Dian was having an old-fashioned coffee - outrageously expensive - cultivated on the rare emerged lands of Hume, practically contraband sold at a ridiculous price to the elites of Earth, and Earth alone. From her balcony, she observed the flat surface of Lake Starnberg.
Her LE called out to her - and it had Lucky's rough tone:
"Madam something-or-other, I've got what you asked for... the psycre, that's it? Hurry up."
"The psyche? What have you got?"
"I dunno, damn it! The AIs say: vector space with six times ten to the power of ten dimensions. That mean anything to you?"
"That's exactly it. How did you get it?"
"Sorry to rush you, old lady, but weren't you the one who said we were short on time?"
"That's correct," she replied rather calmly, checking an ancient gold watch. "The Aleph is arriving at the center in ten minutes. It's too late, mysterious kid with a giant computer."
A rolling vehicle of polished steel, with the pure predatory lines of a Xeno craft, honked on the road below. Dian recognized the car of her billionaire neighbor, whose lineage and fortune went back to the first creators of the After.
"You go down and get in that fucking car!" shouted the LE. "I'm driving. You'll be there in eight minutes - I've got the map in front of me."
Dian took a moment to think - ah! how frustrating it was not to be able to read the thoughts of her interlocutor - then dashed down barefoot.
The car didn't start: it leapt onto the straight road leading toward Munich. The road was crowded with rolling drones carrying the supplies necessary for the area's sweet way of life - but those same drones, one by one, threw themselves aside to crash into the guardrails, opening a clear path for the vehicle, which climbed to hundreds of kilometers per hour.
The city was suddenly paralyzed to let the speeding vehicle pass. Drones, taxis, and private cars swerved and shut down - sometimes, indeed, to protect a pedestrian from being struck by another.
Inside the prototype, Dian asked Lucky to unlock a project called Transfer Suit. It required on-site handling, and Dian contacted Aubrie. A half-awake face, after a night of work - or love - against a laboratory backdrop, appeared on the screen.
"Aubrie, please lift the seals on the Transfer Suit and connect the terminals to the comatose person inside the Wau Armor."
"Uh, I'll note that down."
"I wasn't clear, Aubrie. You'll do it NOW, and you have exactly one minute to do so. The Aleph arrives in one minute and wants this device in place. If it's not, he'll turn your mind into mush - and if by any chance he has mercy on you, I'll take care of it personally. I am not joking."
Aubrie jumped out of frame toward a piece of equipment, as if electrified. Thirty seconds later, Lucky reported that the Suit was active.
"So, I plug in the psyche? I mean, the thing?"
"No. I want to see with my own eyes that it's properly connected. It's experimental, and Aubrie isn't qualified."
"An Original Tyger is aligning on UniPsi's spaceport, old lady."
"Well then, do your magic, kid. You managed to open a corridor for the car."
The car screeched to a stop in front of Valentine's mangrove garden - an ecological and legal blasphemy that adorned UniPsi's square, brutal façade. With brisk steps, she advanced toward the laboratory, giving off a psychic impulse of overwhelming force that made every student, researcher, and professor evacuate the building as if it were collapsing.
She was so powerful that they didn't even suspect it was an illusion - they became animals.
What a pity.
The panic in the city - with its drone crashes, the first in five hundred years - echoed the panic within the Uni.
The Tyger was caught in the same confusion. The LE contacted the pilot.
"Hello, uh, you can't land - problem, uh, with the landing strip."
"This is the Aleph's shuttle," declared the pilot imperiously. "I'm landing whether you like it or not."
"Yeah, but you might crash, you know."
"Who the hell are you, clown? I'm a test pilot capable of landing anything on anything. Trust me, we'll find you and twist your ears off."
And the Tyger approached the platform at the top.
"Oh, to hell with it," Lucky muttered, and ordered the Tyger's AIs to increase speed so it would actually crash.
