Vitro (20 page)

“No you didn’t! At least you didn’t do it for my sake. You did it because I was a better control if I was ignorant, if I lived thinking I was normal. Isn’t that it? Well, isn’t it?”
“Sophie! No, it wasn’t . . .” But Moira’s eyes told her all she needed to know. She’d been given as normal a life as they could give her, but it had never been for her. It all came back to Corpus.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Moira. “None of this matters anymore. After what happened today, I’ll be fired. Corpus will exterminate all the Vitros Nicholas woke, and they’ll likely kill him too. There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.” She looked drained, as if she could barely hold her head up. She slid down the wall and sat with her knees drawn up, her hands kneading her hair.
“I can’t save them,” she whispered. “I tried. I did everything I could. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” Gun still clutched in her hand, she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Nicky may have woken them, but I destroyed them.”
Sophie thought of the bleary-eyed newborn Vitros, of their nightmarish introduction to the world. “Is there a way to reset them? Can you erase their memories or something, put them back to normal?” She didn’t want any part of it; she wanted to walk away now and never look back, to forget this woman, this place, all of it. But she was haunted by those empty faces and she knew she would never stop hating herself if she didn’t try to help them.
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Moira. “There’s no cure. This is what they are. This is what I made them to be.”
“What about Nicholas?” Sophie threw out. “What makes him immune to imprinting? What’s the difference between him and those miserable kids out there?”
Moira looked up through a mess of hair and fingers. “I told you. He’s a psychopath. Him and Mary, Jay, and Wyatt.” “Yes, but why? Why didn’t they imprint like all the others?” “It was . . . there were complications.”
“That’s it? That’s all you can say—that there were complications?”
Moira made no reply.
“Fine. Whatever. Keep your secrets for now.” She began pacing the length of the wall, one arm crossed over her stomach and her other hand cupping her chin. “Think, Mom—Dr. Crue. Whatever. Can’t you save them? Reverse it somehow? If they’re imprinted on Nicholas, then they’re useless to Corpus, I get that. But if they stopped being useless—don’t you see? We’ve got to make them nonexpendable. We’ve got to make them necessary.”
Moira turned the gun over in her hands, her brow knitted in thought. “We can’t undo it. Once imprinted, imprinted for life. It even extends beyond death.” Her hands froze, the gun pointed at the ceiling. “Philip Wolf—one of the doctors—he had a stroke, and there was nothing we could do to save him. But one of the Vitros, a girl named Clarissa—” Her voice choked out; she shook her head. “She was imprinted on him. It was like she just . . . crumpled. Couldn’t take it. Couldn’t stand for him to be gone. She went crazy, breaking things, trying to dig up his grave . . . We had to put her down, in the end.”
“Put her down,” echoed Sophie, pausing to stare at her. “Like she was a dog.”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see how bad off she was. We tried everything else—erasing her chip, medication, even electrotherapy. Nothing worked. Her world ended when his did. So it’s no good shooting Nicky—might as well shoot them all. Do you know what he did?” Moira’s hands trembled with anger. “He told them to jump off the cliff. He’d murder them, just to get back at me.”
Sophie’s mouth opened in horror. That sick, twisted bastard.
“Is there no way to save them?” She was thinking of Lux now as much as she was of the other Vitros. She’s the only family I have now. If there’s any chance of saving her—
“The other doctors are trying to deal with them. I came down to see if there were any left sleeping, but he got to them all. But they won’t give up trying to carry out Nicholas’s orders unless he tells them to.”
“Yes—but I mean isn’t there a way to save them permanently? To un-imprint them?”
“It all comes down to the code,” said Moira, shaking her head. “The computer code on the chips—we call it the Imprima Code. We can manipulate it, but we can’t erase it— the chip is too integrated with the brain. Even if we took all the data off of it, the information would be stored in their cerebral cortex. We’d have to insert a new code, something to override it.” She shook her head. “But there’s not time. And there’s no way of knowing what that code would be. It’s like trying to invent the bicycle before the wheel. Like trying to paint something you can’t see.”
