Awakening (30 page)

He gaped at her. “I don’t—”

She shook him. “Who?”

Her hold didn’t hurt, but it felt a little like being in the clutches of a bhimkay. “No one.” Another shake. “Please—”

“We’re done then.” She got up and stuffed the datapod into the pocket in her waistband.

“Wait, please.” He grabbed her shirt as she turned away. “Let me explain.”

She stared down at him, then with a sigh, sat down again. “Talk. No more chutting around with me.”

“Okay. Right.” He locked his hands together in his lap. “I can’t tell you everything. But everything I say will be the truth. You decide what to do.” That was how it should have been. They should have brought Kayla in at the start. Let her choose.

She waved at him to continue. “Okay,” Junjie said. “Everything we’ve done so far is to make you better.”

“That remains to be seen. Who’s ‘we’?”

He shook his head. “Can’t say exactly. Based on the uploads you’ve gotten, you can guess who some of us are.”

He could see the calculation in Kayla’s eyes. “Celia? The trueborn woman who picked up Gemma?”

“Yes.”

“And everyone who’s uploaded me since then?”

“Not all of them are FHE,” Junjie told her. “Some of them gave you our programming without knowing it.”

She was silent a long time. Then she gestured at him to go on.

“We’re trying to free the GENs,” Junjie said. “Just like the Kinship is. Only differently. With the programming.” What he was leaving out, their other tactic, weighed on him as heavy as a thousand kilos of plasscrete. But it wouldn’t take Kayla long to put those pieces together.

“What else is on the datapod?” she asked.

“Some stuff I know. A substitute for what the Kinship does to protect you from the Grid. A way for you to store bare brain memories into your annexed brain. I helped with those. But the rest they haven’t told me.”

“So it could be anything,” she said, her hand going to her waistband where she’d tucked the thumb-sized device. “It could reset me for all you know.”

“No! It wouldn’t. I trust these people. They only want to help.”

Her mouth twisted in a smile. “Maybe I don’t want their help. Can you really erase those letters in my bare brain?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it without uploading the rest of that stuff?”

He sighed. “Yeah. I have another datapod and the algorithm is copied on my wristlink.” She’d be ticked. But maybe she should have been here explaining it to Kayla.

“I’ll keep this one then.” She patted her secret pocket.

He’d handled this about as badly as he thought he might. Well, if they’d done this the right way, Kayla would have willingly taken what the FHE had to offer.

He dug his spare datapod from his pocket. Kayla plucked it neatly from his hand. “How do I know this doesn’t have more of that programming on it?”

Junjie grimaced, then unlatched his wristlink and passed it over to her. “Know how to clear a datapod?”

“Of course.”

She flipped over the wristlink and after pressing the tiny button on the datapod to engage the extendibles, she snapped the datapod into the port on the back of the wristlink. Her fingers flashed across the small keyboard on the front of the wristlink, then the display declared,
Data flushed. Content zero.

For a non-tech GEN, Kayla
had
learned a few things during her time with the Kinship. Even before his compatriots started dumping all that new programming into her.

Junjie brought up the list of software on his wristlink. “JT8840 is the one that’ll erase the code in your bare brain.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?” she asked.

“By the Infinite’s hands, I’m telling the truth.”

He saw the shock in her eyes at his invocation of her deity. His deity now. He’d dug deeper into the false prophets’ made-up liturgy and discovered they’d lifted much of it from ancient Earth documents. Documents with far more truth and majesty than anything he’d learned about the Lord Creator.

When she still stared at him, Junjie said, “Read through JT8840 if you’re not sure.”

“Purging a datapod is one thing. I can’t understand programming code.”

“You can now,” Junjie told her. “That’s part of what got uploaded in your annexed brain. Bring JT8840 up on the display and read through it.”

She gave him a dubious look, but did as he’d asked. He watched her eyes grow wider as she scrolled through the code.

“Is this a trick?” she asked.

