Project 17 (13 page)

“Max has Al, and now you have me,” Jamie said.

“Wow,” Lillian said. “I feel so much safer.”

“I know taekwondo, you idiot.”

“Am I your beard?”

Jamie rolled his eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

They were sitting in the living room eating potato chips when the news broke on Wednesday afternoon. Jamie switched to the feeds. One videocast had been shot from the sidewalk behind a throng of
gawkers, the camera held by a bystander or a journalist who couldn’t get near enough.

The students, carrying placards and calling for transparency about Girl X’s creators and Controllers, massed in front of Northpoint-Pascual. They were surrounded by Sentries. A line of
Sentries also stood between the protesters and Pascual Tower’s doors.

A female student, who introduced herself as Mina Martin of the Federation of Students, stood on a makeshift stage. “Stay away!” she shouted into a microphone. Sentries remained where
they were. Bystanders raised their phones to take pictures. The student lowered her voice. “‘Stay away’,” she repeated. “That’s what Margaret Morales said when
Girl X came after her. ‘Stay away’. She was armed. She knew Girl X was coming after her. Girl X, who carried a syringe filled with a fatal Northpoint-Pascual drug. Why else would
Northpoint-Pascual want her dead? Because Margaret Morales, one of their own, was going to inform us about this monstrosity! Justice for Margaret!”

Jamie stopped chewing. “Holy shit.”

In the videocast, the audience roared. “Justice for Margaret!” they shouted.

“Give us Girl X!” Mina screamed.

“Give us Girl X!”

“This is SentryServ,” boomed one of the Sentries. “You are hereby ordered dispersed. This is your first warning.”

“You continue to support the murderers?” Mina said. “Controllers! You can shut down these Sentries any second! Side with the students! Side with the concerned
masses!”

The Sentries, unmoved, moved closer.

“This is SentryServ. You are hereby ordered dispersed. This is your second warning.”

“Controllers!” Mina screamed. “I know you can see us!”

“This is your third and final—”

Something round and metallic sailed from the protesters and hit the speaking Sentry on the chest. The Sentry fell, jerking limbs thumping on the pavement. Bystanders responded with expletives.
The crackle was loud and audible. A taser gun? A Shock Ring?

“A Shock Ring,” Lillian said under her breath.

Jamie dialed a number. “Maxine! Are you watching this? Where the hell did these students get a Shock Ring?”

Even Mina didn’t know. “What?” Mina said, still onstage, dropping her microphone. No, she was saying. Wait.

“Down with the Sentries!” someone screamed, and more Sentries were felled by the electroshock weapons.

Screams. The protesters and the crowd on the sidewalk dispersed, running the length of Ayala Avenue as the Sentries started deploying their own Shock Rings. The videocaster ran and stopped,
shooting from another angle. The metal rings latched onto protesters’ wrists and legs, and they fell one by one.

“They’re not with us!” Mina screamed at the approaching Sentries. “We are not armed! I don’t know who they are!” The Shock Ring latched onto her raised arm
like a bracelet, and she rolled down the stage.

*

That night, before Lillian fell asleep, she received an email from an unknown account. It was an address, signed with a single letter.
Z.

The address was in Quezon City, in South Triangle. Lillian left early on Thursday morning, leaving Jamie a note on the Newspad about going out for a walk. It was a walk that took her to the
train station.

She got off at the Quezon Avenue Station and walked down Panay Avenue past restaurants, apartments, and Sentries until she got to the right building. Caleb gave the building name and the city,
but not the unit number. She sat on a stone bench across the street from where the building stood, as instructed, and waited—
for what? A homing pigeon?

It wasn’t a pigeon. A boy in a high school uniform peered out of the apartment lobby. He crossed the street and handed Lillian a folded piece of paper.

“Some guy inside asked me to give you this.” The boy looked suspicious. He probably thought this was part of an arrangement for some creepy hook-up. He walked away before Lillian
could say thank you.

503B. Look for Mr. Solomon.
Lillian walked up to the lobby guard, who directed her to the elevators.

