A Thousand Beginnings and Endings Read online

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.”