The Girl Who Dared to Think 7: The Girl Who Dared to Fight

At least, I was pretty sure he was. Honestly, it didn’t matter; his words floored me, causing warmth to grow and swell in my chest, like my heart was an inflating balloon. Leo’s eyes lighted on the smile, and a moment later, his mouth was pressing against mine, his hands holding me in place while he pillaged it.

My hair felt like it was standing on end from the electric current of the kiss, and I clung to him, wrapping my arms around his neck. Gravity shifted around us, and suddenly we were floating, spinning through the air, hurtling toward some unknown destination. My grip tightened on his code, my apprehension growing as we continued to move, and I broke the kiss, looking up in the direction we were heading.

A doorway made of white stood in the middle of the darkness, a prismatic aura surrounding it.

“What is it?” I asked, grabbing Leo’s hand and holding it tightly.

“The next step,” Leo replied, squeezing my palm reassuringly, sending me his love and confidence. “I love you, Liana. And I always will.”

I looked over at him, trying to memorize his face before everything I knew changed once again, and smiled at the only person I had left, except for my brother. “I love you, too.”

Then we were flying through the doorway, and I knew nothing.





46





“Wakey, wakey,” a deep voice called from overhead, and my eyes snapped open, every fiber of my being instantly on alert. I was lying on the floor in what appeared to be the holographic projection room we had found in Lionel Scipio’s office.

In fact, the holographic projection of Lionel Scipio was standing at my feet, leaning all of his weight onto the cane by his side. I sat up, instantly alarmed, and looked around for Leo. “Where is he?” I demanded. “Is this part of the test?” I paused, a dark fear suddenly gripping me. “Was I rejected from the Core?”

If I had been, then why was I here, with Lionel? He was supposed to be a monitoring and analysis program and had only interfered to fix the problem. Was there another problem that needed to be resolved?

“Not exactly,” Lionel said carefully. “Your neural clone survived the simulation, and—”

“My neural what?” I exhaled, and then froze. My skin was no longer humming, and I could feel the steady rhythm of my heart in my chest. I reached up to touch my chest and confirm, and then did a double take of my hands. They were no longer glowing, my skin pale and white like it had always been. “What’s going on?” I asked, my confusion only adding to my fear. “Where’s Leo?”

“He’s fine,” Lionel said soothingly, kneeling down in front of me. “He’s in the Core, with you. Or rather, with your neural clone. Liana, there’s no easy way to tell you this, but everything you experienced after we met was a simulation.”

“A simulation,” I repeated, trying to wrap my head around what he was saying. “A simulation?” I asked again, not quite understanding.

Lionel nodded, his face pensive. “If we had done the process as Lionel originally designed it, your neural clone would’ve been separated from your active mind and put through the simulation. You never would’ve experienced any of the things the simulation forced her through.”

I sat there for several seconds, trying to make sense of what he was saying. We had met after Tony had dragged me here, and after that I’d lost Dylan, Rose, Zoe, Quess, Eric, Maddox, Grey, Jasper, Rose, Tony, and Scipio. Their deaths had been so painful, so real.

And now he was telling me they weren’t? Panic exploded through me as I realized that could mean the legacies were still loose in the Tower—and Sage’s people were still gunning for Leo and Grey. I scrambled to my feet.

“I need to go,” I said hurriedly. “I have to get to my friends! There’s still time to save them!”

“Liana,” Lionel said sharply, rising up to meet me. “Listen to me. You’ve been unconscious for five hours, but it only took your neural clone an hour to pass the test. I didn’t anticipate how exhausted your body was, nor how low your electrolytes were when I initiated the New Day protocol, so it took you a while to recover. Longer than I expected, but long enough for the new AI to reassert control over the Tower. Your friends are fine.”

I blinked at him several times, my urge to race off and save my friends warring with what he was saying. He had no reason to lie to me, but what he was telling me was wrong; my friends were in danger, and they’d been in danger the entire time. If I didn’t get to them soon, they’d die, and I’d have to watch it happen all over again.

“I don’t believe you,” I said on an exhale, my hands curling into fists. “If I don’t reach them, they’ll die.”

“I’m sorry the simulation forced you to witness that,” Lionel said, meeting the urgency in my voice with remorse and compassion in his own. “It’s… part of the process, to see how the neural clone can adapt in times of emergency. Grief is a powerful emotion that can make humans freeze up or break down. You’d be surprised how many neural clones were eliminated from the test after seeing their loved ones killed.”

I trembled, the weight of what he was saying hitting me. If it was true, then his little test had forced me to watch everyone I loved die, one by one, all for a simulation! Everything I had experienced—the pain, the sorrow, the grief—all to see if I could keep going after that? It was torture—and torture of the cruelest design, because I could still remember every moment of it. I doubted I would ever forget.

“That was your test?!” I seethed. “You kill the people they love in front of them in order to see if they can still perform?! That’s cruel. It’s inhumane!”

His mouth curled downward in a frown. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I didn’t design the test. I only administered it.”

I bit back an angry retort, knowing that he was just a fragment of Lionel’s mind and personality and not the real thing, but it was in me to scream at him. I wondered if Leo had to go through this during his simulations and remembered that his simulation hadn’t just taken place in the course of one hour, but over months. Suddenly I felt awful for everything they had put him and the other AIs through. The test I had experienced had to have been trivial compared to that.

And yet… I still couldn’t seem to believe Lionel when it came to my friends. “You say that the power’s back on?” I asked him.

He nodded. “All systems in the Tower have been restored to full power. There is some structural damage that needs to be addressed, as well as some problems in every server outside of the Core, but it’s being worked on.”

“The sentinels?”

“They all shut down when you burned out Alice’s source code,” he replied. “They still killed a lot of people, but you saved many more.”

I frowned. “I thought it was a simulation. How could what I did in there affect the real world?”

“An excellent question. There were a total of sixty-seven active alpha-series nets in the Tower when I activated the protocol. The amount of energy required to run independent simulations for each of them was too great for the system to handle, so the simulations were combined into one massive platform that picked up with what all of you were doing right before the protocol was enacted. Every action you took affected the other clones, and vice versa. The system populated the world using people that you knew so that you couldn’t tell that it wasn’t real, and then constructed a narrative from your goals that would be believable. Even your enemies had obstacles to surmount—the legacies in the Citadel had to overcome the defense of the Knights, and Sadie had to deal with finding Dinah, who was actively working to slow them down and disrupt their plans.”