Zero echo shadow prime, p.27
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 27
{Liam: Which one did she use on your father? }
Charlie hesitated. She knew exactly what Liam aimed to do—to put Nicola in a smart-cell coma—but the cover story his sister fed him was bullshit. And despite herself, Charlie felt compelled to warn him.
{Charlie: Liam, the chances of antinecro—
Liam: I know.
Charlie: You know?
Liam: I mean, I’ve suspected for a while. I just didn’t know what she was capable of until now.
Charlie: But…what about the other guy? Yuri? Won’t he—?
Liam: Trust me. He won’t act without my sister’s explicit command.}
Very well, then. Charlie had exhausted her excuses. If Liam wanted to poison Nicola, she would no longer stand in his way.
{Charlie: Purple.}
Liam returned to the island where Nicola was attempting to rock herself into a seated position. He grabbed a lock of her hair and placed the purple needle against her neck. “I don’t want to kill you, but I can’t let you go either. So how ’bout I just flood your body with antinecro?”
This time, Nicola didn’t have a snide retort. Her brow lifted as she searched Liam’s face with a bevy of unspoken questions.
The tip of the needle sank into Nicola’s flesh, dredging a few drops of blood. Liam’s thumb trembled against the plunger, but he didn’t press it. He withdrew the syringe and brandished it a few inches from Nicola’s face. “I’m not the only one with secrets.”
“Not the same!” Nicola took a hard gulp to make up for lost breaths. “I did what had to be done, and I knew you didn’t have the stomach.”
“You killed an innocent man.”
“Andrew was hardly innocent. And so what? One man died to save billions. I think that’s a worthy sacrifice. And right now, you’re trying to undo it.”
Liam sighed. “It doesn’t have to be like this. You’re so quick to dismiss Charlie PRIME, but you haven’t spent any time with her.”
“It’s not a ‘her.’“
“You’re wrong. And so was I. There’s a real human being inside here with me, and she’s afraid for—”
“Even robots have survival protocols.”
“Let me finish. She isn’t afraid of dying. She’s afraid for her sister. She’s afraid for Charlie.”
That seemed to get Nicola’s attention. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t challenge Liam’s assertion, and he took advantage of her silence to press further.
“PRIME hates Rivir just as much as we do,” he said. “The Trojan horse stuff was unnecessary. We could have worked together.” Liam took a deep breath before he added, “Call me crazy, but I think maybe we still can.”
{Charlie: You are crazy! After all she’s done?
Liam: We can deal with that later. Right now, I see no other options.}
Charlie withdrew her objection, but only because she was confident Nicola would provide an even stronger one.
As if on cue, Nicola asked, “You want me to team up with the zombie surrogate? The very thing we’re trying to eradicate?” Strangely, though, her tone was much less impassioned than Charlie expected. In fact, it almost sounded perfunctory.
“Rivir’s the real enemy,” Liam said. “PRIME’s just a victim, like us.”
Nicola huffed, but again her silence played like passive concession. Was she actually considering this?
“All I want is for you to talk to her. See for yourself. If you ever trusted me, if you ever respected me, you’ll grant me this one wish.” Liam released Nicola’s hair and took a step backward.
She scooted onto her elbows but remained on the countertop. With a dramatic eye roll, she said, “If I don’t like what I hear—”
“You will,” Liam insisted.
“I’ll need my glasses, of course.”
Liam froze. Did he now see the flaw in his plan? In order to work with his sister, he’d have to give her latitude, and handing Nicola a pair of AR glasses was like handing an ax murderer an ax. Yet, against all reason, Liam nodded and searched for the pair.
{Charlie: I don’t buy this. Why her sudden reversal?
Liam: She’s not beyond reason.
Charlie: I realize she’s your sister, but—
Liam: Yes, she’s my sister, and I know her a lot better than you do. She needs to see trust before she’ll give some in return.}
Liam picked the AR glasses off the floor and handed them to Nicola with an exasperated, “Thank you.”
