Unknown 9 by Layton Green (e reader txt) 📗

who punctuated the music with spoken words.

Move.

Create.

Shining star.

Transform.

Her brother, Jianyu, was lounging on the love seat with a striking Japanese woman. She had fitted the left half of her face with wires and thin metal plates to resemble a cyborg. Daiyu waited in silence while Jianyu sent the woman away.

When they were alone, Jianyu lifted a cocktail smoking with liquid nitrogen, which drifted into a chiseled face framed by black hair. His soft brown eyes tempered the hardness of his features. Both their complexions were as white and smooth as alabaster.

“Sister,” he shouted above the din, unperturbed by the intrusion. Jianyu never seemed to resent his sibling’s quirks and cold demeanor. “What brings you out of your lair?”

Take out the earplugs, she mouthed, touching a hand to her ear.

“What? I’m listening to—”

She lifted a palm, and he complied. The people dancing with frenetic energy around the dais observed the twins with surreptitious glances. They always observed them.

Daiyu took a step forward, close enough to lean down and whisper in her brother’s ear, careful not to let her face contort in pain. She had sat in her chair too long and did not want her brother to know how much she was suffering. His pity was the one thing she could never bear. “I received a text.”

Jianyu stilled. He knew that only one source, one entity, would cause Daiyu to relay such an ordinary message in person.

As all human beings are committed to various tribes—family, friends, political organizations, religions—Daiyu and Jianyu belonged to another group, in addition to the biohackers. An elite society. Unlike the general population, who typically viewed biohacking with revulsion, the Ascendants—almost all of them powerful and influential people—embraced transhumanist beliefs as a natural evolution of the species.

Not many Ascendants were biohackers in the true sense of the word.

But they understood that one day everyone would be.

“They want to see us,” she said. “They’ve requested a meeting.”

“Where?” he asked. “Venice? London? Singapore?”

“Here. Tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“We have to leave. Now. And Jianyu—it’s not just anyone.” She nervously fingered a black jade key that hung from her neck on a platinum chain. “The Archon is in Shanghai.”

The twins left the club and stepped into the sultry night air, the Shanghai skyline a neon throb in the distance. Daiyu wore turquoise boots and skintight clothing made of silver microfibers.

Unlike her brother, who concealed his weapons and augmentations beneath his clothing—tonight he wore a black leather trench coat—Daiyu possessed only one true body mod: a micro-bracelet implanted beneath the palm of her left hand. It exuded an eerie phosphorescent glow and gave her access to the small PC she carried with her at all times in her geometric-patterned handbag.

“Why would the Archon come in person?” Jianyu asked as they hustled—as fast as Daiyu’s stooped gait would allow—to his Suzuki Katana motorcycle. The location of the meeting was an unusual library in the Changning District, a common meeting spot under Ascendant jurisdiction.

“I don’t know,” Daiyu replied.

“Surely it concerns the war. How many others are attending?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped.

When they reached the sport bike, he stopped to put his hands on her shoulders. “What’s bothering you? Is it your back?”

“No!” she said, with more heat than she intended.

Daiyu had never been comfortable around others. Most people thought she was cold and unfeeling, and in truth, except for Jianyu, she rather was. She preferred the company of machines, and was happiest when plugged into that beautiful realm that spoke in bytes instead of words, where imagination became reality.

Maybe her social alienation stemmed from knowing her parents had grown her in a test tube from a stranger’s DNA. She was a child of science, and to science she felt the most kinship.

Jianyu didn’t share her intolerance for others. He was a true believer in technology, complicated and enigmatic in his own way, yet he was a soulful, charismatic, fiery person who embraced life in all its facets. Especially those of the female variety.

Whatever the origin of Daiyu’s social anxiety, the mysterious leader of the Ascendants made her more uncomfortable than anyone else on Earth. Daiyu had twice attended a meeting over which the Archon had presided—once in Singapore and once in Venice—and she did not want to be within a thousand miles of their leader again.

Yet she could not speak of this with her brother. He revered the Ascendants. Daiyu had passed their tests and joined them mostly to please Jianyu. Now, she feared that if she tried to leave, she would never see him again.

She also had the strange feeling the Archon knew this about her.

Could see into her true soul.

“Daiyu,” he said. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it the Archon?”

“What do you mean?”

“I noticed how you looked after Venice,” he said. “The same look you have now. Please, try not to show fear. Fear is weakness to them.”

“It isn’t fear,” she lied.

“Then what is it?”

She struggled for something to say. “I . . . don’t know. The Archon has a different aura. I can’t read it.”

“You know what I think of your belief in auras.”

“You don’t have to believe in something for it to exist.”

Jianyu shook his head. “As much as we’re alike, I’ve never understood how you can embrace the technological and the mystical in equal measure.”

As ancient Greeks once visited the shrines of oracles, Daiyu consulted corridors of terabytes and digital architecture, and she believed in their power. Were the answers she received or the source of the responses, the mysterious origin of the laws that governed the physical universe, any less miraculous?

In modern times, humankind had simply put a name to the unknown: science.

And Daiyu bowed at its altar.

“I’ve told you before,” she said. “It’s all one and the same.”

He helped her mount the bike. “I think the Archon might agree with you. You’ve heard the things they say. That the Archon can make you see and do things.”

“Words mean nothing.”

“Or they mean everything, Daiyu!” he said sharply. “Are you as dedicated to this cause as you need to be? The Archon will