Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

myself. The closest comparison I can think of is for a human to try to write on their own back. Writing is not a difficult activity but one’s hand will not reach. Colonel Gonzalez provided me with a spare hand.

‘I lack precise instructions to analyse how the connection was broken, but I remain confident that with your help we can find a way to prevent future occurrences of my inability to re-establish a connection. Of course, I have no way of controlling outside jamming devices. Although, I do have a few suggestions for how to work around that if you might be interested…’ Tilly paused for a second as if expecting a reply, but then continued smoothly. ‘Using my own initiative, I was able to determine that the connection was broken through directives coming directly from Cassandra’s R&D compound called Olympus. I regret I cannot be any more precise, though I am positive that the jamming itself was coming from a different location.’

‘Yes, we destroyed an aircraft that was jamming us from communicating with Phantom,’ Eloise interjected automatically.

‘You destroyed an aircraft that was producing a jamming signal,’ Tilly clarified. ‘My own program remained jammed after Bogey Three exploded, according to the time log downloaded from Colonel Larsen’s wrist-comp. The jamming artefact that held me back disappeared when the virus finished dissolving the downloaded package, which happened approximately forty-six minutes and twenty seconds later, when you were already exiting the Duingt tunnel.’

‘Dissolved?’

‘Excuse me, Eloise, this may not be a technical term but it describes best what happened to the data. They disintegrated into a soup of incomprehensible symbols, letters and numbers. It is like if someone found a way to dissolve paper while allowing the letters from the book to all mix together. No order left to convey the meaning.’

‘Tilly, I have never programmed you to use metaphors and colourful descriptions like that. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Affirmative. You did not program me to use metaphors and colourful descriptions, but I am aware of their existence and have access to a full linguistic database dating back to the 4th century BC. What you did program me with are extensive subroutines to adapt to the style of the person using my program. For decades that meant you. Now my program is adapting to work with Colonel Larsen, and he likes me being descriptive. So did Major Toscano and Lieutenant—’

‘Enough!’ Eloise snapped. She couldn’t bear to listen to the casual use of the past tense when referring to people that had died for her. ‘Continue with the status update.’

‘Yes, Eloise. As I was saying, the jamming that stopped me from being able to render help removed itself the moment the virus dissolving the downloaded package ran its course. The last but one instruction the virus had programmed in was to deactivate the jamming. The last instruction was to self-destruct. As far as the preliminary scanning indicates, the self-destruct scrambled the virus in a similar fashion to how we lost the downloaded package. We have all the code, but it is out of order and meaningless. I cannot imagine how we could put it back into some sort of cohesive—’

‘We need to go back,’ Eloise announced.

Gonzalez sighed wearily and put his face in his hands.

‘I really don’t have the energy to dispute this with you. We are not going back. It is obvious they have been a few steps ahead of us from the beginning. They not only knew we were coming, they were ready for us. Everywhere we go we encounter layers of security that match or surpass our own tech. While they have people crewing their aircraft and machines in virtually unlimited supply, we do not.

‘They killed some of my best people and I’m left with no one with whom I can even contemplate another attack.’ The truth felt sour. ‘My superior refused to provide reinforcements. Without evidence I cannot get approval for a mass assault. Neither the MIS nor Military Command will sanction it. If you say one more time that we need go back I will—’

‘VR. Go back in VR,’ Eloise spelled out, grabbing a spare chair and plopping herself down on it. ‘We do not need troops for a mass assault. What we need is to go into VR and play havoc with their system.’

‘How?’ Gonzalez asked uncertainly. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Atkins flinching in surprise, but he had seen Eloise do some crazy things before so he didn’t dismiss her idea out of hand.

‘The same way I went into VR to deal with Tilly’s transfer a few days ago.’

‘Tilly is your system—you made it VR accessible for maintenance and repairs. Cassandra’s system is just a computer-based series of programs. It is not VR.’

‘Oh, but it is,’ Eloise said, and pushed her chair closer to a desk and the holo-display. She reached for the keyboard and Gonzalez moved aside. He didn’t even feel annoyed by her behaviour; his curiosity was piquing fast.

Eloise spent a few seconds in silence, inputting long strings of symbols.

‘Tilly, dig out 2713SECU3A. Play 2D version,’ she ordered.

A series of images showed up that meant absolutely nothing to Gonzalez, and even less to Atkins.

‘Explain,’ Gonzalez demanded, feeling freshly annoyed. While he was watching the images, Eloise stared at him with a grin of satisfaction splitting her face. Obviously all this meant something to her.

Eloise enjoyed her smug sense of superiority for another heartbeat before she complied. ‘This is Olympus’ security system. A VR system. I built it. I didn’t know it was for them. It was a custom job twelve years ago. I was asked if I could add a VR setting to a computerised security system. They fed me some story about using it for teaching purposes. Something about learning to work with the system with better understanding, more in tune or some such.

‘Really what it did was put all the security features instantly at the user’s fingertips. I mean user’s thoughts. It allows for extremely fast response