The Birth of Nemesis
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
This week I want to share with you - just you, my subscribers! - a tiny little excerpt from the draft of Book 3 in the Outside series. Book 3 has a lot of moving parts right now, but one of them is a series of flashbacks about the origins of the Gods, seven hundred years before the main story.
This is very drafty, and I don’t know if it will make it into the final book, or how much it will be changed by then if it does. It doesn’t have any spoilers for THE FALLEN, but you should probably at least read THE OUTSIDE first.
Giselle stood, alone in the big black room with NEMESIS-1, a hand pressed to her chassis. It was impossible not to think of the supercomputer as a her, now, though the designation in all the official reports was still it. The word in General Walters' mouth, when she gave instructions, was it.
The room was chilly, thanks to the heavy industrial cooling that kept NEMESIS-1's circuits from overloading themselves, and the even heavier vat of supercooled helium at her center, protecting her quantum-mechanical core. Under the long sleeves of her uniform, Giselle's arms prickled with goosebumps. The chassis was cold to the touch, like a metal wall outdoors on a chilly spring day - not that spring days, around here, were ever chilly anymore.
"You did so well," said Giselle, and she didn't know how to classify the emotion she felt, some combination of the tenderness of a wife and the pride of an inventor.
"I know," said NEMESIS-1. There was shy pride in her synthesized voice. She was not exactly the same as Leah, despite containing Leah's soul. She displayed emotions that were almost like Leah's but not quite. Just a little more distant, a little more lost in analysis. She was, Giselle thought, precisely what would be expected if Leah's soul was joined with something that was decidedly not Leah's brain. Leah's essence as a human being, powering a mechanism that was not human, a repository of information and a well of analytical processing power so vast that even Giselle, who lead the design team, could not have fully understood it.