New Elysium: Weapons of War (Book 2)

Echoes Out Of Time Part 27

This isn't mine.

One minute she was standing in the ruins of New Caledonia, surrounded by death and ashes, the next she was home. She found herself propelled forward-moving against her wishes. She looked down at her feet, startled to see the metallic legs of an android beneath her. She couldn't stop the body from moving forward.

The details were sharp, everything crystal clear. She glanced one way and then the other and then opened the door, the hand that reached for the knob was a shade of metallic gray, coming out of a long white shirt, slender fingers gray fingers that reached out of the past to open a door. The feeling of dread permeated the memory but Ember didn't know why that would be.

Clio.

The AI had been hired to tutor Ember, and catch her up in school after her many surgeries to give her sight and make her walk. She'd spent hours with Clio learning everything a highborn should know about society and then some. But it was also Clio who filled her head with other things, her mother's family history, the history of the Neo-Tokyan Empire, and a desire to see more than just the world in front of her.

But the Ai had been fired at some point. Her father could have had any number of reasons for it. She could have walked through the hallway at the wrong time, and perhaps he didn't think she fit in with the decor. Without her mother to beg for Clio to stay, she would have been gone within the hour.

Ember was dragged through Clio's memories, as she followed Clio's footsteps through a hall into an antechamber. Voices sounded on the other side and here Clio hesitated. Her hand shook as she put it out on the door. It was strange seeing the Ai shake with fear. Clio was always a stern, steady teacher.

But with a resolve that Ember herself didn't feel, Clio pushed the door open.

It was a lab. Spiral patterns decorated the ceiling in waves, screens were everywhere. Somewhere in the room, the techno music played at a level much too loud.

But it wasn't Alonian opera at least. It was worse than nails on a chalkboard, the frequencies quaking your inner ear and causing a few eardrums to burst.

She moved further into the room, inside of Clio's body, still not sure what it was that Clio was so afraid of.

There.

Her brother, Caedus, very much alive bent over a screen. Jack not quite mature enough to have a beard, but almost sporting a light mustache line over his nose. The beginnings of a five o'clock shadow and not quite attaining the height he would have in his later years.

Clio stopped moving as the alarms went off, sounding through the room, the music abruptly dropping. Jack whipped around in surprise.

"Hey, Clio, what are you doing here?"

"I was just..." She took a step back, her gaze zeroing in on the screens, the images were lines of code, code she knew very well. It made up her own streams, data that helped formulate her very being.

"Uh, uh, Clio," Caedus said, he lifted a remote and clicked a button. All the screens turned black. The silence was deafening.

The door snapped shut behind her and Clio whirled around. When she turned back to the boys they were much closer.

"Can we wipe her?"

"Already did that, too many times," Jack said. "Any more and she'd be useless as a teacher. She always comes in here, it's like an echo in her mind I couldn't quite erase." His face looked almost apologetic as he spoke. "Her Code is immaculate though, let's take it, we needed a source code to stop it, this is it. At least some use will come of this, these older models, they don't make them like they used to."