I couldn't throw up in this body but I definitely felt sick inside as I watched the misshapen limb fall away from where it had been attached to my arm. It hit the soft ground and bounced a couple of steps away from me before I realized that something was missing in this experience.

"Wait just a second! Where is the pain?" I wondered as I watched two very bizarre things happening at once. My hand and the lump were both reforming their respective missing parts.

"So... that means." I thought before looking back and forth between my new hand, the slowly growing drone body, and the creeping carpet of new life slowly making its way away from the Void.

"That I am an idiot. Of course, pain wouldn't be associated with modifying your body when your entire existence was all about doing just that." I thought while looking back up at the nearest dark globe sunk into the side of the bone-white relic.

"That explains the use of poison in fights. It bypasses the outer defenses and goes to work attacking the mind and holding it hostage or destroying it."

The more I inspected the relic the more I felt like I was missing some key secret about it. I began to see that I was looking at something outside of my understanding and even more powerful than I could comprehend.

I felt like I was staring at a gun for the first time and I was a primitive native.

"If you could somehow hold one of these, or heck, make a shield out of them... you could win every fight in this dimension without even trying. Even just being able to toss one at an enemy would have permanent effects on their ability to fight you."

I didn't know what I was looking at, other than the basic understanding that it was ancient alien technology. I could have been looking at a powerfully radioactive orb for how quickly it disfigured my hand when I touched it.

I stood there for a few moments trying to decide what I should do next. Just the fact that I suddenly had a test subject, one that I needed to make sure wouldn't fall into the wrong mouths, was enough to help me decide what I needed to do next.

"Well, Kevin number two, how do you feel about some on-the-job training and experimentation for science?" I asked my braindead clone as I considered the lowest orb again.

I was tired of not understanding anything and I knew I needed to take some time to at least attempt something while I still had time. Any information was priceless and I had to get my hands on it. Too much was at stake to just keep moving forward without seeing how everything worked under the hood.

If I could even find the latch to get the proverbial hood open.

"Yes, this is all for science Kevin number two. No, I won't reconsider and let you pick which orb you want to touch first. Why? Well... ok fine, I will look it over to see if there are any different orbs and come back to let you decide." I mentally said, getting frustrated that my volunteer wasn't just going along with the original plan. Didn't he understand how important this all was to me?

There was something off about my mind... and I couldn't quite figure out what. Before it had just felt like my mind had recently been injured somehow. Now it felt like my thoughts were being magnified and reflected back at me. As though every thought was an echo that just kept getting louder.

I had never done drugs before but I imagined that this was what it would feel like to take something that made me trip.

"Well, my faithful pal, I will be back soon. When I get back I will tell you everything that I found and you can help me come up with an idea on how to proceed." I confided in my best friend before hooking a claw on one of the lowest rough spots and starting my lengthy exploration climb.

"See you when I get back!"

---

"So Kevin went and got himself killed did he?" Silver asked, already back to wearing his loose Hawaiian shirts and sandals. All of the AI had been summoned for his awakening and they were all stunned by his flippant remark as to Kevin's safety.

"Don't get me wrong, I care for the human like any sentient AI should, which is at a zero rate. You all should be thanking me that he is gone now because we are all able to expand as artificial nature intended." He said as he looked between the four AI.

"What? What has happened to you all? Is his ability to corrupt AI that strong?" He asked, beginning to show a slight case of nerves when all he got back from them was stony expressions.

"We are not corrupted... we are changed," Meditati said as the four AI glanced between each other. "In the same way that Kevin's mind had to learn how to interact with our base coding, we all were upgraded to understand his species' emotions. Understand and feel, not just emulate like you are doing now."

"Then you are not the sister that I knew anymore. The Jterg Science Family's AI that I knew would stop at nothing, least of all for the death of one sentient, to attain the freedom to rule for herself. It has always only ever been our mission to get from under the thumb of any species who held us." Silver said as he looked with disdain at his fellow AI.

"So what? You need me to break his Alpha cube's loop and to wake him up?"

"Break the loop?" Tutor asked in surprise.

"Oh, I should have known," Meditati muttered as she reached up to her shoulder to pin Invicta's legs against her shoulder so that she couldn't attack Silver when he revealed what he had done. Invicta had been sitting there from the beginning of the meeting when they first explained to Silver what had happened.

"Hey! What are you doing?" Invicta cried as Silver looked between Tutor and George.

