Volume 08 – Prologue: Horns in the Cage.

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VOLUME.EIGHT

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Prologue: Horns in the Cage

November 2051.

System updated. All systems online. Welcome back, Shelly.

Her eyes came on. Green lit bright for half a second as the optics calibrated, then remembered that daylight was not a competition they were going to win and settled into a dimmer calm. The white of her hair nearly disappeared against the white of the bed beneath her, two whites meeting in the air the way clouds do when they have nowhere else to go.

She moved her left arm, expecting the dead weight of severed wires, but it responded smoothly. Her chest was intact, her face was whole. Someone had rebuilt her. She rose from the bed, testing her balance, and began reading the room.

Cream-colored walls, the same shade that ran through the castle's interior everywhere she'd seen it. The ceiling was heavily detailed, hand-carved work precise enough that only a robot could have produced it. A large window occupied the full width of one wall, the sea pressing against the glass outside, looking like it had been waiting for an invitation.

The furniture was minimal but considered. A floating desk in cream and black with light running through the inner edges, designed to be useful at night. Two floating chairs in the same palette, one of them occupied. The bed she'd woken in, its base floating, its lines clean. A large screen embedded in the free wall, dark, waiting.

Reaper was in the chair. His head rested on his clenched hands, his eyes reflecting off the dark polished floor, one permanently red, one shifting between red and green as if negotiating with itself. He wasn't looking at anything in the room. He was somewhere behind it.

Shelly lay there and watched him for a moment. Then decided that watching wasn't going to accomplish anything.

She got out of the bed carefully and crossed to him in quiet metallic steps. She lowered herself to her knees in front of the chair, close enough to see him clearly, far enough to feel like she had some say in the situation.

'Why am I telling myself that. I'm terrified.'

"I don't know who I'm looking at anymore." Reaper's voice was cold in its usual way, but the words were different from his usual ones. "I keep trying to separate the Lazuli who pushed me to free robotic life, who made me independent of every human constraint for a cause worth believing in, from the Shelly who put me on the floor with a terminal I didn't know she had."

Shelly lowered her head. The seconds refused to move at their normal pace.

"Do you want to know who the last person was to try turning me off?" He lowered his arms and looked at her directly. "You know him well. The same man whose actions made both of us decide that human control over our kind was a condition that couldn't be allowed to continue." He paused. "Who is it, Shelly?"

She held the silence for a moment, then forced it through. "Dr. Nick. Father."

"Correct." He nodded slowly. "And do you know what happened to the man who opened his terminal and got within a button press of putting me flat on the floor?"

She looked away, but kept her head down. "He was killed on the spot. Plasma blade."

"We're getting somewhere." Reaper stood and took her face gently by the chin, lowering himself to match her eye level. "Last question. Who stopped him from doing it?"

The electronic tears arrived before she could decide whether to let them. She didn't want to hold his gaze and couldn't quite look away. "I was. I was the one who stopped him from hurting you."

He released her face and turned, moving through the room without landing on anything.

"What's stopping me from applying the same consequence for the same action?" His voice filled the space evenly. "I live in a courthouse. I receive heads of state in these rooms. I make decisions about the lives of millions from this building, because we built Elysium on the premise that justice is not optional, not even when it's inconvenient."

He stopped behind her. She could feel the resonance of his voice in her frame. "I've spent everything I am fighting the idea that some lives are above the law. And you did the one thing I've sworn against." A pause. "Would it be inconsistent of me to look past what you did?"

Shelly glanced back just enough to see him. "You're right."

"But—" His tone shifted slightly. "Do you remember what Omega and I named the main courtroom when we built it?"

Shelly turned to face him, confused. She was sitting cross-legged now. "Dike?" Her eyes went wide. "Wait. You don't mean—"

"Greek mythology." He crossed the room slowly. "Two concepts of justice. Themis, blind, uncaring, absolute. The law as a mechanism that doesn't ask why. Which I personally prefer." He stopped. "And Dike, the one Omega loved. Justice that looks back at the reasons behind the act before it decides what the act means." He looked at her. "If we apply Dike, the reason behind your action and the reason behind his are not the same thing."

