Chapter 26
It was like watching Kleio’s rescue all over again, the same powerless horror, but worse because the young woman who was looking over her shoulder with huge eyes was innocent.
Tavion’s lens feed was projected larger than life on the NOC’s dome screens, and Chloe tried to look away, but Tavion’s gun pulled her eyes with it as it centered on the slim fleeing figure—and then Chloe jumped as the screen went white and a roar of static blared from the NOC’s speakers, painfully overloading her smartbuds.
When they adjusted to filter the noise out, it was still so loud that they could feed Chloe only snatches of the shouting now trying to fight against it.
“—appened? Did sh—”
“—meone check wh—”
“—got SWAT on comms, they say sh—”
Somewhere in the front, Andrew Norman was typing furiously at a terminal and yelling what sounded like, “Sprite? Sprite? Sprite?”
Chloe turned to Grandma. “Is she—”
Grandma was spasming. Her head jerked left and right over and over and over again, so quickly it blurred, while her frail body vibrated beneath it.
Chloe’s scream was so loud and so unlike the noises she usually made that her smartbuds didn’t recognize it as her own and cut it off in her own ears, but she felt her throat grate with it.
No one should be able to move the way Grandma was moving; the speed and jerkiness were enough to scramble her brain.
Her head turned toward Chloe but never reached her; it jerked back again so fast Chloe couldn’t even perceive it, as if restarting the motion over and over.
And then she vanished.
One moment she was there, the next—with no transition, no fade-out, no flash of magic—she was gone.
Chloe jumped and gave another involuntary scream, but it was drowned out by a far louder screech that seemed to vibrate through the whole NOC, like the howl of some monstrous bird of prey, before swiftly diminishing and ending in a distant but heavy thump that made everyone duck.
Norman gave a command and the clouded glass cleared, allowing sunlight to fill the dome.
Everyone could see the dirty black smoke trail hovering outside and could follow it with their eyes almost directly up until it intersected another, higher trail just under the base of the gathering rain clouds.
The intersection point was marked by a drifting cloud of black smoke and the glints of fluttering debris.
“Those are missile trails,” Norman said in the ringing silence. “The Revere intercepted a missile right above us.”
“Aimed at us?” someone said.
“No,” Norman said. “Aimed at—” He bit the words off and swore.
“I apologize for the malfunction,” said the System’s voice, and she reappeared on the dome screens. “I was targeted by simultaneous virtual and physical attacks. Both have been defeated, and I am back to full functionality.”
“They—they dared—” Norman stammered. “They dared attack my System, my work, my—” He slammed both hands down on a nearby terminal desk.
“They will burn for that! Get me the president.” He paused for a moment, then said in the same harsh tone, “Mr. President, the Reveres here just shot down a missile aimed at the System’s heart.
Will you give her MilNet access now? No, she’s telling me it was fired by one of our own alert bombers.
Some kind of social-engineering attack, I’m guessing.
But she can stop that happening again if she has MilNet admin.
We’re already at war! Their armies are pouring into Europe as we speak!
What if their next move is nukes? Reveres can’t knock those down, but she can, if you’ll just give her access to MilNet and the satellite lasers and GMDs.
I don’t give a phreak what Moscow says! Get your head in the game and throw the switch!
” He paused, then said icily, “Thank you.” He looked expectantly at the System.
After a long moment, she said, “The Pentagon has connected me to MilNet.”
Ignoring the cheer that filled the NOC, Norman called across to the terminals labeled NewsNet: “Start a priority interrupt broadcast. I’m going to introduce her formally. Let them see they failed. Let them know who they’re up against. And let the American people know who’s delivering them.”
The cheers grew louder at this, but Chloe didn’t join them. She was trying to process a new understanding and all the implications that unfolded from it.
Grandma’s movements had been inhuman.
She hadn’t been jerking her head back and forth. She’d been stuck in a glitched animation.
Chloe knew now why her phone could find no information about Grandma, why she always stood at the edge of the meetings, never taking part, why Norman never acknowledged her.
Grandma was the Final System. Another manifestation, another avatar, controlled like a puppet by the same electronic brain that manifested the little marble girl.