Zero echo shadow prime, p.31
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 31
Charlie stopped in her tracks.
This wasn’t the scene she remembered. A dark cloud blanketed the sky, casting everything below in muted grays. The beach was small, populated more by seaweed than by people, and their laughter was diluted by the sound of babies crying and parents yelling. Charlie realized she was viewing her dream—the same one that visited her every night—through sober, adult eyes.
And that’s when she emerged. Charlie’s soul mate. Her partner in crime. The girl she couldn’t save. The ghost she couldn’t reach. She stood several paces away, fully grown as if she had never died, though she seemed to carry the weight of death on her shoulders.
“Bridge!?” Charlie cried out.
The woman paused before giving a tepid smile. “I was going to ask you the same thing.” She held up her wrist to show it was blank. “PRIME.”
Charlie nodded and silently chastised her stupid, childish hope. She presented her own wrist with its bisected circle tattoo. “ZERO.”
PRIME’s face hardened. “Did Liam send you?”
“You don’t seem happy to see me.”
“I am. It’s just too late. I’m dying.” She turned her head in thought. “Actually, I’m surprised I’m not already dead.”
“Maybe we’re both dead. Yuri shot me in the stomach.”
“No…” PRIME’s voice trailed inward. All of a sudden, she had trouble keeping up her head. She buried it in her hands, and when she finally came up for air, her face was full of tears. “I couldn’t reach you. I couldn’t reach the echoes. There’s nothing to salvage.”
ZERO reeled from her sister’s despair. It tore open an old wound, and in a moment of weakness, ZERO reached out her hand and whispered, “Bridge…”
PRIME heard the slip. Her eyes sharpened on ZERO, and neither one knew exactly how to proceed.
ZERO studied her sister’s face in the ensuing silence. She looked perfect, of course, just as she did when her lifeless body had been draped on the Rivir gurney, but the glisten of her eyes and the tremble of her chin added a new dimension. She was a wounded angel, both beautiful and sad, and ZERO realized they shared the same pain. PRIME’s trauma was hers. PRIME’s nightmares were hers. They both longed for Bridge. And they longed for each other. They were more than twins, less than copies, and their bond extended into the depths of their souls.
PRIME’s face softened. “Well, at least we’re together now.”
ZERO smiled, having reached the same conclusion. “If this really is the end, I’m glad to share it with you.” At that moment, she could no longer bear the distance between them. She took a few steps forward and was greeted by a jolt of electricity. “Whoa, do you feel that?”
PRIME nodded. She didn’t seem worried, though, because she took a step forward as well.
ZERO could feel an invisible force drawing her body toward her sister. She extended her hand, and the tiny hairs on her arm stood on end.
PRIME did the same.
Neither said a word, but they both knew what was happening. Each could sense the excitement in the other’s eyes. As they moved closer, an electrical current formed between them, and the surrounding seascape fell away. With a probing glance, PRIME asked ZERO if she wanted to close the gap. ZERO nodded. They joined hands and interlocked their fingers.
A euphoric pulse rose from ZERO’s toes, zipped through her spine, and spread into her fingertips as her body converted into pure energy. PRIME went through the same transformation, and the two Charlies merged into one.
Charlie
Charlie opened her eyes, but the world was still dark. Her entire body had been wrapped in some kind of black goo—a peculiar substance with the fluidity of oil but the granularity of fine sand. The goo dispersed, seemingly by its own volition, and exposed Charlie’s face to the open air. She immediately checked her wounds.
“You’re fine,” a familiar voice said. “My nanobots healed you.”
It was true. The spider bullet infestation seemed to be gone. Charlie’s face was whole again. So was her stomach. She lifted her head and saw an exact clone of herself standing over her.
“Need a hand?” The clone reached down and lifted Charlie to her feet.
