Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

It was a note. A note she found in the lab, handwritten in penmanship so much like her own, written by her father.

EIGHT

Evangeline woke up screaming. The same nightmare had been haunting her for five years. The same nightmare that spoiled her dreams ever since her last mission off world. The fateful mission on which she found her father’s note and reopened the gaping wounds in her soul. It was the same horrible vision about her parents and their profound absence in her life.

She sat up, curled herself around a pillow, and started to shake with racking, uncontrollable sobs.

Jack woke up beside her. It was not new for him to be startled awake in the middle of the night by her screaming. The nightmares had become so common that he was no longer scared by her outbursts. Their routine on nights like that was always the same. He sat up, with his back against the headboard, and he pulled her over to him to rest her head on his chest. He would pull the blanket up over her shoulders, and stroke her hair while she cried in the safety of his arms.

There was never any way of knowing what might trigger an episode. It could have been something she ate, something she saw or heard during the day, or something that brought up an old memory. There was never any rhyme or reason, the nightmares just happened. Sometimes days or weeks passed between episodes. But often they occurred several nights in a row, days on end. It was her own personal hell, and there was no end in sight.

Jack once suggested Evangeline see a therapist to try to understand why it happened. However, Evangeline refused to talk to anyone about it. She knew why she had the nightmares. She did not need anyone to shed light or insight on the problem. They all stemmed from the secret that burned away at her ever since she found the note from her father. The note that laid hidden in a secret place.

No. Talking about it would not help. She would just have to deal with it on her own in the best way she knew how. Which was ignore it in the hopes that they would simply go away.

She was grateful, especially on the nights when her past haunted her dreams, that she found Jack. When she returned to Earth, her first husband, Erik, did not cope well with her nightmares. He did not understand why she refused to talk to anyone about it, even him. The day the divorce finalized she convinced herself that he had done his best. She had thought it was better for both of them that she was on her own with her pain. She had felt broken, torn, and incomplete. She felt flawed and unfixable.

About five months after her divorce from Erik, and almost a year after her return to Earth, she first met Jack. She was in a restaurant with Tishia Dunbar (now Tishia Lennox) and a group of Tishia’s friends. Tishia was having a baby shower. She and her husband, Sam Lennox, received their license to have a baby after the mandatory post-marriage waiting period. It turned out they were not cousins after all, but neighbors.

They had moved back to the LTZ after their tours of duty were complete and married not long thereafter. Evangeline understood why. Once someone had been off world, few people could relate. It did not help that Tishia had a crush on Sam since she was five and enlisted with him just to make sure he stayed alive.

They had come in from the LTZ to celebrate and brought a group of friends with them. Most of them looked like they were from the LTZ. They were a little rough around the edges, but polite, fun, and sometimes a bit raucous.

Jack also happened to be at the restaurant. When Tishia introduced them, she said Jack was one of the lucky ones that got out on his brains. It turned out that Jack had a knack for programming artificial intelligences. He had once reprogrammed his teddy bear to respond to his mother’s questions from the other room so he could sneak out of the house. It took weeks before his parents realized they were talking to a toy.

He also became a minor criminal in school when he reprogrammed the principal’s AI to sass back to her when she asked for information from the library database. This prank got the attention of the leading technical academy at Olympus. Jack underwent a series of tests and the dean of the academy was shocked to discover he had a 210 IQ.

However, a high IQ was not what impressed Evangeline. Jack was intelligent, but he was also thoughtful. He was observant; he noticed things about the people around him and responded to a need he perceived they had before the other person realized what happened.

That night Evangeline knew there was something unique about Jack. As they talked on the patio of the restaurant, Evangeline liked the way he could make her laugh and the way he listened to her. Before she knew it, she was telling him all about her divorce and the nightmares. She caught herself just before telling him about the letters from her parents. Evangeline surprised herself by the desire she felt to share all her dark secrets with Jack. However, she was not yet ready to open up her closet of skeletons.

The sobs began to subside, her breathing slower and more regular. The hysteria from the nightmare was over, at least for the night. The clock showed that it was after 2:00 in the morning. She lifted her head to look up at Jack. Evangeline appreciated that aspect about Jack that. His sensitivity and patience never seemed to diminish no matter how many times her nightmares interrupted his sleep, nor how often her emotions became erratic from the slightest reminder of her lost childhood. He moved his hand from her hair to her back and glided his fingers up and down her spine, feeling the vibrations of his fingertips as he rubbed them along the TRTV connection ports.

The ports were permanent, once installed. The pilot’s nervous system would become accustomed to the regular input from the interface and nerve damage would occur if removed. Even if a pilot discontinued operating a TRTV for an extended amount of time the degradation to their system would require periodic maintenance connections. It was what Tishia and Sam had to do now they were retired from the military. They connected to a TRTV simulation once a month and performed drills in order to keep their nervous systems, as Harper liked to call it, tuned up.

