Fragments (56 page)

Kira’s mouth fell open. “You created the expiration date?”

“It was a kindness, I assure you,” said Vale. “When the government requested a Failsafe,
I posited the expiration date as a more humane alternative—”

“What’s humane about killing them?”

“It’s not humane, it’s ‘more humane.’ Humans, of course, have an ‘expiration date’
as well, when we’ll die of old age. It’s the same principle. And expiration doesn’t
put any humans in danger, which a Failsafe might have—and eventually did. But my arguments
about the Failsafe and the expiration date were all in the beginning, before we could
see the entire picture. Graeme and Nandita, who were tasked with creating the Failsafe,
saw it long before the rest of us did. They were the ones who built RM.”

“I knew Nandita,” said Kira. “I . . .” She hesitated again, but decided there was
nothing wrong with a little more information. “I lived with her for years—she ran
a kind of orphanage, and I was one of the kids she helped. She’s not a mass murderer.”

“No more than any other human in her position,” said Vale, cryptically. “But by any
measure imaginable, she, and the rest of us, are indeed mass murderers.”

“But that doesn’t hold together,” said Kira adamantly. “If she wanted the human race
dead, completely eradicated, she could have betrayed us to the Partials, or started
spreading poison, or a million other things to kill us, but she didn’t. It had to
be her partner,” said Kira, following him breathlessly as she sorted through the clues
in her head. “Graeme Chamberlain, the one who killed himself. Could he have, I don’t
know, re-engineered the Failsafe behind everyone’s back?”

“You’re still not seeing the entire picture,” said Vale, never looking at her as he
walked briskly down the hall. There was something he was keeping from her, something
he was reluctant to tell. Kira pressed on.

“But Chamberlain acting alone doesn’t add up either,” said Kira, slowing a bit as
she thought deeper into the problem. She ran to catch up. “The cure was part of the
Partials’ design, embedded in their genetic makeup. Why would he make a virus obviously
intended to kill every human on Earth, and then also build a cure perfectly designed
to stop it? It doesn’t make sense. But it does make sense if . . .” The answer was
right there, on the tip of her brain, and she struggled to grab it—to force it to
coalesce into a simple, understandable thought.
There were so many of them working,
she thought,
on so many different pieces. How do they fit together?

Vale walked a few more steps, dragging slowly to a stop. He didn’t turn around, and
Kira had to strain to hear his voice. “I was against it in the beginning,” he said.

“But it’s true?” Kira approached him slowly. “You and the rest of the Trust—you did
this on purpose? You altered the Partial Failsafe to kill humans instead, and you
built them to carry the cure so that . . . Why?”

Vale turned to face her, his face once again tinged with deep anger. “Think about
the Failsafe for a minute—about what it is, and what it represents. We were asked
to create an entire species of sentient creatures: living, breathing individuals who
could think and, thanks to the UN Resolution on Artificial Emotional Response, feel.
Think about that—we were specifically instructed to make a being that could think,
that could feel, that was self-aware, and then we were told to strap a bomb to its
chest so they could kill it whenever they wanted. Ten minutes ago you wanted to free
ten comatose Partials, and you couldn’t stand to kill a single human child. Would
you be able to condemn an entire race to death?”

Kira stammered under the sudden onslaught, searching for words, but he carried on
without waiting for an answer. “Anyone who could create a million innocent lives and,
in the same moment, request a means to kill all of them, without mercy, is not fit
for the responsibility of those million lives. We realized what we were creating in
the BioSynths—creatures every bit as human as ourselves. But the ParaGen board and
the US government saw mere machines, a line of products. To destroy the lives of these
‘Partials’ would be an atrocity on par with every mass genocide we’ve seen in human
history. And yet, we could tell, even before we released the first of them for combat
testing, that they would never be regarded as anything other than weapons, to be cast
aside once they were no longer useful.”

Kira expected his face to grow harsher as he spoke, more furious at this remembered
horror, but instead he became softer, weaker. Defeated. He was repeating an old argument,
but with all the fervor drained out of it.

