Quantum Cultivation by Jace Kang (simple e reader TXT) 📕

Aya just about jumped out of her skin. How…

I’m in your mind. I can see through your eyes and hear through your ears, and even feel what you feel.

It was just like when she’d taken over androids, though their sensations were probably so much different than another living being with two eyes and ears.

And a tongue!

It was like Ai’s voice in her head, though without the lilting accent.

Who’s Ai?

How to explain her AI assistant?

Oh, an AI. Ai. How cute. I wonder if I’ll run into her in here.

Was that even possible? Well, technically, telepathy was impossible.

Yet here we are.

Indeed. Aya continued walking until they turned into a maglift.

It looked like they were on level seven, and it felt as if it were rising.  If Ryusuke’s pills were still on level twelve, maybe…

Don’t try anything by yourself.

Was that Siena’s voice? Or Aya’s own?

Definitely mine, Siena said.

They got off the maglift and turned into a hall where several Peacekeepers in dress uniforms were running about. Thankfully, Keiko wasn’t among them.

The man took her to a room with a single table and several chairs. He gestured her to one.

“Someone will be with you shortly,” he said, then closed the door.

The unadorned walls with no windows and simple furnishings suggested an interrogation room.

They hadn’t confiscated her emitter, or even bothered to check her. Would it be safe to jack in from here? No doubt there were several surveillance devices watching her, and the elevated security measures would probably keep her from being able to link into the EtherCloud without detection.

On the bright side, if she could just get to a room with a user terminal, she could jack directly into the Peacekeepers’ EtherSpace, behind its security measures.

The door slid open, revealing two male Peacekeepers in burgundy uniforms. The one with straight brown hair had a crooked nose—since that had been genetically edited out of XHumans, it was likely from an injury that hadn’t healed correctly.

The other, with a mop of curly brown hair, scrutinized her through narrow eyes as he walked over and set a holoprojector onto the table. “I’m Officer Martin,” he said, taking a seat across from her.

“And I’m Officer Kim.” Crooked Nose sat down beside him.

Definitely interrogation.

“Your hair,” Kim said, looking past his bent nose. “It’s Elestrae gold.”

“It’s not mine,” Aya said. “There’s an expert down in Minami Ward who can weave imported Elestrae hair into our own.  You ought to try it.”

Running his hand through his disorganized curls, Kim opened and closed his mouth.

At his side, Martin snorted. A menu—how amateur, Aya had a mind to hack the damn thing—appeared above the holoprojector, and he swiped his hands left and right.

“In your statement to Officer Perez, you said you and your boyfriend were attacked by this creature.” Martin drew his finger in a circle in the holoprojector’s menu.

An image of the Nue appeared.

“Just what is this?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Aya lied. “I thought it might be some escaped genetic experiment, fusing baboons, tigers, and God knows what else.”

The Peacekeepers looked at one another before Kim turned back to her. “The fugitive, Ryusuke Ishihara, was seen fleeing the scene. What is your relation to him?”

Had her viruses destroyed all photo evidence? Had the one Peacekeeper Ryusuke knocked out on the bridge gotten a good look at the rest of them? A new lie formed. “I don’t know. We were just passing through the neighborhood.”

“Despite the warnings to stay inside at night?” Martin swiped again, and the holoprojector swept to a blurry image of their group from when they saved the man from the Kappa. “Do you recognize these people?”

She shook her head. “It’s blurry.”

“Yes,” Kim said. “The image was degraded by a mysterious hack, but we were able to save this.”

Had they figured out she was the hacker? The MoD and the Peacekeepers would have had to cooperate in order to track down her identity.

Not likely.

Kim eyed her, then continued swiping his hand through the projector’s menu.  This time, the three Yin-Yang symbols Ryusuke had drawn appeared.

“These images have appeared here: dug in the Zen sand garden of Ginkakuji; inexplicably furrowed into the grounds of Pontocho Park; and finally here, drawn in blood outside of Hozoji Temple, where we just found you.  What are they?”

Aya made a show of leaning closer to get a better view. “They look like ancient symbols.” Shrugging, she turned to the Peacekeepers.

“We found you and your boyfriend’s DNA in some sludge our labs have identified as organic.”

That must’ve been the impurities they’d been scouring from their meridians with Cultivation.  As for the DNA—a swap was part of her identity swap program, so they’d be seeing Hiromi Johnson as having Aya Oyama’s DNA.  For now, they were safe.

“We were there,” she said.

“At all three sites?”

Shit.

Kim swiped the menu, going back to the degraded image. “Which brings us back to this picture. I see two heads with traces of gold hair. Don’t you, Officer Martin?”

“I sure do.” Martin stared at her, a grin forming on his lips. “Let’s start at the beginning. How do you know Ryusuke Ishihara, and who is this boyfriend of yours?”

Oh, shit.

Chapter 31:

The Purebred

A s the medics ran, guiding Kentaro’s biobed through the sterile halls of Peacekeeper Headquarters, it felt like a nostalgic homecoming…even if there was the constant worry of being recognized in his workplace.

Of course, he had nothing to worry about. None of the Peacekeepers he recognized showed any sign of knowing him—he was just like the furniture to them.  Even the medic who’d rode with him in the hover