At breakfast the following morning, Ember suggested letting Jacob go,

  “We have played with him for quite a while now and he has been such a good sport about it. Seems only fair.”

  Felton glanced up. “Are you kidding, he has barely been here any time at all, you only want to let him go because you fancy him…”

  Ember gave him an odd, mischievous, little look and Felton stopped in his tracks.

  “Good idea, My Lady,” he said. Utterly changing his tune.

  “Jacob,” Ember spoke, “we will let you go if you complete a quest for us.”

  “You need to find the heart of the lost love of Emanuel Roe,” she continued.

  Jacob frowned, Ember’s look and Felton’s rapid change of heart at the idea, having left him quite suspicious.

  Roe was the other supposed creator of these viral monstrosities and of the evil AI. An AI that Ember claimed was amongst other things, a worldwide spy mechanism to aid Aryan in his take-over of society. Goodness knows if that was true, if anything she said was but clearly, that machine, Monovalent, wasn’t what it seemed. When he first heard it speak candidly and it was not just giving him its usual, helpful instructions, it had been so disturbing. When it had led him to find that strange, little love note, it had sounded both mocking, mean-spirited, and chilling.

  “Follow me,” Ember said suddenly and led him to her grandiose bedroom. Lace curtains billowed and silver vases shone and the little light that tiptoed in from the window, slanted gold against the loveliest of gray stone.

  Ember handed him a picture. “Here is the fair maiden whose heart you must return to the reptilian beast,” she said.

  Jacob groaned with an utterly exasperated sigh. Another sick joke.

  “That is, you,” he stated exasperatedly.

  “No, it isn’t,” she said, seriously.

  Jacob stared because maybe, just maybe, she was right. He could see this young lady was maybe a sliver older and there was a little scar on her right hand and a few sweet, honey-coloured freckles on her nasal bridge and delicate cheeks. Ember lacked those features.

  “That love letter that talked about the end of the haven of her childhood wasn’t for his lost love, it was for me.”

  Jacob frowned; “the one about shadows and yielding to sunlight or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jacob. Please. You need to convince him, that I am not her. That it is she he loves, not me. I am just a clone made in her beauteous image. As he calls it. He is otherwise going to make me his bride. As soon as the clock ticks me towards majority, in just a year. He is quite old and deformed, like a beast. Yet If I wed him, he will free me from Aryan’s control.”

  She paused and her eyes grew sweet and soft. Lost their manic glint.

  “Aryan has programmed the wicked AI machine to kill me if I ever disobey an order, but the reptile beast is the AI’s co-creator. Aryan can use the AI which controls the virus that is part of me to flood my system with so much extra viral DNA, my body gets overwhelmed and perishes.” She quelled a trembling lip.

  “The man who looks like a reptile beast is the only one with the expertise to reprogram the machine and free me from this hell. You and I are both trapped but I am willing to set you free. Aryan won’t do the same for me. The reptile beast is devoted enough to me that he would throw away all they have achieved politically to win back my heart. Only it is not my heart he so longingly loves and recalls.” She looked upon Jacob imploringly.

  “Despite his darkest wishes we do not share a heart and will never be one soul.”

  There were tears in her eyes and she really did look just like a lost child, at that moment. Jacob felt revolted though he knew he shouldn’t, since she was just a little monster. This whole thing did seem quite sick and wrong to him all the same, though.

  “I wish I could help but I can’t imagine he is interested in what I have to say…”

  Ember wasn’t listening, instead, she was humming boredly. She then unfurled her white wings and fluttered prettily up onto the tall nightstand. “Oh, well maybe I was joking,” she said.

  Jacob was infuriated. Great, another disgusting lie. What a rotten thing to lie about: pretending you were practically a child bride. However, she soon flitted down and right out of the room and the slump in her little shoulders seemed real.

  “She tells the truth,” the metallic voice of the machine informed him. Jacob believed it.

  “Emanuel my dear creator, is quite the stalker,” the AI continued.

  “Want to see the time he tracked her down to the Wrighthouse Unit?” he asked Jacob.

  Before Jacob could answer he was shown by the machine a virtual recording of a certain day at the Wrighthouse Unit. A strange little boarding school it would seem.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Jacob could see an older woman. Wrinkling her harrowed forehead as she ticked names off a list.

  “Carrie?”

  “Here.”

  “Oliver?”

  “Here.”

  “Evan?”

  “Yes, Miss Shaya?” asked the boy, Evan, with a bland and impertinent little smile.

  “Please go fetch Alice for me; we don't want to be late,” Shaya said. Evan, who was very clearly Felton, then disappeared and didn’t return.

