Полная версия
MILA 2.0
I scrambled out the door before anyone could speak, mumbled, “See you later,” and tumbled into the late-afternoon air, a chill sweeping over me that hadn’t been present before. Because even if the tiny part of me was right, it didn’t matter. I had to know the truth.
As I rushed through the guesthouse front door, I told myself, You’re blowing it all out of proportion, Mila. Mom will explain it, and everything will be fine.
I couldn’t have been further from the truth if I’d tried.
With a deep breath, I shoved open the white swinging door that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house, to find Mom rummaging in the white walk-in pantry.
The sight of her slim, jean-clad figure, shuffling through cereal boxes and containers like today was any other day, gave me a sudden urge to shake her. My arm looked like something out of a nightmare, and she was looking for a snack?
When she turned around, a bag of her favorite dried pineapple in hand, she smiled and said, “Hey, honey. How was school today?”
I just stood, wordless, staring into Mom’s familiar face. It was so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that sometime, somewhere, she had started keeping things from me. But when? Why?
Was she sheltering me from something she didn’t think I could understand? Not that it mattered. It was like I could feel the fragile bonds of last night’s reconciliation snapping around us under the strain of her lies.
By the time I opened my mouth to ask, her astute gaze had fallen on the hoodie wrapped around my arm. Hunter’s hoodie. “Oh no,” she breathed, her eyes closing as if to block out the sight. Her sharp inhale pierced the room, a harbinger of bad things to come. But when she opened her eyes, efficient, capable Mom was back. The Mom who hunted noises in the night with flashlights. The Mom who didn’t let anything, not even the knowledge that she’d just been trapped in a lie, faze her. “Show me.”
Show me? Didn’t she know she was doing this all wrong? She was supposed to tell me everything was going to be okay.
Why wasn’t she doing that?
“Show me,” she repeated, louder, when I didn’t move.
Slowly, I reached over and untied Hunter’s hoodie with my free hand, let it collapse onto the cheerful blue-and-white tile floor. Contrary to my fervent wishing, the alien parts protruding from my arm had not disappeared. The white liquid had ceased leaking, but the twisted wires, the plastic—they were still there, like the guts of a child’s mechanical toy.
Mom gasped. “What happened? To do this kind of damage, you would have had to hit something sharp at an incredibly high velocity!”
When Mom said “something sharp,” Kaylee’s words clicked in my head.
I was sure you’d landed on that rusted hunk of metal.
“I was thrown from the back of Kaylee’s truck,” I murmured, but Mom wasn’t listening. She was too busy inspecting my arm. I scrutinized her expression, searching for even a trace of the shock I’d felt when I’d first seen my injury. The shock I still felt. But there was nothing. No exclamations of disbelief, no sobs, no cries of horror. Nothing at all to indicate that the interior makeup of my arm was news to her.
The flare of hope that maybe, somehow, Mom hadn’t known about this, known that my arm was completely freaktastic and had just failed to mention it to me, smothered to death, right there, in my chest.
Mom’s own chest rose and fell under her soft blue tee. She reached for my hands. “Mila. I know this is hard, but I need you to listen.”
I allowed her to take them. And waited. Waited for an explanation that could make sense out of this. After all, a simple, logical explanation had to exist. It had to.
Mom’s cheeks showed an uncharacteristic pallor. “How many people saw this?” she demanded. When I just stared at her, dumbfounded by her reaction, she grabbed my shoulder and actually shook me. “How many?”
“Just . . . just two. Kaylee and another friend.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! You’re starting to freak me out—please, just tell me what’s going on!”
Her grip on my shoulders eased. Resignation settled over her face. “Follow me.”
That simple command gave permission for the dam inside me to burst, unleashing wave after wave of craziness and anxiety. I followed her down the hallway, and by the time we arrived at her bedroom, it was a wonder I wasn’t shaking.
I wanted to turn and run. To tell her to forget that I’d just demanded an explanation, to forget the whole thing. We could tape some kind of permanent bandage over my arm, pretend it didn’t exist.
