My spirits plummeted, and I felt ashamed that I had missed once again, but then there was another sharp crack. A pulse of green energy rippled out from the orb, reminding me of a massive ripple in a pond, spreading outward. Dark cracks appeared in the surface of the orb a second later, as if someone had clenched it tightly in his fist and squeezed, and then chunks began to break off, moving slowly at first, and then faster and faster, as if the shockwave was dragging pieces of it away, like some sort of reverse comet.
A massive hunk of the debris hurtled right for me, and on impulse, I lifted my arms across my face, forming a shield that looked like the corner of a building, with a blade jutting from its center, seconds before it was going to hit. There was a great shearing sound as the mass of code slammed into the shield, kicking up sparks all around me and forcing me back. The hunk split in two, streaming all around me, but a quick glance told me that I was still in danger, now hurtling toward the wall of code that made up Kurt’s skin.
I had no idea whether it was going to be as hard on the inside as it was on the outside, but I didn’t hesitate, either.
Lifting my feet, I planted them on the shield and shifted my perspective of gravity until it was like I was standing on an elevator, hurtling toward the ceiling. I formed another plasma rifle in my hands, brought it up to my shoulder, and fired it before it was even formed, and to my surprise, the bolt was a blue orb wreathed in black lightning. It smashed through the wall of Kurt’s code, and I leapt for the opening seconds before the remaining fragments of the orb shot through his chest.
I flapped my wings, shooting myself upward to avoid the debris as light spilled from Kurt’s wounds. The AI sang his first and final note, and it was like the beating of drums coming to a slow and steady halt on one poignant note of rage, and then he exploded, his code hurtling into the datasphere and disappearing into the glittering darkness. Several pieces slammed into me, but Tony’s armor kept me safe from harm.
I quickly scanned the datasphere, looking for any sign of Leo, and found him wrestling with Sage above me. The minute my eyes saw them, Sage kicked Leo viciously in the chest, and then reached out to grab him by his hair in the same way he had grabbed Tony.
Fire burned in my heart, and I snapped my wings out and flapped, imagining myself right next to him.
A fraction of a second later, I was, and before Sage could even lift his eyebrows in surprise, I drove a fist right into his face, sending the program flying. Leo fell back, still intact, and I ignored him to chase after Sage, a gun forming in my outstretched hand. I fired at him, the shots blue with black lightning, and he spun in an effort to miss them.
But the lines followed him—whether they were directed by my will or Scipio’s, I didn’t know—the first one catching him in his hip, the second in his shoulder, the third in his leg.
He cried out and fell, and I was on him a second later, tossing the gun aside to take my fists to his face. I pummeled him as we fell, my rage turning my fists into fire and brimstone, punishing him for stealing my friends’ lives, my life, Grey’s life, and everyone else’s. He struggled, but his strength was waning.
We hit the ground a moment later, and I manifested a sword and drove it though his shoulder, pinning him to the ground like an insect.
“Wait!” he cried a second too late, and I smiled savagely at the choked sound of pain in his request. I manifested another sword while he writhed, and slammed that one into his other shoulder when he tried to use his good arm to free the first. “Stop! Please! We can do this… together! You and me! You can make sure I stay in line while—”
“No,” I said, unwilling to hear any more of his drivel. “You and your so-called legacy die now-here, and forever.” His eyes widened, pleading, but I felt nothing toward him except a deep sense of purpose. I plunged my hand into his chest, shoving through the outer shell of his coding and deep inside.
“NOOOOO!” he wailed, struggling against the swords pinning him to the ground, but I ignored it, my fingers searching for his source code. I found it a moment later, the humming on my skin intensifying as I came across something hard and grabbed it in my palm. Then I squeezed, using all the pain he had caused me to form a vice around it. I felt it snap and crack in my grip, but I didn’t relent, the images of Dylan, my mother, Zoe, Maddox, Quess, Eric, Grey, and even myself flashing in front of my eyes. Then Rose, Tony, Scipio… even Kurt and Alice, whom he had corrupted against their purposes. Then his obsession with destroying Lionel Scipio’s code—and how it had cost so many people their lives.
Sage opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out except a bright white light, which was being expelled by an even brighter amber one, consuming every bit of his code until only his outline remained, and that was rapidly fading into oblivion.
I opened my fist to release the granules of sand I’d crushed his source code into, and released them, letting them evaporate into nothingness as well, then leaned back on my heels.
It was done. Sage was gone.
As soon as it hit me, a sob caught me, the humming on my skin fragmenting and distorting in response to my pain. It was over, but at what cost? I’d lost everyone. All of my friends were dead, Grey and I were dead, and I was all that remained. A ghostly remnant of a girl who had done nothing but fail.
And I had failed. I’d failed them all. Rose, Jasper, Scipio, Tony… gone forever. As was everyone I had ever loved. A tide of grief slammed into me, and I bent over, pressing my face into my hands, as if I could contain the hurt behind a wall of my fingers. And there was no one else left for Leo to combine with, and I knew he couldn’t do it with me. I was too impetuous to have the fate of the Tower resting on my decisions. At every turn, I had made wrong call after wrong call, and I was guaranteed to do it again. It was a flaw in my character, and it would be a flaw in my programming. It would corrupt Leo, influence him to make the wrong decisions, and the Tower would fail.
