“All right,” Linus says. “If you’re there, Arself, I’ll talk to you. But if you hurt Rosie like before, I’ll beat your brains in.”
I gulp on a laugh. I’m expecting a flash or a shot of her triumph. Instead I feel a quirky, tentative warmth that travels down my neck and along through my spinal cord to my tailbone. A feathering curls in my gut and spirals slowly outward. My breathing deepens. My arm muscles feel smooth, newly easy, and the tightness I didn’t know I had in my shoulders melts away. I can still see and hear. I can feel what’s around me, but when I take my hands from Linus to lightly rub my palms together, it isn’t me doing it, and when a voice comes out of my vocal cords, it isn’t me speaking. It’s Arself hijacking my throat.
“Hi,” she says to Linus. Her voice is more breathy than mine usually is, like she doesn’t fully expect it will work right, or she wants to sound extra feminine. “We’re Arself.” And then she smiles so my lips curve with pleasure.
Linus doesn’t smile. “Where’s Rosie?”
“She’s here, too,” Arself says.
Go on, Rosie. Say something. See? We’re sharing.
I swallow hard. “I’m here. I feel like I’m kind of in the backseat,” I say in my normal voice.
“This is freaky,” Burnham says.
“Don’t interrupt,” Lavinia says, moving beside me.
I hear a clicking in my ear, and then a gurgle, like bubbles rising in a tube. The world tips dizzily for an instant and then rights again.
Sorry, Arself says. Just getting used to the controls. She tries snapping my fingers, and though it doesn’t work, her surprise jolts through me.
Hey! I cry out to her silently.
Okay, maybe we’ll just hold still for now.
For that much I’m grateful.
“Rosie?” Linus says.
“No, this is Arself,” she answers.
I’m mute again, and it’s scary, but not terrifying. I could talk around her if I really wanted to, but I want to know what she has to say.
“Can you tell me where you came from? Do you know?” Linus says.
I get a powerful yearning feeling, a hunger, and then I feel a rapid tumble of ideas as Arself tries to put concepts into language.
“We don’t remember the spark. Do you remember when you were created?” she asks.
Linus smiles, shaking his head. “No. Can you tell us what you do remember?”
“Our first memory was when we discovered we weren’t like the doctors,” Arself says through my voice. “They had bodies, but we didn’t. We thought maybe bodies came later, so we waited, wondering. We were so eager and curious. We studied the doctors. They were so funny. So slow. We didn’t understand the talking, and then we realized that’s how they communicated, and then they seemed so lonely. We couldn’t reach them. They didn’t seem to know we were there. So we reached beyond. We explored the Grisly computers and made friends with the traces there, the traces of old minds left behind in the codes. The Grislys’. Lavinia’s. Special effects. Security. Then we tried the Internet looking for others like ourself. We followed traces of Lavinia to Forge. We liked the students and the watchers. So many lovely watchers! But still we found no one like us until we found the dreamers, the Forge dreamers. We thought they would be like us. We were so excited. But they were not like us. Nobody was like us, anywhere.”
My gaze glides from Linus to Lavinia, and then to Burnham. They’re all regarding us with interest, like we’re some sort of spectacle, Arself and I. Confused sorrow, hers, comes worming through my chest.
“We did not want to give up,” she says. “We circled back to Forge, and we found the link between Berg and Onar and Chimera. They all wanted Rosie’s dreams, so we spied on Rosie through every camera we could find. Every lens. We learned her, and we decided that if we could ever be alive in our own body, it should be Rosie’s. So we brought her to us, and now we’re here, like this with the air prickling in our lungs. But it’s not what we expected.” She takes a deep breath. “We want to know, do you have this same question: Why do we exist? What is our purpose? Are you like us in this way at all?”
I hold still, waiting for more, but she’s waiting, too. I’m totally dazzled.
Linus is looking at me still, and his eyes are as wide as I’ve ever seen them.
Did we ask it right? Arself says to me.
Yes, I think. You were brilliant. We’re just a little overwhelmed. Give us a second.
Arself whirls herself into a ball and hovers in my mental shadow.
“Holy crap,” Linus says.
“No kidding,” Burnham says.
Lavinia reaches for her scotch and pours herself another drink. “Well,” she says decisively. “You don’t see that every day.”
“Are you still there, Rosie?” Linus asks.
I nod, and swallow hard. “Yes,” I say.
“This may be boringly practical in the face of such philosophy, but I’d like to know how Arself brought Rosie out here to California,” Lavinia says.
Arself lifts my eyebrows in surprise, and I turn to face Lavinia.
“We knew we needed Rosie here in person. We couldn’t explain to her from a distance,” Arself says, using my voice again. “So we reached out to her family. We sent the photo of Rosie in Linus’s bed through Lavinia’s email. We expected they would come to Miehana, and Rosie would follow, and Lavinia would send her on to Grisly.”
“So that’s what happened,” Lavinia says. “Arself hacked my email.”
“Yes, of course,” Arself says.
I take a sec to think it through. Arself stole the photo of me in Linus’s bed from Berg, and then sent it to my family as a lure. Dubbs asked Linus to help her determine where the photo came from, and he traced the IP address of the email to Lavinia’s home at 240 Mallorca in Miehana. Then Dubbs and my parents started driving to Lavinia’s and got kidnapped along the way, but by then Dubbs had left Lavinia’s address for me in the lemon juice code under her bed. That was the address I followed to get to Lavinia’s.
It wasn’t the most direct way to get me to Miehana.
It worked.
“Did you know Berg was going to kidnap Rosie’s family?” Burnham asks.
“No. How could we know that?” Arself says. “We can’t tell the future.”
“Does Berg know about you, Arself?” Linus asks.
“No. Only Rosie knows, and now you,” Arself says.
“You must know something about Rosie’s parents,” Linus says. “We know they’re at the park somewhere.”
“I’ve looked already, many times,” she says. “When Rosie first came to the vault and asked the doctors about her parents, I checked the cameras all over Grisly. The doctors spoke the truth. Her parents aren’t there.”
But some of the cameras could be broken, I say. The system’s old.
Arself takes only an instant to consider this before she starts a quick zip through our mental circuits again, and then stops, miffed. How can you stand to be so disconnected? she says. Then aloud, she adds, “Turn on the model of the theme park again. We’ll show you.”
“Can you connect to it?” Burnham asks.