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Unfortunate Ends
Time was unkind.
Dahlia saw red everywhere.
Even with her special goggles, the walls bled in the simulation. No matter how many times she blinked, she could not clear the vision.
Dahlia had known it was not as simple as The Matrix of the Old World made it sound: neither the red pill nor the blue pill appeared out of the ether, ready to be swallowed at will by an unsuspecting mortal who would decide to stay in the simulation or reject it entirely. There was no chosen one. There were just people scrambling for some sense of meaning in a world that had long ago tried to burn itself down to the ground — helped in no part by the men whose greed had hastened a reckoning of epic proportions.
Her friends had called her a madwoman, thinking she could change a thing about what had happened when Rex — the last one of the Old World engineers — had perished in a flight accident. He had been her mentor through thick and thin. It had been no easy thing to accept that he could be gone in the blink of an eye.
At the heart of the mission was Amelia: lion-hearted Amelia with her whip-smart ways and her tendency to show both middle fingers to the systems that sought to undermine her. She was a hero in Dahlia’s eyes — far from a scrappy gutter rat who had only ended up in this line of work on a whim — but it didn’t matter…
