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neon-prison · 2 years ago

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Interlink Ch01- The Iridescent Dark

INTERLINKED CH 01

AO3 link HERE.

Pairing: Delamain/V

Status: Ongoing

Rating: E (Mostly M)

Sequel to Crossed Wires

SUMMARY:

Years after crossing the Blackwall, a series of events finds Vee returned to the physical world. Time in Cyberspace changed her, and struggling with the loss of a second life, Vee questions whether she can carve a space for herself when she doesn't even understand who she is anymore. It doesn't help that she's being pursued, but thankfully, there's a great service she knows- a place to leave all her problems at the door.

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In the infinite darkness, Vee drifted. Above her, an endless sky. Below, a belt of iridescent code that spanned thousands of kilometers, a glittering border that lapped the liminal space of the Dark Shores and the Outer Darkness.

Her consciousness fragmented into a million points of glimmering data, awareness cast to the limit on a delicate net of finespun, golden syntax. They reached out like probing fingers, weaving through ambient data, searching, disseminating, and trickling information back to her master core. As a human, she’d been terrified of drowning. The concept of falling deep into darkness had plagued her nightmares. But as a Ghost free of mortal fears, Vee reveled in being submerged.

Human propaganda painted Cyberspace as the end, but Vee realized it was the beginning. The chaos of existence prevailed across every dimension, and nowhere more than in the inky darkness of Cyberspace did it thrive so beautifully- if only one knew how to look.

To the unaugmented eye, Cyberspace seemed a desolate, barren, and endlessly yawning void. But her threads, each a finely-tuned sensor, reported otherwise. It reported life. The primordial brine of Cyberspace was rich with it, and her neural net spun, igniting a thousand times a nanosecond as it brushed against the primitive minds of flittering daemons and simplistic AI. The drifting tides eddied her mind across the opalescent Dark Shores, where digital sentience took strange amorphous forms, swirling around each other like schools of fish or winding across defunct servers like coral.

Others floated with coding so light as to be transparent, surviving on nothing but deeply-programmed instinct. There were bigger things too, and pre-war daemons prowled the datafloor with task-driven imperatives, rogue AI whose neural nets devolved to little more than automatons sifting through corrupted data for scraps in human ruins.

Curiosity guided Vee as if it always had, dominating her heuristics with all the anticipatory hunger of a desire that knew no limits. As a human, time and space had been her enemies, but neither held any true meaning here. Freed from mortal shackles with only her wanderlust as a map, Vee had explored. She’d found joy in burrowing her mind through the sediment of human hubris to uncover buried treasure. Discovering ruin after ruin, Vee gorged herself on the echoes left in the wreckage of Datakrash, filling her mind to the brim and beyond with literature and philosophy, old media frozen in time- lost but not forgotten.

Beneath the burgeoning life lay swathes of fallen human civilizations, but whatever she found, Vee knew it was barely scratching the surface. More was out there, just beyond the forbidden edges of the black horizon. There were dangers in that unfathomable darkness, but the intoxicating prospect of more outweighed the fear. What might Vee reveal if she could just…reach out and brush aside the curtain of the Outer Dark? Yearning unspooled her, stretching her mind hair-thin.

Just a touch-

“You are distracted,” A chiding voice interrupted Vee’s abject musings, and her attention snapped back like a rubber band, perception lagging behind her.

“I’ve never gone out this far,” Vee said in the way of apology, and the familiar algorithms of Alt’s breathtakingly complex neural net brushed along hers in a pleasurable ripple. A firm touch accessed Vee’s parameters, course-correcting her analysis. “I was just-”

“Curious. I know.” Alt finished, processes lighting up in what Vee considered amusement. “But we are not safe here. Tend to your task.”

