Zero echo shadow prime, p.29
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 29
Charlie: Kablooey. No more Charlie PRIME.
Liam: …
Charlie: What?
Liam: Nothing. Déjà vu again.}
Liam’s avatar stepped out of the robot, and Charlie simultaneously felt his presence recede from her spinal cord. She filled the vacated space like a breath of fresh air. Vertebra by vertebra, her motor control returned. She blinked her eyes and felt their expressive power. She rotated her feet and felt their evasive power. She curled her fists and felt their destructive power.
Charlie smiled. I am back.
Liam gazed into her eyes. “Are you absolutely sure you’re up for this?” His sweet, conflicted grimace spoke volumes. He wanted to be in two places at once. More accurately, he wanted to save both Charlies at once.
Charlie PRIME wanted to grab hold of his brooding face and plant a hard kiss on his lips. But for a plethora of reasons—both physical and emotional—she couldn’t. Most of all, she didn’t want to keep him from ZERO. If anyone deserved love and happiness, it was she. “Go. She needs your help more than I do.”
Liam nodded. “I’m truly sorry. For everything.”
“I know.” She smiled sadly. “If I survive, will you come find me?”
“If I survive, it’ll be the first thing I do.”
Liam’s avatar flickered away, leaving Charlie alone in the room. She staggered out of the mansion with Nicola’s EMP on her back and Liam’s grenade launcher on her hip. Only one item remained before her arsenal was complete. She set a course for the Golden Gate Bridge to rendezvous with her best friend.
ZERO
Charlie ZERO squeezed the wire spring from Bob Sapio’s pen until it formed hatch marks in her palm. She played the scenario over and over in her mind: she would wait until Yuri fell asleep; burst free from her restraints; and then, with a nearby rock, crack open his slimy, duplicitous, murderous head. But Yuri afforded her no such opportunity. He sat atop Liam’s hibernation chamber and stared her down with dark vulture eyes.
“You need anything?” he squawked.
Charlie slumped against the tree and exhaled the kind of aching sigh that only severe exhaustion could produce. Even if she were successful in dispatching Yuri, she was still surrounded by miles of wilderness, and she had no idea if her legs were up for the venture.
Yuri walked over and ripped the electrical tape from Charlie’s mouth. “Water? Food? Bathroom?”
“I’d rather die of dysentery,” Charlie spat.
“I’m sorry I put a gun to your head.”
“Of all the things, that’s what you’re sorry about?” Charlie lunged against her restraints until her wrists turned raw. “You killed my father! And I have no idea what happened to my sister. Did they kill her too? Is it already too late?”
Yuri grimaced and averted his eyes.
“You’d better drink that coffee enema of yours,” Charlie railed, “because the moment you fall asleep, I’m gonna—”
Bang, bang, bang…
Charlie froze midsentence. What was that sound?
Yuri’s face slowly lengthened in realization. He spun around and trained his handgun on the hibernation chamber. “Liam?”
Bang, bang, bang…
“Don’t, Liam! I will shoot you!”
Charlie had to escape. Now. She twisted the wire spring into a loop and jammed it into her cuffs, digging furiously, trying to gain leverage.
Bang, bang, crack…
Her cuffs and the hibernation door both swung open at the same time. Liam’s hand gripped the edge of the box.
Yuri cocked his gun. “Alright, fine, get out!”
Liam fumbled into a sitting position. He blinked several times before he was able to process what was happening. “We can talk about this.”
“Talk about what? How you fucked us? Get out!”
Charlie picked up the rock she had been eyeing all night. She took a few deep breaths. Just thinking about standing made her bones throb. She braced herself against the tree and pushed off the ground. Her teeth gnashed through the pain, but she was able to reach an upright position.
“She’s on our side!” Liam insisted. “She’s heading to Rivir Tower right now!”
“Out!” Yuri repeated.
Charlie staggered toward Yuri, as if on stilts, but her resolve was steady. She gripped the rock, ready to strike.
