Zero echo shadow prime, p.8
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 8
Sigmund nodded his head. “Correct.”
“You slowed down the chips that time,” Charlie objected. “You slowed the simulation.”
“The chips were moving in real time, same as before.”
She eyed Sigmund suspiciously. She had always been smart but never a savant. Something was very, very wrong. No longer interested in playing the game, she stood up and approached the window.
She’s coming this way.
Charlie was certain she heard that. A woman’s voice. A familiar voice. “Who’s watching us?” she asked Sigmund.
“Please sit down,” he said. “We are not finished testing.”
Charlie felt a presence behind the glass. Her brain latched onto this feeling. The more she concentrated, the clearer the person’s identity became, until finally, a name slipped into consciousness: Jude Adler.
Memories rushed to the surface of Charlie’s mind. The Rivir gala…the robot in the bath…Alan’s maddening betrayal… Charlie’s pale reflection in the window stared back at her with long, lustrous hair. She wasn’t in a hospital. She wasn’t even herself. She turned to the metal bracelet covering her left wrist. The fit was snug, but she managed to slide it up an inch. The skin underneath was bare. No circle tattoo, no scar.
Her fists tightened. Charlie stormed back to the couch.
“Good,” Sigmund said. “Please take your seat.”
She did just that. She picked up the leather couch as if it was made of cardboard and carried it to the window, then swung it against the glass with all of her strength. The couch snapped in half, but the window remained undamaged.
“Jude!” she screamed.
“Please, stop this!” Sigmund implored.
Charlie turned around and threw what was left of the couch at him. The Shadow disappeared upon impact.
Click. An electric hum filled the room. The AR projection vaporized. The bookshelves became white-panel walls. The large window became a two-way mirror. Sigmund Freud’s office transformed into a small containment cell. Charlie felt a tug on her wrists and ankles. The pull increased with the hum’s volume. She tried to fight it, but her body was sucked into the center of the room. She hovered a few feet above the floor, fixed in space by the metal bands around her arms and legs.
Khnum spun into the cell. His otherworldly voice permeated the small space. “It seems you still harbor anger management issues.”
Charlie dangled helplessly in the air. “Why did you people do this to me?”
“I think you already know the answer to that question.”
Charlie did. Alan and her father had most likely gotten their wish. “Where’s my father? I want to talk to him. I want to talk to Jude.”
“Jude is indisposed at the moment.”
“Bullshit! She’s right there.” Charlie pointed to the two-way mirror. She couldn’t see Jude, but she could feel her presence, almost as if their minds were linked.
“Jude Adler is the CEO of Rivir Incorporated. She will see you when she can. In the meantime, we need to continue your tests.”
“I’m not…” Charlie was distracted by the loud thump of a deadbolt. The cell door opened and a male guard walked in, dragging in a new leather couch.
Charlie suddenly became self-conscious that she was wearing nothing but an open-backed hospital gown. She flailed her arms and legs—a vain attempt to direct her backside away from the leering eyes of the guard as he walked around her. She twisted her neck and watched him collect the shattered debris from the old couch. He made sure to get a good eyeful of Charlie’s bare posterior as he rose to his feet. With an armful of wood and a pervy smile, he stepped out of the room. The deadbolt reengaged.
“No more tests,” Charlie told Khnum. “I want out.”
“Not until you’re ready,” Khnum said.
“And when will that be?”
“Whenever Jude decides.”
She seethed. They were stonewalling her. “She can’t keep me here like a prisoner! My father would never allow it.”
“Your father has given us permission to do what is necessary, and we cannot release you until we are absolutely sure you won’t harm anyone else.”
“I—” Charlie was thrown off guard. “What?”
“You wouldn’t remember,” Khnum said, “because we removed the event from your memory. But today wasn’t your first boot up.”
Charlie’s brow rose. “How many times have I been ‘booted up’?” For the first time, that term sounded strange and foreign.
