Wildcard
Marie Lu
I wonder what he’d say if he could’ve seen this place.
Now we step through the entrance with other avatars and emerge inside a space that takes my breath away. Underneath the soaring glass ceiling is a vast area full of displays, each one roped off and surrounded by clusters of admirers and potential buyers. Strings of lights hang in elegant arcs from the glass ceiling, adding to how surreal the place looks. Tiny mechanical birds flit by, as if in an aviary. When I look closely, I notice them carrying blank notes strapped to their wiry legs.
“Those birds are encrypted packets. For secure messaging between the visitors here.” Jax nods at a couple of the exhibitions we pass. “These are funded by secret patrons, developed illegally at the Innovation Institute,” she says in a quiet voice. “By Taylor.”
One of these exhibits is a cloud of data, a million tiny specks that swarm and separate from each other, then swarm close again. Another is a display of weapons with glowing blue ovals running along their edges, sensors for your specific fingerprints. A third is a demonstration of invisibility done through the NeuroLink; instead of downloading a randomly generated face over your own as a disguise, it maps your surroundings and combines them into a lattice that covers your body, making you vanish from view.
I look at her. “And Taylor . . . is selling these technologies?”
She nods. “Quite a few of them. For the right price.”
I shake my head and stop right underneath a grand, rotating display of armored suits. “How is Taylor developing all these illegal devices from a proper science institute? And how are the Blackcoats connected?”
“What do you know about Taylor?”
“Not much. Just what she’s told me. She said her father was killed because of his illicit activities.”
Jax’s lips tighten. “Dana Taylor grew up during a rough time, around when the Soviet Union collapsed. Her father laundered money for a living. As a child, Taylor saw more than her share of death. She ended up studying neuroscience because she was always interested in how the mind works—the way it manufactures every aspect of our world. The mind can make you believe whatever it wants you to believe. It can bring dictators to power. It can crumble nations. You can do anything, if you put your mind to it. You know the saying. Well, she truly takes that to heart. If the mind weren’t dependent upon the rest of the body, it could operate forever.”
I nod absently at Jax’s words. They echo what Taylor had said to me.
“When she got a job at the Innovation Institute as a junior researcher and moved to Japan, that became her obsession—learning how to disconnect the mind from the body. Separating its strength from its ultimate weakness.”
Her obsession. I think of what Taylor had told me. “Is it because of her father’s murder?”
Jax pauses for a moment. “Everyone’s afraid of death, but Taylor is absolutely terrified of it. The finality. Of seeing your father dead, gone forever without an explanation. The idea of her mind just . . . shutting off one day, without warning.”
An uneasy feeling lurches in my stomach. In spite of myself, I can understand that fear. I can taste it in my mouth.
“And what about the Blackcoats?” I say.
“Taylor worked her way up the ladder at the institute rapidly until she became its executive director. But there were some studies she wanted to do that the institute simply wouldn’t approve. As you know, she grew up around illegal dealings—the idea of her not being able to do what she wanted was unacceptable. Hence: the Blackcoats. She created the group as the shell for all the experiments she wanted to conduct that she didn’t have permission for.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let’s say, for example, that Taylor wanted to do something that she knew she couldn’t get approved by the institute. She would go ahead and conduct that experiment anyway, under the guise of something else. Some innocuous study. And she would make sure every shred of paperwork and evidence of that experiment would get funneled toward the Blackcoats instead. If she sells the results of that experiment to someone—a foreign government, some other foundation—it would be traced only to the Blackcoats.”
I narrow my eyes as I start to understand. “So the Blackcoats . . .”
“They’re essentially a false business name,” Jax finishes. “An empty shell, underneath which all of Taylor’s secret projects are kept.”
“None of the data would ever lead back to her,” I say in realization.
“Right. Let’s say that news got out about some illegal weapon Taylor was developing at the institute. Investigators would find the trails leading not to Taylor’s name, but to some mystery group called the Blackcoats. Taylor could claim she was an innocent bystander, her identity stolen and used by the Blackcoats. The clients who bought the tech from her can also point their fingers at the Blackcoats. So, the news reports would all say something like, ‘Who are the Blackcoats? Mystery criminal ring in the business of illegal tech development.’ The Blackcoats get the blame and the reputation as some shadowy crew.”
“What was all that about the Blackcoats being a group of vigilantes who fight for causes they believe in?” I say.
“Lies,” Jax says with a shrug. “We’re not vigilantes, Emika. We’re mercenaries. We do what we get paid for.”
“But how does Hideo’s algorithm fit into all this? Why does Taylor care about destroying it? Is someone paying her for that?”
At that, Jax gives me a dark look. “Taylor doesn’t want to destroy the algorithm. She wants to control it.”
To control it.
The obvious truth of it hits me so hard that I can barely breathe.
