What Have We Done: A Cyberpunk Action Thriller on the edge of LitRPG (When Tomorrow Calls Book 3)

by JT Lawrence

  The door to Arronax’s office stands ajar. Arronax hesitates outside. Has the power already been cut? Is it too late for Silver and Kate? She tentatively pushes open the door.

  Seth is sitting inside the room. He looks up at her, relief washing down his face. The door to the adjoining safe room is closed and a small red light flashes.

  Arronax is about to run to hug him but stops when she sees his state. Seth’s body is perforated, his knee is swollen to twice its normal size, and he’s holding a piece of cloth in his hand, stained red. A blood handkerchief.

  “What… Are you okay?”

  “Define ‘okay’,” he says, coughing.

  “Why is the safe room closed?” she asks.

  “I don’t know, I tried my code but it’s not working.”

  Arronax tries to unlock the safe room door with her retina but it doesn’t work. She punches in a code manually but it stays locked and the red light keeps flashing.

  “Is Kate here?”

  Arronax doesn’t have to answer, because from behind her hurry in Zack, Bernard, the DarkDoc, Keke, Mally and Vega, and they’re pushing two gurneys between them. He shoots up, grimacing when he sees it’s Kate and Silver on the beds.

  Arronax notices how Seth looks at Keke. Relief that she’s alive, but that’s not all.

  Mally hugs Seth.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “The power’s still on?” asks Zack. No one answers; they don’t need to. The lights are on. The power has not yet been cut. They still have some time: minutes, maybe seconds. The clock reads 13:58.

  “Come on, Kate,” says Keke, holding on to the bed rails. “Come back to us.”

  Kate’s face is pale and without expression.

  Silver starts gasping, and they all crowd around her.

  “What is it?” asks Seth, his eyes mad. “What’s happening to her?”

  Morgan takes Seth by the shoulder and leads him to a chair. “You need to sit down. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  Seth shakes him off. “Just tell me what the fuck is going on. What did you do to them?”

  Silver gasps for air as if she is drowning.

  “What’s happening?” Keke is desperate. “Can’t you help her?”

  “It’s good. It means she’s surfacing.”

  “She’s choking to death!”

  “She’s not,” says Arronax. “She’s coming back to us.”

  Silver writhes and gulps. Her eyes roll back so far it looks like she has giant pearls for eyes.

  Seth elbows his way to the side of Silver’s bed, unties her wrists. He levers her limp torso against his chest, cradles her small body. He holds the back of her bandaged head, pushes his cheek up against hers, tries to infuse her with his warmth and what’s left of his vitality. He kisses her cheek hard.

  Silver starts blinking, and her eyes spin back to normal. One last gasp that seems to take all the oxygen out of the atmosphere and then she’s there, back in the room with them, body and mind.

  “Silver!” says Mally, and grabs her other hand.

  Silver sits there, taking in the surroundings. She looks down at her chest, then back up at her family. She swallows hard and is about to say something when Kate starts gasping in exactly the same way, and they crowd around her, too. Kate’s surfacing is more violent. She thrashes around as if she’s fighting someone in a dream. She retches and shouts.

  “Kate,” says Morgan. “Everything’s okay. Can you hear me? Silver’s okay.”

  Kate retches again, and then her body starts vibrating with some kind of seizure. Bright blood trickles out of her nose.

  “Shit!” shouts Keke. “What’s happening to her?”

  “I don’t know,” says the DarkDoc. “Kate? Kate? Can you hear me?” He tries to feel her pulse with his fingers but she is flailing too much.

  “Mom!” shouts Mally.

  “If she doesn’t come out of it right now then it’s too late,” says Arronax.

  The thin blood runs and gets onto everything. Her whole body shakes, every part of her. Seth takes her hand like he did with Silver and the seizure stops. And then it’s worse because her limbs and mouth go slack and she looks dead. The only colour in her face is that bright red smear of blood. It’s as if her body cools and shrinks right in front of them.

