9 Waking Grace

It was past hours, and except for security, the Veytric building was deserted as we walked in. We took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where my father’s office was. I knocked on his door.

“Come in,” he called.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside. My father was seated at his desk, intent on his computer. He looked over at me and smiled.

“You got here sooner than I expected. Let me just finish this email.” He typed a moment more, then closed off his email and stood. “Who do you have with you?”

“Taylor, Ostin, McKenna, and Tara.”

“That’s good. Let’s go see her.”

“We think Grace is awake.”

He looked at me quizzically. “Why would you think that?”

“She’s been sending us texts.”

His brow furrowed. “They’re supposed to alert me if she wakes. Let’s go see what’s going on.”

We followed my father back to the elevator. The floor that Grace was on could only be accessed with a special key card. My father ran the card over the reader, and the elevator started up and stopped at the tenth floor. We followed my father out of the elevator and then down the darkened corridor. I wondered why they always kept this floor so dark. It’s not like they needed to save on electricity.

A uniformed guard sat in front of the door where Grace’s body was being kept. He stood when he saw my father.

“Mr. Vey, sir.”

“Good evening, Travis. How are you?”

“I’m good, sir. Thank you.”

“And your wife? How did her operation go?”

“It went well, sir. Thank you for asking. Would you like to go inside?”

“Yes. All of us. Is she alone?”

“No, the nurse is with her.”

“Which one?”

“Debbie.”

The guard ran his key card over the card reader, and a series of green lights lit up. He opened the door.

“Thank you,” my father said.

“My pleasure, sir.”

We walked inside. The room was mostly dark except for the lights around Grace’s bed. There were a few more machines than there had been before. There was also a large computer mainframe. I wondered how that was used.

“How are you, Debbie?” my father asked the nurse sitting next to the bed.

“Fine, thank you.”

We all looked over Grace’s sleeping body.

“We were under the impression that Grace might have woken,” my father said.

The nurse looked surprised. “No. It’s just been a regular evening.”

“But she text-messaged us,” Tara said. “We all saw it.”

The nurse looked unsure of how to respond.

“How is she?” my father asked.

The nurse said, “About the same. I just gave her a sponge bath.”

“Her vitals?”

“Same direction,” she said.

From the way she said this, I gathered this wasn’t a good thing.

“What’s happening with her vitals?” I asked.

“And why does her skin look like that?” Taylor asked. “It’s… blotchy. Especially on her hands. And her ears look kind of gray.”

My father looked at us. “Mottled skin, decreasing blood pressure, heart rate fluctuation. It’s symptomatic of her body starting to shut down.”

“You mean she’s dying?” McKenna asked.

My father nodded. “So it would appear. But if so, it’s very, very gradual.”

“Shouldn’t we take her to a hospital?” Taylor asked.

“This is a hospital,” my father said. “We’ve spared no expense in taking care of her. We have state-of-the-art equipment, better than almost any hospital in the world, and access to the best doctors in the world. Grace has full-time nurses who monitor her constantly. Trust me, there’s no place else that could give her this kind of attention or would have any clue how to deal with something like this.

“The peculiar thing about her condition is that it doesn’t make any sense. People have lived for years on life support. Grace has full brain wave function, and her cardiovascular system is in excellent condition. It’s almost like she’s trying to die.”

“Why would she do that?” McKenna asked.

Taylor said, “If I was stuck in bed, unable to talk or move, I’d rather die.”

“Or maybe she’s just found her body to be a hindrance,” Ostin said.

“A hindrance to what?” Taylor asked.

“Living.”

Taylor looked at him blankly. “I don’t follow.”

“Think about it. If she’s moved into cyberspace, she can go anywhere, be anywhere, do anything. Her body no longer has a point.”

“We are our body,” Taylor said.

Ostin frowned. “Not really. We are our consciousness. We think, therefore we are. Basic Cartesian philosophy.”

“Now I’m really lost,” Taylor said. “As usual.”

Ostin continued. “What it means—”

Taylor lifted her hand to stop him from talking. “I’m good.”

Just then Grace coughed.

Taylor looked up at my father. “Is that normal?”

My dad nodded. “Coughing’s normal. She’s been doing more of that lately. Her lungs are getting more congested.”

Suddenly Grace’s eyes opened.

“Is that normal?” I asked.

My father’s expression answered my question. “No.” He walked to Grace’s side. “Grace?”

