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“Alissa couldn’t come today,” Sofia said. “They sent me instead.”
Luis looked doubtfully at her. Sofia held her chin high, pushed out her chest, drew in her waist. She was aware of time passing.
“Alissa told me what you liked,” Sofia said. “And she sent me over with a gift.”
Luis’s expression softened. “A gift.” He smiled nervously. “She told you about that?”
“Of course. And I can keep it a secret too.” Sofia pushed inside without waiting for an invitation, drawing her hand across his chest as she moved past him. He didn’t protest. The apartment was clean and sparse and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. Sofia draped herself on his sofa. Over the thumping whine of the music, she could hear the computer in the next room, whirring behind the closed door.
Luis didn’t live here. No one did. The city had purchased an apartment in this expensive uptown building just to house a mainframe. To hide it, actually, from people like Sofia and Ignacio Cabrera. Keeping it in the city offices would be too obvious. These new sorts of computers, that ran on electricity instead of steam, always made the city nervous.
Luis sat beside her. She smelled his expensive European cologne, his cigarettes, the residual electric scent of the computer. But beneath all that was the strange feral fragrance she associated with humanity, pheromones and salt water and iron.
She reached into her handbag and pulled out the little glass apothecary jar Cabrera had given her and set it on the coffee table.
“Your gift,” she said sweetly. “From Alissa.”
Luis stared at it. Already desire was coalescing inside him, manifesting in the form of droplets of sweat on his forehead. Not desire for her. Or for Alissa, that sad girl with haunted eyes Sofia had seen sitting in Cabrera’s office as he’d explained what Sofia was to do.
“Here, let me.” She picked up the apothecary bottle, unscrewed the lid, drew the thin golden liquid up into the dropper. Luis watched her with something like longing. She let two drops fall onto her tongue. It tasted dull and bitter. Then she did the same to Luis. He closed his mouth and his eyes at the same time and fell backward onto the couch like his bones were melting away.
She did the same.
She lay there for five minutes, listening to him breathe beneath the music. She stared at the filigree in the ceiling, a pattern like snowflakes. An old pattern in a new building. Those two golden drops were working their way into Luis’s bloodstream, seeping like lead into his cells. Like lead, it was poison. She wondered how it was, for them, to languish so close to death. She wondered why they enjoyed it.
His breath slowed but did not stop.
She stood up, swinging her legs over him in one liquid movement. He lay, unmoving, on the sofa, his eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling, dark with pupil. She slipped off her shoes and walked over to the record player lurking in the corner and knocked the needle off the turntable. The record scratched and fell silent, and Sofia was free from the sharp panic associated with music. She could hear the computer better now—whump, whump, whump, as slow as Luis’s poisoned heartbeat.
The door leading to the computer was locked. Sofia pulled a pin out of her hair and picked the lock easily, then slipped inside, leaving the door open. The computer took up the entire room, lights dazzling in the dim apartment, magnetic tapes rolling out their long streams of information. It was a database, brand-new, that contained information about every power plant, every dome, every utility, every icebreaker, every entrance and exit, every seaport in Antarctica. Everything you would need to know to run a domed city on the bottom of the world, collected into one place.
It was beautiful. A modern marvel.
And they left it alone with a man like Luis Villanueva.
She dragged a chair across the room and sat in front of the computer. It was much more advanced than she was, and designed for different things, but Araceli had assured her she would be able to co
She pulled a narrow cable out of her handbag, coiling it around her wrist like a bracelet. She knelt on the floor and ran her fingers across the back of the computer until she found the co
She plugged in the cable and stood up.
As she’d expected, she hit up against the mainframe’s security systems, but it was easy for her to thread her way around them; she was an old computer, and this new computer didn’t quite know what to make of her, so it only took a bit of trickery inside her head to convince it to let her pass.
The moment she was in, the computer’s information poured into her. She had never experienced so much at once before, and it left her dizzy and disoriented. She slumped down in the chair. For a few terrifying seconds, she was afraid she wouldn’t acclimate to the information rush, that it would overcome her and she’d have to disco
But then she began to make sense of things.
Cabrera had asked her to locate a specific piece of information. When she brought it back to him, he’d consider her an employee. He’d explained that he was looking to expand the fleet of mechanized icebreaker ships he employed during the winter months to bring in food and supplies and luxury goods (his phrase, of course—Sofia knew he meant narcotics) into the city, in competition with the city’s own efforts. He’d heard from a source that the city engineers were hard at work developing a new model of robot for the icebreakers, and he hated when the city got the jump on him. If there was any chance of his network of reprogrammers taking control of these new icebreakers in a timely ma
“You might be an andie,” he’d told her that afternoon in his office, the lights low and amber-colored, “but you’re also just a dancing girl. I looked into it.”
Sofia had burned at the slight, but outwardly she hadn’t reacted except to smile sweetly.
“Any human reprogrammer I take on, they have to prove their mettle. I expect no less from a robot. No matter how much they might look like a woman.”
“I understand,” Sofia had said, and she had. She’d expected to be tested.
All part of her plan.
City information was still flashing through Sofia’s thoughts, boring her. The initial rush had faded, and her own treacherous programming was listless at the thought that she should care about any of this. It was dull, her programming insisted. Concerned with politics. Oh, let’s not talk about politics tonight, boys. Anything but that.
Sofia forced herself to concentrate.
She did not know how long it took. She couldn’t track the passage of time when she had to also track the passage of information. But eventually a word flashed in her thoughts: “icebreakers.” She immediately diverted the information flow into a special place in her brain, where it would wait to be downloaded by Araceli into a format Cabrera could access on his own mainframe down at the Florencia. She sca
But then the information took on a heavier quality that Sofia knew meant it was protected more strongly—a new password, a clearance level. Not that it mattered, as the computer let her through. But she could taste the protection in the back of her throat, like ashy metal.