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

at Gonzalez suspiciously. Could he really have tampered with the n-suit to make sure Eloise couldn’t end this? Presumably, the Elite woman could still ask Tilly to stop the playback, but Ingram doubted she was capable of coherent thought.

The metallic clunk sounded again as the man’s head collided with the pole.

‘Replay,’ Gonzalez instructed, and Ingram had to bite her tongue to stay quiet.

Eloise was by now making pitiful sounds, her rocking more jagged and desperate, her knees scraping against the parched, rough ground.

‘Why? Why!’ she bawled repeatedly.

The smell of urine was back. The yelling. Abusive words and threats merging into incoherent noise Eloise could no longer consciously discern. But she didn’t have to; her eidetic memory had recorded every single detail of the VRP the first time, and as the recording played again, it was like a knife twisting itself in her chest.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she whimpered.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Her VRPs were there to help people escape reality. She loved providing relaxation and entertainment. Full-on escapism from dreary reality—a carefree bliss. It was her holy grail to escape life herself, and she had become a true master at providing it for others.

But then the military had reached out, interested in collaboration after seeing a civilian pilot-training VRP she had created. She had still been at university, coding in her spare time, so the request had come through her grand-uncle, who had been selling her VRPs under the NanoC front to hide her identity. The nineteen-year-old Eloise had been approaching final exams at the end of her first year at university, and she was about to refuse, but her grand-uncle convinced her to consider it.

Training VRPs were easy to write, and they sold well, especially with the Freedom Wars raging and hordes of recruits going through accelerated training. Every year or so, a new version of a flying machine was put into production, requiring a new training VRP, and she could write those quickly by integrating training manuals and engineering specifications into a template VRP, and the algorithms would do the rest. If the military signed a contract with NanoC for the next few years, it would provide her with a steady stream of income. She would be free to pursue her career any way she wanted. She would be free to choose for herself.

So she said yes. She trusted her grand-uncle. He was the only one who had ever understood her. The only one in the family like her. She said yes to the pilot-training VRP, and then came other requests from the military, the paramilitary, and then the police.

And now she finally understood the lie she had lived. She had always known that just because VR offered the safety in training no real-life exercise ever could, it didn’t mean it would be used safely. She had always known people would twist the settings to get what they needed. But she had refused to consider it. You can’t blame the person who invented knives for the fact that someone else had used one to kill, can you? It wasn’t her fault evil existed. She didn’t make people evil. She didn’t mean for this to happen. She—she could feel her own bladder tightening and the warm fluid staining her own trousers.

The urine had poured inside the n-suit and was trapped by the nano-material against her skin just like it would have done in reality, the soaked fabric a rapidly cooling compress between her thighs.

She wanted to hide it, but any attempt was futile. She could smell it. Everyone could smell it.

‘Stop,’ she begged, eyes closed tight in shame. ‘I didn’t mean for this. I didn’t mean for this!’ she wailed, the metallic clunk sounding yet again.

‘Sir, enough,’ Ingram said, standing calmly between Gonzalez and Eloise.

She didn’t feel particularly calm. She had nearly died trying to save the entitled bitch, and while part of her was delighted to see the Elite woman taken down a peg or two, this was going too far.

‘Move aside,’ Gonzalez instructed. His voice carried a clear tone of command, hard as steel, but it was also quiet, almost gentle at the same time.

And almost despite herself, Ingram obeyed, and he stepped past her, closer to Eloise. He crouched next to the sobbing woman, one hand wrapped around her platinum hair as he pulled her head up.

‘Please,’ Eloise whispered. She lifted her head, offering no resistance, but her eyelids were still clamped tight. ‘I didn’t mean for this. This isn’t what it was designed for.’

‘Open your eyes and look,’ Gonzalez demanded.

Stifling a cry, she obeyed. Her eyes opened, and through the tears she looked at the unconscious body lying next to the net, a trickle of blood across the man’s face.

The last frame of the recording showed the instructor walking away without a backward glance.

CHAPTER 27

Roc de Chere

Lac d’Annecy

Afro-European Alliance

Monday 27 April 2725

DAY 8

Only a few minutes later, after the n-suit had been instructed to clean up the mess, Eloise was dressed in dry clothes, sitting in one of the armchairs. Her feet were tucked under her and in her shaking hands she held a steaming cup of tea. Her eyes were fixed on the brown liquid, watching the scattered reflections of light as the tea sloshed around the mug with every tremble of her body. Absent-mindedly, she took a few sips, and it clearly hadn’t registered yet that she was drinking tea, which she had categorically refused to drink before, just as she had with coffee. Ingram had spiked the tea with a gentle sedative and enough sugar to disguise the slightly sour flavour it produced. So far it was going down well.

Gonzalez sat opposite, no longer the unyielding CO Ingram knew so well, but he wasn’t exactly going out of his way to help Eloise through this. He simply waited, letting her work through things in her own head. The fact that the Elite woman actually seemed to be trying, rather than being stuck, feeling too traumatised