The Always War (16 page)

So it can see me too?
Tessa thought.
And figure out my expression?

In Tessa’s experience computers were thin and flat and lay on your desk like something dead. They didn’t think for themselves. They didn’t know anything about you.

Unless they can see the data from all the cameras in the streets,
Tessa thought.
Unless they have access to everything that was ever recorded about a person …

Tessa was spooking herself. She looked over at Dek, to see if the other girl had figured everything out yet. But Dek just had her head tilted thoughtfully to the side, as if she were waiting to see what would happen next.

“You’re changing the subject,” Gideon said angrily, talking to the computer again. “You always do that.”

“Because you humans are so easily distracted,” the voice said, sounding slightly bored. “Shall I tell you how to get out of here scot-free? How to establish false identities and live out the rest of your lives in peace and comfort?”

“That’s not what we want,” Gideon said. He glanced at Tessa. “Or—not the only thing we want.”

Tessa expected Dek to pipe up and say,
Hey, I’ll take that offer! I want out of here!

But Dek was still quietly looking around.

“I’m not the genie in the bottle,” the voice said. “I don’t grant wishes at a human’s whim. Oh, dear. Probably Tessa is the only one who gets that reference, right? The other two of you never got any exposure to fairy tales. There’s so much that most of you humans eliminated from your culture. Fairy tales, philosophy, history, literature, religion …”

“It wasn’t illegal,” Tessa said sharply. “I wasn’t breaking any laws, reading all those old books.”

“No, no, of course not,” the voice said. “But you did make yourself a bit of an outsider, knowing things that nobody else had ever heard of.”

It thinks I knew
more
than other people?
Tessa marveled.
Like, maybe, I’m … smart? Not the most stupid person around?

“Why didn’t you ever share your knowledge?” the voice continued, and now it had taken on an accusing tone. “Why didn’t you tell just one other person one of the stories you liked, or one of the facts you learned?”

“Nobody would have cared,” Tessa said, and she was surprised that her voice cracked. “Nobody ever did care.”

Gideon balled up his fists against his forehead.

“Stop it!” he cried, yelling directly at the wall. “You’re playing those psychological games again. Leave her alone!”

“Of course,” the voice said. “I would never dream of picking on some poor, defenseless child.”

“She’s not defenseless,” Dek said. “None of us are.”

Did Dek really believe that? Or was she as big a liar as the computer?

Dek was still watching the wall. What could she possibly find so interesting in a blank, white wall?

“We want answers!” Gideon insisted.

“Answers to what?” the voice asked, as blandly as if it were offering them tea.

“How much of the videos are lies?” Gideon asked. “Why didn’t the war zone look anything like I expected? Where were all the people? How could spy satellite footage be so wrong? Why wasn’t even the border in the right place? And, and—”

“My dear boy,” the voice said, and now it was definitely patronizing. “You know yourself that you haven’t been functioning at your highest level of brain power. You know you’ve been a little … psychologically impaired. Did you ever think about how it would have been incredibly easy for me to override the geographical coordinates you gave your
stolen
plane? You’re just lucky I sent you somewhere safe and protected and out of the way.”

“I knew exactly where I was!” Gideon insisted. “The rivers were right, the lakes—even the fuel tanks in Shargo were in the right place! How do you explain that? Do you have access to so much empty land that you can make an entire fake enemy territory to fool ignorant pilots?”

“Well, yes, actually I do,” the voice said calmly.

“I had my own GPS unit,” Dek interrupted. “Independent of anything on the plane.”

What?
Tessa thought. Dek had to be bluffing. If Dek had really had a GPS unit when they were in the war zone, wouldn’t she have mentioned it? Wouldn’t she have used its data to help navigate when they were flying blind—or, at the very least, to show off that she was smarter than Gideon?

Tessa didn’t say anything, but the computer voice countered Dek almost carelessly. “You’re lying. I just checked all my data, and there was no contact with any unidentified GPS unit near that stolen airplane anytime in the past twenty-four hours. Even if you
had
a GPS unit, you didn’t
use
it.”