“What I don’t understand, what I’ve been trying to understand all this time—is why would you even do this to begin with?” Now Sophie was ranting, spitting out words simply because she was tired of holding them back. “How could you be so heartless as to give people life only to strip away their identities? What’s in it for you?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Moira rose quickly to her feet, her eyes burning defiantly. She slipped her gun into the deep pocket of her coat. “It wasn’t about imprinting in the beginning. That was an accident, a sort of side effect. You should have seen this place back then, when we were first getting started. Your dad and me and the others—we were so full of hope and excitement about the future. We were working to save the world, not . . . not this. The chip technology was originally intended to be a new form of psychotherapy. This technology is huge, Sophie—it’s world-changing. We can influence the human mind by speaking to it through computer code. We’ve achieved a human-machine hybrid technology whose full ramifications we’re only just beginning to realize. At the beginning, the chip was meant to be a cure. We knew that if we could manipulate the psyche with the aid of the chip to translate computer code into human thought, affecting the brain in the same way you’d download a program onto your computer, we could cure almost any mental disorder and, in time, even physical ones. We could cure Alzheimer’s and bipolarity and schizophrenia and . . . and psychopathy.”
Sophie stared at Moira, her mind hardening around a new realization. “So you created test subjects. You created psychopaths so that you could try to cure them.”
“Yes,” Moira whispered, not returning her gaze. “We performed a kind of advanced lobotomy on Nicky and the other three, creating a kind of induced psychopathy, and then we tried to cure them. But for Nicky, Mary, the other two, it was too late. By the time we administered the reversal code, they were too old, their personalities too cemented. The worst part was that we knew what they should have been like—thanks to their Controls. We’d created little monsters we couldn’t cure, and their twins are out living normal lives and reminding us every day of what we destroyed.
“We had to improvise and experiment; eventually we learned that for the cure to work, the subject had to remain unconscious throughout the entire chip procedure. If they woke, even for a moment, we’d lose them and they’d become just like the first four Vitros. So we did it all at once, without them ever gaining consciousness. And then, after the first few successful Vitros were born and Corpus decided to shift the focus of the project to simply creating more Vitros, we found we didn’t need to induce psychopathy at all—we just needed the cure.”
“The cure that became their curse,” Sophie said darkly.
“It reversed the psychopathy in the most dramatic possible way,” Moira admitted. “Psychopathy, sociopathy—they’re nearly interchangeable terms—stem from one’s inability to relate, to feel empathy, to connect with another person. When we tried to reverse it with the chip, it resulted in the subjects’ psyches overreacting, going to the other extreme—they fixated on the first person they saw, over-connecting, forming an unbreakable bond. When we realized what we’d done, it was too late—Corpus threw out all our plans of cures and therapies and instead focused on creating Vitros, and on developing the Imprima Code, which enhanced their imprinting instincts a thousandfold. Moldable, perfectly obedient workers. The code originally intended to heal people was instead turned to programming bodyguards and servants, equipping them with the skills needed to serve their masters.”
“And you just went along with it, even though Dad refused.”
“He refused to take part, threatened to out Corpus and the project to the media. I admired him for it, Sophie, and I always have, but I couldn’t break away like he did. I was too entrenched here and I had so much still to accomplish. . . . Foster did what most of us here only dream of doing, and certainly speak of—he walked away. He turned his back on Skin Island even though it meant they might have killed him for it. But it wasn’t just out of his sense of morality—it was because of you. Before you came along, I think he might have stayed on, but you changed him. You changed us both, really, but him most of all.” Her eyes seized on Sophie’s. “You mustn’t blame him. He loves you so very deeply, and he risked everything for your sake when he left the project. Corpus let him go, but not entirely—they never let go entirely. They watch him as much as they watch me and you, and you must never think he is free of their influence. He was careful in his break with the Vitro Project. He went through all the right channels, appealed to all the right people, and in the end, he won himself more freedom than most of us here will ever know. He lied to you because he knew that he’d stretched Corpus’s mercy as far as it would go, and that if he broke away for even a second, they would have him in custody or killed within hours. He lied to you so that he could live and protect you. If you must blame anyone, blame me, blame Corpus. Your father . . .” She shut her eyes. “He was and is all of the good things I never found in myself, and the only thing I regret as much as I regret losing you is the day I lost him.”
