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

that there will be nothing left to recover the data from.’ This was the fourth time Gonzalez had explained his reasoning, each iteration using simpler and simpler language.

Damn, she’s going to drive all of us insane sooner or later. He shook his head wearily.

‘Please, program the self-destruct,’ he said, with far more patience than he felt.

They can’t make me, Eloise thought desperately. They need me to set the instructions—without my co-operation they just can’t.

‘I won’t!’ she shouted. ‘This is my home we are talking about. It may not mean much to you, but it means everything to me! It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged, my sanctuary, my reason to live. I spent months upgrading the state-of-the-art facilities. You won’t find better VR labs or playrooms anywhere in the Alliance. And the n-suits… I just can’t!’

Her thoughts briefly hovered around her beloved grand-uncle, Jayden Chandler, the only person that ever truly understood her. Before his death in 2695, Jayden Chandler had created an absolute masterpiece of an n-suit. Almost single-handedly, he had taken the n-suits’ capabilities from merely good to so perfect that in the thirty years since his death no one had found any room for improvement. The n-suits were in fact more perfect than a human body could hope to perceive. They had opened a new era for VR adventures, and this heritage meant the world to Eloise.

In memory of her grand-uncle, she had created a little n-suit museum, carefully preserving the ones his small research team had developed. She had made a chronological display of their astounding progress. No one had ever seen it; it was all hers. A place where she could retreat, and almost feel as if her grand-uncle was still with her. A place where she found inspiration and motivation.

Her family had been involved in nano-farming and nutrition for generations. That had been her future from the day she was born. All respectable Elite families ran generational businesses, improving on the resources and riches passed on from their parents. Like the obedient child she had been, she had begun learning the trade, specialising in nano-tech for the food industry, studying physiology and nutrition with a bright and gifted mind. She had hardly known there was anything else out there that she could do. Until her eleventh birthday.

Jayden Chandler had been the youngest son of Eloise’s great-grandparents. As a young boy he had been eccentric, and as the years passed by he had got even more so. He had shown Eloise that VRPs weren’t just ready-made, pretty-looking training tools or frivolous entertainment. He had introduced her to what lay behind the pretty colours—the code.

While others saw meaningless numbers, letters and symbols in a disorganised mess, Eloise saw the most perfect way to express herself. Within months of learning the basics, she had displayed an uncanny ability to work with both code and the visual interface. Most VRPs needed multiple people working on the developmental stage. Some were best with code, others with the interface. The code was what made the VRP functional and entertaining; the visual interface was what turned it into an experience that could rival a real adventure. Eloise could work with both, showing an instinctive potential like no one else.

Now, she couldn’t just destroy her home; it would take the memories away. It would be like pushing a knife between her own ribs and twisting hard. And there were other personal reasons too, like the private VRPs she had written for herself that she kept locked in a specially constructed underfloor cupboard. There were no electronic copies of those VRPs; she kept only a single hard copy on a chip.

And Gonzalez wanted all that, her memories and who she was, to go up in flames, because there was a risk someone could break in.

‘Ms Moretti, we cannot protect your residence. We have to destroy it,’ Gonzalez argued, hoping that the silence was a sign that Eloise was seeing reason and reconsidering.

They could always send half a dozen missiles down and vaporise the whole place, but such a bold statement would only convince Wagner that they were indeed trying to hide something. They would have to devastate the extensive facilities entirely, past the nano-reinforced walls and structures, to make sure Wagner and his cronies would never recover anything. That was rather more destruction than Gonzalez wanted to indulge in. That sort of missile strike would hit the news all across the Afro-European Alliance, and the heavily laid propaganda would invariably blame the MIS because of his suspected involvement.

Gonzalez couldn’t allow the military to be undermined so foolishly. Since the end of the Freedom Wars the Armed Forces had lost their value in the eyes of the average citizen. The protection the military offered was not as visible in peacetime. Slowly, the military was becoming a drain on the economy and the average citizen got little in return on a personal level. Any blow to the military, further undermining their importance, would do too much damage.

Such a blow would also play right into the Central Police Inspectorate’s hands, painting the police as the victims who had been denied the sort of secret information the MIS had at their disposal. The information the military then used with impunity, putting citizens at risk of being injured or killed in the missile strike at the Chandler N-Suit Research Base. It would only feed the paranoia that the military was plotting and scheming to overthrow the Council and the civilian government of the Afro-European Alliance with it. A notion that had been floating around for a while.

‘You can copy all your VRPs, databases and files first. There may not be enough storage at the Roc, but we can find you a safe place for it all,’ Ingram chimed in.

‘VRPs, databases and files, is it? I know you consider me some sort of useless VR nerd, but there are things important to me that are not in the form of a code that can be copied. We are not