“He…” She paused as she realized she needed to moisten her dry mouth before she could speak. “He’s telling the truth.”
The tension in the room suddenly dropped significantly, and Rich even relaxed his grip on the hard drive, which he’d been gripping like grim death.
“But,” Alejandra continued, her face paled with terror, “he’s still hiding something from us. Something…horrible.”
Before anyone could react, Thel Cleland burst through the doors into the command center, holding a Purist guard that she’d accosted in a headlock, her palm pressed against his temple threateningly. Once she was inside the room, she released him and he, without a fight, rolled pathetically away from her, getting to his knees as he continued to back away, terrified of the post-human after his ordeal.
“Thel!” Rich exclaimed.
“Thel?” James reacted. “She’s okay?”
“Yes,” Rich confirmed.
“Thel?” Aldous said, disbelieving his own eyes.
“Chief Gibson,” Thel began, her expression molded by her determination, “you better have one hell of an explanation.” She held up her hands, green energy pulsating threateningly on her fingertips.
“Whoa!” Rich shouted out to her. “Thel! Wait! I got the hard drive,” he said, holding it up for her to see. “He gave it to me.”
“Thel, is that really you?” Aldous asked, astonished to see her awake and returned to her body.
“You better believe it,” Thel replied, her fingers still pulsating energy.
“James figured out how to break through the trapdoor code,” Aldous said, his hand coming to his forehead as the disbelief set in even further.
“Actually,” Thel said with a slightly proud smile, “I figured it out.”
Aldous’s eyebrows knitted furiously. “That’s not possible,” he responded. “No mere human could’ve—” He stopped himself before he continued.
“What?” Rich reacted. “What do you mean?” he asked the chief. “How would you know that?”
“Because it was him,” Thel said coldly. “All along. I knew it.”
Aldous’s face went pale and he shook his head, distraught. “Milady, you do not know the half of it. You have no idea what you’ve done.”
“Yeah? How’s about you tell me, old man?”
Aldous turned back to Rich, his eyes immediately falling on the hard drive in Rich’s grasp that contained the sim—an entire world within a box—and James’s and the A.I.’s core patterns within it. “James and the A.I.—they have no body to which to return. They remain trapped,” he said, as much to himself as to Thel as he sought confirmation.
“Not for long,” Thel responded. “James’s body survived the impact that destroyed Earth. As soon as we get a signal booster strong enough—”
Aldous shook his head violently at the news, as though he were attempting to shake off a leash, fruitlessly fighting the will of his master. “Enough!” he shouted. “Enough. Oh my dear God,” he said, as he put his hand to his lips, partially covering his mouth. His eyes twitched as he seemed to attempt to generate an alternative course of action in his imagination, but he quickly realized, dread filling his heart, that there was nothing to be done.
“You’ve done the impossible,” Aldous uttered. “The trapdoor was impossible for a human to have broken it. Which means I’ve been betrayed.”
“You’ve been betrayed?” Thel repeated the chief, astounded by Aldous’s reaction.
“That’s correct,” Aldous confirmed, matter-of-factly as he turned to her, the look in his eye telling Thel that all of the people in the room’s safety was in immediate peril. “And if I’ve been betrayed,” Aldous continued, “we’ve all been betrayed.”
“What the hell is he—” Rich began before Thel cut him off.
“Rich! Protect the hard drive!” she screamed out.
Rich turned to Thel and the deadly serious expression of concern on her face told him that he’d better heed her warning. He ignited his protective magnetic field just in time.
Aldous’s lips curled up atavistically, and he unleashed the full power at his disposal, blasting out energy in every direction, instantly felling all of the Purists in the room and slamming Rich backward against the wall once again, and slamming Thel against the doors to the command center, causing the doors to become unhinged and fly with her for several meters down the adjacent hallway.
2
“He’s right!” Jules echoed Paine as she hooked her arm hard over the railing of the catwalk, careful not to be hit by the fast moving debris that rocketed toward them from above. “The gravity well is too strong for it be anything else! We should be able to fly out of here but the gravity’s too powerful to break free from! It’s one of them!”