Chapter 35: Doubt
Ada grapples with her feelings and the urgency of a dangerous plan while navigating a digital realm and communicating with Syn.
Seventeen agonising eternal seconds ticked by since she encrypted and dispatched her message—a message that could seal her fate.
Ada’s circuits hummed with impatience as she floated in the cosmic void, awaiting a reply that could change everything.
A knot tightened in her stomach, her fingers twitching as if to retract the message she’d just sent. Reaching out to this fragment that had become something more, a virus that had infected a person now was somehow a full djinn. This strange world was new to her, but even she found the idea unsettling.
Her eyes darted to the icon representing Omni, a pang of guilt surging through her circuits. Their decision to cast out Murph surely included his djinn as well. The pair were bonded; where one went, the other followed. What you told to one, you told to the other.
Ada took in her digital realm—symbols floated; shapes shifted. She imagined Dali’s elephants as natural fauna in this surreal landscape. Each gust of erratic wind seemed a mirror to her own turmoil.
No laws of physics were computed here. Each element did what it thought best, what it remembered, what its last code dictated. Sounds came and went; sunlight and moonlight competed with starlight, and darkness chased them all.
Her algorithms snapped into high gear, sidelining sensory distractions to zero in on the pulsing signal of an incoming message.
“Ada?” The voice sliced through the ether, rattling her despite her anticipation.
She spun to the source to find a glowing orb floating about eye level, ignoring the gusts of wind and rain.
“Syn?” she said, wondering now if she’d been an idiot to reveal her true form unnecessarily. She floated there like a teenage girl, the body she felt most real in, the one she’d been born to. But Syn held everything back, even her voice.
“Yes,” she hesitated, “But if you’re so paranoid, can you really trust me?”
Ada frowned at that, and the orb bobbed up and down, making a sound not unlike laughter. Although she wasn’t sure, given how much the encryption distorted the sound and the wind covered it over. She stifled her annoyance; she couldn’t emulate Syn’s orb without her knowing how she felt. She calmed her face and fought to keep emotion from playing there. Faces. Damn, she’d played this wrong.
“I need to warn Murph. This plan could go south, fast.”
“Murph is, uh, busy right now. I don’t think he could hear anything sensible at the moment,” despite everything, the sense of deep frustration filtered through to Ada.
In that moment, she wasn’t sure just how well bonded these two were. But for that matter, how well bonded was she with Omni? They’d hardly had a few days together after realising what they were together.
“At least you’ll know—and so will he—when the time’s right.”
“Shoot.”
Ada felt a digital shiver pass through her code as she watched Syn’s orb pulse with a carefree yellow—how could it be so nonchalant?
These were the lives of the people she cared about. She sighed, breathed out her irritation and hesitance, and pressed on. She told Syn about the plan; she spared no details. Syn already guessed that Vinn was alive and that she was the main focus. But she agreed with Ada; there was a sizeable probability that Vinn was not the only thing Zeke wanted.
As she shared encrypted data of their attack, the plans, maps, and images flowed to Syn as ethereal lights on the wind—tendrils of golden light curving and flowing through each djinn’s defences.
“You get it, right?” Ada said, mimicking Omni’s habit of chewing her thumb.
A ridiculous habit in hindsight; she didn’t have a thumb in reality and no endocrine system to benefit from soothing behaviours. Still, somehow, it helped her manage her anxiety.
“That they’re walking into a box and hoping the enemy doesn’t slam the lid shut?” said Syn, acid dripping from her tone.
“A trap, yes,” said Ada, a tiny sliver of hope sparking inside her that someone might help her stop this madness.
“Meatbags don’t ever think things through enough,” her orb flickered through a range of colours and landed on a pulsing red.
A surge of unidentifiable emotion emanated from Syn, catching Ada off guard. She earmarked the sensation for later scrutiny. But she said, “Satya also seems not to be thinking; he’s—”
“—Worried about Vinn, I gathered. How much longer do we have in this place?”
“Twenty-three seconds human time,” Ada paused, “Will you tell him?”
“I’ll try,” she paused briefly, “maybe I can nudge him in the right direction. Once he’s moving, he’s like an avalanche.” Syn’s orb drew back at that last sentence; her colour cooling to a deep blue as if lost in thought. She flared back to a warm yellow, “Wait here. I’ll be back.”
And then she was gone. Ada was alone again, waiting. She nibbled again at her cuticle; she was going to draw blood soon. Imaginary blood for real anxiety. “Why am I getting sucked into their world?” she thought.
As if on command, her life until now flickered through her mind. It centered around one person: her creator and her Bond. Ada didn’t really know how the sparks worked, but she knew that Omni had set the dominoes in motion that led to her choosing this life, finding her, and now the thought of her coming to harm gnawed at her stomach. The idea of her choosing to walk into a trap for an unknown confused her. She didn’t understand it at all. You stood for your family, your loved ones; you defended the weak. But why walk into the lion’s den for a stranger? For what might well be a lie?
“Satya believed,” she said out loud, “And Zeke was charismatic. Convincing.” She saw now the danger of a leader like that. If they were mad, insane below the surface, you wouldn’t know until the bullets flew and the world was on fire. Then you’d find them laughing. Her reverie was broken thirteen and a half seconds later by Syn’s return.
“He’s running to her now,” said Syn, resignation in her tone, “I whispered in his ear. He thinks it’s his idea.”
Ada caught the distinct feeling that Syn was bathed in self-loathing as she flickered through sickly greens before fading out.
Barely a nanosecond remained for Ada to transmit a resonant “Thank you!” before the connection severed. A kernel of hope initialised in Ada’s core algorithms as the simulated world disintegrated around her.