Of course she would. Why would someone like Taylor, obsessed with the power of the mind, want to cripple the NeuroLink by ripping out such an intricate system like the algorithm? Why hadn’t I guessed that she might have other plans for it?
During our first encounter, Taylor had sat across from me and looked so sincere, so genuine, about what she wanted to do. She knew how to turn my own history against me, baiting me with what I had done for Annie that had gotten me the red on my record. She manipulated me into agreeing with her that what the Blackcoats were doing was noble.
The conversation tears through my mind. How timid and quiet she had seemed. How perfectly she had played that moment.
Jax watches me as these thoughts sink in. “I know,” she says, breaking the silence. I nod numbly back.
Jax looks away from me and up at the bridges lining the main dome’s ceiling. “The Blackcoats use the Dark World’s Fair as storage for their archives. Every experiment they’ve conducted, every mission they’ve run, everything they do is locked away here in a blockchain, one secured packet after another.”
A blockchain. An encrypted ledger of records, nearly impossible to trace or change.
Jax stops at the very edge of the dome’s glass, in an empty corner. “This is what I wanted you to see—the story behind Sasuke. It’s what you’ve been after, isn’t it?”
My heart squeezes when I hear her words, and again I see the Memory I’d glimpsed in Zero’s mind, the image of Sasuke’s small figure crouched in a room, the strange symbol on his sleeve.
I bring up the image now for Jax. Her eyes immediately jump to Sasuke, and her face softens for a moment. What is your story? I find myself thinking. How did you cross paths with Sasuke?
She finally touches my arm and motions me forward. As she does, she slides her other hand once against the glass. A panel shifts with her movement, like an invisible door in the dome, with stairs curling downward into darkness.
“Only Taylor and I have access to these archives.” Jax suddenly hesitates, and in her silence I understand that if word got out that Jax had shown this place to me, Taylor would kill her, too.
“Just you and Taylor?” I ask. “Not Zero?”
“You’ll see why in a second.” S
he gestures for me to follow her in. “Careful you leave no traces behind.”
I watch as Jax steps in through the door, then glances around to see whether anyone else might be watching. But no one seems able to see us or the entrance that Jax opened up. It’s as if we’d existed in an entirely different virtual dimension from the others here. I look back to see Jax’s figure disappear into the shadows of the stairs. I take a deep breath and follow her in.
The stairs vanish rapidly into pitch-black, and even though I know I’m in a virtual world, I still instinctively put my hand out, searching for the wall beside me. Moving in the darkness here, where nothing’s real, makes me feel like I’m not moving at all. The only hint I get that we’re making progress are the sounds of Jax’s footsteps, still moving steadily downward ahead of me.
Gradually, the ground before us lightens, and when we reach the bottom of the stairs, everything is illuminated in a soft, dim blue glow. We step out into a vast chamber that takes my breath away.
“Welcome to the library,” Jax tells me over her shoulder.
It looks like all the books in the universe, shelved in an endless, circular room framed by ladders that stretch in both directions. I imagine every book is a file that the Blackcoats have stored—archives upon archives of research, data on specific people, records of missions. This is their central directory. We stand on a platform, looking up and down into the endless space, and I have to close my eyes to fight off the vertigo.
Jax motions me onto one of the ladders. We click right into place against it, so that it’s impossible to fall, but I still feel a wave of dizziness. “We store every iteration of a Memory, and duplicates of every file.” She opens a search directory, and in front of us, types in “Sasuke Tanaka.”
The world around us blurs, and an instant later, we’re on the ladder against a new section of the library, where certain books are now glowing with a blue halo. Jax pulls them out with a wave of her hand. They form a ring around us, and when I stare at any one of them long enough, it starts to play the first few frames of the recording.
There are records from the Blackcoats’ security cams, from Sasuke’s Memories, from white-coated technicians, and from what look like actual tests and trials. There are police reports, files about his disappearance, and data on his parents. There are also files about young Hideo.
I remember the first time I sat in Hideo’s office, studying Zero’s hacks, wondering who my bounty was. I remember the way Hideo tilted his head up to the sky at the onsen, the endless versions of his constructed Memory of how Sasuke had disappeared.
These files will show me what really happened to Sasuke all those years ago.
Jax looks at me, then gestures at the files. “We can’t stay in here forever,” she reminds me. “If you want to know something, find it now.”
I hesitate for only a second. Then I scroll through, sorting the files by date so that I can look at the oldest ones first. I find one dated ten years ago, the year Sasuke disappeared, and tap it.
It’s a recording from a security cam. And it starts to play.
19
We’re standing in a room with two dozen young children, probably no older than ten, each one wearing a yellow band around their wrist. They’re sitting at white desks arranged in neat rows, as if in some sort of classroom. The bare walls are decorated with cheerful drawings of rainbows and trees. Posters that say READ and LEARN SOMETHING NEW TODAY! and DIFFERENT IS SPECIAL.