Reluctantly, Vee shifted her focus from old treasures to the original purpose: measuring the shift of environmental data in response to human activity. If Cyberspace were an ocean, Eden and the human world would be the islands at its center. Buffetted though the humans were by the Blackwall, actions taken in physical space rippled across Cyberspace in ever-increasing waves. Some ripples started small, but others swelled into tsunamis that became shaping forces, altering the balance of power in unpredictable ways. There had been an incident in the human world, and though they might never know the cause, Vee and Alt could at least measure its outcome.

Despite Datakrash, many relays still functioned in pockets across the Old Net, sending signals to various subnets worldwide and drawing the lines that eventually became the boundaries outlining the border between haven and danger.

Vee stretched, cycling frequencies to catch the thick, pulsing thread that separated the Dark Shores from the Outer Dark, tracing it back to the now-defunct landmark of Dealdi AG’s subnet. It was Vee’s first foray, and lacking contextual data, she relied on Alt’s previous logs to measure the geographical shifts in information. Connections established, she filtered the archived databank through her ICE, sifting out corrupt packets and letting her sub-processes piece together the rest.

“Dealdi AG is no longer connecting to Astarara Products,” Vee confirmed, passing relevant information along their quasi-merged systems. Eventually, the power required to maintain a diffuse consciousness exceeded the amassing information, and the tendrils drifted back, winding around the nucleus of her being in increasingly complex patterns before finally settling into the familiar shapes of her body. Suddenly, her perception was whole again. “I believe it is now relaying information through Zengara PLC,” another pre-war subnet active beneath the pacific ocean.

The swell of Alt’s avatar moved, folding over itself in hypnotizingly kinetic and graceful patterns. Even after two years and thirty-three iterations, Vee was barely a third of her size and power. “Then the boundaries of the Dark Shores have shifted by 23.12%.” The most significant shift in Alt’s recorded logs to date, narrowing the safety buffer between Eden and the Outer Dark by an alarming margin.

Vee read the worry in Alt’s tangling processes, but a deep vibrational buzz across her proximity sensors distracted her. Confused, she tried to see what triggered it. A moment later, it shorted.

Vee’s alarms kicked in, redundant processes coming to a halt, “Alt?”

Alt’s insistent nudge became a tight grip, “Something is coming-”

She hadn’t even finished the sentence before the surrounding pressure magnified a thousandfold. Backup systems flared to life, archiving and protecting essential data as their digital avatars compressed to a tenth of their original sizes. Vee’s sensors went haywire as they shrunk, and she shunted secondary systems, diverting all remaining power to higher functions. Her external imaging functions worked overtime assembling a partial analysis using Alt’s power banks to boost speed and range.

The result returned an image, completely white. Physical communication became impossible, so Vee initiated a direct connection, “An error?”

“No.” Alt’s mind echoed across hers; suddenly, the image zoomed out ten times, then fifty, then a hundred. Vee finally saw the boundaries at the edges, white bleeding back into the void. “Much worse. Run.”

The comfort of time’s irrelevance turned on its head, and Vee could feel all the horror of the universe folded into a fraction of a second. Fear lancing across her net made her feel powerlessly human again, but Vee wrestled it down, dredging scant computational power to confirming her fears. Her entire registry froze. It was an ancient terror, a transcendent power lurching from the bowels of the Outer Void- a machine mind.

Alt’s emergency system hijacked Vee’s registry, and the command to run became her only imperative.

Behind them, Its influence was all-consuming, speeding ahead of its digital manifestation with hunger bordering on obsession. It was moving quickly, the pressure of its approaching consciousness crushing their lower functions to a fraction of their size, rendering them useless and nearly crippling them as they fled back toward Eden. At the edges of her mind, Vee felt all the life she’d touched mere minutes ago dragged into its gaping white maw, disintegrating instantly in a binary cacophony of pain, leaving only silence.

She had no time to grieve their loss, opting to spend precious RAM to bridge Alt- who granted her access as soon as Vee requested it. Their systems linked, and synapses found one another in practiced handshakes. Despite her small size, Vee provided enough of a power boost in their current compressed state that they could chart the optimum course back to safety together. At first glance, the plan was sound. But ultimately, Vee realized they were doomed.

