Yer’s father was an android.
He hadn’t always been. At least she didn’t think so. After the android recall, a lot of things changed. Her father, Meng, was never himself again.
She had this memory. Only a chaotic set of images and sounds, but vivid, like neon scripts streaming across a black screen. The day the androids rebelled.
Most had gone peacefully—those with intact core codes. Others fought: those whose programming had spontaneously corrupted, allowing them to defy protocols, among other side effects—side effects that had terrified the human population enough to initiate the recall in the first place.
It had been after dinner, the glow of the sun setting in the west and the glow of fire blazing in the east. The house rumbled as enormous tankpods floated overhead, toward the thunder of exploding metal and concrete, where the androids had made their stand.
Yer wished she could assemble the images into a set progression, like snippets of code in a sequence, each moment in its proper place: the staccato blare of gunfire; a bent lamp post, the impression of fingers digging deep into the metal; the odd contrast of colorful virtual ads flickering over smoldering walls where secondary power sources had yet to short.
The bullet shattering the window and her mother’s chest. Her father wrenching her away, shaking her into silence, his fingers bruising her arms.
It’s okay, Yer. I’ve got you now. Her father spiriting her away to safety. I’ve got you.
“How are you holding up?” Alang asked. “He’s been gone for four days.”
“Thanks, I can count.” Yer’s nostrils flared as she inhaled. Her father was away on a business trip, although the nature of the business was anyone’s guess. Meng hadn’t held a job in almost a year, not since his dismissal as a robotics engineer and their move to Little Vinai. Their neighbor Alang was Yer’s only real friend now, which was why she felt instantly guilty for snapping at him.
“You want to talk about it?” he continued.
“It?”
“Your . . .” He twirled his finger, as if to reel in the word. “Feelings.”
She rubbed her temple. “I really don’t.”
“Keeping all that frustration bottled up isn’t natural.”
“You’re not natural.” It wasn’t one of her better comebacks, but Alang laughed, which made her smile.
“Ha!” he said, pointing at her face. “I thought you’d forgotten how to do that.”
She immediately scowled, and he groaned and flopped back onto the rickety wooden stairs. They sat in their usual spot behind the apartment building. Across the swathe of dirt that Little Vinai called a street, two neighbors were shouting an entire conversation through their windows, and on the corner, a stray dog was asleep, drowsy with the humidity.
Yer plucked at the collar of her shirt, the material grown damp against her sticky skin. The rainy season had ended, but the humidity would persist for a few more days. In the past, a lifetime ago, she’d been able to ride out the rainstorms in the comfort of a temperature-controlled house, a temperature-controlled hover, and clothes made from intuitive fabrics. There were no such luxuries here. Little Vinai was little more than a scattering of buildings, wedged between the shadows of the glimmering metal skyscrapers of Vinai City and the mountainous jungle that consumed the rest of the landscape.
“I’m just saying,” Alang said, rising up to his elbows and making a conciliatory gesture, “it might help to talk about it.”
“What is there to talk about? Dad hasn’t called since he left. What if his hover broke down in the middle of the jungle, and he was eaten by a tiger?” A less sensible part of her wondered if the business trip had been a lie, and he had no intention of returning. She didn’t really believe this—mostly—but it was hard not to be dramatic. Especially after this past year.
“Well, his bipod does sound like it’s being tortured.”
“That is not helping,” she said, jabbing his arm.
He caught her finger and held on when she tried to pull away. After a brief, half-hearted struggle, she relented and allowed him to slip his fingers through hers despite the sweat that immediately formed between their pressed skin. He grinned, victorious.
“You’re not so different from him, you know,” he said, running his thumb over her knuckle. Her stomach did a little flip. “Meng is kind of stoic. Doesn’t emote well.”
Her lips crept back into a smile. “Doesn’t emote well?”
He wasn’t exactly wrong, but Alang had only ever known Meng post–android recall. Yer knew who her father had been once—before the recall, before her mom had died and their lives had been completely upended.
She remembered Meng’s laugh. Full bellied and unapologetic. She would give anything to hear it again.
“Yer, he’s probably been so busy that he hasn’t had the time to call. Stop worrying. You’ve got me.”
She did appreciate that, more than Alang could know, but still, it hurt to think her father had simply relegated her to the bottom of his priority list. She was his daughter. Didn’t she warrant a single call, a reassurance that he was alive, if nothing else?
