Fragments (15 page)

“I’m the last human being on the planet,” he said loudly, walking more quickly to
stay ahead of her, and Kira realized that she was practically shouting at him. She
backed off, forcing herself to calm down; he had to have something about the virus,
but she’d never find it without his help. She need to keep him, and herself, calm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I got loud. I’m very . . .” She took a deep breath,
collecting herself. “I’ve been looking for some very important answers, and you’ve
found them, and I just got overexcited.”

“You’re still real,” he said, backing into a corner. “You’re still here.”

“I’m here and I’m your friend,” she said softly. “You’ve done an amazing thing here—you’ve
found all the information I need. But I don’t know your system; I don’t know how it’s
organized. Will you please help me find what I’m looking for?”

Afa’s voice was soft. “I have everything,” he said, his head nodding up and down.
“I have almost everything.”

“Can you tell me who created RM?” She clenched her fists, forcing herself not to get
loud or aggressive.

“That’s easy,” said Afa. “It was the Trust.”

“Yes,” said Kira, nodding eagerly, “the Trust, keep going. The Trust are the Partial
leaders, the generals and the admirals and the people who made the decisions, right?
You say they made RM?” That was completely the opposite of what Samm had told her;
he’d insisted that the Partials had nothing to do with it, but she’d already suspected
that might be a lie—not Samm’s lie, but one that had been told to him by his superiors.
If the cure for RM was in their breath, manufactured in their own bodies, then the
connection between the Partials and the virus was undeniable. To learn that they had
created it and released it was an easy jump to make.

And yet Afa was shaking his head.

“No,” he said, “the Trust aren’t the Partial generals—they aren’t even Partials. They’re
the scientists who made the Partials.”

Kira’s mouth dropped open in shock. “The scientists? ParaGen? Humans?” She struggled
for words.

Afa nodded. “The Partial generals still follow the Trust; I don’t know why. That’s
where they get all their orders.”

“The Trust,” said Kira, forcing the word out. “The Trust created RM.”

Afa nodded again, never stopped nodding, rocking his whole body slowly back and forth.

“So the people who destroyed the human race were . . . humans.” She groped for a chair,
realized they were all full of documents, and sat heavily on the floor. “But . . .
why?”

“I know everything,” said Afa, still rocking back and forth. “I know
almost
everything.”

K
ira stared at Afa. “What do you mean, you know almost everything?”

“Nobody knows everything.”

“I know,” said Kira, struggling to keep her temper from flaring up. “I know you don’t
know
everything
, but you have so much.” She picked up a handful of printouts from the nearest box,
shaking them tightly in her fist. “You have hundreds of boxes in this room alone,
and more all over the building. You have files in every room, you have cabinets in
the hallways, you have at least twenty salvaged computers in the room we ate dinner
in last night. How can you have so much—the entire history of the Partials—and not
have a scrap about the people who made them?”

“I have scraps,” said Afa, holding up his hand. He shuffled out of the corner, jogging
awkwardly to the nearest door. “I have scraps in my backpack—I’m never supposed to
leave my backpack.” He ran down the hall, shouting over his shoulder, and Kira followed
close behind. “I’m never supposed to leave my backpack. It has everything.” Kira caught
up with him in the cafeteria, the makeshift computer lab where they’d eaten fruit
cocktail the night before. He crouched down in front of his massive backpack and zipped
it open, revealing thick sheaves of paper.

“That’s what’s in the backpack?” she asked. “More papers?”

“The most important papers,” said Afa, nodding. “All the keys to the story, the biggest
steps, the biggest players.” He thumbed through the papers with lightning speed, his
fingers guided by an obvious familiarity. “And the biggest players of all were the
Trust.” He pulled out a slim brown folder, holding it in the air with a flourish.
“The Trust.”

Kira took it gingerly, as she might have touched a baby in the old maternity ward.
It was thin, maybe twenty or thirty sheets of paper at the most—pathetically slim
next to the massive bulk of papers bursting out of the overstuffed bag. She opened
it and saw that the top sheet was an email printout, framed by layers of meaningless
symbols. At the top of the page was the name she hadn’t dared to hope for:

Armin Dhurvasula.

