Page 123 of The Towering Sky

There was a moment of profound, acute silence when Watt wished he could undo what he’d just done, but it was too late—Nadia sailed in a flying arc over the water, gleaming in the pearly morning light, and hit the surface with a definitive, echoingplop.

That was it, Watt thought dazedly. Nadia was gone. The briny water of the bay was already corroding her, destroying her processors as she sank on and on toward the bottom. It was the same water in which Mariel had died.

Leda reached over and curled her fingers in his.

They stood there like that for a while, neither of them speaking. Watt could barely think over the twisted pain in his chest.

When his contacts lit up with a ping from an undisclosed caller, it took Watt a moment to realize that Nadia wasn’t going to hack the system and tell him who it was.

He gestured to Leda and stepped away, turning his head to accept the ping. “Hello?”

“Mr. Bakradi, it’s Vivian Marsh. From MIT,” she added, as if he didn’t already know. “Did you code this yourself?”

“Excuse me?”

“The files you just sent me, containing the code for a quantum computer. What are they from?”

Watt muttered frantically to his contacts to pull up his outgoing mailbox; when he saw his most recent message, his heart burst in his chest, because he’d sent the complete script of Nadia’s code over to MIT. Or rather, Nadia had sent it, during the procedure. It was an enormous file, so massive that she must have co-opted several local servers just to initiate the data transfer.

Watt braced himself to lie, to deny any knowledge of a highly illegal quantum computer, but the words wouldn’t come.

He had already told a lifetime’s worth of lies. Maybe it was time for him to own up to the things he had done.

“Yes. I wrote that code,” he said slowly, almost defiantly. His chin was tipped up, in a look he’d picked up from Leda without even realizing it.

“You know that to write code like this without authorization is a felony, under section 12.16 of the Computing Directives Act, and punishable by a federal court.”

“I know,” Watt said, feeling nauseous.

“Not to mention there’s a dangerous flaw in your core directive!” Vivian made atsknoise, as if to chide him.

Watt’s interest momentarily surged above his fear. “You read the code?”

“Of course I read the code, don’t you remember that quantum engineering is mybackground?” Vivian exclaimed. “Honestly, Mr. Bakradi, I’m impressed. It’s remarkable, the way you’ve managed to stack and fold the code in on itself; you must have saved yourself at least a hundred cubic millimeters. Where is the computer?”

He realized in a daze that she meant Nadia. “Gone,” he said quickly. “I destroyed her—I meanit. I destroyed it.”

“Oh,” Vivian breathed, and it struck Watt that she sounded almost... disappointed. “It’s probably for the best, a computer of this kind, unregulated. You didn’t use it for anything, did you?”

“Um...”Hacking the police, hacking the Metropolitan Weather Bureau, hacking people’s flickers and messages, trying to make Leda like me, cheating at beer pong, oh, and summarizingPride and Prejudiceso I wouldn’t have to read it. The usual.

“On second thought,” Vivian amended, “Don’t answer that. If I knew you had actually used a computer like this, I would feel morally obligated to report you.”

Watt didn’t say anything.

“Can you come by this week for a second interview?” Vivian went on impatiently.

“Second interview?”

“Of course. I would like to revisit your application, now that I know what you’re capable of,” she told him. “If you still want to attend MIT, that is.”

Watt felt as if the entire world had suddenly turned several shades brighter. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Vivian added. “It was risky, you know, sending over the code like that. I might have had you arrested.”

Watt felt a fist clench around his heart. He tried to imagine how Nadia would have answered if she were here. “I calculated the risks and decided it was worth it,” he said at last.

“Spoken like a true engineer.” Vivian sounded oddly close to laughter as she ended the ping. “I’m looking forward to seeing you this week, Mr. Bakradi.”