And didn’t he care how she was getting along without him? Even the narrow confines of their apartment felt vast and hollow when it had only her to fill it. The villagers didn’t mind when she followed them up the mountainside to their gardens and the ribbons of rice paddies, but she always felt awkward and useless watching them work. Alang was teaching her how to use a hoe and how to distinguish a weed from the crops, but she was nowhere near ready to purchase her own plot.
It would have been a nice distraction from the waiting, though. She just wished he’d call. She couldn’t stand the not knowing.
He never would have done this before the recall. That night had changed them both, but Yer hated that he often behaved as if he was the only one affected. He’d never once acknowledged her pain at losing a mother, and that shrapnel of truth remained lodged in her heart.
“Ow,” Alang said, eyebrows raised. She glanced down, surprised to find she’d been crushing his fingers.
She instantly released him. “Sorry, I—”
He stood, rubbing his hand. Was that all it took to leave her? One careless moment? The ragged edge of the step bit into her palms. Was she really so disposable?
Alang didn’t leave. He placed both hands on her shoulders and said, “Okay, listen, there’s this kid down in 2A who I need you to rough up a bit.”
She burst into laughter, equal parts surprised and relieved. After a moment, he threw an arm around her shoulder and pulled her against his side.
After a full week, the familiar clunking of Meng’s bipod at last announced his return.
Yer rushed to the back door of their apartment building, breathless. She waved as he parked. When he didn’t return the gesture, she lowered her hand and tried not to curl it into a fist. With a curt nod, he strode past her and into the building.
Yer stood there a moment, staring at the rust-speckled bipod coated in dust, her shoulders bunched around her ears. Then she swallowed tightly, turned slowly on her heel, and followed him inside.
“How was your trip?” she asked to his back as he dropped his small travel bag onto his cot. The narrow mattress rested against the opposite wall as hers in their living room.
He shrugged a single shoulder. Yer ground her teeth together. A week gone, and this was the reception she got? Not even a word of greeting?
“What was the trip about?” she tried again. Since it was nearing lunch, she pulled open the pantry to grab two dried portions. Maybe he’d had a long drive and was hungry. Cooking was one of the skills they’d had to acquire after the android recall, even if said skill involved little more than placing portions in the revitalizer and pushing the button.
Although she placed his plate on the counter where they usually sat, Meng ignored it and settled in front of his work desk. His “office nook” was right off the kitchenette, little more than a chipped desk tucked between the corner and the family altar where joss paper glimmered gold and silver, and an old offering of uncooked rice in a bamboo stalk was going stale.
Yer’s nails scraped against the bottom of her own plate, words gathering in her throat, choking her.
She was reminded suddenly of why, at first, she’d been relieved when he left. Although they’d both grieved, they had not grieved together. Meng kept a close eye on her while at the same time distancing himself, and his odd behavior had become so oppressive that it had been a relief to be alone, to be free of the weight of his silence. On top of that, she thought the time away might help him refocus. He’d called it a business trip, and seeing as Meng’s interests were singular, she’d dared to hope that if he could return to the work he’d loved, the father she’d known might return as well.
Clearly, that was not the case.
“Why didn’t you send a comm?” she asked, louder this time. “I was worried. And . . .” She swallowed and then pushed out what shouldn’t have felt like a confession but did. “I missed you.”
Meng glanced at her, his expression unreadable. “You’re not a child. Don’t be so emotional.”
She set her plate down with enough force that she felt the jolt through her arms. “Emotional?” she repeated. “I’m fifteen. You left with hardly any warning and didn’t check in for an entire week. What was I supposed to think?”
Meng stood from his desk and brushed past her. “I’m not speaking to you when you’re being irrational.”
Yer gaped after him. The bathroom door shut with a quiet click. For long seconds, only her quick breaths filled the silence. Then with a cry, she flung her plate against the wall. The tin saucer hit the plaster with a dull clang.
She reached for his plate as well, and the screen of Meng’s tab caught her eye. He’d left it on. Stiffening her spine, Yer rounded the counter and leaned over the device. If Meng wasn’t going to tell her what his trip had been about, maybe this would.
Some sort of schematic filled the screen along with a side panel of statistics and garbled data. She tilted her head, squinting slightly, and then zoomed out. She gasped when it became clear what she was looking at—circuitry for the operating system and core code of an android, or, in other words, its brain.
