False Idols - Published Version

Chapter 18

                  

It had been a shock to see the riots emerge so quickly and violently the previous week. Laura had believed she had the anti-Aeon protest movement well in hand. But the rabble had forgotten their place, and badly overstepped permissible bounds. It was one thing to scream angry slogans, another to take up arms. Nick had been attacked and threatened. He had fled like a dog with its tail between its legs. All in the face of natural men far his inferior.

It was a humiliation. It could never happen again. Laura would make sure that next time, the Aeons were prepared.

Nevertheless, something good may have come of the debacle. Nick's nat girlfriend, Sarah Trenton, was dead. A victim of the riots, burned so badly a DNA test was required to identify her, buried in a common grave with a hundred other victims of the New York Energy Riots.

Nick had reacted to the news by disconnecting from the ether. He was distraught. It was Laura's role to reassure him.

Since she had been a young girl, Laura knew she had a great destiny to fulfill. After she'd received the MindWave, she'd realized the implant was the instrument that would allow her to achieve that destiny, and that all other Aeons would follow her ascent.

And the other Aeons had slowly accepted her beliefs. Some were impressionable like Abril, and accepted the truth without prodding. Others like Kobus were more argumentative and prone to skepticism. Regardless, she had convinced them all to accept their elevated place in the universe by means of promises of glory, tastes of pleasure, or threats and bullying.

All except for Nick. He was the only one she'd been unable to fully convert. It was curious, because at first glance, she'd thought Nick's personality was weak. By now, she had invested more time in him than in any Aeon, and yet his relationship with Sarah was egregious evidence that he persisted in holding onto the misguided values he'd learned before becoming an Aeon.

While Nick was sometimes maddening, his independence also made him intriguing. It wasn't so much that he openly contradicted her; that only happened occasionally. More often he simply kept his own counsel. Laura knew that one day, she would be able to bring him fully over to her. It was part of her destiny.

Perhaps today would be that day. Possibly the trauma of losing his nat girlfriend would finally show Nick the foolishness of sympathizing with an inferior race.

And so Laura pulled herself out of the ether and ordered her driver to bring her from her rented residence in the upper floors of the Empire State Building to Nick's parents' flat on Fifth Avenue. She would be by Nick's side during this moment of pain. She would teach him to understand it was not a tragedy, but an escape, an event that would allow him to reach his full potential.

Her physical body was already clean and made up; she had taught her MindWave to take her through the ritual of combing her hair and applying cosmetics on Autopilot. To match her pale complexion, she donned a flowing, yet flattering, white dress, not unlike some of the ones she wore in the ether. She complemented the dress with fat pearl earrings and a matching necklace.

Her limo slowed as it steered around the debris still clogging some of the streets. During the twenty-minute car ride, she fidgeted nervously with the small electronic device she clutched in her fingers. She was uncomfortable being disconnected from her normal habitat of the ether. Discontent with being limited. Limited by her own senses, to the news broadcast on the radio, to the speed of the car. Why did it take twenty minutes to reach Nick when she should be able to reach him with a thought?

Steel-reinforced security gates were being fitted to the Lal family's building as she arrived. She strode past the workmen, through the threshold and directly to the elevator without even looking down at the squat doorman.