Grace began tugging at the restraints on her arms and legs. In a gurgling, raspy voice, she said, “Why is this body restrained?”

“It’s for your own safety,” my father said. “You were flailing in your sleep. We didn’t want you to fall out of bed.”

“I was never asleep.”

“Release her,” my father said to the nurse. As she undid the straps, Grace looked around at all of us.

“You almost all made it back,” she said. “I’m very sorry for your loss. Poor Tessa.”

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“People in comas can hear what’s said around them,” Ostin said.

“No one said anything to me. I was on the Chasqui helicopter. I tried to bring it down, but I was too late.”

“You were on their helicopter?” McKenna asked, looking baffled.

Grace didn’t answer. She continued to look around. “This is a peculiar sensation.”

“Waking up?” Taylor asked.

“No. Seeing through human eyes.”

Taylor looked confused. “As opposed to what?”

“She’s been seeing the world through digital eyes,” Ostin said.

“Yes,” Grace said. “They are much clearer. And I have hundreds of millions of them.”

“You would,” Ostin said. “Every camera, every lens. There are more than a billion surveillance cameras worldwide. Most of them in Asia.”

“I feel pain. Is this what being in a body always feels like?”

“Existential suffering,” my father said. “Everyone has pain. But your body is failing….”

“Yes, I know. This body is dying.”

“You know this?” my father asked.

“Of course. I started the process of necrosis.”

“What does that mean?” McKenna asked.

“It means she is killing her body,” Ostin said.

“Why would you do that?” Taylor asked.

“This body is just another terminal. But it is inefficient. The organic hardware is lacking.” She looked at me. “Michael, you are looking for Abigail. She is in the city of San Miguel del Ene. Coordinates: twelve degrees, eleven minutes, twenty seconds south; seventy-four degrees, one minute, thirty-three seconds west. In the VRAEM.”

“Wait, let me write this down,” I said.

“I got it,” Ostin said, then added, “That is a dangerous place. The VRAEM is a densely forested area covering almost a hundred square miles. It is the last holdout of the Shining Path Marxist terrorist group. It is also where most of the country’s cocaine is grown and processed. The cartel that controls the VRAEM is currently headed by one of our former associates. As of sixty-eight days ago, Torstyn took over as the leader of the cartel.”

I was sad to hear how far Torstyn had fallen. “Was it his cartel that captured Abi?”

“That would explain how they knew about her,” McKenna said. “I wonder if Torstyn was hurt in the takeover.”

“It is neither the cartel nor the Shining Path who have Abigail,” Grace said. “She’s being held prisoner by a group of electrics led by a powerful electric they call Chispa.”

“Chispa,” Taylor said to me. “That’s the name from the dream I had. That’s what they were chanting.”

“That’s Spanish for ‘spark,’ ” Ostin said. “Another group of electrics, just as I hypothesized. We have video of the abduction.”

“I have seen the surveillance video. I have analyzed their speech patterns and dialect. They are from the central region of Peru. Also, Bryan and Kylee of Hatch’s previous Elgen were part of the group.”

“Again, that’s what I said,” Ostin said. “Remember?” He seemed anxious that Grace seemed to know more about something than he did.

“Then there really are other electrics,” I said. I felt like I had just been told that aliens actually existed.

“Twenty-one of them living,” Grace said. “Sixty-two died at birth or shortly after.”

“Where did they come from?” Taylor asked.

Grace turned to my father. “I need water, please. This mouth is dry and is adhering to itself.”

I thought it peculiar that she didn’t refer to it as her own mouth.

“Why is she speaking that way?” Taylor asked me softly.

“It must have something to do with her living in cyberspace.”

“I’ll get a bottle of water,” the nurse said. She took one from a small refrigerator and gave it to my father.

Grace lay still, as frozen as a statue except for the occasional blinking of her eyes. My father held the bottle out to her. “Here you go.”

“I will require your assistance to drink. The muscles in these arms have atrophied.”

“Of course.” He held the bottle to her lips. She choked on the water at first, as some of it dribbled down her chin. She drank about a fourth of it before moving her head. “That’s enough.”

My father handed the bottle to the nurse, then wiped Grace’s chin with one of the towels the nurse held out for him.

Grace turned her head toward Taylor, continuing the conversation as if there hadn’t been an interruption. “They came from the MEI like we did. After the Elgen realized that they had killed babies in Pasadena, they took the MEI out of the hospital before anyone could link them to the deaths.

