The skyline of metal and glass towers rose into a grey-pink smog. Within minutes they were on the capital's outskirts and still no sign of police. The highway they were coming in by was totally empty. It probably hadn't been used in twenty years. The Loop's magnetic grid joined the cities and the electromagnetic pods driven by droids served for journeys within the city's perimeter. The old tarmac highways were relics of another era, like the coliseum in Rome and the chateaus of France.
Will slowed the motorbike as they came over a bridge to an intersection. The pods crossing the intersection moved on three lines, taking up most of the road, but Will turned, weaving between them.
They cruised down a street with tenement buildings and shop fronts. Will's head bobbed between his wrist and the passing road names. She couldn't figure out what he was doing. Why he didn't just use a guidance system?
The handful people walking dogs, or crossing the road, were droids designed to make human towns look populated. As Day observed them, and they stopped to stare at her and Will, she realized it was the wrist-monitor that made wandering the streets impossible for humans. More than a minute outside and the monitor activated an emergency warning like it had done when she'd left the kitchen and stood outside in her backyard. It was the monitor that had made her pass out, not the lack of oxygen.
"Where are the police?" she asked. They'd been outside for fifteen minutes, Day's third long exposure to the real atmosphere in the space of a few hours and she could feel her lungs starting to strain.
"Hang on," Will said. He was focused on the information on his wristband and the task of locating their destination.
Some of the passing pods had people in them, who stared and pointed. Occasionally, a child waved. Day wondered what she would have thought if last week she'd seen two people riding through Boulder on an old fashioned motorbike. She'd have thought they were droids.
"I think it's down here," Will said slowing, and turning down a street with a historical red-bricked building encrusted between silver-mirrored monsters. They veered around another corner and almost crashed straight into a hover-bike. The hover-bike levitated sharply upwards, avoiding the collision by a few centimeters.
Will hit the accelerator hard. Day clung to him as the hover-bike swung around. The hover-bike raced after them, blue light flashing in the casing around the wind blades.
"Stop your vehicle." The droid's voice broadcast over the street.
Day's stomach rolled. Will responded by going faster. He wove between oncoming droids and road posts as though they were in a video game. He kept accelerating and breaking. They turned sharply, skidding down a narrow alley. Day glanced back and saw the hover-bike follow.
"We can't outrun it," she shouted.
"Here," he said, passing her something.
"Watch the road!" she screamed, taking the metal thing he was offering so that he'd look ahead instead of at her.
'The disc fixes onto your eye. It's your scope. Once you've lined up the target you press the red button. The charge will automatically find your target.
Day's hands began shaking. "Will..." she croaked. Her hands fumbled with the small metal gun, which looked more like a tube than a weapon. "Will..."
"Have you got the eye scope on?" He shouted glancing back at her.
"I... I..." The motorbike crashed through metal fencing and they skidded onto another busy street. Trembling, Day held up the disk against her eye wondering how on earth it attached. Little pinchers darted out form the disc and dug into her skin. Suddenly, lain over her normal vision of her right eye were hairlines of light.
"When I break," Will shouted. "The hover-bike will be forced to go over us. You lock on it and shoot."
The lump in Day's throat seemed more like a tumor. 'Oh God. Oh fuck. Oh shit,' she muttered. She just wanted to shrivel up and play dead. Maybe they should let themselves get arrested and she'd tell the police none of this was her—the shopping mall bombing, the disappearing person at Janus—All she'd done was try to get a personality implant.
Pull it together, a voice inside her said.
"Day, have you got this?" Will shouted. "Are you ready? I'm gonna do it!"
The bike broke so suddenly, Day slammed into Will. The impact winded her.
"Now!"
She tilted her head to the sky and saw the hover-bike curve up fly over them. Her open eye locked on the droid, her finger pressed the red button. An electric charge flooded her hand and the next thing she knew, the droid on the hover-bike froze.
Shocked, she stared at it in amazement. Will pressed hard on the accelerator and they raced forward, while the hover-bike dropped from the sky and crashed on the road where they'd been less than a second ago.
"Nicely done," Will said, pulling over twenty meters from the smoldering wreck of droid and hover-bike. He cut the engine and suddenly all she heard was the distant whir of pods, and the wind blowing through the trees that lined the wide boulevard.
"Down you get," Will said. She could barely lift her leg over the seat; her limbs were weak and her lungs in bad need of oxygen. Will got off and gently removed the gun from her hands. Then he pressed something that disconnected the scope from her eyes. She felt a pinching release.
He slipped the equipment back into his leather jacket pocket and glanced up at the skyscraper entrance. "This is the place," he said.
She leaned over, hands on her thighs. Her breathing was erratic and her body felt hot and sweaty then cold and shivery. Thoughts slipped through her mind like elusive minnows in a fast moving stream. How many laws had she broken in the last two hours? Was this the place where they'd arranged to take out the implant? Wouldn't the police easily find them if they left the bike outside?
