Chapter 79 - The Signal from the Deep
Hannah was not a victim. She never had been.
"You were running the accounts," I said, stepping closer, seeing the cold, razor-sharp intelligence behind her pale blue eyes. "The crying spells when the rent was due. The hysterical calls at midnight when I was studying for my accounting certifications. You weren't having panic attacks. You were timing my responses."
"I needed to know your stress thresholds," Hannah purred, the wires on her temples twitching as the CRT monitors behind her cascaded with lines of binary code. "The bioceramic key in your ribs only synchronizes when your pulse hits one hundred and forty beats per minute under extreme fight-or-flight conditions. Mother and Father couldn't just cut it out of you; the tissue integration required twenty-five years of emotional tempering."
"The birthday party," I whispered, the memory of that cold, rainy Tuesday night in October slicing through me. The cheap cake on the counter. The way my mother had thrown my coat at me and told me Hannah needed an emergency MRI, canceling the only dinner I had asked for in five years.
"That was the final calibration," Eleanor said, stepping behind me, the cold barrel of the Colt .45 pressing against the base of my skull. "We needed to see if you would break or if you would harden. When you walked out—when you left that key on the pillow with that insolent little smile—we knew the core was ready. You had decoupled from your humanity."
"You're wrong about one thing, Mother," I whispered.
"Oh? And what is that?"
"I didn't decouple from my humanity," I said, my voice dropping to a subterranean growl. "I decoupled from *you*."
With a sudden, violent twist of my hips, I drove my elbow backward into Eleanor's throat. Cartilage crunched beneath the blow. The gun went off with a deafening roar in the confined space, the bullet ricocheting off the titanium deck plates.
May you like
Eleanor stumbled back, choking, clutching her crushed windpipe.
Hannah shrieked from the chair, her hands flying over the command console, attempting to trigger the manual override. "Mother! Kill her! The uplink is cycling! The trench array is hot!"
