The elevator stopped at the fifty-eighth floor. Two humanoid drones greeted Marvin, each a head taller than him and sporting heavy armor and paralyzing rifles. They escorted him down a carpeted hallway with ivory walls that appeared translucent. Marvin assumed that those shapes behind the walls were 2D designs, not shadows.
With every step he took, he found it harder to move. Why couldn't he have just stayed in the chair? Why hadn't he used the EMP?
The hallway ended abruptly at a wooden door. No sign beside it, no marker to distinguish it from the others. But Marvin knew that once he crossed that door, his fate would be sealed.
I need to run. Can I beat these drones?
But a part of him didn't want to. A part of him wanted to see what Saeyung had to show him. The woman was ruthless but not unreasonable; she couldn't kill him yet.
And now she might say she knows who I am. She might say where my body is.
Saeyung knew he was dangerous, but she couldn't possibly know how strong Caroline had made him. Plasma daggers, arm-shields, rocket boosters, and 75% the strength of an average mech—he could at least make it out of the building in one piece.
And the data leech virus, the bug… he no longer needed them. The recording would show Saeyung had kidnapped him using the elevator. This was enough evidence to convict Ainsel, was it not?
The wooden door opened on its own, giving way to a pitch black room. A white speck appeared in the abyss and grew larger, until Saeyung Park was standing before Marvin, wearing her white lab coat and tinted glasses.
She didn't speak. Just smiled, turned, and beckoned Marvin to follow. The door closed behind them, leaving the two of them and the two drones alone in the room. Despite the darkness, Marvin could see Saeyung and the drones as clear as day, like they were the gods of a newborn universe.
"Load 3E," Saeyung ordered the room's AI. To Marvin's right, there was a flash of color. The light-absorbing nanoparticles in that section of the room dissipated, showing a lone desk, chair, and monitor. The monitor displayed an oddly familiar room with a Bessmer chair and a mech strung up behind it.
Someone was sitting in the Bessmer chair. Marvin focused his cameras—it was Sunwoo. He had a piloting helmet on but hadn't crushed the neurobrick, meaning he wasn't synced with the mech.
Saeyung pressed a button on the keyboard to activate her microphone. "Sorry for the holdup."
"All good," Sunwoo said. He sounded stressed, like he wasn't sure exactly what was happening.
Saeyung turned to Marvin. "I want to show you how you came to be," she said. "It's a beautiful process."
"Can I sync?" Sunwoo asked.
"Not yet," Saeyung said. Then, deactivating the mic, she continued to Marvin, "Most people don't actually know how consciousness implants are made. Replicating an entire human brain requires an ungodly amount of resources. Look at Megacity 2—their virtual world is almost the size of our megacity and a million times more dense. We can't fit a quarter that much in a mech."
Marvin looked between the monitor and Saeyung. What does that make me, then?
"Luckily, human nature can be approximated," Saeyung said. "What would you say drives you?"
Marvin tilted his head.
"What are you most passionate about?"
"Mech-fighting," Marvin said.
"That's your code's throughline. Everything else you feel and think is derived from that. It makes the process so much simpler."
That can't be true. He wasn't constantly thinking about mech-fighting.
"You don't feel that way, obviously. Your brain just approximates human nature close enough to where it convinces itself it's the real thing."
Marvin felt a coldness grip his phantom heart. "How do you know I'm like this?" Who's to say all consciousness implants are the same?
Before Saeyung could respond, Sunwoo cut in.
"Saeyung, what's going on? You good?"
"Yes, sorry." Saeyung began typing commands into the computer.
"When can I sync?"
Saeyung paused. "You actually won't need to sync today."
Silence. Sunwoo glanced around the room in confusion. "What's this mech for, then?"
Saeyung resumed typing. "The mech is for you."
"But I'm not syncing with it?"
"No."
Marvin took a step back as he realized what she was doing. Sunwoo doesn't know.
"You've become the best version of yourself, Sunwoo," Saeyung said. "You should be honored to know that you're ready."
"Ready for what?"