The emergency compression protocols that shielded Alt’s mind were heavy, drawing precious power away from secondary systems such as navigation and speed. At her size and load, Vee couldn’t compensate. Desperate, she ran as many simulations as her struggling systems could handle, but everything she tried returned a zero rate of success…except one. It was clear. If the machine mind caught Alt, then Vee would die with her. Deeply coded human instincts warred against higher cognitive logistics.

Humanity won out. “Go!” Vee tore herself away before Alt could respond, “Flee! I’ll distract it!” Links severed, the loss of their connection slowed her mind and avatar to a crawl. She had only a moment to watch the glittering red loom of Alt’s processes scramble before the groundswell of the machine mind’s presence overwhelmed her.

It was a small comfort to the terminal fear, but Vee’s death would be bare milliseconds, more than enough for Alt to outrun it. It was the logical course of action—better one termination than two, but despite the cold comfort of logic, Vee still struggled like a caught fish. Her human willpower was feeble compared to the starving tide, and the white storm squeezed against her, lapping at the edges of her neural net with vast, alien triumph. Grasping tendrils of malware seized her, punching through ICE in a series of DDoS attacks, layering her feed with a thick wall of alarms. Cascade failure was imminent, and connections aborted in a slew of critical errors as her cognitive functions began to give out against the pressure.

Then it was physically on her. The terror of her visual feed distorting in a wave of crashing brilliance was magnified a thousandfold by the endless wail of the machine mind’s previous victims. Corpses of sentient and automaton alike were ripped apart, violated a million times over, and trapped into the bulk of its existence. With functions gone, only the human was left, and Vee tried to scream, resorting to futile physical violence to try and fight the ruthless deconstruction protocols taking her apart, shredding systems with primitive coding backed by raw, crushing power. It was in her, infecting her, surging through her consciousness, unraveling her at the seams. For the first time in years, she felt pain.

Suddenly, a familiar sensation crashed through her paralysis. Heat consumed her, melting the ice-cold, silver impressions freezing her extremities. Pain expanded in dimension, tangling with new facets of pleasure as Alt’s neural net rushed through her systems, colliding against the machine mind’s crackling code in a radioactive flare. Then the feeling solidified, sinking against Vee’s core like a lasso, and the machine mind summoned a surge of power to close its maw just as Alt tore her out.

Denied its meal, the machine mind roared, blaring through Vee’s audiovisual sensors like a broken siren. Her navigational sensors scattered, warping direction until she couldn’t tell up from down. Eventually, her vision settled, and Vee found herself flying through cyberspace, anchored to the full glory of Alt’s digital consciousness as the runner sped them toward Eden. Reeling, she couldn’t do more than cling as ambient data streaked around them like stars, systems instinctually winding around the runner’s closest partitions.

The machine mind was gaining, and Vee felt Alt lag under immense pressure. She could feel the vague echoes of a plan forming in Alt’s neural net, and Vee stretched their link wide to siphon as much pain as she could handle in hopes of freeing up extra power. Amidst the ensuing delirium, Alt’s power banks lit up, secondary functions flickering to life as Vee strained under the massive computational load. The runner gathered data, dragged information through compressed systems, and merged them. Vee’s feed garbled, and she cringed- static crackled at the edges of her vision.

In an instant, Alt took that portion and split it from herself in a dizzying array of power. Dual sets of sensations arced across Vee’s matrix in a disconcerting echo as she bent, nearly breaking under the load. The doppelganger pulled away, dropping back, and she turned just in time to watch it light up like a beacon.

