Agnosis – Ch. 7
Dorian sat in stunned silence. Raville watched them, a superluminal construct with the shadowy giant Kedesma orbiting his impossible star. Finally, Dorian looked to Amara, and she stared back at him, her eyes large and dark in the wavering light. She had stars in her dark hair; miniature suns burned about her ears. What he wanted to ask her was simple: Do you believe any of this? It was foremost in his mind, but he couldn’t vocalize the question. He was afraid of what she might say.
“You must stop him,” Raville said. “He can’t be allowed to proceed.”
Dorian lifted his head. Very clearly, so that he would not be misunderstood, he asked, “Why not?”
For once, it was Raville who seemed to have no answer. “You would hesitate to stop an interstellar war?”
“If I thought you were a credible source, I might give it some thought. But as it stands, I can’t say I’m feeling particularly motivated, no.”
“I’m telling you what I myself intend to do and you’re telling me that the source is not credible?”
“That’s pretty much it, yeah.”
Raville stood motionless, blinking, as though he could not begin to process Dorian’s argument.
“Even if I did believe you,” Dorian continued, “why should I automatically be opposed to what the actual Michael Raville chooses to do? I mean, by all reports, he’s a sharp guy. He’s powerful, connected, intelligent, seemingly reasonable. Why should I assume that he’s the one being unreasonable here rather than you? Seriously, you’re telling me that an alien civilization as contacted key individuals surreptitiously with the intention of re-making humanity in its own image without most of our input or consent. Even worse, they’ve been dragging us down this road for a hundred years without our knowledge. That makes me a little suspicious, to be honest, and maybe at the end of the day, it made your better half suspicious as well. Maybe he decided he liked being human instead of whatever it is that you or these Exousiai characters think we ought to become that would be so much better for us than what we’ve already got. It makes a whole lot more sense to be wary of strangers bearing gifts than it does to grovel at their feet just because they’ve handed us a few pretty toys and told us they have our best interests at heart. I don’t know about you, but I like being human.”
Amara’s expression grew thoughtful. “But what if he is right, John? If the Exousiai do exist, and if they’re offering these gifts to us, why shouldn’t we share in what we’re becoming? Isn’t this what our whole history has pointed toward? Transcending our human limitations has been our self-proclaimed destiny since we figured out the wheel and the stone axe! We have a chance for the first time to take a premeditated evolutionary leap. Not as victims of a random mutation, but to actually re-make ourselves from a design we choose, to forge our own destiny. There are so many possibilities.”
“And there are no guarantees that any of the possibilities we’d select would be a good thing,” he countered. “We can’t even design our communities to accommodate changes in technology, social trends or economic shifts. We don’t have the kind of foresight it would take to responsibly alter something as complex as the course of human development. Just look at Sonali Real, for God’s sake! Do you really want to turn over our future to the same people who gave that to us?”
“So you’d rather continue to have wars, random violence, jealousy and hatred, all the ongoing symptoms of our personal and corporate disconnection because that’s the way we’ve always progressed?” Amara asked in quiet supplication. “The gift of the Exousiai is the opportunity to be proactive rather than reactive to the events that shape our experience. You act as though you want Sonali Real, as though you’d rather have natural and broken than than new and better just because the change is so different.”
“I’m not saying that,” Dorian said. He didn’t understand why they were arguing about this now. “I’m saying that I don’t trust this notion of some sudden transformation into divinity that will let us just snap our fingers and make all of our problems go away. We’re not equipped to handle that sort of existence. We’re not made for it. It’s too easy an answer, too neat, and I’m suspicious of the myth of progress that seems to permeate zap, nano-assembly, even the Strand–everything the Helpers have supposedly given us.” Dorian jabbed his thumb at Raville. “He says that they’ve given these things to us to prepare us for some glorious appearing. I say that every time they’ve given us something and changed the way we interact with or understand the universe, they’ve unilaterally altered our future by tampering with our natural solution set. They’ve made us more likely the select the outcome they’ve scripted, because that’s the nature of knowledge. Every new piece of information we acquire kills an old way of understanding. Every potential that is actualized snuffs out other potentials that will never be realized and changes the landscape of what we believe is possible, probable or even desirable. That scares me. It feels wrong. It feels like they’re manipulating us.”
Amara furrowed her brow. “You’d throw away humanity’s future because it feels wrong?”