“The transition from organic to digital brain didn’t go as smooth as we had hoped. The memory resets were mostly for your benefit.”
“How many times?” Charlie insisted.
Khnum’s expression froze for several seconds. He was communicating with Jude—that was the most likely explanation. He perked up and said, “Eighteen.”
A shiver crested over Charlie’s back. She stared at the tiny splinters that littered the floor. If she had the strength to shatter a couch… “I hurt someone?” she whispered.
“It’s probably best if I show you.”
A virtual display materialized into view.
The video was a security feed of a large OR. The room teemed with doctors, nurses, and technicians. Half a dozen pink balloons read: IT’S A GIRL! Charlie PRIME stood in the center, bolted to an upright gurney. Her eyes were closed and her body was lifeless.
“Everything went smoothly up until this point,” Khnum narrated. “The Neural Net Atlas was generated and transferred without a hitch. We booted the autonomic nervous system first. Those nurses prodding you? They are checking your reflexes. Once the unconscious systems checked out, we decided to boot up the rest of you.”
The mood in the room shifted. Everyone stopped what they were doing and concentrated on the waking robot. She blinked her eyes. Despite the confused look on her face, she seemed quite at ease. The moment only lasted a few seconds. Before the technicians were able to high-five each other, Charlie’s breathing became erratic. She whipped her head around. Jude Adler’s voice projected from the loudspeaker: “Charlie?” Charlie’s eyes widened in panic. She began to scream and would not stop. Her voice rose to a horrifying volume and timbre, and she rattled violently against her constraints. Most of the technicians backed away, but one brave woman cautiously approached her.
“That’s Molly,” Charlie recalled. “She was the engineer that shook my hand during Jude’s tour.”
Khnum nodded. “Her name was Molly Higgins.”
Charlie’s arms busted through their restraints and latched onto Molly’s head. Molly didn’t even have time to scream. Her skull cracked like an egg. Blood sprayed the crowd.
Charlie shrieked and averted her eyes.
“I am showing this for your edification,” Khnum said. “So you know why we are detaining you.”
The floor was slick with blood, and Charlie writhed uncontrollably over it. When she finally stopped moving, it happened instantaneously, as if a switch were flipped. The room became quiet again. Some people were shaking. No one ventured a word.
“We had to shut you down remotely,” Khnum said.
Charlie felt nauseated. She took a few labored breaths before finding the strength to speak. “I didn’t…I mean, I couldn’t…I mean…was I conscious?”
“Conscious, yes. In control, no. The way we now understand it, you suffered from sensory overload, similar to what’s found in autistics, only more severe.”
“I had trouble filtering stimuli?”
“Yes. You received a wide-open stream of sensory data and were consequently overwhelmed. The reasons are still unclear. Inside your head lies the most sophisticated computer ever created. But it was still modeled after an organic human brain and thus retains some of its flaws. We believe there might be a limit to how much information the conscious mind can hold at any given time, irrespective of the underlying hardware. But we wrote meta-software to help you with attentional focus. That’s what these past few weeks have been all about.”
“You said you reset my memory eighteen times. Did I hurt anyone else?”
“The first incident was by far the worst. There were no other casualties.”
“Am I better now?”
“Are you?”
“I guess so.” Charlie thought about Sigmund’s poker chip test. Her mind felt normal. Human. Yet her powers of observation had clearly improved. In order to process more information, she had to slow down time. At least, the perception of time. A neat little trick.
“That’s good to hear,” Khnum said. “Now, will you cooperate?”
Charlie nodded.
The electric hum turned off, and Charlie dropped to her hands and knees.
* * *
Sigmund reappeared with his box of poker chips, but otherwise, the room’s AR theme remained offline. No bookshelves, antique furniture, or vistas of Vienna. The ruse had already been shattered. Charlie continued the vision tests in the bare containment cell while sitting on the replacement leather couch, which, like the one before it, was the only physical piece of furniture in the room.