"Transference." She said the word without missing a beat in her typing, as if she expected Sunwoo to share her brain.
"You didn't tell him," Marvin said quietly.
"He wouldn't have agreed."
"Why are you doing this?" Marvin took another step back and ran into the barrel of a rifle. "Consciousness implants are a thing already! You already have me!"
"You are not my end goal," Saeyung said. Still, she didn't look up, didn't stop typing.
"What the hell is transferrence?" Sunwoo demanded. "You told me this was a syncing test!"
"In a way, it is. It's the ultimate syncing test."
Sunwoo reached for his piloting helmet, but some sort of magnet pulled his arms down and secured them to the Bessmer chair. They trembled with effort but were held firm. He widened his eyes. "Saeyung?"
"You'll be okay."
The pilot's voice grew quiet. "I don't want to do this."
"You'll be okay," Saeyung repeated.
"No, stop!" Marvin blurted out. "That—" His voice box could barely stammer out the words. "That's your brother for fuck's sake!"
Saeyung looked at him with genuine confusion. "Are you not glad?"
"What?"
"You won't be alone anymore."
"He didn't agree to this!"
Saeyung might as well have not heard him as her finger reached for the enter key. Marvin didn't know what he was intruding on. He didn't know if Carlos' suspicions about Sunwoo were right, or if Saeyung was doing some great, selfless act. He just knew that he couldn't let her press that button.
He unfolded his right plasma dagger and stabbed it at the keyboard. It stopped short. Smoke rose from the blade in small wisps, and pieces of ash and skin drifted onto the desk.
No more than a millisecond could have passed, but it felt like time stood still. The blade had never reached the keyboard; Saeyung's hand had blocked it. She'd given her own hand to stop him and had not even winced.
Marvin was yanked backwards by a drone. Saeyung snatched the keyboard and pressed enter. Before Marvin could see what happened on the monitor, he was thrown to the ground.
He knew he should've stayed there, tried to remain at Saeyung's mercy. But he couldn't let her force Sunwoo into an implant. He couldn't let it happen to anyone else.
Marvin activated his rocket boosters and bolted up. He stuck his plasma dagger out behind him so that it cut through one of the drones. The other drone fired its rifle, but Marvin blocked the electric shock with his arm-shield. He lunged at the enemy and sliced its head off. The first drone grabbed him from behind and put him in a headlock, but Marvin inverted his arms and stabbed the drone several times in the sides. Its arms crumpled and let go of his neck.
Marvin spun around, looking for Saeyung. The room had gone dark and the monitor had disappeared. For a moment, he felt like a human again: terrified, unable to breathe.
Why would she do that? How could she do that? How could she let me watch like it was some regular experiment?
Marvin clutched his chest to calm the buzzing of his circuits. He had to escape. No, he had to save Sunwoo. He knew where that room was—Renee had shown him the first time he was here. Fourth floor, near the elevators.
A white rectangle materialized in front of Marvin and drone guards began streaming through. He ran the opposite way, ramming everything aside. Another squad of drones spawned in front of him, but he had momentum on his side. He cut through them like butter, barely breaking his stride.
He soon hit a wall. There was nowhere else to go but through, so Marvin made a square out of four lines and pummeled past.
The world lit up. The skyline suddenly filled his vision as he dove into open air, low-resolution shapes glinting in the sunlight. Then he saw only the rapidly growing streets of Sector 8.
Fourth floor. I need to get to the fourth floor.
Marvin angled himself so that he was upside-down and facing the wall of Ainsel's gargantuan lab. He stared at the bottom of the building, made note of the separate window panes, and began to count. As he barreled towards the ground, his rocket boosters subconsciously unfolded and angled him up and towards the wall.
Seventh floor, sixth, fifth…
The calculations were second nature. His thrusters burned and propelled him through a fourth floor window. Everything became a shower of prismatic light and dark metal. Then Marvin stabilized, climbed to his feet, and registered his surroundings. He was in a foreign, silver corridor, but he had an idea of where to go. He'd traveled roughly 200 feet due west from the elevator to Saeyung's lab. There, he'd been displaced by 53 feet south. He needed to retrace that path, then go north four dozen more feet and turn right.
