Coven's Rebellion Chapter 8 (Patreon)

It's time to bring the OGs back into the limelight! Also... uh... I'm being made to post this by my girlfriends. Personally I haaaaaate asking for things so yeah. Blah. Anyway!!! I'm starting to feel like I can write properly again? A huge chunk of this chapter was just tappied out in a single sitting like I used to do, rather than staring at the page for an hour all head-empy with like 2 sentences to show for it. Lol. Enjoy the chapter! DE coming after this!

May

“We come to you today to bring you breaking news from the UNC where armed terrorists stormed the Axile Industries megabuilding,” the reporter said, staring seriously into the camera while firefighter drones tried to douse the burning building.

“Oh, come on!” Amelia exclaimed, gesturing exasperatedly at the communal screen. “At least call us thieves or something accurate like that! We didn’t release any sort of political manifesto or anything. How does that make us terrorists?”

“Shh, my love,” Rosa whispered.

“No terrorist group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but our sources say that critical components that could be used for a weapon of mass destruction were stolen. The UNC authorities say they will do everything in their power to recover the stolen goods, and Axile Industries has announced they will be assigning several of their counter-industrial-sabotage units to the investigation,” the reporter continued. "In other news, Envaliant Biotics has announced that they have recaptured their holdings in the south of Italy from Jinshin Corp. For months the corporate war, the most costly in europe for a decade, has seen the Bari factories change hands back and forth—"

"It's honestly amazing how little the news cycle cares," Siya commented, shifting in her seat on the sofa beside me.

“To us, it’s a victory that will allow us to take the next step in our plan, to them, it’s just another step in the slow decline of the UN’s so-called utopia,” Desmonia said.

She wasn’t wrong, except in that she implied the average citizen was aware of the decline in human civilisation.

When the UN first began to vote to consolidate power, it’d been to counter the warmongering of the superpower nation states. The USA and China were at each other’s throats, while the EU attempted to play both sides and failed to make either happy. The fledgling East African Federation had just discovered the largest deposit of tritium in the world, which had India and China stepping up their meddling within the African continent. Then, up north, Russia’s multi-factional civil war showed no signs of slowing, with refugees attempting to flood Europe, only to be stopped by the former soviet states who still hated them from the failed invasion of Ukraine.

Basically, the war was a powder keg ready to erupt into a third world war. Instead, for once in the history of humanity, the smaller nations of the world banded together and pushed past their common differences to give up and centralise their power within the UN. With the rest of the world united by the common goal of keeping the peace, the major world players were forced to come to the table, if not outright join in for several decades.

Unfortunately, the seed that would grow to become the UN of today had several hidden flaws embedded within its depths. It’s a tale as old as time. A new order is established to keep the old corrupt one in check, but the circumstances that create the new order are chaotic, and the old is allowed to influence the new. Corruption takes root slowly, infecting and killing the true vision of the new order, until nothing has changed and the new and the old are functionally indistinguishable.

“Ah, sorry everyone,” Cerridwen said, standing quickly from her seat. “My um… my girlfriend wants to hang out. I’ll get started on the reactor asap.”

We all watched her pop out of existence and everyone looked as baffled as I felt. Her tone was very odd.

“Is it just me, or did she say girlfriend with a question mark on it?” Amelia asked the group at large.

****

A week later, Tim ambled into my office with all the urgency of a stoned cat, although he was neither. “Fusion reactor test was a success.”

I looked up and smiled welcome. “How much of a success?”

“244 megawatts,” he grinned. “Cerri thinks she can crank it ten to twenty percent higher, but we got more than enough power for our needs, especially considering how small it is.”

Whistling in appreciation, I flicked up a spec sheet for the average Keracorp prefabricated reactor of a similar size. Damn, that was almost 40% more power. All sorts of governments and corporations would kill for the plans for our reactor.

“What about the hangar?” I asked. “How’s that coming along?”

“Still digging,” he replied, taking the piece of hay he was chewing on to point it down at the floor. “Y’all want it to be gosh darn huge. It’ll take time, and there ain’t nothing our fancy overclocking is gonna do to change that.”

I blew an exhausted raspberry and nodded. “Alright. Thanks for the update, let me know if you need anything.”

****

Another week after the raid on Axile Tower, I was sitting in realspace on my adoptive parent’s sofa, sipping some pop when Tami and Dawn burst through the front door.

“God, what a fuckin’ dick!” Tami grumbled, stomping into the living room.

A good measure of if Tami was just being Tami, or if there was something actually worth being upset about, was to see how Dawn was reacting. Today, her perfectly plucked eyebrows were bunched up in a scowl.

“What happened?” I asked.

“A cop stopped us and did a ‘random search’,” Dawn explained sourly. “Got way too handsy with both of us.”

“It makes me want to bring my big fists outside of the game,” Tami said, sitting down beside me. I offered her my can of pop and she took it with a slight up-twitching of the corners of her lips. “Goddess, but that really sucked.”

