“Show him the TV,” Taylor says.

The technician pauses to switch on the screen. As we look on, the TV plays an interview with Hideo, now gradually growing into his newfound fame. I glance back at Sasuke. Not long ago, he had grabbed Jax’s arm and cried at the sight of his brother. Now he watches the interview with some notable interest, although he doesn’t seem truly affected by it. It’s as if he were fascinated by a celebrity instead of missing his brother.

The questions start again.

“Who is this?”

“Hideo Tanaka.”

“And is he your older brother?”

“Yes.”

“Do you miss him?”

A hesitation, then a shrug.

As he answers each question, the technician observes a series of data appearing on a screen beside him and taps down notes on a pad he’s holding. As he goes, he reads out some of his reactions. “Zero’s signs of recognition still holding steady at eighty-four percent. Overall response times have improved by thirty-three percent.” The man drones on as Sasuke answers each question.

Whatever it is that they’ve been doing to him, they’ve taken away something—something real and human, an intonation in his voice and a light in his eyes—something that defines him as Sasuke. There’s no sign of struggle now, and Sasuke seems perfectly willing—if not eager—to do as he’s told.

“Zero’s cognitive skills are all wholly intact,” the technician finally concludes, as the final question happens. Someone injects Sasuke in the arm with a needle, and as I look on, his eyes roll back, his body going limp against the platform.

“Good,” Taylor says with her arms crossed. “And what about his reactions to mentions of his family? He’s still responding to them with a degree of emotion. That should be tracking down faster than this.”

“He’s holding on harder than I expected. Don’t worry. He’ll be yours before long and believe he has always worked for you. We should be all caught up in the next few weeks. He’ll be fully downloaded well before he expires.”

Before he dies.

As the tech talks, I pick up on something else in the recording. Now that the system has been switched to the NeuroLink, I’m able to wander around the recording, and I notice something on one of the screens in the room that catches my eye. At the top of it is the same symbol I’d seen on Sasuke’s sleeve, and below it is written the following in large letters: PROJECT ZERO.

I head over to it, suddenly afraid of what I might see. Beside me, Jax does the same, talking softly as we go.

“Project Zero is an artificial intelligence program,” she tells me. “Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has improved everything from search engines to face recognition, to the ability for a computer to defeat a human at complicated mind games like Go. But Project Zero is building on that, to install the advances of AI into the human mind and the human mind into AI, to blend the two so that we can have all the benefits of a computer’s mind—logic, speed, accuracy—and the computer mind can have the benefits of a human’s—gut reactions, imagination, instinct, spontaneity.”

Taylor is literally separating his mind from his body. Downloading his mind into data. She is transferring his mind into a machine. A machine that she can control.

I sit back, my world spinning, my mind flooding with questions. Why not just stick to the artificial, to installing human instinct into machines? Why destroy a human like this?

“What’s the end goal of this technology?” I whisper to Jax.

“Immortality,” Jax replies as we go on to a final recording. “You know how Taylor fears death. She wants the mind to live on beyond the body. With this technology, she can.”

In this one, Sasuke no longer looks like Sasuke, but like the Zero I recognize, standing in the middle of the lab room with his cold, unfeeling gaze.

“But what did they do to him?” I finally ask as I stare at Zero, still puzzled. “He’s gone this far, he’s being experimented on in this artificial intelligence program—but what’s the end result? What can he do now, that he was unable to do before?”

At that, Jax fixes me with a hollow stare. “The end goal is to transform him into nothing but data.”

I blink. “Data?”

“Emika, Zero isn’t real.”

Right as she says it, I see a technician walk straight through Zero, like he’s nothing more than a virtual simulation. A hologram. Just like what I’d seen at the lab earlier tonight, when I witnessed him walk right through the glass wall.

