The Girl Who Dared to Stand (The Girl Who Dared #2)(5)

I jammed the new crystal into the slot and then flipped the switch, reconnecting the circuit.

There was a crackle, followed by a surge of power, and a searing hot tongue of fire licked a fiery brand over my chest and shoulder. I flew back, caught in an arc of power. I hit the bookcase and doubled over, dazed and confused, and trying desperately to catch the breath that had been stolen from me.

“Oh, that is so much better,” a soft voice announced from directly above me. “That crystal had been growing less and less stable for years, and I had to shut down some of my more… frivolous systems to keep from overloading it, so thank you. I finally feel as if I can breathe again.” The voice paused, and then drew closer. “How rude of me! You look hurt. Are you okay?”

I became aware of something glowing beyond my eyelids, and managed to pry them open.

A man’s face hovered just inches from my own, the planes of his face glowing as if built from pure white light, and as my eyes tracked down his vibrant form, I realized that he was suspended in the air, floating over me.





2





I screamed instinctively and lashed out with my fist, aiming for his jaw. But when my fist made contact—or rather, should have made contact—my arm punched through as if nothing were there, while his face did not change or move a muscle.

My eyes bulged as I watched it happen, my brain unable to comprehend exactly what I was looking at. He stared at me through eyes that glowed bright blue, and then pulled away, floating upward. My arm still hung in midair where I had been holding it, and I slowly lowered it, gaping at him.

“Who… what…” I fumbled, trying to settle on one question while fear of any answer kept my tongue partially paralyzed.

The man of light blinked at me, and the corners of his lips quirked downward. His mouth moved. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

It was Scipio’s voice. It was him. I had done something when I changed out his power crystal, and this was the result. Now, evidently, he could make himself appear out of thin air.

“It’s just a hologram,” he said, when I still failed to say anything. “I can turn it off if you want, but Lionel liked to look me in the eye when he spoke to me.” His mouth tipped upward as his eyes turned distant, locked in the grip of a pleasant memory. “He said he liked to take my measure, and it took him three times to explain that he didn’t mean he wanted my specs.”

“Specs?” I asked. He seemed harmless enough, but I was still trying to overcome the fact that Scipio had a body. Not a physical one, sure, but a facsimile of one.

I imagined he would have been handsome, if he didn’t glow so much. As it was, the details were fuzzy: glowing blue orbs for eyes, his head topped with a thick mass of inky, blue-black hair. Everything else was lost under the brightness.

“Specifications? My… um… system parameters? My emotional emulator and core processes?” He cocked his head at me, and when I didn’t respond, he sighed and rounded his shoulders downward. “Lionel always told me that I shouldn’t talk about those things, because it reminded people I was a machine, and not a person.”

I considered that for a long moment. The interactions I’d had with Scipio made it seem like he was anything but a person, and couldn’t care less about what anyone thought about him. But this version seemed to care; he seemed… disappointed by it, and that gave me pause. It was at odds with what I knew about Scipio. I needed to know more—so I could understand why he seemed so different.

“Are you a… person?”

He stiffened—or rather, the hologram stiffened—and I started to feel less afraid and more… fascinated. His responses were so real that it was like I was talking to a living entity, and not just a program. I didn’t know if the Scipio from the Core had a hologram of himself, but I had to imagine that it didn’t act like this, even if he did. I started to pick myself up off the floor, my joints and body still aching from the sharp shock I had received.

“I guess it really depends on how you define ‘person’,” he said after a pause. “I don’t have an organic body, if that’s what you mean. But… is that what makes you human?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” I replied, dusting off my clothes. I caught a glimpse of him looking away, and upon closer inspection, realized that my answer had saddened him. His mouth was turned down in a frown, and his eyes held the look of a man who hadn’t heard anything he didn’t expect, and yet was still disappointed to have heard it. Like me, whenever my parents reacted in exactly the way I knew they would, and never in the way I needed. It made me feel bad. “I’m sorry, it’s just that… people don’t view AIs as people, pretty much for that reason alone.”

“And you believe everything that everyone else believes?” He didn’t ask it maliciously, but rather with pure, unadulterated curiosity.

My immediate thought was, Of course not, but I let it stew for a moment, knowing myself well enough to realize that it was more reflexive than anything else. I really hadn’t thought about the issue of sentience before, but it had never been presented to me in such a way. In school, we were taught that Scipio’s personality matrix was a complex thing, and that the levels of complexity were what made him human-like, but never human. And for many, that made him a god of sorts.