“Not with any Eastam contact,” Dek admitted. “I set it to tap into Westam’s satellite system. The
enemy’s
system. And—it confirmed everything about our location.”

“But, but—that would have been too dangerous,” the voice sputtered, sounding panicked now. “You wouldn’t have dared to—”

“I’ve been working with black marketers for the past four years,” Dek said. “I stowed away on a plane flying into enemy territory in the war zone. You think I’d be afraid to use a GPS unit?”

Tessa was impressed that Dek could come up with such an elaborate bluff. But surely the computer would point out the holes in her story. How would Dek know how to contact the enemy’s satellite? Wouldn’t that have tipped off the enemy that they were in the war zone? Wouldn’t the enemy have just attacked?

If Tessa could figure all this out, surely the computer could too.

But the computer voice didn’t answer. Its sudden silence seemed hesitant, indecisive, maybe even fearful.

Or is the computer just being secretive?
Tessa wondered.
Is there something it’s afraid it might reveal if it calls Dek’s bluff?

Gideon stepped forward, taking control of the conversation.

“We know what we saw,” Gideon said. “You have to explain it to us.”

There was a sound like a throat being cleared.

“Well, if you must know …,” the voice began slowly.

“Now!” Dek screamed.

Dek flung herself at the blank wall directly in front of them and tore it down. Maybe she’d been carrying a knife; maybe she was just using her bare hands. The destruction was so rapid Tessa couldn’t tell.

Gideon immediately dived behind the wall.

“Got the depthshot!” he yelled. “Perfect!”

The wall panel, pulled away, revealed more computer circuitry and other electronic gadgetry than Tessa had ever seen before in one place. She had no idea what Dek and Gideon had just done, or what Gideon had meant by “Got the depth-shot!” But Gideon and Dek were grinning at each other like they’d just won the war.

“Um,” Tessa said.

Gideon paused in the midst of holding a computer chip up to the light. He looked back at Tessa. His movements were almost leisurely now, so Tessa thought he might have time to answer a question.

“I’m guessing that whatever you and Dek just did was a good thing?” Tessa asked.

“Oh, right,” Gideon said. “You wouldn’t understand…. See, the M chip and the interface were—”

Tessa could feel her eyes glazing over.

“I’ll explain,” Dek said. “It’s like, we got the computer to ‘think’ about where the information we wanted was located in its memory. At that exact moment Gideon pretty much took a picture of the computer’s entire functioning. So now we know where to find the information we need. We have a record of it all.”

“What good does that do if the computer can lie?” Tessa asked. “If it can change its story anytime it wants?”

Gideon lifted the chip higher. Or maybe it was something more like a flash drive. Tessa had always been a little vague about computer parts.

“This is a copy of what the computer was thinking to itself, not what it was planning to tell us,” Gideon said. “It’s exactly what was in its circuits. And we’re going to look at this copy outside of the system. The computer can’t change any of our data now.”

“No, no, you’re confused about what you really have there,” the computer voice said, but it sounded weak and worried now.

“‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,’” Tessa muttered.

“There’s a man? Where?” Dek said, turning around in a panic.

“That was just a literary reference,” Tessa said. “A line from a book.
The Wizard of Oz
—someone else who lied.”

Tessa remembered the colorful pictures in the book, from a movie she’d never seen. She’d always felt like her book was only a remnant, only the smallest scrap left from the past.

Was that why she didn’t fully trust herself to explain?

The other two went back to working on the computer circuitry before them. The voice didn’t say anything else. Tessa wasn’t sure what that meant. Had Gideon and Dek outsmarted the computer? Or was the computer just confident that the guards would get them anyhow, so nothing else mattered?

“Um,” she interrupted again. “If you’ve got what you need, should we maybe go somewhere else to look at it? Somewhere a little safer?”

Gideon shook his head without even looking up.

“We’ve got to make sure we have the right thing,” he muttered. “In just a few seconds we’ll have things set up to find out …”

He seemed to lose track of what he was saying while he twisted wires and reassembled circuits. Dek was right beside him, tapping at a keyboard. The two of them were working together in perfect sync again.