Blood rushes to my head. That can’t be true. “What do you mean, he isn’t real? I’ve seen him. He’s physically been in my room, in the same space as us, plenty of times. He’s—”

“Has he?” Jax interrupts me, her eyes distant and bleak. “Zero isn’t real. He’s an illusion. Sasuke Tanaka’s real body died years ago on a lab gurney. What you’ve seen standing before you is a virtual projection. Emika, Zero is Sasuke’s human mind successfully transmitted into data. He is an artificial intelligence program.”

21

Zero isn’t real.

All this time, I thought he was flesh and blood. But he is an illusion, a projection, a virtual image so realistic that I couldn’t even tell the difference.

That’s impossible.

The thought bubbles up in my mind, and I feel a desperate urge to laugh at Jax. I must not have understood her.

But then my memories come back to me, faster and faster. The first time I’d ever seen him was in the Pirate’s Den, a virtual space. The second time, inside a game of Warcross. The third time, he had been standing in my dorm room, only to vanish when everything exploded. When I arrived at the hotel to meet with him and the Blackcoats, Jax and Taylor had been with him, and he’d been leaning against the wall, not touching anyone.

But no! When I saw him standing on the balcony with Jax, hadn’t he pressed his hand to her back, pulling her to him? My mind whirls frantically, remembering that moment and searching for a sign that would make this conclusion false.

No, Jax had only stood close to him, and he had only bent down near her to whisper something in her ear.

I have never touched Zero, and he has never touched me. We have only ever been close to each other—never making physical contact. That cold, artificial look in his eyes is because he is artificial.

The realization sends me spinning, and I put a hand out, steadying myself against my desk.

Zero isn’t real. He is an illusion.

Sasuke Tanaka died a long time ago.

Jax watches me as the information hits me in waves. There is a haunted expression on her face now. “Living eternally inside a machine is something we’ve always talked about, isn’t it? Only now, Taylor has actually done it. Zero’s mind is as accurate and agile as a human mind—in an intellectual capacity, he’s every bit the same as he was when he was Sasuke. Only now, Zero can exist anywhere and everywhere. He has no physical form. He does not age. And so long as there is an Internet, so long as there are machines, he’ll exist forever.”

“What—” My voice catches, and I have to try again. “What about his memory? His recognition of his family?”

“Taylor can’t have him going off to see them, can she? Reporting to the authorities?” Jax replies. “She gave him immortality. In exchange, she took away his memory, linking his mind to hers. He does what she wants. He believes what she believes. And when she dies, he’ll shut down.”

Jax has scrolled us onto another file, and I stare numbly as this one shows a detailed list of names. Clients.

The military. The medical-industrial complex. The one percent. Tech companies. Government officials.

My mind aches. There are plenty of people eager to benefit from the results of this research—maybe to make obedient supersoldiers or as a cure for the terminally ill or whatever it was they needed. Maybe just to live forever.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Jax says in a resigned voice. “In a way, Taylor did keep her promise to Mina Tanaka. She saved Sasuke’s life by making him permanent. The only price was to kill him.”

I think back to institute, how I watched Zero move in tandem with that armored figure, how his gestures manipulated the machine. “What about the robot in the lab?” I ask. “The one Zero was controlling?”

“A physical form for him,” she replies. “He can sync with that machine, as surely as if that were his own body. He can control one of them; he can control multiple ones if he wants to.”

Supersoldiers.

“Now, imagine this hooked up to the NeuroLink. How easily Taylor could replicate this, on a massive scale.”

“But,” I say hoarsely, clearing my throat, “do all these clients—patrons—know how she did this experiment? What it took?”

“Would it matter now, if they knew?” She shrugs at me. “If the end results are this remarkable, would you throw away the research just because the process was unethical? Immoral human experimentation has been around forever, has been performed by your country, by mine, by everyone. You think people don’t want the results of this kind of research, regardless of how it’s obtained? People ultimately don’t care about the journey, if the end is worth it. And what was the price tag here, in exchange for immortality?”

One life.

She’s right. If the experiment is exposed, it can be blamed on the Blackcoats, and all of these clients can just point the finger at them, denouncing it as heinous and illegal while being absolved of any blame for funding the research. But no one would throw away these findings just because Sasuke had died for it.