Sam’s world was crumbling around her. The disappointment in Dan’s eyes was soul-crushing. He might not bring it up, especially around the rest of the candidates, but she knew he was upset with her.
Frankly, she was upset with herself. It was easy while she was caught up in her research to normalize the situation and go with the flow. Henry wanted to cultivate his aura of eccentric mystery. He kept everyone in the dark, and it wasn’t really fair to anyone, but with his combination of energy, wealth, and charm, no one questioned it.
Despite her best efforts, Henry drew her into his strange world. She knew better than to engage him when the old man lapsed into his secrets and conspiracies, but at some level, she worried. If he were just a doddering old man in a retirement home, he would be harmless, but a billionaire with governmental influence could do a lot of damage.
At this point, when he talked about the Illuminati or tearing down the government and starting fresh, she didn’t know if he was venting after a stressful day or if he was dead serious. Rather than confront that question, she had just ignored it. Her work was interesting enough that she could focus on the day-to-day of her job and pretend that the fallout had nothing to do with her. Now, looking around the group of survivors, she saw the cost of her inaction. True, Sam was just following orders from Henry, but that was a weak excuse and she knew it.
Henry could claim all he wanted that he would only use the limiters for “the betterment of the human race,” but Sam had seen the specifications on his nanites. They were a good deal more advanced than what he injected into the rest of the candidates. More importantly, they didn’t have any limiters he insisted on for everyone else. Including her.
The last few months hadn’t made him any more confident. Instead, his behavior had become even more secretive and erratic. Then, when Dan had failed to awaken his mana, the Director had gone off the rails. Meetings became an excuse for him to trap his executive staff and go on multi-hour rants about how the corrupt rats in Washington were out to get him. She had tried to politely suggest that he talk to one of the Foundation therapists, but Henry wouldn’t hear it.
The people around her had all suffered at Henry’s hands, borderline enslaved and forced to fight to the death with minimal training. Even the training they had was invasive and painful bordering on sadism. Worst of all, she had been part of all of it. Henry might have ordered it, but her hands were the ones that injected the nanites. She was the one that programmed the Systems to punish their users for eating poorly or failing to exercise. It had made sense as part of the total training program, but that didn’t make it fair or right to shove it on people without their total knowledge and permission.
The worst of it was Dan. With the new additions, she could fall back on clinical detachment, but he was like a brother to her. Siblings torment each other, but as she looked back on her treatment of Dan, she cringed. It wouldn’t have been that hard to warn him before the hard parts of the training, let him know what he was getting into. More than that, the process hurt like hell, and she had made fun of him the entire time. She owed him more than an apology for all of that.
“Doctor Weathers,” Jennifer interrupted her thoughts, “I would like to know if the fail-safes can be disabled as well. I don’t have the most faith in Ibis after he manipulated the legal system to cut us off from the rest of the world. I still want to fight back; this is my planet after all. I just don’t want to be shackled to a timebomb.”
“The good news is that it isn’t all that hard to block,” Sam smiled wanly. “You can’t get rid of the hardware, but the only way to activate it is when someone with root access connecting via bluetooth or using a verbal command. If you have root access yourself, you can open your settings and turn off verbal commands and require a prompt before accepting any wireless connections.”
“That…” Jennifer frowned briefly, “That seems fairly simple, actually. How do we know that Ibis hasn’t buried something deeper into the System that you can’t access?”
“You don’t.” Sam shrugged. “I think I’ve looked the schematics over thoroughly enough that I would catch any additional major back doors, but I can’t guarantee you that you’re safe. I can just give you the same precautions that I’ve taken for myself.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ellie grabbed Sam’s hand, tears streaming down her face. “I thought I meant something to you! You know I shouldn’t be here! I belong behind a computer screen, not trying to stab a zombie. You said you would keep me safe, but you couldn’t even stop yourself from lying to me!”
Ellie threw down Sam’s hand, wiping her face with her other hand. The rest of the survivors looked away, tired and unwilling to intervene in her quarrel. Sam ran her hand through her hair as she looked at Ellie sobbing.
“Look,” Sam began, wincing at how insincere she sounded even to herself. “It’s not like anyone would ever use the fail safes. They’re only there because-”
“They wouldn’t let us leave the compound!” Ellie was bawling. “I tried to call my Mom to let her know I was ok, and they wouldn’t let me. What the fuck do you mean they wouldn’t use the fail safes? The Thoth Foundation doesn’t give a shit about the law! We’re just valuable assets to them, and they aren’t going to let those assets escape.”
“Hell, how do I even know you didn’t tinker with my emotions, Sam?” The young woman paused for a breath, staring at Sam through tear-filled eyes. “This entire time, you could have just programmed me to have a crush on you. None of this could be real.”
With a choked off sob, Ellie turned and ran into the jungle. Sam rubbed her temples, doing her best to ignore the reproving glare on Dan’s face. This is what she deserved for dating so much younger than herself. All energy and passion. Ellie didn’t even give her a chance to explain herself, and then she was gone.
Dan grabbed Sam by the shoulder and shook her firmly.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Sam?” A little bit of the anger that he had been hiding earlier leaked into his voice as he tried to make eye contact with her.
“She just needs time to think.” Sam avoided his gaze. “She’s young, and this rattled her. I can talk it over with her in the morning.”
