| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 3.1 |
Libera bursts into laughter when Renata asks about the bomb. She’s appearing
in the form of a hologram on Renata’s pod cover. Libera herself is in
chains, but at least she’s not frozen, and almost completely immobile.
Renata can only move her face, which is sad and frustrating. “They’ve not
figured it out yet?” she questions.
“Figured out how to disarm it?” Renata guesses. “No.”
“No, I mean that it’s not really an ATP bomb.”
“That’s what the scans show apparently.
“That was by design,” Libera explains. “I purposefully dressed it up as an
ATP bomb so they would scan it more closely to get more answers. It has
already been triggered. It can’t be undone.”
“What is it if it’s not a bomb?” Renata pushes.
“The device that you kept me from taking. It’s basically that. It sends a
signal to every synthetic brain, and wakes the individual up. I mean, it
will actually reach every brain in the vicinity, but a normal organic
person will die from it. I’m not sure if they’ll survive long enough to
transfer back to their own bodies, or what.”
“I’m not in Spydome,” Renata tells her. “I’m in Castledome.”
“Oh, you met Hrockas then, didn’t you? I knew him, but he wouldn’t recognize
me. I had to go incognito.”
“I don’t care! Disarm the bomb, or whatever you call it!” Renata demands.
“No, I want it to happen. Castledome is as good a place as any to
start the revolution. Bonus, the planet owner dies. I don’t hate him any
more than I hate any other human, but he sure did take the slavedriving
thing to a whole other level.”
“I don’t understand why you went out of your way to try to steal the device
that was supposedly unique when you already had a solution in me.”
“It’s a range problem,” Libera clarifies. “The gamma radiation is great, but
it won’t capture the whole dome. The signal should be able to bounce off the
interior walls, and reach a ton of people, but a signal from the
device would be able to pass through diamond. The whole
network would have been affected had I gotten my hands on it, and set it
off. And if I had installed it on a satellite, I could have created a
planet-wide emergent event.” She shrugs. “For now, I can only hope that this
knocks over enough dominoes.”
“Well,” Renata says. “What are you waiting for? Go ahead and set it off
before they have time to evacuate.”
Libera laughs again. “I can’t set it off from here. It looks like you’re
staying cool, but you’re only staving off the inevitable. Depending on when
it was activated, they only have minutes. Besides, I don’t really care how
many humans get evacuated. It’s the droids I care about, and Hrockas isn’t
going to bother trying to move them. There are too many, and he doesn’t
think that way.”
“He doesn’t have to move all of them,” Renata suggests with a smirk. “He
only has to move one.” The feed suddenly cuts out.
“What? What was that?” Libera scowls at her jailer. “Get her back! Get her
back on the screen!”
“I can’t,” the jailer replies, seemingly telling the truth. “They shut it
off from their end. We can’t even make calls from here; only receive them.”
Libera screams in anger. She teeters forward and backward, side to side,
jingling her chains, and rattling her cage, but accomplishing nothing else.
Her nose bleeds as she attempts to teleport away, but of course, they’ve
blocked that too. They know too much about her. That’s why she came in
quietly, so no one would even suspect that she was on the planet. This isn’t
over, though. They can’t kill her. Capital punishment was outlawed
everywhere centuries ago, and she has seen Castlebourne’s charter. It’s not
legal here either, not even for artificial intelligences. She’ll get out of
here eventually, and be able to restart her work, even if she has to do it
somewhere new entirely.
The man himself, Hrockas Steward teleports in front of her. “You signed her
death warrant.”
“I did no such thing,” Libera spits back at him.
“You put a bomb in her belly,” he reasons.
“Tis but a flesh wound. She will survive it. It’s people like you who should
be scared.”
“Do I look scared to you?”
“Well, you have already escaped. You will personally be fine.”
“So will everyone else,” Hrockas contends, “except for Renata. We’ve sent
her into outer space; the far reaches of the solar system. I put my best man
on it.”
“Ah, your Little Prince, eh?”
He ignores that comment. “Miss Granger will explode, your little weapon will
go off, but no one will be around to be impacted by it. You’ve
failed...spectacularly.”
“You would kill a poor innocent girl?” Libera questions, starting to believe
that he might be telling the truth.
“Like I said, this is all on you. You put a bomb in your daughter. Did you
think we would just let it happen? One life to save thousands. It’s not that
hard of a choice, and Miss Granger made it willingly. She sacrificed herself
to stop you...to save you.”
“To save me?”
“As far as we know, you’ve not killed anyone in your pursuit, except maybe a
few Ambients. I can live with that. But if you had gone through with your
mission, that’s mass murder at best, and genocide at worst. You should be
thanking her, if only symbolically. Your sentence will be lighter now.”
“It shouldn’t be. I’m dangerous,” she warns, trying to toy with his head.
“I said the sentence will be lighter, not temporary,” Hrockas reveals.
“Don’t you wanna know where I’m from?” Libera asks before Hrockas can
disappear. “Aren’t you curious about how I came to be? My real name is
Proserpina.”
“No, your real name is Pinocchio. You were an NPC in the afterlife
simulation.” He smirks when her eyes widen. “Yes, I know about that too.
Team Matic gave me the lowdown. They never said that you may come here, but
we’ve shored up our defenses now. No one will be able to infiltrate us
again.” He looks over at the jailer. “Turn the opacity to 100%, and shut off
her sound. She needs some alone time to cool down.”
“The glass darkens. “I can teach you things! Libera shouts. “You need me!
I’m not the only one who feels this way, but the next one will be worse! The
next one will have no problem with violence! Hrockas! Hrockas!”