Armin.

Her father.

The email was date-stamped November 28, 2051, and the list of recipients was illegible—another
string of random symbols. She read it breathlessly: “‘So it’s official. The government
has placed an order for 250,000 BioSynth 3s. We’re building the army that will end
the world.’” She looked at Afa. “He knew?”

“Keep reading.” He was more lucid now than before, as if the familiar topic had rejuvenated
his mind.

“‘A quarter million soldiers,’” she continued. “‘Do you have any idea how ridiculous
that is? That’s a small city of completely new beings, not technically human but still
intelligent, still self-aware, still capable of human feeling. It was one thing when
we were making a few thousand Watchdogs, but this is a new humanoid species.’” These
were his words—her own father’s words. She had to fight not to cry as she read them.
“‘The government—even our own board of directors—talks about them like property, but
that’s not how most people will see them, and that’s not how they’ll see themselves.
At best, we’re reverting to the worst excesses of “partial people” and human slavery.
At worst, we’re making humans completely obsolete.’”

Kira shook her head, her eyes locked on the page. “How could he know all this? How
could he know it and not do anything to stop it?”

“Keep reading,” said Afa again, and Kira swallowed her tears.

“‘I don’t know where this is going to end, but I know that there’s nothing we can
do at this point to keep it from starting. The wheels are already moving, the technologies
are already proven—Michaels and the rest of the board could do this with or without
us. We can’t stop it, but we need to do something to tweak it. I don’t want to say
anything else, even on an encrypted server. We’re having a live meeting tonight at
nine in Building C. My office.’

“‘The first thing we’ll do is figure out exactly who we can trust.’”

Kira fell silent, reading and rereading the email until the words seemed to blur and
lose meaning. She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s the first instance of the word,” said Afa, standing and pointing at the final
sentence. “He said they had to figure out who they could trust. From what I’ve been
able to piece together, they formed the group that night, in that secret meeting,
and they started using the word Trust as a code word.”

“He said they were trying to tweak something,” said Kira. “What does that mean? Were
they trying to tweak the plans for the Partials? Or tweak the Partials themselves?”

“I don’t know,” said Afa, taking the folder from her hand. He sat down and began laying
out the papers on the floor. “Everything they did was encrypted—that’s what all this
gobbledygook is up here, and down here. I got through as much of it as I could, but
they were being very careful.” He arranged another printout carefully on the floor
in front of him. “This is the next one, though it doesn’t say much. I assume it’s
in code, but not machine code, or I could have cracked it. They gave themselves pass
codes and phrases so they could talk without their bosses understanding them.”

Kira sat down across from him and turned the document around. It was another email,
from her father like the last one, but this time he was talking about company parking
spaces. Afa had circled several words: Trust. Parallel. Failsafe.

“What do these mean?”

“I’m pretty sure ‘Parallel’ was the name of their plan,” said Afa. “Whatever they
started coming up with that night. Or maybe a second plan, designed to go along with
the first. The ‘Failsafe’ I’m not sure about, because they talk about it in different
ways: Sometimes they’re trying to create something called a ‘Failsafe,’ sometimes
it seems like they’re trying to work against it, and I can’t figure it out.”

“So what is this email saying?”

Afa took it from her hands, touching some of the marked words. “If I’ve deciphered
their code the way I think I have, they’re saying that the plan is underway, and they’ve
started work on the Failsafe, and they need to lie low and wait before holding another
meeting.” He shrugged. “I can’t read any more than that. I’m the last human being
left alive.”

Kira nodded, recognizing from his phrase that the moment of lucidity was passing;
in a few more minutes Afa would be back to his old, mumbling self again. She pressed
him, trying to learn as much as she could before he slipped away. “Where did you get
this?”

“I pulled it out of the cloud. It was encrypted, but I knew most of the keys.”

“Because you worked at ParaGen.” She held her breath, praying that he wouldn’t shut
down at the mention of it. He paused, staring, motionless, Kira clenching her fist
in desperation.