“Shhhhh,” Leo said from behind me, and seconds later, I felt his hands smoothing over my shoulders and arms. “It’s okay. It’s all over. You won. We won. Soon, we’ll be bonded, and—”
I shook my head, cutting him off. “You have to go without me,” I said, knowing in my heart that I couldn’t enter the Core with him. “Take Rose, Tony, and Scipio’s source codes, and—”
“What?” he interrupted, coming around to face me, his expression incredulous. “What are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“I’m not suitable for the Core, Leo,” I told him tiredly, my heart sick. “Everyone’s dead. Even Grey. Even… me. The real me. I got us all killed, and it’s only through blind luck that we survived that fight! Those aren’t good qualities for an AI; I’d make you impetuous and give you tunnel vision. My decisions never turn out right, and—”
“Shut up,” he said softly, cutting me off.
I looked up at him, surprised that he’d even think to tell me to shut up, and found him already kneeling down in front of me. I opened my mouth to tell him off for dismissing me like that, but the fiery look in his eyes told me to keep my mouth shut and listen.
“I’m sorry that you’ve had to suffer so much these past few weeks. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. But without you, Sage and Kurt would’ve won. You’ve given Lionel Scipio’s dream another chance, and I know, together, we can make something really beautiful. We can heal the Tower, make it strong and whole. We can tell the people the world beyond is habitable, and find ways to give them new lives, if they want it. What we want for the Tower is the same thing: we want its people happy, safe, and protected.” He paused, and then reached up and cupped my cheek. “I know that you will never give up on that dream. I know you will always fight to keep me safe. And I know… that an eternity without you isn’t one worth having. So call me a rotten bastard if you want, but I am absolutely prepared to turn my back on the Tower if you get all stubborn and refuse to come with me.”
My jaw dropped, and I stared at him for several seconds, unsure of what to m
ake of his sudden ultimatum. At first, I was angry that he would dare threaten the Tower like that, then suspicious, knowing that he actually wouldn’t. A corner of his lip twitched a second later, and suddenly I smiled, knowing that he was joking.
At least, I was pretty sure he was. Honestly, it didn’t matter; his words floored me, causing warmth to grow and swell in my chest, like my heart was an inflating balloon. Leo’s eyes lighted on the smile, and a moment later, his mouth was pressing against mine, his hands holding me in place while he pillaged it.
My hair felt like it was standing on end from the electric current of the kiss, and I clung to him, wrapping my arms around his neck. Gravity shifted around us, and suddenly we were floating, spinning through the air, hurtling toward some unknown destination. My grip tightened on his code, my apprehension growing as we continued to move, and I broke the kiss, looking up in the direction we were heading.
A doorway made of white stood in the middle of the darkness, a prismatic aura surrounding it.
“What is it?” I asked, grabbing Leo’s hand and holding it tightly.
“The next step,” Leo replied, squeezing my palm reassuringly, sending me his love and confidence. “I love you, Liana. And I always will.”
I looked over at him, trying to memorize his face before everything I knew changed once again, and smiled at the only person I had left, except for my brother. “I love you, too.”
Then we were flying through the doorway, and I knew nothing.
46
“Wakey, wakey,” a deep voice called from overhead, and my eyes snapped open, every fiber of my being instantly on alert. I was lying on the floor in what appeared to be the holographic projection room we had found in Lionel Scipio’s office.
In fact, the holographic projection of Lionel Scipio was standing at my feet, leaning all of his weight onto the cane by his side. I sat up, instantly alarmed, and looked around for Leo. “Where is he?” I demanded. “Is this part of the test?” I paused, a dark fear suddenly gripping me. “Was I rejected from the Core?”
If I had been, then why was I here, with Lionel? He was supposed to be a monitoring and analysis program and had only interfered to fix the problem. Was there another problem that needed to be resolved?
“Not exactly,” Lionel said carefully. “Your neural clone survived the simulation, and—”
“My neural what?” I exhaled, and then froze. My skin was no longer humming, and I could feel the steady rhythm of my heart in my chest. I reached up to touch my chest and confirm, and then did a double take of my hands. They were no longer glowing, my skin pale and white like it had always been. “What’s going on?” I asked, my confusion only adding to my fear. “Where’s Leo?”
“He’s fine,” Lionel said soothingly, kneeling down in front of me. “He’s in the Core, with you. Or rather, with your neural clone. Liana, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but everything you experienced after we met was a simulation.”
“A simulation,” I repeated, trying to wrap my head around what he was saying. “A simulation?” I asked again, not quite understanding.
Lionel nodded, his face pensive. “If we had done the process as Lionel originally designed it, your neural clone would’ve been separated from your active mind and put through the simulation. You never would’ve experienced any of the things the simulation forced her through.”
I sat there for several seconds, trying to make sense of what he was saying. We had met after Tony had dragged me here, and after that I’d lost Dylan, Rose, Zoe, Quess, Eric, Maddox, Grey, Jasper, Rose, Tony, and Scipio. Their deaths had been so painful, so real.