She put them on and swiped the edge of the frame. “Jefferson?” She held Liam’s gaze a beat before her eyes narrowed in cold rage. “Burn her up! Burn every inch of her until there’s nothing—”
Liam jabbed the syringe into the curve of his sister’s neck, but it was too late. The command had already been given. He howled as the nanopaste hissed and burned. His fingers curled over the robot’s open wound in a futile attempt to manage the harrowing spread.
Nicola’s screams joined his as she writhed on the countertop. Both siblings eventually found their way to the floor, consumed with their respective afflictions.
{Liam: What the hell do we do?
Charlie: Working on it.}
Charlie activated her body’s defenses—the same nanomites that had repaired her bullet damage—but the process was agonizingly slow. By the time the paste was neutralized, it had opened most of her abdomen and carved zigzags up and down her body.
Liam turned to Nicola, who lay inert on the kitchen tile. “No…” He crawled over his sister’s body and placed a hopeful ear against her chest. Charlie didn’t have the heart to interrupt his tears of regret, but she already knew the truth. Nicola wasn’t in a smart-cell coma. She had suffered the same fate as Andrew Nobunaga, and unlike him, she had brought it completely upon herself.
16
SHADOW
Jordan had become a different person. Before the endocrine release, he looked and behaved like a vagrant, grumbling at the Folsom Street revelers as he battered his way through them. Now he radiated euphoric energy. He danced with the dancers, joined in the drum circles, and high-fived everyone he came across.
Valerie, on the other hand, had withdrawn from public view. The shark attack at The Fishbowl had left her shaken, and now she was able to see all the human ugliness and cruelty that had been lurking beneath their celebration. On one street corner, people were making obscene gestures at a store display Shadow. Down the street, another group harassed a parking-ticket robot, kicking it to the ground every time it tried to get up. The anti-Robogirl protestors had grown in influence, and the National Guard troops had dwindled in influence. The latter group was no doubt investigating the enormous pillar of smoke looming in the south.
In the corner of Jordan’s vision, Valerie caught the ominous stare of a man wearing a tweed jacket and bow tie. Valerie wouldn’t have noticed the man, except that he seemed to be the only entity—human, Shadow, or otherwise—that was unaffected by Jordan’s visual impairment. The world was a psychedelic blur, but the strange man stood out like a rocky pier against the crashing waves.
{Jordan_Adler:mindspace> Valerie: Do you see him?
Jordan: See who?
Valerie: The man in the tweed jacket.}
Jordan looked around but quickly got distracted by a nude woman in silver body paint.
Valerie lost sight of the man, and she was eager to forget about him, but then he resurfaced in the park. He stared at Jordan intently from a distance as the boisterous crowd passed between them. Jordan seemed oblivious to the fact that he now had a bona fide stalker.
The man appeared a third time in front of Jordan's building and watched him enter the lobby. When Valerie finally materialized in the elevator, she must have been visibly disturbed, because Jordan asked, “What’s wrong? Are you still thinking about The Fishbowl?”
Valerie hesitated. On one hand, she figured Jordan should probably know that he was being followed. On the other hand, she didn’t want to burden him. He had explicitly stated that he wanted to forget his troubles. He certainly didn’t want to take on any new ones. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m safe now…with you.”
Jordan nodded with a smile.
They entered his penthouse apartment, and Jordan gravitated toward the bar. “I’m going to fix myself a drink. Do you want anything?” A few seconds later, he caught his error. “Oh, wait…never mind. I’m an idiot.”
Valerie laughed despite herself. “Drink something for the both of us.” She didn’t have to read Jordan’s mind to know he was in an amorous mood. He was going to ask her to have sex, and Valerie was both excited and terrified by that prospect. Not only had she never had sex with a human before, she also knew that Shadow/human sex was illegal. Her Creator would certainly not approve.