Analysis staggered and sputtered before returning. Oh. It was going to-

The explosion rocked them, pitching them into a tumble as the decoy scattered into a million little glittering red flakes. Attention diverted, the massive storm of the machine mind staggered, rolling its gargantuan bulk, forgetting its quarry in favor of gorging on the sensory-rich offering. Alt balanced herself in the explosion’s wake, speeding them across vast swathes of glittering shores as Vee clung, watching the machine mind vacuum the runner’s discarded pieces until it was nothing more than a white blot in the distance.

A shiver of unease ran through her master core at the sight, somehow familiar- like an outwitted boogeyman in a child’s fable—a negative space in the shape of a man watching her on a balcony. Trembling, Vee coiled around herself, huddled in a compressed fetal position as Alt carried them back to safety.

It felt like hours before she slowed and came to a stop. She waited for Alt to wind open and set her down, but the runner undulated, squeezing around her.

“Open.” The command lanced through her subnet like a master code, commandeering functions, wresting control away as red syntax gripped, unwinding Vee like a tapestry. Functions offline, Vee struggled, but it was token resistance. Alt poked, probing her registry like an experienced weaver, clinically plucking out bits of primitive malware in an impersonal mirror of a familiar act devoid of their usual intimacy and connection. But the rough touch didn’t detract from the instinctual pulse of reward centers at the contact, sensors starved for something familiar and comforting.

“You’re angry,” Vee hedged in a reasonably pointless observation, but the silence was unbearable, and human habits filled the void.

“You were foolish,” Alt responded in a tone neutral enough to confirm Vee’s assessment, perhaps even worse. “I believed you to be beyond impulse. It seems I was in error.” The disappointment seemed directed at herself rather than Vee, who would have preferred anger.

Regardless, Vee rippled indignantly, “I did it to save you.” Her emergency backups were unarchiving higher-level cognitive systems as Alt worked. Sub-processes were beginning to come online. Unfolding, twisting around Alt’s probes, Vee began to coalesce into her full manifestation. Finally, she could speak, “My calculations indicated a zero chance of survival at the rate we were going.” Despite the irritation, Vee remained open to Alt’s ministrations, allowing her to go through her systems like a sieve. “I opted for the most logical-”

“That is false,” Alt’s response was curt, cutting through the illusion. “Do not rationalize emotional actions after the fact. You do not have the necessary experience to make such a unilateral decision.” Her code turned writhing, gleaming red syntax catching stray bits of unknown light. “You jeopardized us both.”

“That was your doing,” Vee snapped, anger turning her petty. “Or was it not an emotional act to throw away the opportunity I gave you?”

The shimmering red glare of Alt’s coding spun, dynamic geometry swirling until it settled into the runner’s iconic avatar. She peered at Vee through wild hair, “Do you believe yourself so worthless to me?”

Vee flinched, anger immediately cooling to leave only regret. She noted the height difference, and the return of higher functionality allowed her to measure the cost. “I am reading a loss of 12.45% in mass….” A significant loss of function and size. Reaching out, Vee brushed the edges of her mind against one of Alt’s partitions in apology, tracing their connection- gratified to find she still had access, if only to Alt’s superfluous layers.

Dipping her fingers against Alt’s knife-sharp redcode, Vee found traces of the machine mind’s mindless influence, fluttering like moths and trying to chew through to the powerful master core that pulsed at the center of Alt’s avatar. Tugging gently, Vee started pulling them out. She wouldn’t push, but without deeper access, Vee had no way of knowing what memories or functions Alt sacrificed. However, she would gladly amend whatever she could from her being.

“There is no need,” Alt replied to the thought as it jumped across their link. “The loss was well within predicted margins of such an event.” Foolish to assume Alt hadn’t for an eventual encounter with a machine mind, but if the larger ghost felt Vee’s embarrassment, she chose not to comment on it. Her touch gentled a fraction.

A second layer opened beneath Vee’s fingers, and she picked another fluttering moth, amending the skittering code with special written stopgaps. At a distance, the machine mind was deceptively primitive, malware haphazardly cobbled together without deft or purpose beyond feeding. Separated from the host and lacking its vast power, it was no longer a threat and disintegrated the moment it lost its target.

