The Mother Code Page 24

  But what was that? The water around him was churning now, a maelstrom. He felt himself being sucked under once more, then swept to one side. His head filled with an awful roar. Engines. Bot engines. The boat was yawing, tipping, overturning. He felt something lock under his arms, a pull. He was lifted from the water so quickly that the bones in his neck seemed to crack.

  “Sela!” he cried, struggling despite himself. “Sela!”

  As Rosie lifted him skyward he saw Alpha-C plummet into the waves. And something else—a thin arm, clinging to her treads as she went down.

  * * *

  THE DRONE CAMERA scanned the length of Lincoln Boulevard one more time, but Misha was nowhere to be found. James’s heart fluttered in his chest. He grasped the armrest of his chair, trying desperately to stay calm. “William, any word?”

  “Nope,” came William’s voice. “And I can’t find the opening she was talking about either.”

  “Mac,” James said, “I need you to go back and check the bay.”

  “Will do,” Mac muttered.

  The video veered north, out over the Golden Gate, then east along the shore. Dark against the brilliant flash of the water, a swarm of bots had congregated in the air over the spot where the little green boat had been. Still more were ranging up and down the beach. “Lots of bots down there now,” Mac said. “Gotta stay high.”

  As the drone swerved toward shore, James caught sight of the boat. “Capsized . . .” he murmured.

  The drone flew along the shoreline, panning and scanning. Now a group of kids had emerged, tiny dots running toward the beach. “Don’t want ’em spotting me,” Mac said. He guided the drone east, past the fence, outside the perimeter.

  Suddenly the video zoomed in on the ground. “Shit,” Mac choked.

  James could feel Rudy and Kendra leaning in close behind him, their breath caught in their throats as they stared at the screen. The satellite image went blurry, then refocused. And Kendra gasped.

  Tangled in seaweed, on the shore well outside the fence, was a small, lifeless body.

  * * *

  THE DRONE HOVERED, circling tentatively as though even it could no longer bear to look. Time passed, minutes like hours. James sank to the floor, hugging his knees. “Why . . . why aren’t the bots finding her?” he asked.

  Kendra’s gaze was still fixed on the screen, her mouth agape. “Not the right shape, I guess,” she muttered. “Too . . . cold . . . ?” Tears began to run down her face. And for the first time since James had known her, Kendra broke down. Her head bowed, she sobbed uncontrollably.

  “It’s okay,” Rudy said, patting her shoulder helplessly. “It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t. James could barely quell the fear and rage battling in his chest. This was all his fault . . .

  Suddenly they heard something—a small, high voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Misha?” William’s voice boomed over the connection, cracked and nasal.

  “My sister’s missing,” Misha sobbed. “Kai said Alpha-C sank the boat . . . We searched the beach. But we can’t find her.”

  “Misha.” James got to his feet. “Honey, this is Daddy.” His voice was shaking. His whole body was shaking. “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Why didn’t you come to the fence?”

  He heard a choked sob. “I did,” Misha said. “But they blocked it off!” She sobbed again. “I tried to find another spot, but . . .”

  “Then why didn’t you call Uncle William?”

  “I was in such a hurry once he called, I left the phone in my room.”

  Gripping Mac’s desk for support, James huddled over the phone, his one lifeline now. “Misha, I love you . . .”

  “I love you too,” came the soft reply.

  James looked at Kendra and Rudy, his eyes clouding with tears. “I promise . . . we’ll think of something. One way or another, we’ll get you out of there. Just tell us everything, from the beginning.”

  35

  IN THE XO-BOT cafeteria’s dim interior, James listlessly stirred a bowl of lamb stew. Across the room, Kendra fiddled with the old coffee machine, her back toward them. Mac, who had returned late the previous night, sat with his hands flat on his thighs, his food untouched. There was more bad news. Early that morning at the Hopi hospital, Rick had lost his final battle.

  Kendra turned toward the table, two cups of burned-smelling coffee in hand. Gently, she set one in front of Mac. “He requested a Hopi burial,” she said.

  With effort James stood up, the muscles of his back sending painful messages to his spine. The general would claim a spot next to Grandfather on the side of the mesa. There, Grandmother said, he would wait for Rose to bring his son back to him. But now the likelihood of that ever coming to pass seemed more remote than ever. Through a long and restless night, he hadn’t been able to get Misha’s plaintive voice out of his mind.

  “How’s Rudy doing?” James asked.

  Kendra sighed. “He’s been better since his last treatment,” she said. “But he still has that nasty lump near his collarbone—they suspect metastasis. I let him sleep in. I just . . . couldn’t tell him about Rick.” She sat down. Picking up a spoon, she stirred her coffee, watching the creamer slowly dissolve. “The problem seems to be a breakdown in communications,” she said.

  James turned to her. “What? With Rudy?” But from the determined look on Kendra’s face, he could tell that her mind had refocused, something it always seemed to do under pressure.

  Kendra looked up at him. “No . . . with the Mothers. I keep thinking about what Misha told us. How the kids have lost communication with their Mothers. How it was one of the first things she learned when she got there.”

