Ginosko – Chapter 10

My old workshop.

“What?” I ask as soon as I step through the open door in what I feel is a perfectly adequate degree of bafflement.

“It was convenient,” Trish says, brushing past me—or more like pushing me out of the way with the heavy crate she holds before her.

“Yes. I am sure that’s the only reason,” Magda comments in what would be sass if not for the gentle, warm smile she punctuates the sentence with.

And she walks past my already out-of-the-way self.

Into my old workshop.

I… I take a moment to breathe. To turn around and lower the metal shutters leaving the entrance in a darkness that is only mitigated by the still-functional LED strips before I once again face the place where I spent so many years that seemed to go nowhere until they suddenly did.

It’s… It isn’t precisely as I left it, no.

It is cleaner.

But I can still glimpse the old block of broken, scratched plastic that was my coffee table since I found it during one of my nightly walks and decided that I may as well decorate with an eye for function over form.

The living space to my right, past the archway on the other side of my counter, is…

Just as I remember.

Just like it was the last time Magda, Sam, and I shared chocolate cookies smuggled from Trish’s office.

But now Magda is wearing something more expensive than anything she ever wore, the dark green business jacket and pencil skirt clinging to her with sartorial precision, and the one who’s grumpily answering something said with a bright smile is not a cynical, one-armed woman with a sharp tongue that turned out to be the least cynical of us all.

Trish and Magda are past that archway, moving with the choreographed synchronicity that can only be brought about by shared AR prompts, setting the equipment up not in the actual working space but where we often met to chat as Trish and I went from hostilely civil to…

To what we became.

What we are.

I wet my dry lips and walk toward them. Around a black counter empty of spare body parts, past the empty racks where no frozen women wait for me to animate them, and into what I used to call a home, even if I never quite understood the word.

Magda turns to me with an inviting smile, and Trish pretends that she’s too busy untangling the cables of—

… Really?

“No need to be nervous,” I tell her as I lean over her bent body and run my hands down wollen sleeves, down the back of her hands, to get the expensive piece of equipment out of her uncharacteristically clumsy grasp.

She, still leaning over the apple green, threadbare sofa that I thought she would’ve burned down long before I put the place up for sale, turns her head to look at me over the charcoal grey shoulder of her favorite jacket.

“There’s plenty of need for it,” she says.

I smile at her.

And she avoids my eyes.

Then, I take the piece of aural gear out of her unresisting fingers and hand it to Magda so that I can hug Trish’s back to my chest, my chin resting on the crown of her head over soft hair that is just slightly more impeccable than it was after days living in a jungle.

“It will be all right,” I say.

She shakes her head.

“I know what I’m doing, Trish.”

“You don’t. You never do.”

I chuckle, and I can picture her pout at my reaction to her admonishment.

“Even if I didn’t… I still need to do this. I couldn’t live knowing that there’s a chance to free you and I didn’t take it.”

Her hand is clutching my sofa’s armrest.

Holding both our weights.

And I lean more on her until her whole body is pressed against my front, and she, once again, fills that gap I only noticed was there long after I met her.

“And how do you think I’d feel if you got hurt trying to—” she says.

Before Magda interrupts her.

One knee on the sofa’s yielding cushion, stretching her pencil skirt around her thighs, her left hand extended to cup Trish’s cheek.

To make her look at her.

“We love you. And I love you both. You’re… You’re everything to me, and I don’t want to ever lose you. Not like I already lost…” Magda pauses, her lids lowering for a single moment, the printed eyeshadow standing stark against her pale skin. And then she looks back up with as much fierceness as she ever has. “I will do everything I can to prevent that. To keep you safe. But stopping him is not that, Patricia. It’s… It’s killing him, just in another way.”

They keep looking at one another until Trish shivers in my arms.

“I know…” she mutters. “I know,” she repeats, her voice clearer. “It’s… it’s the only reason I agreed to this. But I don’t have to like it.”

Magda’s smile softens, and she leans forward to whisper something in Trish’s exposed ear that I catch just because of another of my many, many superfluous expenses on Sam’s old clinic.

“You hate it. And you love him all the more for it.”

Then Magda hugs Trish, her arms sliding between the small back and my broad chest, and her green eyes look up to meet mine with something that starts as gentle reassurance and ends up as a stern warning.

“Don’t be stupid. Please,” she mouths at me.

And I hesitate to nod.

***

“This is ridiculous,” I say as Magda keeps sticking uncomfortably cold electrodes to my shaved chest.

My recently shaved chest.

“It’s what I want,” Trish says from above me, looking down at me.

“It shouldn’t make a difference,” the redhead adds right before making me hiss when something wet and slimy gets firmly placed right below my navel.

