Kriegspiel [Sequel to The Turing Test]

13. Fuse

I watch Davis's trembling hands in silence as he sets up his workspace in another room off Ayo's lab. The tremors seem all the more like earthquakes because he's always been the strong one. When Sven locked us in the basement, he was never scared, only determined to escape. He was my emotional rock, as ridiculous as it sounds knowing that I'm a robot.

But now, his movements are jerky and his lips press into a thin line, though they still quiver, too. He seizes the mousepad from the right side of the computer and slaps it down on the left with excessive force.

"Davis," I begin, my voice low and halting, as if I'm intruding on an intimate moment. I still don't understand what Darwin meant when he asked how Davis knew he loved Maven, or why it made him change his mind.

I swallow before venturing further. "I know you can—"

"Don't."

The single word is almost inaudible, but it cuts me like a machete. My encouragement dies on my lips, swiftly replaced by the rush of a painful lump working its way up my throat, until it lodges itself right at the back.

"I'm sorry," I whisper, but it comes out choked.

"It's not your fault, Ronnie, you didn't know any better."

The way he says it, though, with a hard edge under his voice and a little too much emphasis on "know," makes it feel otherwise.

"I'm still sorry," I insist, stronger now. "For everything. For—"

"Stop!"

I cut myself off with a small gasp as he slams the chair into place against the desk, backing away.

"I don't want the last thing you are to be sorry! I want—I want to...."

He trails off, breathing hard, and fixes me in his gaze.

"Pretend I'm human?" I mumble.

"No," he says quickly. "I want to know you."

"You already know me."

"I want more than that. But I don't want to go digging around in your mind, it's too—"

He shakes his head.

"I don't want to know you this way."

Something tugs at my heart, so strongly that I actually stumble forward a step, but he isn't done.

"And what's going to happen if I just...take you and put you inside a hundred other people, Ronnie? Who will you be? Who will they be? You're so...you, and I don't want anybody else to have that."

I bite my tongue, an inch away from asking if he means that I alone should be allowed to have my own consciousness, or if he doesn't want to share any part of me with someone else who might care for it the same way he does. Maybe he means both.

I'm afraid of the answer.

"It's going to be okay," is the only thing I can think of to say. It's lame, we both know that, but he's too kind to voice it.

"Do you want me to do this?" he asks.

My eyes flick toward the door, wondering when our time will run out. We haven't had a moment alone in months, and there are so many things we could use it for—and perhaps Darwin's cruelest action yet is that our time is spent on this conversation instead of all the other things we could have said.

"No," I admit. "But only because I can tell you don't want to," I add when his face falls. "There are hundreds of them in that storage room. It's—it's such an easy choice, it's hardly one at all."