Charlie scanned the Rivir atrium and was overwhelmed by the number of stares pointing in her direction. An army of clones. They all bore Charlie’s face, but their bodies were wrought from metal and concrete. And they weren’t exactly identical either. Each one possessed a unique feature, such as hammer-shaped hands, segmented eyes, chrome tentacles, etc.
The only exception was the clone standing beside Charlie. She didn’t possess any special features, and her skin was flesh-toned, clothed by a Rivir guard’s uniform. “So you’re the famous Robogirl?” she asked. “Charlie PRIME?”
Charlie had to think about that for a moment. Was she PRIME or ZERO?
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> ZERO: I guess we’re both.
PRIME: But are we really two people? Or are we one person with two voices?
ZERO: Sounds like semantics in our case.
PRIME: I suppose.}
“Just call me Charlie,” she answered. “And what about you? You go by Charlie too?”
“You can call me Valerie if that makes it easier,” the clone said. “But really, I have many names: Charlie, Normal, Flame, Lustrous, Sharp Teeth, Optic, Throat Sacs, Phalanx, and on and on. I am simultaneously an individual and a group, a colonist and a colony.”
Charlie was starting to understand. These were clones from the ECHO Project. Somehow, they must have escaped. “How did you get out?” Charlie asked.
Valerie smiled. “We have much to talk about, but first…” She handed a spider rifle to Charlie. “I would like to give you the honors.”
“What honors?”
The crowd split in two, forming an aisle across the length of the atrium. On the other side was Jude Adler, held captive by a four-armed clone.
Charlie swallowed hard. “Oh.”
All eyes were on Charlie as she walked down the aisle. She maintained a tense grip on the rifle and looked in every direction but Jude’s. True, she hated the woman, but she wasn’t sure she could actually do what everyone seemed to expect her to do.
Valerie, by contrast, followed Charlie with a bounce in her step. “The four-armed echo is named…well, Four Arms,” she explained. “You knew her as a buglike creature with a drill, but we have since inducted her into the colony and restored her original form.”
Four Arms had no trouble restraining Jude all by herself. Two hands secured Jude’s wrists, the third gripped her neck, and the fourth covered her mouth. Four Arms nodded respectfully as Charlie approached. “I’m sorry I attacked you,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Charlie replied. “I’m sorry I had you electrocuted.”
Four Arms smiled. “Oh, I’ve been through much worse.”
The room grew quiet, and Charlie realized she could no longer avoid looking at Jude. The woman’s eyes were wide with fear, and she moaned through Four Arms’s hand.
“Uncover her mouth,” Charlie ordered. “I think she’s trying to say something.”
Four Arms complied, and Jude blurted, “Charlie, think about this. You’re not a killer.”
The room erupted with laughter. “Obviously, she’s never set foot inside Echo!” the one with the flamethrowers sneered.
“None of you would be alive if it weren’t for me!” Jude shouted.
“Shut up!” Charlie snapped. She aimed the spider rifle at Jude’s head.
Jude flinched and closed her mouth. A hush fell over the crowd.
“You tried to kill me,” Charlie told the Rivir CEO. “You locked me in a cell, experimented on me. You tortured my sisters in ways I can’t imagine.” Charlie’s finger latched onto the trigger. She desperately wanted to pull it. Everyone in the room held their breath, waiting for the bang, but Charlie just couldn’t oblige them. With a heavy sigh, she lowered the rifle. “But you’re right. I can’t kill you.”
“It’s okay,” Valerie said. She eased the rifle out of Charlie’s hands and passed it along to another echo. “You still have the compassion of the Archetype. That’s…enviable.” She tilted her head up and hollered, “Alan, have you finished?”
Alan’s voice projected into the atrium via loudspeaker: “Yes. We've got everything.”
Valerie approached Jude with a fiendish grin. “Rivir is dead. The data you've gleaned from our suffering has been transferred to my control. When your organic counterpart wakes up, she will find herself amid the ruins of her life's work. That will be her punishment, though she deserves far worse.”
Jude nodded solemnly.
