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“But did you check with your older sister?” Alexis walked into the lab, gold high-tops glinting under the fluorescent lights. They matched the white-and-gold box in her hands.
A brand-new VERA.
“¡Guau, Alexis!” Taina pushed herself to her feet on her crutches. “How?!”
“You don’t want to know,” she said, slamming the box down on the kitchen table. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Janet and Bobbi didn’t answer my texts after I got off the phone with you, so I drove straight to Stark Tower. Aunt Pepper had a whole closet of these things, I swear. And by that I mean three. But when the entirety of New York State is trying to get their hands on one of these, three is, like, a lot.
“They were next to the composting-powered solar cells in her lab. She hadn’t even opened them. I think F.R.I.D.A.Y. kind of hates the idea of VERA. I think that because F.R.I.D.A.Y. told me so as I was running out of the building. Which she let me do. And now I’m here.” Alexis finally took a breath. “So, what are you nerds gonna do about it?”
The G.I.R.L.s looked at the box and looked back at each other.
Nadia took another sip of her tea. Ice-cold. Of course.
NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!
Tea will always be too hot and then you will forget about it and then it will be too cold. This isn’t really science. This is just a fact.
But it didn’t matter. They knew what they had to do.
It was time to science.
This.
This was what Nadia had missed most this fall.
She’d been too caught up with her to-do list and Maria’s list and all the other complicated things going on in her life to realize that the solution to her problems might have actually been to stop thinking about her problems and to start spending time with her friends. To talk to Shay and Ying about their relationship so they didn’t feel like they had to isolate themselves. To talk to Priya about her new powers so she didn’t feel like she had to handle that alone, either.
She’d been so busy trying to get to know her mother that she’d neglected the people who were still in her life. In trying to reconcile with the past and put it behind her, she’d somehow gotten trapped in it. And if they had all just been a little better at communicating, maybe it wouldn’t have been so long before one of them realized that Nadia was relying a little too closely on that little gold device.
The same device that now lay in pieces all over the lab floor. This time intentionally.
But, while VERA might have R.I.P.’d in pieces, the other pieces of Nadia’s life were finally falling back into place. She’d felt so alone this fall and she hadn’t even realized it. Relying on VERA wasn’t the same as having her real friends around. A hologram could never make her laugh like Shay, could never find a weird new obsession like Ying, could never show her exactly how to prune a houseplant like Priya, or deliver a burn as scathing as one of Tai’s. She’d made do, sure, and trusted too much in something about which she knew too little. But there was no comparison to the real thing. To her real friends.
Build a family, Maria had written. The tug in Nadia’s chest told her that she’d already completed the most important item on the list. That her family was right here.
Priya had helped break the thing apart, safely—her vines exerting just the right amount of pressure in the right places to pop the top off of a gold box that definitely had no tiny toothpick hole for maintenance. Shay and Taina were examining VERA’s guts, getting an idea of her physical functionality. Ying was running tests on what exactly the thing was made of.
And Nadia had connected VERA to her personal computer in order to interface with it—and, hopefully, learn its secrets. And Nadia deeply hoped that they were VERA’s secrets alone. There was no question the AI had done something to her—and to the people in Times Square, and at the financial services building. There were VERAs in each of those locations and inside the office building. She must have even tapped into the massive billboards in Times Square, broadcasting her signal to everyone within range—that’s why they’d all turned gold. Everyone there had strangely dilated pupils; they’d all been behaving in strange ways. Nadia hadn’t exactly caused any property damage like most of the people they’d seen, but she had almost caused some damage to her closest relationships. In some ways, that was so much worse.
But Nadia hoped—really hoped—that’s where this all ended. AIs had a nasty habit of turning evil. Everyone knew that, even people who grew up in spy-training facilities and had to catch up on pop culture a few decades later than everyone else. She had an evil AI relative, right alongside the good AI relatives. It was a totally reasonable theory.
Much more reasonable, Nadia thought, than her mentor, latest personal hero, and new friend Margaret being the actual evil here.
Taina wasn’t wrong, of course; Margaret was white and wealthy and privileged and used that privilege to launch her business. She was granted a sought-after internship at Pym Labs, no doubt over plenty of equally-if-not-more-gifted girls like Taina, who didn’t have the financial or circumstantial advantages.
Margaret was certainly driven, but Nadia just didn’t want to believe that she was doing all of this in service of some broadly evil goal. It just didn’t make sense. Margaret talked at length about making the world a better place; surely she hadn’t meant it in the same way as Monica Rappaccini. Monica was just looking out for herself. Margaret was looking out for the people who lacked her privilege. Nadia had to believe that. She had to.
So Nadia kept her headphones on to block out the outside world as she raced through lines of code, searching for anything that looked out of the ordinary.
Of course, this was a state-of-the-art AI. Everything looked just a little bit out of the ordinary.
Search parameters. Internet connection. There was the code Nadia had injected earlier, teaching all the VERAs how to self-repair. Voice recognition. Image generation.
And…
“There!” Nadia whipped off her orange cat-ear headphones with one hand and pointed to her screen with the other. Her friends, all deeply into their own work, dropped what they were doing to crowd around behind Nadia, staring at her screen.
“What are we looking at?” Priya asked, echoing what the group was thinking.