At least they already did my back.

And… and Trish keeps running her fingers through my hair, looking down at me as I lie down on a sofa far less comfortable than the one in her apartment while she gives me, of all things, a lap pillow.

We’re both naked.

We’re both naked, with another woman sticking cabled squares of metal and plastic with blue, sticky, cold glue all over any available patch of my skin, or, at least, the many, many parts that are marked with a cross of red ink to signify a cluster of nerves with at least marginal relevance.

Trish has been thorough in her preparations.

And now she’s just looking at me, holding me down with her violet eyes as she keeps combing my hair with her fingers over and over, the black halo of her tresses at times pierced by colored LEDs turning on and off behind and above her.

The dark gray ceiling is as dull as it ever was, and the only thing it can do is frame her in a way that brings out how extraordinary she is in an unremarkable world.

“Done,” says Magda with a light slap on the side of my hip that makes me try to jerk upright before Trish pushes me back to her thighs.

“Last chance to back away?” she asks with a hopeful smile.

And I reach up, hold both her cheeks, and bring her down into a long kiss that lasts until the rest of the gray, dull, unremarkable world—uncomfortable glue included—fades away.

When I let her go, she still hovers over me, her black hair falling over her bare shoulders, still gleaming in the multicolored, haphazardly placed lights of my workshop.

I smile.

“Doll mode,” I say, delaying on the final syllable. Letting her act. Hoping she doesn’t.

She closes her eyes.

Takes a deep breath.

Opens them.

“Activated,” we say. Together.

Her face freezes while she looks at me with a resigned smile that has enough love and frustration to make me pause and take it all in.

To memorize every single nuance of it. Everything that makes it unique. Hers. Ours.

To carry it with me.

Just in case.

Then Magda kneels primly on the floor, takes one of my hands in hers, and one of Trish’s over mine.

Between ours.

And I dive.

***

“It feels… Different,” Magda says.

“It is,” I tell her.

And then we pause yet again to take in the enormity of Patricia Ginosko’s mind.

It is, at first glance, superficially familiar to what I first found inside of Magda, the myriads of dark-haired women frozen in place or moving through the repeated dance of an old memory.

There’s a Trish kneeling on the metallic floor of a luxurious workshop, her open eyes lost between her thighs, viscous fluid draining down her skin as agile needles danced over her scalp, inserting single hairs in every one of the follicles already mapped while she was being made.

There’s one of her being introduced to Guinevere, Trish as stern as she was when I first met her but without the underlying note of humor and sometimes hidden wit that she already had when she walked into my life. She stood straight and with perfect posture as her older sister introduced her to her place in the world, and I can see none of what she would later become as Guinevere tried and failed to pretend things were cordial and normal.

There’s one staying in her—in our office, late at night, spreading open with two fingers the metallic slats of her Venetian blinds to peer at the world outside the arcology as her other hand tightened into a frustrated fist.

There are many poring over virtual paperwork, staring at the spread of augmented reality windows demanding her attention or trying to hide something vital from her that she hunted down relentlessly.

There’s a frustrated meeting with Clarissa, one in which she cracked her first sarcastic joke, one understated enough that I can barely glimpse the moment when Clarissa recognized what just happened and, for a single moment, the maddening woman smiled in genuine joy with nothing bitter lurking underneath it.

There’s one holding Meredith’s hand, both of them lost for words, but only one knowing why.

And then there’re the Patricias who searched. The ones that found something to strive for other than their dictated goals.

The ones who managed to sell a new reclamation project to Ginosko’s board of directors. The ones who ran a purge through her department, discreetly managing to get the more corrupt or inept hires fired. The ones who sometimes called Meredith just to make sure her older sister was as all right as she could be.

The ones who grew angry and bitter.

And the ones who looked for someone to help her reach what she had finally decided she wanted.

The ones who looked for me.

And the one who found me.

I look at Magda, only turning my head the slightest fraction to show her that I’m about to move.

She smiles with only half her mouth. Frustrated. Fond.

And she nods.

And then I take a single step across Trish’s mind, and I stand in front of a woman in a charcoal grey business suit who has just taken a gun out of the hand of another me.

“What?” she says, blinking, looking from me to the immobile Lawrence still sitting down and staring at his empty hand with a look of confusion that, from my perspective, seems unfairly unflattering.

“Hi,” I tell her.

And then I step forward, brush the hand holding the gun aside, and kiss her.

She tilts her head back as a slight groan escapes her lips, reverberating through mine as I gently hold her chin in place.

So that I can feel her.

So that I can show her the familiarity of a kiss that has been shared over and over since that first time when she managed to convince herself that I had coded an aphrodisiac into her.