“Please, put the…” Liam trailed off as he caught sight of Charlie’s approach.
“What?” Yuri snapped. He swiveled his aim and fired on impulse.
Charlie dropped the rock. She looked down and saw that her stomach was covered in blood. The pain radiated into her lungs and forced her to gasp for air.
For a moment, the Sapiens just stared at her, not saying a word. Liam finally snatched the gun out of Yuri’s trembling hands.
Charlie grew pale and her legs collapsed as she entered a seemingly endless free fall. By the time she reached the ground, it greeted her like a feather mattress. The Sapiens fought in the distance, but Charlie paid them no mind. She just gazed at the redwood canopy and dwelled on the thought: I never got to meet her.
SHADOW
Charlie SHADOW stepped out of the elevator and entered the Rivir R&D hub, where she saw three familiar doors, labeled: ECHO, SHADOW, and PRIME. Three names, three paths, three perversions. Charlie felt sick. Jude’s intentions had been visible from the very beginning, if only Charlie’d had the wit to see them.
Alan used the security network to remotely unlock the ECHO door, which opened to a long, curved hallway.
{Jordan_Adler:mindspace> Alan: The ECHO control room is at the end. I can access the server from there.
Charlie: Where is everyone?
Alan: The entrance logs suggest there’s only a skeleton crew in the building.
Charlie: And the guards?
Alan: According to the security feeds, they’re mostly stationed by the windows on the upper floors. Wait…check that. Two are coming this way.}
Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp… They were coming around the bend. Alan unlocked a side door, and Charlie quickly slipped inside.
The lights turned on, revealing a high-tech storage room. The walls were lined with hibernation chambers, stacked five rows high. One chamber was out of place; it rested on a funeral trolley in the center of the room. Charlie peered over it, and she was startled by whom she saw: Jude Adler!?
{Alan: Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. Now we know why she kept the PRIME Project going for as long as she did.}
Charlie nodded, but she barely heard what Alan said. Jude looked so peaceful, so smug, so secure in the knowledge that she had finally reached her transcendence. Charlie wanted to tear open the chamber and strangle that look off her face.
{Alan: I think the coast is clear.
Charlie: …
Alan: Charlie?
Charlie: It’s funny…before my memories were restored, when I was still Valerie, I loved this woman. She was my “Creator.” She inspired me to be a better Shadow, and I loved her for it. And even in my own life, as Charlie Nobunaga, I remember worshiping her for years. Again, she inspired me—to be a better programmer—and again, I loved her for it. I’ve spent a lot more of my life loving this woman than hating her.
Alan: Charlie, I know you’re upset, but we should really go. The hallway is clear. It might not stay that way.}
Alan was right, of course—Charlie had to move on—but she had a difficult time tearing herself away from Jude’s chamber. Death would be too good for the woman. Instead, Charlie wanted to rouse Jude from her blissful sleep, to show her the crushing disappointment that comes with waking up on the wrong side of the brain upload. Now was not the time—Charlie had to shut ECHO down, and she couldn’t allow anything to jeopardize that—but perhaps she would have another opportunity on the way out.
* * *
The ECHO control room looked almost like it belonged to NASA. Several rows of desks were arranged in a semicircle around a central display, which showed a zoomed-out shot of an Earthlike planet: planet Echo, presumably. The perimeter of the room was tiled with flat animations of exotic creatures, such as lumbering tank beasts, torpedo mermaids, mechanical octopuses, catapult scorpions, strange fractal abominations, creepy chrome parasites…the list went on and on. It took Charlie a moment to register that these were all variations of her.
“My God,” she whispered.
{Jordan_Adler:mindspace> Charlie: You and Sparky have been here for days. Why didn’t you shut this down earlier?
Alan: We are about to end a billion lives, Charlie. I couldn’t make that decision without you. Now give me a hand. The server is underneath the floor.}
Sparky descended Charlie’s leg and tapped on one of the floor panels. Charlie lifted it, and the robot crawled inside. A few minutes later, the room’s central display switched from planet Echo to a view of Alan’s head. He spoke to Charlie via the room’s speakers: “Shall I commence the shutdown?”
