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“Can you stay?” Maria asked. “At least for a little while? Fifteen minutes? I took the rest of the afternoon off.”
Eliana wanted to stay. Even in those bright lights, it was nice to see Maria, to have someone to speak with other than Luciano. Nice to share a bit of yerba mate with a friend.
She glanced at Marianella. Marianella sighed, so slight it was just her shoulders hitching for a half second. Eliana was sure she would make up some excuse to get them back to the park. But she didn’t.
“Fifteen minutes would be fine, I think,” she said.
Eliana had never been so grateful for fifteen minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SOFIA
Sofia sat out in the garden, the folder with her schematics resting in her lap. Eliana and Marianella had returned several hours ago, both of them quiet but not hurt. Night had fallen shortly after that, and she had monitored the screens herself since then, waiting to see if Cabrera would make a move under cover of dark. But he hadn’t. No one had.
She decided it was time.
She’d already read through the schematics, studying each line of information to see if she could find some scrap of herself. She couldn’t. It wasn’t like reading code, which was like looking into a mirror. This was more like the time she had found an advertisement for herself in the back of a cigar magazine. Disconcerting and strange.
Far away, in the city itself, a church bell chimed three o’clock. As the gongs faded into silence, Sofia stood up and walked to Araceli’s workshop. Marianella was asleep in the palace, dreaming like a human. And Sofia did not want Marianella to watch this. She didn’t want anyone to watch this, except for Araceli. And that was only out of necessity.
The walk to the workshop took seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The night air was cold and shimmered with the movement of entertainment robots watching her from the shadows. Sofia held her head high.
The workshop door hung open, waiting. She went inside. Araceli was gone, but she had taped a note to her desk that said, Ran to the cottage. Be back shortly. A record player sat beside it, unmoving, not even plugged in.
It still felt dangerous.
Sofia wandered from the record player to the worktable. All of the supplies she’d procured from Cabrera were laid out in a neat display, glittering in the work lights. She selected one of the smaller vacuum tubes and held it up, twisting it so that it caught in the light.
“You shouldn’t touch anything.”
Sofia looked at Araceli. “My touching never bothered you before.”
“I just didn’t want you to get started without me.”
“You know I can’t.”
Araceli walked across the room, carrying a big canvas bag that clanked as she moved. She dumped its contents out onto the work tray—mostly spare electronics parts. But there was also a long, thin knife of the sort used to operate on robots.
“Did Eliana get the information?” she asked.
“She did.” Sofia handed Araceli the file. Araceli opened it up and sca
“The activation code is in the upper-right corner.”
“Yes, I see it. This is perfect.” Araceli set the folder next to the parts on the table, leaving it open. Then she looked up at Sofia.
“Do you understand how this is going to work?” she asked.
“Of course I do.” Sofia tilted her head, looking again at the scatter of electronics and the surgical knife. “You’re going to cut out my heart. So to speak.”
One end of Araceli’s mouth turned up. “Pretty much.”
Sofia trusted Araceli. She was the only human Sofia trusted, because she had given up everything to protect a maintenance drone. And when the city belonged to the robots, Araceli would be the only human allowed to stay behind.
But nevertheless Sofia could not imagine Araceli plunging that knife into her chest, not without harming her in some way, cutting the wrong wire or knocking the wrong part loose. Not on purpose, but out of nervousness.
“If you don’t mind,” Sofia said, “I think I’d like to cut the core engine out myself.”
A faint relief washed over Araceli’s features. Sofia was almost touched.
“Well, let’s get it over with,” Araceli said.
Sofia stripped off her blouse and camisole and sat, topless, on the edge of the table. She had not been fully naked in front of a human for almost forty years, but Araceli looked at her the way she always did.
“Let me put in the code so we can access everything,” she said, dragging a cable across Sofia’s lap. She inserted it in the place behind Sofia’s ear, and when she plugged it into her computer, Sofia felt a twinge of co
Araceli straightened. “Your knife,” she said, handing it over.
Sofia pressed the tip of the knife against her clavicle. The core engine was only a heart in the metaphorical sense. Her brain, tucked away in her skull, contained her motor skills and the programming necessary to create intelligence, but the core engine was a cluster of wires that housed her intrinsic programming, the programming that defined her. Here was the programming that made robots servile to humans. Here was the programming that converted music into orders. The intrinsic programming was separate because it could not be reprogrammed easily, by just anyone. You had to have the right permissions. And entering the code made it possible to remove the programming without destroying Sofia completely.
Sofia dug the knife into her skin.
It didn’t hurt because she didn’t feel pain. She split open her sternum, hydraulic fluid pouring down her chest. Araceli looked at her feet, hair falling over her eyes. Exactly as Sofia had thought. She couldn’t bear to watch this violence. Or rather, what she perceived as violence.
Sofia reached inside her chest, her movements jerking, halted. Her programming was trying to stop her. But she could overcome it. For the five seconds it would take, she could overcome it.
She wrapped her fingers around the core engine. Her thoughts blacked out, grayed out, returned. Her hand was still inside her chest. Using her fingers, she unhooked the wires, one at a time.
Another blackout. She returned, having lost three seconds. No time to delay.
Sofia yanked out her core engine.
She screamed and slammed backward onto the worktable. Her mind was rioting, flooding her with a thousand images of humans—Araceli and past clients and workers from the amusement park and even the engineers who had built her so long ago in Brazil. She was aware of a weight being lifted from her hand, and then of a warm human palm pressing against her forehead.
“It’s all right.” Araceli’s sweet voice. “You did it, and you’re all right.”
Sofia couldn’t see the workroom, only the mass of humans crowding around her. Memories come to life. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound of Araceli’s humming as she worked. It was enough to draw her out of the past and into the present.
Slowly, her mind cleared and returned back to her. She felt hollow and purposeless, like a discarded doll. When she sat up, it surprised her that she could move, because what reason did she have to move, without her programming?
Araceli leaned over the worktable, a bright light fixed on the core engine. It was dismantled, strewn out in many tiny pieces across the surface, glittering like sand. When Sofia saw it, she felt nothing, and that was not what she’d expected.
Araceli set the micro-engine under the light and snapped it open. It was larger than the core engine, despite its name, but Sofia knew, distantly, that it would still fit inside her chest. Araceli hunched over the micro-engine with a soldering iron and a vacuum tube. There was a faint whiff of burning.