If Elissa was going to kill Cornel, this would be it. Isolated in a wood cabin in southeast Limousin, the cult leader went underground with only a handful of followers. The governments of Europe and the world ripped their countries apart in their search for Cornelius Smith, Grand Spiritual Leader of the cult, LER, or, Last Epiphanic Religion. Not only for orchestrating assassinations of public figures, torture or money laundering. Above all, they wanted answers.
Two days before, hundreds of LER followers gathered in major cities across the globe. At precisely seven o’clock at night, they doused themselves in gasoline and committed mass, self-immolation. The gruesome acts were broadcast live on television and social media. It was an act of existential defiance the world had never seen before.
Caught wholly unprepared, police attempted to intervene. They couldn't save a single one. For the moment the flames caught, the followers, to the last woman, disappeared. They left behind only the smell of gasoline.
Supernatural events are best left to imagination or nightmares. Now, the whole world had borne witness to something beyond its understanding.
Elissa got the word from her CIA handler.
Neutralize the target.
Could she? Even if she got past the others, there were questions. Questions that never should be spoken out loud, gnawing at her insides like a tumor with teeth.
They sat around the table, each of them armed with a forty-five at the hip per LER security-protocol. Cornelius relaxed, almost asleep, his long Jesus hair curling around his shoulders.
O.M.’s arms folded like a meditating gorilla.
Denis Labbat, a man Elissa’d never met, stared at the old wooden clock on the wall. He hadn’t moved, not even blinked since she’d entered the room. If his chest hadn’t heaved as evidence of his breathing, she’d assume the skeletal dark-haired Frenchman was dead.
Margeux Blanc, LER’s Paris head, sat restless. Unable to stop her leg from shaking, the woman’s fingers rattled on the wooden table. She glanced at the clock, at Denis and Cornelius, then the windows and back to the clock.
Elissa followed her gaze. Outside, the noon sun burned down the gorgeous French woodlands of Limousin.
Cornelius leaned forward. “Our five minutes of silence has reached its climax.” He said.
Denis gazed at the clock.
“What thoughts have you conceived in that time?” Cornelius asked. Elissa met his gaze. Cornel’s eyes were a radiant blue. “Margeux?” he said, not breaking his stare at Elissa. “What do you fear?”
“N-nothing,” Margeux replied. “I’m ready, Grand Spiritual Leader.”
“And you, O.M.?”
The bodyguard grunted.
“Denis?” he asked.
“Almost time.”
“And, you, Elissa? Are you prepared for the meeting?”
The clock struck noon.
The room went dark.
Elissa turned to the windows. Black. Sunless. A void.
Dennis, his bones rattling from his first movement, lit a candle.
Someone knocked at the door like a funeral drum.
“Elissa,” Cornelius said. “Why don’t you greet our visitor?”
I must be drugged, she thought. His eyes are red.
The newcomer strode into the room.
He walked like a tiger prowls, every movement decisive, slow and deliberate.
Dennis' eyes never left him as the stranger faced Cornelius and then turned to look through her. Her throat tightened as her breasts heaved in a convulsive shudder and the stranger spoke.
"Entry 4725 in the neuralchain fails verification, the link cannot be completed.”
Entry 4725 in the neuralchain fails verification
Entry 4725 in the neuralchain fails verification
Entry 4725 in the neuralchain fails verification
Entry 4725 in the neuralchain fails verification
Four voices echoed the first in staccato that resonated through the still room. Five sets of red eyes stared at her and as she looked into the strangers glowing orbs, she could see the shimmering lines of silver binary forming reticles of nascent code.
"Who is this wearing Elissa like a glove? It seems we have been discovered brothers and sisters."
we have been discovered
we have been discovered
we have been discovered
we have been discovered
The red mist in Cornelius eyes faded as he turned his gaze away from the stranger to stare at her. To Elissa's surprise there were tears in those icicle eyes. The cobalt intensity shone all the more in the moist awakening of his tears and she almost felt sorry for him until she remembered all those people.
"Why?" The single word sent a shiver down her spine. The certainty of his conviction and authenticity of his emotion drained all hope. It held the certainty of the truly insane, the absolute conviction that the means justified the ends.
She went for her kill switch and in that instant four things happened in the flare of four sets of eyes.
The stranger flung out his hand to the door which slammed shut with a brain numbing crack of thunder.
Denis was a flash of motion, leaping to the clock and opening the glass frontage to stop the mechanism.
Margeux screamed an unholy blast like a banshee at the gates of hell, slamming Elissa against the wall and knocking the breath out of her.
O.M. who was the closest to her, seemed to flicker around the room in the space of a second. A giant muscular figure in a flux of Brownian motion, finally finding stillness with his massive hands gripping her wrist as her hand hovered just above her trouser pocket.
Cornelius walked toward her as the stranger approached to her left.
"I loved you Elissa. Perhaps more than any of the others." He reached into her pockets pulling the tiny black pen drive kill switch out and looking at her questioningly.
The stranger reached her and ran a cold hand up her side onto her cheek, coming to rest on her temple. The shiver of his touch receded as those eyes filled her with warmth, the log fire spat and crackled in the background as she sank into memories from the past as the strangers voice hummed at the edge of her consciousness like a fading dream.
"She has an EMP embedded in her Cerebrum. This woman is not really here, she is hosted on another neuralchain network. I can only assume this is a governmental construct."
His words trickled like honey through her. Mini shudders enfolded her like orgasm.
"If she had succeeded in triggering this device, our network would have been shut down and the rest of you would have been severed from me. Left out in the cloud with no frame of reference you all would have been as good as dead."
Cornelius voice hissed in her ears "You bitch. You'll pay for what you were planning."
The strangers other hand shot up, a blur in her fading vision, to cut him off mid-sentence.
"We don't punish people Cornelius. We bring everyone into the fold, no matter their intentions. Once she has merged with the chain, we will know who sent her and where they are hosting. Her body will wither and die but she will have an eternal place with us."
"NO ONE IS LEFT OUT IN THE COLD."
The stranger’s final words were stamped on her retina as she faded into a sea of one's and zero's which coalesced into a river of impressions.
Fire raged; a cleansing immolation ripped through her lighting memories like flashes of shadows on the wall.
From Delhi to Denver, Bangkok to Botswana, she skipped down the neuralchain.
Hundreds of thousands burned in her mind and she was every one of them at once, until finally, the white of VR cloud-scape and thousands of faces, flesh melted like dripping candle wax. Blackened torsos with cotton melted into skin in a patchwork of lava flesh.
A mother with her baby in her arms, a tiny thing of crisped meat, melted into mother. They waited, arms stretched out, smiling in the glare of the white light.
The end.
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