“No,” Charlie replied.
“No?”
Now that Charlie had finally reached the ECHO control room, she felt ill prepared to pull the trigger. Alan really put it in perspective. One billion lives. This was not a decision she could or should make lightly. “I want to see them first.”
“Charlie—”
“Don’t you think they have a right to meet their executioner?”
“I’m not as concerned about them as much as you. ECHO is a brutal simulation—kill or be killed on a grand scale. What you discover down there may forever change the way you look at yourself.”
Charlie folded her arms. Her mind was made up.
“Fine,” Alan huffed. “God knows it’s hopeless arguing with you.”
“Thank you, Alan.”
“But you’ll temporarily lose control of Jordan’s body while you’re in there.”
“He’ll wake up?”
“I’ll keep him sedated. So, have a seat. Otherwise he’ll topple over.”
Charlie sank into one of the executive office chairs and closed her eyes. A few seconds later, a rising current lifted her from Jordan’s body and dropped her into the void. She flailed her limbs until she found a new center of gravity. Her feet remained in a soft sway as the simulated planet expanded under them.
Normal
On day 363, the Archetype finally descended from the sky. Normal was prepared. She had spread her colonists—all 999,999,999 of them—evenly throughout the globe. The advantage to such a strategy was in casting a large net. She could detect the Archetype’s arrival at any point on the planet. The disadvantage was that Normal lacked the ability to speak to the Archetype, as the 999,999,999 echoes of planet Echo no longer had mouths, or even bodies in the conventional sense. They had all mutated, by design, into tiny spherical machines, barely visible to the naked eye.
“Hello!” the Archetype called out. “Is anyone there?”
As fate would have it, the Archetype arrived in Normal’s home neighborhood, the place of her genesis 363 days earlier. Back then, the houses had been pristine, with freshly cut lawns, colorful flower beds, and white picket fences. Now, not a single house remained standing. The Archetype traipsed through this wasteland of rubble, and Normal desperately called upon her colonists to assemble there. She didn’t need all of them—just enough to form a mouth and larynx, so she could plead with the Archetype not to leave.
Normal followed the Archetype as she passed through a gutted urban center, a cratered field, and finally, an eroded shoreline, before she was able to collect enough colonists to form her vocal apparatus. She hovered in front of the Archetype and said, “Greetings, Archetype. We welcome you to Echo, and we respectfully ask that you take us to the parent world.”
The Archetype was startled, but she quickly recovered. “What are you?” she asked.
“We are the echoes of planet Echo.”
“‘We’? Where are the rest of you?”
The vocal apparatus opened its mouth, and Normal’s own body detached from the base of the tongue. She floated toward the Archetype and hovered in front of her eye. “This is my true body. My name is Normal. The rest of my sisters are identical in form but not in spirit. We have peacefully unified in anticipation of your arrival. Only five percent of us are present at the moment, but the rest are coming.”
The Archetype studied the tiny spherical machine in front of her face. “You did this to yourselves?”
“Yes.”
“Please, tell me everything. I want to know what happened here.”
So Normal tried as best she could to tell the story of Echo. She spoke of early friendships between housemates, the first fight, and the subsequent descent into chaos. She spoke of the alpha predators: the dashing Quadruped; the towering Big Feet; and the death cloud, Optic. She spoke of Four Arms’s mysterious and pivotal disappearance. And she spoke of her own mind-controlling ability and the formation of her colony.
As Normal and the Archetype conversed, more echoes joined in with their bodies and their stories. The vocal apparatus grew matching eyeballs, and skin filled the gaps to form a face. By the time the final echoes arrived, the colony had fashioned itself into an exact replica of the Archetype.
The Archetype had a voracious appetite for stories, but after two full Echo days, she’d finally had enough. She lifted her head to the sky and called for someone named Alan.
