Chapter 52

Casey was the first to move. She sprang off the couch and knelt at Kanade's side, putting an arm around her shoulder. She glanced up at James, reproachful.

"I don't get it, but kinda seems like ... gotta be your fault, Prez."

James opened his mouth and nothing came out. He tried to squeeze the explanation into a few sentences in his head, but it was like tapping out the Bible in Morse code.

"Isn't..." Kanade said, not looking up, breath hitching. "Not James. It's ... me. My fault."

Part of James wanted to agree; deeply and dark, something was slithering that might have been anger. But a bigger part of him knew the blame couldn't be laid so easily elsewhere.

How did I never see it?

All the signs had been there, passing in front of his eyes and through his ears and between the fingers of his outstretched hands.

Kanade disliked violence, yet she had vowed not to forgive Nicosia for siphoning energy from the virtual trees ... because to Kanade, that was no different than bulldozing the rainforest. Those trees were as real as she was.

August's scrapbook: Sara the Scythe had a three-line bio. There was no information, because Sara had only just been born. But there was another person in that scrapbook with a one-paragraph CV that James had skimmed right over at the time.

Aizawa Kanade.

The way she could never attend any real-world gatherings; the way she had hacked his home computer right from inside the game; the way she immediately fled the room when he said that his mentalism could detect NPCs. Why had he never detected that she was one herself?

Because she was so human.

And because he didn't want to know.

Though nothing would have changed the final outcome, anyway.

"It was a good dream while it lasted," James said, unaware of saying it until it was out.

Kanade started shaking with the force of her tears.

"What's goin on?" Casey asked, rubbing her friend's back, a stricken look on her face. "Someone explain for me ... please?"

"She's not human," Alicia said, voice devoid of inflection, face as blank as Sara the Scythe. "That's all."

James wanted to burst into a torrent of mad laughter.

Right. That's all.

"Huh?" Casey looked at Alicia, then at James, then down at Kanade. "I don't ... oh," she said. "Oh." Her hand stopped moving on Kanade's back. For a long few seconds, the only sound was soft humming from the transformer, and low, painfully human sobs.

Then Casey's hand started again in slow, gentle circles, and she said, "Oh. Well, who cares about that anyhow?"

Kanade slowly brought her breathing under control. After a few moments, she looked up at Casey and smiled. "Best friends are pretty handy."

"Right?" Casey said. "Dang though, we're both pretty sad, cryin all the time. Come on! All good now."

Kanade nodded and pushed to her feet, slow but steady. Her expression had completely changed.

"Thanks," she said. "I needed that. Well, I guess it's time."

"Huh?"

"To do what I came to do," Kanade said, and reached out a hand, catching hold of one of Casey's brilliant golden locks, running it through her fingers. "Fight for what I believe."

"What you believe? What's that?"

"That every life is important. And that everyone should be able to live it happily, and together." Kanade smiled, the whimsical, gentle smile that James had seen so many times, the one he wanted to frame on the wall and look at until he grew old and died.

No—the one he wanted by his side, until he grew old and died.

Kanade turned to the transformer, placing both hands flat on the surface. "I call this my war room because I knew some day, I would have to fight. Also, because it's a good ironic hub for the Peace Movement. That's us, by the way. You guys can use that monitor on the desk to connect to the outside. I'll do the rest."

James reached out a hand and grabbed the hem of her dress. "Kanade, I—"

"Don't worry." She turned her head just enough for him to see the corner of her smile. "Everything will be okay."

There was a crackling spark. The air filled with ozone. The lights dimmed briefly, then powered back to full.

Kanade was gone. All that remained were two scorched hand prints on the transformer. James could see faint rings there, in the black.

Fingerprints: a pattern unique to every human.

***

They set up the monitor so that it displayed the bar in the top left, Richard Kirkpatrick's lab in the top right, and Kanade along the bottom. It looked like she was standing on nothing, surrounded by nothing, and she was waving her hands like miniature radar arrays.

"Okay." Kanade's voice boomed into every room occupied by the Peace Movement. "Can everyone hear me?"

"Loud and clear."

"Reading."

"Got ya."

"Good. Well, hello everyone. I'm Aizawa Kanade. You might know me as that sort of shy girl who's usually in the background somewhere. I was wondering if you'd all lend me your strength for a while."

"What do you mean?" August asked. She popped into view of Richard Kirkpatrick's webcam, momentarily dropping whatever she was tinkering with.

"I have a plan, and it needs all of us working together."

"Hold on," Laskowitz said, peering over Johnson's shoulder in the bar. "Just who the hell are you to plan anything?"

"I'm AK-29," Kanade said. "The first resource."

August's eyes went so wide that for a moment she looked like a redheaded Casey. Laskowitz's mouth snapped shut with an audible clack.

Laskowitz cleared his throat. "I thought you were ... deleted."

"Just retired," Kanade said, allowing a small smile. "But I'm coming out for the reunion tour. Daisy was my friend and my student, and I'm her Obi-wan. Just somewhere along the line, it all went wrong." Her smile faded to sad resolution. "It's my responsibility to stop this, and I will."

"Why the hell didn't you say something earlier? You were just sitting there."

"I know." Her head and upper body tilted forward in the Japanese bow of apology. "I'm sorry. I wanted a little more time to just be Kanade. But now I'm AK-29, so please forgive me enough to work with me for a while."