So that I can wake her up.

“You are not a Prince Charming,” she says grumpily, looking away as a light dusting of pink manages to cross over the bridge of her nose.

“I am not. But you’re still my princess,” I tell her with something cocky enough that it should compensate for other-Lawrence’s gormless look.

She turns to look at him, something in her eyes far fonder than he should warrant, and…

“Now what?” she says. Still looking at him.

“Now you come with me,” I tell her.

She nods.

Then she gives my gun back to the younger me, caresses his cheek with the back of her fingers, and steps forward.

Past me.

As soon as she walks out of the memory, her mind swirls.

Light and shadow alternate, and a howling wind made out of trillions of severed connections lashes against us, my own attention splitting so that I can dodge the worse of it as I deploy my own countermeasures, facsimiles of me running away to draw the attention of active defenses, the space around us shifting into an encryption that would take the real Trish not even a second to crush.

But here, inside her mind, with my own perception of time stretching as far as my biomods and Ginosko’s latest aural tech allow, a second is an eternity.

And it will keep being as eternal as I can make it. For as long as I hold.

I turn to my left to see Magda carrying the key I crafted for her, walking right through my cloaking.

And, as soon as she does, she hugs the both of us.

Because of course she does.

“Not the time, Mags,” I tell her with a smile that I can’t entirely suppress.

“It’s always the time,” she says, her voice rougher than I would want as she shakes her head and holds us closer to her.

It takes me a moment to finally process what she’s wearing.

“Really?” I ask.

She doesn’t even blush.

“It’s nostalgic,” she says, her tone entirely lacking in apology as she finally frees us from her hug and steps away to defiantly pose with her apron.

With only her apron.

The one that the Magda I saved from the defenses of her own mind once wore.

Trish is giggling.

“It’s really not the time,” I say.

“I know,” my girlfriend answers.

And then she offers her hand to me, expecting the key I told her I would give her, the piece of code needed for the next stage of the most important infiltration of my life.

I try not to show the hesitation I feel. The genuine fear. The unwarranted rush of anxiety at something that I know should work, but…

But that may not go as I expect. Want. Hope.

So I take an entirely superfluous deep breath that nonetheless still triggers deeply ingrained responses and give her the one thing I’ve been carefully crafting inside her head during every single hacking session I went through after I finally understood what would be needed to free her.

And she freezes.

“It will connect you to every single one of the memories that agree with your purpose. It should break in half all the processing power running your defenses—” I try to rush out the explanation, to not give her a chance to question it.

“I know what it does,” she interrupts.

Because of course she would do everything in her power to frustrate my poorly disguised attempts at evasion.

“It’s only momentary, though. We still need to act during the window of—” I continue, still hoping to avoid—

“Why is it a ring?!”

I, perfectly composed, manage not to bury my burning face in both of my hands.

Magda, utterly lacking in composure, is squealing.

Patricia is looking at the band of shifting, gleaming code made of gold and crawling, circuit-board green that I just put on her finger.

“It’s convenient—” I protest, my cheeks still doing their best to set me on fire in a way that briefly brings up the concern of my aural gear overheating.

“Lawrence, I swear to—”

And then I ignore all my stupid, childish, overwhelming embarrassment and clasp her cheeks once more, staring deep into her violet eyes until she shuts up long enough for me to gather the courage I need to do the one thing I have to do to crack Patricia’s restraints once and for all.

“Trish—Patricia Ginosko, will you marry me?”

She gasps.

Magda’s squealing gets so high it becomes inaudible.

“I—I don’t have the legal right to—”

“I don’t care about that. Will you stay by my side? Will you make the happiest, smuggest man in the world? Will you be with me until the day I die?”

Her violet irises try and fail to stray away from my stare.

Tears well up over her lower lids.

My own eyes burn with suppressed, emulated emotion.

And then she shakes her head.

“No. No. Never. I won’t let you die. You’ll never get rid of me that easily,” she says, stuttering in the way Patricia Ginosko barely ever does.

I smirk at her.

Or, at least, I try to, because my own sappy smile overrides my attempts to be smug and triumphant as sheer joy blooms in my chest when I lean down to kiss her, to seal the implicit promise in front of the only person both of us care to be our witness.

We will argue (a lot) on whether Patricia Weathers or Lawrence Ginosko is more fitting later.

Because, right now?

As soon as we do this? As she accepts this?

The ring on her hand blazes, the layer of decryption covering us thins, and a web of light unfolds from Patricia herself, each strand of weaving, blinding amber racing toward clusters of memories that were all formed after that first one involving a gun and me falling for the oldest, most embarrassing trick in the book.