A hundred AIs intervened and blocked the murderous command, so he did the opposite: he boosted the thrusters and sent the Tyger back into space. He took the grappling beam and aimed for Mars.
Alright then - adios, dumbass pilot.
"THE KID!" Dian yells at the LE. "Go on, send your data."
He transfers everything into a directory, which itself is rerouted by a multi-laser conduction toward the Transfer Suit.
"If she wakes up and it's not her, kid, I'll find you."
"It's her."
"Did she have a copy in the After?"
"No, I used your advice: the ESQ."
This absurd answer put her out of sorts, but she didn't repeat her threat - once was enough. Three more seconds. She closes the Armor. The Torso. Cassandre still has a small hole, two millimeters, at the site of the heart. We'll see. Finally, the Mask, right after disconnecting the Transfer Suit.
Nothing happens. Everything here is silent, while outside, there is panic. Even Lucky watches the scene with all his cameras.
Then the Armor awakes Cassandre with an electric shock. She sits up like an inhuman creature, as if gasping for oxygen. The Wau lifts its eyes to the sky and seems to utter a cry of pain. It falls back, and its nearly-ton weight rolls on the ground with a great noise.
Lucky regains awareness of the environment: a million control AIs are hunting the Munich hacker and swirl around him. More seriously, the Original Tyger has been released by those same AIs and is charging the spaceport. It puts all its force into accelerating at the last moment, and, without a word to Dian, but after erasing all video data concerning her, retracts and disappears into the After.
The Wau sits up. It turns its gaze toward Dian, seems to assess her and the situation - the UniPsi, the director's bare feet, the Transfer Suit.
"Is that you, Cassandre?" she asks.
The heart of the Wau, pierced, stops abruptly. It collapses, and the Armor emits an electric shock, and the heart restarts, supported by nanomachines.
The Wau stands up, nods. It calls, via the LE network and other secret, encrypted channels, its Halcyon, which, from the Alké, engages under the flabbergasted gaze of the sailors. On the roof of the UniPsi, a terrible crash makes the building tremble. Metal fragments fly into the garden and decapitate a few trees.
The Wau darts into the corridor… its heart stops again, thus, every two or three seconds, but it gets up, under the power of electricity and subjected to intense pain.
When it is outside, in one bound, it reaches the spaceport at the summit. Dian wants to shout "the Aleph!" but that will change nothing, except her own fate if ever the leader of HS discovers her betrayal. Mid-leap, it dies again, and falls lifeless to the ground.
In the burning wreckage of the Tyger, between the two motionless bodies of the pilot and co-pilot (filthy-damaged but protected by their suits) and that, alas, truly dead, of a high official, a silhouette rises. But it is not the Aleph: he did not come, despite his promise. It is an Anti-Wau, again, golden body and obsidian face.
The Wau gets up, the Anti-Wau strikes it and both fall to the ground: the first felled by the hole in its heart, the second by an unprecedented psychic attack, so terrible that it again shook all the psis in the vicinity. How can an Omega, Dian still wonders, how can the last of the last reach such power? The Wau will leave with that secret.
It remains lying on its back, seized by convulsions between each resuscitation, trying to process a pain impossible to soothe with analgesics: that unbearable pain of a heart that stops.
And the Halcyon, black bird, appears in the atmosphere with a nightmare whistle, adding to everyone's intense confusion. Some citizens, thinking it was a Xeno attack, or for those less keen on current events, the League, had already shut themselves in cellars and shelters, crying with terror.
The Halcyon falls upon the Wau and absorbs it. It deploys its wings and flies majestically toward the sky, triggering a very dangerous Drift in high atmosphere. To preserve her sanity, the Armor plunges Cassandre into a light coma, while her heart is repaired.
Her last thoughts, for two seconds, while everything spins and she anticipates the coming pain, are for Lucky. He really went to fetch me in a parallel universe… he really convinced Dian… he is tenacious. Imagine if it were him, one day, who wears the Armor.
Cassandre never smiles, usually.