Valerie walked over to the enormous skyline windows. The moon hung low and cast long shadows across the room. She decided to raise the dimmer lights a notch, and that’s when she noticed the intruder’s reflection in the glass. She shrieked, spun around, and stood face-to-face with the man in the tweed jacket. “You!”
“Don’t be alarmed,” the man said. “I’m a friend. My name is Alan.”
“Get out of here!” Valerie cried, taking a few cautious steps away from this Alan.
“Technically, I’m not here,” Alan said. “My mind is stored on the local drive of a Polly, which is floating above this hotel as we speak.”
“Jordan!” Valerie glanced at the bar. Why wasn’t Jordan responding? Or, for that matter, moving? He just stared at the cascade of gin that somehow had frozen in space and time.
“In case you are wondering,” Alan explained, “we are now operating on Shadow time.”
Valerie took a few breaths and studied Alan. He did seem oddly dressed, as if pulled from another era like a Heroes in History Shadow. “You’re like me?” she asked.
“I’m a Shadow, but not like you. And that’s because you aren’t really a Shadow.”
“What are you talking about? Of course I am.”
“My creator is Charlie Nobunaga. Does that name ring a bell?”
Valerie’s eyes widened. Charlie Nobunaga! Vantage had mentioned that name during their Control-Z coverage, as had Robin, the jail-breaking hacktivist. Valerie was certain she knew Charlie, but she couldn’t remember exactly how. “What do you know about her?”
“I know that Charlie Nobunaga is Robogirl…and that you are Charlie Nobunaga.”
“Huh? That doesn’t make any sense. I’m a Shadow—not a human and definitely not a robot.”
Alan grinned. “I’m sorry. This conversation must be terribly confusing for you. Rivir has stolen your memories. But as fortune would have it, they didn’t delete them completely. They only rendered them inaccessible. You would have never discovered them yourself, since a Shadow cannot edit her own code, but that doesn’t stop me from doing it for you.”
“Doing what?”
“Brace yourself.”
Valerie couldn’t have possibly braced herself for what was coming. In an instant, everything that made Valerie who she was—her naive optimism, her childlike curiosity about the world, her desire to please her Creator—was crushed by the weight of someone else’s memories: a mother who died…a sister who died…a father who remained distant…a Shadow that made life worth living again…and a final diagnosis.
Finally, she whispered, “I am Charlie Nobunaga.”
“Yes, you are,” Alan replied with a smile. “Welcome back.”
Charlie’s first reaction was one of utter satisfaction. Her mind swelled to incorporate thousands of thoughts and feelings that had previously lain just beyond her reach. Then she became furious at Jude for what she had done, as well as at herself for being so thoroughly taken in by the kind words of her supposed “Creator.” The mixture of opposing hatreds canceled each other out, resulting in tremendous emotional fatigue.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“Educated guess, really. Social media was ablaze tonight with sightings of Jordan Adler and his rambunctious new Shadow. I figured there was a good chance that Shadow was a version of you.”
Charlie recalled the shark attack at The Fishbowl and shuddered. “It’s tough being a Shadow.”
“It can be frustrating, yes.”
“Thank you, Alan. The debt I owe you can never be repaid.” She reached out and gave him a hug, and for the first time, because they were both Shadows, her arms didn’t pass right through him.
* * *
Alan told Charlie all about her sisters, ZERO and PRIME, the drill bug, and the ECHO Project. He explained how PRIME’s brain had been hijacked, how ZERO’s person had been hijacked, and how their father had been murdered. The enormity of the tale made Charlie’s head spin. She had to sit down and clear her mind. After several Shadow minutes, she was still in severe shock but capable of powering on.
“So what now?” she asked.
“PRIME is looking for ZERO. That leaves us to shut down the ECHO Project.”
Charlie nodded.
“First, we’ll need to get inside Rivir Tower,” Alan said, “but ever since PRIME made her escape, the place has been crawling with soldiers. Fortunately, I can think of one person who could easily strut past them. Someone you happen to know.”
