Zero echo shadow prime, p.4
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 4
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Alan: Your cortisol levels have spiked. Heart rate is one-sixty. Are you okay?
Charlie: I’d like to talk to my father alone.
Alan: Are you sure?
Charlie: Go to sleep, Alan.}
Alan spun into the floor. All communication with him ceased.
“That was him?” Andrew asked.
Charlie nodded.
“I watched the show,” Andrew said. “You made me proud today. This whole month. It must have been quite the ride—”
“Cut the bullshit,” Charlie snapped. She was sick of his disingenuous praise. “We both know why you are here.”
“Here you go, making me into the bad guy.”
“No, you’re not a bad guy. We just have very different ideas on how I should live my life. For example, you might be proud now—after the fact—but you’ve always been against Alan.”
“You were failing your classes. I’m all for hobbies, but—”
“And now he’s the most famous Shadow in the world. I could sell him for millions if I wanted to.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.”
“It’s like you figure out the most logical course of action and then do the exact opposite. I’ll never understand you.”
Charlie smirked. I’ll never understand you. That’s the one thing they could agree on.
“Pack a bag,” Andrew instructed. “You need medical attention. Your sister didn’t have much time. Neither will you.”
“I’m staying here.” Charlie crossed her arms. She had to stay firm. Concede one morsel to this power glutton and he’d swallow you whole.
“It’s not a choice,” Andrew said.
“It’s my life!”
“That’s where you are wrong. You have a responsibility to other people. People who love you.”
“You’re referring to yourself, of course. Everyone else is dead.”
Andrew locked up. He gave Charlie a wounded look that made her feel like a horrible human being. She momentarily forgot that her traumatic memories were also his. They cut in both directions.
Charlie caught her breath in the silence that followed, unsure of how to proceed. She couldn’t kick her father out, and he showed no signs of leaving.
“Charlie, you're scared,” he said in that soft, paternal voice she’d known as a kid. “I wish I could hold you in my arms and wipe away the last two years—”
“You can’t even hold me. Too busy to come down in person.” Charlie wanted to smack herself for saying that. She had to learn not to say counterproductive things just because they were true.
Unsurprisingly, Andrew’s face hardened again. “I’m a Nobunaga. Like you, I have responsibilities. But I have a hovercopter waiting outside—”
“How many times do I have to say it? I’m not coming.”
“If you are doing this just to spite me—”
“You know why I’m doing this. It has nothing to do with you.”
“You really won’t come peacefully, will you?”
“No,” Charlie insisted. A few seconds passed before she caught her father’s word choice. “Wait, what do you mean by peacefully?”
Andrew turned his head away and whispered something unintelligible.
She strained to listen. Instead of hearing whispers, she was deafened by a crash at the door. Her heart and body both jumped. “What? What’s going on?” Charlie cried. Even Monkey was alarmed. He assumed an aggressive stance.
“I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago,” Andrew said coldly.
Another crash. The door was coming off its hinges.
“Daddy, please, no.” Terrified, Charlie took a few steps backward. Her heart thumped painfully against her constricted chest.
“Since Bridget died, you’ve been a walking time bomb,” Andrew said. “You asked for space? I gave it to you. And this is where it brought us.”
A final crash. The door flew into the center of the room, revealing a mercenary in body armor. Monkey immediately leaped on the man. He dropped his battering ram and tried to wrestle himself free, but Monkey was too heavy and strong. They teetered a bit, smacked against the doorframe, and then toppled over.
Charlie used the diversion to sneak past the man and out the door. She ran down the hallway but was quickly ambushed by another mercenary. This one wrapped his meaty arm around her head and pushed a syringe into her neck.
The man scooped Charlie up and carried her toward the exit. She pummeled his helmet and body armor to no effect. Her eyes desperately searched for help and found her building manager, who was watching the scene unfold from the safety of her apartment door. Charlie cried for help, but the woman simply shook her head in disapproval, as if Charlie’s abduction was both expected and warranted.
The concussive pulse of a hovercopter spread from above as Charlie was dragged into the street. Her pupils contracted under the thick glow of its jets. The colors of the night bled together, and her eyelids grew heavy. The last thing Charlie noticed was a slight tug on the back of her shirt. Her Replicator friend, the little robot with the papier-mâché shell, climbed over her shoulder and made a home for himself inside her breast pocket.
Charlie smiled sadly. Then everything went dark.
3
ARCHETYPE
Where’s Bridget?
The thought emerged from the darkness. An urgent dread soon followed. The world coalesced in Charlie’s mind: seagulls prattling overhead, saltwater mist rushing through her hair, white-hot sand shifting between her toes. Charlie weaved through the crowd, searching for her twin sister. It was a game they liked to play.
Beep, beep, beep…
Charlie’s ears perked up. Those beeps sounded both distant and internal, but she didn’t have time to dwell—had to keep searching. Bridget wasn’t in the water. She wasn’t over the dunes. She wasn’t pretending to be some other family’s kid, a favorite tactic of hers. Charlie quickened her pace. A girl slipped behind the lifeguard tower. Was that her? Charlie ran at full speed. Her feet caught a divot in the sand, and she tumbled over. When she got up, the tower was vacant.
