Deus: The Eurynome Code, Book Six

by Gorman, K.

  “I’d like to continue our last conversation.” She bared her teeth in something that was not quite a smile. “I feel like we left it on a bad note.”

  Considering Sasha had abandoned them and tried to lock them in her pocket dimension, and then had managed to shoot Soo-jin when they’d come out, she had a lot of things to add to that last ‘conversation.’

  “I see. My son has been errant.” Sasha shook her head and dismissed her with a wave. “Go home, Karin. I have no need for an Eos―you screwed that pooch. Go spend your last few hours on a beach. That’s all you can do now. I have to stop him.”

  Through her Eurynome power, she felt the dimensional boundaries begin to turn, the air bending and warping around her. It was like a touch of the ERL gate, that slight flutter in her gut, except all over her skin.

  She reached into her Eurynome powers and gently stepped around the warp.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Doctor.” Her voice dropped in tone. Beside Sasha, the boy had rooted where he stood, eyes wide and staring at her.

  “I’ll get the kid,” Layla said. “You get her.”

  “Do it,” she replied. “Tell them to get the kids out. Leave me here, if it comes to that.”

  “They won’t do that. Marc and Nomiki won’t.”

  She nodded. She knew.

  Then, between one step and the next, she snapped into a sprint.

  A dull roar filled her mind. She leapt the corner of the pool in a single stride, her armor augmenting the motion, and raced for Sasha.

  The doctor watched her come, her face an evolving expression of anger and thinly veiled disgust.

  Then, she lifted her hand.

  Karin’s suit wailed a warning. She felt herself lifting up, turning over.

  Then, everything went black.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “You’re quite a smart girl, Karin. I hope you know that.”

  Karin blinked at the doctor, and then at the classroom that surrounded them. They were on the eastern side of the building, the blinds open, the view looking out onto fields that shone a dark tan in the early summer sun. Beyond, the fringe of forest bordered them like an ocean, deep green and with leaves and needles that shivered and rustled under the wind.

  She looked down, taking in the slender curve of her arm. She was sixteen, and skin and bone, and she’d been working on a year-end science project about the beginning of the universe. Posters of stars and stellar charts layered the tables around her, along with stacks of books on constellations, terrestrial planets, exoplanets, and varying world creation mythos. The unquiet hum of the overhead fluorescents pulled at her left temple, threatening to turn into a headache.

  The rest of the students had already left. It was just her and Sasha in the classroom, each quietly working on their own thing.

  It was…odd.

  Sasha wasn’t like most of the other doctors. Where others tended to go through the motions, mouthing small talk as they completed their tasks and examinations, then went to their offices, Sasha went out of her way to spend more time with the children.

  But then, she was a Eurynome Project subject herself. Had the tattoo and everything.

  After a moment, Karin looked back down at her work. “Not that smart. Layla is smarter. Was smarter.”

  She stumbled over the tense, and a shadow crossed Sasha’s face.

  The doctor quickly hid it behind a smile.

  “She was made to be smart, that one.” The smile broadened. “Your intellect comes naturally. We didn’t modify for that.”

  Didn’t modify for…Karin frowned. She was a genetic construct, programmed in a lab. She knew that. Knew also that they’d been modeled after the attributes of gods and goddesses from varying mythologies.

  There was no disease that the doctors were trying to cure. They’d dropped that story a few years ago, when it had become less believable. No, they had been born and bred for an experiment. Test tube babies made in artificial wombs. Genetically modified to their Program’s specifications.

  But Sasha seemed to be implying something more.

  “Nomiki’s smart,” she said. “Much smarter than me.”

  “Your sister’s good at analyzing,” Sasha judged. “But you and I―we go a bit deeper.”

  Karin frowned. “Deeper?”

  “Yes. Deeper.” Sasha seemed to sigh. She leaned back on the stool and set her netlink down. “We both play a part in aspects of creation.”

  Karin had never found out what powers the doctor had manifested, but powers in and of themselves had never seemed to be a focus of the Eurynome Project.

  She’d come to understand that, now.

  “It’s people like us, Karin, who make the world how it is,” Sasha said. “There will always be a need for the Nomikis of the world, but we are a different side of the dice. The world can’t survive without us.”

  * * *

  The trouble with hunting down Sasha was that the woman had never truly been that evil with her. Sure, she’d been part of the people who had modified her and fucked up her childhood for some scientific experiment, but…she had also been a part of that experiment.

  And, mad science aside, she hadn’t been an inherently bad person.

  In fact, if Karin had to point to anyone as being a ‘mother figure,’ it would be her.

  Sasha never was and never would be her mother―she didn’t have one―but there was no arguing that she was a prominent feature and role model in her early life.

  Perhaps it was part of her Chaos programming. As a creation deity, Sasha was technically very much an archetypal mother figure.

  But, somewhere along the line, something had clearly gone very wrong.

  Now, her mind was stuck in a loop, hell-bent on ‘saving the universe’―and willing to sacrifice her only son to do so. Painfully.

