Today's Tomorrow Episode Three

By Odette C. Bell

Connie’s won, right? Wrong. When the shadow AI takes the node off her, she’ll have to fight to get it back.
But she’s not alone. It’s time for Makar to learn he was never the AI’s perfect, cold-hearted host. There’s a force inside him that, if he can finally reach it, will cleanse the infection for good.
He’ll have to hurry. With more nodes and more soldiers, the AI will soon set its sights on everything. Not just the future base, not just the simulation, but the real world too.
....
Today’s Tomorrow follows an ace cadet and a clumsy recruit fighting to save the Coalition from a simulated universe. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Today’s Tomorrow Episode Three today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
Today’s Tomorrow is the 20th Galactic Coalition Academy series. A sprawling, epic, and exciting sci-fi world where cadets become heroes and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781005371456

Book preview

Chapter 1

Makar Tax

It was the hardest moment of my life. I’d been through grueling training scenarios. I couldn’t tell you what I’d been forced to do in Alpha Team. But no act of will had come close to stopping my body in place a second before the shadow AI had claimed the node. It’d taken everything. Every. Damn. Thing.

I’d had to draw on the lessons my father had imparted before his death. I’d had to draw on everything the Coalition had taught me.

And I’d had to draw on one stupid impression. Even though I hadn’t been able to see through Connie’s armor, I’d gotten the distinct impression of the cadet smiling at me. And that smile had done the most important thing of all. It had fractionally melted my cold heart. But not for long.

The shadow AI was back. I felt the moment it roared into my body, controlling every single one of my cells.

But it was too late. Right?

Connie had the node.

It was almost beautiful to watch it disappearing through her body. Its ordered lines of light spread. Even from here, I could feel its eagerness. Faced between the choice of the shadow AI and Connie, it would obviously choose her any day.

But I’d made a mistake. And so had Connie. This wasn’t over.

The shadow AI had its ways and means.

Connie, the idiot, spent too long staring at me. I could see from the soft look in her eyes that she expected me to still be inside. She was searching for any sign. Hell, her left hand twitched, suggesting she might even reach out to me. But the point was, she wasted every single second she should have used to run.

The shadow AI would not give her another.

I first heard it hiss dangerously.

Then the chaos it was inflicting on the hologram around it only became twice as significant. In a rush, this spasmodic cloud erupted out of my left shoulder. It absorbed all the light around us. It spread out in a 20-meter radius, and that included around the unfortunate Connie.

She jerked backward. She was momentarily the only thing in the cloud that was lit up, and it was amazing to see her armor glowing as brightly as a fist full of starlight.

But nothing could be forever illuminated in the AI’s grasp.

The lack of light started to force its way into her. It attacked her armor first. It started to break it down. And though I used the word started, it was a quick, startlingly fast process. It began around her arms then shot toward her face. Her head jerked back. She screamed out. I wanted to shout her name, but I couldn’t.

The shadow AI thrust both hands out, producing more chaos in its wake.

My arms shook. But it wasn’t because I was starting to control myself. There was a limit to how much the shadow AI could force my body to do. A limit it simply did not care about. It didn’t matter if I blacked out. I’d become some zombie. It would move me until my body literally turned to dust.

But first, it would break a certain Connie Wilkinson.

The dark strands of the shadow AI’s power looped around her stomach and back and hands. They concentrated on her face, tilting her neck back at a painful angle. She screamed again, but it was cut short halfway through and turned into a dangerous gurgle.

I shook on the inside, but that was all I could do. I still screamed her name over and over again.

And it still did nothing.

The shadow AI reached out with its hands. I hadn’t seen them before. For most of the time I’d spent with it, it had been nothing more than a smear of black energy. Now it actually produced hands from my shoulders. They reached through Connie’s cracking armor. They grasped her skin.

Connie, I screamed as loudly as I could in my thoughts. It was the equivalent of screaming into a void.

The shadow AI grasped up the node. It hadn’t disappeared into Connie fast enough.

I could feel its fear, hear it screaming as it was dragged back.

Connie’s armor failed completely. I finally saw her expression. She sure as hell wasn’t smiling. She stared at me in wide-eyed horror. Her lips couldn’t move. They were frozen over her gaping mouth.

Her head was tilted further back.

And in one last silent scream, the node was removed from her.

The black cloud the shadow AI had created continued to spread out around it.

As Connie’s light diminished, the node became the only illuminated thing. It pulsed in this almost nervous way, the light shivering wildly.

Then the shadow AI reached out with its hands and collapsed them around it. And the pulse went out. Just like that. Suddenly there was no illumination at all. But I could still hear, and I heard Connie gasp.

Makar, fight it, she tried.

Idiot, I wanted to scream back. You should have run when you had the chance.

But Connie had no chance now.

