Rupture Read Online Free PDF

What’s your deal?”
    He sighed. “I’ve got about the best brain package you can get. Customized by the top minds in the business. Cost my parents ten million dollars. Slow but steady phenotypic expression. By twelve I was programming basic AIs for our home. Had the entire place working like a charm. But I guess they must have really spiked the cocktail. Sometimes, my mind just ... does things.”
    Psychic, she thought, hoping it was so. That was simple enough to handle with standard mind blocks. Her mother could whip him into shape in one afternoon. It was one of the first abilities to be monitored and regulated. You could find licensed psychics in most of the hive cities nowadays. If that was his only problem, he might be okay. But if he’d summoned something nasty …
    “After a long interface,” he said, “I ... changed one time. My parents freaked and sent me here.”
    A metallic taste filled her mouth. “Changed?”
    He looked like he thought nothing of it, as if it were some big misunderstanding. “I don’t know. Mom said I expanded. I think she hallucinated it.”
    “I guess she did.” Simone stood a little too quickly. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The only other two unaware Alters she’d met both said the exact same things. They didn’t believe it at first. They thought people were seeing things when they transformed. Joss was an Interfacer and a Channeler, for sure. And here he was with bandages that probably covered Rogue brands, acting as if nothing were wrong. She felt her breath catch in her throat because he was clueless about the danger. But we’re all in danger, she told herself. I should have never come here. I need to get away from him. “I ... told, uhm, Kimberlee I would meet her after the meeting.” She backed away. “Okay, then. I’ll see you.”
    She hurried away from the clinic. He was a Altertranshuman—the most dangerous kind: top-grade Intellect Package with interfacing and channeling capabilities. And now he had a Rogue in him.
    * * *
    Simone walked straight to her dorm (well, she had to ask directions twice, and get one of the lawn guys to drive her over in a cart). It was a multistory brick building. Girls wing on side, boys on the other. Her room was on the third floor. She shut the door behind her, locked it, and did what she always did when she was stressed: She moved to her single large suitcase, opened it up, and withdrew her hollow buckyball. It was a model of a spherical Buckminsterfullerene molecule made of some special metal her mother had given to her as a child.  
    With a simple caress, the alloy bonds expanded from the size of a golf ball to the size of a soccer ball full of holes. She placed it on her desk and sat before it.
    She began mumbling the mantras of centering her mother taught her.
    Simone glanced once at her door to make sure it was locked—silly, because she always locked doors—then returned to the bucky. As she spoke the words, she saw the bucky expand. She lifted it off her desk. It floated above her hand, as light and as big now as a beach ball. It nudged a pencil holder off her desk; she ignored the pencils as they cascaded to the floor. She set it in the middle of the room. In seconds, the bucky gained enough size for her to crawl through one of the holes. She did and immediately began floating inside, buoyant. Soon, she began to move inside the bucky, performing a psy-kata that, along with the mantra, would channel the mysterious energies that came from her entities.
    She followed the prescribed steps her mother had told her, every one a single piece in a grand formula.
    The bucky that now floated in the middle of the room revolved on a random axis. Simone wasn’t bothered by this, having long ago become used to it. If she opened her eyes she would feel that she was still and the room was spinning in all directions. For her, she was a fixed point in space and time. She danced for over a half hour with movements seemingly