Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

15 - Weapons of a New World

extract_7563_messagelog-hardcache112958

networkIdent:[ACCESS DENIED]

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Update?

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Confirmed. Our assets on site have made contact with the subject. She's joined the academy, believe it or not.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Repeat that?

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – They've inducted her into academy. Board vote 12-8.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Shit. How much do they know?

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Impossible to say, but we have placed an agent close at hand to follow her progress.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Good. Keep agent involvement as reportage only. No leaks and no interference at this stage. We can't afford to spook her.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Acknowledged.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Alright, keep me updated.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – There's more.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – More?

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – We have reports of more attacks in the city. Wraith attacks.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – That's impossible! Tell me our fucking assets are accounted for?

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Negative. Armoury reports 3 empty bays – assets MIA. No signs of forced entry; no incidents reported by guards on site.

SenderID || [ACCESS DENIED] – Send the Armoury Officer to my office, right now. I'm going to fire that useless bastard face to face. Then deploy all measures to find those god-damn assets before someone else gets killed!

extract_terminated

*

Two days had passed since that clandestine meeting in the bowels of AmpCore, and Piper felt more exhausted than ever. But at least she was starting to get a better understanding of exactly what she needed to do.

The introductions, the theory, it was all fine if you didn't have a big damned clock ticking right above your head. Odiye and the others skipped over all that. She got to watch, and feel the changes in the air as they operated their amplifiers right beside her.

Holly lifted half the furniture in the room and sent it dancing around them in a circle. Toran reduced one chair to a heap of molten slag, generating enough heat to send sweat running down her face. Odiye actually conjured a thin layer of mist inside the room, enough to make her hair frizz.

She wanted to try it for herself. She could feel it in those ... implants, that she could do it. Whenever someone else screwed around with the natural order of things, her bones tingled, the AmpCore grafts straining to be unleashed. Piper still had no idea how the hell she'd ended up with the damned things, but there was no sense worrying about it now. She had to use the tools she had.

Which is how she found herself skulking around outside the AmpCore tech wing in the middle of the night, alone and expecting an instructor to come and drag her back to her dorm any second.

But when soft footsteps finally did echo in her ears, she turned to find Arrow walking down the hallway towards her, their slim frame illuminated by the scrolling corp ads on either side. They glanced left and right, checking the connecting passages, but the motion was lazy and carefree, as though they were just going through the motions.