As the shadow AI greedily lapped up the power of the node, it started to control this section of the hologram. Beyond, this area had started to break down, but now every single black void that had appeared stopped in place.

The darkness spread.

And all the while, Connie simply remained there.

Then the fool did the worst thing she possibly could. She reached out to me. Her fingers slid along my right arm.

That just got her closer to the shadow AI’s control.

Now it had the node, all it needed was the crystals within her. It would take Tom first, then the remaining nodes. Then? Her life.

Connie, I roared as loudly as I possibly could. Just get out of here.

Maybe she heard me. Maybe she figured out there was no chance to get to me, for her hand soon slipped off mine. She wasn’t fast enough though. My left hand surged forward and tried to grab her. But Connie pushed back. All this time, she’d held a curious device in her left hand. She wielded in front of her now like some small dagger. She sliced it in a cross pattern. My hand tried to push through it, but it was rebuffed.

The shadow AI roared. A strengthener. Impossible. They don’t exist. We destroyed the civilization that created them. Give it to me.

Connie sure as hell didn’t hand it over. I felt that she flattened her foot on the strengthened section of space she’d created. She used it as purchase to push back and flip.

I knew that she exited backward out of the shadow AI’s cloud. Into what, though? Because this node was now fully controlled by the AI. There’d be nowhere for Connie to go. It was over.

But I should have appreciated one thing. It was never over for Connie Wilkinson.

Chapter 2

Connie Wilkinson

I flipped backward out of the shadow AI’s cloud. The second I reached the air outside, I wanted to say I felt hope, but that was a lie. At least I wasn’t surrounded by the shadow’s absolute lack of light. Instead, I was surrounded by chaos.

Now the shadow AI had this node, it was copying the program. To be fair, it had already been doing that when I’d arrived on the scene, but it sped up.

And the process was nerve-racking.

Whole sections of the city lifted up and were copied all around me. It was a random process, though. Sometimes it would be windows and doors and desks and trees. Sometimes it would be clouds and actual strands of sunlight.

Anything and everything was swept around me in an impossible-to-follow vortex.

Meanwhile, only several meters away, the shadow AI’s control-cloud spread.

It had the node. Next it would go for me. And all I had was the strengthener.

I held it close to my chest in a shaking grip.

As I pinned it against myself, I decided if I should leave.

If I could leave.

I went to twist the strengthener around to create a gate, but that would be when it started to lose its light.

What the— I began.

Makar suddenly burst out of the black cloud, hand outstretched toward me.

His left eye was open. His right eye never even blinked.

It was an eerie experience, especially considering his pupil had expanded to take up the rest of his eyeball. It looked like I was being stared at by the void itself. But voids don’t have minds. The shadow AI did.

You will succumb, it said in the kind of blank voice you’d use if you knew something had no option but to fall to you.

Like hell.

I couldn’t wield the strengthener to create a gate. Here at least. Something told me that if I got further away from the shadow AI’s control cloud, I might have a chance though.

I flipped backward. I allowed myself to drop. I locked my hands against my thighs, making myself as aerodynamic as I could. But it was only then that I reminded myself I wasn’t even in any armor. And that meant I didn’t have any protection.

While most of the objects that floated around me hadn’t been fully formed yet and I could shoot right through them, some of them quickly gained density. I fell headfirst against a table leg. Fortunately it didn’t knock me out, but it did gash my brow down to my cheek. As blood flew out around me in an arc, I crumpled my hands over my head. I collapsed into a ball and tumbled over and over and over, hoping like hell that I could get far enough away from the cloud to use a gate before I struck the ground.

Hell was not on my side. And nor were the future soldiers that filled this half-floating city.

One was to my left. I caught a glimpse of it out of one half-opened eye. The guy was that Barbarian with the whip. Clearly he’d been irritated that I’d blocked him previously. It was his turn for revenge.

He cracked the whip to the side. I no longer needed to fear braining myself on the street below, because he grabbed me right out of the air. The whip locked around my stomach, and I couldn’t control my limbs anymore. But something fixed my fingers around the strengthener. It was either fortune alone or a blast of Tom’s power. Neither of those could save me from the whip nor the waiting future soldier’s anger. As I spun through the air, I shot toward him.

I’d already faced some pretty dire situations, but nothing could be this bad. I had no help and no hope.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

Just before the future soldier could rip me apart with his hands, I saw a gate appear behind him. I recognized the make immediately and knew where it had to come from.

It would be Xan or his guards. Sure enough, a familiar guard sprinted through, gun in hand. He shot the future soldier and shoved him out of the way. I fell into the guy’s waiting arms. It was hardly a soft landing. We didn’t have time.

More of his guard friends appeared around him, but they had their work cut out for them. Future soldiers were everywhere, and the more of the city the shadow AI controlled, the harder it became to maneuver through it. The guard holding me tried to shift to the side, but that was when the floor