Chapter 17
NOVA play: Specter by Bad Omens
“He’s going to be fine. He’s smart,” NOVA reassured me through the small speaker in my mask. I was pacing the rooftop of the Annex, using tactical binoculars to watch as Sebastian led Milo toward NeuroWell, where I knew he would then escort him to The Cave.
Spinning the dial to zoom in, I counted the small constellation of freckles that dusted Milo’s cherubic cheeks.
“Yeah. He’s smart as fuck, but you know he has like, zero self-preservation skills or situational awareness. If this all backfires and he gets hurt…”
“Well, if that happens, then you can go postal and just hit the big red button early. But it won’t. Trust him.”
I snorted.
Trust him.
I’d lost my ability to trust after my first ‘tour,’ if you could call it that.
Maybe I’d lost it well before that.
I still wasn’t sure if I’d actually fought overseas or if the memories I had were fabricated.
I’d told Milo to call me ‘The Forgotten,’ but for two fucking years, the only name I’d answered to was Patient 001.
I had memories of who I’d been before Luke Stevens and his mad Doctor, Caspien Grey, had forced me to undergo severe memory alteration with a faulty, early prototype of the NeuroManipulator—but those memories all felt like they belonged to someone else.
I think I used to be a good person, but I now felt so emotionally disconnected from that part of myself, it was difficult to know which memories were real and which ones were fake.
NOVA often helped me. She used to be the predominant AI here, but something happened that booted her out, and Luke implemented a new AI called TECHA.
Despite the fact that TECHA had fought NOVA out of the campus servers, she and I were slowly working to sneak her back in.
Much the same way I’d been planting bombs strategically through campus, NOVA had been planting little viruses specifically designed to attack TECHA’s markers.
We’d been testing it by putting TECHA in a sleep-like state periodically when we needed to move about freely, like last night, for example.
But when the time came, we’d be putting TECHA to sleep permanently, along with the rest of this god-forsaken campus.
The one place NOVA couldn’t seem to access was The Cave.
It made sense that The Cave was more heavily guarded than the rest of the campus.
That was where Luke built his top-secret shit.
It is also where I’d been locked up for years, being forced to undergo several sessions of memory manipulation.
My head was now a jumbled mess of wars that I wasn’t sure I’d actually ever fought in. I had a Frankensteined mix of intensive military and combat training. In some memories, I was a Navy SEAL. In others, I was a Marine. In most of them, I was killing people.
Every time I’d succumbed to the guilt and trauma that comes with indiscriminate murder, they would strap me back to the table and fuck around in my brain until they killed the parts of me that tried to rebel.
It wasn’t until NOVA had been able to weasel her way back into Neurovance’s servers and temporarily plunge the entire campus into a full-blown blackout that I’d managed to escape.
Bet they regretted turning me into a Frankensteined jarhead now.
The old me would never have been able to get past the armed guard they had stationed in The Cave. Especially malnourished and with no weapons.
But my fabricated training made me pretty resourceful. Turns out there are tons of things in a biotech lab that you can use to kill a man, especially if you’ve had years of muscle memory synthetically programmed into you.
After that, it had been a mad dash to the exit while the entire campus was down. NOVA assured me the foggy memories I had of a remote cottage in the mountains were real and that I should head there.
Which I did, and I lay low there for a while, licking my wounds, healing, and then finally, planning my revenge.
NOVA had worked with me extensively to tease out which of my memories were real and which were not. Being that the old me had been the one to build her, I trusted her implicitly.
It had taken me a few weeks to safely source the weapons and tools I needed to execute this plan without signaling my location to Dr. Grey, and it had taken me even longer to gain enough muscle and weight to feel like I could actually execute the plan.
Now, here I was, balls deep in my last hope at survival, because if all this went to shit, there was nothing left for me here, and I would stop fighting for good.
“The memories I have on Amygdala Ave… those are real?” I asked NOVA quietly as I watched Milo and Seb disappear into NeuroWell.
“Yes. Those are real.”
“I want to take him through there on the way out. I want him to see it.”
“You know that’s dangerous. We have no idea how he will react. Even what you did last night—That was careless.”
“I wanted to see if it would make me feel something.”
“Did it?”
Remembering how my entire body had lit on fire the second our lips had touched. The way his fingers had tenderly mapped my face and dug into my hair like he was desperately trying to see me, despite being nearly blind without his glasses…
The earth-shattering explosion of emotion in my chest that erupted and swelled with each tiny pant he made as he kissed me back…
Last night was the first time I could remember feeling anything other than pain, and now I was greedy for it. Feelings of any kind were foreign to me. Maybe they’d once been commonplace… but now… now my skull was a hollow shell full of horrors and my heart a forgotten corpse.
“I dragged him into this. He’s my responsibility.
I need to get him out,” I finally said, and NOVA sighed.
Not like she was annoyed with me, but like she was mourning for me.
I knew she was an AI, but I often suspected she’d achieved some level of sentience.
Why else would she have come back for me? I hadn’t programmed her to do that.
Neither of us ever acknowledged it. I just treated her like she could feel, and she did the same for me, even though I wasn’t sure either of us actually could.
“I know that too. We’ll get him out.”
I nodded, dropping my binoculars and checking the surveillance feeds for my base in the mountains. Milo’s mother was happily making herself a pot of tea in the kitchen, and I smiled.
She kept asking for him, and I kept promising he would come visit her soon.
I really hoped I didn’t have to break that promise.