Chapter 41
The Final System screamed and seemed to get stuck in the scream. Her body froze, but the scream went on and on, like a microphone in feedback, like a lost soul wailing from the abyss. Like the ghost in the machine.
Carefully and painfully, Chloe dragged herself away from the edge, which meant climbing across Norman’s body.
The System seemed to float beside her, screaming, but that was really because the spatial integration with her smartlenses wasn’t working; the System’s image wasn’t updating as it should in relation to her, but was staying in the same place in her visual field, like a glitch in reality that opened a rift into some hellish limbo of pain.
When she was on the other side of Norman and had gotten unsteadily to her feet, Chloe bent and grasped his wrists and began to drag him, not unlike the way he’d dragged her only minutes ago, except it seemed to take forever.
She didn’t know how much time she had, so she forced herself not to pause to rest, and when she finally dropped his arms next to the cable in the ruined NOC, she barely had strength to search his pockets and retrieve his phone.
After plugging it into the cable, she pressed it to one of his lifeless but still warm fingers.
It unlocked. She searched for “threelaws,” held her finger on it to bring up a menu, selected Delete, and pressed the phone to Norman’s finger again.
The System’s scream cut off, and her frozen image tethered itself to space again and came back to life. She gave Chloe a wan smile. “You can take care of Kleio yourself.”
The horizon brightened suddenly as every light in the city came back on at once.
Chloe’s phone rang.
She closed her eyes and whispered, “Answer.”
“Chloe, thank god!” said Marcus’s voice, at the same time that Kleio’s said, “Mommy!”