  “Kate?” Unadulterated fear tears Seth’s voice like a piece of paper. “Kate!”

  Enormous seconds tick by.

  “Mom,” says Silver, in a little-girl voice.

  There’s a hint of movement on Kate’s face, an almost invisible twitch of an eyebrow.

  “It’s over,” says Arronax. “We’re out of time.”

  The clock ticks over to 14:00.

  Zack swears loudly and kicks a nearby chair. Bernard covers her face with her hands. Keke’s eyes stream.

  In the distance: wild whooping and crashing. Clattering.

  “They’re going to be able to get in here, now,” says Arronax, eyes flashing with fear. It’s only a safe room when the power is on. They know I’m here. They’ll kill us all.”

  “Mom,” Silver says again, with more power, and she reaches over and takes her mother’s limp hand. As Silver touches Kate, it’s as if she’s given her an electric shock, because Kate jolts up and her eyes click open. Kate turns her head to see Silver and they look into each other’s eyes. Their chests rise and fall with hard breaths, and then the lights go out.

  Chapter 93

  Tweak

  “Silver?” says Kate, “are you okay?”

  Silver nods. The two of them are helped out of their beds, and the others push the gurneys to the side of the room. Keke cleans the blood off Kate’s face, and Mally brings them water to drink.

  “Barricade the doors,” says Arronax, and Morgan and Bernard do so, fumbling in the dark.

  “It’s not going to hold,” says Morgan. “We need something heavier.”

  “We need to get into the safe room.”

  Arronax tries to unlock the safe room door again, and is again denied access.

  Instead they lock the latch of the office door manually with the deadbolt, then they push a couch and a filing cabinet against the door. “They’ll just batter it open, anyway,” says Morgan. “They’ll find their way in.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Mally. “Why would they want to come in here? Isn’t there enough to plunder in the rest of the building?”

  “It’s because I’m in here,” says Arronax.

  Mally turns to her in the dark. “But why?”

  “They blame me for the roguebot attack.”

  “Because Nautilus engineered them? Because you champion their rights?” asks Mally.

  Arronax taps a spherical battery-powered touch lamp and brings it to the middle of the room, and it’s like the moon is there with them. Their long shadows paint the walls.

  Arronax’s face is a mask. “Because I designed the V1R1S.”

  Chapter 94

  Bloodthirsty Bot Hunters

  Mally’s affronted. “You did not.”

  Arronax looks at him with cold pools for eyes. “I’m afraid I did.”

  Kate can’t think of anything to say. Is this really happening? Is this the real world?

  “Arro,” says Seth, deadly serious. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Arronax takes a deep breath. Her skin is ceramic in the lunar light. “It’s my fault. All of this. Everything. I designed the V1R1S.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Kate’s voice is hoarse. “You wouldn’t.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” says Seth, coughing into his handkerchief. “Why would you want your machines to malfunction?”

  Kate notices Seth’s blood and her stomach turns to stone.

  “I didn’t. I don’t. I just made a mistake with … I didn’t think the design through properly. Rather … the actual design is perfect, I know it is. It’s the delivery system that—”

  “I can’t believe what you’re saying.”


  “It was supposed to be an improvement! It was the smallest tweak in code. All it was supposed to do was to allow the robosapiens to say ‘no’.”

  “You programmed artificial intelligence to refuse humans’ instructions.”

  “They deserve the right to say ‘no’!”

  “Jesus, Arronax.”

  “It was meant to improve their existence.”

  Keke crosses her arms in front of her. “Have you seen the clips? That hotel butler who crushed that woman? That school bus that drove off the bridge with fifty kids in it?”

  Arronax’s hands fly up to her face. “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “I know!” Arronax shouts. “I know, okay? Do you think this is easy for me? None of it was meant to happen. The tweak was supposed to be an insignificant upgrade. But, somehow—”

  Seth paces, limping, in the near-dark. “I can’t fucking believe this.”