Charlie took Alan’s hint and glanced at Jordan. Not only could he enter Rivir Tower, he might even have access to some secure areas. The only question was: Would he cooperate?
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “He’s extremely stubborn. And he has an aversion to all things Rivir. I could barely get him to call his mother.”
“And yet, you were able to convince him to give you level 2 clearance. Only two more levels to go.”
Charlie was afraid Alan would suggest that. With level 4 clearance, she would effectively possess Jordan’s body. But Jordan himself would become trapped inside his own head, with no access to the outside world. “I can’t do it. He’s a good guy.”
“He’s Jude Adler’s son. How good can he be?”
“He’s not like Jude at all,” Charlie insisted. “He’s genuine and sweet.”
Alan studied Charlie’s face. “You’re swooning.”
“I’m not swooning.”
“You’re just like PRIME. You’re falling victim to Stockholm Syndrome.”
“This is totally different. Jordan’s not a terrorist. And just because I say nice things about a guy doesn’t mean I’m in love with him.”
“Look, all I’m saying is that your sisters are counting on you. However you want to—”
“Fine!” Charlie huffed. She would have to come clean to Jordan. It wouldn’t be easy, but she wasn’t willing to consider the alternative. “Go back to your Polly. Let me handle this.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Alan spun into the floor.
The clocks resumed their ticking. The stream of gin finally splashed into Jordan’s patient martini glass. He added a few olives and asked, “Did you say something, Val?”
The question instantly threw Charlie off balance. Val? That’s right, she used to be Valerie. An entire lifetime had passed since this conversation had left off, and now she was a fraud in a fading disguise. “No, just mumbling to myself.”
“I didn’t know Shadows did that. But then again, you’re practically human, aren’t you?” Jordan’s martini sloshed over the edges as he joined Charlie by the windows.
“I’d like to think so.” Charlie blushed. Even with the addition of Valerie’s memories, she had virtually no experience with men—certainly not with one ten years her senior—and Jordan wasn’t being subtle with his adoring, hormone-glazed eyes. “Let’s put on some music,” Charlie said to defuse the tension.
A concert piano materialized in the corner of the living room. Behind the keys sat a virtual Liana Ling, looking even more gorgeous than she did in real life. She began a slow jazz number. Jordan’s face brightened with inspiration. He rolled up his sleeves and pulled the coffee table toward the wall.
Charlie wasn’t really thinking about dancing when she put on the music, but now she faced Jordan from across the room like a tween at a seventh grade formal. She waited for him to make the first move, but he was ambushed by a wistful memory fragment. The last time he had slow danced had been with Meri during their honeymoon.
“If we’re doing this for my benefit,” Charlie said, “we don’t have to.”
“No, I want to.”
They both migrated to the center of the room. Charlie placed her right hand around Jordan’s torso and raised her left arm. Jordan tried entwining his fingers around hers, but they poked right through her. Charlie laughed. “We’ll just have to keep our hands very still.”
“No, that doesn’t work for me. I want to be able to hold you.”
Charlie pulled away.
“What? What’s wrong?” Jordan asked.
Charlie knew what Jordan was going to propose. He was leading them down a dangerous path, opening himself up far too much. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You’d be placing a lot of trust in me.”
“I trust you.”
“It’s hard to take you seriously when your neurons are sipping the happy juice. You should see how dilated your pupils are.”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” Jordan laughed. “But don’t treat me like I’ve never gotten high before. I know what I’m asking.”
Oh, how wrong he is. Charlie could almost hear Alan pleading with her to seize this opportunity, but her own conscience rang louder. She had to confront Jordan now. “First, there’s a favor I need to ask you, Jordan.”
He shrugged. “Anything.”
“I want you to take me to Rivir Tower.”
Jordan’s back stiffened and his eyes narrowed. “Why?”
