7
OUROBUROS
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo Penthouse
The silence that came after the lights went out was worse than all the chaos that went on before it. I stood in the dark with the others for what felt like a long time before the overheads flickered back on, but even once they did, the screens on the wall stayed dark. The feeds were all dead.
“What happened?” I asked. Ai was staring into space, not moving or saying anything. At first she looked like she had a seizure or something, but when I focused on her, I saw her mind was still working; she was just in some kind of trance. None of the others at the table moved either.
The armed guards were all alert but weren’t sure what to do. One of them called on his radio to see about the power, while the noise outside rumbled off into the distance. No one approached the table or Ai.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“It was the CMC Tower,” Penny said. Her face was lit by the glow from her computer tablet. “Fawkes just destroyed it.”
“What?”
She turned the tablet toward me, and on it I could see a video feed from somewhere in the city across town. Someone was filming from the window of a building that would have looked out at the spot where the Central Media Communications Tower would have been, if it had been there.
“Oh …” It was all that came out. I stared at the image as thick black smoke billowed up from flames that had spread through the surrounding blocks. The CMC Tower was gone. It just …wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t get my brain around it.
“That’s why we lost all the feeds,” Penny said, her voice flat. “It was all going through a hub at the CMC Tower.”
“Mr. Raphael—”
“He’s dead, Zoe.”
I just stared. I liked Mr. Raphael. He was always nice to me, and whenever we’d met face-to-face, he’d always brought me a little gift of some kind. The last thing he’d gotten me had been my little diamond solitaire. I put my hand to my throat without thinking, but I wasn’t wearing it.
“He blew up the CMC?” I asked. My voice seemed to be acting independently from my brain, which was still trying to take in the size of the wreckage I was seeing on the screen. The fire blazed as waves of smoke and dust several stories high boiled down the surrounding streets, swallowing up the cars and streetlamps as they went. Pieces of debris were still falling down through the air, raining down into the expanding cloud below. The CMC Tower had been almost as big as Alto Do Mundo, and now it was just gone.
“Zoe, snap out of it,” I heard Penny say.
I felt her hands grab my elbows as I looked around. No one else in the room was moving.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. The guards had left the room to secure the floor and try to get back communications with the others. Except for the distant rumble, it was completely quiet. It was almost like Penny and I were alone together.
Penny started to get up, but I stopped her by grabbing her sleeve. She looked back at me, confused.
“Wait,” I said.
“I need to check on Ai—”
“Wait. I …”
“What?”
“Something happened,” I told her. “I saw something. Something important.”
“What did you see?”
“The Green Room,” I said. “I saw inside the void again. I think …Noelle tried to contact me there.”
Penny’s face changed when I said her name. I felt a distant spike of emotion that she stifled just as quickly, a red flare that arced up out of the aura surrounding her.
“Did she say anything to you?” she asked. I nodded.
“I think we’ve been wrong this whole time.”
“Wrong about what?”
I glanced past her at Ai. Her consciousness had taken the form of a dense, white sphere. The connections had all been withdrawn. She was experiencing an intense vision, and wasn’t watching either of us. Still, I leaned close to Penny and whispered in her ear.
“Penny, I think I’m Element Zero,” I whispered. She tried to pull away, but I held on to her sleeve.
“Fawkes is Element Zero,” she whispered back. “Fawkes drops the nukes. You stop him.”
“She’s been trying to tell me something…. I think we’re wrong.”
“We’re not.”
“What if we are? She said the blast doesn’t cause the event; it stops it. I think Noelle knew that. I think she knew Ai was wrong and that she’d have to be the one to kill all these people, to stop something worse from happening. She knew—”
“It was one vision,” Penny said, raising her voice. “That’s not enough to—”
“But it’s the only one that matters,” I said. “It came from the void after the event …isn’t that why Ai tracked us down? Maybe she is some ‘next step in evolution’ but even if it’s true she can’t see past that point—she doesn’t survive whatever happens, she knows that. We ran out of time, and even with everything she did, she wasn’t able to figure it out.”
“Zoe—”
“I’m telling you I saw something, something important. Noelle tried to reach me there…. I think she’s alive.”
“She’s not alive.”
“The database says she’s dead, but how can we really—”
“Because I killed her, Zoe.”
I felt the vibe again, like a spike. Her face didn’t change, but I felt it, and I remembered something she’d said to me a long time ago:
“
“I thought they had her killed,” I said.
“They did.”
“Ai made you do it?”
She shook her head. “Osterhagen,” she said. “Things were different then. Noelle was …”
“Was what?”
“She was amazing,” she said. “She was better than I ever was. Ai sent her to go get me and bring me in. She took me under her wing. She took care of me and protected me.”
One of the screens flickered, but didn’t make it back on. Ai’s consciousness pulsed, but she stayed withdrawn.
“Like you did with me,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“She had a bad vision one day,” she said, looking down. “Like the ones you’ve been having …the deformities and all that. She started talking dangerous talk.”
“Like what?”
“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “Noelle was afraid. She did think we had it all wrong. One day, she saw something she wouldn’t talk about, and she changed after that …she lost her appetite, stopped smiling.
