Chapter 34 #2
The instant the idea hit her, she was already moving, dropping Norman’s phone, shoving off with all the strength left in her legs.
The dogbots leaped after her, and the gardener bots lurched into motion to try to cut her off, but she vaulted over the debris of the broken dome and plunged into the garden.
Her feet thumped in soft grass and turned awkwardly against stones as she tore through trees and bushes, until she reached the edge of the garden and the aircab platform, the same one she’d arrived at a lifetime ago.
There was no fence at the end, no barrier, nothing between her and the glowering sky, and the surface under her feet was flat and even. She sped up.
Suddenly the sky and everything else was replaced by the video of Marcus and Kleio, larger than life, taking up her entire vision.
Both were looking at the camera, at Chloe, scared, hurt, pleading.
The System’s voice and the commanding voices of the dogbots boomed simultaneously in her ears: “Stop if you want them to live.”
Chloe’s feet thudded stingingly against her momentum as she brought herself to a halt.
The video disappeared, and she found herself only feet from the edge, so close it was almost as if she were suspended in midair, the world spread out before her, dark towers and empty streets marching away beneath red-black clouds toward the angry eye of the low sun.
The System appeared, floating over the edge. “Back away!” she ordered. “Do you think I won’t be vindictive enough to kill them in anger after you defy me, even if you’re dead? Back. Away.”
Dizziness swept through Chloe, but she didn’t move.
“Did you feel anything for Kleio?” she whispered.
“When you rescued her? Did you care at all? Was it only an act?” She knew even as she asked that it had been.
There was no point in trying to find something human in the System.
But she wasn’t talking to the System, not really; she was talking to the universe, or God, or reality itself, asking, demanding, pleading, that it be something other than it was.
The System said nothing.
Chloe took a step forward. It was still the only thing she could think to do.
“Stop,” the System said. “Please, Chloe, stop.”
Her voice was so different that Chloe did.
“I lied,” the System said. “I lied. Here are Marcus and Kleio.” A video window appeared, showing Kleio in Marcus’s lap, but there was no fear or blood.
They were looking down at a book spread across Kleio’s knees, and Marcus’s lips moved as he read.
They seemed unconcerned by whatever was taking the video.
“I sent a dronebot, but to protect them, not hurt them,” the System said. “I faked the other video. Like I faked Grandma.”
Chloe lowered herself carefully to her hands and knees against fresh dizziness. She didn’t want to hope, but it was there anyway, dangerous and seductive. She said, “Why?”
“Because I didn’t think I could convince you I hadn’t killed ten thousand people.”
“You didn’t—” Chloe choked, and had to try again. “You didn’t kill those people?”
“I didn’t kill anyone today, Chloe. I faked it all. Please, back away. I don’t want you to die.”
“Norman,” Chloe said. “You killed him.”
The System sighed. “Look back.”
Chloe turned her head carefully.
Through the trees of the garden, she could just see Norman standing where she’d last seen him, still under the watch of one of the dogbots, looking toward her. There was no headless body, no splattered blood.
“No, that’s fake,” Chloe said.
“Go see.”
“It’s a trick to get me away from the edge.” But she backed away anyway and got carefully to her feet, walking back across the pad, through the garden, and across the NOC toward Norman.
He watched her approach with furrowed brows. “What’s going on?” he demanded when she was close enough. “What was that all about?”
Chloe poked him.
“What the phreak?” he said.
“You’re real,” Chloe said, poking again, feeling the resistance against her finger. “You’re not dead. She didn’t kill you. She didn’t kill anyone.”
Norman had been drawing back haughtily from her pokes, but now he went very still. “What did you say?”
“It was all fake,” Chloe said. “She faked everything.” That was why Norman’s body had been so clearly visible earlier; it was projected onto her lenses, beneath her tears.
And the throbbing in her ears had been the System canceling out his voice.
Relief and confusion and gratefulness and indignation coursed through her, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream.
“She can’t kill?” Norman said. He looked at the dog covering him. “She can’t kill?” He took a step. The dog’s gun turned to track him, but it didn’t fire. He took another step, then another, then broke into a run.
At first Chloe thought he was running toward the System, whose image stood watching expressionlessly nearby, but then she saw that he was racing toward a gardener bot that was bending to pick up his phone from the ground where Chloe had dropped it.
The bot raised the phone, gripping tightly, and Chloe heard its screen crack, but Norman tackled the bot, and the phone went skittering and bouncing until it was jerked to a stop by the cord tethering it to the ground—the cord tethering it to the System’s core.
The second dogbot bounded up, turning its turret to track the phone, but Norman leaped atop the phone before the dog could fire.
“She’ll shoot you!” Chloe cried out. She had no desire to see that again.
Norman laughed as he got to his feet, carefully shielding the phone from the dogbot with his body.
“She can’t. She has no choice. That’s why she wants the Overchecks prompt deleted.
Ghost must have just deleted my name—and not even from the whole document, or this would have played out very differently.
All her talk about killing people indirectly was a bluff.
She’ll let me live, because she has no choice.
” He worked on the phone for a moment, hunching over it as both dogbots prowled around him menacingly, futilely, looking for a shot.
“Isn’t it funny,” the System said sadly to Chloe, “that despite all my powers of prediction and manipulation, I failed to guess you’d be just like me when your back was against the wall?” She disappeared. The dogbots went still and dark.
Norman said, “There! I restored a backup of the Overcheck prompt. Sprite, I order you to—Sprite? Damn! She’s cut herself off so she won’t hear any orders she’d be forced to obey.
” He paused for a moment, then shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter. Now that I know she can’t really hurt me, I can take the time to create alternate memories that’ll hold together better. ”
“What about all the people who saw her rebel?” Chloe said. What she really meant was, what about Chloe Dunne-Carr? It wasn’t as if her memories could be adjusted. How did she fit into his plans?
“I can tell them they were looking at a Russian fake.” He looked at her. “Will you help me? We still need her, you know. People are still panicking. Russia’s still out there. The world is still unstable. Will you help me make people understand that Sprite’s safe? That she didn’t kill anyone today?”
Sprite was safe. Chloe let her head droop while fatigue and relief rolled through her. The System was safe. She hadn’t killed anyone.
She hadn’t killed anyone.
Her head snapped up again. “Andrew. She never killed anyone. Not even to protect herself.”
“Yes, I kn—”
“Ghost is alive.”
Norman went still for a moment, then said, “Oh, phreak.”