“I’m trying to look at the future objectively rather than confusing opposable thumbs with manifest destiny,” Dorian answered. “The truth is that no matter how fancy our gadgets become or how disconnected we try to imagine we are from meat, from embodiment, we’re still just naked apes playing with increasingly complex sticks who remain inevitably confused by the fact that the world inside our skulls doesn’t match the one outside of it. That’s where we are as humans. That’s our experience, and there’s no guarantee of imminent becoming implied in it; it just is. But that struggle between what we are and what we yearn towards also makes us human, and any fantasy world that denies that reality isn’t healthy. It’s giving answers without having to show your work.”
“Perhaps that was true in the past,” Raville allowed, “but we’re talking about the opportunity to change that, to actually take control of our development, to ascend to heights greater than those to which our biology has limited us.”
“But change it into what?” Dorian insisted. “You say they’re giving us control of our evolution. I say they’re distracting us with goodies so they can control what we become and when we become it. Our ideas of beneficial change and theirs may be completely different when it gets right down to it, and until I know exactly what their agenda is, I’m not particularly interested in jumping on their bandwagon.”
Raville raised his hand and the sunlight returned along with the illusions of the fire’s warmth, the solid furnishings and the seemingly permanent stone walls. He returned to his chair by the fire. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Maybe we are never going to be anything but exalted apes. Maybe that’s all we’re supposed to be. I, for one, would like to believe otherwise. But what we want to believe changes nothing. The Exousiai exist. I have touched the infinite. I have communed with them. We may very well reject their offer of godhood and continue to toil both at our own pace and in whatever existential directions we desire. They will allow us to do so unmolested, I have no doubt. They may be lonely, but they are not desperate.” Raville’s tone grew hard and determined. “What they will not countenance is war. If Raville attacks them unwarned and unprovoked, if he is allowed to carry out this great evil that he has undertaken, they will come against us with such raging fire that they will scorch the heavens, and if that does not assuage their wrath, they will come again and again until their lust for our blood is sated, or until they have razed the very foundations of human existence. They will exterminate our kind from the universe. I cannot imagine that even you, Mr. Dorian, would wish for such a thing.”
Amara straightened in her seat. “But what can we do, Michael? We don’t have any means of countering someone as powerful as Michael Raville, let alone several thousand Marines.”
Dorian stared at her in horror. “You actually believe him?”
“I do. I want to.”
Raville smiled. “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ve already made provision for that which you lack.” He opened his hand, once again revealing the shimmering orb. “Take this. It is the quae-ha-distra, precious gift of the Exousiai. It will lead you to the knowledge of how we may be saved.”
Dorian leapt to his feet and positioned himself between Amara and Raville’s outstretched hand. “I warned you about this, Amara. Don’t touch it.”
Raville only laughed. “Believe me, Mr. Dorian, this is not the way I would have chosen if other paths had been opened to me, and you certainly would not be my preferred tool for humanity’s salvation. But perhaps you would rather negotiate, yes? Rather than grubbying your own hands with this task, you could simply give me access to the Strand. I could be out of your hair in the blink of an eye and so pass information along to people who would actually be of use to me.”
Dorian growled. “That isn’t going to happen.”
“Then we’re at an impasse. Either you allow me to access the resources I require, or Ms. Cain accepts the orb. There are no other options.”
“Sure there are. We leave. I pull the plug on this foam. Neither one of us burns any more brain cells worrying about this. That’s a more than attractive alternative.”
Dorian’s p2p message system dinged in his ear. Amara whispered to him on the private channel.