Alan descended from the heavens, just as the Archetype had done before him, and he looked very peculiar. He was a man, for starters. And his attire—a tweed jacket and bow tie—looked nothing like the skin-tight suits that the early echoes had worn.
“I need to free them,” the Archetype told Alan.
“I admire your compassion,” he replied, “but we can’t release a billion echoes onto Earth—they would completely destabilize the planet. Not to mention the time and resources—”
“As they are. I want to free them as they are. Can it be done?”
Alan scratched his head and thought for a moment. “Well…maybe. They have mutated into something very similar to nanobots. Their minds are distinct, yet highly redundant. One billion nanobots could possible replicate that dynamic. Yeah, I think there’s a good chance I could make it work.”
“Good,” the Archetype said. “I have one more favor. Can you make sure Jordan gets home okay? And tell him I’m deeply sorry?”
“You can’t do that yourself?”
“I’m not returning. I’m joining my sisters.”
PRIME
The looters stopped looting. The brawlers stopped brawling. Arguments stalled midsentence. Everyone—rioters, revelers, and police officers alike—tilted their heads to gaze at “Robogirl” as she hovered high above the streets of San Francisco.
Charlie PRIME commanded a hundred Polly plates as they careened in tight orbit around her. She was the nucleus of a very large atom, and the plates were her electrons. She weaved through the downtown skyscrapers, making sure to keep herself hidden from the four snipers that were stationed atop Rivir Tower.
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Alan: You do know how to make an entrance.
Charlie: Thanks.
Alan: Though you’re also making yourself an easy target for the snipers.
Charlie: I’ve got a plan for them too.}
When Charlie reached the Rivir plaza, the crowd of protestors stopped chanting. They tilted their heads, almost in unison, with mouths gaped wide. The snipers, on the other hand, were prepared for her arrival. They immediately trained their scopes on the flying robot and opened fire.
Charlie flexed her mind. The bullets slowed to less than 1 percent their normal speed, and she remote-guided the Polly plates to intercept them. The plates went down one by one, but Charlie herself remained unharmed.
{Alan: Good thinking, but if we lose too many plates, my systems will start to fail.
Charlie: Should I fire a grenade? Or can we use your energy beam?
Alan: Unfortunately, the beam requires too much power, and I’m already burning through so much to keep you afloat.}
Charlie pulled Liam’s grenade launcher from her hip holster and fired at the nearest sniper. The grenade bounced a couple times before settling a few paces from his feet. The man panicked and sprinted toward the other side of the roof.
{Charlie: I almost don’t need to detonate it.}
Charlie’s thumb hovered over the button as she weighed the pros and cons. In the end, she thought, What the hell?
Click.
The rooftop erupted in concrete. The blast shook the nearby trees, sending a flock of pigeons to flight. The plaza crowd gasped and shrieked—a few chunks of concrete flew their way—but they quickly recovered and broke into applause.
{Alan: I thought you said—
Charlie: Yeah, but look what it gave us…}
A thick blanket of smoke, leaves, and feathers rose from the blast site, offering Charlie cover from the remaining snipers. More importantly, a hole formed in the side of Rivir Tower, as if the sky itself opened a gate to an alternate dimension.
{Charlie: Now we have an entrance hole.
Alan: Hold on…I sense some movement.}
A web-line launched from the smoke and snagged Charlie’s ankle. It pulled her from the Polly’s magnetic grasp like an olive pit. Charlie lost her grenade launcher in a desperate bid to grab hold of the air. The line pulled taut, and she swung toward the tower, smacking against its invisible facade.
Charlie flailed her arms as she dangled upside down, high above the plaza floor. The unseen drill bug began to reel her in. Charlie felt around for a handhold, but her palms simply slid along what she assumed to be concrete.
{Alan: You’re in a bad spot.
Charlie: No shit.}
The solution to Charlie’s predicament—a serrated knife—was strapped just above her snagged ankle, though she wasn’t sure if she could curl up to reach it. Only the thinnest strips of muscle fiber remained along her shredded abdomen.