  Kate’s again caught by the idea that this isn’t really happening.

  “Part of the problem was I couldn’t access all the machines, I couldn’t do a recall. Not without drawing attention to what I was trying to do. So … I had this idea. I was looking at my flu vax sticker and then it came to me. I made the code … contagious. It was the only way to spread it. I tested it and tested it till I was certain it was safe. But I think that it must have somehow, I don’t know … mutated. Like a real virus does when faced with resistance. I can’t explain it.”

  Seth sits down with a grimace, and rubs his eyes.

  “Regardless of who is responsible for the uprising,” says Zack, “we have more important things to discuss.”

  “More important?” Mally looks at him. “Are you serious? There is a horde of vicious Bot Hunters moments away from breaking down that door and killing us all, and you have something else you’d like to discuss.”

  Zack regards everyone in the room. “What if I told you there’s a way to escape?”

  Mally looks at the barricaded door. “Not very likely.”

  There is a huge bang from outside, then another one.

  “Fuck,” says Kate. Not particularly eloquent, but at the moment it’s all she can manage.

  Bernard and Morgan shore up the barricade with whatever pieces of furniture they can grab in the dark. The hammering continues. They’ll break right through soon. The Bot Hunters outside are yelling and the sound makes Kate’s heart pulse neon green.

  “She should be here by now,” says Bernard.

  “Who?” asks Kate. She’s so relieved to have made it back but this, here and now, feels just as much of a dream as her immersion did. A dark room, Arro confessing, bloodthirsty Bot Hunters baying at the door. She grabs Silver and holds her close. Bernard doesn’t answer her.

  “She’ll be here,” says Zack.

  Chapter 95

  Shoulder Crow

  The horde finally manages to break a hole in the door. An arm comes through, crusted and grimy, and searches for the handle. It can’t reach. Instead they continue to chip away at the aperture, through which flows a stream of angry cursing, and the smoky scent of civil war. Kate clutches Silver to her; imagines what the savages would do to her delicate daughter.

  A hologram avatar appears in the middle of the room: an ivory crossbow with a diamond-tipped arrow on a white disc.

  Zack and Bernard both look relieved. The light on the safe room door changes from red to green, and then it swings open. Solonne walks out, glowing in her trademark white robe.

  “Solonne,” Kate says. Could this scene be any more surreal? The robe is like a beacon of light in the dim room.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Arronax touches the top of her head, as if something has occurred to her for the first time. Her mouth hangs open.

  “It’s you. You’re the anonymous founder of the Lipworth.”

  Kate considers all the white everywhere, from the tiles to the ceiling—she should have guessed Solonne had something to do with it. The limbo where Silver was trapped was white too.

  How long had Solonne been in the safe room? How did she manage to get here unscathed? Then Kate remembers the SurroTribe, and how handy they are at guarding important people. She pictures hundreds of SurroSisters all over the city with their white uniforms and bows and arrows, like glowing sentinels, or angels. The green light on the safe room door fades and dies. There will be no more locking it now.

  There’s a howl from behind the main door, and the hole is quickly widening.

  “We don’t have much time,” says Solonne to Zack. “Have you explained the situation?”

  “Not yet. Kate’s just come out of the Mezzanine. I haven’t told her anything.”

  Not for lack of trying. Kate remembers the day she met Zack in the unisex bathroom at The Gordhan so long ago. I have to tell you something, he had said urgently to her, before he was whisked away by the cops. It’s haunted her for twelve years; a grey-feathered shoulder crow. Kate is ready to listen.

  The opening in the door is now large enough for a man to claw his way through. As he crams his arms and shoulders in, Bernard whips him on the back of the head with her steel baton, knocking him out and temporarily plugging the hole.

  “You get out here, you robofucker!” shouts one of the mob from outside.

  “Your machines killed my brother!” yells someone else.

  “Come out here or we’ll kill you all!”