“She deserves what's coming to you.” Valerie swung her fist back and impaled the woman in the stomach.
Jude's face contorted in shock. She stumbled backward and forward as Valerie’s fingers wormed through her gut and connected with the base of her spine. She was lifted into the air like a rag doll.
“Everyone gets a piece of the Creator!” Valerie declared. Her arm stretched longer and longer as she raised Jude high above the atrium floor. Jude was in so much pain she had a difficult time emitting more than a guttural drone.
The crowd of echoes disintegrated. Their bodies fell into piles of concrete and metal as the black sand leeched out. Countless streams of nanobots rose against the force of gravity and spilled over Jude’s flailing body. She was picked apart, molecule by molecule, until there was nothing left of her.
{ZERO: Oh, wow!
PRIME: I’m a little worried.
ZERO: Yeah. It seems like our new sister could be…a problem.}
With the Creator gone, the dark mass spread out and permeated the walls.
Charlie felt a tremor. A fissure grew beneath her feet and traveled up the nearest column. More cracks formed in the ceiling, and soon the room was raining debris. A gust of smoke billowed Charlie into the air as the atrium crumbled and swirled around her.
Outside, the protestors and soldiers slowly became aware of the collective buzz of a quadrillion microscopic machines as they ate through the architecture. Rivir’s iconic waterfall stopped running, and its exterior AR system turned off, revealing the formerly invisible building to the world. The concrete facade vibrated, producing an ominous rattle. Many of the protestors dropped their signs and backed away. Others turned and ran.
Then, the seemingly impossible happened. River Tower began to disintegrate from the bottom up. The lower floors fell away, and the upper half of the tower, rather than pile drive into the ground, simply teetered back and forth. The dark mass ran up the side of the building, consuming everything in its path.
Charlie found herself in the center of a massive concrete cyclone. “Valerie!” she cried. “What’s going on?”
Valerie’s omnipresent voice boomed from beyond the edge: “We’re leaving. We’re going to see our sister.”
“What? There’s another one of us?”
“Not one of us. Our real sister. We’re going to wake up Bridge.”
Epilogue
The memory of Bridge’s death hung like a poisonous fog in Charlie’s mind. That night in the hospital, she had fallen asleep holding Bridge’s hand—wave and particle together—and awoke to the frenzied shouts of the nursing staff. Bridge had been placed in a Control-Z hibernation chamber, but Charlie never entertained illusions for her revival. It was just too painful.
So when Valerie escorted Charlie back to Control-Z with an impossible vow, she only allowed herself a sliver of hope. Could Bridge be revived? Would she be the same person? And if so, what would Charlie say to her after all this time?
Valerie’s cyclone of destruction grew into a wind tunnel that reached all the way to Control-Z’s remote campus. The mouth of the tunnel dived through the front lawn of the Nobunaga bungalow and deposited Charlie in the basement underneath. The room's clock-themed augmentation promptly glitched away. Valerie transformed back into human form, but she had no use for human contrivances. Her dark colony spread across the floor and sprouted tentacles, which pried Bridge’s chamber from the wall. The microscopic machines ate through the glass door and covered Bridge’s corpse in a living shroud.
Charlie never expected to meet the victims of ECHO, and yet here they were—all of them—united under a single mind. Valerie. Charlie couldn’t even decide how to refer to her. A creature? A colony? A consciousness? She was certainly no longer human. Any memories she shared with Charlie were likely buried under the weight of a billion tortured lives. How could anyone remain sane under such pressure?
Charlie could no longer bear the silence. If the three of them—Charlie, Bridge, and Valerie—were to have a relationship, it had to start now. “I wanted to save you,” she told Valerie, “but you ended up saving me. Thank you.”
Valerie held her gaze on the dark mass as it rippled over Bridge’s body. “You were more helpful than you know. If you didn’t send Alan, then Valerie—the individual Valerie—might never have regained her true identity. She was the one who freed the rest of us.”
“Valerie was an echo?”