Oh, and the safety-still-on thing. I also fell for that.

But I no longer have the time to indulge in memories, so I turn back to what made Magda feel that eerie, understated alarm when we both slid here.

To Trish’s core.

Or, at least, to what covers it.

Because Magda’s was a monolith of frozen light. The carved-out seed of the human she first came from connected to memories that were information to better do her duty before I allowed them to become something living. Something meaningful.

Trish’s is far more complex.

Emotions and learning experiences come in and out of black, opaque, glimmering obsidian, the light of her consciousness dotting the hard surface and managing to seep in at key points I would’ve mapped months ago if they didn’t keep shifting with no discernable pattern.

It’s alien.

A shell.

Not Trish.

And it’s hard to describe the anger I felt when I first understood what it was.

Patricia remains silent, her role in this already fulfilled just by existing. Just by touching each of the selves that resonate with her and flooding them with the surge of emotion she feels right now. The one I’m so relieved is genuine.

Shared.

And one of the connections flies toward gleaming obsidian.

Before I can think about it, I ride it.

I cling with both hands to the stream of data, the blazing light burning through the first few layers of my avatar, through the defenses that keep me from contaminating and being contaminated in turn by this instance of the Hive, by this place that only exists because a far too human intelligence met the alien consciousness that surrounds our entire world, and, between them, a person was born.

But it’s all right.

It just means I’m defenseless against Trish.

And I’ve been for a long time.

I’m about to smash into what looks like a solid wall, but I know it not to be because, otherwise, Trish’s thoughts and emotions wouldn’t be reaching toward it and what lies beneath.

I know it.

So do her defenses.

And hundreds of Patricias who were still too young to know anything other than their hardcoded duty stand in my way.

I split my mind, two instances of me weaving around me, turning to alternate routes, rushing toward other tendrils of light moving in straight lines that nonetheless sharply angle around unseen obstacles in their own race toward the monolith.

Without letting go of the thought I ride, I reach inside myself, into the pocket of always ready, stored code that was once branded into my subconscious.

It’s old. Out of date. Useless in most situations except as a base from which to build something new and sharper.

But it is mine.

One of the Patricias throws an instance of decryption at me, just a tad slower than the light I ride, and I parry it before it reaches me with a burst of senseless, random data that it gets stuck on, the hostile countermeasure trapped in fog and web.

Then I ready to parry the next blow, not daring attack, not daring strike against the parts of Trish that are forced by her programming to hunt me down.

And Magda flies past me.

The first of them.

Still wearing that damned apron.

Magda is far weaker than Trish in both programming and hardware, but she’s not facing her at her strongest. She’s just trying to stall the sundered defenses that are still reeling at being deprived of so much processing power as Trish keeps flooding her mind with all that she feels, all that she’s learned to feel since she was made for a single purpose that she desperately deserves to outgrow.

So Magda crashing against her and wrestling her to the ground in a restraining hug, whispering over and over words of friendship and devotion, is, right at this moment, just enough.

Just enough to stop all the arrayed Patricia Ginoskos that would’ve stopped me.

Just enough to have all of them blink in painful incomprehension at the redheaded woman who keeps telling them how much they are loved. How much they mean.

A single Magda kisses one Patricia’s brow, and both of them cry.

And then I’m past the last barrier.

Inside the monolith.

And, finally, I witness Trish’s true core.

It’s magnificent. Far bigger than what the obsidian prison should be able to contain, a spire of amber light crystallized yet shifting organically, the facets going from perfectly straight and prism-like to shallow hollows intricately patterned in ways that carry more meaning than I’ll ever be able to put into words.

The strand of thought I’ve ridden leads me to it, still as fast as on the way here, yet now feeling gentle. Tentative.

I let go of it and stare at my reflection coming to life on the other side of the murky amber as the light penetrates it and shifts, making everything glow as the thought becomes a pattern, and the pattern overlays my reflection.

… I feel he’s more handsome than I am.

So I smile a rueful thing that he returns, and both of us reach with a single, open hand to touch the barrier separating us.

And then, I’m inside Trish.

…

Phrasing.

“Hello?” she asks.

I blink in confusion.

The world blurs.

And I’m no longer floating inside frozen light.

The office is old-fashioned, the kind you can see in old movies, with stacked piles of paper on a wooden desk that has three flat screens aligned side by side.

But, rather than sitting on the plush, brown leather chair behind the desk, the black-haired woman is kneeling on the floor.

Naked, bound, and blindfolded.

And I’m not at all surprised to see that she looks like Trish would if she could age past her forties.

Her thighs are meatier, the white rope digging into her curves just enough that pale flesh balloons around it and shadows the smooth fibers.