  James leaned down to splay his palms on the table, enduring yet another of the dizzy spells that had begun to plague him. “She said the kids used to talk to their Mothers in their heads?” he asked. “What was that about?”

  Kendra took a sip of her coffee, then dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “As you know, the children and their Mothers are attached through their communicators—”

  “The biofeedback chips?” James said. He knew about those, an old technology used for remote wellness monitoring. Misha’s own bot Mother had installed one, and Edison, in consultation with Sara, had advised against removing it.

  “It went beyond biofeedback. The communicator chips are attached to injectable electronics, implanted in the brain.”

  “Implanted?”

  “The Mothers were programmed to implant the chips and their associated injectables immediately after birth. The specialists on Dr. McBride’s team had years of experience with these in patients with neurodegenerative disorders. Though they’re very effective at transmitting biofeedback, they can also receive stimulation.”

  “Receive?”

  “The child’s signal is weak, run on power harvested from the movement of his muscles, his digestive tract, his lungs. But the Mother’s signal is much stronger, run off power from her reactor. She could send out stimuli, even from a distance.”

  “So what sorts of ‘stimuli’ did these bots send out?” James asked.

  “A Mother could ping her child without an audible signal, for example. But Misha thinks something else happened too. She thinks they developed more high-level nonverbal communications. A sort of conversation, but without words.”

  “If that’s true, these kids aren’t really human at all,” Mac grumbled.

  “They’re as human as you and me. And they shared a connection to their Mothers, just as you and I once did,” Kendra said. “But it was different. More direct, I would imagine. Without all the filters that humans, even children, often impose on their communications.”

  “A kind of telepathy?”

  “Maybe. We don’t know,” Kendra said. “But this sort of intuitive link would have m
ade the bond between the Mother and her child very strong indeed.”

  James blinked, trying to clear his bleary vision. “Why didn’t Misha experience this with her own bot Mother?”

  “Her Mother didn’t live long enough to form a bond with her. Misha barely made it out of her incubator alive.” Kendra shook her head. “Anyway, you heard Misha. The Mothers have no audible voices. And whatever other communications did exist between the kids and their Mothers, those seem to be gone now too.”

  “Why?”

  Kendra brought her hands down on the table, to either side of her now-cold coffee. “I don’t know. Some sort of code degradation? I suppose it was inevitable . . . But of all the interactive systems, only the vision systems and the learning database still seem to be functional.”

  “Does that put the kids in danger?”

  Kendra stared down at her coffee. “Based on what Misha told us, the Mothers seem to be reverting to the prime directive.”

  “Prime directive? What’s that?”

  “Security. At all costs. Think about it. They’ve lost their ability to sense their children through biofeedback, to know when they’re hungry, thirsty, fearful. They’ve lost their ability to communicate cautions or instructions. Outside of visual recognition and physical control, they have no way of maintaining their mission.”

  James sat down heavily, tapping the table with a nervous forefinger. “Which is why they’ve corralled the kids in Building 100 since the drowning?”

  “It might even get to the point that they won’t let the kids out of the building at all, even to find food and water.”

  “But how could they do that?” James asked. “It goes against their requirement not to harm their children . . .”

  “Not if they’re no longer picking up the biosignals.”

  Mac clenched his fists. “So, what can we do?”

  Heaving a sigh, Kendra looked over at him. “I think it’s time we try putting these Mothers to sleep.”

  James stared at Kendra. “We can do that?”

  Kendra drew a deep breath. “I think so. As part of standard procedure after the Tenth Congress, the New Dawn project was given access to the replivirus used to quell rogue bots during the Water Wars. I found it last night, after we hung up with Misha. It was encrypted in the North Dakota files.”

  Mac leaned forward. “So how do we infect them?” he asked.

  Kendra stood up, one hand to her forehead. “We can’t simply broadcast the virus like we did with the special protocol command.”

  “Why not?”

  “Protocol commands just turn on a series of instructions already written into the Mothers’ code. But getting a virus in requires uploading new code. The Mothers won’t allow that.” She took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “No. We’ll need to try uploading it through a secure channel, something they’re built to receive input from . . . like the tablets.”

  “But how— Oh . . .” James imagined Misha, alone in her room at the Presidio. “Do you really think Misha can make that happen?”

  “I think she’s our only hope.” Kendra reached down to pat James on the wrist. “I know you don’t like it that Misha’s there. But without our brave little soldier, we wouldn’t even have known the kids were in such deep trouble.”

  36

  IN THE DARK dining room Misha caught sight of Kai, his face illuminated only by the light from his tablet as he tapped impatiently at its keys. She was surprised to see him there.

  On her way back from the plugged-up fence the previous morning, she’d been intent on hiding in her room, conferring with Uncle William about her new predicament. But she’d stopped short at the sight of Kai, the look on his face as he’d limped breathlessly up the front steps of Building 100. His jacket soaked, his pants torn, he’d stuttered incoherently until finally Kamal had come to his side, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. “What is it, Kai? What has happened?”