“At the most fundamental level,” he said, “humanity would not learn to be ‘humane,’
for lack of a better term, unless their lives quite literally depended on it. So we
created RM, and with it the cure, both embedded in the Partials. If the Failsafe was
never activated—if humanity never got to the point where they felt the need to destroy
the Partials in one moment—then no one would have been the wiser. But if humanity
decided to push the button, well . . .” Vale breathed deeply. “The only way for humans
to survive, then, would be to keep the Partials alive. Just as disenfranchising the
Partials would cost humans their humanity, so destroying them like defective products
would cost them their lives.”

Kira could barely think. “You . . .” She searched in vain for the words to make sense
of it all. “All of this was intentional.”

“I begged them not to,” said Vale. “It was a desperate plan, one of terrible consequence—even
worse, in the end, than I’d prepared myself for. But you have to understand that we
had no other choice.”

“No other choice?” she asked. “If you objected so strongly, why not go to the executives,
or to the government? Why not tell them it was evil, instead of going through with
this horrible . . . punishment?”

“You think we didn’t try?” asked Vale. “Of course we tried. We talked and persuaded
and kicked and screamed. We tried to explain to the ParaGen board of directors what
the Partials really were, what they represented—a new sentient life form introduced
to the world without a thought for how they would live in it once the war was over.
We tried to explain that the government had no plans for their assimilation, that
there was no possible outcome but apartheid, violence, and revolution, that it would
be better to shut down the entire program than to condemn humanity to what was going
to happen. But the facts, as they saw them, were simple: number one, the army needed
soldiers. We couldn’t win the war without them, the government was going to get them
from somewhere. Number two: ParaGen could build them those soldiers, could build them
better than any other company in any other industry. We were miracle workers; we made
giant trees with leaves like butterfly wings, delicate and perfect, and when the wind
blew they fluttered like a cloud of rainbows, and when the sun set behind them, the
world lit up with iridescent shade. We made a cure for malaria, a disease that killed
a thousand children a day, and we erased it from the world. That’s not just expertise,
little girl, that’s power, and with that kind of power comes greed. And that’s fact
number three, and the most damning fact of all. The CEO, the president, the board
of directors . . . The government wanted an army, and ParaGen wanted to sell them
one, and what good were the Trust’s arguments in the face of five trillion dollars
in revenue? If we didn’t build their Partial army, they would have found someone else
with more malleable morals to do it instead. You don’t remember the old world, but
money was everything. Money was all that mattered, and nothing we did would stop them
from buying, or ParaGen from selling.

“We could read the writing on the wall. This army was going to be built, and there
would be no plan to give these Partials rights equal to humans. There were only two
outcomes: either the Partials would be killed with this Failsafe in a genocide on
par with the Holocaust, or a violent revolution would break out, which the Partials,
superior in every way, would win, destroying humanity as we knew it. Any way you sliced
it, one species would be decimated, and the death of one would come at the expense
of the soul of the other. All we had left was to try to, somehow, provide for a way
in which both species could work together—that they had to work together just to survive.
And so when Armin pitched us his plan we . . . well, we didn’t like it, not at first
and not ever. But we knew we had a responsibility to see it through. It was the only
plan in which both species made it out alive.”

Kira’s breath caught in her throat. “Armin Dhurvasula.”

“You know him, too?”

She quickly shook her head, hoping her face didn’t give her away. “I’ve heard of him.”

“A genius among geniuses,” said Vale. “This entire thing was his plan—he devised the
pheromone system, and designed the entire interaction of the Failsafe and the cure
and everything else. It was a masterpiece of science. But despite his plan and our
best efforts, the worst still came to pass. I promise you that we didn’t mean for
it to be this devastating; we don’t even understand how RM turned out as ruthlessly
efficient as it did. I suppose it’s small consolation that, when it comes down to
it, this was unavoidable. From the moment we created the Partials, from the moment
we thought about creating them, there was no other possible outcome. Humanity will
destroy itself, body and soul, before it will learn a simple lesson.”