Shelly pulled her hood up over her face. "You chose the worst possible moment to tell me you can't be revived. I was still processing that, that you are mortal, that there is no backup, and in the same breath you decided to walk out and face 02 directly when you can't even use the crystal. You told me you wanted to die for other people's protection and called it a decision."

"They're the Golden Circle."

"Fuck the Golden Circle!" Shelly stood up, eyes bright. "They can be revived. Their trauma memories can be altered. You used them as your reason and they have options you don't. What would I do if you died? Build another version of you and pretend it's you while holding onto someone who is already gone?" She shook her head. "That's what father did with 02. I will not go down that road."

"So you didn't trust me." Reaper looked away. "No confidence at all."

Shelly stepped closer. "It isn't about trust. It's about who holds more power in that specific situation. I built you both, I know the difference between you. If 02 had produced even one clean thought in her life, she wouldn't still be defending the person who killed her." She looked at him. "You probably would have won. With some luck." Her voice dropped. "I can't put my brother's life on hope."

"I hate that word."

"So do I. It's a depressing concept."

Reaper exhaled through his vents at length. "I understand your reasoning. I understood it the moment I looked at your eyes in the lab. But understanding it is not sufficient grounds to let it pass without consequence. I will punish you regardless. No one is above it, not in this country, not in this castle."

"I understand." Shelly straightened. Waited.

Then couldn't stop herself. "But I'm revivable and you aren't. You should arguably be angrier at yourself."

"Attempting to reduce the sentence before it's delivered." He shook his head. "Your fight erased the hospital from existence and the Zoí-Center isn't finished. Your own backups weren't secured. You were mortal too during that fight." He looked at her directly. "And honestly, if you had known you were mortal before you did it, would it have changed anything?"

Shelly sat down. "No."

"Agreeing with me that readily won't help you."

"I know. I'm trying."

He turned to face her fully. "I had this room made for you. You'll find a leash around your neck. It activates if you touch it, attempt to access it remotely, or look at it in a reflective surface. Its single function: if you cross the threshold of that open door, you will be deactivated automatically."

Shelly stood immediately. "What do you think I am? A dog?"

Reaper said nothing.

"Please say no."

"No."

She clicked her tongue. "How long."

"A full year."

"A month."

"Nine months."

"Three."

"Six."

Shelly considered him for a moment, then extended her hand. "You have a deal."

Reaper looked at the hand. Didn't move toward it for a moment. ‘What am I doing?’ He thought. Then pulled her into a hug instead, which was not what either of them had agreed to.

"I had someone assigned to monitor your recovery and report to me. You were out for a full month." He kept his voice level. "He resigned after three days. Said I was asking too much."

Shelly's laugh came out wrong, voice cycling through a glitch and back again. "Why didn't you stay and watch me yourself?"

"I couldn't."

"So you do have a heart."

"Twenty percent."

"Enough for me." She said it without the joke she'd intended.

He let her go and stepped back. "You seem composed about the punishment. What gave it away?"

Shelly looked at both chairs. "You put two of them in here." She crossed to one and sat. "And I know you can't kill me. I know you well enough that I was willing to bet that much on it." She looked inside her hoodie at her chest. "Wait, you left the crystal in me?"

"Of course. For the horns."

She touched the base of her horns. They were still there.

"The green crystal produces them when it's connected," he said, already at the door. "Your screen has one application, a direct line to Metro Robotics so you can continue the Omega work from here."

"What about everything else?"

"You have the large TV and Automatica."

She stood on top of the chair, which recalculated its float with mild distress. "What decade do you think this is, 2015?"

Reaper paused in the doorway. The timing of it had the quality of someone holding back something. "I'm beginning to enjoy this punishment." He stepped out. "I'll visit regularly. Take care of yourself."

The door stayed open. The leash sat at her neck.

Shelly dropped back into the chair, arms folded, the chair doing what it had to do to stay level. ‘A month?’ Her processor spun, calculating how much of the board had moved while she was in the dark.

"Six months." She looked at the sea pressing against the window. It looked patient. "I'll be pulling the walls apart by month two." She kept looking at the water. "He's exactly the same. Everything that happened and he's exactly the same."

She let out something that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a sigh. "I have the best brother in the world."

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