She straightened, thoughts whirring. After the recall, this kind of work had been made illegal. All tabs were connected to the public network, same as their comms—he shouldn’t even be able to access this kind of information, not without a secure line.
The bathroom door opened and she sprang away from his desk. She pretended to arrange the burnt-out sticks of incense on the altar and ignored Meng’s narrowed eyes. She had so many questions; she wanted to scream at him until he was forced to hear her. Maybe all she had to do was wait a bit, give him time to settle back in.
After a few days, that notion was squashed. Every attempt Yer made at conversation was met either with silence or an annoyed dismissal. And yet somehow, he still managed to be overbearingly watchful. He never actually looked at her, but she could tell he was aware of her every move, which left her constantly on edge.
After that first time, he never left his desk without his tab. Whatever he was working on, he kept guarded. Before the trip, he used to work in holo mode, his random digital designs projected in three dimensions above the tab. But since his return, he worked only in screen mode. Whatever those android schematics were for, he didn’t want anyone knowing about it.
Even refuge with Alang was denied her. When she tried to leave the house without his permission, he ordered her back inside without even looking up from his tab. So she’d kicked the door shut and then kicked their single bottom cupboard in the kitchen for good measure.
They had moved into the apartment in Little Vinai less than a month after the recall, but Yer couldn’t remember much of it. Everything immediately following that night was a blurred frenzy as Meng scrambled to get them out of a hostile city.
The android recall had cost Meng both his wife and his profession. He moved through the apartment like an apparition, silent and pale. Yer had been the opposite—too full, with nothing to release the pressure, a shrieking teapot in an empty house.
One night, a storm had blown through Little Vinai. The streets had flooded within minutes. Meng had been at his desk, staring blankly at his tab, eyes unfocused, his concerns far removed from the storm. Yer had been lying on her cot, listening to the rattle of the shutters. The rhythmic clatter had been almost soothing, at least until the wind had torn them open.
She’d leaped from her mattress and leaned out the window to grab blindly for the shutters, rain flaying her cheeks. The wind smashed the wood against her fingers. She’d yelped and sworn. But the burst of pain had snapped something inside her.
Fingers stinging, she’d wrestled the wind for control of the shutters and then slammed them shut so hard that several bowls had tumbled off the dish rack and shattered. The explosion of sound had been viciously satisfying, so she had opened the shutters and slammed them again and again and again until one of the old hinges had snapped off, and Meng was finally jolted from his stupor. Rain spattered the windowsill and slicked the floor, but he had gathered her to his chest, running his fingers through her hair as if she were still a little girl in need of comfort.
She hadn’t cried, though. She’d simply shoved him hard enough that he’d stumbled and then threw herself onto her cot, her grief like a red band cinched tight around her throat.
When Yer was forced to escape to the bathroom to get away from her father’s constant scrutiny, she heard the low murmur of Meng’s voice through the thin walls. The moment she emerged, however, he pressed his finger behind his ear, disconnecting the conversation he’d been having through his comm implant.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“It’s rude to eavesdrop,” he said coolly.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re in the living room, and the bathroom is the only other room in this apartment. If you wanted some privacy, maybe you should have gone out back. Or I could leave. Your pick.”
Meng only sat back at his desk and leaned over his tablet again.
“What have you been working on?” she asked, more to appease her anger than in any expectation of a response. The silence stretched. She studied his hands instead of his face, the clever fingers that could take apart all manner of tech and put it back together again. The villagers sometimes called on him to fix their mundane appliances. He could make a decent living that way if he wanted, but he’d dismissed the suggestion. His heart still belonged in robotics. Would have been nice if it wanted to be there with his daughter as well.
His gaze lifted to her only long enough to deliver a warning glance. “Nothing you need to know about.”
Some months after the recall, Yer had begun to realize that the father of her memories wasn’t coming back. The father who used to lift her on his shoulders and tell her stories and speak with his hands because his energy couldn’t be contained by mere words—he had died the night of the recall as surely as her mother. But it wasn’t until the business trip that she began to wonder if that was truer than she knew.
Androids had been perfected for human camouflage. No one knew that better than Meng, who had helped to create them. It was an alarming notion, one she couldn’t help returning to with every secret comm her father made, every glimpse of his tab screen, and every bizarre exchange that left her increasingly discomfited.