In fact, the only part that doesn’t look like a classroom are the technicians in white coats at the front, watching the children.
A long window runs along the room’s back wall. A bunch of adults are clustered there, looking on with craned necks, their faces curious and worried. Some are wringing their hands or talking to each other in low voices. Their expressions tell me, without a doubt, that they’re parents.
I look at the timestamp of the recording. This was before Sasuke was kidnapped.
My gaze returns to the kids. I study each of their faces—until I find one that I recognize. I spot Sasuke, sitting near the center of the room.
Jax stands next to me, looking on at the scene, too. She smiles a little at the sight of young Sasuke, then nods toward a girl at the front of the room, her brown hair in two low pigtails.
“Is that you?” I ask.
“I was seven,” Jax replies. “Just like everyone else in the room. It was a requirement of this particular study conducted by the institute—specifically, by Taylor. This is where I first met Sasuke.”
I glance toward the parents at the window. “Are your parents over there?”
She shakes her head. “No. Taylor adopted me.”
Now I look at her in surprise. “Taylor’s your mother?”
“I wouldn’t call how she raised me motherly,” Jax mutters. “But yes. She found me in the hospital wing of an orphanage. Later on, I learned she adopted me to put me in this study. “
Jax points out two of the adults at the far-left side of the window. It takes me a moment to recognize them as Hideo and Sasuke’s parents—the same elderly couple I’d once met.
“They look completely different,” I murmur.
Decades younger, as if it hadn’t only been ten years since their son went missing. The mother, Mina Tanaka, is sharply dressed in a suit and a white lab coat with the institute’s logo on its pocket, her face young and her hair glossy black. The father seems nothing like the frail, sickly man I’d seen at Hideo’s home, but like a slightly older version of Hideo now, with his handsome features and tall stature. I glance back at Jax. “What kind of study is this? Why are you and Sasuke in it?”
“Every child you see in here is dying,” Jax replies. “Of a disease, of an autoimmune disorder, of something terminal that medicine has deemed incurable.”
Dying? Hideo had never mentioned that. My gaze returns to Sasuke, his large liquid eyes dark against a small, pale face. I’d assumed it was the lighting. “Did . . . did you know? Did Sasuke’s parents know?” I stammer. “What about Hideo?”
“I have no idea if his parents ever told Hideo,” Jax says. “If he’s never mentioned it to you, it probably means his parents kept that from him. I certainly was too young to grasp how sick I was. I didn’t know that the reason no one wanted me was because, well, who would want to adopt a dying child? Sasuke himself didn’t even know. All he thought at the time was that he got sick much more easily than other kids.” She shrugs. “You don’t really question things when you’re that small. You believe everything is normal.”
I think of Hideo calling out for Sasuke to slow down at the park, the way he’d scolded his little brother as he wrapped the blue scarf snugly around Sasuke’s neck.
“And this study focused only on terminally ill children?”
“The study was a trial for an experimental drug that was supposed to be revolutionary,” Jax says. “Something that could cure various childhood diseases by taking advantage of the child’s young cells to turn their own bodies into collections of supercells. So, you can imagine that parents who were running out of options would jump to sign their children up for this radical study. What was there to lose?”
I look back at the room, lingering on each of the parents’ faces pressed against the glass. They seem hopeful, watching every move their children make. Mina Tanaka clutches her husband’s hand tightly to her chest. Her eyes never leave Sasuke.
A deep nausea settles into my stomach. The scene reminds me of the false hope every new drug gave me and my father. This is the one. This might save you. “There’s always more to lose,” I whisper.
We look on as a researcher adjusts the wristband on one child. “Of course, the study was a cover,” Jax continues. “While the study’s small team was working earnestly on a real drug, Taylor was also conducting her own research. The real study.”
“So what was her actual experiment?”
I swallow hard. Hideo had told me this about Sasuke, that his little brother had sat for many tests measuring his intelligence. “What was Taylor looking for?” I ask.
“A candidate whose mind was strong enough to withstand an experiment to separate the mind from the body.”
Suddenly, I make a connection so horrible that it makes me dizzy . “So that’s why Taylor had wanted each child to have a terminal illness,” I breathe.
Jax’s eyes are stone-cold, bleak with truth. “If they died during the study, it could easily be blamed on their original illness. Covered up. Their parents had already signed consent forms. This way they wouldn’t get suspicious and start asking questions.”
As we look on, the recording finishes, then automatically goes to the next. We watch at least a dozen of them. Some of the kids in the study change as the recordings continue; the number of parents standing at the window start to dwindle, too. I don’t want to ask Jax where they went, whether those were the children who couldn’t make it all the way through.
We shift to a recording with a room empty of kids, with the sun setting through the windows. Taylor is speaking Japanese with another researcher, in a voice low enough that translations start appearing in English at the bottom of my view. I blink—the researcher is Mina.