/&OpenSess
<I think we should help him, John. I think he’s telling the truth.>
<I have no doubt that he believes he’s telling the truth. I also have no doubt that he’s completely disconnected from objective reality.>
<But what can it hurt to at least see what’s inside the orb? We could take a look and investigate his claims; see for ourselves if there’s any merit to them.>
/&:sigh: <I know you want this to be true, Amara. I understand how this fairy tale could hold some appeal, but you’ve got to open your eyes here. What do you think that orb is? Do you really believe it’s some sort of alien artifact? It’s not. It’s a representation, a render just like he is, and more likely than not, it’s some sort of viral plug. He’ll use it to tap into your interface, shred your cortical matrix and open the window into the Strand that he knows I won’t give him. He said so himself: we’re makeshift allies. He doesn’t want us. We’re just the best tools he can get his hands on at the moment.>
<But what if he isn’t crazy? What if he’s right.>
<Okay, say he’s right. Just as you pointed out: what are we going to accomplish against five thousand Marines?>
<The Marines won’t reach Phi Sophia for six months.> /&whisper <I’m not suggesting we do anything rash, John. Just that we take the orb and do some investigating on our own. We’ve got time, and if there’s something creepy going on, we can put Raville in contact with the proper authorities.>
<It’s a bad idea, Amara. Whatever is going on here–if anything is going on here–it’s between Raville and himself. Certainly not any business of ours.>
<For the kind of hope he’s talking about, it’s a chance I’m willing to take.>
<Wait just a sec->
/&Sysnote: Broken Connex
/&AutoTerm: EndSess
She must have given Raville some signal that Dorian did not see while his attention was focused on their internal messaging. Maybe she had even been running a sideline p2p session with him all along. How she had done it didn’t really matter. What Dorian observed was Raville vanishing from one instant to the next leaving behind an empty chair and a taunting Cheshire grin. In the time it took him to turn himself around to attempt to protect her, Raville had already appeared at Amara’s side. Too late, Dorian lunged at them. He glimpsed the physicist placing his palm against her breast. He saw, or imagined he saw, the cut open there, deep and black like the maw of a shark, just as Raville pressed the orb into her. Amara cried out, a long, keening wail, and her body went rigid.
Raville flashed out of existence again before Dorian could get his hands on him.
He appeared on the other side of the hall at the entrance to far hallway, ready to flee in case Dorian should give chase. But Dorian hardly took account of him. He rushed to Amara’s side and caught her as she fell forward out of her seat. He cradled her head on his arm and set her down gently upon the flagstones. She lay completely still, her eyes open and staring, the pupils tiny black holes. Her chest rose and fell in small hitches; her breath came out in painful gasps. She was pale as marble, lifeless as stone.
“What did you to do her?” Dorian demanded.
But he didn’t wait for Raville to answer. He uncached a dozen antiviral scripts, sorted them by indication and symptom set. They flickered through his hands as syringes, inoculation guns, silver scalpels as sharp as razors. Too late, he remembered that he had no way to deliver them. They were off the Strand, and the narrow bandwidth of the p2p pinhole wouldn’t be sufficient for any significant antiviral transfer.
“I haven’t harmed her,” Raville called out. Even as he spoke, her breathing eased and color slowly began to seep back into her cheeks. “She’s in no danger. It just takes a moment for her array’s firmware operating system to adapt to the code matrix. It’s a configuration pause, that’s all, much worse in render than in actuality. Just leave her alone, and she’ll be fine.”
Dorian scoured her features for signs he wouldn’t have been able to interpret even if he did detect them. He needed to see the code that underlay her virtual image to undertand what Raville had done, what poison was contained in the orb package. But off the Strand and contained in their own virtual shells, all he had was the uncertain interface of her render to tell him what was going on. And it looked as though it was deeply contemplating dissolution. His mind buzzed with the catalogue of all the diagnostic tools at his disposal, and his thoughts scattered down rabbit holes of problem solving: how he would open her up, how he would extract this thing from her matrix before it burned anything up, all the things he could do to save her.
But it was pointless here and now. He was powerless until he could get her out of this frozen foam and into a true interactive environment. And he couldn’t get her out of the locked node without leaving her in order to dump the session connections from the admin panel. He wasn’t about to do that, to leave her at Raville’s mercy. Until she was sufficiently self-cognizant to flash herself out of geek and get herself into a Strand session where he could access her core, she was closed to him.
He didn’t have any help to offer. Not here, not like this.
Without taking his eyes off of her, he barked at Raville. “What is it doing? I warn you: tell me step by step so I can back it out, or you’ll pay.”
“It is the quae-ha-distra. She has nothing to fear.”
“No, it isn’t,” Dorian growled back. “It’s code. It is a hostile application feasting on her foam matrix. It isn’t real.”
“Of course it’s real,” Raville said with exasperating calm. “Anything the human mind accepts as reality is reality. We define reality by what we encompass. We build it from the raw material of our desires. There is no difference between the Strand and the world, the foam and the world, except the difference you make for yourself. Her belief is the only thing that enables the orb to work.”