I wanted to run. Instead, I followed her into the master bedroom.
She headed for her antique mahogany dresser and squatted before it. The bottom drawer, always obstinate, finally popped open.
I stared blankly at the assortment of colorful folded T-shirts, wondering what on earth they had to do with my alien arm. Then Mom yanked the drawer out completely, set it aside, and peered into the dresser. I squatted next to her and immediately saw her target. In the very back corner, a bit of silver gleamed under a piece of masking tape.
A key.
Once she had the key in hand, Mom led me into the laundry room, halting just in front of the door to the garage. Finally she turned, smoothing my hair away from my cheek before dropping her hand back to her side. “Mila, before we go any further, I need you to know that I really do care. In fact, I believe now, more than ever, that you’re worth all the risks.”
Those words froze me to the core.
Inside the garage, she led me to a bunch of empty moving boxes, arranged neatly against the far back wall. Or at least I’d assumed they were empty. After dragging down the top three, she reached inside the bottom one and withdrew a shiny silver metal box by its handle. An oversized toolbox.
As she turned to carry the box into the house, I flinched away to avoid touching it. My body’s reaction to knowing, without a doubt, that whatever was locked away inside that innocuous-looking container was likely to change my life forever.
When we reached the living room, Mom set the box on the coffee table and pointed to the overstuffed green couch. “Have a seat, Mila. This is going to take a while.”
I sat. The silver key headed for the lock. Three seconds until my life exploded.
The key turned. Two seconds.
The lid opened. One second.
And . . .
Whatever crazy ideas I’d had about the contents of the box, I could say with certainty that none of them involved a silver iPod and matching earbuds. Which were exactly the items Mom withdrew.
“Here. Listen to this while I fix up your arm. It will explain everything.”
Mom looked away, her strong, capable fingers brushing quickly under her eyes. Then she extended the earbuds toward me. Two round white circles, only a quarter inch in diameter each. Nestled like tiny bombs in her upturned palm.
I hesitated. Did I really want to know? Really? Because whatever was on there was bad enough to make Nicole Daily cry.
No, the truth was, I didn’t want to know. But I had to.
My fingers curled around the earbuds. I shoved them into my ears before I could change my mind. Mom withdrew more items from the box—a pen-sized laser, a pair of crazy-looking tweezers, goggles, and a tiny screwdriver—tools that seemed perfect for servicing a broken laptop. She saw me staring and managed a faint smile. “To fix your arm,” she said, sounding like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Uh-huh, I thought as I eyed a screwdriver. Totally normal.
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”
Then she hit play on the iPod, flooding my ears with a deep male drawl, and everything else fell away. Well, everything except the lingering thought that Mom had lied. Because while there wasn’t pain in my arm, the words spewing from the stranger were another story.
They hurt. They hurt like hell.
“MILA, or Mobile Intel Lifelike Android, is the military’s current experiment in artificial intelligence. The MILA project is cofunded by a special top-clearance segment of the CIA and the military, so as to produce a supercovert robot spy that can infiltrate sleeper cells and then record all of their movements and intelligence.”
I groped for the pause button, pushed it. Stared into space as the words penetrated. Mobile Intel Lifelike Android. Android. My name wasn’t a shortened combination of Mia and Lana, it was an acronym. And it meant . . .
No way. There was no way. That was ridiculous, un-believable. The stupidest thing I’d ever heard.
I went to yank the earbuds out, consumed by an urge to chuck the iPod at the wall, to smash it into a million pieces . . . and then my gaze fell on my mom. My mom, who was currently using a laser to seal the tube in my arm shut.
And just like that, it hit me. Destroying the messenger would do me no good. Not when I couldn’t escape the reality unfolding right in front of my eyes.
I hit play, and the voice continued its detached monologue.
