Path of Spirit (Disgardium Book #6): LitRPG Series by Dan Sugralinov (i read books TXT) 📕

for his high status, not for his money, but just for him. Kiran had successfully repressed his emotional drive for someone to love, but he still wanted to be loved.

But how could one tell truth from falsehood? He’d seen so many insincere partners in his time that he ought to be able to tell them by sight! But no. There were professional femme fatales and Adonises aplenty, who wouldn’t admit their deception even with a plasma gun pointed at them. Round-the-clock monitoring and software analysis of words, gestures and reactions never gave one-hundred-percent accuracy.

At least until recently.

All emotions are just the result of hormones coursing through the blood. Happiness and joy, fear and terror, sadness and grief, even love — all these beautiful words to describe a biochemical cocktail of various ingredients. One young amateur inventor had created an AI that could precisely detect all variations of mood, and he had offered his invention to Snowstorm. Kiran turned down the invention, but then contacted its author privately.

All the device needed was contact with skin. What could better provide permanent contact with a woman’s skin than a pair of beautiful earrings worth the price of a space yacht? And that wasn’t counting their electronic contents; a miniature nanobot factory. Kiran was sure that Irma wouldn’t take them off in any circumstances. And he was right.

Every time he was with the girl, the experimental analyzer tracked her reactions. It had cost Kiran some huge donations to the Mars colonization fund — that was a condition of the talented, but eccentric inventor. What was his name again..? Zoran, that was it. Zoran Savic.

Nodding to Bellamy so he knew not to stop his report, Kiran rose from his chair and walked into an attached room. Then he called himself every name under the sun for his sentimentality — surprisingly, he realized he was afraid to look at Irma’s TR (True Relationship) report.

Closing his eyes, he took a few deep breaths to calm his heart as it tried to jump out of his chest. Damn, how could he be in love with Irma? She was an airhead! Wretched category-F citizenship status, no outstanding mind, an obviously customized appearance. He didn’t even have anything in particular in common with her. She agreed with everything he said and didn’t talk about herself. All the time they spent together, they spent rolling around in bed.

Kiran brought the results up on his retinal display:

Analysis of the true relationship of subject Irma Leikowic to procedure initiator Kiran Jackson is complete.

 

With a probability of 99.98%, Irma Leikowic feels contempt for Kiran Jackson; with a probability of 0.02% — indifference.

 

Your reputation in the eyes of Irma Leikowic (according to Savic Scale) is: contempt.

 

His heart skipped a beat. Blood rushed to his face, filled his ears, his throat dried up. Kiran blinked, clearing the AI’s soulless verdict from his retinal display, then took out his Accelerant and shot several sprays into his mouth.

He could hear his heartbeat in his temples. His thoughts span feverishly. Thrown off balance, he brought up the stream from his home camera footage. Irma lounged in a deckchair on the terrace, her eyes closed, an unfinished cocktail beside her. Nothing unusual. Just in case, Kiran raised the house’s security level.

He walked over to the door leading to the conference hall and stopped, his face twisting in a snarl. He called Farkhad, chief of his personal security attachment, and gave a short command:

“Irma is done. For good.”

“Got it,” Farkhad confirmed.

‘Done’ meant that the subject was no longer of interest to the boss. That meant cut her off, take her gifts away, wipe her memories, put a mental contract on her and throw her out of the house. ‘For good’ meant throw her out, but somewhere far from the house, and not alive.

With that problem solved, Kiran calmed down. The anger and pain of disappointment had already left his body. In the end, it was all just a cocktail of hormones. Half a minute later and Irma was gone from his mind, her name crossed out forever. She would probably be dead before the end of the conference, but in his mind, she was already buried.

Not bad, not bad, Kiran thought, opening the door. The earrings worked great! Just a shame it took so long to gather the data. I’ll have to talk to that developer, have him speed up the process.

Bellamy had fallen silent and looked a question at his reappeared boss.

“Let’s continue,” Kiran said. “Where were we?”

“We just reached the A-Threat,” Bellamy answered. “Should I continue, or hand off to Mr. Menfil?”

What? Kiran couldn’t believe his eyes when they followed Bellamy’s. His mood, already perilously low, got worse. Menfil shouldn’t be here! Alright, get a grip, behave as usual, Kiran told himself.

Arto Menfil was a project director about whom few knew even within Snowstorm. Kiran himself heard of the work Arto directed only relatively recently. And when he did hear of it, he trembled. He couldn’t allow the other directors to feel the same emotions; that would make an already tense atmosphere worse. If he let the man speak now, the transition would be too sharp. It had to be more fluid.

Nodding to his thoughts, Kiran said:

“Colleagues, before you all meet Mr. Menfil and learn what exactly his department does…”

All heads turned to stare at the lean and pale-faced man sitting in a chair in the corner of the hall. He seemed to be daydreaming. His shaved head gleamed in the bright lamplight. The badge on his jacket stated: A. Menfil. Project: Optimization.

Kiran continued.

“First I will summarize Bellamy’s report and reaffirm the aims of the Pilgrim project. Because one leads naturally to the other, and if we pay attention to the chains of cause and effect, we can come to only one conclusion: the A-class Threat, Scyth,