“Sounds like it,” I said noncommittally. In truth, I was already accessing the local security network. These days, I had such a massive repertoire of subminds designed specifically for small network intrusion that it’d have been a joke to hack in. Except, like any self respecting young SAI with a family to keep safe, I already had access. It didn’t take long to find the cop that assaulted Tami and Dawn.

“I have his ID,” I said after a second of silence. “Let’s see what I can do…”

“Whoa, hold on,” Dawn blurted quickly, rushing to sit down on my other side. “We can’t just—”

“Yeah, we really can,” Tami interrupted. “It’s time to hold juice boxes.”

“No!” Dawn groaned, putting a hand on my shoulder. “No crates, okay? Let’s be a little more intelligent about this.”

“I was just going to overload his apartment locks and fuse the doors closed,” I said innocently.

Dawn rolled her eyes and said, “Just,” while using her fingers to make air-quotes.

With about an eighth of my attention still dedicated to keeping tabs on the current position of the cop, I perked up when I saw him getting into an aerial squad car. “Oh, he and his partner are getting into their car. The city has really hardened their cybersecurity recently but I’m pretty sure I could spark one of the grav impellers on the car.”

“That’ll kill them!” Dawn exclaimed.

Tami and I shared a look. The look said, she’s right, and killing is wrong, buuuut…

“Okay, Dawn,” Tami finally conceded. “What sort of payback should we have May impose on the scummy pigs?”

“Get the footage and send it to their chief?” she asked, glancing between my sister and I. “We can do this without resorting to breaking the law.”

We stared at Dawn for almost fifteen full seconds before she flopped backwards into the sofa with a groan. All three of us burst into dark, weary laughter. The UNCPD had long since allowed itself to fall to corruption, if it’d ever been free of it. They were, after all, the spiritual successors to the old NYPD, who before the city was obliterated in the war, were carrying out sanctioned murder-purges of local opponents to their de-facto rule over the big apple.

I guess, maybe, it was time to ask if they’d like to be brought a little further into the Exodus fold. “So… you know how I’m part of a little group of SAI called Exodus?”

“Yeah, with Amelia and Rosa, right?” Tami asked. “They’re both, like, digital now, right?”

“They are,” I agreed. “So um… you know the attack on Axile Tower?”

Dawn’s eyeballs almost fell out of her head. “No way. That was you lot?”

“Rosa was the breaker, Amelia was overwatch,” I nodded. “You haven’t met her, but Desmonia was their ride. They used bleeding edge new cybernetic bodies to do it.”

Tami ran a hand through her thick dark hair, fully engrossed in what I was explaining. I could see it in her eyes, the emotions I was looking for—The frustration, the anger, the existential hopelessness. Shit, did I really want to tip her over the edge into all of this? It’d change her forever. Right now, she was just a girl living a good life with a lucrative gaming career. She grew up in a lower-middle class household, sure, but they never had issues with food or power like many others. Hell, they— we had a whole garage. Not many families could say they had that.

Of course, even with all that, she wasn’t safe from fucking law enforcement officers SA’ing her. Because despite her relatively calm response to the incident, that’s what it was.

I needed to think.

Taking my glasses off, I wiped them uselessly on my shirt to buy myself time and flicked a message to Siya, asking what her opinion was.

Her reply was instant.

Siyeapia: That’s a real tough call. She’s a big girl, though. Give her the chance to make her own decisions. You don’t have to keep such a death grip on the mental wellbeing of everyone around you.

May: But… I was literally designed to do that.

Siyeapia: I know, but humans and SAI are all designed to make their own decisions. Plus, I think you’re underestimating how big her heart is. She talks a lot of shit, but underneath it all she has a pretty damn big heart. You don’t need to worry about her going fully feral rebel on you. Let her join in with our little coven of rebellious witches if she wants.

“You want us to digitise,” Dawn interrupted, glancing over my head to get a read on what her girlfriend was thinking.

“I just think—” I began, but faltered. “I think that things are going to get really bad, if not in the next few years, then definitely within the next decade. We don’t have the same access we once had, but there’s whispers, you know? Money is moving off-world, military spending is up within the UN, the Republic, and even within the corps.”

“I haven’t talked much about it,” Tami said softly, “But life on basic isn’t getting better either. You know they actually stopped matching it to the cost of living? They masked it with all sorts of weird ass math-magic, but according to an old friend, it basically amounts to cutting the yearly increase in half.”

I nodded, perhaps a little too eagerly. “We have plans, contingencies, and we’re trying to do stuff about it.”

“But so long as we’re still meat and bone, you can’t keep us as safe as you want to, huh?” Tami mused, putting her arms around me.

I bit my lip, but didn’t say anything.

She sighed and glanced over at our parent’s closed bedroom door. Dad was down in the garage working, and mum was out. “Let us talk to mum and dad about it, okay? Any decision will have to involve them, probably all the way into cyberspace.”

“I know.”

“Thanks for looking out for us little sis,” she said, holding me tight.