Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

platitudes they left the woman and her slightly deer-in-the-headlights expression to her models.
    Neal: ‘good. she will be fine. you are all going to see to that. and even if i don’t have total confidence in her yet, i do have it in you.’
    It was a compliment and a threat in one, and it received only the quick mental acknowledgement it required. William knew what Neal wanted an update on, and he did not wait around.
    William: ‘ok. let’s talk about our friend the bionic man!’
    He said it with some relish, and Neal could not resist a grin to match William’s own. Mynd, watching and listening, was equally intrigued, if less boyishly enthused as they.
    William: ‘the best way to explain is to show, as we always say. ¿so why don’t you just take a look? i’m bringing phase nine online now. i’ll meet you out there.’
    And with that they were gone, through the ether and out the other side, back into reality once more. But this was an augmented reality, like the view from within a battleskin. But this was not a skin, it was an entire body.
    Neal stood now in a broad aluminium shed, one of the many that dotted the bay at the center of Deception Island. He stood still, almost impossibly so, his lack of command signals leaving the body he was now possessing completely without movement.
    Hand. He brought it up. It was not a hand as he knew it. It had only two fingers opposite a fat thumb. One finger looked like a black, pointed version of an index finger, the other was much thicker, matching the powerful looking thumb that faced it. He flexed his digits. They moved with a dexterity that was at once amazing and frankly disgusting. He could fold them back all the way, to touch his wrist, a wrist that could rotate 360 degrees.
    He shivered at the sight, and the tremor ran up the spine of the machine body like it was mocking him.
    Neal: ‘mynd, give me an outside view of the machine.’
    But before he could answer another view was approaching. It was William, the paraplegic, crippled from the neck down, walking into the room on equally bionic limbs. Mynd co-opted the view from William’s suit as Neal had requested and now he saw both machines simultaneously as they approached each other.
    William was a crumpled form wrapped and enveloped within a machine skeleton. It was akin to a battleskin, only to facilitate easy access it lacked the armor plating, and as such was able to remove itself at will from William’s body and then climb back on him again. He rarely took it off in the day, but he still slept in his natural form, his suit waiting next to the bed to take him up once more when he awoke.
    Where William’s suit was all exposed synthetic muscle and skeleton, Neal’s was pure night black. A shadow of a form, almost spindly by comparison to William’s bulky suit.
    Its form was also distorted. Its arms were too long, its legs a little too short, and its head but a simple black cylinder the size of a pineapple. Its torso was a thick block, designed to contain and protect its processors, fusion core, and the subspace tweeter that allowed it to be controlled. It did away with the need to support a human body inside itself and replaced that with greater muscle mass, more power, and, in its Popeye-esque forearms, greater weaponry.
    It was an evolving form, adjusting with each version to discount some of the vagaries of evolution in exchange for greater power and flexibility. Phase Eight, a taller, bulkier version, had formed the core for the avatar which part of Minnie even now inhabited as she played with Banu. But by shortening the legs and lengthening the arms they had allowed this version to fall forward and run on all four limbs should it want to, extending its top speed to up over a hundred miles an hour over even rough terrain.
    William had been working on it for months now, since even before the earth-shaking events that had brought down SpacePort One and killed so many of their colleagues and friends.
    Neal