This could be our last stop, a final end to the endless chase. A place to plan and plot and devise our crucial counterattack.
Ava nudges me with a sharp elbow. She points to the trees in front of us. Two distinct shapes emerge, a faint silhouette floating behind.
“Ready?” I whisper needlessly. Ava tightens her jaw, and I ball my hands into white-knuckled fists. I take a big gulp of air and exhale slowly. My breath comes out in swirling smoke, reminding me of a dragon. There’s a fire inside me, and suddenly I feel warm and calm. One look from Ava and I know she feels it too.
We’re ready.
The outlines become faces and bodies. Emery appears first, then President Moore, with Pawel a few steps behind. I stare at Moore, transfixed, my eyes glued to the man who can grant us refuge.
He stumbles forward, as if his own eyes have not yet adjusted to the dark. I search his every feature, looking for any hint of surprise, or shock, or understanding. But his face, though startlingly attractive in the starlight, is blank. Indifferent.
“President Moore,” Emery says, “this is Ava and Mira Goodwin.” His round eyes squint as he moves his head from side to side, taking us both in. We all stand motionless, awaiting his response.
“You don’t look identical to me,” the president finally states, his thin voice magnified in the still night air. “One of you is slightly taller, the other rounder.”
The leader of the free world opens with an insult. My first reaction is to defend my identicalness. Surprising, when all I’ve ever wanted is to be seen as different from Ava.
“Sir—” Ava and I speak at the same time.
The president laughs. “Ah, there it is.” The ground spins as he turns to leave. “This conversation will be moved to a different setting. Just the twins and me.”
Barend detaches from the shadows. Pawel and Emery enclose my sister and me. Ava grabs my arm, her grip tight enough to bruise.
“We do not agree to any change—” Emery starts, but Moore shouts over her.
“Security!”
Everything shatters, all plans and expectations smashed to pieces.
A gunshot rings out, then two more.
“Run!” Emery yells.
The last thing I see is Ava’s face, twisted in fear and fury.
Then something covers my eyes. My mouth.
I’m thrown over a bulky shoulder, the deafening sounds of a helicopter growing louder with every footfall. With every one of my muffled screams.
I’m shoved against something solid. I reach out, arms flailing, but there’s no one beside me. Ava.
I feel the chopper lift into the sky. Two spinning blades taking me higher and higher away from Common ground.
OWEN
“Bullshit,” I scoff.
I’m keyed up and restless, bored out of my mind. It’s impossible to sit still like I’m supposed to. The collared uniform the high rankers of Kismet Automotive Factory make all its lucky employees wear is itchy as hell—a getup I wouldn’t be caught dead in back home.
“Well, if I were back home, I probably would be dead,” I reason out loud to the girl next to me. “Georgia,” I whisper, and then pause to let my place of birth sink in. The wildfires, the drought, the plague of mosquitos—it’s a conversation starter for sure—but my nameless coworker doesn’t bat an eye.
Fifty other Programmers, or Code Cogs as I like to call us, are crammed inside the room with me, burning the midnight oil. This is my third double shift in a row, but I’m not complaining. Complaining is what my parents do if half my earnings aren’t in their bank account every other Friday by six.
Like me, everyone is staring hypnotized at their overly bright screens, mindlessly sorting through millions of lines of code, looking for vulnerabilities in security. We’ve been at this for seven hours straight with no bathroom breaks, no outside breaks, no breaks for stretching or talking, and definitely no breaks for thinking. I swear they’ve started to count our blinks, and they’re working out ways to accelerate that pesky lag in their machine.
“Bullshit,” I tell the room again, a little louder. No one responds or looks up from their screens. Not even a grumble or glare is thrown my way. I check the guy on my left to see if he’s even breathing.
“Hey, are you still there, or did you turn android after all?” I ask.
“Shh,” the girl next to me hisses. Her eyes jump to the surveillance above the entrance doors. I turn toward her, naming her Amelia inside my head, the only one in here who seems to remember English and not just the programming language we were all trained to speak.
“It took me fourteen hours today to search one hundred twenty-four thousand fifty-three lines of code to find why a stupid period was added to the end of the output,” I vent, but I think she’s stopped listening. “What did you accomplish today? Something as equally life changing, I hope?”
“We’re doing important work,” Amelia informs me. “Complex problems require complex solutions—”
“And every found key can unlock victory,” I finish the company motto for her. I smile because she’s earnest and pretty and composed of warm flesh and blood and not cold zeros and ones. But she doesn’t smile back.
I’m not saying what we’re doing doesn’t matter—we’re one of five teams challenged with making an autonomous car “survive and thrive!” inside the 150-plus mph winds of a superstorm—I’m just saying I won’t have anything to do with it. I’m only a back-row lackey who does what he’s told. A Code Cog till I die.
All fifty screens suddenly dim in unison, blinking out a three-part pattern that signals a shift change. Well-conditioned, everyone lifts their right wrists and scans their chips to log off. Right on cue, the back doors slide open, and a wave of replacement Programmers files into the stale room like robots, wrists already extended to log on for the next graveyard shift.
One and all we rise, most of my coworkers asleep on their feet while we wait for each row’s turn to exit. My fingers twitch with pent-up energy.
“The future waits for no one,” I say to Amelia, knowing full well I’ll never see her again. Every shift brings new faces. This is a place of work, not a bar, my Team Leader once told us. Fraternize on your personal time. What’s personal time?
I break protocol and bound for the front doors, bumping through the orderly line of people on my way into the hall. My brain switches on the second I make it out.
Rambling down the wide corridor, I pass a series of doors that lead to massive data centers stuffed with machines and hundreds of what I call Code Monkeys, the people below even the Cogs, who receive and manage all the data from your Kismet autonomous cars. They’re the ones who ensure you always get to your twelve-hour shift up in those gleaming high-rises safe and on time. Extra bananas for the Monkeys if you smile at the end of your riding experience. The sensors know if you’re happy. Remember that.
Here it is. My favorite place on the entire 375-acre factory grounds. The room where the magic happens. I stop and press my face against the enormous glass wall. They’re beautiful, the scores of autonomous cars positioned in the final line of assembly. Pale silver or jet-black, each curved like the slope of an aluminum hill, with dark one-way windows and electric-blue trim, the spiral Kismet logo on the front and rear bumpers. All that’s needed is a test run in Little Detroit, and off they’ll go, serving the citizens of the megalopolis by next week.