S?ren presses another button and the somber voice of a reporter fills the room.
“Three vehicles carrying police officers and the CEO of Outlier Pictures, Miranda Lawson, have been involved in a severe crash on the I-10. As you can see, the vehicles are engulfed in flames. No one has gotten out of them. Emergency crews are on their way—if you would pull out, camera four, there you go—we can see a line of fire trucks and ambulances on the shoulder, inching their way through traffic.”
The picture turns to two reporters behind a desk in the news studio, a small inset of the live video stream in an upper corner of the screen. When they continue to discuss the accident, S?ren mutes the audio.
Without a hint of regret, he says, “Unfortunately, Miranda outlived her usefulness.”
He killed Miranda. He used her to get to me, and then he killed her off like she was nothing more than an annoying insect.
Then I think, The woman in the Bank of America video. The woman who opened the account in my name… Oh my God, was that Miranda? How far back did their relationship go?
“Look at all the gears turning!” S?ren says, amused. “What’s really going to bake your brain later on is how much I know about your new friend Connor Hughes.” His voice hardens. “And how he feels about you. Dear sister.”
The sound of Connor’s name on S?ren’s lips jerks me out of my shock and sends a blast of pure rage throughout my body. “If you hurt him—”
“No more threats,” he interrupts. “Here’s the bottom line, Tabitha. I own you now. You’re mine. I’ve waited a long time to get this family back together, and nothing will separate us again. Including you. The two of us are going to start our new lives together here, and you’re going to forget about your old friends. If you try to escape, I’ll kill them all. If you try to hurt me, I’ll kill them all. Basically, if you do anything that displeases me, I’ll kill them all.”
He lets that sink in. Then, his tone dropping an octave, he says, “But if you’re good, I’ll give you the world. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted.”
The silence that follows is awful. I stew in it, my mind going the speed of light.
I say, “I have questions.”
S?ren looks intrigued. “Go on.”
“Dismiss the guards first.”
When his look sours, I say, “I’ll never be comfortable while there are men with guns pointed at my back. You’ve told me the consequences if I misbehave, and I believe you. If you want us to be a family, you can start by treating me like family. Dismiss the guards.”
His expression is unreadable. For a moment, he stares at me, one finger tapping a staccato rhythm on the arm of his chair. Then he makes a dismissive motion with his hand, and his guards leave. I wait until the dull thudding of their boots has faded from the stairs to speak again.
“The place I woke up in.”
“Our room.”
I force myself not to react to the connotations of those two words and decide to go in a different direction.
“I know how much you like games and manipulation, so I know it amused you to watch me play into your hands. What I don’t understand is why now?”
He inclines his head, a kingly nod that indicates he approves of this question. “It took years to find this place. It took more years to prepare it. And during that time, I perfected our little project, the one we dreamed about in college. The thing all the experts said would never happen in our lifetime.”
A shiver of dread passes through me. Seeing my expression, he nods again. Then he glances at the wall of glass to my right with the rows of white server towers behind it.
Horror and fascination mix inside me to create an almost irresistible urge to run over to the servers and run my hands along their smooth flanks. I whisper, “A quantum computer?”
“One hundred million times faster than the average home PC, thirty-six hundred times faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world, built on a doped diamond crystal that’s easily scaled and functional at room temperature.”
There’s pride in his tone. Though it pains me to admit it, there should be.
A quantum computer is so complex, the algorithms so advanced, the machine can actually think for itself. And not only think.
It can learn.
“Yes,” says S?ren, watching me reel in amazement. “It’s a revolutionary technology that will change the entire world as we know it. I calculate that just its uses in artificial intelligence, robotics, defense, and cryptography are worth well over a trillion dollars.”
My voice is faint when I say, “You could win the Nobel prize for this.”
“Prizes don’t interest me.”
I tear my gaze from the servers. S?ren is looking at me in anticipation, knowing I’ll guess what does interest him. Knowing I’ll know.
The blood drains from my face so rapidly, I feel dizzy. “You’re going to tear the whole world apart. But first you’re going to make them pay you for it.”