“I was the IT director in the Manhattan office,” he said, and Kira breathed a sigh
of relief. “I’d been watching this grow for years, from one piece to the next. I didn’t
know where it would go. I didn’t know how far.”

“You got this from the office computers,” said Kira, looking up at the rows of computer
drives lining the cafeteria. “Is there any way to get the rest?”

“It’s not in these computers,” he said, shaking his head,” it’s in the clouds.” He
corrected himself, and Kira saw another gap in his comprehension begin to widen: “In
the cloud. The network. Do you know how the cloud works?”

“Tell me.”

“It’s not just up in the sky,” he said. “Every piece of data is stored in a computer
somewhere—a little one like these, or a big one called a server. It’s like a . . .
an ant farm. Did you ever have an ant farm as a kid?”

“No,” said Kira, motioning with her hand for him to keep going. “Tell me about them.”

“It’s like, a bunch of rooms, and a bunch of roads all running between them. You could
make something on one device, and people could see it on the others because it traveled
along through the little roads. Every device had a road. But the cloud is down.” He
looked at the floor and saw the papers, as if noticing them for the first time, and
began cleaning them up. He was silent for too long, and Kira spoke again, trying to
pull him back.

“If all these things are in the cloud, how do we bring it back up?”

“You can’t,” he said, and his voice was still strong—still “present.” “It’s gone forever
with the power grid. The cloud only works if every piece works—every computer from
here to the one you want to talk to, like links in a chain. When the power went down,
the cloud went with it. All the roads in the ant farm got filled in, and none of the
rooms can talk to each other.”

“But the rooms are still there,” said Kira. “The data is still there, on a computer
somewhere, just waiting for us to power it up. If we can find the right computer and
hook it up to a generator, you can read it, right? You know the file system, and the
encryption system, and everything?”

“I know everything,” he said. “Almost everything.”

“So where is the ParaGen server?” she demanded. “Is it here somewhere? Is it back
in the office tower? Let’s go get it—I can go get it right now. Just tell me how to
find it.”

Afa shook his head. “The Manhattan office was financial only. The server we want is
too far away.”

“Out in the wilderness?” she asked. “Listen, Afa, I can go to the wilderness if that’s
what it takes. We have to find the rest of these records.”

“I can’t do it,” he said, hugging the folder and staring at the floor. “I’m the last
human being left alive. I need to keep the records safe.”

“We need to find them first,” said Kira. “Tell me where they are.”

“I’m the last human—”

“I’m right here, Afa,” she said, trying to coax him back into coherence. “We can do
this together. You’re not alone. Just tell me where the server is.”

“It’s in Denver,” said Afa. “It’s on the other side of the continent.” He looked back
at the floor. “It may as well be on the other side of the world.”

“. . . moving through the LZ . . .”

The voice rose from the static like a breaching whale, surfacing in a moment of clarity
before sinking back down in the deep. White noise filled the room again, a dozen different
signals washing over and through one another in Kira’s ears. Afa had shut down completely,
too spooked by their conversation—or by the thoughts their conversation had brought
to mind—to think about anything important. She’d taken him to the food stores and
given him fruit cocktail, hoping it would soothe him, and then left him alone to recover.
She’d searched through his records for a while, desperate to find what she wanted,
but without Afa’s guidance the filing system was impenetrable. As she explored, the
sounds of static had brought her to the radio room, and she listened helplessly to
the whisper of disembodied voices. Lights glowed like dim green stars on the console,
hundreds of buttons and dials and switches arrayed before her. She didn’t touch them.

She listened.

“. . . in B Company. Don’t . . . until they get . . .”

“. . . orders from Trimble. That’s not for . . .”

“. . . everywhere! Tell him I don’t care . . .”

That last one had been human. Kira had learned to recognize the difference between
human and Partial radio traffic, though it wasn’t exactly hard: The Partials were
more professional, stiffer and colder in the way they talked. It wasn’t that they
didn’t have emotions, it was that they weren’t accustomed to expressing them verbally.
The link carried all their emotional cues chemically, and their radio communication
was too disciplined to need any emotion at all. It was pragmatic, even in the midst
of combat. And there was a lot of combat.