And now he was telling me they weren’t? Panic exploded through me as I realized that could mean the legacies were still loose in the Tower—and Sage’s people were still gunning for Leo and Grey. I scrambled to my feet.
“I need to go,” I said hurriedly. “I have to get to my friends! There’s still time to save them!”
“Liana,” Lionel said sharply, rising up to meet me. “Listen to me. You’ve been unconscious for five hours, but it only took your neural clone an hour to pass the test. I didn’t anticipate how exhausted your body was, nor how low your electrolytes were when I initiated the New Day protocol, so it took you a while to recover. Longer than I expected, but long enough for the new AI to reassert control over the Tower. Your friends are fine.”
I blinked at him several times, my urge to race off and save my friends warring with what he was saying. He had no reason to lie to me, but what he was telling me was wrong; my friends were in danger, and they’d been in danger the entire time. If I didn’t get to them soon, they’d die, and I’d have to watch it happen all over again.
“I don’t believe you,” I said on an exhale, my hands curling into fists. “If I don’t reach them, they’ll die.”
“I’m sorry the simulation forced you to witness that,” Lionel said, meeting the urgency in my voice with remorse and compassion in his own. “It’s… part of the process, to see how the neural clone can adapt in times of emergency. Grief is a powerful emotion that can make humans freeze up or break down. You’d be surprised how many neural clones were eliminated from the test after seeing their loved ones killed.”
I trembled, the weight of what he was saying hitting me. If it was true, then his little test had forced me to watch everyone I loved die, one by one, all for a simulation! Everything I had experienced—the pain, the sorrow, the grief—all to see if I could keep going after that? It was torture—and torture of the cruelest design, because I could still remember every moment of it. I doubted I would ever forget.
“That was your test?!” I seethed. “You kill the people they love in front of them in order to see if they can still perform?! That’s cruel. It’s inhumane!”
His mouth curled downward in a frown. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I didn’t design the test. I only administered it.”
I bit back an angry retort, knowing that he was just a fragment of Lionel’s mind and personality and not the real thing, but it was in me to scream at him. I wondered if Leo had to go through this during his simulations and remembered that his simulation hadn’t just taken place in the course of one hour, but over months. Suddenly I felt awful for everything they had put him and the other AIs through. The test I had experienced had to have been trivial compared to that.
And yet… I still couldn’t seem to believe Lionel when it came to my friends. “You say that the power’s back on?” I asked him.
He nodded. “All systems in the Tower have been restored to full power. There is some structural damage that needs to be addressed, as well as some problems in every server outside of the Core, but it’s being worked on.”
“The sentinels?”
“They all shut down when you burned out Alice’s source code,” he replied. “They still killed a lot of people, but you saved many more.”
I frowned. “I thought it was a simulation. How could what I did in there affect the real world?”
“An excellent question. There were a total of sixty-seven active alpha-series nets in the Tower when I activated the protocol. The amount of energy required to run independent simulations for each of them was too great for the system to handle, so the simulations were combined into one massive platform that picked up with what all of you were doing right before the protocol was enacted. Every action you took affected the other clones, and vice versa. The system populated the world using people that you knew so that you couldn’t tell that it wasn’t real, and then constructed a narrative from your goals that would be believable. Even your enemies had obstacles to surmount—the legacies in the Citadel had to overcome the defense of the Knights, and Sadie had to deal with finding Dinah, who was actively working to slow them down and disrupt their plans.”
I frowned. “So then when I killed Sadie…”
“You just killed her neural clone. She’s very much alive, and currently locked up in the cells under the Citadel, thanks to your Lieutenant, and AI count
erpart. Things got a little strange once you reached the integration chamber. You knew you were going to die, but because you were aware of the New Day protocol and what it was going to do, you unintentionally copied your code, against the design of the system. That action destroyed the simulation and triggered a download of the remaining AIs and fragments into the integration chamber, which you saw as the datasphere. Everything that happened in there… it was real. The protections of the simulation were gone, but your psyche was there controlling your actions, learning what it was to be an AI. It was also exposed to everyone else who was there, and able to die just as easily. The servers in the integration chamber were never built to handle so much data, and I thought you would die within moments from an overload, but in microseconds, you stopped Kurt and Sage, and absorbed the source codes of three of the fragment AIs. So… technically you didn’t pass the simulation. You destroyed it.”
I stared at him. There was so much there to try to wrap my head around that I wasn’t even sure where to begin. I had broken the simulation by copying myself? I had no idea how to do that! All I knew was that Lionel had told me to start the New Day protocol, and I had. Could it be… Had my assumption that I would become a neural clone caused me to not accept the death the simulation had chosen for me? Had my imagination overwhelmed the simulation?
From what Lionel was saying, it seemed as good a guess as any, but then… What had he said? What happened in the datasphere had become real—so when I killed Kurt, I had destroyed his entire code. The same with Alice, and… Sage? What did that mean? Had I killed him in real life, from floors and levels away, all through what was quintessentially a shared hallucination? That was the most far-fetched thing I had ever heard of, and I told him so.