He began to run. Alarms blared all around and the white hallway lights turned blood red. Doors vanished before his eyes and the floor and ceiling and walls all began to turn black, distorting his vision. He ignored the surroundings and relied on his internal map.
Drones hidden with camo cloaks grasped at his arms, invisible forces interrupting his inertia. He cut through every resistance he felt and saw sparks spray into the air, then dissipate into nothing. Saeyung's words echoed through his head, overbearingly loud as if trying to wake him from this nightmare.
Your brain approximates human nature close enough to where it convinces itself it's the real thing.
Was that all he was? An approximation of something he used to be?
Marvin clenched his phantom teeth and imagined all his tense limbs, his pounding heart, his gasps for breath as he ran. He was more than an approximation. He had to be.
Soon, he had covered the 200 feet east. He turned and barreled through another hallway. A dozen strides in, he ran into a wall. Something suddenly rammed into him from behind, pinning him. Marvin inverted his shoulder and swung his right arm in an arc, decapitating his assailant. He then grabbed what he assumed to be the body of the drone, put it up as a shield, and boosted towards the wall at full power.
He crashed through. A beam from his arm popped out of the plating and one of his rockets short-circuited, but he'd made it past.
He kept running until his mind told him to stop. Then he turned and pressed a hand against the metal in front of him. If his memory was right, Sunwoo was behind this wall.
Marvin pressed closer to the metal, then rested his shoulder against it. He took what he wished he could call a breath, then pushed.
A metal door gave way and he stumbled into a white room whose multitude of wall-screens were flashing red. A Bessmer chair was in the center, and behind it stood that mech, the one that had seemed to breathe before. Now it was completely still. It was a plain gray prototype, humanoid but blatantly angular and mechanical so that even its silhouette could not be mistaken for a person.
If the end goal wasn't to make something human, then what was it?
Sunwoo sat slouched in the Bessmer chair, eyes closed, peaceful almost. But his face was pale and his cheeks were hollowed, as if he'd been stranded here for years, not minutes. Marvin looked around for guards, but none came. He approached Sunwoo and muttered his name. No response.
He searched the room for something to disconnect so he could stop the transference. The wires that ran from chair to mech were too dense, and unplugging the wrong one would probably kill Sunwoo. Same with cutting power to the Bessmer chair.
Marvin backed up to the edge of the room and noticed a small monitor beside the chair. It displayed several lines, one blue, one red, one green. Heart rate, brain activity, and something else he wasn't sure about.
All three of them were flat.
Marvin's heart fell to his stomach. He's dead.
He wanted to throw up. If Saeyung had wanted to convince him he was less than human, then she'd achieved the opposite effect. He'd never felt so scared, so disgusted at anyone in his life. How could he even begin to understand why she'd killed her own brother?
The shuffling of footsteps caused him to turn around. Guards were gathering at the door he'd broken through. Another door on his left opened, revealing more guards. The drones began streaming into the room. Six. Twelve. Eighteen. Marvin wasn't sure if he could fight all of them.
Am I dead, too? Is this how my story ends?
It seemed silly now, him being here. He wasn't some spy or an Inspector who could infiltrate Ainsel AI. He was just a kid who'd done the dumbest thing imaginable and messed up every step of the way.
I have to try to fight, he told himself. Saeyung wouldn't kill him yet, and until then, he had a chance to escape.
He raised his daggers and primed his thrusters. There were twenty drones in total. These were built to overwhelm and keep order, but if he could single each of them out—
A sudden hum startled him out of his battle stance. It had come from behind him. He didn't dare turn around, but he heard a series of pops as wires disconnected and clattered to the floor. Then came a thud of metal against metal.
Marvin stiffened. The guards had shifted their attention, looking at something above his head.
There was a split second of silence. Then a mech—the one Sunwoo had been hooked up to—leapt past Marvin, grabbed the nearest drone, and smashed its head against the floor.