The Mother Code Page 18

  There was a tap at the door. He turned to find Rudy, his once capable hands grasping the doorframe for support. He barely recognized his old friend, his skin ashen, his eyes rimmed with red. “James,” Rudy said. “There is a call on the satellite phone . . .”

  “Who is it?”

  “It is Misha.”

  James turned back to the window, a lump forming in his throat. “Tell her . . .” he said. “Tell her not now.”

  Rudy watched him quietly. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk to her?” he asked.

  James remembered a time over a decade before—when he and Rudy had still been young and healthy, enjoying the simple pleasure of pork tamales in their shared apartment. That time when they had still held out hope. “Thank you, Rudy,” he said. “I’ll call her back.”

  Rudy nodded. “Entiendo,” he said. “I will tell her.”

  25

  JUNE 2065

  IT WAS A while before Misha understood that James, the man she still called Daddy, would only return to the mesas on those rare occasions when he took treatments at the hospital. She could visit him at Los Alamos whenever she liked. And she often did, accompanying Uncle William on food deliveries and staying overnight in her little room, learning about computers from Aunt Kendra and biology from James and Uncle Rudy. But as three years went by and her brain adjusted to the eyes that Sara and James had given her, she began to examine more closely the stories she’d heard all her life. More and more, she wondered about her birth.

  “Your Mother malfunctioned,” Uncle William had told her. “But we managed to rescue you.”

  “When we found you,” James said, “you were like a gift.”

  From the histories they recounted of a robotic Mother who hadn’t survived to care for her, from Grandmother’s tales of the Silver Spirits, from what little else the adults in her life seemed willing to share, she’d pieced it together. Her real mother had been one of those Spirits. And William and Rick were working to find more like her Mother—ones who still lived in the desert and had children of their own—her brothers and sisters.

  She was eleven years old—old enough, she thought, to join the search. But Uncle William insisted it was too dangerous. “We go for days without finding anything,” he said. “And then when we do, they shoot at us.”

  “Shoot at you? How? Why?”

  “They have lasers. But we must understand. The Mother Spirits are only protecting their children. They can’t know that we mean them no harm.”

  But, Misha insisted, they would never shoot at her. Sitting with Kendra in her dark lab, plinking out search terms to bring up images from what Kendra had explained was the bot learning database, she imagined herself a child of the desert, learning from that powerful, mysterious Mother. She combed through the fragments brought back to Los Alamos for inspection by Mac—the treads, the massive arms, the soft hand that Daddy told her Mama had designed. She felt the chip embedded in her own forehead, the mark that Sara had always told her made her special. These Mothers, these Silver Spirits . . . she belonged to them. She belonged with their children.

  Then early this morning, a scout had come to William’s house with news about a sighting at a place with a magical name—the Grand Staircase. In the hospital lot, she’d waited while William and Rick loaded Rick’s transport with supplies. Then she’d slipped through the back transport door and sandwiched herself between two cases of water bottles. From her hiding place, she could just see out the side window as they took off, soaring north.

  The thrum of the transport’s engines and the steady hiss of air from the filters lulling her, she struggled to stave off sleep until, finally, she felt a shift in the air pressure, her stomach lurching at the descent. The transport landed with a thud. She held her breath as William pulled open the side door. As he unloaded the cases of water to stack them outside, she edged her body farther back, finding cover beneath a folded blanket in the rear of the hold. When the door slammed shut, she could barely hear William’s voice from outside.

  “Let’s check the canyon,” he called.

  She caught sight of Rick, struggling to don a face mask before climbing out the pilot’s-side door.

  Then, silence.

  Misha crept from her hiding place, then slipped through the door and down to the ground, her feet sinking into moats of fine dust. She could see the two men heading toward a deep, narrow gorge ahead, William with his steady gait and Rick with his characteristic hobble. Carefully she backed behind the transport, then hurried left, keeping them in her sights. At the edge of the gorge, she scampered behind a boulder to shield herself from their view.

  Peering down, she could see something—two gleaming bots. And as she watched, a door opened on the side of one of them. Misha caught her breath. A girl, her thin figure wrapped round with a tattered blanket, emerged, her sleek black hair hiding her face as she climbed down the bot’s treads to reach the ground. Misha watched the girl pick her way along the far side of the gorge, then disappear into a hollow sheltered by an overhang of reddish rock. From inside this small cave, she thought she saw a strong arm, reaching out to steady the girl . . .

  Suddenly the earth shook. A whoosh of wind knocked the breath from her lungs and clouded the air with powdery dust. It wasn’t until moments later, when the air cleared, that she realized the girl’s bot was no longer down below.

  Her gaze swiveled up. A metallic leg. An arm. A massive body, towering over her from just feet away. She stared, and this . . . thing . . . stared back at her. Though it had no face, no eyes, she was sure it was watching her, waiting. She listened but heard no voice.

  Yet somehow she wasn’t afraid. She could see the sun glinting off the translucent window of the empty cocoon, the place so recently inhabited by the black-haired girl. She could see the soft interior of the hand that Sara had designed. She was filled only with awe, a deep sense of wonder. Her Mother, the one who had borne her in the desert . . . her Mother had been one of these.

