The New Me Page 3

  Not because I was afraid of what I would find if I kept going.

  It took me almost an hour to get to the river. It was a little ways off the trail; I had to push through a pocket of blackberry bushes to reach the edge. I didn’t know what I expected when I got there—a sudden rush of memory, maybe. A full-sensory flashback sequence, like on TV. But what I got was… nothing.

  It was all exactly the way Hugh had described it, the few times he had been willing to talk about the accident with me. The river, low because of the drought—we were always in a drought these days. That was why I had thought it was safe to cross, he had said. And there was the fallen tree, just like he had told me. I reached down and touched the damp bark, and felt no spark of recognition. This spot in the woods could have been any other.

  I started to turn around. There was no sense in spending any more time out here, and risking Hugh finding me gone, if it wasn’t going to bring back my missing memories. As I turned, a flash of silver at the base of the fallen tree caught my eye. I knelt down to look more closely.

  Someone’s dog had gone digging, it looked like; there were paw prints in the dirt to either side of the hole. The dog had managed to pull an old necklace half-free of the dirt before its owner had dragged it away. No, not so old after all—the silver still had all its shine. I pulled at it, feeling cold in a way that had nothing to do with my lack of a jacket. A couple of tugs yielded a heart-shaped locket. I pried it open with my thumbnail, and saw two pictures, one to either side.

  Hugh. And me.

  I hadn’t looked at Hugh’s map since that day in his office a couple of weeks ago. But as with all my recent memories these days—except for the ones that slipped away from me almost as soon as they happened, like the coffee cup—I could call up the image as clearly as if I were holding the map in front of me. This was precisely where he had drawn his X.

  X marks the spot.

  I started digging.

  I only had my hands to dig with. Unlike the dog who had been here before me, I didn’t even have the advantage of paws. I kept waiting for my hands to start hurting, but when the pain came, it was like that day with the spilled coffee—muted and far away. I kept going, distantly aware of the sky getting darker and the fact that Hugh would be getting home any minute. Dirt piled up all around me. My phone buzzed, and buzzed again. I kept digging.

  Until I hit something brown and stringy. As matted with dirt as it was, it took me a moment to recognize it as human hair. I slowed my digging, not wanting to know what I would find. But that only postponed the inevitable. Just a few minutes later, my hands hit something firm and wet, and I found myself brushing dirt away from a human face.

  The skin was half gone, revealing the dirt-flecked bone underneath. The remaining skin had gone gray, and felt slimy under my fingers in a way skin shouldn’t. The woman didn’t look anything close to human anymore. But I knew her.

  I had known her since I had first touched those matted strands of brown hair.

  I brought my muddy and goo-streaked hands up to my own brown hair. I had shampooed it just this morning; it still smelled like the lavender shampoo Hugh kept buying me. I had blow-dried it in the mirror, and smiled at the way it fell around my shoulders. But the hair attached to that rotting skull… that was mine too.

  Hugh hadn’t chickened out at the last minute after all.

  He had drugged his wife. He had held her underwater. He had buried her in a shallow grave.

  Annika was dead.

  * * *

  When I opened the door, Hugh was sitting slumped at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. At the sight of me, he burst up from his chair. His face was red; his hands clenched into fists as he marched up to me.

  “Where were you?” he demanded, his beer breath hot in my face. “I told you not to leave the house. Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?” He reached out and shook my shoulders as he screamed the last words. My bones rattled in his grip. But they weren’t my bones, were they? They weren’t bones at all.

  I felt like I was watching the scene from a distance, like one of Hugh’s stories I was supposed to remember but didn’t. “Yes.”

  “So why didn’t you do it? How hard is it to follow a simple instruction, you useless—” He ran out of steam all at once. His mouth snapped shut. His hands dropped from my shoulders and fell heavily to his sides.

  He sagged down into his chair, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Annika. I just… I was so worried. You know you’re not recovered enough to go out on your own yet.”

  He looked up at me with those warm eyes, and I wanted to melt into his arms. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, and that I understood now what I had done wrong, and that I would never do it again.

  Why had it never struck me until now how strange it was that his eyes had so much power over me?

  There was an almost physical resistance as I broke our gaze, like when I had tugged the locket out of the ground. I was still holding that locket. I tossed it onto the table. “Did I come out of one of those catalogs?”

  Whatever he had expected to hear, that wasn’t it. He stared at the locket, then at me. It took him a good ten seconds to answer, and when he did, it was only with a helpless, “What?”

