Unnatural

  * * * *

  The moonlight allowed Sabrina to see the electromagnetic gun on Livingston’s lawn. That she’d escaped the house at all might have been a sign that the weapon would be unnecessary, but she had to admit Uriah was right to think of Jane as at least a partial threat.

  She stopped at the steps up to the patio, turning around and craning her neck. Regardless of whether what Livingston had said about freeing the androids was true, a police bot could be back on patrol. It would lack apprehension about stunning a woman bringing a gun into someone else’s house, and if Jane, wherever she was, ran into her …

  Get a grip. She opened the door. If you could survive that omnipotent King of the Androids, this should be easy. But she was ignorant of why she’d survived him, and ignorance was her worst fear.

  To the left of the foyer was a den with a computer resting on a home office desk. Such an obvious goldmine of information, yet if Livingston was a halfway-decent technological virtuoso, it was silently mocking her with its impenetrable security. After she started it up, this prediction proved accurate. She moved on to the bedroom across the hall.

  If a messy desk was a sign of a disorganized mind, this room could only lead one to the conclusion that Isaac Livingston was the mortal enemy of the obsessive compulsive mind. Annotated Softsheets flooded the floor. Another, smaller work desk held myriad microcomputers with phenomenal data capacity, even by modern standards. There were even paintings and sketches lining the walls, betraying the man’s retro view of the artistic process.

  Not that any of this was inherently suspicious. In fact, whatever writing or records Sabrina found were innocuous, and she’d seen far more disturbing artwork in her lifetime than his. If anything, the relatively minimalistic nature of this home reflected well on its owner’s priorities. Maybe he really did just want a world where everyone could trust each other.

  Still, her nose wrinkled at the chaotic atmosphere. The key could be anywhere!

  She pulled open each drawer, performed a search on every digital document that wasn’t password-protected, and made feeble hacking attempts on those that were. Next came the “thinking outside the box” stage, but she soon found that perhaps that philosophy was just a new box. All that came to mind was that nagging curiosity about how Uriah had withstood vitrification.

  The only consolation was that at least the machines she was snooping through were still active – Uriah wasn’t dead, nor was the secret. Snatch the gold from the beast, then put it to sleep.

  Sabrina collapsed onto the dark green sheets of the single bed, covering her face with her hands. She should’ve just stayed in the Mindscape, living in perpetual happiness. No more conscience, no more of those flashing images in her mind’s eye of a person she’d killed coming out of her body. Could her identity really be worth that much, after all?

  She lay still, looking at the slits of light passing between her fingers, as if trying to capture an elusive fragment of a dream after waking. A dream about the Mindscape. It frustrated her for minutes. Then –

  Marshall.

  The doors in her way flew aside while all that ran through her brain was, Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead. Give me a miracle, don’t be dead!

  Uriah turned around as she descended, muttering something in surprise before cursing himself. She ignored him and snatched up the Mindscape nodes. How did he work these things, again?

  “What in Christ’s name –”

  “Dennis, do you know how to connect someone’s brain to the Mindscape?” She affixed the devices to the Organic’s temples.

  He lowered the ring hand slightly and said, eyebrows creased, “I remember he pressed the thin green button on that capsule, but what’s the point of this?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Now, how to determine if the blasted thing was even inducing any memory recall? Her heart beat with the apparent goal of compensating for what years of her life she might lose if this went wrong. Not far from the telltale button was the door handle. She grasped it with a sweaty hand and crossed the fingers on her other one.

  Yes! Rectangles curved along the inner wall, covering the cylindrical space almost entirely. Straight across from her was a minuscule control panel connected to an upside-down bowl-shaped object overhead. Without hesitation, Sabrina stepped inside, coming to a stop at the matrix of switches.

  The “on” button caused only a blink of cerulean light behind her. A voice surrounded her: “Please close the door before operating this device.”

  Her history with horror movies and mild claustrophobia told her this was a bad idea, but there was no time for risk management here. This was her leap of faith.

  “Sabrina, don’t –!”

  Clang. The outlines of each screen imitated the door’s blue glow as the pixels of video feed sprang into animation. She exhaled in relief and awe.

  No view of the scene was satisfactorily easy to observe, however. It was like trying to watch what someone else was dreaming through their eyes, which made her wonder what the point of multiple screens was. Each showed the same fuzzy image of what seemed to be a beach.

  She perused the controls, small yet daunting in complexity. Perhaps these could make the extra screens more useful, but they were clearly not designed so that just anyone could walk in and operate them. One button depicted a human in profile with the bowl-like machine connected to her head. She looked up.

  So that was it. The only way into Marshall’s virtual skin was through a temporary mind mod. There was probably some mechanism by which she could leave at will, yet the majority of the Mindscape’s controls might as well have been crafted by aliens.

  “Dennis?” she said, poking her head out.

  “I get it. You think Marshall might know, assuming that really is his brain in my body.”

  “Yeah, but to figure this out, I need to connect my mind to the Mindscape, though not in the same way. So please, if I don’t get out of here in half an hour –”

  “Fry it.”

  Sabrina nodded. “I know you’re injured, but if push comes to shove, can you make it from there to this door?”

  Uriah lifted himself from the steps to within a yard of the Mindscape, using his Transhuman arms. “You’re in good hands.”

  She flashed a smile of as much comfort in him as wan desperation. Shutting herself inside, she pressed the circle.