Unnatural

CHAPTER 24

  “It all came back to Goodsprings.” She brought Jane into the MRI room, to Uriah’s surprise.

  “Of course she would’ve told you that she knew nothing about Marshall’s secrets, because it’s her purpose to secure his interests. However,” she said as she plucked Michael out of his arms and into Jane’s, “a Mindscape tells all, including the sort of info a man would confide in the woman he’d designed to be perfectly trustworthy. In the end, Livingston might not’ve believed in the honor system, but Marshall did.”

  “What can she do?” said Uriah, who started to take his son back from Jane, but Sabrina got between them. “Besides stab us in the back again, I mean.”

  “Just trust me on this.” Not that she wasn’t a little apprehensive herself, but it made too much sense not to try it. She turned to Jane. “Go ahead.”

  The crimson-haired android looked away with meek eyes, then sighed. “If you’ll keep your promise …” She lifted Michael’s face closer and pressed her lips to his.

  Nothing happened.

  “Mind explaining why she just did that?” said Uriah.

  “Be patient. It takes time for anything to travel from the mouth throughout the body.” She beamed at him. “Oh, don’t you see, Dennis? Livingston said Marshall wanted to make everyone their own Jane, so doesn’t it make sense that he would put the antidote in the robots he was making? It’s kind of romantic, each person waking up in a better world and the first thing they see is their soul mate.”

  “So the plan was, anyway.”

  The somewhat bitter tone in which he said this reminded her of the insensitivity of her comment. “I wasn’t implying anything. I mean, sometimes what’s romantic isn’t what’s best for people in the long run.”

  “No, maybe you’re right. Maybe Marshall was right.”

  Jane huffed.

  In a few moments, he got the hint. “Is right. You get the idea. If Pat hadn’t lied to me –”

  “We’d all be under Marshall’s thumb. Or Livingston’s. I’m still not sure how much they collaborated. But that’s not important – we’re free, that’s what matters.”

  Uriah was caught off guard by that remark. He looked out a window. No moon there, as far as she could see. “Yeah, but at what cost? She’s probably dead after so many days vitrified, not according with Marshall’s plan. Even if she isn’t, can I trust her anymore? And …” He trailed off.

  “And what?”

  He avoided eye contact. “Sabrina, please don’t be mad at me for this. I, well, haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

  The part of her that said, Well, at least he’s owning up to it now, was substantially smaller than the side saying, Oh God, what did he do?

  “You know how you weren’t much at all religious when we first met?”

  She nodded, a little less anxious now.

  “It wasn’t always that way. You used to be a Christian. Not the kind you are now, though. That’s why Zolnerowich wanted me to father the next generation instead of you just taking some, er, donations.”

  Sabrina put her chin in her hand briefly. “What do you mean, not the kind I am now?”

  “Well, for one thing, you probably wouldn’t’ve been willing to put me in this body if Livingston hadn’t messed with your brain.”

  She made a hollow laugh. You couldn’t be more wrong. If that had been the case, she would’ve had a very different past. “So you’re saying that either I would’ve believed a lie if all of this hadn’t happened, or I’m believing a lie right now?”

  “If you wanna think of it that way, sure.”

  They couldn’t add anything to that sentiment. What is there to say when you find out that you basically lost your identity because of a machine? Yet from a more objective view of recent events, perhaps it wasn’t so unfortunate to have relinquished that identity. For now identity was extricable from beliefs. Strange. All the crap she’d put up with over these past few days, and they were the only ones, for years now, that had felt in some way imbued with purpose. There was both peace and repulsiveness in that thought.

  “Mama?”

  That freakish son of hers hopped out of Jane’s caress into that of his mother.

  Sabrina wished she could’ve just embraced the child and left it at that. Uriah would realize he’d loved her all along and they would start the first family of a new era. This era would rebuild itself upon the values of Godly Simplicity, with the Dethroned reawakening only once they were ready to.

  But life was never that simple. There was no choice to delay the reverse-vitrification, not when there remained the probability that the Dethroned would die if they chose that. The citizens of Luna would vehemently stifle her movement anyway, and Uriah was a human being, not Artemis. His will wouldn’t bend to hers.

  Even indulging in pure affection for Michael was easier in theory than practice. At that moment – when she saw the almost physically mature yet fragile boy bury his head in her chest, while Uriah’s warmth of heart appeared to match his previous sadness – she knew his father’s dilemma.

  Just as Pat’s lie seemed the cause of a greater good, what was Sabrina to make of a kid born to be a pawn in some evil men’s chess game, brought into the world through his mother’s greatest agonies of both body and conscience?

  She hugged him tighter.