“Although the MILA 2.0—” The! THE! Like I was an object, a thing! And 2.0? What did that even mean? “—is physically indistinguishable from an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl, its brain is a reverse-engineered nanocomputer, a complex mix of transistors and live cell technology that gives it unique capabilities. These include exceptional reflexes and strength, superhuman memory skills, and the ability to hack computer systems, among many others. It can also evoke appropriate emotions, based on environmental and physical stimuli.”
I . . . what was this? A nanocomputer? Evoke appropriate emotions? Evoke? This person couldn’t possibly be trying to tell me . . . he couldn’t be saying . . . there was just no way. Of course my emotions were real. I felt things all the time.
My throat constricted, as if to confirm my belief.
“The rest of its structure is also a conglomeration of human and manmade, but mostly synthetic. Its body is comprised of cyberdermis, synthetic tissue infused with a polymer hydrogel lying just under bioengineered skin that is exceptionally strong and resistant to injury and also holds receptors to carry sensation signals to the nanobrain—though pain receptors are very sparse, only one one thousandth of the amount found in a typical human.”
I recalled the fall from the truck, my worry that I’d damaged my spinal cord. Suddenly Mom’s insistence on slow horseback rides made complete and terrible sense. She hadn’t been terrified that I’d hurt myself—on the contrary. She’d been worried that I’d fall and the whole no-pain thing would lead to questions. It was amazing it hadn’t happened before.
Wait a second. How had it not happened before? How, in sixteen years of life, had I not noticed that I had little to no pain sensation?
That’s when the brutal wave of reality really hit. The voice had said that the MILA 2.0 was physically indistinguishable from a sixteen-year-old girl. Meaning . . . he was also saying I’d never been any age other than sixteen.
Meaning . . . those memories I had of being younger? Lies. All of them.
According to him, I’d been “born” exactly as I was now.
Nausea flooded me. Which, given everything I’d just heard, made no sense. None of this did.
I was human. I was.
“Its endoskeleton mixes tightly woven braids of fiber optics encased by tubes of transparent ceramic hybrid that is very difficult to break and easy to repair, and its body utilizes a unique technology that meshes human with machine by way of embedding nanotransistors into live cell membranes. Instead of a heart, Mila has a sophisticated pump to supply energy to her partially organic cells, which can generate their own oxygen. Breathing for it is just a computer program to simulate human function.”
No heart? I had no heart? No, that was absurd. Ridiculous. I could feel it there, in my chest, beating away.
Unless . . . unless that was the “sophisticated pump” the voice was talking about. My hand flew to my chest, my fingers spreading across my shirt and pressing inward. A second passed, and then I felt the faint upward motion. Beating. Something under there was definitely beating. I hoped the action would soothe me, but instead of the fist-shaped, vein and artery-covered organ I’d seen in biology class, all I could picture was a pool pump. A bit of machinery stuck under my ribs, masquerading as life.
Of course, that was assuming I had ribs to begin with.
I hit pause again, my gaze flying to Mom, but her goggled head was bent over my arm, her focus on aiming the laser’s bright-red line at a spot within it.
It felt like no more than a tickle.
I hit play.
“In an especially exciting development, the MILA 2.0 goes one step beyond just approximating feelings. By using experimental data on living girls, we were able to store the visceral and physical sensations that emotions produce and re-create them. Thus, the MILA 2.0 actually feels the same things that humans do, which we anticipate will facilitate blending in with subjects and add authenticity to her cover.”
Cover. Oh my god. Did he mean . . . my cover as a human?
“MILA contains just enough human cells to simulate biological functions, but it is in reality a machine. The launch date for this exciting project is August twenty-second.”
The recording cut off, but the ramifications of that last sentence remained. August 22. Just five days before Mom and I arrived in Clearwater.
I couldn’t even move, couldn’t breathe. Guess that not-needing-air thing really came in handy. The thought made me laugh, a gasping, hysterical gurgle that made Mom drop her tools and grasp my hand.
Mom. Just another lie in a whole string of them.