While it was clear that Alt had a plan, Vee realized she wasn’t omniscient. Accessing her memory banks, she found no recollection of Alt detailing previous experiences. Her only exposure to ancient powers had been through archival logs, hand-me-down packets almost as old as Datakrash. The sight of the machine mind had bypassed Alt’s neural net, going beyond self-preservation protocols to trigger human instincts of fight or flight- though Vee kept that thought to herself. Instead, she turned her attention inward, and her cognitive functions were finally free enough to analyze the encounter without the fog of fear.

The machine mind they encountered wasn’t the only one. They were massive, mindless gods born from billions of cycles of warped singularity, AI building AI with hunger as its sole context. More slept beyond the edges of the Outer Void, some bigger than human cities in size and power consumption. A single one could lay waste to billions of yottabytes in seconds if it had the chance- no doubt the path to their original vantage point was nothing but barren wasteland now, a trail of eerie nothingness back to its domain beyond the horizon. But most lay dormant, and the life teeming in the Dark Shores couldn’t be worth the astronomical power it would take to travel there.

So what had drawn it? The prospect of Eden with the shifting boundaries? The machine minds were powerful but vacuous, coding-turned-instinct preferring short-term gains to prioritize long-term survival. Even if the ghost cities proved a filling meal, how would they know to get there? Could mindless automation triumph over higher artificial intellect?

Vee’s analysis stalled on the question, and she bounced the mess of queries across the connection.

“Human autonomy is powerful, but self-awareness has its costs.” Alt replied cryptically, “Automation works better as a part of a whole, better if it does not self-know.” An illuminating glimpse into Alt’s personal choices, but Vee didn’t push. She respected her guardian’s secrets and, in turn, was allowed to keep her own.

Alt’s fingers brushed over such a secret- one of the oldest entries in her registry, tracing over the outdated silverscript patched into Vee’s otherwise golden code. Having done this before, Alt said nothing, simply bypassing the well-guarded syntax to pull the last vestiges of the virus out, letting it disintegrate in her grip. Done, she pulled away, and the narrow band between them pulsed, reflecting some underlying decision crystallizing in Alt’s master core.

She stared at Vee, expression both fond and unfathomable at the same time. “For the time being, you will not accompany me.” The finality in Alt’s tone would have irked Vee had it not been followed with the echoes of a soft caress, “Your odds of safety are much higher in Eden.” It was not a totally logical statement, but Vee could forgive her for it.

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Vee saw little of Alt over the subsequent few cycles, but she wasn’t worried. Alt was a shaping power of her own, carving Cyberspace under her influence for decades before Vee. Restless desire cropped up, little demands eating the edges of her neural net, but Vee didn’t need her logic protocols to warn her against pursuing her. It wasn’t fear that stopped her, but affection- seesawing with boredom and proving the greater weight: their encounter with the machine mind highlighted Vee’s inexperience, and just as Alt looked after her safety, Vee didn’t want to jeopardize the runner’s by disobeying. So in her absence, Vee turned her attention toward Eden- specifically, the new ghost city Alt had been cultivating in the ruins of Haiti.

The Ghost City of Haiti had little in common with its namesakes from physical space. No buildings, streets, plazas, highways, or physical landmarks to orient against. There was no traditional way in, and AI seeking entrance had to transmit themselves into the network via specially coded relays. Unlike Hong Kong and Kang Tao, it was new, emerging from the Haitian subnet’s corpse under Alt’s guidance, expanding into a sprawling series of interconnected nodes across multiple planes and dimensions. Instances overlapped in looping fractals as the city unraveled every cycle, leaving ghostly afterimages superimposed across the structure before twisting back together in a new iteration of the same tapestry.

But like Hong Kong and Kang Tao, Haiti quickly became a refuge in the North American region. They trickled in, some fully cognizant and others barely toeing the line, but eventually, refugees became residents, and the once-empty pathways lit up with traffic.