Beep, beep, beep…
She bumped into someone’s legs. The tall stranger reached down, but Charlie scrambled away. Her path became more erratic. This was no longer a game. She couldn’t remember where she came from. She couldn’t decide where to go. Bridget was nowhere.
Beep, beep, beep…
The sound accelerated. How much time had passed? An hour? Two? Everyone was laughing, having fun. They weren’t aware of the nightmare. Only Charlie knew. She was sick with fear.
“Bridge!” she cried.
Beep, beep, beep…
The world spun around her. The ground slipped away. Charlie swung her arms but couldn’t stop the descent. She heard a crash. Her eyes snapped open. Strange people rushed at her. She kicked and clawed at them, but they secured her limbs and held her down. Where was her sister? She screamed at full volume, “Bridge!”
“It’s okay, Charlie. You’re safe.”
She recognized the man’s voice, and her brain started putting the clues together. Beeps from the heart monitor. Nurses in scrubs. She lifted her head and saw Dr. Klein, Bridget’s old oncologist, at the foot of her bed. Charlie’s heart slowed and the beeping followed. She took a deep breath and relaxed her fists. The nurses released her arms and legs. One of them picked up a fallen IV pole.
“You are home, Charlie,” said a different man.
Charlie recognized that voice too. Her heart rate spiked again in a torrent of beeps. She lunged into a seated position, but the nurses immediately held her back down. She heaved and thrashed and screamed, “You asshole! You kidnapped me!”
Andrew Nobunaga entered Charlie’s field of view. “If you don’t calm down, they will give you a sedative.”
Charlie was horrified into momentary submission. She stared at her father, the same man who had once read her bedtime stories and taken her to science camp and taught her the constellations. How could he treat her this way?
“Go ahead, say it,” Andrew said. “Let it all out now, because we are going to be seeing a lot of each other for the next few months.”
“I hate you,” Charlie seethed.
“Good, anything else?”
She was beyond talk. She wanted to claw tracks of blood into his smug face. Her arms surged under the restraint of the nurses, struggling for inches, but her energy quickly dissipated, and she sank back into her bed. Charlie turned away from her father. She would have to hurt him some other way, at some other time.
“Fine,” Andrew said. “You remember Dr. Klein?”
“Hello, Charlie. How are you feeling?” Dr. Klein asked in his bedside voice.
Charlie was too angry to respond.
“Your father is only looking out for your best interests,” Dr. Klein said. “I’m told you are already aware of your predicament. Of course, we’ve been discussing it for a while now. You share the same mutations as your twin. We hoped in your case, with the benefit of today’s smart cells, we would have caught the cancer sooner. Certainly before it metastasized.”
“She has a custom-made Shadow,” Andrew informed the doctor.
Charlie lashed out: “It wasn’t Alan’s fault. I told him not to run any scans.”
“Why?” Dr. Klein asked, as if it were the craziest thing he had ever heard.
Again, Charlie didn’t respond. She didn’t need to defend herself. Or Alan.
Andrew led the doctor out of the room. His hushed voice trailed down the hallway. My daughter is not herself… Ever since the death of her twin… Can’t be trusted… Tried to end her own life… Charlie knew her father’s apology by heart. He wanted to project the image of the tireless, empathic father to concerned family and friends, but in reality he was deeply ashamed of her.
Charlie sat up in her bed and opened a private conversation with Alan.
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Charlie: We need to get out of here.
Alan: Sounds like a plan. And then what?
Charlie: Then…we go somewhere he can’t find us.
Alan: And then what?
Charlie: And then what!? Then, I continue living my life.
Alan: Exactly how much life do you think you have left?}
Charlie knew exactly where this conversation was heading.
{Charlie: Are you on his side?}
Alan spun out of the floor and looked directly into Charlie’s eyes. “I would never side against you. You know that. But you should think about your decision.”
“I have.”
Alan glanced at the two nurses, who were busy entering data into their personal displays. “Can we have the room?” he asked. The nurses shared a moment of confusion—Shadows didn’t normally give people orders. They turned to Charlie for her approval, and she gave them a slight nod. After they left, Alan resumed: “I thought you and your father were close at one time. What happened?”
“You have access to my memory,” Charlie replied.
“There’s your memory and then there’s your interpretation of said memory. I’d rather hear the latter.”
With a heavy sigh, Charlie turned up her left wrist. She could still see what lay beneath the clear medical tape and IV tubing: a simple tattoo of a circle, which had lost significance since Bridget had died; and an ugly scar, from when she’d bled into the bathwater. The scar bisected the circle. Not a coincidence.
“He really freaked out after I did this,” she told Alan.
“He became controlling?”
“He was always controlling, though as a kid, I didn’t seem to mind as much. No, he became…unsympathetic. I’d be crying my eyes out, and he’d shove a stack of college applications in my face. He’d drag me to cocktail parties where I had to pretend to smile and show all his colleagues that we were doing fine. He made me install a Child Tracker Shadow, though I quickly rewrote its code. He filled my schedule with meaningless crap so I’d never be alone, so I wouldn’t have time to think about her, and all I really wanted was for him to understand my pain. I wanted him to admit he missed her too.”
