531
Why

“He was already perfect.”

Wu DaQi kept his gun on Sandus, but he watched as 531 stepped closer.

Sandus let out a heavy sigh. “I pay good money to keep unwanted visitors from showing up.”

531 smiled. “And you paid even better money to make us unstoppable. It would be poorly spent money if we couldn’t get past building security.”

“What happened to Jason?” Charity asked, forcing them to look at her.

“Do you really care what happened to your husband?” 531 kept his gun on Sandus even though he’d shifted his attention to Fulmer. “It was an act, right? You had me fooled and that’s damn near impossible for a human.”

“I was terribly upset when I came to your office, Chan Yi. It was mostly about the state of the business though. My husband had big dreams, but he never realized them. He was an idiot. And so was I for believing he could give me the life I wanted.”

“So, what?” 531 asked. “You went crawling back to your old lover to fill your bank account?”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Sandus hissed.

“Stop.” DaQi waited until Sandus looked away from 531. “Why did you do all this? The-” He still had a hard time believing that he wasn’t human, but he’d never shied away from facts before. He was still skeptical but he wanted to know the rest. “You said you wiped my memories. Why would you do that?”

“We needed to study you. The AI program went comatose when you emerged. In the next few models, we tried to adapt the programming, but it didn’t work. We tried to fix the emotions, but the later designs were unstable. We couldn’t recreate what we did with you two without the emotional component. Everything since you two has missed the mark by a mile. We still had you to study though, 532. The real problem was we built programs that would keep you from being erased and reprogrammed if you were captured. You were built to retain the information in ways that no one could replace.”

“You can’t erase us,” 531 realized. “Not completely.”

“No, we can’t. Every time we found 532’s hidden memories we wiped him and removed the coding. But he kept storing them in unusual ways.”

“You’ve been using me to replace 531,” DaQi said.

“Yi.” 531 corrected him.

“What?”

“My name is Yi.”

DaQi nodded. “You were using me to bring him in. Why?”

“As Charity pointed out earlier, there is one constant that triggers your memories. Every time, it was after exposure to 531. When he first escaped us, we used you as bait, but you remembered your past almost immediately. Over time, the wipes were more efficient, but we had to keep you from accessing information about 531. Somehow - every time - something always sent you looking for him. This time, we decided it was time to wipe you both. Bring you home. See if keeping you together will help the wipe hold.”

“That makes no sense,” DaQi said.

“Doesn’t it?”Sandus was looking at 531 though and the other man - the AI - looked troubled.

“You can’t believe we would have just gone back into the field and continued to kill for you.”

“You did for years.”

“No,” DaQi dropped his hand down and stopped pointing the gun. His head was splitting and his hands were shaking. “I don’t know what’s going on, but there is no way I would kill for you.”

“Two,” Chan Yi stepped closer. “We need to leave.”

“I don’t think so,” Sandus said. “We’ve worked too hard to get you here. You’re not leaving, 531.”

“My name is Chan Yi!” the AI screamed at Sandus.

A loud alarm screeched across the rooftop and DaQi covered his ears. His augmentation was malfunctioning. The sensory input was too much and he was nearly doubled over in pain. He heard a gunshot and was knocked to the ground.

“They’re coming up the stairs,” he heard Chan Yi say as he pulled DaQi down the landing and behind the stair wall. “We need to get to the other side.”

“The chute,” DaQi said.

“Exactly. It’s our best shot out of here.”

“If he was expecting you, they’ll be waiting for us.”

“Yeah, we’ll deal with that when we get there.”

“Didn’t you have a plan when you came up here?”

“This wasn’t exactly planned.”

“Why are you here then?” DaQi felt calmer as he looked at 531. The pain was more manageable.

“I’ll explain later. First, let’s get to the chute. Can you run?”

DaQi nodded. “I don’t think I have a choice.”