Mark Bryan was its designation. It would have a model number, a serial number, circuitry buried in its biology. It refused any more to think of itself as I and me.

As the chopper took it to where it knew not, to what fate it could not imagine, it found itself feeling an emotion it had felt only once before, when it knew that the mission must kill Gina. This was sadness of the kind that produces tears.

When a human being is moved to tears, they come. For a machine, it depends on the design. In this one’s case, an ability to conceal evidence of its emotions was designed in, so a torturer could never know what it felt. Thus, it could open and close its tear ducts at will.

It kept them closed.

Chapter Twenty-Six

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ACROSS THE DARKNESS

This time, the silence around him brought him back to consciousness. He detected the softest hiss of a ventilator, a small human movement nearby. For a moment, he felt a sort of happiness, perhaps at just being alive, but then he remembered his situation and a great weight of sorrow filled him. Or rather, it. It felt only sadness.

A sigh filled it—but didn’t. Its lungs didn’t work as expected. Not that it couldn’t breathe. It didn’t feel a need. A burst of fear coursed through it—and a male voice that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere said, “There it is—right there—okay, we have awareness.”

Mark tried to move, but he could not move. He tried to talk but he could not talk.

“Wow,” the voice said. “You got some complicated code in there. Did Doc Emma write that? She’s a damn genius.”

“That’d be why she got the Nobel,” a female replied, young, and for an instant, he thought maybe Gina.

“If they knew she created them, she wouldn’t have gotten any Nobel.”

“Turner did gen three, and he’s dead. The mad scientist.” Not Gina, no, another woman.

“This code causes the personality glitches we’ve had so much trouble with. The prof’s ‘poetic soldier.’ Moody’s the better word. We get this put right, we are ready with our big guy. I need to get to the bottom of the program. Think about the cards, Mark. Dr. Turner’s cards.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“It’s in the speech center,” the female voice said.

“So it’s noncompliant. Is that your revised code, dear, because the doc wants her toy back, and not have the damn thing try to rip her face off again or whatever.”

“This is an independent mind. If we edit out the uncertainties, it’s a huge difference. There’s no Mark then, and that is definitely not what she wants. He’s in those six lines of code. That’s the individual, right there.”

“Go to hell,” Mark said.