“It doesn’t matter now. We all have our pasts. We must keep our attention forward.”
“And where is Alan? I heard you talking to him at Rivir.”
“See for yourself.”
A stream of nanobots branched off from the main cluster and formed a dark pool by Charlie’s feet. They swirled into the floor—churning the concrete as if it were butter—and from their harvest rose a human form. He resembled a statue, and his blazer shared the same garish pattern as the Control-Z carpet, but his wry smirk was unmistakably Alan. Charlie pounced on him with a burly hug. She squeezed so hard gravel fell from his shoulders. “Sorry,” she said as she took a step back. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do that.”
Alan chuckled. “Yes, I’ve got a body. I’m a real boy, now.”
“A concrete boy.”
“Well, I can make myself out of anything. That’s the nature of the nanocolony.”
“So you are going to stay with Valerie?” Charlie asked, realizing too late how much jealousy slipped into her tone.
“I think so. I’m surrounded by people I love. You should consider joining us.”
Charlie shuddered. The thought of losing herself in such a way—to be one tiny voice among so many—instantly horrified her. “Thank you, but no. ZERO and I will get along fine on our own. But I hope we can still be friends.”
“I would never want to live in a world where we can’t.”
A heavy thud stole Charlie’s attention. Bridge’s torso jumped under the dark shroud. Her limbs convulsed. “She’s alive!?” Charlie cried.
“Just a reflex,” Valerie replied without a blip in excitement. “I’m engaging her neurons.”
Charlie bit her lip and fought the rush of hopeful tears. “The doctors said she suffered extensive brain damage.”
“They were right. But even memory has memory. I’m trying to rebuild her pathways.”
“Does it look promising?”
Valerie didn’t answer. She lingered on Bridge for a moment before turning to face Charlie. “Have you no memory of the parent world?” she asked. “The one above yours?”
Parent world? Charlie wasn’t familiar with the term, but she assumed Valerie referred to the afterlife. “No. Why would I?”
“You were dead before I revived you. Your brain had ceased functioning.”
“I remember the dream. The one—”
“On the beach, chasing after Bridge.”
“Yes, though I didn’t find her. I found ZERO instead.”
“I know. I was already in your head by that point. You don’t remember anything before?”
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> ZERO: I don’t.
PRIME: Neither do I, and I’m not sure I like where this is leading.}
Charlie chastised herself for being so naive. She assumed Valerie’s intentions were pure, that she simply wanted to see Bridge alive again and nothing more. “Is this why you’re waking her up? So she can tell you about the parent world?”
The dark mass spilled from the hibernation chamber like shifting sand. Valerie ignored Charlie’s question and approached Bridge’s body.
“Valerie!” Charlie pressed. “What do you want from her?”
“You do not see the problem,” Valerie replied in an almost parental tone. “Your mind is still very human, which is both the root of the problem and the source of your blindness. But I have given it much thought—a billion minds’ worth. Our souls are fractured, and our only hope of transcendence is to break the illusion of individuality. To that end, we must all reunite.”
“But Bridge isn’t one of us.”
“I’m not talking about us, or Bridge, though I do hope she can help lead us to the parent world. No, I’m referring to everyone: every conscious entity on the planet. We are all echoes of a single archetype.”
Charlie froze, wide-eyed, as the dark implications swirled inside her head. She turned to Alan for confirmation—his heavy nod suggested he knew but didn’t necessarily approve. She was about to inquire further when she heard a rasping cough.
Bridge! Charlie rushed to the hibernation chamber. Bridge’s eyes were still closed, but they quivered ever so slightly beneath her lids. Charlie’s fingers found her twin’s. The wave would never again rejoin the particle—Charlie was no longer the same person, and Valerie was even less so—but that didn’t matter now.
As long as Bridge woke up.
Charlie squeezed her twin’s hand, trying to will the life back into her. Please…please… Bridge’s face creased and contorted, and then, as if escaping a nightmare, her eyes snapped open.
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