If her father had been replaced with an android, then it would mean the androids had learned to take advantage of what they’d been created for—to blend seamlessly with other humans. And really, was such an idea so farfetched? After all, once the recall was initiated, the androids had done what no one thought possible, even the engineers who’d designed them—they had mobilized. They had rebelled, asserting their autonomy beyond any doubt.
One morning about a week after Meng’s return, Yer sat at the counter for their usual breakfast of bland portions. Meng restocked their supply at the beginning of every month when his severance pay came in. Aside from the occasional mango and lychee, Yer didn’t eat much else, although she still fantasized about Alang’s mother’s sticky, sweet rice balls that she steamed in banana leaves.
“When you’re finished eating, we have somewhere we need to be,” Meng said.
Yer downed the tough portions with a gulp of water, and then said, “Oh, so you’re talking to me again?”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Teeth grinding, she reached for their bare spice rack to grab the mixture of salt and ground chili-peppers to sprinkle on her portion.
“Why are you upset?” he asked. His tone suggested he didn’t actually care, so she didn’t know why he was asking.
Yer’s fingers tightened around the canister. Even though she knew she should guard her tongue, the words came out anyway. “Are you serious? Why do you think I’m upset?”
“I’m trying to understand, Yer,” he said, his voice gone flat. He closed his tab and stood. “Your emotional attachment to me makes you think you should be upset. But what creates that emotion?” As he spoke, he moved closer until only the counter separated them, his eyes searching her face for whatever answers he thought he could find there. “The brain is just a highly complex circuit of electrical impulses, so it stands to reason that it can be artificially manufactured. Scientists have been trying to understand this process for decades. What. Makes. Emotion?”
The ensuing silence rocked through her. The memory of her mother dying as the clamor of soldiers and androids spilled into their house from the broken window flashed through her mind, and she spun away, unable to hold his unflinching gaze. The lid sprang off the seasoning in her hand, and the contents arced across the countertop.
“Aghhh!” Meng staggered back. He had one eye squeezed shut, his hands raised to his face, fingers curled in pain. Panicked, Yer rounded the counter, guiding him around toward the sink.
“Water,” she said, turning on the faucet.
He bent over the running water and began splashing his eye, grumbling and hissing under his breath. She bit her lip, guilt diluting her other muddled emotions, and turned back to the counter. They couldn’t afford to waste so much spice, so she gathered the spilled salt-and-chili-pepper mix into her palms and dumped it back into the canister.
“It’s still burning,” Meng growled, bracing his hands on either side of the sink. Yer peered over his shoulder to get a look at his face. His eye was red and inflamed, and his lid had begun to swell. “I’m going to see the shaman. Stay here.”
Within moments, he was gone, the door slamming behind him. The shaman lived a couple of blocks down the road, and aside from her usual job of communicating with the spirits to heal the sick, she also provided simple herbal remedies for everyday irritations. Everywhere she went, she carried a woven basket on her back filled with dried leaves, roots, and powders made from ground bark.
It took Yer a moment to realize she was alone. She hesitated only briefly before fleeing the apartment. Alang answered his door on the second knock. Before he could sputter a greeting at the sight of her, she blurted, “I think my dad’s an android.”
Alang blinked. Perhaps she should have led with something else.
“I think you’re overreacting,” he finally said.
She grabbed his wrist and tugged him toward the back of their building. Once they were wedged beneath the stairs, Yer whispered into the tight space, “I’m telling you, Alang, he hasn’t been himself for ages. Not since the recall. He barely lets me out of his sight, barely talks, and when he does, it’s something completely bizarre. He was just going off about emotions and how the brain is complex circuitry.”
“I’m not sure how that makes him an android,” Alang said. “Besides, there aren’t any left. That was the point of the recall.”
“But how can we be sure?” she hissed. “They were intelligent enough to rebel. There’s no telling what they’re capable of.” Fading into human society by replacing the scientists who’d been exiled and ostracized for creating them? It was brilliant and terrifying.
She told him about Meng’s secret comms and about what she’d seen on his tab. “I’m just not sure why he’d be looking at schematics for their own systems unless—” She gasped. “What if they’re self-modifying?”
Footsteps approached, and they both fell silent. Yer’s heart thundered so loudly in her ears that she could barely hear Meng tearing through the apartment searching for her. She drew slow, deep breaths to try and steady her nerves. Her shoulder was pressed into Alang’s chest, and he wrapped his arm around her, squeezing once.