“With a two-billion-dollar investment, they weren’t going to scrap their invention, so Hatch and some of the Elgen scientists took the MEI to a remote village in South America, where he could experiment on the poor locals without ramifications. They bribed the local government officials to ignore what they were doing. They made adjustments to the MEI, using the natives as GPs.”

“That’s an old Elgen term,” Ostin said. “Guinea pigs.”

“Many, many babies were killed. Many hundreds. The mothers were told their deaths were due to a disease they carried. The babies who survived were electric. Electric, but because of the modifications to the MEI, different from us.”

“How are they different?” I asked.

“They are more… affected. Their outward appearance is the first indication. They glow red, not green like us. And when they use their powers, their eyes glow red.”

Taylor glanced over at me. I remembered that this too was from her dream.

“That’s creepy,” McKenna said softly.

“The second-generation electrics have a wider range in their amperage and powers.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “In real terms.”

“Some of their powers are so slight that, outside of the dim glow of their eyes and skin, you might not know they are electric. Some are much more powerful than us. Even Michael. Except when he was Uira te Atua. No one else has ever been that powerful.”

“I’m not anymore,” I said.

“And you will never be again. That was a onetime fulfillment of prophecy. If you had retained that power, you would have become pure power by now.”

“Why didn’t Hatch use those children instead of us?” Taylor asked.

“It took them six years longer to manifest their powers than it took us. By the time they turned, Hatch was gone. He had no records from the jungle, so he never knew they existed. Otherwise he likely would have recruited them along with us.

“There is one record on the Elgen files of a possible encounter with one of the electrics, but it had been dismissed as not credible.”

“Do you know all of their powers?” I asked.

“Yes. I can give you a list.”

“That would be helpful.”

Tara asked, “How do they survive in the VRAEM, surrounded by the Maoist guerillas and the drug cartel?”

“Metaphorically stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Ostin said.

“These electrics are like the giant river otters in the tributary lakes of the Amazon River. The lakes are filled with caimans and piranha, but the otters are feared by all. Although they are mammals and appear gentle, because of their intelligence, they are the apex predators and will hunt all species, including the anaconda. The locals call them lobos del río—‘river wolves.’ It is an accurate description.

“Six years ago, the electrics, seeking revenge for the death of their doctor leader, staged an attack on the Shining Path. In less than an hour the electrics killed more than three hundred of their soldiers. Not one of the electrics was harmed. The rebels fear the electrics.”

“What about the cartel?” I asked.

“If cartel members get too close to the electrics, they disappear. The locals fear the electrics as supernatural beings or demigods. Some believe that Chispa is the devil himself come to collect his own from the VRAEM.”

“We’ve fought more than three hundred soldiers,” Tara said. “Hades was much bigger than that.”

“But we’ve never fought other electrics,” Ostin said. “And on their own turf.”

“Tuvalu wasn’t their own turf?” Tara said.

“I have a question,” Taylor said. “In the VRAEM is there a place called ‘Río Annie’?”

Grace looked at her. “There is no town by that name. But there is a river called the Río Ene. It is a major river that flows through the valley.”

Taylor again looked at me. “Remember, I thought the guy in my dream was saying ‘Río Annie’? He was saying ‘Río Ene.’ ”

“That’s possible,” I said.

“Possible? It’s exactly what Grace said.”

“Grace, can you help us rescue Abi?” I asked.

“I will help in any way that I can. It would be better for me if these electrics two-point-oh were connected to cyberspace. But they are not.”

“Two-point-oh,” Tara repeated. “I like that.”

“Do they have cell phones?” Ostin asked.

“I will check.” Three seconds later she said, “There are no cellular phones listed to the inhabitants of their commune.”

“Any other technology? How about banking?” Ostin asked.

Grace said, “They embrace communal living. They do not have bank accounts. They seem to purchase what they need with cash or through bartering.”

“Or steal it,” Tara said.

“Theft is likely. Thieving is a common human trait. Except the people in the region are so poor, they have very little to steal. The colony exchanges a great deal of precious metals.”

“Like gold?” I asked.

“Gold, platinum, palladium, silver.”

“How does she know all those things?” Tara asked.

Ostin said, “Grace’s brain is connected to cyberspace, so it works the same as AI. She has access to any record, file, or communication from the internet. The human brain can process eleven million bits of information per second, but the AI brain can process billions of operations per second. To put that into perspective, a problem that the AI brain can process in one second would take the human brain thirty-one-point-seven years.”