  She also packed one hell of a punch.

  Karin groaned, slowly coming to her senses. Her suit was beeping at her, and her comms were going haywire. She was in a large room. There was an echo at her back and a sense of space that pulled at her and made her feel vulnerable.

  Her suit scraped against the floor as she moved. Under her, the granite was polished and cold against her cheek.

  She considered staying there for another minute.

  She’s after the children.

  Pain echoed through her body as she pushed herself up. She gave herself a shake and looked around.

  Whatever Sasha had done, it had knocked her clean into a different room. This one, like many in the complex, had an indoor pond, its waters dark and still under the light. The sun had slid closer to the horizon―or, at least, the ridge of the mountaintop―and the sky outside had turned a dusky shade of violet. A thin layer of cloud added a haze of silver to the view.

  Three pods took up the center of the wall next to her, backlit in gold. She turned her attention to realize that all three tanks were full, each with what she guessed was a male version of a Sasha clone. They looked like they could be Tylanus’ brothers, hunched over and wholly naked inside the tanks, their faces covered with breathing masks, a nanoinjector crown on each of their heads.

  Hades, Zeus, and Poseidon, complete with statues.

  I need to find her.

  She breathed out and took a step back. “Layla, you there?”

  No answer. Oh, well, it had been worth a try. She glanced around the room, briefly out the windows, then back to the statues.

  As before, the cable path branched upward to the ceiling, joined together like the roots of a tree―or the branches of nerves―and headed for the door.

  She silenced the alarms of the suit, then followed it.

  Tia, you in there?

  The geneticist didn’t reply for so long, Karin’s heart skipped a beat.

  Yes. That was…uncomfortable.

  What did she do? All I remember was lifting up, then blacking out.

  You hit your head, I think.

  Karin lifted her hands to her head, running her fin
gers along her skull.

  Sure enough, one part came away sticky with drying blood.

  The anti-pain modifications Tia had given her must be suppressing it.

  I don’t even remember hitting it.

  Tia made the mental equivalent of a grunt. Comms are down, too.

  Yeah, she’d noticed that.

  The outer hallway deposited her onto a balcony that wound around the outside. The sky was getting steadily darker, its tint heading more toward the royal blue of night. Stars were starting to appear in the east, shining like scattered, glowing freckles. She could already spot Orion above her, and the Pleiades cluster farther to the right. On the left, the bright double-star of Sirius, her new home system, twinkled brightly. A light breeze touched her skin, and she brushed the tips of her fingers across the stone railing.

  Then, the cable-path took her back inside.

  The side of her head started to throb.

  Sometimes, it was easy to forget that she was still human. That, powers aside, she was still a flesh and blood person. That a heart still pumped blood through her. That she still needed to breathe air. That her mind, for all its thoughts and weirdness, was just a pile of flesh, jelly, and electrical impulses, sensitive to even the slightest knock.

  No concussion symptoms yet, anyway.

  Not much I can do for those except dull the pain and reduce swelling, Tia commented.

  That’s more than most people get.

  No, most people get nanos these days. Tia sighed. So, any idea on what Sasha did to us?

  She threw us somewhere. Clearly. Let’s not let her do it again.

  Do you think it was something as simple as a portal?

  Could be.

  She followed the cable path up another hallway. More cables had come together from different rooms, forming a main trunk on the ceiling. They passed her Eos statue, and she once again felt the pull of the tank on her mind. The cable overhead thickened further, joining with another branch. In the back of her mind, she felt Tia begin to work on something.

  After a few minutes, they came to a large, palatial-looking lobby. A frieze of some ancient battle decorated the walls, gods and goddesses fighting in the stone, glorious and radiant in their depictions. Two grandiose sets of stairs curved up each wall, laden in a thick, blood-red carpet. There were doors both above on the second floor, and below underneath the balcony.

  She took a minute to examine the room.

  I wonder what’s gotten into Sasha.

  Tia shook her head. Tylanus mentioned broken programming, right? She’s one of the earlier tests. It could be as simple as that.

  True. But she didn’t seem broken when I was growing up. And, the last time we spoke, it felt…off.

  Does it matter? She wants to destroy the universe. We’ll need to stop her. Tia hesitated. She’s after children.

  Karin’s jaw muscles rippled, her back molars grinding together. She glanced to the wall, looking to the cable for direction.

  The cable went up.

  She followed it.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Eva stared at the plant. It was a simple ficus, and it had lived in the compound for the ten years she’d worked here and likely more, standing innocuously in a ceramic pot that only Adrian, one of the security guards, remembered to water.

  She’d never paid it any attention before―but, now, it had caught her eye.

  As she stared, her attention diverted completely from the papers she’d carried, or the number of tasks she had to complete that day, and something deep within her began to stir.

  It doesn’t belong here.

  It started as a piece of static in her mind, like the crackling mix of an old radio dial tuned to a non-existent channel―a hole in the regular noise that gaped at her. And as she watched, she began to see it, too, little pieces of otherness that threaded through the plant’s basic, cellular structure.