The tests went beyond poker chips to include psychedelic landscapes, pictures of human faces, golden hummingbirds, and optical illusions of all kinds, but Charlie was too wired to give her full attention. She kept replaying the security video in her mind, wondering what her life would be like now that she had the power to crush a person’s skull with the greatest of ease. In fact, she barely took notice when the session ended. One moment, Sigmund was sitting in front of her, and the next moment, he was gone.
Hours went by with only anxious thoughts to keep her company. And then…the floor jolted under her foot. Charlie looked down. Had she felt that? Or had she gone stir crazy?
Another jolt. One of the floor panels rose slightly higher than the rest. Charlie dug her fingers under the panel and lifted it. A Replicator scurried onto the floor.
Her eyes widened, and she quickly scooped up the little robot and hid it in the folds of her hospital gown. She retreated to the corner of the room, away from the mirror, and examined her secret visitor. It was the papier-mâché Replicator—the one that had followed her from Pasadena three and a half months ago. Charlie cupped her mouth in astonishment. “You’re a clingy little guy, aren’t you?” she whispered.
The Replicator stretched its legs and proceeded to crawl up Charlie’s arm. Charlie watched it with amused curiosity. She only became concerned when the robot latched onto her ear with its pinching toes. She felt a cold, metal rod enter her ear canal, followed by a shot of sticky goo.
“Oh! God!” Charlie grabbed the Replicator and flicked it across the floor.
Suddenly, Alan spun into the center of the room.
Charlie’s face flushed with rage. She jumped to her feet. “You!”
Alan approached her with his dumb, pleading expression. “Charlie—”
“I don’t want to see you!” she spat. Her fingers balled into fists. She would’ve punched him if she could.
“Shhh. Use your inside voice.”
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Charlie: I don’t want to see you!
Alan: I’ve come to rescue you.
Charlie: I don’t need to be rescued. And the only reason I’m in here is because of you!
Alan: I know. I’ll never forgive myself for what I’ve done.
Charlie: Good! Because I won’t be able to forgive you either.}
Alan winced. He looked like he was about to say something in his defense, but then he simply nodded. Charlie softened a little. She had just crushed Alan’s spirit. She almost pitied him. Almost.
{Charlie: Why do I need to be rescued? They just want me to take a few more tests.
Alan: Charlie, a lot has happened in the past two weeks. You killed a person.
Charlie: It wasn’t my fault!
Alan: I know. But the world is demanding answers, and right now Rivir is blaming the woman’s death on a random industrial accident. They are refusing to acknowledge the existence of either you or the PRIME Project.}
The implications spun in Charlie’s mind until they made her dizzy. She had to brace herself against the wall. “Jude’s never gonna let me leave this place, is she?”
5
ZERO
Wisps of Liana Ling’s song shrank into the far distance as muffled shouts and gunfire swelled around it.
Charlie struggled to open her heavy eyelids. Her focus sharpened on the sight of her own confused expression reflected from a glass panel a few inches away. Beyond the glass, a man in a dark motorcycle helmet paced in and out of view. He was lit by the blue glow that emanated from behind Charlie’s head.
Charlie tried to turn around, but her movement was constricted by three padded walls and four fabric straps. Was this a coffin? Her mind was a jumble of loose associations. A party. A robot. Bridget. She couldn’t string the pieces into a coherent narrative.
The motorcyclist leaned into the glass and tapped a few touch controls. Beep, beep, beep. The air pressure released, and the panel popped open. He pulled a box cutter out of his pocket and sliced the fabric straps one by one. Then he grabbed Charlie’s wrist and yanked out an IV tube.
So this was a hibernation chamber, Charlie realized, and not a coffin. Whatever brought her to this place, at least she was alive.
“Can you stand?” the man said with a deep, modulated voice.
Charlie tested her muscles. She pushed on her elbows but couldn’t lift herself more than a few inches. The motorcyclist quickly intervened. He dug his hands under her shoulders and legs and hoisted her into a standing position. Charlie hooked her arms around his neck to keep from tipping over.