  Shaya with a sigh eventually followed after him. She entered a large, spacious room. stepping over Alice’s mini-V-COM and Jacob could see Evan was perched on Alice's bed.

  Alice's round-ended and delicate nose, just like Ember’s. was both small and also quite classical and was currently parked under a book with a slice of vanilla cake, a choc-chip muffin, and a bowl of chocolate mousse next to her.

  Alice appeared rather overdressed for school, in a pale-grey silk dress, strappy black sandals, and a dark navy-blue coat.

  “Come on Alice,” Shaya said, putting on a wan smile when Jacob could tell she would have liked to throttle the girl; “you know you have to go on the outings there mandatory.”

  “I would but I’m allergic to fresh air and sunshine though,” Alice said seriously.

  “No one's allergic to sunshine,” said Shaya calmly. “Now come downstairs dear.”

  “I'll come down to the foyer,” said Alice solemnly,” but I shan't go outside, or I shall become very ill.”

  “You see Shaya,” Alice continued, “I think I have developed late-onset albinism, so the sun damages my super sensitive skin. If you don't believe me just look how pale I am, see look!” She held out a lily-white hand for Shaya to inspect.

  “You don't have albinism, Alice.” said Shaya, “Because your eyes are hazel-brown, not pink, and your hair is strawberry blonde not white.”

  “Actually,” Evan chimed in, “Not all albinos have pale eyes and hair. Some have blue or even brown eyes. Look it up Miss, if you don't believe me.”

  ‘I don't need to look it up,” said Shaya sounding exasperated. “Because I’ve read Alice's medical records, and I know she's not an albino so just shut-up the both of you. Everyone else has been waiting on the bus for you two hooligans for nearly ten minutes now. So just hurry up and get on the bloody bus.”

  Under Jacob’s watching eye, they did get on the "bloody bus" and sat together at the front of the bus as far away from the other residents as possible.

  It took forever before they got to the theatre and Ambrose, who Jacob was seeing for the first time, appeared to be telling the head nurse Leila about his recent dates in a fancy French restaurant. Evan snorted out loud at this and Alice elbowed him quietly repressing her own snorts as they leapt out of the bus in a frenzied manner.

  An old lady when they reached the sidewalk was crossing the road, her frail legs trembling as she slowly but steadily walked. “I'll go help her, shall I?” Said one of the boys, Ethan, gallantly, striding toward her and saying self-importantly, “Need some help, ma'am?”

  “No thanks,” she replied quietly.

  Ethan, a rather affronted look on his face walked back over to his friends. “What a bloody, stupid bint,” he intoned. “Refusing my offer of help like that.”

  “Like what a total old… So ungrateful,” agreed one of the girls who seemed to be called Isabella.

  “Hope you fall and die and go straight to hell you old hag!” Screamed another girl, Lily, loudly, making a face at her.

  Evan turned to Alice, whispering quietly, “Oh no Lil, why don’t you do us the immense honour of dying instead, then me, Alice, and the old lady can party at your funeral.”

  “Children please stop,” Leila, a worry-browed teacher, implored.

  “Just stop that all of you.”

  “Hey, look, I think some ridiculously tall and thin old guy is following you, Leila,” said Isabella suddenly.

  “Yeah, you got yourself a secret admirer,” Ethan sneered.

  “He’s creepy…” A dark-haired, young girl called Sally murmured. “His looks remind me of the bogeyman or slender man.”

  “Or the Grim Reaper,” Annie nodded. He’s so long, and real bony and makes no sound when he moves, and I can just tell there’s something really wrong with his face. Its shape is off… For a second it seemed he had no face at all and the way he just disappeared…”

  “I don’t see anything,” Evan said meanwhile.

  They walked into the theatre and the adolescents all piled in to see different films. The majority of the boys saw an action thriller and the girls a cozy, little romantic fantasy story.

  Alice and Evan however, walked over to see a documentary/movie entitled History’s Most Notorious and Evil Rulers. As Jacob watched, they then proceeded to shout throughout the entire thing; “oh no Nero, you were doing so well killing Christians and striking blows for equality and gay marriage and gender-bending.”

  “Hitler, Hitler don’t kill yourself we love you,” our supreme overlord Monovalent says that his creator, that Emanuel guy, once remarked, “Hitler just wanted to align the entire world and make it a pristine snowfall; a hailing sea of pure white beauty”

  Jacob heard screams of Mao, Mao come back and make China great again, “and even, “You’re Russia’s greatest hero, marry me, Stalin,” shouted by Alice with a spectacular performance of real tears. They then got promptly thrown out of the theatre by an usher still stifling sniggering giggles.