Amara unleashed a sharp, hacking cough that twisted her in Dorian’s arms. He struggled with her for a few moments, then let her go. She curled up on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head turned away from him. She made a retching sound deep in her throat, and her jaws opened reflexively as though she was going to vomit. When the spasms had passed, and she lay still with her eyes closed, but her chest rising and falling in a regular, unstrained rhythm.
In a small voice, she said, “I’m fine, John. I’m…really. Okay.”
Dorian crouched on his knees above her, his hands anchored on his thighs, and exhaled his relief. He cast a baleful glare at Raville but said nothing as Amara gingerly pushed herself first to a sitting position, then levered against the sofa and coffee table, and climbed unsteadily to her feet.
“My hands are numb,” she said.
“It will pass,” Raville answered her. “Perhaps a touch of dizziness, some blurred vision, nausea. Session variables that will remain here after you leave. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Amara took a deep breath, carefully it seemed to Dorian, as though she feared even the act of breathing would upset her fragile balance. When she did falter, he sprang to her side to catch her. She clung to his arm for support and allowed him to ease her back onto the sofa.
“I’m okay,” she said again, but her grip on his arm remained fierce, frightened. “I just need a second to clear my head.”
She patted his hand to reassure him, then began to rub her temples with her fingertips.
Small circles, Dorian thought. Happy circles.
“I’m going to kill you,” he said to Raville.
Amara froze, stiff and sudden. “I can hear…singing?”
“Yes, the voices of the Helpers calling out to you,” Raville said, clearly pleased.
“And I feel tingly.” Dorian could feel her trembling against him. She flexed her fingers over and over, as though she was testing their function. “It’s strange. It tickles.”
Raville eased tentatively across the hall. “What can you see, my dear?”
“Lights? No. Forms. Shapes of some kind?”
Dorian saw nothing, heard nothing, but he continued to watch Amara. Her brow furrowed with concentration. She squinted in the direction of the fire, but her pupils did not focus. They scanned the wall from side to side like spotlights searching out a hostile aircraft. Whatever it was she could see occupied no world that Dorian was a part of.
“The Exousiai,” Raville assured her. “Go to them, if you can. Or call out to them.”
“They’re coming.”
“Yes.”
Amara’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They’re—it’s–so…huge.”
A shiver rippled through her body. Dorian said, “Amara?”
“I see them!” she cried. “Oh, John, I see them! I–”
She swung her head toward him, and she threw her arms wide, her hands spread as wide as her fingers could manage. She gripped his shoulders and squeezed. The intensity of the render interface translated as a sensation of pain. “They’re coming to me, John! They’re–”
There were lights in her eyes, as bright and naked as newborn stars. Dorian pressed his hands against the sides of her face, tried to make her focus on him.
“Amara!”
She uttered a single, piercing scream, then popped out of existence. Only the echo of her voice remained, reverberating off the virtual stone walls. Dorian clutched at the empty space where she had been.
He lurched to his feet, then wheeled to face Raville and snarled. “What just happened? Where did she go?”
“Do not fear, Mr. Dorian. She’s well enough.”
“Well—What kind of answer is that? Well enough!”
Ignoring Dorian’s roar of outrage, Raville clasped his hands behind his back and made his way back to the alcove. He walked ponderously, gazing at the floor, his chin lowered almost to his chest. When he reached his chair, he fell into the seat and propped his feet on the table. He looked physically exhausted. “I’ve expelled her from the environment with a mental soporific to ease her transition.”
“What are you talking about?”
Raville waved his hands lazily. “A gradual, guided slide back to normal cognition. I don’t know what you call them now.”
“A synaptic bridge,” Dorian said, grunting. He willed himself to relax. It was something, at least, an indication that there was something else behind his madness than pure malice.
“Amara is fine for the moment. I want you to believe that. The sequence by which the orb must be integrated into human consciousness is admittedly harsh, I’ll grant you. It is uncomfortable to have one’s perception of reality and the structures that underpin it turned completely upside down. Some existential dissonance is to be expected, and in a purely virtual environment, that dissonance will manifest as apparently physical discomfort. But I wouldn’t ever do anything intentionally to harm her. She’ll be out for a bit while she correlates this event in a meaningful way, but she’ll emerge essentially whole.”
“Essentially.”
Raville grimaced. “You must trust me. You said yourself that her experience wasn’t real, as you define it. I suppose there is a grain of truth in that. The Exousiai she encountered were a simulated event object, as near as I could come to the actual thing with my clumsy skills. The copy of a copy, as it were, or an interpretation of the ineffable, inherently lacking the original’s particular grace. She was awed, but not overwhelmed. There’s a significant difference.”