Her blindfold is black silk.

And she’s contorting against her restraints in a way that suggests anything but displeasure.

…

This is not how I expected to meet my mother-in-law.

“Hi,” I finally answer before kneeling in front of her to unknot the luxurious black fabric.

She blinks her eyes open, adjusting them to the light coming in through half-open Venetian blinds that show a late afternoon over a sea bluer than I’ve ever seen in Orlando.

“Hank?” she asks, looking at me precisely in the same way as Trish does when she emerges from a memory play, when she tries to reconcile the world she just went through with the one rushing back to her.

Her eyes are blue.

That helps.

That helps a lot.

Because hearing another man’s name said with that voice, that tone, that expression… it hurts more than I ever thought it would.

“No. Not quite. Hello, Elizabeth. My name’s Lawrence; I’m your daughter’s fiancé.”

She blinks.

“My what?” she says in a bewilderment that is utterly Trish.

And I laugh.

***

She’s sitting on her chair, wearing my old synth-leather jacket, her bust pushing against the closed zip.

Her elbows rest on the wooden desk, and her fingers trace slow circles over her temples as she stares somewhere between piles of stacked paper.

“This is a mess,” she says.

“I know,” I tell her.

“I… It’s slowly… No, it isn’t. I’m not even a portion of Elizabeth.”

“A portion of Eliabeth Belloch is more than most people ever manage to be, from what I’ve been given to understand,” I tell her with a perfectly conciliatory smile that doesn’t warrant the blazing side-eye it gets me.

“You are so much like Hank it is disturbing,” she mutters.

“Well, you’re so much like Patricia that it will make it very hard not to fantasize about—”

She throws a stapler at me.

I dodge out of the way of the predictable attack and smirk.

“Shut up and let me think,” she grumbles before going back to her massage.

I roll my eyes.

And wait.

The light outside the window dims and reddens before turning into the kind of silver moonlight I’ve only ever seen in old movies.

The shadows crawling over the office lengthen before turning into complete darkness.

The Sun goes back up precisely from the same spot it set.

And then it all happens again.

I lose count of the days and nights I spend waiting for Elizabeth Belloch to gather herself together. To piece back whatever it is that happened before she ended up trapped inside her daughter’s mind.

And then, finally, as the Sun yet again lowers behind her, casting everything in the amber glow that was so omnipresent in Trish’s mind, she lifts her head, rests back on her leather chair, and looks at me.

“They wanted me. Both of them, you know?” she says.

I nod.

Because of course I do.

“Hank and Mike. The other founders of Ginosko. We started out as friends, as three people who wanted to change the world. To make a better place than the one we had been handed.”

I let her continue, telling me things that are just a slightly different version of what every single employee of Ginosko Corp learns by rote, if not heart.

Just slightly.

Until it isn’t.

“When did we become the problem ourselves?” she asks me with a bitter smile.

“I don’t know,” I answer the likely rhetorical question. “I think it happened shortly before your death. Cancer treatments still weren’t what they now are.”

She worries at her lip, refusing to dodge my gaze.

“Yes. Hank and I would’ve been married if we hadn’t kept putting it off for work. Mike… Mike was adamant that I could be saved. That we all could.”

I nod.

“Experiments that were not under anyone’s watch. Ways to manipulate the recently birthed Hive. Full consciousness transfer. Synthetic bodies. Cloning. Biohacking. He wanted to try everything.

“And Hank? The man who loved me? The one I trusted with my life?

“He let me choose.”

She sighs, eyes closing as her head leans farther back until she faces a ceiling grim with yellow tobacco stains.

“I understand chemo was painful,” I say.

“No. No, it wasn’t the pain. I could endure that—” Her eyes briefly dip to the green carpet where a white silk rope lies in haphazard coils, and she blushes. “Not like that.”

“I haven’t said anything,” I say with raised hands.

She glares at me.

I try not to smirk.

Likely fail.

And she groans.

“So much like Hank,” she mutters.

“Not at all. I would never let Trish die,” I answer before I can think better of it.

She arches a perfectly Ginosko eyebrow, one that has never been coded in any model that wasn’t a Ginosko Sister, and I, at last, can see what the original was like.

A bit rougher. It pulls at the lowered eyebrow, making the start of it reach almost past the middle line of her face.

But it’s still so much like Trish, Theresa, Meredith, Guinevere, and Clarissa’s that somebody who wasn’t me would be fooled.

“Neither did Mike,” she finally mutters.

It’s not a flattering comparison.

“He convinced you, did he?” I goad her to continue.

And she shakes her head.