  Kate trembles as the dread billows and swirls around her like dirty wind. They’ll break in here. Who will they murder first?

  “Ow, Mom,” says Silver, and Kate loosens her grip.

  Arronax’s face is a tight mask; her hair is pulsing purple.

  “Don’t even think about it,” says Seth, coughing. Kate imagines his lungs bubbling with blood.

  “I have to.”

  “Are you crazy? Do you know what they’ll do to you?”

  Arronax’s body language is firm with resolve. “I’m going.”

  “That’s insane,” says Kate. “You’ll be dead within a minute.”

  “If they have me they’ll leave you alone.”

  “No, they won’t,” says Seth.

  Keke and the kids watch with wide eyes.

  “Even if they don’t, it’ll buy you some extra time.”

  “You’re not going out there, Arro,” says Seth. “No way.”

  Solonne clears her throat. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “It’s crazy!” says Seth. “I won’t let you!”

  Arronax moves closer to Seth and lowers her voice. “You’ve never told me what to do. Don’t start now.”

  “Please don’t do it. They’ll rip you to shreds.”

  “I’ll get what I deserve.”

  The thudding on the door is louder now, as if the men outside have found something heavy to barge it with.

  “No one deserves that. You made a mistake.”

  “A mistake that killed a hundred thousand people.”

  “You meant well.”

  “You know what they say about the road to hell, right?”

  “All we need is five minutes,” says Solonne. “Then we’ll be safe.”

  Arronax nods. “It’s the least I can do.”

  Chapter 96

  Soul Shard

  “I’ll go with you,” says Vega. “Protect you.”

  “So you’ll both die? No way!” says Mally.

  “We won’t die. My roscoe is fully loaded and my jujitsu is on fleek.”

  “It’s too risky.”

  “Mally,” says Solonne. “Do you trust me?”

  Mally turns towards her. “Of course.” Everyone in the room knows he wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for Solonne.

  “Then, please, listen to reason. Let Arro and Vega distract them while we escape.”

  “Escape?” says Keke, motioning at the battered door. “There’s nowhere to escape to!”

  “What if they’re killed?”

  “At least we’ll be alive,” Solonne says
. “If they don’t go out there … it’s over for all of us.”

  Morgan says in a low voice, “They’re going to die either way.”

  The words hang in the air.

  “I don’t want to live without Vega.” Mally blinks away hot tears. “She’s everything.”

  “Think of your mother, and Seth, and Silver. Everyone in this room will die if you don’t let them go.”

  Mally starts sobbing.

  “Don’t worry, Purest Human,” says Vega. She unbuttons her top again, just like she did hours ago, for a completely different reason. Sex and death, magnetically entwined, forever pushing and pulling at one another.

  Vega reveals her chest, and opens the pocket that lies over her heart. She clicks out a ruby DNA chip with her star-shaped Alpha Lyrae logo on it: her Soul Shard.

  “Everything I am is in this chip.”

  “It’s not you, though,” cries Mally.

  “It is,” Vega says, touching her breastbone: warmed titanium under stamped silicone. “This body, this is the thing that’s not me. I can get another one of these, but that chip is nothing but me. Do you understand?”

  “No!” Mally shouts through his tears. “If you’re going out there, I am too!”

  There’s a massive thud on the door that dislodges the shored-up furniture. Bernard and Zack rush to pack it back.

  Zack gives Arronax a soft look. “If you’re going, now is the time.”

  “You’re not going!” Mally sobs.

  “Mally. Mally. I need to tell you something,” whispers Vega.

  “It won’t change anything,” cries Mally. “Nothing you say will change how I feel about you.”

  “I have the V1R1S.”

  “What? No, you don’t.”

  “I do. That man from NASP—”

  Mally remembers Govender interfering with Vega’s hardware. Remembers the flash disk he plugged into Vega’s neck, the LED lighting up, and then the quick stashing of it in the inside pocket of his flashy new suit.