this.

”
“I have no intent …”
“I know you have no intention of killing me,” she said. “I
need to know that I can count on you not to give in to human
foolishness while we are doing this run. I need you to be cold.
Logical. Calculating. Ruthless. I need you to be the kind monster
you trained me to be. Can you do that?”
A light shone in through the darkness, cutting the answer
short. A jacketed guard holding a lantern started to probe the
alcoves: patrol IC, woefully timing for a routine inspection.
She popped her parasol and squeezed tightly against Augur
underneath it. Resonance pattered like rain, drenching them in
nonsense. Everywhere it touched, their forms faded to transparency.
This close to his code, she could feel the human left in
him. The way he moved his arm around her as his configurator
switched to maximize their encryption algorithms. There was
nothing noble in the gesture, but her heart moved in a response
that was seventy-five percent flight-or-flight, and twenty-five
percent wildly inappropriate for this situation. Panicking, she
quietly chanted to herself, “I am thought. I am not my body.
My body is nothing but a shell. I am not the shell. I am not the
shell. I am …”
“Andrea. Andrea Schell. Schelly …?” Her name. Augur’s
name for her. Not the Augur who’d taught her to fight, but the
Augur who’d taught her to fear.
“Augur?” The tone was almost childlike. Weak.
“Your veil was adequate. We have not been discovered.”
She’d closed her eyes. Why’d she done that? She felt so foolish.
Closing her eyes would not stop what was coming. The
IC had not blinked or wavered. How she wished she could be
free of that humanness. As the wall behind into the faraday lab
fell away, Shell sought to find that cold certainty that she had
known as a child that would enable her to be the monster she
needed to be. Looking inside, she found it.
Being fashioned in tones of antiseptic white and grey> As the Crash cascaded through the world’s networks,
Dunkelzahn convinced Gavilan to join Gossamer
Threads. When Big D learned Gavilan helped create
the virus, he urged him to join Echo Mirage to redeem
himself. Also, in the time between the deaths of the first
team and the next thirty-two, Echo Mirage discovered
how to weaponize Psychotrope and use it as an antivirus
against the Crash Virus.
> Bull
> Enter: AI. At some point during