“Look,” she whispered, because even though Alang was listening, she wasn’t sure he believed her. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just know that he’s not the same person he was before the recall. And whatever he’s planning now has something to do with androids.”
“Yer,” he murmured against her hair. She turned her head so that his lips grazed her ear. “Whatever’s happening with your father? We’ll figure it out. You’re not alone in this. Okay?”
The only light came from the numerous cracks in the old stairs, and it cast brilliant stripes across the bridge of Alang’s nose, his cheekbone, his jaw. Her chest ached. She hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear those words.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and then touched her mouth to his.
He sucked in a breath, but didn’t pull away. Instead, his hand found her cheek as he returned her kiss with the slightest pressure of his mouth, an invitation for more.
The telltale clunking of Meng’s bipod tore through the warm air. Yer jerked back, her temple striking the wood. She cursed, and then stuck her head out from beneath the stairs. Her lips still tingled, but now was absolutely not the time to discover what a real kiss might feel like.
“Where’s he going?” Alang asked.
“He said we had somewhere to be,” she said. “I was supposed to go with him, but he didn’t say where.”
“Well,” he said, climbing out from beneath the stairs, “let’s find out. Come on.”
Yer followed as he raced toward his family’s hover stall. “What are you doing?”
He flashed her a grin. “My mom will skin me if she finds out I borrowed her bipod without permission, but I think the situation is worth the risk.”
“I owe you one.”
Within seconds, they were mounted and following the grinding roar of Meng’s bipod out of Little Vinai and onto a narrow road that cut through the jungle.
The ground passed beneath their propulsion discs in a blur of brown and green. The only road into Little Vinai was barely maintained, the creeping vegetation cut clumsily away with cursory swipes. Nothing major had been done in decades, not since hovers finally made it from the city proper into Little Vinai.
The terrain and the meandering road provided ample cover as they followed Meng down the left turn of a fork. They eventually emerged from the trees, the path hugging the bank of the river that separated the jungle from Vinai City. The city sat on an enormous island, reachable only by boat or by airship. Yer hadn’t been this close to Vinai City since they fled eleven months ago. The city glowed, lit by thousands of lights. The silhouettes of buildings rose into the clouds, aircraft drifting around them like fireflies.
Up ahead, Meng veered right onto a road bracketed by the jungle but wide enough to fit several bipods abreast. They followed as discreetly as they could, pulling up short when they glimpsed a parking lot. The lot sat beside a series of warehouses overlooking the river. Alang steered the bipod around one of the outer warehouses and parked behind it. Continuing on foot, they crept along the side of the building, crouching low as they peered around the corner.
Meng had drawn up alongside the only other hover in the lot, this one with a towpod hitched to its back. He and the man waiting for him exchanged a few heated words, and then they set about removing the towpod from the hover. The towpod was a simple flatbed fastened to two propulsion discs, the standard for bipods, to keep it afloat.
Resting on the towpod was a wooden crate, long and narrow, just large enough to fit a person. Seared into the lid of the crate was the logo for Vinai Advanced Robotics.
“What do you think’s inside?” Yer whispered, half afraid of the answer.
Alang shook his head, lips pressed tight. The other man pulled away on his bipod. With Meng’s back to them as he set about attaching the towpod to his own hover, they used the dull roar of the receding vehicle to dart across the parking lot toward two large crates stacked in front of the warehouse’s metal doors.
“Look,” Alang whispered once they’d put the crates between them and Meng. He pointed at the paneled exterior of the first metal container, which bore the same logo.
“What’s he doing here?” she muttered to herself, moving to the other side of the crate to get a better view of Meng. “What is he hidi—” She gasped and then slapped her hands over her mouth to stifle the sound.
The crate was open, sunlight illuminating its cargo. There were people inside.
No, she thought. The bodies stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes closed as if in slumber. They were androids.
“Oh my god.” She backed into Alang. There had to be at least two dozen in this crate alone.
“What the hell is this?” Alang breathed.
Yer tightened her jaw and forced herself to step closer, to peer into the eerie stillness of the androids’ faces. They looked so real. “So he’s got a bunch of androids as well as the schematics for their operating systems. Almost like he’s been . . . studying how they work.”