  It…didn’t belong to this world.

  Except―it also did.

  She frowned.

  What the hell?

  “Eva?”

  The sound of Bernard’s voice jerked her out of her thoughts. He stood at the intersection to the next hallway, a dormant netlink in his hand. She steeled herself as she felt his eyes pierce straight through her.

  She plastered a smile on her face. “Hi, Bernard.”

  They’d been polite since she’d given up her youngest child―well, she had been polite, and he had carried on as usual. She tried to avoid him where she could. Not the easiest with him almost constantly at the compound, these days, but he tended to keep to his secret basement.

  He’d been doing a lot of work on the Cradle.

  “You were looking at the plant?” He stepped forward and made a gesture to the ficus. “What do you see?”

  Ah. So they weren’t going with pretenses this time.

  She steeled herself, jaws clenching together as she turned back to the plant. Now that she was aware of it―aware of its wrongness―it grated at her senses like a bad void.

  Her powers longed to tear it apart.

  Aware of Bernard’s attention on her, she forced herself to relax. “Did you do this?”

  “Yes. What do you see?”

  He sounded breathless, excited. In all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen him like this. He’d come closer, slipping silently across the floor, his body blocking her in now.

  She picked up one of the leaves and examined it. “It no longer belongs to this world. It has a different…dimensional material to it. What did you do?”

  “Just a small experiment with the Cradle.” He stepped forward, and she shifted away before he crowded her too much, moving back. “It really doesn’t belong anymore?”

  “Really,” she said. Her teeth gritted together. Again, she forced herself to relax. A deep part within her, one she’d long suppressed, was rebelling―it did not like the ficus at all. “What did you do?”

  “Just a little experiment,” he said again. “I didn’t expect it to work.”

  She’d known him long enough to tell when he was lying. But it didn’t matter. She already knew. Both him and his brother had given enough clues over the years for her to piece it together.

  He’s figured a way to connect this world to a Cradle base, and he’s going to change it. This isn’t about making a hive mind anymore. It’s about using that hive mind to change the world to his liking.

  Her jaws clamped together again, the muscles rippling in her cheeks.

  This is wrong. Everything about this is wrong.

  Watching his back, she felt the Chaos side of her slip forward, once again triggered by the wrongness of the plant.

  I have to stop it. I have to stop him.

  She swallowed, taking another step back.

  This time, though, her attention caught on Bernard himself.

  As she studied him, the static came back, etching over her vision in stops and starts, like watching a puzzle put itself together, piece by piece.

  Except that this puzzle was very, very wrong.

  I have to stop him. I have to protect my son.

  “I’m conducting some examinations today,” she said, changing the topic. “Brennan and Nomiki. Will you be joining us?”

  There was a pause.

  “Brennan? Project Arawn?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry to inform you―he died this morning, during treatment.”

  She frowned. “He wasn’t supposed to get treatment until we got a look at his head. He was having trouble with the treatment after his concussion.”

  “Unfortunately, our schedule couldn’t allow for it. Don’t worry. We managed to archive his data.”

  Cold flooded her chest. Since when did they have a schedule?

  Of course, she knew the answer to that―ever since she’d sacrificed her daughter to him.

  I have to stop him. Whatever he is doing, it’s not good. I have to protect my son.

  But, to do that, she’d have to play a
long. And she’d have to explore as much of the Eurynome Project’s end game as she could.

  The gods of this world are dead. If I want to change it, I need to make new ones.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Evangeline stared out the window. The two suns were little more than large, particularly bright stars this far from Sirius’ center, but the magnification and thermal atmospheric tech worked well to keep the atmosphere outside of her office a balmy twenty-five degrees, even in this region’s supposed winter.

  It reminded her of Hawai’i, that way. The one time she’d been there.

  She sipped at the rim of her coffee, watching Chamak Udyaan’s perpetual cloud-cover shift slowly above the compound. It was quiet today. Streaks of rain pattered the windows, the outside storm occasionally making the panes rattle. The office, at the top of the building, just next to the access for the roof, lifted her largely out of the way of student intrusion. In the distance, she heard several of the girls talking loudly, their voices carrying up from the yard―under the eaves, she suspected―and a part of her chest contracted.

  She used to like visiting with the children. Being among them. She was a creation goddess. It was in her programming.

  Now, she was just tired.

  She closed her eyes. Even now, in her office, this far from him, she could feel him in the background, inserting himself ever more and more into the DNA of the universe.

  His touch was like a cancer, turning everything alien right before her very eyes.

  It ate at her constantly. Everywhere she looked, it was wrong. Off. Like looking at your mother’s face and realizing that it was a stranger wearing her skin and moving her body and thinking her thoughts. Violating her being.

  And the whole of the universe was just going along, living through its motions, unaware that a puppeteer had cut a hole in its back and changed its strings.

  She felt like a rogue ant, walking on its surface, watching it happen, and tasting the wrongness beneath her feet.

  I’ve already given you one of my children. Must I sacrifice another?