"The System wants me dead?"
Individually, the words were simple enough, but strung together, Charlotte Shaw couldn't make any sense of them at all.
"Are you saying that your System wants to kill me?"
"Yes." Renee Sinclair nodded. "She wants you dead."
"Why?" Charlotte was a little scared, but more than that, she was just baffled and confused. "I don't even know her. We've never had any kind of conflict. Why would she want me dead?"
"Besides, isn't it just a cold, unfeeling system? How can a machine want to kill someone?"
"She isn't a machine, and she's not really the System," Renee said, her face grim. She enunciated every word with weight. "To be precise, she's more like a monitoring program spun off from the System, responsible for supervising transmigrators and ensuring they complete their missions."
"A program?" Charlotte frowned. "So, just a jumbled mess of code?"
Renee replied, "She is, in fact, code. But the fatal part is, she's become self-aware."