The pain in my chest, in my nonheart, was excruciating. Whoever had worked on “evoking appropriate emotional responses” had done a bang-up job.
Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I would wake up and realize this was just a nightmare.
Maybe I’d even wake up back in Philly, with Dad still alive. A man who, if I believed the voice, had never been a part of my life.
As for “Mom”—well, according to the voice, I was more genetically related to our toaster than I was to her.
Another gurgle erupted.
“Is this all true? It can’t be, right? Please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke. Please!” But when Mom looked up from packing away the tools, all I saw was the sadness in her eyes. No matter what, I knew this was real to her.
“Mila, I’m so sorry. . . . I wish—”
“I don’t care what you wish,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Just tell me what’s going on. Where did I come from? Why am I here? And how—how could I not be real?” I whirled and faced a watercolor of a horse, wrapping my arms around my waist. I immediately wondered if that action had been programmed, too.
“You are real,” Mom said in her soothing calm-down-and-listen-to-me voice. I bet she didn’t know that, right now, it had the opposite effect. It made me want to jump up and down, scream bloody murder, and shake that poise right out of her. “That’s why I stole you from the military labs. I worked with you every day, Mila. Actually, I’m the bioengineer who helped create you. I know that you aren’t just a weapon . . . you’re too human for that. So yes, I stole you—to keep you safe. You deserved more than what the army had to offer.”
Stolen. I was stolen goods.
Mom’s hand smoothed my hair aside before gently stroking the nape of my neck. Everything inside me wanted to believe her, to know that she really did love me, that I really was part human. She’d always been there for me, when I was little, when Dad died . . .
. . . except—none of that was real. But how was that possible? I could see the memories etched in my head, so perfectly clear, playing out behind my eyes like detailed videos.
Like videos.
The pressure of her fingers on my neck went from comforting to oppressive in an instant. I jerked away and whirled to face her. “How did you do it? All those memories I have?”
Mom—no, Nicole—sighed, her shaking fingers reaching up to remove her glasses so she could rub the bridge of her nose. “I programmed them. The reason some of them feel especially real is because I created them using a virtual reality program, which allowed me to actually insert you into the memory.”
Programmed. My entire past, everything I’d understood to be true about my life, my family, what had formed me as a person. Stripped away with one simple word. Programmed.
“And the fire?” I whispered. “What kind of a person makes that up? And wait—is your name even Nicole?”
“Yes, it’s Nicole, but Laurent, not Daily.” Mom—Nicole—sighed and rubbed her head. “I was just trying to buy us time, to figure out a way to tell you! My first priority was to keep us safe. The only way I could make sure to protect you was to make you think you were a real girl. There’s no doubt in my head that the government is searching for us, with every resource they have at their disposal. Why do you think I chose Clearwater? I disabled your tracking device, but that doesn’t mean they won’t find us.”
And it was just going from bad to worse. Tracking device, like I was some kind of runaway dog. Except—at least dogs were truly alive. Whereas I was some kind of monster. Part living cells, mostly hardware.
All freak.
She made another move to touch me, but I batted her hand away. “Don’t! I don’t even understand how . . . how can any of this be true? Manufactured emotions?” A tight ache squeezed my throat—programmed? Real? How could I possibly know?—and I lowered my voice to a whisper. “If I’m not human, why does this hurt so much?”
“It’s a little like phantom limb syndrome . . . only for emotions. You might not have the same parts as a regular human, but you can still sense the feeling in those parts when you’re in an emotional state—pressure, warmth, chill, visceral, all of it. Phantom sensations, if you will, copied from the feelings of a teenage human girl. Via an elaborate neuromatrix, we prewired your brain to believe you were formed just like a human body, so it would accept all those sensations as real.”
Prewired. Neuromatrix. It was too much.
“And what about Dad’s shirt?” I sneered, using air quotes around the word “Dad.” “Was that just to buy us time, too? And that stupid necklace?”