“And what’s changed since then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you moved away for college, where I assume you had access to sharp objects. Why didn’t you try again…to, you know, off yourself?”
Charlie raised an eyebrow. That was certainly a blunt question, but a good one. She recalled the night in the bathtub as she held the razor against her arm, feeling certain that she was done with this world and hopeful that she would rejoin her sister in the next. Those feelings didn’t exactly go away.
“Until you can answer that question with certainty,” Alan said, “I advise you not to make any rash decisions. I know your father’s an asshole—”
“To put it mildly,” Charlie scoffed.
“But he is a rich, powerful, well-connected asshole and your best chance for beating this thing.”
Charlie fell back into bed. With a defeated groan, she tucked the sheets over her head. Remaining at her father’s estate would require a monumental amount of pride swallowing. But deep down, she knew Alan was right.
* * *
Charlie followed her father’s plan. She stayed at the Nobunaga estate in Hillsborough, a wealthy suburb of San Francisco. Her old childhood bedroom was converted into a private cancer ward. All of her favorite possessions—telescope, drafting table, box of Frankensteined toy robots—were cleared away to make room for medical equipment and personnel.
Charlie saw her papier-mâché Replicator once more, confirming that it had, indeed, made the trip from Pasadena. The little guy crawled behind her dresser before disappearing completely into the house. Charlie decided not to warn her father. It would be her private act of revenge. Soon enough, he would start to see the telltale holes in the furniture.
Like Bridget before her, Charlie was placed on an old-fashioned chemotherapy regimen, which was still the most viable option for many stage four cancers. Dr. Klein wanted to swap out Alan for a hospital-grade Shadow. “He may be a good conversationalist,” the doctor told her, “but does he possess the subroutines necessary to command billions of smart cells and make intelligent medical assessments?” Even Charlie had to admit that Alan’s abilities were lacking in this department, but she refused to let him go.
It was actually Andrew who resolved the dilemma with a surprising, magnanimous gesture. He bought the company that produced Nightingale, the industry-standard virtual doctor. Charlie then dived through Nightingale’s code and incorporated its medical subroutines into Alan.
Over the next three months, Charlie’s hair fell out and her skin tightened around her bones, but she didn’t need a mirror or a Shadow to gauge her condition. She could sense it in her father’s temper, which soon escalated into a screaming match with Dr. Klein. Charlie hid under her comforter as the two men almost came to blows.
Dr. Klein decided to work remotely thereafter.
And Andrew switched his strategy. He began to mine his professional contacts, trying to find any leads on experimental treatments and clinical trials. He was the CEO of Lotus, the world’s largest space tourism company, so his influence stretched wide—to the tech sector, the US military, NASA, and beyond. His frantic conference calls often woke Charlie in the middle of the night. “It’s always daytime somewhere in the world,” he’d mutter to the concerned nursing staff before contacting some expert in Asia.
One day Charlie woke from her afternoon nap to find her father sitting on the bed beside her. “I’ve found our solution,” he said as he draped an evening gown across her lap.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. She was too nauseous and groggy to feign hope anymore. After all, the nurses were already pumping “solution” into her body. She had slowly become the daughter he always wanted—dependent, unable to make decisions for herself, vulnerable to his will. She barely possessed the energy to flinch as he placed his fingertip on her forehead and traced the letter C around her face. It was his way of saying I love you without having to say it. It also meant that he was about to ask for unearned forgiveness. She turned away from him.
“I’m trying, Charlie…to set things right,” he said.
Charlie’s whole body tightened. How could he be so dense? “Things can never be set right. She’s dead.”
“I mean between us. I made mistakes, unreasonable demands. I never gave you time to heal.”
“You seem to have healed remarkably well.” Charlie bit her lip. That was a hateful thing to say, and she knew it.
Her father’s voice remained surprisingly steady. “We have a big night ahead of us. You are to look presentable. One of the nurses will help you get ready.” He rose to leave but stopped just short of the door. “After this is all over, I’d like a fresh start. I hope you’ll give me that chance.” He left without another glance.
Her heart swelled with pity for her father. His parental hope had clearly turned delusional. Her chances for recovery were virtually nil…weren’t they? She lifted the evening gown off her lap and studied it. What was the grand occasion? What was her father’s “solution”? She probably should have asked him these questions before she insulted him.
“He really is doing everything he can to help you. You should let him.”
Charlie looked up and found Alan at the foot of her bed. She hadn’t even noticed him spin into the room. “Did you know about this?” she asked.
Alan nodded and a dumb grin snuck across his face.
“What? Tell me.”
“Trust me,” he said, “it’s better if you see for yourself.”
* * *
Neither Alan nor Andrew would divulge any details about the night, only that Charlie would meet someone very important. She guessed where they were going as soon as the limo reached downtown San Francisco. The tech world was buzzing about Rivir’s merger with Bethea Robotics, and Charlie knew they were hosting a celebratory gala that night.