  He wondered how the hell the pair ever got away with any of this, if they were supposed to be covert weapons under his full control, why didn’t Aryan threaten and stop them?

  “He was ever focused on other things and I concealed much of what they did from him and he didn’t spend much time looking into it. I diverted his attention because I honestly thought their antics were a joy to behold. Aryan has beautiful if rigid and dangerous ideals but is frightfully boring,” the voice of the AI chimed in helpfully.

  Oh, great, so someone finally made a killer AI but one with a dark sense of humour. At least it would get a good laugh as it wiped out all of humanity, Jacob thought.

  Later Jacob went to find Princess Ember and to agree to her quest just so he could get away from the castle for a while and do something, anything to escape. No matter how futile.

  He was soon transported somewhere that looked somewhat like modern-day reality. He was standing in a pretty little countryside with lush greenery and nice, regular people going about their day. He actually smiled at the sweet normalcy.

  Yet the people passed out of sight quickly and he soon found himself standing outside the door of a golden manor that looked itself, eerily like a castle. There was, he realized with a shudder, a creepy graveyard out the back. With white-mantled gravestones, half-unfurled flowers, and leering statues of crows.

  A giant creature, not human, it couldn’t possibly be, walked out the door. Sidled out gracefully. Jacob almost gave a girlish cry when he saw its height of nearly seven feet and the hard, greenish scales and that fact it seemingly had only half a face. The other side was puny, and the slitted, pale eye hung lopsided. It was the worst case of what was likely, harlequin ichthyosis he had ever seen.

  “Oh, great another virtual person,” he spoke with impressive modulation and a surprisingly lovely, deep voice that was far gentler and softer than Jacob would have expected.

  “I see Evan and Alice have decided to include me in their games yet again. Or are they calling themselves Shiver and Mist now? I always forget that they changed their names when they joined Aryan’s party because they said their old ones were too pedestrian.”

  “You can’t replace your lost love with some girl who is scarcely more than a child,” Jacob said.

  “Oh great, she is playing the victim again. How charming. Well, you can weep for the little monster if you like but frankly, my love is likely the only thing that will spare her from a death, she most dearly deserves.”

  “Don’t be disingenuous Emanuel, The Wrighthouse unit children were hardly angels and pure innocents,” a voice, that metallic AI voice of Monovalent, said. It seemed to both rise up from the ground and thunder down from above. As if it were reigning down strangely from the heavens. From a literal computer cloud.

  it was almost like it was here to help Jacob and to come to Ember’s defense. He then groaned as he was transported into yet another virtualizer. Where Shiver and Mist were again hosting their OCEMA virtual podcast.

  Mist: Today Shiver has suggested we take a peek at some of Brosy’s acted entries from back when he was completely friendless, and everyone wished agonizing death upon him much earlier in the year. The entries have been condensed somewhat as we deemed people’s reactions more significant.

  Entry one: Singing Gone Array: I apologize profusely to those who were offended by my singing classic songs from various movie tracks at the Wrighthouse concert…Though many of you seemed merely to be laughing, others claimed I ruined a masterpiece. You have threatened to beat me in regards to it well I guess it's par for the course in my life at this point.

  Reactions:

  You must die

  You are taking up precious oxygen that could be put to better use continuing life for people who don’t suck.

  You bleached us all for life with your horrible, pale poison of a performance, the most tragic thing I have ever seen in my life besides you. My eyes… it can never be unseen… I laughed at just how retarded. Can’t believe you didn’t even fall from your seat!!!!! Or better still smash your head and die. I mean a gazillion people want you dead. Take a hint and die, dancing and singing douche.

  Dear God. Ambrose seriously, you’re so fat and ugly I’m surprised my eyes aren’t bleeding. I hope you never have children, or it could start the apocalypse. There are very creative methods of suicide look into them.

  You look deformed. The ugliest person I have ever seen. His hick, trailer-trash breeding would be something of a crime against humanity, I agree.

  We were all hoping you’d fall off your seat during your performance. That’s what we were whispering about while you sang and played.

  I can’t believe he didn’t fall damn!!! And break his ankle or better yet his aborted foetus of a head. Go jump off a cliff and die slowly and painfully. To all the other Ambrose haters don’t worry even if he gets to hospital, nobody will save his sorry life.

  Seriously this V-blog is bullshit, is this an elaborate joke man. Am I being had? If not, Ambrose you really rub people the wrong way.

  Don’t underestimate how much we hate Ambrose, it’s real alright. His very existence makes us all so sick we want to kill ourselves or him just so we can get away from him and we even question a God who put him here. Die just die.

  Jacob was whisked out of the memory and felt a little dizzy but mostly he just felt sad. He could see why Ember had felt sorry for Ambrose.