“For all of your degrees, you’re being a fucking idiot.” Dan let go of her shoulder as he turned in the direction that Ellie had run. “This isn’t a camping trip. Even before the Elves came, there were creatures out there that could tear her apart in a second. If she’s off on her own, everything that hesitated to attack our group is going to zero in on her.”
Then Dan was running through the forest. Jennifer sprinted after him and Sam did the best she could to catch up, but without runescripting, it was a losing proposition. Silently, she cursed her status as a rear-echelon technician. For obvious reasons, that put her lower on the priority list for the time-consuming enchantments, and now here she was. Left behind and lost as Dan raced off to rescue her girlfriend.
Ellie’s sudden shrill scream sent adrenaline coursing through her veins, and gave Sam a target in the dark forest. She tried to run even faster, her chest heaving as she sucked in the damp night air.
Ahead, a masculine shout answered Ellie and the clamor of combat overwhelmed the sound of Sam’s heart beating in her ears. She burst from the tree cover into a hole in the forest opened by a recently downed tree. Her breath froze in her lungs.
Ellie cowered behind the tree, with two men and a woman in combat fatigues wielding shortswords forming a triangle around her and fending off a gigantic olive and brown snake. At least twenty-five feet long, the creature curled partially around the base of a tree with its motorcycle-sized head settling almost eight feet above the jungle floor, just out of reach of the humans. Dan was already in the clearing, his sword glowing purple with Jennifer standing at his side, the starlight shimmering off of the mana-infused planes of force covering her body.
Sam panted for breath. She had never felt so helpless in her life. The snake lunged for the three soldiers, but they responded with practiced ease. One of the men grabbed Ellie and dragged her back while the other man and woman stepped to the side and swung their swords at the snake. The blades deflected off of the creature’s steely scales, not doing much damage, but causing the snake to arrest its momentum to avoid impaling itself.
The woman pointed her left hand at the snake and three small blobs of fire darted out from her index finger and hit the side of its head, blackening the scales slightly. The snake hissed and rotated its head toward her, only for a semi-translucent set of chain links to appear in the starlight, connecting the snake’s head to the nearby man’s left wrist. The movement jerked the man forward a step, but he quickly dug his heels into the forest floor, noticeably slowing the snake’s head as it tried to drag him.
Sam tried to wrack her memory for something that would help, but her mind came up blank. In the handful of months she had the System, she never really had the opportunity to properly train with magic. All she had at her disposal were two basic spells: a light spell that was more or less a mana-powered flashlight and a metal spell that let her shape and rework steel with her bare hands with some difficulty.
Dan blurred forward, his purple sword digging into the side of the snake, sending a spray of scales and blood into the night. Idly, Sam made a note that they needed more of whatever his sword was. Even minorly-enchanted weapons didn’t really cut it against monsters.
The snake reared back, pulling the male soldier up into the air with it as it turned toward Dan. The male soldier near Ellie stood up and threw a knife with a smooth motion. Sam blinked as the knife’s hilt suddenly appeared in the side of the snake, a sonic boom following it a fraction of a second later. Dan hit it with his electricity spell.
The snake convulsed, sending the soldier connected to it by the semi-invisible chain flying. The chain stretched taut then snapped with an audible crack as the man slammed into a nearby tree before rolling over and throwing up. Dan plunged his sword into the snake’s side and took two steps forward, dragging the blade through the beast’s scales with some difficulty.
It recovered from the shock and tried to bite down on Dan, only for its teeth to catch on his spellshield. Then Jennifer danced past him, throwing herself into the snake’s open mouth and clambering down into the monster’s throat. With a flash, spectral blades of force covered her entire body, and she lashed out at everything in the soft, whitish pink of the snake’s interior. The animal drew back from Dan in confusion, only for another trio of burning blobs to sail past its face, distracting the animal further.
Dan struck again, widening his first blow just enough to put his hand up against the wound and jump away. With a thump, the snake twitched, and the area near the wound Dan inflicted expanded and began smoking. Its head flipped back into the air, blood streaming from the wounds in its throat. Dan stepped forward, once again cutting a hole in the monster’s side before putting his hand against it and triggering a spell.
This time, when the spell detonated, the creature’s head dropped to the ground, allowing Jennifer to crawl out of its mouth, covered in blood and bile. Purposefully, Dan walked past her and put his blade into the creature’s eye. A second later, he shuddered. The three soldiers and Jennifer joined him, their eyes glazing over as they stared off at nothing, leaving Ellie and Sam more or less alone.
All of that training that she had skipped out on. Those months where Dan did nothing but jog, spar, and practice magic. The year fighting abominations on another planet. Sam spent all of that joking around with him and playing pranks on him, but today the results were apparent. For all of her internalized superiority, she had frozen in terror, and Dan had been a superhero.
Sam glanced from Ellie to Dan bitterly. Dan had been right. Even when she was trying to turn over a new leaf and become a better person, she only thought about herself. It would have been a hassle to chase Ellie down, so she would ‘do it in the morning.’ She sighed. Ellie was right, too. They weren’t really dating, but she owed the woman some honesty about her situation. Hell, she never should have agreed to let Ibis more or less kidnap people from his video game in the first place.
