531

“No.”

Chan Yi stepped through a layer of plastic and ignored Dr. Obuo’s protest. Her clinic was busy mid-afternoon and the patient she was working on twitched at her vehemence. Good thing she was working on diagnostics and not surgery.

“I have something new.” She didn’t need to know that it wasn’t the real reason he was there. The blade he’d taken from Darcy’s store would be a nice addition to his hardware, but that could have waited.

“I had enough of you yesterday. What more do you want?”

“Someplace private?”

Obuo looked away from the piece of leg tech that she was working on and stared at him. Her lips grew into a thin white line and her eyes tightened.

For the first time in seven years, Yi worried that she meant to throw him out. If Mariner Tech ever found out he was visiting her, it was likely a death sentence. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to keep their distance when he felt the same way.

“Go wait in the back.” She jabbed her finger towards the plastic walls. “The last room is open. I’ll be there when I can.”

Yi left her to the disgruntled patient he’d interrupted her with. He walked past an empty room on his right, but on the left a man was lying on a bed, healing from a visual augmentation surgery. In the next room, a young woman waited with a broken elbow joint.

Yi entered the last room, surprised to find Dr. Obuo’s office. All the times he’d come to her with emergency repairs over the years, he’d never been invited back. Of course, the clinic was usually empty when he showed up. He preferred to come late enough to avoid unwanted eyes. He could maneuver around cameras, but people were a surveillance problem he couldn’t hack.

The office was sparse. Although the room had three working walls, heavy plastic hung in front of each. It gave the illusion of cleanliness, though he could see the muck that bled through most walls in the Piles. Her desk was sturdy metal and the chair behind it little better than a fold-up. The computer and tech sitting on the desk and on shelves around the room were impressive though. He knew he paid her well, but she had to have found a patron to afford the equipment he saw.

He’d thought it before, but with the question from last night’s visit, he began to doubt. It wasn’t just the money and the quality of the tech she used. How was she alive? Mariner didn’t leave loose ends, so how had she left the company and managed to survive in the Piles? When he first found her, he’d had no choice but to trust her. Over time, he stopped asking himself and just accepted that maybe she’d been smart enough to get away, living under their noses in some grand rebellious gesture to Mariner.

He ran his fingers over the cool, smooth surface of the desk and looked around the room, checking the dimensions against the outer walls. Public records were useless for placed in the Piles, but Chan Yi had taken the measurements the first time he’d been to the clinic. A precaution he did without thought. There was no hidden room though, no storage space waiting to be found.

There were also no cameras in Obuo’s office. Yi had hacked her system years ago and loaded a program to hide from her cameras, but it was strange to find her private space without any security features. Was she protected by something else? Someone else?

It fit with the questions he couldn’t answer. And if it were true, it might be that she could find answers to things he hadn’t known to question until now.

He dropped his bag on her desk, then sat on the edge facing the doorway. He closed his eyes and took the time to run diagnostics over his system. If there was anything glitchy he was in the right place to get it fixed.

Even if he began to doubt the truths, he thought he understood her; she was his doctor and had seen him through some tough times. He trusted that if nothing else.

He heard the click of her boots on the floor, before the plastic shifted, allowing her entrance into the room. He opened his eyes as she walked past him and sat behind her desk.

“Chan Yi, you’ve never been this needy. Why are you here?” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I have something I need you to look at. I can’t trust this with anyone else.” He turned towards her and opened the bag between them. He dumped out the contents and watched as she recognized the brand.

“Where did you get this?”

“You’re better off not knowing. The outer boxes were marked ‘defective’. I ran all the tests I know on these blades, but I can’t find anything wrong with them. I want a professional’s word though.”

She opened the drawer on her desk, and he waited as she put a pair of contacts in. He watched the blue flare of the augmentation powering up, then waited as she began to examine the throwing blades Yi had admired before.

“These are good, 531. I mean made-for-your-kind good. This is the sort of thing they were dreaming up in the labs. They weren’t at a practical stage of production when I left.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. I never believed Mariner would stop trying to make AI soldiers, I just didn’t expect to find something like this here in the Piles. Is it defective?”

Obuo turned her attention back to the piece of tech and after a few minutes, she shook her head. “There is nothing wrong with this.”

“Let’s add it to my collection then, shall we?” He pulled off his hoodie and extended his left hand to her.

“You’re going to use their tech?”

“I am their tech, remember? It’s made for me. I might as well put it to the use they intended. Before they send some soulless version of me into the world to bring me in.”

She pursed her lips together, but let out a deep breath and nodded. “I take it you want me to look at the rest of that too?” She pointed at the other boxes.

“No installation today, but I want to know if the tech is good.”

“One of these days, you’re going to bite off trouble you can’t handle.”

Chan Yi let out a mirthless laugh. “Just another day in the Piles.”

He closed his eyes as she took a tray of tools down from one of the shelves. He muted his pain processors and watched the programming begin to load as she carefully opened his left wrist. He felt the fluid drip from his veins and ignored the need to look. She sliced the flesh open and attached the blade sheath to the underside of his metal bone structure.

“Sync.”

Yi opened the data ports in his left arm and let the blades integrate with his programming. The code was as slick and efficient as he thought it would be. It entered his system and he thought it might be like a human getting the first kick of whiskey after a hard day. After the first hit of information, it flowed smoothly, warm and calming across his processors.

Fuck, I’m really spending too much time around humans.

Obuo was the best in her field, and she completed the augmentation quickly. He felt the flesh around the wound start to close as the skin mender she applied began to work. He looked down but there were no noticeable seams or scars as his flesh healed. “You always do good work.”

“Just remember that when I send you the bill.”

“Or maybe you can do this one on the house, considering the secrets you’ve been keeping from me.”

“What are you talking about?” Her eyes widened as she stood up and stepped back, placing the chair between them.

“Who do you know, Obuo?” She was already jumpy, so he didn’t try to intimidate her, as much as he wanted to press her for information. “You got out of Mariner Tech and landed on your feet. No one leaves Mariner. No. One. I was one of the people that used to make sure of that. How did you get out alive?”

She swallowed hard and her heart skipped erratically. “531.”

“My name is Chan Yi,” he reminded her. “You know someone. Someone is protecting you. That’s the only way you’ve stayed clean.”

“This isn’t-”

“I don’t care what it is. We all have our secrets. But now I need you to use yours. Whoever it is, I want to know the truth. Did 532 survive?”

“What?”

“We were separated. They shot him in the chest and shut him down. I believed he was dead. For 7 years I believed it.”

“What happened?”

“I saw him yesterday, in the Piles. I … you said they couldn’t shut down his memories completely, but he looked me in the eye and didn’t know me. I need to know what happened to him after I fell.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”

“You were flung to the Piles for protecting us once. I’m asking you to do it again. Just tell me, so I can save him.”

Obuo closed her eyes and dropped her head, tears falling silently down her face. He didn’t say anything. He’d played his cards. It was on her now.

When she looked up, she nodded slightly. “I’ll find out what I can and send it to you. It won’t be safe to come back again though.”

“Thank you. For everything.” He grabbed the boxes and shoved them back in the bag without looking back. When he left the building, he jumped onto his bike and headed back to his office.

He needed to process what was happening and plan his next step. He might be an AI, but his heart beat wildly, physiology responding to the emotions he was never meant to possess.