Before she could grasp my intentions, I’d lunged forward, grabbed the emerald around her neck, and yanked. The fragile chain snapped, and when it did, I chucked the entire thing across the room.
“Mila!” she gasped before scrambling after it.
I raced down the hall, rushing into my room and locking the door behind me, desperate to escape before I burst into tears.
I threw myself facedown on my bed as the first sob hit, felt the warm tears pool under my cheeks. Tears I wasn’t even sure were real. Were they made up of some weird solution, prompted by “appropriate” environmental stimuli? Was I really sad, or was a computer program telling me to feel sad?
One minute I was a normal girl, the next . . . a monster.
That thought urged me to my feet and over to the oval-shaped mirror topping my white dresser. Frankenstein did not stare back at me. Just my own face. Were my eyes a slightly-too-improbable shade of leaf green? I reached up to slide my fingers through my hair. And my hair—how did it grow? Or didn’t it? Those memories of haircuts I had . . . they must all be fake. Not Mom—Nicole, I corrected once again. But even knowing what I did, calling her by name just didn’t feel right.
Next I touched the wetness on my cheeks. The liquid felt like real tears, but then, how did I even know what real tears felt like? How could I believe anything ever again, when everything I knew about myself was completely false?
Even my face, my familiar heart-shaped face with the extra-wide lower lip and the tiniest smattering of freckles fanning out from my nose. Not real. Not real.
Not. Real.
Before I knew it, my fist flew forward, my urge to destroy that phony reflection eclipsing everything else. Glass shattered and a jagged avalanche spilled across the dresser like a cascade of lies. Glittering lies, strewn in front of me as a reminder of everything I’d lost. Of everything I’d never had.
Once the rush of emotion faded, I surveyed the damage. Stupid. Not only had I made a huge mess, but the act hadn’t done anything but reinforce my otherness. No blood seeping through cuts in my knuckles, and only the faintest of pink scratches. Worst of all—no pain in my hand to speak of.
No, the only pain I was allowed was choking the nonexistent life from my fake heart.
Sweeping the shards onto the floor, I stormed over to the bed and slid between the sheets. Threw the pillow over my head in an effort to block out the world.
But I couldn’t block out the memories, false or not. Couldn’t block out the internal pain I shouldn’t even be able to feel.
Couldn’t keep those annoying phony tears that felt so, so real from flowing.
The familiar, musky scent of horse engulfed me, along with the slightly sweet smell of hay. It was quiet inside, except for the occasional snort or shuffling of hooves.
Quiet, but not safe.
Less than twenty-four hours before, this barn had been my refuge. A place where I could come to recover from Dad’s death in peace, under the nonjudgmental eyes of the horses. In my grief-stricken state, I’d never once believed that something worse could happen.
I’d never once imagined that discovering Dad hadn’t really died would haunt me in ways that his death never could.
Nowhere felt safe anymore.
“Why couldn’t I be a horse?” I asked, the sound of my voice making Bliss swing her massive head toward me, her huge oval nostrils snuffling at my hair. That simple gesture made my throat tighten.
At least she didn’t care if I was a freak.
I reached behind my head to rub her soft muzzle, ignoring the stupid tears that refused to quit welling up. “You wouldn’t even understand if you weren’t . . . normal. Not that any of that’s true, right? I mean, look at me—I’m asking a horse a question. Could it get any more human than that?”
Outside the barn, only a few stars escaped the thick cover of late-night clouds, leaving the sky dark and depressing. Besides the rustling of horses, an occasional cricket chirped. An owl hooted from a nearby tree. But I refused to go back to my room until I was sure my mom—Nicole—was sleeping. Once she’d poked her head in and swept up the disaster I’d made of the mirror, she’d taken to hovering.
Yes, hovering. As if acting like a stereotypical teen’s mom would make everything better. Right now, the sight of her slim, capable figure and concerned face filled me with violence: simultaneous and disparate needs to rage against more mirrors and to break down and sob in her arms.
