‘What are you doing, Catarina?’
I ignore him, trying to orient myself in the VR interface, fumbling desperately in the mess of menu items. It’s hopeless. I need a keyboard. The VR chip in my arm is newly grown; it hasn’t yet learned to read my thoughts. It’ll be weeks until it can understand the commands I send to it, and make sense of the impulses my brain generates.
But that’s not entirely true.
This panel is grown from the backup of the one Jun Bei carried, so I still have every file and setting she stored in it. Lachlan may have rewritten my mind, but I still have memories of Jun Bei. There is still some flicker left in me of the girl I used to be. If I can drag back a glimpse of her, just for a moment, I might be able to control my panel enough to launch an attack.
I close my eyes, ignoring the wash of text and colour the VR interface throws at me, trying to zero in on my strongest memories. Leoben’s smile. Ziana singing in the trees. Anna laughing at the impressions of the nurses that Leoben used to do. Cole’s face in the moonlight the first time he kissed me. The night he swore to me that we would always be together.
Something prickles in the base of my skull, and the edges of the VR interface ripple into focus. It’s working. I grasp desperately at more memories, urging them back to me, trying to bond with the girl inside me, with who I used to be.
I see Cole standing beside me, staring out at the mountains through the barred windows of our room, our hands linked together. We were so young and broken, and he was the only thing that could take my pain away. We saw the darkest parts of each other, and we faced them together. He was the brightest light in my life, and I threw myself into him the way someone would hurl herself off a cliff.
Something stirs within me. A presence. A whisper. A keyhole into a dark and hidden part of me. I reach for it, grasping, urging it back to me, and the VR session snaps into focus. Cole’s face fades from my memory, but something deeper takes its place.
I hear a voice rising inside my mind that is not my own.
Her words are clipped and sharp. She speaks the way a rifle fires. She is steel and glass and blood fused into a blade. This panel in my arm is her universe. She knows every line of every file.
I open my eyes and let Jun Bei sweep back into me.
The genkit’s mainframe unfolds before me, sparklingly clear. Files and commands, links and directories sprawled in a virtual map. A firewall pops up as I tilt myself into it, but I’ve faced firewalls before, and I have an arsenal of viruses waiting inside my arm. My fingers twitch, my instincts urging me to type a string of commands, but I don’t need to code that way any more. I can work like Dax does, jacked straight into the heart of the machine. I tilt my head back, my consciousness sliding into my panel, searching for something I can use.
‘You can’t fight this, Catarina.’
Lachlan’s voice is distant, inconsequential. I ignore him. A dozen files rise before me, forming a wall in my vision. A glance at each is enough to bring its meaning back to me, and I pick and choose between them, selecting loops and subfunctions. Lines of code unfurl like smoke billowing from a fire. A single thought brings blocks of logic spinning together, then coalescing and stretching out into infinite virtual space.
A new virus of fresh, devastating code snaps together in my mind, and I wield it like a knife, stabbing it into the genkit’s heart.
The firewall crumbles. It’s almost too easy. Lachlan has been holding me back all this time. The hypergenesis wasn’t just to stop me from studying my DNA, it was to stop me from turning into this. The girl I used to be. A mind too sharp, too powerful for him to control. He gave me his intelligence, sure enough.
It’s the biggest mistake he ever made.
The genkit’s defences peel back like blistering layers of paint, revealing the pure, structured programming at the heart of the machine. Lines of code blink into view like strands in a multidimensional spiderweb that stretches out in every direction as far as I can see. Some are black, others white, some are silver and yellow, each running a different task in the genkit’s memory. A pulsing strand in the distance is a lurid, blazing orange, and I know instantly that it’s the strand I need to break.
It’s a satellite connection linking Lachlan to the tower at Homestake, and it’s pulsing with a constant stream of information. I angle my consciousness closer, skipping through memory banks like a stone across a lake.
‘What are you doing?’ Lachlan shouts, his voice half lost in the wave of code I’m riding.
‘I’m fighting you,’ I whisper.
I trace the strand to a communications port and send every attack, every scrap of malicious code I can remember into its base. Electric shocks. Logic bombs. Every line in the stockpile of weapons I’ve been developing ever since I was a child. ‘You gave me your mind,’ I say as the connection frays and hisses. ‘Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.’
‘You won’t stop it, Catarina.’ Lachlan’s voice is far too calm. ‘The connection is linked to the machine’s core. Breaking it will trip the self-destruct.’
I pause. He’s right. Buried at the base of the glowing orange strand is a web of white that’s wound into the genkit’s power unit. Severing the connection will set off the self-destruct sequence – the same trigger I set off in Homestake, only this machine is a hundred times more powerful. Its blast will take out half the room. I won’t be able to run, not with my wounded leg.
It’ll kill us both within the space of a heartbeat.
Cole’s face flashes into my mind. I just got him back. I have a life and a future. I don’t want to die, but deep down I know what I have to do.
‘You think we’re animals,’ I say, throwing my consciousness harder into the genkit’s architecture. ‘You think we’re controlled by our instincts, that we’re just the sum of our genes. But you’re wrong. I’ve faced death, and I’m not afraid any more. I’m ready to die to stop you.’
I blink back into the room as the connection snaps, severing the link to Homestake. Lachlan’s bloodshot eyes lock on mine, full of something that looks strangely like pride.
‘I’m sorry, Father,’ I breathe as the door to the hallway flies open and the bank of genkits on the wall explodes.
CHAPTER 48
It takes six healing tech syringes to stop the blood pulsing from Cole’s back after he threw his body over me when the genkits exploded. His back shredded down to his titanium-latticed ribs, and the skin on my hands is sliced to ribbons as I haul shards of glass and metal from his flesh. Leoben forces bags of saline, then finally bags of his own blood, into Cole’s veins.
Cole’s heart stops twice. After an hour it grows steady, and Leoben and I stare at each other across the silver-tinted flesh of Cole’s back.
We’re blood-drenched and shaking. Pale and exhausted.
Brother and sister.