He gave a little shriek of exasperation. “It’s a simple program. You’ve just read it. If you still don’t trust me, you’ll just have to live with the letters in your bare brain.”

Her thumb tapping on the wristlink, she sat silent for a good long time. Then she looked up at him. “Do you swear by the Infinite’s hands this is the only thing you’ll upload?”

“I do.” His hand went to the prayer mirror tucked in the hem of his shirt. She didn’t miss the now automatic motion.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

“Sure.” He rarely pulled it out, but he put it in Kayla’s hands. “I made it myself.”

He’d used a reflective mirror from a defunct microscope. The etching on the back of the Infinite’s cupped hands was clumsy, but Kayla admired it nonetheless.

She gave it back to him and he put it away. “I’m ready,” she said.

He had her copy the JT8840 program herself onto the datapod, then double-check that that was the only thing loaded on it. Then she released the datapod from the wristlink and pressed it to her tattoo. The light flashed red as the extendibles bit.

And her eyes went blank.

“Wait!” Junjie jumped to his feet. She wasn’t supposed to be downloaded. What was going on? “Kayla!”

She didn’t respond, her gaze empty. Great Infinite, he wasn’t accidentally resetting her, was he? Horror filled him at the thought. But he didn’t even possess the GEN reset program.

Then her eyes started flickering to life, but they didn’t stay alert. They flashed from glassy to aware, strobing back and forth so quickly he was sure he had damaged her. He reached for the datapod, thinking to tear it from her cheek, but he feared he would catch it at that moment of download emptiness and somehow ruin her even worse.

Finally, in quick succession, her eyes filled with life again and the datapod light flashed green. Kayla slapped the thing away from her cheek and it rattled across the table.

Her hands covered her face. She stared at him, but in that moment didn’t seem to be seeing him.

“Please, Kayla,” Junjie pleaded, sinking into his chair. “Oh, dear Infinite, you’re not reset, are you?”

K
ayla slowly shook her head. She could barely keep in check her rage at the . . . invasion? Not strong enough. The
rape
of her mind.

She tightened her hands into fists to keep herself from wrapping them around Junjie’s neck. “Did you do that?”

Terror and horror mixed in equal amounts in his face. “No, I would never have. Not after I promised you.” He gasped in a breath that sounded like a sob. “I don’t even know what
that
was.”

“It downloaded me,” Kayla said. “And I could
feel
it. Feel it stripping everything from me.”

“But you blacked out,” Junjie said. “I could see it in your eyes. They . . . flickered in and out.”

She remembered that. Paralyzed, but aware. Then switching back and forth between that frozen download state and awake as she was uploaded.

Junjie really was crying now, his eyes wet, one tear spilling. “I was only uploading the one program. Did it even work?”

She followed along the pathways as she’d learned to do, retracing the neural network to where FHE had been stored. Just as Junjie had promised, the letters had been erased.

“Yes. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands of new programs running in my annexed brain.”

Understanding flashed on Junjie’s face, tightening the knot inside Kayla’s stomach. “I think . . .” Junjie gulped. “There are two possibilities. One, someone hid those programs on my datapod. But it was my own personal one. I bought it new from a tech shop in Plator.”

“Or . . .?” Kayla prodded.

“The programs have been in you all this time. Maybe since you got that first FHE upload from Celia. Probably compressed or distributed throughout your annexed brain, so you wouldn’t recognize them. Something must have triggered the download, expanded the programs, then installed them in your annexed brain.”

Kayla leaned closer to Junjie. “And what could have triggered that, except you?”

He slapped his thighs. “It wasn’t me! Maybe the programs on my datapod detected me deleting them, and set off a secondary protocol. They must have known I might get cold feet. So they made sure.”

She wanted to believe him. Of all the trueborns she’d met, she’d been certain that Junjie, more than Zul, even more than Devak, had seen her as his equal. “Tell me why, Junjie. And no denking lies.”

