Kira stammered under the sudden onslaught, searching for words, but he carried on without waiting for an answer. “Anyone who could create a million innocent lives and, in the same moment, request a means to kill all of them, without mercy, is not fit for the responsibility of those million lives. We realized what we were creating in the BioSynths—creatures every bit as human as ourselves. But the ParaGen board and the US government saw mere machines, a line of products. To destroy the lives of these ‘Partials’ would be an atrocity on par with every mass genocide we’ve seen in human history. And yet, we could tell, even before we released the first of them for combat testing, that they would never be regarded as anything other than weapons, to be cast aside once they were no longer useful.”

Kira expected his face to grow harsher as he spoke, more furious at this remembered horror, but instead he became softer, weaker. Defeated. He was repeating an old argument, but with all the fervor drained out of it.

“At the most fundamental level,” he said, “humanity would not learn to be ‘humane,’ for lack of a better term, unless their lives quite literally depended on it. So we created RM, and with it the cure, both embedded in the Partials. If the Failsafe was never activated—if humanity never got to the point where they felt the need to destroy the Partials in one moment—then no one would have been the wiser. But if humanity decided to push the button, well . . .” Vale breathed deeply. “The only way for humans to survive, then, would be to keep the Partials alive. Just as disenfranchising the Partials would cost humans their humanity, so destroying them like defective products would cost them their lives.”

Kira could barely think. “You . . .” She searched in vain for the words to make sense of it all. “All of this was intentional.”

“I begged them not to,” said Vale. “It was a desperate plan, one of terrible consequence—even worse, in the end, than I’d prepared myself for. But you have to understand that we had no other choice.”

“No other choice?” she asked. “If you objected so strongly, why not go to the executives, or to the government? Why not tell them it was evil, instead of going through with this horrible . . . punishment?”