Page 82 of Cruel Master
“Shit.” Hadrian stares at the lights, lips moving silently as he tries to translate. I’m quicker, though. I love Morse code. The pattern is jerky, the speed uneven, but I manage to pick out most of the letters. When the code starts to repeat, I get the rest. Just four words.
Hadrian still looks puzzled by the message, so I speak the words aloud. “Not me. Bad man.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hadrian
NOTME.BADMAN
The words drop like stones into my gut. Once I have them in my head, it’s easy for me to follow the repeating lights of the message. Juliet is right. I look over my shoulder, scanning the room, although there’s no chance anyone else can be in here. My skin prickles.
Juliet’s eyes meet mine. “What the hell does that mean?”
The jerky, uncertain message repeats once more, then the lights return to their usual steady state.
I close my eyes, letting the memory of the first Morse code message replay behind my eyes.
I WILL SHOW YOU FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST.
It was smooth, repeating in an even loop as if programmed to do so. This message feels different. Uneven, rushed in places and slow in others. As if someone were frantically tapping it out. And it stopped as soon as we understood it. Not a pre-recording. It’s like the person making it was responding to us.
Once I have that image in my head, it takes over. I replay the new message and can almost picture some unseen person hitting keys in a panic. Is it linked to the partial messages I’ve been receiving for days? It has to be. BAD appearing in both is too much of a coincidence.
“Ha—I mean, Master. Do you know what it means?”
Juliet sounds excited, like this is a puzzle to be solved. I can’t shake a creeping feeling of dread. “I wish I did.”
We sit in silence until Juliet voices the thought I’ve been trying to keep at bay. “Could it be Candice? It started up when we were talking about her. When you shut her down, are you sure you got everything?”
“I…” I want to say I’m certain, but how certain can I be, really? Candice is the first of her kind. “We haven’t seen any signs that she’s still active.”
“Until now.”
Juliet’s voice is flat and practical. She always cuts right to the center of a problem. Where I tend to get bogged down in the details and stuck on what I think ought to be happening, Juliet takes a utilitarian view of everything. It shouldn’t be happening, but it is, so let’s fix it.
It was one of the things that made us a great team.
Juliet’s eyes are bright and alive. “This feels like a warning, though, not a threat. And the language is childish, nothing like the video you showed me. What were Candice’s speech patterns like normally? Did she ever slip into this sort of speech if she experienced slowdown?”
For an instant, I’m confused. Why does Juliet care so much about this? It’s not her problem. But then good sense reasserts itself. I’ve kept this highly intelligent woman in a cell for weeks, with virtually nothing to challenge her mind. Of course she’slatching on to this mystery. She must be desperate to use her brain for something.
I want to see what her brilliant mind makes of this issue. I want to, but I need to be careful. She can use her intelligence—if she remembers she belongs to me.
I can remind her of that again later, though. For now, we can work through the problem together.
She’s watching me expectantly, and I snap into action. “It’s never happened. This lab is linked to a supercomputer. Slowdown isn’t a thing here.”
Juliet’s eyes widen, and she looks around my bare lab with more respect. “Really. Okay then. Well, what about the early days? Were her early speech patterns childlike? How did you train her linguistically? I’m assuming you tried to copy natural language development.”
“I did. In fact…”
The memory hits, and I fall into it. Me, feeling like an absolute lunatic, reading children’s books out loud to my computer because I wanted Candice to gain language in the right order. Most AI models are flooded with everything on the internet right away, and I had a theory that it changes the way they communicate, adding to that uncanny valley feel.
I wanted Candice to grasp language as a human does.
The big bad wolf blew the house down.
BAD MAN