She found Caleb sitting outside the unit, on the floor by the fire exit, smoking.

“Can I still call you Caleb?” Lillian asked. “Or Zeke? But I’m more used to Caleb.”

Caleb didn’t turn his head. “Actually, my name’s David right now. I was Ramon three days ago.”

“Life on the run.”

“Hm.”

“How long can you keep this up?”

“Not for long.”

She nodded at his cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I used to. I stopped before college. But my brother took it up again and he kept offering his packets—” He shrugged. “Never smoke, Lillian.”

“I smoked before, but sense got into me and I quit.” Lillian sat beside him and took out a Candy Stripe from her bag. “Where’s your brother?”

“Asleep. It’s just seven.”

“I had to sneak out,” Lillian said. Jamie will be livid when he wakes up in a few hours. “Does Paul know I’m here?”

“No.”

“Is he going to throw a fit when he sees me?”

“Probably.”

Lillian chewed on her candy.

“Margaret Morales was killed with Neuropro,” she said.

“I thought she was killed with an IED.”

“Are you still taking the meds?”

“Yes, minus the two.” Lillian knew which two. “My remaining stash could last me three weeks.”

“And after that?”

Caleb shrugged again.

“Why did you give me your address?” she said. “The truth now.”

“The truth.” Caleb blew out smoke. He looked at the landscape before them, the people dotting the asphalt like little ants. The city was starting to awaken. “I went to
Northpoint-Pascual to design a robot that could care for dying patients. Its working name is Project Felisa. She is designed to have an intimate knowledge of human anatomy and the body’s
biological processes. Felisa is a robot that will be with you till your last breath. She’s coded to protect and comfort you. But he wanted something else.”

“He?”

“Nikolas Morales.”

Caleb said the name so casually she thought she had misheard.

“He wanted a robot that would have an intimate knowledge of human anatomy, and would know how to attack it. He wanted a robot that would be with you till your last breath, but only because
she wouldn’t leave until she’s sure you’re no longer breathing.

“Nikolas talked to me about it one night, after work. He called it Project 17. The number worried me. Had he tried doing this several times before? He asked if I were interested in a
lucrative endeavor. I said no. But he described the project anyway. I said that’s what the Sentries are for. I said what he was asking me to do was illegal, and could get us the death
penalty. He said abolishing private security is a death penalty in itself. He said we cannot completely rely on the government for something so important. He said: ‘Do you think your precious
Controllers are clean? Do you think just because they’re anonymous that they cannot be bought?’ He said I was an idealistic fool who had no balls. What angered me was he talked as if
his rhetoric was connected to some fucking ideology, as if he were doing it because of some sacred belief, when it was just really about making more money than he would ever legally earn in his
lifetime.

“There have been rumors about him going around for years. That he was dirty. That he took money from politicians and businessmen. That he bribed people. No evidence, though, and no
witnesses. Then one day I caught him talking to one of the programmers about changing Felisa’s schematics. I was not consulted. I told him that it was unacceptable and I was going to ask for
a meeting with upper management.”

“Oh, shit,” Lillian said.

“He said he’d kill my family if I continued to refuse to get involved in Project 17. I was already under so much pressure then. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat.
Couldn’t focus. Then I started hearing voices.”

Caleb took a deep breath and let it out, slowly, as though his past was in his breath and it was something he could exorcise.

“I experienced blackout episodes,” he said. “Who’d believe me now, if I told Sentry that Nikolas Morales threatened to kill my family? There were days when I
couldn’t even string three words together.”

“You didn’t have a history of mental illness in your family,” Lillian said.

“People break under extreme pressure.”

“But Neuropro can cause hallucinations.” Lillian wondered how Nikolas could have done it. A small amount in the coffee brought to Zeke’s desk; a small amount injected into his
food. Day after day of steady, small amounts.

Caleb took a drag on his dwindling cigarette. “Makes no difference now, whether I became crazy on my own, or if he helped. I could no longer function without medication.”

I would burn him alive if I were you,
Lillian thought.
Ruin his life the same way he ruined mine.
She hugged her knees. “Then what happened?”

