The Softwire: Betrayal on Orbis 2 by PJ Haarsma Read Free Book Online Page B

me.
    “Let’s get a little farther away first,” I said.
    “But I’m tired,” Grace complained.
    There was a lot of commotion in Core City. People were running, and an alarm wailed in the distance. It wasn’t Magna, that’s for sure. Core City was a small, crude metropolis bursting with activity. Trams loaded with aliens or the same battered crates I had seen at the spaceport raced from building to building. I walked past dingy trading chambers, but there were no toonbas for sale, no glowglobes, not a single place that looked like the Earth News Café. Instead, the shops were packed with tools and contraptions and things that could only have been used as weapons.
    I was forced to squeeze against the wall as a transport shut tle floated down the street and then up and over a building. It carried more of those battered crates. An alien was yelling at me, but all the beeping, shouting, and roaring engines made it impossible for me to hear him.
    “What’s he saying?” Max shouted.
    Across a tram channel cut into the ground, I saw a concrete platform. It was dark, and no one was around it.
    “Over there,” I said, pointing toward it.
    We scurried across the channel and huddled under the shelter.
    “Vairocina?”
    “Are you kidding me?” Switzer scoffed. “We need to keep moving. Are you gonna believe this freak after he talks to some
malf
voice in his head?”
    “Keep quiet,” Max scolded him.
    For the longest time, the Trading Council and the Keepers hadn’t believed that Vairocina was real either. They argued fiercely over her existence, pointing fingers (or whatever they had) and accusing each other of sabotaging the central computer.
    “Vairocina?” I said.
    “Yes, Johnny Turnbull.” Vairocina’s voice echoed in my head.
    “How are you?”
    “I am exactly the same as I was last time we spoke,” replied the little girl. For an eternity she had isolated herself inside some sort of computer, so it was going to take a while for her to get used to communicating with other people again.
    “Does anyone believe this dumbwire?” Switzer said, raising his arms in the air. “You’re just talking to yourself.” Switzer mocked me like he had on the
Renaissance
when he wouldn’t believe I could speak to Mother, the ship’s computer.
    “Ignore him, Vairocina. He’s as dumb as he looks,” I said.
    “Dumber,” Max added. Theodore snickered. Switzer took a step toward Theodore.
    “Do you find something funny, split-screen?” he said to Theodore, who got very quiet. I rolled my eyes. It was getting old. Sometimes I wished Theodore would stand up to the bully.
    “Maybe this will help,” Vairocina offered.
    In front of me, the air bent and distorted, pulling colors from everything around us. A form began to take shape.
    “How’s this?” Vairocina asked, now floating in the air in front me, no more than twenty centimeters tall. She was a six-year-old girl who looked a little like Ketheria, with her long brown hair, only Vairocina’s was lighter and did not move the same way. If you looked very close, you could even see little streams of computer code running under Varocina’s skin.
    Everyone circled her.
    “Wow!”
    “Amazing!”
    “See?” Max said, scrunching her face at Switzer.
    “How did you do that?” I asked Vairocina.
    “It is simple, really. I used the same program that the Trading Council members use to project their images as 3-D holograms,” Vairocina said.
    Max poked Vairocina, but her finger went right through her image.
    “I cannot manipulate solid objects as they can since I have no real physical form anymore,” Vairocina added.
    “But this works,” I told her. “I like it.”
    Everyone stared. They all knew about the computer virus that had wreaked havoc on Orbis, but they had never
seen
her before. Only I saw Vairocina when I pushed into the central computer.
    “That’s it? That’s what was causing all those problems?” Switzer said mockingly.
    “I was not the cause