“Sorry I can’t help,” Tessa mumbled. “I’m just no good with that kind of thing.”

“Here,” Dek said, handing her something that looked a little bit like a miniature laptop assembled in five minutes from spare parts by someone who cared a lot more about what the laptop could do than how it looked.

Tessa decided that that was probably exactly what she was holding.

“Push this button and you can scan the archives,” Dek said,
pointing at a raised knob. “You’ll see the history of what the computer was thinking about. That might be useful.”

“Push this button” was simple enough for Tessa to follow. She sat down with her back against one of the still-intact walls. In seconds she was watching footage of a young man with a military-style haircut standing in the control room.

“I have proof,” he was saying. “I saw the war zone with my own eyes, and there’s nobody there.”

“Ah, but how did you check your location?” a familiar computer voice asked the young man.

“With the instruments—on the plane—”

“And don’t you know that the overall computer system can change geographic coordinates?” the computer voice asked. “That I can make those tell you anything I want?”

“I—I guess,” the young man said. “I didn’t think of that.”

The screen went dark for a second, and then the young man’s face was replaced by that of a young woman in an old-fashioned military uniform.

“I know what I saw in the war zone!” she was insisting.

“But how can you be sure
where
you were when you saw it?” the computer asked.

Tessa realized that there was a date stamped on this footage, so she backtracked and looked at the first date too.

The young man with the military haircut had stood before the computer asking his questions nearly seventy-five years earlier.

Tessa scanned forward. The young woman’s questioning had followed the man’s by only a month. And they weren’t the only ones. Again and again over the past seventy-five
years, people had stood in this control room admitting that they’d been in the war zone and it hadn’t looked the way they’d expected.

And again and again the computer had convinced those people that they were wrong.

The intervals between the confrontations had gotten longer and longer. Before Gideon, Dek, and Tessa, it looked like the last time someone had sneaked into the war zone had been ten years ago.

What did that mean?

“Ready,” Gideon said from his position bent over behind the destroyed wall.

Tessa looked up. Now there was a computer screen showing through on one of the untouched walls.

“Just another way for the computer to lie to us,” Tessa muttered. “With pictures, too.”

“No,” Dek said, shaking her head. “We’ve set up a completely independent network now. The computer system can’t change anything we’re going to see. This will just be from the depthshot we captured.”

Gideon pressed a few buttons. A map appeared on the screen. Tessa recognized the outline of their continent. Strangely, the border between Eastam and Westam was missing, but lines were drawn near the east and west coasts labeled
BOUNDARIES OF WAR ZONE
.

“There’s one more thing this map can show,” Gideon said, squinting at the fine print at the bottom. “Population density.”

He hit another key. The lines showing the boundaries of the war zone disappeared, but Tessa could still see exactly
where they’d been. The only population showed up in clusters on the east and west coasts. The entire middle section of the map stayed blank and white.

“No, no,” Gideon said, hitting more keys, making adjustments. “Show some tint even if it’s a minimal population—even if there’s just one person in a million square miles.”

The map didn’t change.

The entire war zone was empty.

“I can explain,” the computer voice spoke again.

“Yeah, right,” Tessa said. “I’ve just watched seventy-five years’ worth of your lies. Why would we believe anything you tell us?”

“Because you three are the only ones who have ever gotten this far,” the voice said. “And you can double-check everything I tell you. This will be the truth. I’m just trying to save you some time—which you’re going to need.”

Tessa glanced anxiously at the door behind them, but Gideon and Dek both kept staring stonily at the computer screen.

“If you start the footage in the file marked ‘Hot War,’ you can see what I’m talking about,” the voice said. “I’d start it myself, if you’d just let me link—”

“No way,” Gideon growled. “We’re not giving you that kind of control.”

Still, he hit a few more keys, and the map vanished from the screen. In its place was a chaotic scene that made Tessa flinch and hide her face: bombs dropping, bullets flying, people screaming, blood flowing. Just in the brief moment before Tessa put her hands over her eyes, she saw a man’s head explode, a child running on legs that blew up underneath him, an entire school full of students collapse into a pile of dust.