In a motion as natural as any GEN’s, Junjie swept his prayer mirror out again. He held it up against his heart and his lips moved in some brief silent prayer.

When he’d finished, he said, “The FHE wants to bring you in.” He wrapped his fingers more tightly around his prayer mirror. “To make you part of us. So they wanted you prepared.”

Prepared against my will.
Her outrage seemed to fill the small meeting room, to pound against the granite walls.
“What
did they put inside me?”

“They don’t tell me everything.”
Just like the Kinship
, Kayla thought. “I don’t know the names of anyone. I’ve only spoken to two people, a boy, and a woman I call Neta.” He lowered his voice a little. “Our leader.”

“I don’t care about that, Junjie. What’s the programming?”

“I’m not sure,” he wailed. “I can only guess. First, a way to hide their programming if you’re downloaded. Then, a way for your brain to write its own programs you might need, and to hide those. A way to increase your memory capacity. All of it’s to your benefit—”

She slammed her hand on the table, denting the surface. “But no one asked me! You trueborns think I’m some kind of animal slave, the Kinship acts as if I’m a child, and now the FHE treats me like a denking machine.”

“You’re not an animal to me, Kayla,” Junjie said quietly. “If I’d known they planned this, I wouldn’t have done it. I swear to you.”

Her stomach hurt, she was so angry. But she could see the remorse in Junjie’s eyes. He reminded her of her nurture brother, that time Jal had broken a carved plasscine doll she’d treasured. Jal had begged for her forgiveness, as close to tears just as Junjie was now.

She let go of her rage; it was useless anyhow. Junjie wasn’t the enemy. She’d never heard him speak a negative word against
any GEN. Even when suspicion of every trueborn urged her to mistrust him, instinct told her Junjie was telling her the truth, at least as he knew it. She saw it in his unflinching gaze, and the way his fingertip traced the etching of the Infinite’s hands on the back of his prayer mirror as he still whispered to the great deity.

She sucked in a long breath. “How do I get all this out of me?”

Her heart fell at his miserable expression. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s probably so distributed, I’d have a hard time finding it all. And if I only managed to erase part of it, the broken pieces of programming would really mess up your thinking.”

Denking hell, to have to live with these unwanted uploads. Yet she’d agreed to myriad other uploads from the Kinship. Until the FHE programming had allowed her to read what had been stored in her annexed brain, she hadn’t given much thought to what the Kinship might be shipping along her neural circuitry.

“Um . . .” Junjie glanced sideways at the datapod she’d thrown. “Do I put the Kinship failsafe back in place?”

“Only if you can do it with a datapod
you
had nothing to do with.”

She was tempted to just do without it, to take the risk. But if an enforcer downloaded her without the failsafe and got that treasure trove of Kinship data, she’d be reset anyway. She still had enough loyalty to at least some in the Kinship—Risa for instance, and Mishalla—to want to protect them.

So Kayla sought out the resident safe house tech, a twentieth-year GEN woman, and explained that the contents of both of Junjie’s datapods were corrupt. Curiosity sparked in the tech’s eyes, but used to Kinship secrets, she didn’t question Kayla’s excuse. She just sorted through her datapods for the right one and handed it to Kayla.

Kayla applied the device to her tattooed cheek and waited for the brief failsafe activation to complete. Except the upload seemed sluggish, as if her annexed brain were resisting the process. It seemed to take forever for the short string of text to travel along her circuitry to where the failsafe algorithm was stored.

“Not done yet?” the tech asked, eyeing the red light on the datapod.

Kayla shook her head. It reminded her of that first Kinship upload from her friend Skal, before her first Assignment. But that one took longer because of the message the Kinship was passing to her. This reactivation upload was just twenty or so characters of text.

Just as she panicked at the thought that this was some other FHE programming, that the tech was one of them too, the activation clicked into place. Kayla did a quick survey of her annexed brain and found nothing new hiding.