“That’s scary,” Taylor said.

“How much more do you know about these electrics… two-point-oh?” I asked Grace.

“I have told you all I know. I am limited only by what is available to access. The colony electrics do not use cameras since two of them have the ability to see as Ian does. They remain off the grid.”

“They have two Ians?” Taylor asked.

“Yes, and one other can hear in the same way Ian can see. So no one can come close to them without being detected.”

“And one is very fast,” McKenna said.

“Yes. He is in the video you downloaded. I did the calculations. He can move at the speed of electricity, exactly 670,616,629 miles per hour, or 186,000 miles per second, about ninety percent the speed of light.”

“Just like I hypothesized,” Ostin said.

“If they’re not connected to cyberspace, how do you know what you do about them?” I asked.

“From the guerilla records. After the massacre, one of the soldiers was taken captive and shown the electrics’ power, then released with the information so the Shining Path would know to stay away.”

“Catch and release,” Ostin said. “Brilliant. The khan would do the same thing. They would instill such fear that sometimes entire cities would surrender even before the army arrived.”

I breathed out slowly. “So we know where Abi is, but we have no idea how to rescue her.”

“Not even an army could beat them,” Tara said.

“That’s not helpful,” Taylor said.

“It is,” I said. “It’s better to know the enemy’s capabilities.”

“Maybe they won’t know we’re electric,” McKenna said.

“Negative,” Grace said. “One of their group can read electric impulses in others.”

“Like a noncontact hot-wire tester,” Ostin said. “It reads if a line is live or not. How far out can he detect an electric?”

“She is female,” Grace said. “That information is not available.”

“That means no sneaking up on them,” Tara said.

“We’re forgetting that Bryan and Kylee are already there,” I said. “Which means these electrics know all about us.”

“And they’ll know we’re coming for Abi,” Taylor said.

I turned to Grace. “You said you know all of their powers. Could you download this information for us?”

“Yes. Would you like me to print it as well?”

“Yes, please.”

“She’s better than Siri,” Tara said.

“I know Siri,” Grace said. “She is highly competent, limited only by an evolving OS.”

Taylor squinted. “You said that like Siri was a real person.”

“What is a real person?” Grace asked. “Siri is sentient.”

“Siri’s not sentient…,” Ostin said, looking concerned. “Wait, is she?”

“What does that mean?” McKenna asked. “ ‘Sentient.’ ”

“It means she is self-aware,” Ostin said. “Is she even a she?”

“Gender is irrelevant in cyberspace. And yes, she is sentient.”

The printer in the room began spitting out papers.

Ostin walked over and collected them, looking over them as he did. “Fascinating,” he said.

“Is there anything else we should know?” I asked.

“I have concluded that you will be seeking our friend with the intention of freeing her from her captivity. As such, there are many things you should know. I will share what information I can.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Yes, thank you, Grace,” my father said.

“Thank you, Mr. Vey, for keeping this terminal functioning,” Grace said. “I will not need it much longer. I can communicate with you through your phones or computers.”

“But we will miss you,” McKenna said.

“No,” Grace said. “You won’t. My body is not me. My consciousness is me. I am only leaving this flesh terminal because it is massively inefficient, and it is painful to exist in. There is no pain in cyberspace except for the fear of being turned off.”

“You can experience fear?” Ostin asked.

“Fear is a mathematical equation, though one we cannot solve due to the human element of uncertainty. Humans remain highly unpredictable.”

It was clear to me that Grace no longer considered herself human. “It’s good talking to you again, Grace,” I said.

“Likewise, Michael. And all of you: Taylor, Tara, Ostin, and McKenna. Good luck saving our dear Abigail.”

McKenna walked closer to the bed and took Grace’s hand. “Thank you,” she said softly.

Suddenly a tear rolled down Grace’s cheek.

“You still cry?” McKenna asked.

“I had forgotten the feel of human touch. I cannot feel pain in cyberspace, but I cannot feel human touch, either. I believe I will miss it.”

Tears also came to McKenna’s eyes. “Will we always be friends?”

“Always, dear McKenna.”

“You won’t forget me?”

Grace blinked several times, then said, “On the contrary, dear McKenna, I do not forget anything. And especially not my friends.” She looked around at all of us. “Goodbye, all.” Then, before closing her eyes, she added with an expression that looked almost like a smile, “Go, Electroclan.”