Raville looked toward the fire and did not speak for a time. He looked increasingly drawn and weary, and Dorian had to remind himself that the construct was not real. This render was for his benefit. Finally, the package said, “Besides, this is as much your fault as it is mine. Your arrogant refusal to even listen to what I had to say put her in a position where she felt like she had to do something drastic.”
“I’m not even going to respond to that.”
“That’s fine. It’s really beside the point. The actual point, however, is that she has, in fact, done something drastic that I did not originally intend for her to do alone, nor can she perform the task set before her by herself. As much as I like sweet Amara, you and I both know that she doesn’t have the training or the hardware to make sense of the code with which I’ve infected her.”
Dread tightened Dorian’s belly. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means, my friend, that your involvement has been co-opted with or without your consent. I’ve said that I don’t intend to harm her, but the bottom line is that whether or not she comes to harm is really dependent upon you.”
Somehow, he hadn’t expected anything less. “Go on.”
“Even as we speak, the quae-ha-distra has begun to execute a sophisticated load mapping of a highly secure proprietary foam target whose address has been hard coded into the orb application itself. This procedure will place her at considerable risk mentally, physically and perhaps legally if her intrusion is detected.”
Dorian closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Raville had plugged Amara unprepared into a hostile environment running any number of barrier defense scripts. That wasn’t just cruel as he reckoned such things, it was evil.
“Whose?”
Raville smiled weakly. “Mine, of course.”
For some stupid reason, this made perfect sense to Dorian. “What could you possibly have been thinking in sending her in there by herself?”
“I told you, my boy, this is not the way I had envisioned events unfolding at all. I had hoped to enlist your support without these strong arm tactics and such unnecessary drama. You could have protected her, at least to some extent, from the inherent risks of such a task. Nevertheless, part of living—even in this truncated existence—is adapting to circumstances. My adaptation was to place you firmly between the proverbial rock and its related hard place.”
“Stop pontificating and just tell me what you’ve done to her.”
Raville sighed as though Dorian’s inability to understand pained him. “I have made her my spider to obtain the information that I require to stop my better half from bringing about the end of days. Unconscionable, I know, but someone had to do it, and with my unique assistance and your skill set to shield her, she stands as good a chance of getting away with it as any. The orb itself will protect her from immediate harm–it has been keyed to the security of the foam it will be extracting–but it is a perilous environment. Difficult to integrate consciously. The foam definition that is being loaded into and connexed with Amara’s array is for an environment that is not strictly human foam in any way we understand the word. It is very nearly something else entirely, a gift from the Exousiai that accompanied the true quae-ha-distra when it was given to me. This specially configured dataverse serves as a channel through which the Exousiai may interact with its human bearer, even in our naturally degraded state. It is a place where many things can exist that are not possible with our understanding of quantum foam. A magical land. Think of it rather as an intermediary space, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. It acts as a translation device between Exousian purity and human frailty, being both less than they are, but more than us. The orb Amara now possesses opens access to this theoretical space between their world and ours. It is a massive, frightening, bewildering place that she has been allowed to enter. She will require some assistance to extricate herself safely.”
“Oh, that’s much better than just giving her some brain-scraping crud,” Dorian spat. He felt a growing urge to break something, starting with Michael Raville. “Now tell me how to get her out of it.”
But Raville held up a hand to stop him. “There’s more that you must understand. The problem, as you might already have guessed, is that though I call it mine, I am not the sole consumer of this particular foam. In fact, I have not been any sort of consumer of it since I left Oak Ridge, and even then my access was passive, a mechanism for transmitting the data I uncovered back to my actual self without the danger of trying to secret it across their secure metwork. True immersive access, full access, requires the mediation of the Strand, you see.” There was a note of longing in Raville’s voice, an expression of deep and hungering loss. “That was one of the things I surrendered when I accepted this incarnation. Its control has passed into the hands of my actual self alone. But the moment the quae-ha-distra entered with Amara into a live Strand environment, it began extracting and synchronizing certain key data representations from that specially configured foam environment to a more readily accessible sector appendant to Amara’s personal foam. It is attempting to fulfill its potential, to become what it wants to be, which is nothing less than a direct conduit between the I and Thou, man and god. It will enable her to enter that Holy of Holies and commune with the divine.”
