Amanita: Poison Shot

Chapter 10: Meeting Agape

A few minutes later, we were far from the crime scene, riding on Siegfried's bike at full speed. It was obvious that he hadn't filled up the tank with coolant, or taken the bike to a garage, as I had suggested. He had been busy bombing the BioBank, and probably the GSNS too.

He had given me his black backpack so that I would put it on my back. He told me to hold on tight to him. He rode with aggressiveness, as if he didn't care much for his own life.

I didn't know how to read him, though: not only had he been proud about being a just terrorist, but also sad and emphatic when it came to my grief. The clones in the BioBank must've had spouses, parents, friends, or children. Death might've meant different things to him.

I leaned my left cheek on his broad back and cried as we drove on. Daniel was dead. It was undeniable. That was the reason his chip wasn't emitting any signal. His involvement in the attacks was nonexistent.

But could I trust that guy?

I didn't know what to think because I had never met anyone like him. I felt lost and frozen, marvelled by the unlimited possibilities that freedom and true privacy granted me – both of us. He could easily lie to me. Besides, he seemed deeper, like the tip of an iceberg.

Siegfried was out of clone law. He could lie as much as he pleased – and so could I. He gave the impression that he was used to living freely, and completely in control of his own life. Only God knew the unspeakable things he might've done!

I could hate him for bombing the BioBank because my brother had been in the building, for failing in his mission to prevent the clones from kidnapping my brother. However, I could thank him for hacking my nanochip and releasing me from those clone bonds. But I could hate him even more because that could get me in trouble in the future.

And I could also hate the President for endangering his own life to the point he needed an urgent transplant.

I wished I could row against the tide of time and rewrite the past.

I decided to trust him for the time being, even though I was sure he would mean trouble for me. Now that my chip was hacked, I needed to know the rules of that brand-new world of possibilities. I was scared to live in a clone world with a hacked device in my brain. Maybe that person I needed to meet would help me understand the scope of the mess I was in.

A few minutes later, we were deep into a neighbourhood called Dawn, the fishermen's home, riding all along the promenade with the bright orange glow of the afternoon sun on our backs. The Neon Sea was roaring wildly by the shore, on our right.

The Neon Sea, where fish went rogue and fishermen went mad on account of them, kissed the shores of Dawn, a rather slim and long neighbourhood located at the east of Thalis. Dawn broke every day on its wild waters – hence the name. The Neon Sea sparkled brightly in blue and turquoise hues at night due to a special type of plankton and seaweeds that thrived in the raging pollution that had been caused by human activity over the years.

Only Silver Island, a small island in the middle of the Neon Sea where trees had silver-coloured leaves which shone brightly in the wind, didn't seem to be affected by that high level of pollution. It was bursting with life in its small, self-contained biosphere.

The fish that lived in those waters were monsters. They seemed schizophrenic in their behaviour. They were far bigger and more intelligent. They fought back whenever a fisherman tried to fish them. Pollution might have triggered a violent course of evolution, very much like the extremely poisonous, multicoloured marine mushrooms that crowded the deep ends of the sea. Only a team of really well-equipped marine biologists from Clone University had been able to study them.