Jack was never squeamish about the ports like Evangeline’s first husband, Erik had been. They had been married prior to her joining the military and acceptance into the TRTV program. Seeing and touching her with the ports in her back made him squeamish. It had been a detrimental to their love life. This physical repulsion to her ports was a big factor why she accepted the assignment for a short tour on the Chiron. She was hopeful that absence would make the heart grow fonder. Instead of longing, Erik began to frequent bars, clubs, and casinos while Evangeline was off world. It did not take long after she returned that their marriage died.

The clock now read 2:30 A.M. Evangeline was finally calm, falling back to sleep in Jacks arms.

Jack, on the other hand, was wide-awake, as she dozed on his chest. Once Evangeline’s hysterics yanked him from his dreams, he could never fall back to sleep, despite being accustomed to rising early.

He rolled Evangeline onto her side and pulled the blankets up over her body. It would have been pointless to try to sleep, so he decided to get up and spend the morning hours on his new pet project.

He padded down the hall and into the kitchen for a glass of water. While emptying his glass, Tori, their virtual daughter, materialized at his side.

“Daddy, did mommy have another nightmare?” She inquired, looking up at him. She was wearing her favorite pink pajamas with the bunny feet. She looked to be around six years old, with Evangeline’s long chocolate hair, but she had Jack’s green eyes.

“Yes, sweetie, Mom had a nightmare again,” Jack replied. “But it’s nothing you need to worry about. Go back to bed.” In an instant, Addison blipped next to Tori, cuddling his teddy bear and blanket.

“Is she going to be okay?” he asked in a tender voice. Addison was around three, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and the latest addition to the family. Jack had wanted to add a son to the family, so Addison’s name was Jack’s little joke to himself.

Jack kneeled down and faced the kids. “Yeah, buddy. She’s going to be fine. It was just a bad dream.” Addison did not seem to accept his answer.

“But she has bad dreams all the time. Am I going to have bad dreams?” he asked.

              Jack chuckled at himself.” No, buddy, you won’t have bad dreams. You’ll be just fine.”

Tori turned to her brother. “You can’t have bad dreams. You’re just a program.” Addison looked wide-eyed at Jack.

“Is that true Dad? Am I just a program?” he stared, waiting for a comforting answer.

Jack gave a scolding look to Tori before answering Addison. “Well, technically, that is true. You are an AI. But I made you, so that makes you my son.” Addison smiled and bobbed on the balls of his feet for a moment, then turned around dissolved out of the kitchen. Jack turned his attention to Tori, who was still standing there, looking sheepish.

“Tori, I’ve told you. Addison’s programming isn’t sophisticated enough to understand he’s an artificial intelligence yet. You still have a lot to learn about people’s feelings,” Jack explained.

Tori was not about to be curtailed. “But Dad, I know I’m an AI. My friends know I’m an AI. You and Mom know I’m an AI. What’s the big deal with telling Addison he’s an AI?”

“You didn’t always know you were an AI, did you?” Jack countered. “For the first few months of your life you were barely interactive. It took months of input and adjustments until you realized you were a program. Now look at you! You’ll be all grown up before you know it.”

Tori processed his answer for a moment and then tilted her head to the side. “I think I’m all grown up now,” she said. “Good night!” She chirped before turning around and dissolving like her brother.

Jack smiled to himself. He had been developing virtual children for most of his career. It started out as another side project, trying to help couples who were waiting for a license to have a biological child. His idea was to create an interactive program that would act and think like a real child. Giving the parents something to bond to and train, like a real child, without the more unpleasant aspects of parenting.

It became so popular that the number of applications for biological children in Olympus dropped as the demand for virtual children increased. His hobby had swollen into a full-fledged AI business. He was now working on a way to make the virtual children more independent.

Growing up outside all the privilege that came with Olympic citizenship, Jack and his hidden mischievous nature, loved to pull a joke now and again. Evangeline did not know it, but he had created a code within the program that allowed him access to the operating command system with a particular phrase.

On more than one occasion, he had caused the virtual kids of his obnoxious neighbors to transform into purple pigs with wings and fly around the room for an hour. Every time it happened, upset customers swamped his office with calls for the latest software patch to fix the problem. Free of charge, of course. Jack did not care about the infrequent complaints about glitches in a few customer’s children. He longed for biological children of his own, but it was not going to happen for him and Evangeline. As far as he knew, his virtual children would have to be enough.

Jack set his empty glass into the sink and stretched. A drawn out yawn rattled in his throat as his fingers brushed the low ceiling. He stared at the marquee across the courtyard outside the sliding glass doors to the balcony for a lingering moment. The advertisement for a vacation to the islands off the west coast carried no appeal to him.