Page 69 of Amethyst Flame
“How are you so okay about this?” His gaze was crazed.
“Oh, I’m not okay. I’m pretty sure I have a severe case of PTSD that I smooth over with sarcasm and treat with a heart attack’s worth of sugar.” I raised some more shake-dipped fries and stuffed them in my mouth. “What was all that megabot effects crap again?”
“It’s called a degenerative nanocular virus with electromagaleron propulsive and manipulative affect.”
I giggled. Because damn. “And in English?”
He took another bite. “Degenerativemeans that it’s slowly killing us.”
My giggles faded, but no, I’d been worried about that before. I felt fine. Better than fine, except when I was hungry. My hive was fully synergized. I was a miracle. Everyone said so.
“Nanocularmeans from nanobots.” He swallowed. “Virusbecause we are infected.”
That part was obvious.
“Electromagaleronis the term for the combination of energy the nanobots manifest.”
“That’s a made-up word,” I told him.
“Well, somebody had to name what the nanobots can do.”
“And that somebody should clearly be me.”
He snagged one of my fries, ordinarily a crime punishable by death. “Propulsiveis the part that almost killed your cat.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Manipulativemeans that we can control it…a little.”
I shrugged. “Practice makes perfect.”
“So you can? Control it?”
I backed off. Didn’t want this bozo to know too much about me. “Only a little. But I’m working on it.”
He nodded as if my correction was more in line with his experience. “What about a cure? Has your team managed to stabilize you?”
I took a deep drag from my shake straw and felt the telltale pulse of a cold headache behind my eyes. “I don’t have a stabilizing team.” Yet. Adley was putting it together. Jacob and Dane weresonot stable, and they didn’t have the megabot angle covered, although the Palm Springs data might be leading…somewhere.
“Then what are you doing at BantaMatrix?”
“Trying to learn where it’s all going. What the future will be like.” I stole a line from Adley. “My place in it.”
“She knows, then?”
Again, I hedged. “I think she suspects. I haven’t…been as careful as maybe I should’ve been.” Understatement.
“No, you haven’t.”
I gave him a thin smile. “Well, if I had, we wouldn’t be having this chat, now would we?”
“So you’re not concerned about the degenerative thing?”
Clearly, he was.
I crumpled the cheeseburger wrapper and threw it in the back of my car. Fished out another burger from the bag. “Well, ya know, the thing is…I feel okay.”
“I feel okay too, mostly. But the tests show otherwise.”