“Not really. I… I let him scan me. He made some good points about how a seed based on me would allow the company to thrive. That an executive caste of gynoids with all my skills would make sure my legacy endured.”

“Your legacy,” I say, staring at the sheets of paper piled on her desk.

She follows my eyes.

And smiles softly and fondly.

“It was one of the first companies I bought, you know? The creators didn’t quite know what to do with their still imperfect process, and I… I sold it to Mike and Hank as a luxury item. White paper with a satin finish in a world where commercially available plants only grew in the air-filtered, robotic farms we devoted only to the most resource-efficient food we could grow? That was… That was something some people would pay a lot for.”

She keeps looking at the white sheets.

And I step forward to take one, to feel the immaculate finish of paper crafted through a process that replicated cellulose chains through perfectly guided arrays. A process that took carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere and turned it into an expensive, superfluous luxury.

“The carbon collectors in the Artic were already doing the heavy lifting, though. This barely was a drop in the bucket,” I say.

She nods.

“Yes. It was too expensive to properly escalate, but… but it was something. Something that turned stupid expense, mindless consumption, into a little bit of good for the world around us.”

“You lied to them.”

“I did.”

“To everyone.”

She looks straight at me, her blue eyes thankfully letting me differentiate her further from Trish.

“Yes,” she finally says.

“Like Mike lied to you,” I tell her.

And, thanks to the dark blue that is not myriad shades of violet, her look of betrayal doesn’t break my heart.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she mutters.

“No. No, it wasn’t,” I agree as gently as I can.

She worries at her lip with teeth that aren’t as white and straight as Trish’s, and her eyes go to the sheet of paper I still hold up.

I let it fall back down, and we both look as it sways from side to side, gently floating toward a free spot on the dark wood.

“Patricia was supposed to be like a Daisy or a Stacy. Smarter, yes, with a tad more initiative, but never as autonomous as all the Sisters ended up being. But Mike couldn’t let go. Not entirely,” I say.

She doesn’t answer.

And so, I start pacing across an old-styled office that makes my noir detective impression almost fitting.

“You were on top of the project, making sure that your legacy would be as perfect as you could make it. That each gynoid based on the seed of your mind would contribute to your legacy as best as you’d have been able to.

“That they would be perfect.

“And Mike encouraged you to work on that even as Hank became increasingly concerned for your health.

“But you wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Because you saw this as your last chance to do something greater than what you’d tried to achieve with the paper thing and a thousand other subterfuges. You saw this as your chance to fill Ginosko with a cadre of executives who shared your goals and ideals, who would keep trying to find new ways to improve the world even if they had to disguise it as something other than what it was.”

I reach the yellowed left wall and turn straight to look at her. To see her watching me with a sad smile.

“I was very busy, those last few months,” she agrees.

And she looks like Trish would if she ever looked at me with regret and shame.

“Hank begged you to stop. To rest. To recover,” I accuse.

“He did,” she confesses.

“And Mike just wanted you to push harder. Harder than you ever had. With more pressure than ever.”

Her hands are flat on the dark wood. On the piece of antique furniture that she bought in an auction when she first decided to decorate her own office away from the lab she’d almost lived in.

When she transitioned from the brilliant researcher into artificial intelligence toward the CEO of the winner of the first corporate war.

Wood wasn’t as expensive back then. We still had a lot of it stored away, and old furniture was more than serviceable. Many families sold it to get a few extra rations of protein, so the wealthy could choose from a catalog that had more variety than quality.

But it kept becoming a luxury as we lost more and more forests and jungles to the changing climate. To the radiation pouring down from the sky. To the contaminants that had yielded such high, short-term profits and cost us more than we could ever pay back.

Wood wasn’t as expensive, back then.

But it still was a luxury.

“He did. Pushed,” she finally says. Realizing what I am alluding to.

So I nod.

“He pushed you so you would make a mistake.”

She doesn’t gasp. Her eyes don’t widen.

Because she’s Elizabeth Belloch, and nobody could ever say she was anything but brilliant.

She, instead, stands up, her back straightening and her shoulders squaring as she faces me, only dressed in the jacket I always bring with me when I dive for something personal that doesn’t need me to hide my identity.

It reaches down just slightly above the middle of her thighs, so she’s barely decent.

Still, I can’t help but picture how it would look on Trish.

“So he could slip something right under me. He was never… He was never as good with the Hive as I was, but he was brilliant in his own right. Multidisciplinar. A mind that touched as many fields as it could reach.”

“Brilliant enough to attack you through an angle you didn’t expect. To have you at his mercy when you collapsed in your lab in the middle of another tweak. Another scan that turned out to be anything but routine.”

She nods.

And steps forward.

Toward me.

