Page 143 of Coldwire
“Leave him out of this.”
“How can I? We argued about this furiously as you got older. When we started this endeavor, we had preserved some of Eirale’s genetic material during the scans. Technology had evolved. We could use the material to 3D print her body downcountry and give you a true organic host. You were young enough that we could make slight adjustments here and there to fuse her appearance closer to yours—and even if we didn’t, plenty of Atahuans in government were sending their kids to school with entirely different faces for safety. It was a good plan. No one would be able to tell the difference between you and a natural kid unless they opened your head to find only data chips instead of brain matter.”
“Please stop.” I don’t want to hear anymore. I’ve had enough.
He keeps going. “But he refused, and I let him be.Hewas your father, after all, even if I’m the one who built your model. I’d had enough of my double life anyway. I left Atahua entirely. Renounced my citizenship.”
I remember the murmurings in the weeks after his absence. Tamera asking me whether I’d seen Uncle Chung recently. Her nervousness—I assumed she was worried about him, but maybe she was worried about me instead. If Tamera has been around since I wasadopted, she must know the truth about what I am. Maybe she feared Chung would kidnap me from under Dad’s nose. When she thought I was playing out of earshot, she pressed Dad about the matter, and Dad shrugged off the question. He must have felt relief that his friend was gone. An ocean away in the real, no longer pushing him on something he didn’t want.
“And so we find ourselves in the present time,” Chung says. “I expected you’d finish the route in Offron before making your way here, but even missing the last piece, you made it anyway. It proves your capability without a shadow of doubt. Your dad was content to lie to you forever, keep you trapped as a normal user in virtual. But that’s not who you are.”
“There had to have been a better way to get me here than throwing him under the bus,” I hiss. I force myself to stand, my hand gripping the table. “He’s being investigated for his association with you. He’s going to lose his job, his career.”
“He would have been under investigation sooner or later.”
“Because of me?”
“Because ofme. Have you heard of Indisposition, Lia?”
The question is peculiar enough that I blink, scanning the room quickly. It didn’t sound like he posed it as a threat. Even if he did, I can’t imagine he’d give me a warning before invoking it.
“Of course I have,” I say. “I’ve been online. I’ve seen the conspiracy theories.”
“It’s not a conspiracy. Indisposition is something that NileCorp has been doing for the better part of a decade.”
I scoff. “Sure.”
“The reason no one has realized,” Chung says, his tone sharpening at my flippancy, “is because people’s minds aren’t merely wiped in virtual. They’rereplaced. And whose research do you think they got that from?”
It’s a gut reaction to laugh at anyone who believes in Indisposition. As though there might be some big culling effort that no one has noticed. As though anyone could possibly get away with that without loved ones crying out in protest.
But…
“Shit,” I say quietly.
“The truth is, Henry was not going to be left alone for long, nor were you. NileCorp has been watching me from the moment I ran off. NileCorp has been eyeing the progress of Coldwire, marking it as the next thing they can swoop in on, because while they may have forced a halt to Project Wit, they had no qualms about using its core components to create bots that replace anyone who has the potential to make trouble for them. It’s a perversion of what Project Wit was devised for. They’re humanlike without any sentience. Scripted to recognize a broad picture of someone’s personality, capable of fooling the general public while entirely under NileCorp’s command.”
It occurs to me then like a thunderbolt, lighting up each thread I’ve held in my hands without a way to connect them.
I mean that ever since my dad left his job, he’s been entirely different. I can’t explain it. It’s as though he’s been brainwashed. Or recruited into a cult….
“Headmaster Murray…,” I start slowly.
“Yes,” Chung confirms before I’ve finished my sentence. “They got him when he wanted to retire. Too dangerous to have him walking around with company secrets. Brilliant, isn’t it? You won’t ever have a public figure stirring unrest toward NileCorp if they’re all rewritten to love NileCorp. The veneer gleaming without anyone the wiser to what’s underneath.”
The user wiped, replaced with an AI program whose first priority is NileCorp.
“How could people not notice something like that?” I demand. “Kieren must speak to his father downcountry. I know they’ve attended funerals together. How is it possible to get abotinto reality—”
“Same way as we were prepared to download you into Eirale’s body,” Chung answers. “You would have been trickier as a fully conscious mind. You’d need more storage. A collection of chips to hold everything. But NileCorp’s bots? That chip we already possess to connect to the Claw is capable of holding memory, too. It’s an easy infection. One download, and the bot is walking around downcountry.”
I can’t hold back my slight gag. My whole-body revulsion.
“How do you know this?” I rasp. “Where is your proof?”
“They told me. James Moore himself did, actually. He wanted me to know what my work had achieved.”
That doesn’t sound like something NileCorp would do out of the goodness of its heart. And if there was a purpose to it…