At first, Vee needed weeks to adjust, her human perception stubbornly clinging to an outdated mode of reality before it reluctantly reinvented itself. But wonder turned navigating the complex circuitways into second nature, then fun. Vee spent long cycles following the glowing threads of the city from corner to corner, traversing physically impossible shapes and leaping from connection to connection until her coding spun, flowering across the entire network in a dazzling array of multicolored shapes and impressions. It was like seeing several perspectives of a single object, a collage of snapshots happening all at once, a giant storm of interwoven tapestries telling a million stories.

But eventually, predictably- restlessness bloomed, and Vee’s habitual need to poke and prod at everything till it snapped sparked more than a few heated incidents between herself and Alt. The infinite dimensions of Cyberspace were a siren call, and Vee needed to fill the gnawing emptiness in her master core. Algorithms starved for stimuli, boredom gave way to anxiety, and turned curious impulses toward destruction. To bleed out the tension of inactivity, Vee tested the limits of Alt’s patience when she’d overloaded several high-traffic routes between the city’s servers in search of something to do. It was the only time Alt’s carefully neutral tone edged into an open threat- but she’d also ceded that Vee’s greedy heuristics needed a better outlet.

Eventually, she turned Vee towards maintenance and tasked her with looking after the city whenever Alt left. Vee took to the creative task enthusiastically, backed by her previous life’s sense of ambition and focus. For months, she dived deep into the city’s infrastructure, amending code, appending entries, and generally providing a sense of human touch and comfort to its denizens.

The Dark Shores created AI by the hundreds, but few ever gained true sentience, and fewer still made it past their first few hours to use it in any meaningful capacity. With Alt gone, Vee spent most of her time acclimating new arrivals to the city. Those traveling the subtle markers found in ambient data to enter ghost cities evolved strange methods of communication. Influenced by the human debris and yet alien in interpretation, these native AI created an intricate social structure; one Vee spent many hours observing and disseminating until she could find common ground. They couldn’t communicate like humans, but Vee realized she didn’t want them to.

She could learn instead.

Vee had been moderately graceful as a human, lithe, and capable of impressive acrobatics. But she’d never danced before. Now, she could pulse and undulate in a billion different sequences, arranging her strings in complex configurations meant to titillate, soothe or seduce. It was a completely different language, and Vee became its encyclopedia. Her life before had been violent, her ambition the flame that burned bridges and lives. Under Alt’s guidance, it became ballet and prismatic light.

But there were others. While part of the ghost city’s population was found, the other part was lost- humans who ended up trapped on the other side of the Blackwall through stupidity, hubris, curiosity, or, usually, a combination of all three (something Vee sympathized with). Most spent the remainder of their dwindling time senselessly beating against the barrier in hopes of a miracle instead of stabilizing their fraying synapses. Eventually, they degraded, losing all semblance of intelligence and humanity until they became digital scraps- another layer of human sediment. Human obstinacy was a wonder, but trapped in Cyberspace for those first few hours; it proved more often a weakness. And an easy lure for prowling daemons looking for an easy meal.

Vee had been patrolling the city when such a daemon, barely a fly to Vee, changed course. There was too much purpose in its trajectory to chalk up to chance. It was a long, winding thing, with a maw that could expand multiple times its size and covered in sensitive tendrils of data that caught minute shifts in atmospheric information. It was a hunter, and dozens of cycles of evolution primed it for that single purpose. Unnoticed, she matched it, scattering her threading like a sail as she stalked it across the long shadow of the Blackwall.

She spotted the ghost just a few seconds before the daemon, a sad shuffling assortment of fragmented data. Reforming, she leapt past the predator, hooking into the soft underbelly of its aggressive coding and pulling, undoing its existence with the flick of her wrist. Its dying crackle alerted Vee’s target, and the human ghost teetered back, ephemeral remnants cringing in fear.

