The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

After that, Maddox had to go meet with the Knight Commanders to keep up appearances, and Quess went with her, as a Knight Commander of an internal department. I envied her for that, but also recognized that if I had gone, I would’ve gone insane from the anxiety.

Besides, doing all of those things did nothing to answer one of the other things causing my stress to mount as time wore on—what was happening to Jasper and Rose. So, I busied myself with trying to help Leo, going through Lionel Scipio’s files to try to figure out why Jasper was attacking Rose, while he worked tirelessly on trying to separate the two programs.

Unfortunately, the files were two parts technical and one part psychological, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it, beyond a few extra details that didn’t help us much. It was beyond frustrating, as I was the least technically savvy of our group, and as each moment went on without news of either AI’s welfare, I grew more and more agitated by my limited capabilities. I tried to absorb as much as I could, scanning for some hidden clue in the detailed notes.

Luckily, some of it was interesting. Even if it didn’t do much to pass the time.

The AIs had been created using neural scans of the five founders of the Tower, those scans stripped of all the human memories, save one: each founder’s “core memory.” Those memories were the cornerstones for the new AI personalities, the seeds from which they developed. Jasper was based on the founder of the Medica, Samantha Reed, and apparently her core memory had centered on her relationship with the grandfather who had raised her, and who had been some sort of famous detective. The memory in question was her playing with some sort of puzzle that he had laid out for her to solve, and from it came Jasper’s analytical and diagnostic skills. These, his most successful traits, were incorporated into Scipio’s coding once they were joined.

Learning that had taken me all of thirty-five minutes. No word from the council. No progress with Jasper and Rose. I stopped long enough to study Leo, and then picked up another file when I realized asking him anything would only disrupt his focus.

Rose, on the other hand, was based on a woman named Jang-Mi, whose core memory was centered around the loss of her daughter, Yu-Na. That loss translated into Rose viewing all the citizens of the Tower as her children and being ruled by a desire to protect them from harm. It was what had carried her program far during the trials. But it failed her when the loss of human life became too high, and her grief became too powerful for her to continue. From her came a lens of maternal love, which Scipio was supposed to use when thinking about the citizens of the Tower.

I sighed and closed the file. Another half an hour gone. Still nothing. My skin crawled, and I was hyperaware of the time, but I ignored it, knowing it was too early to give in to panic.

Then there was Kurt, the protector. I found that role for him a little odd, considering his program was based on Ezekial Pine, the man who had murdered Lionel Scipio and tried to kill Leo, the backup version of Scipio. But apparently his core memory was based on his experience in the military, and a situation where he’d pulled nearly every one of his soldiers from danger and saved them in an act of altruistic brotherhood. Clearly Pine’s views of brotherhood had limits, but perhaps Kurt was different. I’d recently learned from the legacy net Lacey had given me that her family had recovered him, but I hadn’t had a chance to confront the head of the Mechanics Department yet.

But then again, I didn’t fear for his safety like I had feared for Jasper and Rose’s. Lacey was from another legacy family who had been working with the head of Water Treatment, Praetor Strum, to stop the legacies from hurting or controlling Scipio. I wasn’t sure how much they knew of the big picture, but her family had managed to keep Kurt from falling into the hands of their enemies, and I hoped that meant he was safe.

Another twenty-five minutes gone—another twenty-five minutes of silence. It was starting to grate, but I pressed on.

The other two programs were unaccounted for, but thanks to the files, I had an idea of what they’d been doing for Scipio. Alice had been the first program to fail in the trials. Her contributions to Scipio’s programming were fear and self-preservation, and had been based on a woman named Aelish Mikhailov, who was the founder of the Mechanics Department. Tony, the second program to fail, had been the heart of Scipio’s creativity, his human counterpart a man named Anthony Kahananui. The man, a respected marine biologist and ocean conservationist who had created Water Treatment, had been from some place called Hawai’i. He’d also helped design the Terraces in Greenery 1.

It was all fascinating, but ultimately did nothing to help Leo, Jasper, or Rose. I tossed the folder down on the desk with a long groan and turned my eyes to the clock. Another forty minutes gone. “Leo?” I asked, trying to put a lot of meaning into his name.

“It’s done,” he said grimly, his fingers still going. “It’s been done for thirty minutes. But they are both offline… unconscious… and I can’t seem to wake them up.”

I studied him, deciding not to get angry that he had gotten them separated without telling me. “You should get some rest,” I said softly, concerned by the dark shadows that were collecting under his eyes. “You’ve been going nonstop since this morning, so if they’re separated and stabilized, then maybe give it a few hours, and come back fresh?”

“I’m fine,” he said, not even casting a glance at me. I hesitated, warring with the decision to insist, but decided to let it go. I wanted to make sure the programs were okay as well.

So we continued working together, side by side. Reading the files on the AIs had been interesting at first, but then the files grew too technical for me to follow, and sitting there for hours on end, doing nothing really productive except waiting for the call from Sadie or for Jasper and Rose to wake up, had me going a little stir crazy. Specific fears and worries kept crossing my mind, the chief of which was: What if I had somehow recorded a memory in Sadie’s legacy net while I was shooting Baldy’s friends? She’d know everything if I had, and probably wouldn’t even bother to call the council. Because she could just send her undoc army after me to take back what I had stolen. She could be organizing an attack right now, putting her people in place and arming them with cutters, batons, pulse shields… anything that she could. And there were at least thirty of them. I’d set up my defenses well, but I knew that if someone wanted to get in, they would find a way in. We had, after all. The fear only grew as I realized that it could explain the delay in her call, and could mean that even now she was trying to get something in place to breach my quarters.

The idea made me want to gather everyone and run, try to hide again, keep us safe.