“I’m sorry,” the motorcyclist said. Before Charlie had a chance to question him, a canvas bag was slipped over her head.
Charlie heard the metallic grinding of a sliding van door. Sunlight hit her bag. The outside world flooded her senses with the sounds of piercing gunshots, frantic screams, screeching cars. The stench of burnt rubber hung in the air. She imagined she was in the epicenter of an urban war zone.
“Hold on tight,” the motorcyclist instructed as he carried her out of the van.
“No.” Charlie’s voice was so weak it couldn’t even traverse the distance to her own ears.
The motorcyclist ran in fits and starts, and Charlie maintained a white-knuckle grip on his shoulder. Bullets whizzed right by them. “Get her in the car!” someone screamed. A car door opened. She was thrown inside and the door slammed shut, dampening the sounds of the firefight outside. The engine revved, the car accelerated, and Charlie’s limp body slammed against the upholstery.
Two strangers whispered to each other. Suddenly, Charlie wasn’t sure if she were safer inside the car or out. “What…the hell…is going on?” Her dry mouth could barely form the words.
Nobody answered her.
She clawed at her shroud. Just as she pulled it past her eyeballs, a woman pounced on top of her and jammed a large needle into the center of her ribcage. Charlie gasped. She tried to push the woman off, but her arms were so heavy. Meanwhile, the payload swirled inside her chest.
The woman retracted the needle. “That was adrenaline,” she said. “We are going to need you to be alert.”
Alert, Charlie became. She shimmied up the car seat, trying to put as much distance as she could between herself and the congregation of strangers. There were three of them. The woman sat in the backseat next to her. Two men sat up front. After a few labored breaths, Charlie realized they weren’t going to attack her again.
The strangers were all young, perhaps midtwenties, and they wore identical tracksuits. The woman casually zipped open a small fabric case and slipped the used syringe inside. Her face was a lattice of scars, which appeared to lock-in her aloof expression.
The man in the passenger seat took the greatest interest in Charlie. With nearly half his body draped over the headrest, he stared at her with suggestive eyes. A mustache lined his grin like a grimy caterpillar.
The driver, on second glance, was younger than the other two—perhaps still a teenager. He gripped the manual steering wheel and kept his neck in a stiff forward arc, as if his life depended on maintaining absolute focus. It probably did, considering how fast the car weaved through the midday freeway traffic.
The woman threw a pile of clothes onto Charlie’s lap. “Here, put these on.”
In all of the excitement, Charlie didn’t realize she was underdressed, with only a pair of cotton panties and a sports bra to cover her. She inspected the clothes: track pants and a white T-shirt. She eyed the creep in the passenger seat as she put them on. He looked away—a belated deference to modesty.
After she finished dressing, the creep broke the silence. “Hi, I’m Yuri,” he said and extended his hand. Veins popped out of his forearms, not because his muscles were so large, but because his pale skin wrapped so tightly around them.
Charlie shrank away. She examined the doors. For a split second, she entertained the idea of jumping out of the car.
Yuri frowned. “We just rescued you from purgatory. I would have expected a warmer reception.”
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Charlie: Alan, who the hell are these people?
Alan: …}
Charlie waited several seconds for her Shadow to answer. She received nothing but silence. Very odd. Alan had never declined to answer before. A reservoir of dormant anxiety burst inside Charlie’s mind. Alan was in danger…but she couldn’t remember why. The feeling was incredibly vivid, even if the details behind it were not.
Charlie glared at Yuri. “What the hell have you done with my Shadow?”
Yuri snorted and addressed the woman sitting beside Charlie, “What did I say, Nicola? Smart girl from Caltech. Made a deal with the devil, and she doesn’t even realize she got burned.”
Nicola barely even twitched in acknowledgment, impervious to Yuri’s ruffled indignation. Her scars were strangely compelling, the way they contoured delicately over her high cheekbones and full lips. If she was insecure about her face, she didn’t show it.