  “Sela,” the boy had sobbed, pointing back toward the bay. “Sela . . .”

  Behind him had stood Rho-Z, her long arms drooping toward the ground, her posture stooped forward as if in solidarity with her son’s sadness. And Alpha-C, inert, her flanks glistening with dried salt. “But Alpha’s right there,” Misha had murmured. “How could she leave . . .”

  Kai had turned on Alpha then, raising his voice to a scream as his eyes burned with rage. “You did it!” he cried. “You tipped the boat! You killed her!”

  Kamal had simply hugged him, taken him to his room, stayed with him until at last he’d fallen into a fitful sleep. Meanwhile the rest of them had formed a search party, combing the beach to no avail. Misha had completely forgotten her mission to escape this place. Precious time had passed before she’d called William. And by then she’d already known—with everything that had happened, she couldn’t just leave.

  But it made no difference anyway—the Mothers had barely let them budge from the building since. As afternoon had melted into night, the children had scavenged what little they had in the pantry for dinner—some day-old stew, a stash of precious pine nuts, strips of dried fish and squirrel meat. Some had resorted to Pedia-Supp. Their meager dinner over, they’d formed a convoy to the makeshift latrine they’d dug over by the woods. Then they’d retreated wearily to their own rooms, all vowing to deal with their Mothers in the morning.

  Another morning had dawned; another long day had passed. But until now, there had been no further sign of Kai. The door to his room sealed tight, no one had dared cross the threshold.

  Carefully, Misha approached the table where the boy sat, near the front window. “Having problems?” she asked.

  “Huh?” Kai looked up. His cheeks splotched red, his eyes swollen, he averted his gaze toward the window. Close outside, Rho-Z was stationed in the dry grass.

  “It looks like you’re having trouble with your tablet,” Misha said softly.

  Kai frowned, his features contorting before settling on anger. “It was getting slower . . . even before. I thought if I brought it down here, closer to her . . . But now it isn’t working at all.”

  “Can I have a look?” Misha sat down beside him. She grasped the tablet with both hands, shaking it while holding it to her ear. “Nothing loose. Is it charged?”

  Kai stared down at his hands. “The power indicator says it’s fine,” he mumbled.

  “Hmm,” Misha said. She remembered Clara and Álvaro complaining about something similar that morning. According to Álvaro, the input request was being registered, but no reply was forthcoming. “Everybody seems to be having the same problem.”

  Kai took the tablet from her. With an air of finality, he powered it down and shoved it aside, casting the area around them into shadow. “It’s bad enough that Rosie doesn’t talk to me,” he said. “Now even this doesn’t work.”

  Misha watched him. They were talking about Rho-Z. About the tablet. But she knew—they were both thinking about what had happened the day before. She looked toward the entryway, half expecting Sela to come through the door. “Kai,” she said hopefully, “maybe Sela’s still out there. Maybe she’ll come back. Kamal said she did it all the time in the desert, wandering off like that . . .”

  Kai stared at her, his eyes reddening. “She’s not coming back,” he said. He balled his fists. “I saw her go down. She’s not coming back.”

  Misha felt her body going limp. Maybe, like Kai, she just needed some solace. “I guess I still don’t want to believe that,” she murmured. Without thinking she reached over to awkwardly wrap her arms around his waist. But she felt no response. Like so many of the children here, the boy was painfully thin. His limbs were taut, his spine hunched defensively. She pulled back, catching sight of the communicator embedded in his forehead—that special emblem, the symbol that marked every Gen5 child. Her gaze lingered on its intricate pattern of circuits, seeming almost to pulsate with its o
wn life. It was just one of the things that made him and the others so special. But was his chip useless now, just like hers?

  Kai glared out through the window, toward the spot where Alpha-C sat in the field—where, just as they had the night before, all the Mothers had massed in the darkness to form an impenetrable wall around the fortress of Building 100. He brought his fist down on the table, tears running down his cheeks. “Sela was my best friend,” he said. “The first person I ever met. But now she’s gone, and it’s my fault!”

  Misha looked around the empty room. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “And nobody thinks so.”

  She’d been listening to the others all day, each offering theories, each trying to come to terms with what had happened. Each trying to make sense of the ever more repressive behavior of his or her own Mother.

  “They have to keep us safe,” Zak had insisted.

  “They sense something we can’t,” said Chloe. “That’s why they’re being so careful.”

  But not everyone agreed. They were all tired, wracked with hunger, thirst, and worry. And they all wanted answers. “How long can this go on?” Hiro asked. “We need food!” Even Kamal’s kind face was shadowed with doubt. And poor little Meg, bereft at the loss of her beloved roommate, could barely utter a word.

  Misha took a deep breath, trying to think of some way—any way—to console Kai. If what had happened to Sela was anyone’s fault, maybe it was her own. Wasn’t she the one who had encouraged her sister to test her limits? But no . . . she couldn’t think that way. “Kai,” she said, “you have to believe it was just a terrible accident. It was nobody’s fault . . . Alpha thought Sela was drowning, she tried to save her . . .”