I'm in a cage. It's a strange, cold, iron contraption like something from a museum of 19th century torture, and it's just as terrifying as it sounds. Apparently, it's designed to protect the Gap from whatever malware has infected my Rhizome. I'm thinking maybe it's just a bit about scaring me shitless.
Ahead of me the judges' chairs rise up, three of them built behind dark wood panels, the highest of the three is an empty chair, on the left sits Sadie and The Siren Queen sits on the right. Behind the judge's podium is an inverted pentagram. A flag on either side with the spider emblem on one and the mermaid emblem on the other.
It's very dark, the oil lamps barely pick out the details of the faces in the public stalls. It's a full house, I can just about make out Ty and Vash huddled amongst the other avatars.
The Siren Queen draws my eye, my everything, and when she speaks my desire to listen to her forever is almost matched by my terror of her voice. A voice that slips under all my defences and undoes the ties that bind my soul together.
"You are accused of reckless endangerment of your fellow students. The punishment is immediate expulsion."
"So, it has been." Sadie interrupts, sounding nasal and pedantic by contrast. "But precedents can be broken by this council if the need arises."
Her words seem to fade out of view while the Siren's echo in my head, devoid of their original content, just sort of shimmering.
I'm standing in this cage, hours pass and my legs ache, either psychosomatically (because I'm really just lying on the floor in meatSpace), or through some element of the insanely detailed coding of the Gap itself. Who wrote the routines for simulating leg pain? So much for abstraction. Code everything.
The procession of witnesses has been so long, and most of them I do not recognise. I find myself enjoying watching the Sirens more than I care how successfully the Weavers argue in my defence.
I'm mentally exhausted.
Sadie makes her move.
"It seems to me that the only crime of this brilliant girl is to search for her mother, and all this time we have tried to protect her from the truth, we have in fact let her down and exposed her to undue risk."
"Did she not knowingly take it upon herself to manipulate her coven into doing reckless and violent deeds? Did she not make herself a target to the witchfinder general and then fail to report any of this to her superiors?" Retorts Queen Bess, the High Siren, Empress of Sighs
"My dear sister, she is a child driven half mad with grief. We failed to protect her from herself."
The murmuring of the crowd seems to be turning in my favour.
"I propose that she be expelled immediately, but granted continuing protection. She shall be returned to New York where she will be safe, and her coven sisters may remain with us in London."
Return to New York? Gasps.
Nobody was expecting the Siren to be merciful, least of all me. My heart leaps. Is this what I secretly want? Could I leave my sisters here just to feel safe for the first time in months?
"My counterproposal is this..." Sadie replies.
"She shall swear before us all to stop searching for Amanda Loveless and to be obedient and true to the laws of our clans. She shall agree to take a shiver into her system that will report to us to ensure this promise is upheld. We will purge her of malware and break Marketta's link to her system, and we will rewrite the spells that keep the Gap safe from infiltration."
I'm half expecting a vote to take place but it does not happen. Both proposals are fed to the gods.
Senior Witches bring in a great head with an open mouth, a monstrous woman with a huge maw, and inside the mouth a glimpse of a writhing Rhizomatic network, just like the one we saw under my real school.
The judges' proposals are fed into the system at the same time.
Then I realise what they're doing, they're letting a neural network decide my fate. A biological neural network with the face of an ancient female god.
And the god decides that I can stay. So, I sign the contract and they lead me away, finally out of the cage, away to an operating table where they begin to cut me open, to operate on my Rhizome.
If this is happening in the real world or the Gap, I'm really no longer sure.
###THIS NOVEL IS IN OPEN BETA###
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Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn
Science FictionImagine you wake up one day and discover that your body is a cursed organic computer. To make matters worse you keep getting possessed by AI demons. You know you can use their power, if only you could figure out how. But the clock is ticking, becau...