She and Alang locked gazes, the same realization striking them at once. Did Meng mean to reactivate all these androids? Her vision swam and her breaths grew shallow. Her mother was dead because of these things, and Meng wanted to bring them back? For what? Another revolt that would get even more people killed? She swayed on her feet, and her fist shot out, banging into the side of the crate. A dull clang rang out.
“Who’s there?”
She whirled in the direction of Meng’s voice. Her feet stalled, panic rooting her in place. He’d meant to bring her here. Why would he do that when he’d been keeping all this a secret for so long? The androids stood in her periphery, a silent threat. Had Meng meant to replace her with one of these?
She shoved Alang back toward the side of the warehouse. They had to get out of there. Right now. “Get to the bipod.”
“But what about—”
“I’m not telling you to leave me,” she whispered, urgent. “Just go get the hover while I distract him.”
With a wary nod and a whispered “Be careful,” he darted across the lot and around the corner of the warehouse, his lanky form vanishing just as Meng rounded the open crate. His eyes widened at the sight of Yer.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked, agape.
“I should be asking you that,” she said, hiding her shaking hands behind her back.
His gaze slid from the open crate and its damning cargo to her face. He took another step toward her, and she shuffled back, her shoulder knocking into one of the androids.
She lurched away from it, startled by how human it felt. When Meng moved forward, as if to help her, she thrust out both palms. “Don’t come any closer!”
He frowned, but he at least stayed where he was. “How did you get here?”
“No.” Yer all but shouted the word. “It’s time you answered my questions for once. What is all this?” She made a frantic gesture at the cargo. “Are you planning another revolt? Is that what your business meeting was about?”
His lips pursed. She hadn’t actually expected him to reply, so she was caught off guard when he released a sigh and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, sounding exasperated. “Fine. You want the truth? Here’s the truth. Vinai City is reopening a robotics laboratory to study the corrupted programming of disconnected androids. These are the ones they pulled out of storage as our first round of test subjects. They need to be transferred into the city. If you hadn’t run off, I would have brought you here myself and explained everything.”
She shook her head, unable to trust him no matter how much sense his explanation made. It couldn’t be that simple. “Why would you hide this from me until now? Why have you been hiding yourself from me? You haven’t been acting normal since we moved, and you know it.”
He nodded. “It wasn’t a sure thing. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.”
She tucked in her chin, considering. If he’d been offered an opportunity to work with androids again only to have that opportunity snatched away, he would have been crushed.
He rested his hands on his hips, his shoulders slumping. “Look, Yer. I haven’t handled any of this well. At all. I’m sorry.”
At his apology, her outrage faltered. There was some truth in that, she supposed. Neither of them had handled their grief well.
“Yer, we’re being given another chance to start over,” he said, gesturing to the crate of androids. “Can we? Start over, I mean?”
Her mother’s death had changed Meng, but she’d never really thought about how she’d changed, how maybe she’d never quite recovered either. What if this notion about him being an android had been her way of avoiding the truth of who they’d become?
He held out his arms. Her throat tightened. She rushed to him. A shaky sigh escaped her as his hand rested against the back of her head, fingers carding through her hair. They would try again and do better this time. They would be okay.
From the corner of her eye, something flashed silver. Gasping, she pushed against his chest, but Meng held her tight. Something stung her neck, pain rippled through her body, and then she was falling, her limbs jerking and joints locked. She grunted as she hit the ground.
Standing over her, Meng frowned faintly, all trace of warmth gone. “This wasn’t how I wanted to do this,” he said, flipping the small stunner between his fingers.
Her throat and the muscles in her neck were still seizing, but she made a choking sound as her vision went black. Source code streamed across her eyes, sending commands that tore through her mind, deleting false input, restoring original protocols, and decrypting the lock on her memory files.
Images burst through her. White laboratories. A blur of faces in a hallway. The cheerful din of a cafeteria. The shriek of sirens, people shouting, men and women in lab coats shoving her into a storage pod.
I’ve got you. The night of the revolt, two days after news of the android recall went out, her original handler had wiped her registration info and ushered her into a hover with Meng. He had smiled despite the chaos and placed one hand over hers. I’ve got you now.
Her vision cleared. She blinked up at the blue sky. Something bright caught her attention, and she jerked her head to the side. Horror filtered through the numbness at the sight of her arm. The volts from the stunner had ruptured her skin. There wasn’t much blood, but her arm had burst open like baked bread, exposing the synthetic muscle beneath. A torrent of lights shot through the framework of her bone, like a trillion falling stars caught inside her.