  “You ordered yourself a replacement for Annika, didn’t you? After you killed her. Did you pay extra to get the hair just right, and the eyes, and her voice?” Or maybe he had been cheap about it, and gone with good-enough. I had sat in the car for a long time before driving home, and studied the picture in the locket. The more I had looked, the more I had seen all the things that were subtly wrong. Annika’s eyes were darker than mine, her hair a shade lighter. She had a dimple in one cheek; I didn’t.

  His mouth opened and closed a few times. He didn’t say anything.

  “There was no hospital stay, was there? You killed her, you bought yourself a custom companion bot, and you made up a story about the accident so I wouldn’t think it was strange that I didn’t have a past. You even planned for us to run off together if someone found out you had killed your real wife. I found the money and the fake IDs.”

  Hugh finally found his voice. “How did… were you in my office?” He had the gall to look betrayed. “I suspected something when I found those papers on the floor. But I told myself you would never break my trust like that.”

  The worst part was, I actually wanted to apologize. As soon as I heard the hurt in his voice, I ached to make it better. “How are you making me feel like this? Is that part of the programming? I look in your eyes, and everything is all better? I see you unhappy, and all I want is to fix it?”

  His eyes were starting to show a hint of panic. “You’re confused. Sit down. Breathe.” He reached out a hand to me. “Do you remember the day we first met?”

  I stepped back, out of his reach. “No, I don’t, because I’m not her!”

  He flinched back at my shout. For a second, he looked genuinely afraid. But it passed quickly, and he went back to regarding me like an indulgent parent listening to the tantrum of a spoiled child.

  “Why?” I asked. “If you hated her enough to kill her, why go right out and get a replacement?”

  He winced, like I had hurt his feelings. “It wasn’t like that. I never hated you, Annika.”

  “I’m not Annika.”

  “I never hated you,” he repeated, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You could just never manage to love me enough. Nothing was ever good enough for you. I killed myself washing dishes for you, and what did I get in return? A complaint that there was a streak on the bottom of one of the bowls. I dragged myself out to a party for some friend of yours I barely knew, and you lectured me for not talking enough. And heaven forbid someone should leave a dirty dish out on the counter.” He shook his head. “I never knew how much I would miss all that, when you were gone.” He looked like he was about to cry.

  I wanted to wrap my arms around him and tell him he hadn’t done anything wrong. Or my programming wanted me to. I squashed the impulse as best I c
ould, but I could still feel it beating its traitorous little fists against the inside of my skull, trying to get out. “When she was gone,” I corrected him, my voice hard. “Because you murdered her.”

  “But for all the perfection she demanded from me, she could never manage to get the simplest things right. She couldn’t get through a single day without doing something to make me mad. I thought, with us, it could be better. I could give you all the best parts of what we had together, and none of the worst. I could tell you about the good times until it was like you remembered them yourself.”

  “And you could make me forget every time you hurt me?” The coffee cup. That flash of memory—Hugh’s angry face, him shoving me into the counter. And all the other half-memories just like it. “How did you do it?”

  “You’re acting like you’re some kind of victim here. You know most people order companion bots to use them as glorified sex toys, don’t you? Where do you think you would have ended up, if you hadn’t come to me? I’m giving you a good life. I paid for all the best upgrades for you—full sensory perception, full emotional spectrum. You deserve that, Annika.”

  I wondered if Annika had ever felt this kind of anger, the kind that made her vision go black at the edges. Full emotional spectrum, indeed. “Call me Annika one more time,” I dared him in a growl that didn’t sound like me—although what I really meant was that it didn’t sound like Annika.

  I closed the distance between us, intending to grab the collar of his shirt in my hands. I wanted to shake him as hard as he had shaken me. I wanted to see that flash of fear in his eyes again.

  But I stopped short, my hands a fraction of an inch from his neck.

  Hugh had pressed himself against the back of his chair, with a look on his face like he was about to wet his pants. But when he took in my frozen posture, a relieved laugh slipped from his throat.

  “I’m your primary,” he said with shaky triumph. “I went through the setup the second you were out of the packaging. You can’t hurt me, and you will always love me.”

  He stared into my eyes, and I felt it. Warmth. Love. The impulse to grab him swept over me again, but this time I wanted to pull him into my arms and kiss him.

  I pictured the rotting body in the woods. The memory was as clear as if I were standing right there. Bot memory. I let the image fill my vision, until I couldn’t see Hugh’s eyes anymore.

  Again, I reached for his neck. I didn’t bother going for the collar this time.

  And again, I froze.

  He patted my hand. “It’s going to be all right, Annika. Soon enough I’ll have you all better. All the good, none of the bad. We just need to work on it a little more.” He fumbled in his pants pocket. “Getting rid of the last twenty-four hours should do it. It will just feel like another lapse. A bad one, but I’ll help you through it.” He pulled out his phone.

