Her smile held anything but humor. “Yes, well, the Overseer doesn’t follow galactic law. He just imposes it on everyone else and adds new ones at the drop of a hat to suit his agenda.”
My stomach turned over. The man knew no limits. “Did he do this to you? When you were a kid?”
She shook her head no and visibly tensed.
“I don’t understand.” There were rules about this. People could have mechanical elements inside them as long as they didn’t contain programming, things like bionic limbs or other prosthetics, mainly for medical reasons. Robots, especially humanoid ones, were full of AI. Basically, they were walking, talking computers shaped a bit like people and doing a lot of human tasks. Working toward artificial general intelligence in truly humanlike androids had been banned ever since the Wei-Peng experience. That disaster took up a whole semester in every kid’s history classes. It had proven once and for all that robots that believed they were smarter, faster, and better than humans would eventually band together to destroy their makers.
Luckily for the human race, the experiment had been contained by a necessary fail-safe: the constantly evolving androids had never once been made aware that anything existed outside of the self-sustaining Wei-Peng station. No entrances. No exits. No outside communications. No visitors on or off, ever, from the moment the scientists activated their AGI bots. When the last human heartbeat extinguished on the space station, it blew up. History books told us that Wei-Peng exploded well before the original human crew would’ve died of old age—and they’d been reproducing. The station log, recovered from the debris, reported that the conquering androids hadn’t offered terms of surrender. They chose execution, even for children. It was more efficient.
“How much of you is AI?” I asked, trying to understand. Tess had blood. I’d heard her heart beat against my ear. Touched her everywhere. She was real. I loved her.
“Not much.” She turned away from me, fiddling with her hair again. It was sheer nerves, and I wanted to stop her. “But I get it. You’re right. I’m not fully…human anymore. Not everywhere. It’s disgusting.”
“I didn’t say that.” I turned her back to me. “I’m just surprised, and no part of you is disgusting. Can you explain? I thought any experiments melding AI with the human body were banned after the Wei-Peng explosion.” Scientists and lawmakers had taken a step back from what everyone had assumed was the future, fearing that people could end up dominated by the artificial intelligence inside them. The human mind and body evolved. It stood to reason that an internal AI component connected to that evolving system could also evolve, learning things and behaviors outside of its original programming. That was a risk humans had decided not to take after seeing how quickly Wei-Peng went wrong.
Tess pressed her lips together, a flat line that said she was still afraid to talk.
I cupped her face in my hands and searched her eyes with mine. “You can talk to me. I won’t judge.”
Her fear gutted me. That lack of trust. My fault.
I brushed my thumbs across her cheeks, my heart in a knot. “Every part of you is precious to me.”
Tess’s eyes softened. Her slight nod came just before she stepped back. “It’s not in my brain or anything. I don’t think it’s connected to me in that way, or if it is, I’m not aware of it.” She frowned, probably because that was the whole fear with integrated AI. If it adapted and learned your muscular and nervous systems, making improvements on them, what was to stop it from hijacking your entire body? From getting to the point where the computer ran the show instead of the person?
“Okay.” I wanted her to go on. Nothing was clear to me yet.
“The Overseer commissioned the new technology for himself. It was totally off the books and covered by about a thousand smoke screens. A one-of-a-kind deal, just for him. That’s why the exchange happened at our house, instead of on Starbase 12, where he did almost everything else. And I have no doubt the scientist who developed it died the day he delivered it to my father.” She winced. “I mean, to the Overseer.”
I bit down on a curse. Our house… He’d kept Tess and her mother prisoners to his scare tactics and tyrannical gloom, strapped Tess down in a basement laboratory and stole her blood, and now this—along with a whole hell of a lot of other abusive and shady things that made me want to fly into a rage. Fuck the wall; my fist needed his face.
“What was it exactly? This new tech?” I was curious, but that was it. Any anger or disgust I felt wasn’t directed at Tess. All I wanted to do was take her in my arms and kiss the crease from between her brows, but she was stiff and didn’t particularly look like she wanted to be touched. I hoped she’d relax when she realized I didn’t give a damn what was inside her. I just wanted to be a part of it.
She took a deep breath. “From what I understood from a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear, it’s a computer system integrated into my hand that recharges based on my own kinetic energy. It’s specifically designed to interpret data from electronic locks in close proximity and adjust its own response to disable them. With nothing telling a door to stay closed, it opens.”
“Lock magic.” Incredible. “How did you end up with it?”
Tess backed up a few steps and leaned against the door, staring past my shoulder. “Mom had just died. The person I thought was my father hadn’t looked at me or talked to me in days, or offered a word of comfort, although that was no surprise. I was totally alone, with no idea what was going to happen, or what I should do next. I wanted to know why Mom got so sick like that, just out of the blue. I wanted to know what was happening for her funeral. Help. Understand…”
She shook her head. Her eyes dropped to the floor. “I wanted to find Uncle Nate. That was my real reason for sneaking around. He’d been gone for several days and didn’t even come back when Mom was just lying there…burning up and turning into this…shell. He missed her last days, last hours. Even if he’d changed, pulling back from us, I couldn’t understand him not coming back for Mom and me. Not then. Not when I had no one else.” Her voice wavered. Tear-bright eyes lifted to my face. “I thought if I could just send him a message, he’d come. Even if Mom was gone, I thought he’d come back for me. I knew he would.”
Pressure banded in hard ribbons around my chest. He’d come back, all right. He’d come back to betray her, terrify her, abandon her to strangers, and tell her she was dead.
“Oh, sweetheart…” Everything in me burned to close the distance between us. “I’m aching to reach for you. Please let me, Tess.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. Suddenly, she moved. She came straight into my open arms, and I wrapped her in a tight hug.
“I’m sorry. You must’ve been so scared. So alone.” Eight years old, on her own in the Overseer’s house, not knowing if there was anyone left in the galaxy to love or protect her. It broke my heart.