  But then the spell was broken. The Mother turned, her attention focused on the two men now dashing toward the transport. The ground crumbled beneath the Mother’s feet as she took two steps in their direction, and a sickening, high whir emanated from somewhere atop where her right arm joined her body. Coming to her senses, Misha dashed back toward the transport, wedging herself through the back door just as the two men clambered into the front. Something struck the ground right outside her window, a blinding flash as Rick engaged the engines and nosed the transport up from the ground. Misha’s stomach leapt into her throat, and she swallowed hard. In moments, they were airborne.

  “. . . close one!” came William’s voice from the passenger seat. “How many did you count?”

  “Just the two,” Rick replied, his voice hoarse through the mask that still covered his mouth and nose. “Including the daughter of the one that came after us.”

  “It’s a start,” William said. “We left enough water for a while. I hope they stay put. With these dust storms rolling in, they’re better off down in that gorge than up top.”

  Crouched under the hot woolen blanket, Misha worked to steady her breath. Her heart pounding, she smiled. At last she’d seen them, children living as she had been meant to live. And she’d been right: Though others might be right to fear them, the Silver Spirits would never hurt her. In their world, she belonged.

  * * *

  FROM THE DOOR to the computer lab, James watched Kendra, hunched in front of her screen. He’d stopped wondering what kept Kendra going. Instead, he repeated to himself each morning the mantra she’d taught him. “You just have to put one foot in front of the other,” she’d said. “Until you can’t anymore.” Then she’d grinned, that ironic look that had become so familiar over their years together.

  There was strength, James knew, in coming to terms with one’s own mortality. There was solace, he supposed, in knowing perhaps not the when, but
the how of one’s own death. And he’d discovered a new purpose in trying to make good on his promise to Sara—to do what he could for the Gen5s.

  Ever since their launch, locating them had been difficult. And sightings had become even more rare since the six-year point, when an internal “timer” had instructed each Mother to leave for a location unspecified by her software. But now, things had changed. The Hopi scouts had begun to spot viable Gen5 encampments, pairs and trios of children gathered together. Their Mothers on high alert, no one dared approach them. But it was encouraging that some of them had found each other.

  More importantly, the Gen5s seemed at last to have stopped their wandering. But unfortunately, Mac had discovered an ominous root cause for this new behavior. In the ’20s, the deserts of the American West, including swaths of northeastern Utah, western Colorado, and areas north into Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, had been the focus of continued clashes between a consortium of small oil companies, who claimed rights to unrestricted fracking and drilling as per their prior agreements, and the federal government, which was making a push for renewable energy. The feds had won, but only when, in the late ’30s, the price of gas dipped so low that the companies no longer saw any value in the fight. The problem was that no one had advanced the funds required to clean up the oil fields. Through years of intense drought and even more intense legal battles, these abandoned sites had baked in the sun, their polluted expanses incapable of supporting plant life. Now, as evidenced by Mac’s radar scans, a high-pressure system coming out of Canada was pushing strong winds down across the state of Utah. Howling through its northeastern canyons, they drove giant plumes of dust, much of it no doubt toxic, ahead of them. Though perhaps foreseen by the whistle-blowers of the ’20s, this “New Dust Bowl” was unprecedented. And Mac could see no end to it. The Gen5 bots would soon be paralyzed. Their engines and filtration systems clogged, they would no longer be capable of protecting their children.

  “You saw what happened to that last one Rick found,” Mac had said.

  “Did they find the child?” Kendra asked, her eyes rimmed with tears.

  Mac looked at her sheepishly. “I didn’t want to tell you,” he said. “They found her hunkered down in a cave. Died in her sleep.”

  Uttering a low moan, Rudy stared fixedly at James. “We must find a way to get these children to a safer place,” he said.

  “That means getting their Mothers to take them there,” Kendra said. She’d done her best, searching night and day for some previously overlooked snippet of programming that might point to a solution. James and Rudy had spent hours combing through reams of program notes. But to no avail. “If there was anything,” Kendra said, “it must have been something Los Alamos wasn’t granted access to.”

  The central repository for information regarding IC-NAN and the New Dawn project had been a bank of secure servers in Bethesda, Maryland. The bank had been destroyed in the bombing attacks targeting the D.C. area. But during the debriefings following the cyberattack, just hours before the bombing and the onset of the Epidemic in the U.S., Kendra had learned of a mirror site in North Dakota. In a hostile stretch of land aptly called “the badlands,” where real farming was impossible, underground server farms abounded. And in one of these, the Langley New Dawn files had been backed up. The power required to cool the farms had long since gone out, and the servers had shut down. Under the snow and ice of winter and the blistering sun of summer, the bits and bytes lay dormant. Kendra knew the address of the server she needed. But she needed to retrieve it. She needed to wake it up. Then she needed to hack in.

  Rick and William had done the first part, skirting the dust storms in their transport before braving them on the ground. The guards and alarm systems at the farm long dead, it had been a simple matter of breaking and entering. They’d retrieved the drive from the server and brought it safely back to Los Alamos. Kendra had easily inserted it into her system. The trick was the hack. But finally, her efforts had paid off. Late the night before, she’d found a way inside.

