No, the truth was, I didn’t want to know. But I had to.
My fingers curled around the earbuds. I shoved them into my ears before I could change my mind. Mom withdrew more items from the box—a pen-sized laser, a pair of crazy-looking tweezers, goggles, and a tiny screwdriver—tools that seemed perfect for servicing a broken laptop. She saw me staring and managed a faint smile. “To fix your arm,” she said, sounding like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Uh-huh, I thought as I eyed a screwdriver. Totally normal.
“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt.”
Then she hit play on the iPod, flooding my ears with a deep male drawl, and everything else fell away. Well, everything except the lingering thought that Mom had lied. Because while there wasn’t pain in my arm, the words spewing from the stranger were another story.
They hurt. They hurt like hell.
“MILA, or Mobile Intel Lifelike Android, is the military’s current experiment in artificial intelligence. The MILA project is cofunded by a special top-clearance segment of the CIA and the military, so as to produce a supercovert robot spy that can infiltrate sleeper cells and then record all of their movements and intelligence.”
I groped for the pause button, pushed it. Stared into space as the words penetrated. Mobile Intel Lifelike Android. Android. My name wasn’t a shortened combination of Mia and Lana, it was an acronym. And it meant . . .
No way. There was no way. That was ridiculous, un-believable. The stupidest thing I’d ever heard.
I went to yank the earbuds out, consumed by an urge to chuck the iPod at the wall, to smash it into a million pieces . . . and then my gaze fell on my mom. My mom, who was currently using a laser to seal the tube in my arm shut.
And just like that, it hit me. Destroying the messenger would do me no good. Not when I couldn’t escape the reality unfolding right in front of my eyes.
I hit play, and the voice continued its detached monologue.
“Although the MILA 2.0—” The! THE! Like I was an object, a thing! And 2.0? What did that even mean? “—is physically indistinguishable from an ordinary sixteen-year-old girl, its brain is a reverse-engineered nanocomputer, a complex mix of transistors and live cell technology that gives it unique capabilities. These include exceptional reflexes and strength, superhuman memory skills, and the ability to hack computer systems, among many others. It can also evoke appropriate emotions, based on environmental and physical stimuli.”
I . . . what was this? A nanocomputer? Evoke appropriate emotions? Evoke? This person couldn’t possibly be trying to tell me . . . he couldn’t be saying . . . there was just no way. Of course my emotions were real. I felt things all the time.
My throat constricted, as if to confirm my belief.
“The rest of its structure is also a conglomeration of human and manmade, but mostly synthetic. Its body is comprised of cyberdermis, synthetic tissue infused with a polymer hydrogel lying just under bioengineered skin that is exceptionally strong and resistant to injury and also holds receptors to carry sensation signals to the nanobrain—though pain receptors are very sparse, only one one thousandth of the amount found in a typical human.”
I recalled the fall from the truck, my worry that I’d damaged my spinal cord. Suddenly Mom’s insistence on slow horseback rides made complete and terrible sense. She hadn’t been terrified that I’d hurt myself—on the contrary. She’d been worried that I’d fall and the whole no-pain thing would lead to questions. It was amazing it hadn’t happened before.
Wait a second. How had it not happened before? How, in sixteen years of life, had I not noticed that I had little to no pain sensation?
That’s when the brutal wave of reality really hit. The voice had said that the MILA 2.0 was physically indistinguishable from a sixteen-year-old girl. Meaning . . . he was also saying I’d never been any age other than sixteen.
Meaning . . . those memories I had of being younger? Lies. All of them.
According to him, I’d been “born” exactly as I was now.
Nausea flooded me. Which, given everything I’d just heard, made no sense. None of this did.
I was human. I was.
“Its endoskeleton mixes tightly woven braids of fiber optics encased by tubes of transparent ceramic hybrid that is very difficult to break and easy to repair, and its body utilizes a unique technology that meshes human with machine by way of embedding nanotransistors into live cell membranes. Instead of a heart, Mila has a sophisticated pump to supply energy to her partially organic cells, which can generate their own oxygen. Breathing for it is just a computer program to simulate human function.”
No heart? I had no heart? No, that was absurd. Ridiculous. I could feel it there, in my chest, beating away.
Unless . . . unless that was the “sophisticated pump” the voice was talking about. My hand flew to my chest, my fingers spreading across my shirt and pressing inward. A second passed, and then I felt the faint upward motion. Beating. Something under there was definitely beating. I hoped the action would soothe me, but instead of the fist-shaped, vein and artery-covered organ I’d seen in biology class, all I could picture was a pool pump. A bit of machinery stuck under my ribs, masquerading as life.
Of course, that was assuming I had ribs to begin with.
I hit pause again, my gaze flying to Mom, but her goggled head was bent over my arm, her focus on aiming the laser’s bright-red line at a spot within it.
It felt like no more than a tickle.
I hit play.
“In an especially exciting development, the MILA 2.0 goes one step beyond just approximating feelings. By using experimental data on living girls, we were able to store the visceral and physical sensations that emotions produce and re-create them. Thus, the MILA 2.0 actually feels the same things that humans do, which we anticipate will facilitate blending in with subjects and add authenticity to her cover.”
Cover. Oh my god. Did he mean . . . my cover as a human?
“MILA contains just enough human cells to simulate biological functions, but it is in reality a machine. The launch date for this exciting project is August twenty-second.”
The recording cut off, but the ramifications of that last sentence remained. August 22. Just five days before Mom and I arrived in Clearwater.
I couldn’t even move, couldn’t breathe. Guess that not-needing-air thing really came in handy. The thought made me laugh, a gasping, hysterical gurgle that made Mom drop her tools and grasp my hand.
Mom. Just another lie in a whole string of them.
The pain in my chest, in my nonheart, was excruciating. Whoever had worked on “evoking appropriate emotional responses” had done a bang-up job.
Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I would wake up and realize this was just a nightmare.
Maybe I’d even wake up back in Philly, with Dad still alive. A man who, if I believed the voice, had never been a part of my life.
As for “Mom”—well, according to the voice, I was more genetically related to our toaster than I was to her.
Another gurgle erupted.
“Is this all true? It can’t be, right? Please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke. Please!” But when Mom looked