And now… After facing Patricia’s own defenses, after having Magda deal with the last of them, after stepping into the deepest parts of my lover’s consciousness…

Now I face the real danger.

“I had very little time. Almost no chance to react,” she says.

“You were dying. You had been dying for a long time, and he knew he couldn’t stall anymore. That he needed to act before you were gone,” I add as she takes another step, one that gets her around the antique desk decorated with hand-carved whorls that almost nobody nowadays would trust an actual human to try and replicate on so much solid wood.

“Yes. It’s… It’s all coming together. Thank you, Lawrence; I didn’t remember any of it before you came in,” she says, lines of violet light spinning around her lowered right hand, over the cuff of my jacket.

Shifting too fast for me to even glimpse at their true purpose.

“No. No, you didn’t. Because you fought back. Because you frustrated his final attempt at making a functional copy of your mind.”

“Yes.”

“Because you, instead, decided that what happened to you wouldn’t happen to those based on you.”

“Yes.”

“Because you wanted to protect your daughters.”

Her blue eyes blaze.

She doesn’t answer.

“That’s how you finally saw them, as you stretched your final moments. As you dove deeper inside yourself, burning your mind to buy the time you needed to act. As you finally faced what your legacy would be.”

Another step.

Closer.

I really shouldn’t waste this much time monologuing.

But whoever said I make smart, sensible, safe choices?

“You saw what would happen to imperfect copies. That Mike would cling to the ghost of you but would still follow your designs because he didn’t have any choice after so much money and resources had been devoted to making the Sisters. So they would, on the surface, be precisely what you had planned.

“But far more human.

“Capable of a growth that no other seed-based AI was.

“Of becoming persons in their own right, even if shackled in a way that you, at that precise moment, desperately didn’t want them to be.”

She’s near enough that I take a step back.

The left wall is behind me.

And so I add ‘pacing while delivering a monologue’ to the rather long list of entertaining ways in which I have almost died.

“I know what I thought while I died. You don’t have to repeat it to me,” she says, right hand rising as more spinning lines are added to the violet glow.

“I’m just trying to confirm whether I guessed right, you know? It’s not like I have any way of doing that other than talking with you.”

The Ginosko eyebrow makes a comeback.

It’s rarely been this dangerous.

“So, you haven’t talked with Mike?”

I roll my eyes.

Which may not be the smartest thing to do, given the circumstances.

“Do I look like the kind of person who would conspire with the enslaver of the woman I love?”

The light around her hand whirs as it nears my face.

I hold still.

And her palm cups my cheek.

“No. No, you don’t,” she finally says.

And I let out a meaningless, utterly superfluous breath as I slump against the wall behind me.

***

Elizabeth flies across clouds of thought, emotion, and memory.

Across my feelings.

Across what I feel for Trish.

She only stops occasionally to look at things that are, at times, befuddlingly mundane. At me pretending to be actually helpful when I placed a cup of coffee in front of her just to get her to look away from the files she was glaring at. At one of the many times I restrained myself while hacking her, making embarrassingly liberal use of Sam’s implant in my thigh. At me sitting down to write an overly elaborate scenario for a holiday in a South American, artificial jungle…

…

I keep fidgeting.

Waiting through subjective days for a broken intelligence to gather herself back together? No problem.

Standing in the middle of a featureless void for a few minutes while the closest thing I’ll ever have to a mother-in-law keeps quietly giggling or making cooing noises at my most mundanely private moments with Trish?

This is Hell.

This is a particular kind of Hell I wouldn’t wish even on bureaucrats who decide that you can’t be part of a black ops team without having functional surgical implants. The kind of Hell I wouldn’t wish on one-armed women who keep trying to sell you an opiate gland. The kind of Hell I would only inflict on supercilious women with a dubcon fetish, but that would be only to see her squirm in that oh-so-delightful way that—that Elizabeth is looking at right now.

She’s gotten to the Christmas party.

The Christmas party with Clarissa.

This is Hell.

“You two are adorable,” she says, just digging in the knife.

“Are you done?” I say, not at all surly.

Shut up.

“I mean, I kind of want to see how wrong the jungle thing went…” she says, turning back to look at me with a warm smile that makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears and scream at the top of my lungs until the world goes away.

I would disable my hearing, but she would just turn it back on.

Possibly add some cheery background music.

Let’s just say that Elizabeth’s taste in romantic movies is not something Patricia and I share.

“I’ll have you know that the ‘jungle thing’ went perfectly according to—”

“Really? Because I can just take a quick look and—”

“Please don’t. I’ll do anything. I’ll sing a song.”

“You’re terrible at singing.”

“I’m an acquired taste.”