  James stepped farther into the lab. “Kendra? Rudy said you had something?”

  “James,” Kendra said. “I thought you should see this first.”

  “Did you find a way to call them?”

  “Not yet,” Kendra said. “But I did find a few other things. For one, the identities of all the human mothers, together with their bot name designations.”

  James squinted at the lines of type on Kendra’s screen. “I thought those were kept confidential.”

  “When it came to our government, even the most confidential things were documented.” Kendra smiled. “And there’re a few things you might find interesting.”

  “I would?”

  “Based on the results of her interviews, Rose McBride made a specific choice. One of the donors was chosen to supply eggs for two of the fertilizations. Rose felt strongly that this woman had more of a chance than others to produce a child who would survive.”

  “I had no idea that Captain McBride knew anything about biology . . . Who was this woman?”

  “Her name was Nova Susquetewa.”

  “Susquetewa?”

  “She was a fighter pilot. Died on a mission in Syria, right before the Epidemic.”

  “Is she . . . ?”

  “Yes. She’s Grandmother’s daughter. And, James . . . she’s Misha’s birth mother.”

  James leaned back against Misha’s small desk. He imagined her eyes, the ones that Sara had given her—the way their bright green color complemented her light brown skin, her broad, flat forehead, her beautiful chestnut hair.

  Kendra leaned forward, her voice a whisper. “So Misha actually belongs with the Hopi. What’s more, she might still have a brother or sister out there somewhere.”

  James held his hand to his heart. A Hopi mother. A biological brother or sister. But Sara was Misha’s mother. Misha was his daughter . . . He closed his eyes. They’d never lied to Misha. They’d explained that Sara was not her biological mother, nor he her real father—that she herself had been born inside an incubator in the desert, an origin story that was difficult enough to comprehend. But how would she handle this new information? He turned to face Kendra. “I can’t tell her that,” he blurted out.

  “I understand not getting Misha’s hopes up about the Gen5s. But shouldn’t she know about her birth mother? And what about Grandmother? Shouldn’t she be told?”

  James rubbed his temples with the flats of his fingers. Was he just being selfish? Didn’t Misha have a right to know these things?

  But no. Not yet.

  Beyond the horror of the Epidemic, he’d found solace in distancing himself from that painful past. And when Misha had entered their lives, he and Sara had exercised every bit as much caution in crafting the story of her world as they had in engineering the prosthetic eyes through which she perceived it. He’d begun to understand, just a little, the duty that a parent bore in protecting his child from the truth—allowing Rudy and Kendra only narrow latitude in teaching Misha about the world as it had been, preferring Grandmother’s mystical tales to the harsh reality of the hatred and warfare that had destroyed their way of life.

  He’d just begun to think about reconnecting with Misha, of telling her the truth about himself and the others at Los Alamos. But the tale of a biological mother lost in war, of a brother or sister, possibly dead—these were not stories he was ready to tell.

  “I’ll need time to think about it,” he said. “I’m not even sure we should tell Grandmother yet . . . though I wouldn’t be surprised if she already knew.”

  Kendra offered him a smile. “I only wish she knew how to call these Mothers in . . .” She turned back to her screen. “There’s something else here that might interest you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Rose McBride made another choice. She herself was one of the Gen5 donors.”

  “I suppose that
doesn’t really surprise me,” James replied. “It would make sense for her to use herself as the prototype for the personality program.”

  “But what might surprise you is the father.”

  “The father? The fathers were anonymous. We used hundreds of different sperms for each fertilization. We chose the most viable embryos . . .”

  “Not in Rose’s case. She had a special ‘in.’”

  “She chose a father?”

  “According to these records, she wouldn’t allow an alternate. Rose stipulated that the father must be Richard Blevins.”

  26

  RICK LAY FLAT on the road, his Tyvek suit bunching under his body as he propped himself awkwardly on his elbows. Holding his breath, he adjusted his mask down to strap on a pair of field glasses.

  Lying next to him, his rough cotton shirt and dungarees caked with dust and a bandana wrapped tight over his mouth and nose, William pointed down over the steep edge. “There.”

  Sightings had become more regular now. They’d counted at least fifteen, still alive, still eking out an existence in this godforsaken desert. But this sighting was different. The scouts had found Rho-Z.

  Rick adjusted the focus on his glasses, fighting off the double vision that had begun to plague him, panning his field of view. Then he saw them. At one end of the wide wash, their flanks covered in sheets of grayish powder, two bots were stationed close to the opening of a small cave.

  “Seems like they’ve been here for a while,” William said. “They’ve got a nice little camp set up. But the scouts said there were three of them here before . . .”

  As Rick watched, one of the bots pivoted slowly in his direction. Had she detected him? He shifted his weight, attempting to become one with the ground. He was happy to feel no complaint from his prosthesis. But he knew it was not a good thing. The dizziness, the loss of feeling in his extremities—he’d felt them before, signs that he needed another lavage treatment.