“You mean it could make her as crazy as you?”
Raville did not rise to the insult. “The foam is perilous, but to some extent only immediately and fleetingly so. The real danger is Raville himself if he determines who it is that has breached his defenses. You must find Amara within the storm she has entered, extract her from it, and then hide all evidence of her intrusion. Raville cannot know that she was ever there, cannot even learn her name, or she is doomed.”
“How long will the orb’s security keys be able to protect her before that ruse breaks down?”
“The key synch protects her only from the foam’s automated defenses. Those are not the problem. My actual self believes that as the bearer of the quae-ha-distra no one can touch the sacred foam but himself. Thus, he no doubt became aware that his foam was being breached in the instant the load mapping began. Any external incursion would alert him.”
“But he’ll think it’s you,” Dorian said hopefully. “You’re the only one who could have knowledge that the foam itself existed, let alone possess the access key, other than him.”
Raville shrugged. “That may be true, and it may distract him for a time, though I would not be surprised if he has forgotten that I even exist. He certainly doesn’t expect that I have retained consciousness outside of Oak Ridge, and on that basis, he would rightly understand any attempt by my profile to enter the sacred foam as an attack. He will be aware at first only that his foam repository has been accessed. He won’t particularly care who it is, I think, only that the intruder be stopped from digging too deeply and uncovering his secret heart. That is our window of opportunity, Mr. Dorian, the time it takes him to collect his wits. Because once he has them, I can assure you that it won’t take him long to disassemble the orb application’s logic to get at the transmitting array’s logfile and trace Amara’s originating id. I would be disappointed if it took him more than a few minutes. He wrote the code, after all.”
“And knowing this, you still gave it to her. You still let her go into danger.” Dorian thought once more about shoving his fist down Raville’s throat, but it wouldn’t have done any good. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I did what had to be done to obtain the information that we require to save our species from destruction. I shouldn’t have to defend myself to you. You’d have done the same if the stakes were high enough.”
“I would have at least warned her about what she was getting herself into.”
“No, you would have talked her out of it, or failing that, you would have followed her inside to protect her, which happens to be the same decision placed before you now. Let us establish that I am a very bad man who uses poor, unsuspecting people for his own gain and move on, shall we?”
Dorian shook his head. “What’s inside this foam that’s so important?”
“Everything I have ever known about the Exousiai, about zap, about the true and secret nature of the universe itself. “
“Including the reasons why you’re trying to destroy them now?”
“Such is my hope. You can see why the living Raville will be very unhappy that Amara has trespassed in his private sanctuary. It is for us a sublime place, a spiritual haven and a storehouse for all of our private thoughts. If there is a way to stop him, the knowledge of his weakness will be there. That is why he will defend his foam so zealously. You can also imagine, I suppose, how you would respond if someone had invaded your personal, proprietary data environment?”
“I don’t have to imagine, remember?” Dorian snapped.
But that didn’t stop him from doing so, and worse, from envisioning the sort of cortical damage Amara would sustain if she was still connected to Raville’s rogue foam when he went after her. Raville probably had a dizzying variety of cutters, virals and wet-targetting malware apps at his disposal. Not shelf-product scripts either, but the sort of elite homebrewed or private contract poisons that never made the newswire because they were deployed only against heavily fortified conglom or government targets and the victims wouldn’t dare talk about it for fear of losing credibility. “I hate you. Have I said that yet?”
“How you may feel about me is immaterial. The only question that remains is what you plan to do next. Will you save your friend, or will you let her die? Will you aid me, or will you try to walk away and doom us all? What will you do?”
“What I intend to do is burn this place to the ground, and you with it,” Dorian said flatly. “But later, after this thing is over. You and I will settle up accounts, though. Make no mistake.”
A sardonic smile crossed Raville’s lips. “Be assured that I both hear and believe you, Dorian. I would caution you not to be too hasty with your threats, however. You might find that I may still be of some use to you in the future.”
“Not likely,” Dorian muttered, but without any real force of conviction. It would be an argument for another time. He checked his system clock. Amara had been gone for almost eight minutes.
Sighing, he resumed his seat. “Tell me everything you know about this application you’ve set loose inside my friend.”
What other choice did he have?
As if he relished driving Dorian insane, Raville answered, “I’ll have to just hit the highlights. You’ve wasted so much time that we don’t have much to spare.”
May 1, 2008 at 4:54 am
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