“You could have walked away with us.” Sophie spoke in a rasp, her breath squeezing around the knot in her throat. “If he could do it, so could you.”
“I did what I thought I had to do, and even now, I’m not sure I’d have chosen any differently. It didn’t matter if I refused and walked away—they’d have kept on without me, as they kept on without Foster. At least by staying, I could help the Vitros as much as possible. I could be sure they weren’t abused to an even greater extent. At least, that’s what I thought. But then I just . . . I lost control.” Moira spoke in a hush, her eyes distant, unfocused. “It was slow and I didn’t even know it was happening until it was too late. But my power over this project was usurped by the teaspoon until one day, it was gone. I’d lost control.”
Don’t we all, thought Sophie. She remembered what Nicholas had said to her in the salon: Take control or be controlled.
Corpus had played them all for fools.
Sophie drew a deep breath. “Then take it back.”
Moira gave her a puzzled look.
“You lost control—so get it back.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it, though? From what I can tell, this Vitro plan has crashed and burned, thanks to Nicholas. You set out to do something good, to save people, as you said.” Sophie planted her hands on the bench and leaned forward, her eyes intent on Moira. “So do that. Get this train back on the right track. It isn’t too late until you give up.”
Moira was staring at her searchingly, as if Sophie were a map she could not read. “Why are you so concerned about this? Why don’t you just walk away?”
The question was already in Sophie’s mind. All her life, she thought she knew who she was. I thought I was your daughter. I thought if I could only reach you, make you see me, that all the pieces of my life that didn’t make sense would magically fall together. Well, in a way that had happened, but not how she’d expected. She had found herself, but she was not who she thought she was. And now she had no idea who she was—whether she was supposed to be a Vitro or a Control or just a normal person with a strange beginning. Every decision she’d ever made until now had been based on a lie. Several lies, really. And yet, besides the intense feeling of betrayal and anger and loss, she was discovering within herself a capacity for optimism that seemed ludicrous in light of her circumstances. I’m starting over. That’s it—I’m beginning anew. Reinventing myself. All her life, she’d lived in Moira’s shadow, but now the ties between them had been cut and Sophie felt almost buoyant. I don’t need her approval anymore. I can be whoever I want to be, do whatever I want to do.
Contrary to what she might have supposed, the revelation of her identity had set her free. And now every choice, every moment, every word she said seemed weighted with almost sacred significance. She was a new person now; it was a chance most people didn’t get. She didn’t want to mess it up. She wanted to get it right from the start. The person I become is up to me and no one else. I will control my future and I will never give that up, not ever again.
She didn’t want her first deed in her new life to be a betrayal of her own. “Because Lux is my sister,” she said. “And I won’t give up on her. And I won’t let you give up on her.” She swallowed, then crossed the floor between them and stood in front of the woman who had been her mother. “Please.” She met Moira’s eyes and willed herself to stay strong, not to break, not yet. “Help me. Take back Skin Island.”
Moira said nothing for a long moment. She stood very still and did not look away. Sophie saw the torture in her eyes; how long had she been aching to do just that? How long had she chafed under Strauss’s and Corpus’s rule, hating what they made her do but lacking the courage to defy them? Sophie gazed at her intently, wishing she could channel that strength into Moira, but knowing she barely had enough for herself.
“If you ever loved me, even in the smallest way,” said Sophie softly, “if you have any love for Lux or Dad or the other Vitros, if there is a shred of love left in your body—do this. Do this for me. For Lux. For all of us, all the ones you’ve wronged. Please, Mom.” Her voice faltered on the word. “You’re the only mom I ever had. You gave me life as surely as if you’d given birth to me yourself. So be my mom—you owe me this. You owe all of us, so get out there, take back your island, and save us.”
Sophie held her gaze as tears came into Moira’s eyes. Moira pressed the back of her hand to her lips and drew in a deep, shaky breath. She shook her head, lowering her gaze for a moment to the floor. Then, at last, Moira looked up and tipped her chin in the smallest indication of assent. “I can’t face her on my own—I don’t have the resources. For Strauss, it always comes down to numbers—costs and overhead and profit. Without financial backing, none of this matters. Sophie, it’s no use. I . . . I have to go. I’ve been down here far too long. I have to help the others.”