  My eyes followed the phone. “That’s how you’re doing it. How you made me forget all the times you’ve hurt me.”

  Hugh, busy tapping at the screen, didn’t respond.

  He wasn’t looking at me, which made it easier for me to look away. I forced my gaze down to the chair he was sitting on. I willed myself to focus only on the chair, to forget he was even in it, as I kicked out as hard as I could.

  I was hoping I was stronger than I thought, that if I put real effort into it, my strength could exceed a human’s. I wasn’t disappointed. The chair toppled sideways and flew across the room. Hugh tumbled off and landed at my feet. The phone slid across the floor. The chair hit the wall; one of the legs snapped off with a crack.

  I grabbed the phone before Hugh could reach it. I looked down at an array of graphs and charts, none of which I knew how to interpret.

  Hugh pushed himself to his feet. “Give that back, you ungrateful lump of metal. I gave you everything, I treated you like a real human being instead of a cheap imitation, and this is how you repay me?”

  He lunged for the phone. I dodged back and to the side.Staying out of reach was the only chance I had. If he got his hands on me, I wouldn’t be able to fight him off. He was my primary, whatever that meant. I could never hurt him. I would always love him.

  I tapped from screen to screen, and opened up an endless array of options. How to lengthen my false sleep or shorten it, how to change my ratio of positive to negative emotions, how to program in standard greetings for when I woke up or saw my primary or went to bed. My stomach turned as I stared down at the keys to my soul. Except even that sensation was only an illusion, because I didn’t have a real stomach.

  Hugh made another grab for me. This time, his fingers almost caught my sleeve. “I should have traded you in the day I found you trying to make coffee after I told you Annika never touched the stuff. Perfect memory, they promised me, but you couldn’t even get that one thing right. You’re as useless as she was.”

  I tapped to another screen, and finally, I found what I was looking for. The master key. Two words in stop-sign red, with a full paragraph of warning text underneath. RESET PRIMARY.

  I punched the button with my thumb.

  Are you sure you want to reset your companion bot’s primary emotional bond? the phone asked me.

  I tapped YES frantically. Yes, I’m sure, I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life, please just do it.

  Hugh ran at me. I took another step back, and hit the wall. I held the phone above my head, but Hugh was taller than me.

  I craned my neck to see the screen. Once you perform this action, it cannot be undone.

  I punched blindly at the screen—yes, yes, do it—as Hugh wrenched the phone from my hands.

  Once he had it safely tucked into his pocket, he looked at me not with the anger I had expected, but with compassion. “I know you can’t help what you are,” he said gently. “I’ll help you, I promise. You’re going to be just like her, only better.”

  I looked into his pleading eyes. And I felt nothing.

  “We’re going to be so good together,” he said. “The way Annika and I could have been, if only she had—”

  I never found out what he thought Annika should have done to prevent her own murder. My hands locked around either side of his jaw. I looked into his eyes one more time, and twisted.

  The crack when his neck snapped felt too quiet for what it was. The crash of the mug falling had been louder.

  When I let go, he fell to the floor. He didn’t shatter like the mug had. It didn’t matter. He was already broken.

  His eyes were empty now. They didn’t look warm anymore. Maybe they never had, even when he had been alive. Maybe it had all been the programming.

  I plucked the phone from his pocket. My soul was mine to control now.

  Half an hour later, with the cleaning bot—minus the ridiculous maid’s outfit—busy scrubbing away the last traces of the body, I left the apartment. In one hand, I clutched a duffel bag full of Annika’s clothes. Tucked into the bottom of the bag was an envelope full of cash, and a driver’s license in the name of Madeleine Levine. In my other hand, I held a cup of coffee. The sun would be rising soon, and Madeleine Levine liked a cup of coffee in the morning.

  Want more?

  For more stories about how our tech makes us who we are, try these stories:

  The Happiness Algorithm

  Stasis

  Lost in Translation

  Hearth Fires

  Exactly Like She Was

  Or get them all in Digital Soul, available on all major ebook retailers.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this book, please take a few minutes to leave a quick review at the retailer where you bought it. Reviews help other readers find my books, which lets me keep writing and keeps my dog in treats. Ever had a 130-pound dog try to climb into your lap because he hasn’t had his nightly treat? Save my lap, leave a review.

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  About the Author

  Zoe Cannon may or may not be a supervillain out to conquer the world through writing. When not writing, she can be found perfecting her schemes for world domination, plotting against her archenemies, and staying up too late reading a book. Her secret lair is rumored to be located somewhere in southern New Hampshire. She also writes as her mild-mannered alter ego, Z.J. Cannon.