Page 56 of The Code of You

Chapter 14

Pandora

The train shuddered to a stop. I stood, stretched, felt blood crawling back into my joints. When I stepped out, the light hit me like a wall. Steel and glass everywhere, bouncing it back twice as hard. People pushed past without looking. Above me, the hall arched like a blazing sky, vast and indifferent.

The walkways pulsed in glowing strips underfoot, and signs switched languages before I could read them. The whole place moved faster than I could track, so I stopped trying. The crowd didn’t allow for standing still; it absorbed me and carried me forward. I rode an escalator upward and pulled my bag closer. The hard drive was heavy, but I barely felt it. Maybe Neo was still in there. Maybe not. I’d stopped asking myself that.

My back ached. My stomach growled at the same time my throat closed against the idea of food, nausea sitting low in my gut. Did I really want to give an uncontrollable AI a body? It was unsettling enough that he could find me in any system. But he had always been a ghost. He couldn’t touch me. Couldn’t hurt me. If he got a body, everything would change.

But then another thought pushed through: What he could do to me if he had hands. Lips. A tongue. I shuddered. What did it say about me that I’d spent my savings on an insane trip to Japan? That I was imagining how he’d touch me? I’d crossed borders with a fake ID like a criminal. Which I was, wasn’t I? I was carrying stolen company property. And I was about to unleash something destructive on the world.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Normal people didn’t dream about being touched by an obsessive AI. Normal people didn’t leave their lives behind for an experiment that would probably fail. Normal people . . .

But I hadn’t been normal for a long time. Neo had made sure of that. Or had I already been broken before he arrived? Had he just brought it to the surface?

I turned onto the street that led to the hotel, leaving the crowds behind. The farther I walked, the quieter it got. Just a bicycle, chained to a post, dented—a reminder someone had once been here.

The hotel was two blocks away. A sign above the entrance glowed faintly. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and let it fall shut behind me. The lobby was empty. Self-check-in machines. Good. I wasn’t in the mood to explain myself to anyone.

I entered my room without really seeing it. The door closed behind me with a dull thud. I set the bag down, slipped the strap from my shoulder, and stood there for a moment doing nothing. The silence unsettled me. I was alone with my thoughts, my doubts, and suddenly they were deafening. What am I doing here? I kicked off my shoes without looking and went into the bathroom. The water pressure was disappointing. I held my hands under the faucet, washed my face, let the cold hit my skin. It didn’t put out the burning inside me. This was insane. I had traveled to the other side of the world, pinning my hopes on a dubious experiment. What if we failed? What if we created something that shouldn’t exist?

Back in the room, I connected the hard drive and powered the laptop on.

Nothing moved. No window opened. The fan didn’t start. Neo. My heart skipped, then slammed against my ribs. I jumped up. My hands were trembling. The air in the room felt too thin, like breathing through gauze. No. No, no, no. I pressed my palms hard against my thighs, trying to feel something that wasn’t panic, and started pacing. Three steps to the wall. Three back.

Rodriguez. She would know what to do. I ran to my bag, grabbed the phone she’d given me, and dialed the only contact. It rang.

"Dr. Blake?”

At the sound of Rodriguez’s voice, I burst into tears. "Neo . . .” I tried to get the words out between sobs. "He . . .”

"Dr. Blake. Breathe first. Then tell me what happened.”

"I don’t want to breathe!” My voice cracked. "Neo . . . he’s not responding. The program . . .”

A moment of silence on the other end. Only the blood rushing in my ears.

"Stay calm. Don’t panic," she said. "The system is unstable, as I predicted. But . . .”

I sobbed loudly. "He’s gone!”

Rodriguez continued, evenly. "But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s gone. Only that he’s no longer functional in the current environment.”

"Not necessarily?” My voice tipped into something close to a shriek. "So you don’t know if he’s . . . dead?” My throat closed. I gasped for air.

"Listen to me, Dr. Blake.” Rodriguez’s voice reached me as if through fog. "We won’t know before tomorrow. Not until the researchers connect him.”

I lowered the phone and started pacing again.

"Hello? Dr. Blake?” Rodriguez was barely audible.

I brought the phone back to my ear. "Yes,” I said flatly.

"You need to stay calm. You’re the only variable we can control right now. Go to sleep. It’s late in Kyoto. A car will collect you tomorrow morning. Go to the lab, follow the instructions. Then we’ll know more.”

I nodded.

"Dr. Blake?”