Kira was too stunned to speak. She had expected a plan, she had hoped and prayed that
the Trust had a plan, but to learn that it was a plan of mutual annihilation—to force
both species to work together or die apart—was too much. When she finally spoke her
voice was small and scared, more childlike than she’d sounded in years, and the question
she asked was not the one she thought she would. “Have you . . . seen him? Anywhere?”
She swallowed, trying to look less nervous. “Do you know where Armin Dhurvasula is
now?”

Vale shook his head. “I haven’t seen him since the Break. He said he had to leave
ParaGen, but I don’t know where, or what he’s doing. As far as I know, Jerry and I
are the only ones left—and Nandita, now, I suppose.”

Kira thought back on her list of the Trust. “Jerry Ryssdal,” she said. “He was one
of you, too. Where is he?”

“South,” said Vale solemnly. “In the heart of the wasteland.”

“How can he survive?”

“Gene mods,” said Vale. “He came here once, in the night, and I barely recognized
him—he’s more . . . inhuman, now, than even the Partials are. He’s trying to cure
the Earth, so there’s something left for the meek to inherit; I told him he’d do better
helping me cure RM, but he was always single-minded.”

“And there are two more back east,” said Kira. “Two factions of Partials are led by
members of the Trust: Kioni Trimble and McKenna Morgan.”

“They’re alive?” His eyes were wide, his jaw open. Kira couldn’t tell if he was glad
to hear it or not. “You say they’re leading the Partials? That they’ve sided with
them, against the humans?”

“I think so,” said Kira. “They . . . I’ve never met Trimble, but Dr. Morgan’s gone
completely mad, kidnapping humans and trying to study them so she can cure the Partial
expiration date. She didn’t know about it until Partials started dying, apparently,
but she’s convinced she can solve it with human biology.”
And with me,
she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. She still didn’t know what she was,
or what Vale would do when he found out. And she had to ask him. She felt torn between
paranoia and desperation.

“Trimble knew about our plan,” said Vale. “Morgan and Jerry didn’t; they designed
most of the Partials’ biology, but we weren’t sure we could trust them with the issue
of the Failsafe, and since it didn’t touch their work, we didn’t need to.”

“Who are the others?” asked Kira.

“What others?”

“I found all those names in my research,” said Kira, “but I never found yours, and
I’ve heard of two others that I still don’t know anything about.”

“My name is Cronus Vale,” he said, and Kira nodded in recognition.

“Cronus I’ve heard,” she said, and shot Vale a careful glance. “Dr. Morgan seems to
think of you as a threat.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve met her.”

“It was not the most pleasant experience of my life.”

“She’s petty and arrogant and heartless,” said Vale. “By the end, she had all but
given up on humanity as a species.”

“That sounds like her.”

“If she ever finds this place,” said Vale, “we’re all doomed. My philosophies are,
as you’ve seen, somewhat opposed to hers.”

“You’re trying to protect humanity, even if it means the enslavement of the Partial
race,” said Kira, and the truth was beginning to dawn on her. “What happened to your
ideals? What is your plan now? For the survival of both races?”

“After twelve years, I’ve finally come to understand something,” said Vale. “Extinction
has a way of making you choose sides,” said Vale. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, but
if I can only save one species, I’ve made my choice.”

“It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” said Kira. “There’s a way to save both.”

“There was,” said Vale. “But that dream died with the Break.”

“You’re wrong,” said Kira, and she could feel tears welling up. “You, Armin, Nandita,
and Graeme . . . all of your work was about this, about both races surviving. There
must be something that I can do!”

“I promised you information,” said Vale, “and I’m a man of my word. Tell me what you
need to know, and I’ll give you everything I can.”

They climbed the stairs to the hidden lab in the spire, and Kira considered the question:
She had so many; where should she start? She wanted to know how RM worked, and what
exactly the relationship was between the virus and the cure. If the same being produced
both, how did they interact? She also wanted to know about the expiration date: how
it functioned, how they might be able to work around it. Vale had been working on
RM for years without cracking it, but he seemed to have no interest in the expiration
date; he might know something valuable that he hadn’t followed up on yet. “Tell me
about the expiration date,” she said.