Will put his arm around her waist and helped her towards the rotating glass door. Her legs felt like spaghetti, ready to fold and drop her at any moment.
The enormous lobby was the size of a shopping mall but the dark wood floors, water fountain running down the walls, and trees in giant pots, spoke of luxury and exclusiveness. A long escalator travelled up to an open lobby on the second floor. There were three receptions, each manned by a male and female droid. The cool air was oxygen rich and there was a faint smell of soil. It reminded Day of how it was supposed to smell "outdoors", how she remembered it from when she was a kid.
"Just sit here for a sec." Will lowered her onto a cream couch shaped in the crest of a wave.
She grabbed his arm. "Don't leave me."
"I just need to tell my friend that we're here."
"Will," she whispered. She blew up the hair falling into her eyes, realizing she must look a total state and now she was letting him see the panic. Panic when he was a pool of serenity. "Will," she said again, "They wouldn't have sent only one police droid after us... That doesn't make sense."
He squatted down in front of her, taking her hands in his.
"Take a deep breath. Now let it out. Good. And again."
This time her lungs filled with air and she felt instantly better. She let out her breath slowly, taking in the exact blue and green hue of his eyes, the slight break in the bridge of his nose, the lucidity of his lightly tanned skin. That was another way you could distinguish human and droid. Up close the skin of a human had uneven pores. It looked layered. It was imperfect.
'"Everything is perfect. Repeat it."
"Everything is perfect," she whispered.
"The explosions and the fear and the anxiety and the hover bike almost killing us, it's all perfect because it's letting you know you are alive. You are conscious. This is why you came here. To have a unique experience. Are you having a unique experience?"
"Yes."
"Yes," he nodded and an enormous smile lit his face. She wanted to melt into him. Instead, he let go of her hands and gave her a friendly pat on the knee. "I'll be back in a minute."
She watched him talk to the droid at the reception. Then she turned to gaze out the gigantic office window onto the Denver boulevard. A few street droids with their fake shopping bags had stopped to gather around the police hover-bike. The police droid was sprawled half off the bike, one arm smashed, head positioned at an odd angle.
Day closed her eyes and carried on breathing in and out, in and out. Then Will was beside her again. He waved a flat metal key with a yellow stripe down the side.
"Let's go up,' he said.
The lift smelt of citrus spray and opulence. They stood side by side as the doors closed. Will inserted a key that gave them access to the forty-third floor.
Day watched the number light up as they passed the first floor. She vaguely wondered who filled up a building like this. There were no more private companies. The droids took care of food, health, clean water, appliances, housing, environmental protection.
"Is your friend a droid?" she asked. It was a weird question, but then so was the idea of someone human having any expertise in a semi-medical procedure like extracting an implant.
"He's more of a patron. He's supported a lot of my work – my foundation and academy."
"What kind of experience does he have with extracting implants?"
Will raised an eyebrow as though he'd never considered the question before. "Implants are either made to dissolve or become fully integrated within a few months. Extraction isn't your run-of-the-mill business."
"But he's an expert in implants?"
"I don't think so."
She turned to face him, pushed him in the chest. "You don't think so?"
"You're fierier than we anticipated," Will said, a smile dancing in his eyes.
"We?"
"Monday and I. They must have given you the dullest, most morbid, vapid personality that they could possibly rummage up. They'll have had it put together especially, by a psychologist or psychiatric experts, because nobody markets a personality that makes you feel utterly useless and insignificant. And here you are a month later shooting down a police hover-bike."
"Well I'm thrilled I'm impressing you so much, but why don't you tell me why if I'm such a threat to the Vedas they didn't just get rid of me. How did Monday know they wouldn't kill her?"
"Ed."
"Ed?" she wasn't expecting to hear his name. "What about Ed?"
"Monday and Ed had some kind of power-dominatrix thing going on."
"I thought Ed was just the hired help?"
"I'd say it was more like he volunteered. He's high up on the Veda hierarchy. After Monday betrayed him, he didn't want to see her die, he wanted revenge."
The floor numbers flashed past Day's eyes. Thirty-two, thirty-three... she blinked at them, trying to get over the shock. She was running out of time. The lift would reach the forty-third floor and this would be her last chance to understand, to decide: Did she want to be Monday?
Monday, a girl whose ex-boyfriend was so screwed up, watching her suffer was his idea of pleasure. Monday who was brutal enough to take on a lover who she knew she was betraying the moment she met him.
"Monday used Ed to get closer to the Vedas," she said.
Will nodded, confirming her suspicion. Monday had used Ed to get what she wanted. Did Day want to be that girl, or did she want to stay Day?
Monday was ruthless, but a part of her must have wanted to know what it was like to be someone softer, and less cut-throat, or she'd have found another way. Hijacking a prison spacecraft with the assistance of an enlightenment guru couldn't be the only way to get to Mars. What if subconsciously Monday wanted to experience something else? What if subconsciously Monday didn't want Day to surrender?
The lift bounced up and the power went out.