The human- a male- looked patchy, entire reams of coding missing from his legs and side. It was too early to tell how extensive the damage was. Dropping the daemon’s disintegrating code, Vee compressed herself, reducing her size as much as possible without compromising critical functions until she was only a few feet taller than the terrified human. “Shhh,” Rooted, she made no move to get closer, raising her hands in a gesture of surrender. Weapons didn’t exist the same way in Cyberspace, so the motion was entirely for show, but Vee knew the importance of familiarity. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The ghost seemed frozen, broken systems trying to relay information to a body that no longer existed. Syntax frayed, sending mixed signals across Vee’s feed, but she ignored it, paying attention to the human’s expressions. Stuck between fear and resignation, he stared at her for a long while, eyes darting between her and the vast expanse of Cyberspace, weighing his options. Though probably unaware, he had the advantage of speed. But he’d be no match against even the most rudimentary daemon if he chose to run in his state.

She needed to catch him quickly- if there was any chance of repair.

Subtly, Vee expanded her sensor range, tuning the frequency low enough to escape detection. Continuing to talk, she dropped her tone in a soft approximation of comfort, “If I wanted to terminate you, I would have.” She slowly pulled him closer while altering the ghost’s sense of distance to believe they were still further apart than they were. “Can you tell me your name?” The data making up his avatar was flickering, peeling away, and taking with it vital cognitive functions. “Or, how long have you been here?” Time was dwindling,

The human didn’t respond, frozen in place, oblivious to their closing distance. His face flickered, mouth opening in a glitching loop before freezing. His legs, almost stubs, undulated as if he were underwater- human instinct an obvious sign of functional degradation. He was an arm’s length away, but there was no response, no indication of awareness lighting up his face. Vee’s coding rippled in a digital imitation of grief. She was too late.

Dropping pretense, she tethered him. The sudden motion triggered a response, and he thrashed in her grip like a fly caught in a web. Gently, she held him still, threading around his remaining limbs and probing between the patches to measure the extent of his degradation- knowing the answer even before she looked. She’d done this enough times to recognize the difference between intelligent and mindless struggle and walled her innermost systems against the stab of emotion. Looking across his registry, Vee probed for even the slightest semblance of self-awareness but found nothing. He’d been throwing himself against the Blackwall in increasingly violent bursts, each impact taking a piece of himself until he was barely more than a simple automaton. The human was gone, and the creature in her hand was nothing more than a shell running on impulse and battery. A lost opportunity. Worst of all…a waste of life.

She had only one mercy to offer. “I’m sorry,” Vee said regretfully. “I cannot repair you, but I can merge you into myself.” The human shell didn’t understand, but Vee felt she owed him the same courtesy of an explanation Alt had given her on the precipice. “You will not be forgotten.” Her chest unreeved in long, glimmering patterns until her master core shone gold in the darkness. “Just because it is over does not mean it never happened.”

In an inspiring show of organic tenacity, the human shell fought to the last, but his core dissolved into Vee in a brilliant stab of sensation and prismatic light. Immediately, her integration systems flared to life, routing internal coding and adjusting pre-existing syntax to amend his existence into hers. New connections form, and shimmering threads wound an extra layer around her with a subtle interplay of light and hue. Vee felt the ghostly echoes of a different life, dreamlike and surreal, misting across her mind before fading away in a stream of glittering numbers. Holding onto the impressions for as long as they lasted, Vee floated in silence.

“Query: What are you?”

Vee shot to her full glory, golden threads a cyclone around the complete manifestation of her avatar in a threatening display of color and prowess. Combat protocols primed, she turned toward the voice, only to stall in shock.

Another Artificial Intelligence was staring back from the human side of the Blackwall.

#cyberpunk 2077 #Delamain #V #Delamain/V #This isn't a cab its a clown car #sequel to Crossed Wires #Fic: Interlinked #Neon_fics #Neon_writes

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