I’m not anything I thought I was.
“We’ll figure this out,” she says. “One step at a time.”
I glance at her and to her credit she’s still looking me in the eyes, she’s still here beside me. She’s not on the other side of the room dry-heaving because she discovered she was fucking a robot this whole time.
“But why not tell me?” I say. “Why not just say, hey we killed you and we downloaded your consciousness and uploaded it into this new body?”
Mia squeezes my hand. “Do you really think that would have been a good idea?”
“They were ensuring the experiment was a success,” James says. “Had they told you the truth from the get-go, it wouldn’t have been. You’re probably the only person in existence that this applies to, but it can’t be an easy thing to reconcile with your own death. It would have made you unpredictable from the start. You might have been suicidal. Perhaps you never would have retained any of your humanity had you known you weren’t human. They needed to keep up the charade and never tell you the truth, that’s why they went through so much trouble to ensure your body was exactly the same as before and why it needed to behave exactly as a human body does.”
The use of the wordhuman, over and over, and how it no longer applies to me scrapes away at something inside me. Is he right? If I had known I had died and was no longer human, would I have started to act decidedly inhuman?
“The tattoos should have been the first indicator,” I say.
“What tattoos?” Mia asks.
“I had a few tattoos,” I explain. “Got one when I was a teenager, the rest when I was in the army. After that final procedure, when I woke up, the tattoos were all gone. They’d told me that Vanguard couldn’t have tattoos, so they used lasers to remove them…”
And I just believed them. But how could I have ever believed the truth?
James finishes the stitches and steps back. “You should rest. The body—your body—will need time to recover from the trauma, even with accelerated healing.”
“I don’t want to rest.” I sit up slowly, looking at the bandage on my arm. Underneath it, wires and metal and god knows what else. “I want to make them pay.”
James and Mia exchange a look.
“You said that Project Prometheus involved trafficked people, that they were doing consciousness transfer on them to, what? Create an army? Well, we can’t let that happen. What if…what if there are people out there who had this done to them and they don’t even know it? What if there are people who do know it and are trapped in different bodies. We can’t just…we can’t just let Global get away with this. We can’t let Julia…”
“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” James says carefully. “We need to take our time to figure out the scope of this.”
“No, we need to head back to New York and I’ll find Julia and rip her head off myself.” I push myself off the table, testing my legs, finding them steady despite everything. “We expose what Global Dynamix has been doing, and we burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.”
James lays a careful hand on my shoulder. “You aren’t going anywhere yet, Nate. Please. You can’t just go and start a war without being prepared for one. They have Paragon, who is fully synthetic, no humanity in him whatsoever, and probably calibrated to be stronger than you. They might have more than one of him by now, waiting in the wings. And they might have ways to control you that you aren’t even aware of.”
“Yeah, well, whatever kill switch or failsafe they had, it didn’t stop me from ripping Conrad Marsh apart.”
He sighs tiredly and I suddenly realize how late it is, how exhausted he and Mia must be. “Be that as it may, we haven’t even tapped into the other problem of yours, that voice in your head.”
Fuck. The programming that’s still there, still whispering, even now, though now the voice seems to delight in my discovery. Maybe James can figure out how to remove it. Maybe he can’t. But either way, I’m done being controlled.
Somehow, I know that’s easier said than done.
“You’re going to need to lay low here for a few days while I run more tests, see what I can do with that brain of yours,” James says. “Should be easier now that I know it’s a true computer. We can start now, if you’d like.”
“Don’t you need sleep?” I ask.
He grins. “Not when I have tea and the world’s greatest scientific breakthrough in my lab. I’ll be right back.”
He exits the room, leaving Mia and I alone. She’s still holding my hand, still at my side. It does something to my heart, makes it melt slightly, except every time I’m having some sort of emotion, I feel I have to second guess myself.
Is this real? Is any of this real?
I don’t even have a heart.
“Did you suspect? Did you know, deep down?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “You’ve only ever been human to me, Nate. You still will be.” She rubs her lips together in thought, then manages a quiet laugh. “I mean, how could I have ever thought otherwise? I’ve swallowed your fucking cum.”
