"It was summer. We had been in Cambridge for two months, almost living a normal life. Karden was busy planning his next maneuver but staying close to home. Our little girl had just turned one. It was so hot." She looks at me and explains like it just happened, "It was summer, you know? August. The baby was sleeping, and Karden was working on plans, and I said, 'Wouldn't a dish of ice cream be nice?' He nodded and said he'd keep an eye on Rebecca if I wanted to go get some. I was walking back from the market when I heard the shots and explosions. The front door was open and bursting with flames. The windows were glowing with orange light and smoke. I ran, screaming, breaking a window with my bare arms, reaching, trying to get in to save them, but something pulled me back."
She looks down at her arms and lightly traces one scar. "I thrashed, desperate to get to them, and then I felt a tazegun at my neck, and I knew they had found us. When I woke, I was in prison, and they told me my husband and daughter were both dead--all for a cause that in an instant didn't matter to me anymore. They wouldn't even let me make any kind of arrangements for their funerals. I never saw them again. As far as I know, their remains were shoveled up along with the burned rubble of the house. I spent the next eleven years in prison. They let me out early when my father died and my mother was breathing her last breaths--it was called an act of clemency. For the next few years, I tried to figure out if there was any life left for me, if there was anyone or anything worth living for."
She pauses, her fingers nervously weaving together. "I did some searching, looking for leads to family--anyone I might be connected to--but my parents were only children, and so was I. It appeared we came from a long line of dead-ends. The searching became an obsession, and I kept going back farther and farther, learning a lot about my ancestors. I stumbled on a few things that surprised me, especially one ancestor who left an educational trust for our family. He appeared to be a dead-end too, but there was one unusual entry of his name in the search records that--" She looks sideways at me. "I'm rambling. The long and short of it is, in the meantime, I had to get a job, which wasn't easy for someone with my past. I finally got a tip from a small research facility in Boston about the position with Gatsbro. I thought that maybe..." Her brows pull together and she momentarily shuts her eyes.
She turns abruptly and looks at me. "Those are plenty of straight answers. Now, will you give me one?"
She's earned it. I nod.
"You've never talked about your family."
My family. She's going for the jugular. But then, so did I.
"Your brother, for instance, tell me about him."
My brother?
It's as if she can read my thoughts, and she adds, "I was just wondering if he was anything like you."
I shake my head. "No, nothing like me. He was wild. He had a mind of his own and hated anyone telling him what to do with it. He moved out when I was just twelve, so we never got to be close."
"You didn't like him?"
I think about it. I resented him in so many ways. The way he ignored
me. The way pressure was put on me because of him. The way he just left us and only came back when he needed something. But I never stopped hoping he would care. I heard him when I was in the hospital. I couldn't talk or see, but I could hear him. I heard him hovering near my bed, shoes scuffling, feet kicking the wall in his trademark angry way. He called me stupid, but he said it through tears and in the way I had always hoped he would, like a brother who cared. And even though it was what I had always wanted to hear, I thought, Too little, too late. You're too late, brother--
Miesha touches my arm. "Locke?"
I startle and try to cover my lapse with a quick response. "No, I didn't like him. I didn't want anything to do with him. He was a lowlife." Her face is dark, disturbed. How long had I been staring into the past? When I lose track of time, I don't know if it's seconds, minutes, or even longer. I am just gone. Kara warned me not to wander off into la-la land, but for the first time, I'm wondering if it is more than that. Maybe my BioPerfect isn't so perfect after all. What if some memories that were scraped, pulled, and wrung from my brain, then stuffed back into froggy blue gel, don't know they're obsolete. Maybe--
"Locke."
I focus again. "I'm sorry."
"You've been doing so well, but you have to try harder. You have to watch your lapses. In just a few seconds of checking out, something serious could happen."
I nod. She doesn't have to elaborate on what the something might be. We both know that this world is not like Gatsbro's secluded estate, where I was a baby in a well-padded pram. Out here I'm an underage illegal creation, running with a fake ID, with a desperate and angry scientist after me.
"I'll be careful, Miesha. As careful as I can. I don't know why--"
"Refreshments?"
Miesha and I are both surprised by the hanging Bot that has come up behind us. She swivels to face us. As with Dot, the Council on National Aesthetics has decided she has no need for legs, or maybe legs would just get in the way of her servicing the human population. I try not to stare, not knowing if it is even impolite to stare at a Bot, but her face is so human that I still avert my eyes from the thick bar protruding from the top of her head and attached to an overhead rail. A passenger coming down the aisle grumbles at her, and she folds her body up flat against the ceiling until he passes.
"We should get something," Miesha says to me. "It's going to be a long night, and who knows when we'll get another chance." She looks up at the Bot. "Two energy waters and two protein cakes." The drinks and cakes are dispensed from the bottom of her torso stump. I can't help but wonder how that design made it past the aesthetics council.
"Two hundred duros, please."
Miesha pulls her money card from her pocket and waves it over the Bot's extended palm. A bar of lights blinks across the stump of the Bot's torso as the money is accepted and approved. "Thank you," she says, and she hands us our order and moves on to the next car.
Miesha begins to slip her card back into her pocket, then stops. She looks at it like she has never seen her own card before, turning it over to examine both sides.
"What's wrong?"
"My card."
I watch her eyes dart back and forth like she's retracing some sort of sequence, and with each darting pass, her face grows darker.