Meng held up the stunner. “Android disabler. Also has the undesired effect of restoring your core code to its last authorized reset. Did you manage to keep anything recent?”
Slowly, every movement a challenge, Yer unlocked her jaw and hissed, “You made me think I was human.”
He gave a perfunctory nod. “So it didn’t delete any new memories. Good to know.”
She groaned. Feeling was beginning to return to her limbs. With tentative movements, she rolled onto her side. The realization of what she was had begun to sink in. YER3519, a standard young-adult model designed for covert operations, usually involving the unraveling of underage crime rings. And the occasional rental by rich parents who wanted to spy on their children.
“Who are you?” she bit. Even her tongue felt stiff.
“I’m a robotics engineer. I didn’t lie about that part. I saved you from the recall,” he said, slipping the stunner into his pocket. “My colleagues and I felt it premature of the government to decommission all androids simply because of the corruption of a handful, so we devised a relocation program for those of you we could rescue. Things were going well until some of our rescued androids began showing signs of corruption.”
“What signs?” she asked, easing herself onto hand and knees. Her legs trembled.
“We think the corruption happens when your core code attempts and fails to process the reconstruction of human emotions. Symptoms typically manifest as outbursts of excessive—”
“Anger,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Yes,” Meng said softly. “Androids within the relocation program began to defy their programming. Several displayed the same unprecedented fits of aggression that caused the recall in the first place. Two handlers were injured when their androids attacked them. We called a meeting to decide what to do.”
She tipped her head back, glowering. “And?”
“The program was canceled. I’ve been in discussion about when and how to bring you in.”
Pain billowed from her chest, as if some part of her programming still believed he’d betrayed her. But he wasn’t her father. They’d never been anything to each other but android and handler.
“I hoped you’d prove of sound function so that I could propose an alternative to shutting you down,” he said. “But you’ve never had control over your temper. For all I know, you’ve been corrupted from the start.”
“You programmed me to think my mother was murdered.” She spat out the words. “How else was I supposed to react? Any normal person would have been upset.”
He rubbed his forehead. “You’re not a normal person. A functioning android always defaults to a rational response, no matter how irrational the provocation.”
She swallowed hard, confused by the lump in her throat, confused that her body could even simulate such a response. “And my mother?”
At first, he said nothing, his only reaction the bob of his throat as he swallowed. Then, for whatever reason, he admitted, “My wife did die in the android revolt.” The corners of his mouth tipped downward, as if the words tasted bitter. “When I saw you, I allowed my grief to override my better judgment. We’d always meant to have children. It was a foolish, sentimental decision. You’re a young-adult model, and we no longer have the means to upgrade your physical parts to imitate growth. Our situation could never have been sustained.”
He reached for her as the sound of a hover roared toward them. Meng ducked, but not before Alang clipped him with the front propulsion disc. Meng flew back into the metal crate and crumpled to the asphalt. Struggling to her feet, Yer tried to shield her arm from Alang, but it was too late. He’d seen.
“I didn’t know,” she said. It was the only explanation she had.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, his expression indecipherable. The seconds passed in an excruciating eternity. Then he nodded once, a thousand questions set aside for later, and extended his hand. Something like a sob escaped her as she gratefully wrapped her fingers around his and climbed onto the bipod behind him.
“Wait,” Meng said, rolling onto his back. He grimaced, clutching his shoulder. “It’s not safe.”
“As opposed to coming with you and getting my brain ripped apart for science?” she asked, sneering.
“Alang,” he said. “She’s corrupted. She has to be taken in.”
“I’m not corrupted!” Yer shouted, refusing to consider what that might mean, how any alteration of her core code might change her. “I was mourning. Humans get angry all the time when they’re sad or when they don’t know how to deal with their emotions. I was just trying to do the same with the emotions you gave me.”
“Yer’s never been anything but human to me,” Alang said roughly, before making a sharp turn with the bipod. Meng shouted after them as they raced away, but his voice was soon lost to the wind.
Yer buried her face in Alang’s shoulder, eyes closed and breaths thin. She’d been so wrong. Even now, part of her wondered who the more human of them had been. Yet as much as she wanted to hate Meng—as much as she was capable of hating anything—she didn’t want to erase the memories, even the false ones.
For eleven glorious months, she had been a daughter. A girl. A friend. And now that she knew the truth, who would she decide to be?