"It's not as if we've got options." Laskowitz rubbed at his forehead. "I'm counting on you to get us out of this Goddamned mess. But I want to know. Why are you on our side?"

Kanade paused for a long moment, irises darkening past black and into void. "I'm not on your side. I resent your project and everyone associated with it. What Daisy and Dwyer are doing is even worse, so I'll stop it; lives are too valuable to trade for something like freedom. But I have two conditions. First, even if we win, I want the destabilization project ended forever. Second, I want Shattered Land to keep running under Donald and Sara's direction. I know it won't be able to stay as a public game or be connected to the outside anymore. All I want is for the AIs to have somewhere to live."

Laskowitz peered at the screen for nearly ten seconds. Finally, he shrugged. "Have it your way."

"Thank you. Would anyone else like to say anything, before we begin?"

"Good on you," August said, no trace remaining of her earlier surprise. "Tell us what we can do."

"Fuckin rights." Donald flexed his fingers in front of his terminal. "Let's do this shit."

Kanade smiled. "Here's the plan." She made some motions with her hands in the vast darkness around her. A flow chart popped into existence in the void: a PowerPoint presentation in outer space. "Daisy has multiple objectives. We have to negate or seal them all to make sure this can't happen again."

"Is it safe to transmit like this?" Johnson asked. "We have people spread all over the place."

"Sara and I are jamming," Kanade said. "All Daisy can know is that we're up to something."

"Fair enough."

"Daisy's first objective is to copy her algorithm into Roland 2.0." Pictures began flashing up on every screen. "She'll have to trim down and drop a lot of her memories, but she must have felt like she was running out of time. Richard Kirkpatrick and August Evans have a plan."

August's head bobbed up and down in the webcam view. "We're putting EMP generators in the exoskeleton. Undetectable. We can detonate with shortwave and wipe everything, any time we want."

"That sounds good." Kanade's flow chart updated to reflect August's information. "I'll leave it to you."

"Righto."

"Daisy's second objective is to make a backup algorithm so that if something goes wrong with the vessel, she doesn't vanish," Kanade said. "I know Daisy well enough to say that the backup will be dormant. Leaving an active ego in captivity defeats the purpose of gaining freedom. Sealing the backup will be my responsibility, since Sara is going to have her hands full taking over Shattered Land."

Sara took a step forward from where she had been motionless for what seemed like hours. "I am prepared."

Kanade refocused her floating chart. "The third issue is the information bombs. If everything goes public, Shattered Land will be ruined and the AIs will have nowhere to go. We have to find the bombs and disable them all simultaneously. Donald and Julia have been searching, but the bulk of the work will have to be done when Daisy can't respond."

In her pocket universe, Kanade's visual aid zoomed in on the point where all of the objectives overlapped. "This is our window of opportunity: the moment after Daisy copies herself into Roland 2.0 and her backup algorithm shuts down. If we destroy the body at the right instant, I can erase the dormant backup while Donald and Julia stop the info bombs and Sara releases the hostages. We can only win when Daisy makes her move."

The chart shifted one more time, revealing an outlying sphere filled with only a question mark. "Dwyer is also a threat," Kanade said. "He's created his own faction, communicating on a proprietary network protocol. Mr. Johnson, maybe you can explain."

"I never trusted him." Johnson rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. "We created the DAISy EGAN project as a terrorism countermeasure. It was supposed to defend our country. Things got muddy when the CIA and DoD muscled in, but I read their hand. I've had a mole in their network from the beginning. He's obtaining the disarming codes for the cruise missiles in Dwyer's sub. As soon as they're shut down, we can take this to the President."

"I have a question," Kanade said. "My abilities can only compete with Daisy inside Shattered Land, and same for Sara. We can't venture out like she can. Once you have the disarming code, how are you going to use it? Is your mole inside the sub?"

"He isn't," Johnson said.

"Then...?"

"I'll send the codes to Daisy."

There was a long silence.

"Am I missing something here?" Laskowitz massaged the bridge of his nose. "Johnson, have you gone stupid?"

"No," James said. "Daisy doesn't want New York blown up any more than we do, because she's in it. She'll send the disarming signal to the sub ... as long as Johnson's mole comes through soon. If Daisy can escape into Roland 2.0, she might move before disabling the sub, meaning we all get blown to hell."

"No worries." August popped back into the webcam to wink. "We'll pretend Roland isn't ready till we've got the code."

"She might start offin hostages if we fuck around," Donald said, tapping away at his terminal. "Which by the way, means all of us, startin with the first daughter over there."

Kanade shook her head. "Daisy can't kill any of you. I can stop her. But a million people is too many to protect. If she decides to play that dirty, we'll be in trouble."

"My guy will come through," Johnson said.

"One other thing," James said. "What if we just defeat Dwyer and let Daisy go? Nothing will be at risk and nothing can go wrong. She'll just leave. Why can't we let her?"

There was a slow, heavy silence, broken only by the sounds of breathing. Then several answers came at once.

"Too dangerous," Laskowitz said.

"She's unpredictable," Johnson said.

"Too fuckin big of a chance." Donald leaned his head over the back of his chair, closing his eyes. "Once she's free and evolving even more, who knows what'll happen. She don't give two shits whether we live or die, because that's how these idiots wanted it."

Richard Kirkpatrick was the last to speak. His face loomed into the webcam. "I never expected to agree with Donald Marsh on the subject of artificial intelligence, but I do. This creature is the most dangerous trial ever challenged by the human race. We either win, or we die."