“One day,” Caleb said, “I had another blackout episode at the office. When I came to I was home, and my wife and my daughter were dead.”

Caleb was silent for a long, long while after that.

He wiped his eyes before speaking again. “The company, care of Nikolas Morales, spirited us away. Killed us in the news, brought us back to life with new names. It was made clear to us
that I had to continue work on Project 17, or we would die. I should have just let them kill us, or I should have just killed myself, but my brother—” He put out his cigarette .
“He was safe and content before all this. He didn’t deserve this.”

“Did Margaret know anything?”

“No. I don’t know how she found out. But look what happened, Lillian: she steps one foot inside the general area where we are and hours later there’s a hole in her body.”
Caleb shook his head. “We went away because we wanted to protect you.”

“Me?”

“You found out about us. But you refused to stay away because you’re a stubborn piece of shit.”

Lillian laughed. After a moment she asked, “Why didn’t you just write an error into Girl X’s program? Some little thing that Nikolas wouldn’t discover until you’re
far away.”

“That would work if I were the only one working on Project 17.”

Lillian stared at him.

“Why do you look so surprised? Do you think it only takes one person to design and program a robot? That would be the case for your science projects, your flying water jugs, your electric
egg peelers, or whatever the hell college kids build these days, but Girl X makes autonomous decisions on
how best to kill someone and not be caught.
That required check-and-balance. A
team of programmers had to work on her.
”

“Do you know who they are?”

“No. Everyone’s anonymous to everyone else.”

“You mean Nikolas managed to coerce an entire team?”

“Maybe he didn’t need to coerce them,” Caleb said. “It pays well. You learn to look the other way. Makes life a whole lot easier.”

“But now you’re tired of looking the other way,” Lillian said.

“It’s getting out of control. The Unmask the Controllers site, the students with the Shock Rings, that random resident in Sagrada Familia—”

“Not too random,” Lillian said.

Caleb looked confused. “What?”

She realized that Caleb didn’t know about Lester. “I’ll explain later.”

“’We have your mother’, you said in the email.” He turned to face her.

“Felisa,” Lillian said.

“You knew it was my mother’s name.” Caleb laughed and shook his head. “Jesus. Don’t you know everything. You’re scarier than SentryServ. You have a
Felisa?”

“We do.”

Caleb was very still. “Wait,” he said. “Were you in Sagrada Familia when—”

“Like I said.” Lillian held onto the rusty railing and pulled herself up as Caleb looked on, open-mouthed and looking ready to get angry. She wiped her hands on her jeans.
“I’ll explain later. Now what’s the plan?”

“Well aren’t you a bag of surprises,” Paul said. “Here we are trying to contain this knowledge, and you just dole it out like Candy Stripe.”

Lillian didn’t say anything. She felt like she was back in her Catholic grade school, being castigated by one of the nuns. She felt like she deserved it.

“
Kuya
,” Caleb said.

Lillian had entered their apartment and told the brothers about the involvement of Max, Jamie, and Lester in digging up their past, and now Paul sat on another threadbare couch with a massive
cup of coffee and an equally massive headache. Everything smelled like mold.

“Who else knows?” he asked.

“I already told you.”

“Are you sure? Because you might be neglecting to mention another hacker somewhere.”

“Stop it,” Caleb said. “Do you want to end this or not?”

“What kind of a question is that? Of course I want to end this. I just don’t want these stupid kids involved!”

“Well, the stupid kids were able to figure out who we really are.”

They fell silent. Caleb plopped down onto an ancient bean bag. “And the stupid kids managed to get the robot,” he continued. “So they are involved.”

Paul sighed and looked at Lillian. “I curse the day I hired you.”

“I know,” Lillian said, smiling. “Why did you, though? Why didn’t you just get a Northpoint-appointed nurse?”

Paul shrugged. “My one condition was I get to look after my brother, or get a say in hiring the caretakers. Northpoint screens everyone I hire anyway. Background checks, Credit evaluation,
the whole nine yards. They thought you were harmless.”