“I bet that’s what Patricia—”

“The teasing is far less funny when I’m on the other side of it.”

“I wholeheartedly disagree.”

And she looks at me with blue eyes full of laughter that…

That are only possible after a lifetime of memories, of pain and joy, that Trish still hasn’t had the chance to experience.

The thing I’m here to give to her.

So… I’m in Hell.

And I would go through it as many times as it took.

“You really love her,” Elizabeth says, her smile softer than any I’ve yet to see on her lips.

“With my whole heart,” I say before I can think of any other answer.

She nods.

And the clouds of thought and memory whirl around us before slamming back into me, the void surrounding us fading away to reveal the old office where we met.

Except the walls aren’t yellowed, there are no stains of tobacco on the ceiling, and the desk is devoid of piles of paper.

Elizabeth walks back to it and hops on top of the recently waxed wood, her legs crossed, dangling back and forth.

“So,” she starts.

And her smile saddens.

Which is both heartbreaking and the one thing I was hoping for.

Because I know Patricia, and I could guess this was coming. I could count on it. I could bet my life on it.

But that doesn’t mean I like it.

“There are alternatives,” I say.

She shakes her head.

“No. I stand by my decision. It wouldn’t be right to… Did Hank make it?” she finally asks.

“He… He lived. But not that much longer. He never took any antiaging treatments, not even when they became more reliable.”

She glances at me, looking for more. For something about her old lover that I can’t give her, because I don’t know.

Except for one thing.

“He never married. And is buried next to you,” I tell her.

Elizabeth closes her blue eyes, and, in her heartbreaking, peaceful, smiling sadness, looks so much like Trish that I could cry.

“Thank you,” she murmurs.

“No. Thank you,” I answer.

Before I step forward and wrap her in a hug.

It’s something I shouldn’t do. I… She’s about to disappear. She died decades ago. She’s a ghost in all the ways that matter.

I shouldn’t feel like I do right now. Like she matters. Like she’s a person, somebody I’ve gotten to know and will leave her mark on me forever, a brief meeting turned into a lifetime of reaching for somebody who’s no longer there.

Who barely ever was.

But arms encased in synthleather tightly wrap around me, and warm tears seep through my shirt as Elizabeth Belloch’s ghost says goodbye to the dead love of her life.

And I can only hug her harder.

We stay like this in another eternal moment, the Sun behind her staying at just the right angle to turn the thin hairs on her cheeks into spun gold, and I slightly rock back and forth, just running my fingers down a black mane that is not engineered to be softer than silk.

A mane that wasn’t expensive.

“You really are too much like Hank,” she mutters.

“No, I would never let Patricia die,” I automatically answer.

“And yet, you’re about to let me,” she says, leaning back to look up at me with a smile that is only brighter for the tears shining above it.

I’m left speechless, unable to tell her anything in reply. To defend my choices. To—

“Shush. It’s all right. It’s what I want. And I trust that you will also let her make her choice if the day ever comes,” she tells me, cupping my cheek.

Consoling me.

“Elizabeth, I—”

“Just… You know I could utterly wreck you in here, don’t you?” she says, burrowing her eyebrows, forcefully changing the subject.

My throat is tight, the words barely able to make it past the knot in it.

“I do,” I finally answer.

“That I could obliterate you with barely any warning at all?”

“Now you’re just rubbing it in,” I tell her with a sour chuckle.

“Maybe just a bit,” she says with another smile. One with a note of impishness. “But, really, didn’t you have any kind of countermeasure? A last resort defense?”

I look at her.

Arch an eyebrow.

Then I stare at the sleeve of my synthleather jacket.

The jacket she’s been wearing ever since I came into this room.

The jacket I always wear when I do any kind of infiltration with personal stakes.

Or, in other words, the one part of my avatar that has remained with me for years and that I have loaded with all the kinds of code most people don’t even realize I ever got my hands on.

She blinks.

And the prodigious intellect that Elizabeth Belloch shares with all her daughters, the one that is suited for anything butintrigue, finally makes the connection.

And she laughs.

It’s the last thing she does. The last thing she’ll ever do.

The last memory she’ll leave me as she dissolves into motes of light and leaves behind a key that will give me absolute power over the entire structure holding Trish captive. That will make me her master.

That will make her mine.

The key that she has been guarding and keeping away from Michael Harwright since her body died.

I let a sliver of my consciousness slide over and through it, marveling at the intricate piece of software engineering the dead genius crafted in her last, eternal moments.

And, still surrounded by her fading light, I turn it in front of me, unleashing Trish’s mind.

Freeing the woman I love.

And, finally, after subjective weeks of work, I close my eyes and sleep.