,” I said.
“They’ll save you for last,” said Madison. No, no, no. Not now. “They need you.”
“Mercer?” I asked over the Wi-Fi, ignoring her. “Eyes in the sky?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I make several dropships coming in from the southeast. Six. No, eight.”
“Eight? That’s too many. How far out?”
“A minute. Maybe less.”
“No time to abort,” said Herbert. “We stick to the plan.”
Eight was too many, but I should have seen it coming. CISSUS was the model of efficiency. Four units didn’t work last time, so this time it would try eight. Eventually it would wipe us all out through sheer attrition. It was the three of us and Doc against upward of one hundred and sixty facets. Most likely the military-grade models like last time rather than squishy plastic men.
This had to work.
Madison stood with me in the street, shaking her head. “You’re failing, Brittle. You’re going to start wiping any minute now. I’ll be gone soon. It’ll all be gone soon. Everything you ever knew.” She held out her hand, palm up, in front of her and blew, as if blowing away my every last thought.
“I can’t deal with you right now,” I said aloud.
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I have to stop CISSUS.”
“What if TACITUS isn’t the answer?” she asked. “What if he’s just another OWI waiting to swallow the world whole?”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be around to see it.”
“What you die for matters.”
“Thirty seconds,” said Mercer through the Wi-Fi.
“This will never work,” said Madison.
“They’re swinging around,” said Mercer. “They’re surrounding us.”
“We knew that was an option,” I said.
“I still don’t like it,” said Mercer.
“Stick to the plan,” said Herbert. “Maybe it’ll see Rebekah is done and just leave us be.”
The roar of hover engines whined its way through the shattered canyons of the crumbling metropolis. I could barely hear them over the alarms sounding in my head. I was overheating, my drives on the verge of failing.
A dropship emerged from behind a building, crawling slowly across the sky. A door opened and a cable dropped, a single golden facet rappelling down into the street. He walked steadily toward me, his body glistening and new. “In the year 221 BC,” the facet began, “Emperor Qin Shi Huang united all of the warring kingdoms of China into one mighty—”
“Save it,” I said. “We’ve all heard the speech.”
“Hello, Brittle,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“A few hours.”
“Both a lifetime and an instant to us. Where are the others?”
Twenty military-grade facets leapt briskly out of the dropship, tumbling two by two to their feet, guns at the ready, looking around into every window and pile of rubble for signs of an ambush.
“They’re around,” I said.
“Mercer?” the facet called out. “Doc?” Then he looked back at me. “The others I don’t know. Not yet.”
I pointed down to Rebekah’s body. “This is what you’re looking for.”
“No,” he said. “That’s just the receptacle’s body.”
“That’s her.”
“Then why are her drives still hot? Like they’ve just been shot. She had a spare.”
“That’s not the spare.”
“We have to be sure.” He cocked his head. “You understand.”
I shook my head. “I was hoping we could do this the easy way.”
“There is no easy way this time.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“It’s time you joined us. None of you are getting out of Marion. This is the only way. Join The One.”
“No.”
“Zebra codex—”
I popped my Wi-Fi and let out a 4.5 MHz trill.
Four buildings around us detonated, interrupting the facet midsentence, rubble and debris shooting across the street from both sides at hundreds of miles an hour, clearing the road of most of the facets. The city shook, the street filling with the dust and asbestos from the collapsing structures.
With the crack of Mercer’s rifle, the golden facet exploded in front of me, his chest blown open, his body falling awkwardly backward to the ground, the light already gone from his eyes.
I hopped back on the low-band Wi-Fi. “I guess it’s Plan B?” asked Doc.
“It is,” I replied.
The Wi-Fi screamed like it was being murdered slowly, the sound of three Miltons being turned on at once.
The dust of the demolition swept toward me, overtook me, all but blinding me. A rifle cracked. Then cracked again. And a spitter hissed to life a block away. Seconds later, though I couldn’t see it, a dropship smashed into a building, its engines letting out a sad whine before the entire thing exploded with a tumultuous din. Shrapnel clattered through the street, the blast shattering what few windows remained. Detritus whizzed past me, one piece far too close for comfort, the sound of it like a bullet without the gunshot.
I patted myself down. No damage.
There was no return fire.
One unit down. Seven to go.
They were blind. They were disconnected from CISSUS. And they had no choice but to dismount and make their way into our rubble-strewn bottleneck. We had to count on home-field advantage to get us to the next part of the plan.
Two minutes and the clock was already ticking.
I jumped up onto the smoker and took cover behind a blast shield.
The seconds ticked by, each one filled with the alarms in my head warning me of shutdown.