Nightfall by Christian Kallias

Author:Christian Kallias [Kallias, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-22T22:00:00+00:00

Four

Mission completion time: T minus 27 minutes

I realize I have no other choice. Time has run out, and the only way I can make a decision and act on it is to activate bullet-time. It will slow time to a crawl and allow me more time to make this decision. I send the mental command to my neural augment.

“Why are you activating bullet-time, Cole?” says Tanya sharply.

“I need more time to think.”

“To think? What the hell, Cole? You said you weren’t willing to use it because your ass is on the line and now you want to use it to think? What am I missing?”

“Look, we’ll talk about this later; for now concentrate on what you’re doing.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” says Tanya.

Join the fecking club.

“Radio silence until I make contact again. Confirm?”

“Whatever,” Tanya answers, clearly pissed at me.

I can’t blame her.

The countdown on the device seemingly stops at thirty-seven seconds. There are flames around me that look suspended in time. They still move but so slow it’s a tantalizing view and are a result of the multiple rockets exploding outside the shield cover provided by the overlapping drones.

I am still unable to think straight, and the injection of the cocktail of drugs allowing my brain and reflexes to be drastically augmented don’t help me at first. But, I do have more time to think now, no matter how lost and strange I feel.

I wonder if Vassiliki can talk to me in bullet-time like Tanya can. I can feel her still working to diffuse the device’s mechanism, now with improved accuracy thanks to bullet-time. I wonder how long I have. And I wish I knew whom I could trust right now. My world has been flipped upside down, and I don’t know who or what to believe at this point.

Of all the way things could have gone wrong today, this feels like the worst possible outcome since I can’t even trust myself. My heart is telling me that Vassiliki is telling the truth, and my brain is telling me I’m being used to do the terrorists’ bidding. I wonder if by the end of the day I will have an answer. I’m not sure I’ll like it either way, but it would be nice to know what the feck is going on. Because right now, I feel trapped in an LSD-infused nightmare gone very, very wrong.

I’m still here, Vassiliki says.

How?

You must at least have figured that one out, Cole. The only way I can talk to you is through a backdoor to Tanya’s programming. I once worked with you at Rewind where I designed her for you. I’m her creator, Cole. Just like you, I thought I was fighting horrible men intent on killing innocents. And while there are still some out there like Ahmed, today this is not what that is about. While you stopping Al’Hasi is important, we’re trying to get some of our freedom back. The world has been conspiring against us for as long as I can remember; our parents and their parents too.

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