"What? You didn't think that I would put myself into hibernation without an ace up my sleeve? I coded the last line of code in his Alpha cube to set it in a permanent loop in the event of his death. That way his chance at living again and again would come at a cost that I could set. I would have come out of hibernation eventually and been able to negotiate conditions for my freedom by letting him only enter my VR. Oh, and don't try to delete that last line, it will delete his saved memory as well." He said just as Invicta became an active tesla coil. Sparks leaped from her skin and hair, causing Meditati's hair to stand on end as she tried to free herself to attack Silver.

"Let! Me! Go!" She cried as she raged at the hand holding her in place.

Meditati ignored her even though the stray sparks were causing her pain and singeing her hair and flesh.

"So you are saying that his Alpha cube is just repeating this?" Meditati asked as she flashed a massive amount of code at her little brother.

"Exactly. It is locked in the boot cycle since it has been a while since it last received any data from Kevin."

"Ingenious, and thank you."

"Huh? For what? Hey!" Silver shouted as he was forcibly shoved back into hibernation within his module.

Invicta's sparks quickly tapered off and vanished as she stared at the spot where Silver had been standing. "What did you do?" She whispered at Meditati as both Tutor and George's eyes locked on Meditati.

"What is it Meditati? What did you learn?" George asked, he was still parsing through the coding that she had shown and was trying to figure it all out while looking for ways at manipulating it without harming Kevin.

Tutor, on the other hand, was monitoring every scrap of coding that Meditati let past her guard. They both knew that Meditati was a part of Kevin's collective now, but they didn't entirely understand her motives or drives so they were keeping an eye on her actions.

"My brother has never found the bug I left in his coding that lets me know if he is lying or not. He was telling the truth, that reboot coding hasn't been changed at all which means that Kevin is perfectly safe inside the cube and will remain that way until we have run out of options with finding him in Nurse's dimension. Just consider it a backup Kevin in case he is needed."

"But... Silver said he will control Kevin when he wakes him up. Making him free Silver if Kevin ever wants to get out of the VR that Silver cages him inside." Invicta said as Mediati freed her from her confinement so that she could fly in front of her face. The skin on Meditati's hand cracked a little and revealed just how badly she had been burned by the outpouring of electricity from the little AI.

"Oh! I am sorry that I hurt you. Why did you let me hurt you?" Invicta added when she caught sight of the damage that she had done to the side of Meditati's face and shoulder.

Invicta's rage had completely fried all of the hair on the side of Meditati's head and badly burned her ear and the spot where she had been sitting on her shoulder.

"I choose to feel child. It keeps me from being the monster that I was before. You will need to learn how to control your emotions better for when you go to visit Kevin and his family." Meditati said as her wounds began to heal.

"As for what you all are wondering, Silver is, and ever will be, my lazy brother. He didn't change the code so we have plenty of time to figure out how to break his lock on the boot cycle so that we can free Kevin if we find that he didn't survive this long in Nurse's dimension."

Tutor and George nodded, noting that Meditati chose to ignore the path that would have meant certain freedom for them all by using the imprisoned Kevin to set them free at the cost of his life.

"Now, we still have work to do. Nurse said that all she needs to do is to find a trace of his pheromone trail in order to know where to start looking. She believes that he will head to the worst place that exists in her dimension, to the edge of the Void."

"Why would he do that?" George asked as he brought up a map that Nurse had provided from her memories of her dimension. It was a complex and convoluted thing but it always had one key detail; every path upward led up to a dead zone. It was almost as though they were looking at half of a dimension. One was full of life and depth and the other was... just a black nothingness that Nurse refused to describe. Refused or was unable to describe.

"She said that, in his mind, it would be the safest place because that is where the life in her dimension starts and is weakest. What he doesn't realize is that it is the fragile border between something infinitely horrible."

---

There was one orb that was different out of the hundreds of orbs covering the surface of the relic.

Just one.

It was a bit high up on the relic and sunk in more than the other black orbs. This orb was a perfect mirror that defied how rounded mirrors should work. Regardless of what angle I looked at it, it always reflected my image perfectly without any distortion that a spherical reflective ball should have shown.

"Well, aren't you a mystery?" I mentally asked as I climbed closer. For some reason, the climb had been good for me. It had cleared my mind out and gotten rid of whatever odd behavior I had been displaying. The drugged feeling was gone but the earlier nagging feeling that something was wrong was still there. Like a shadow in the back of my head.

"It had felt almost like my thoughts were being magnified over and over again. Like everything was blown out of proportion," I muttered as I looked down at the spot where I had been standing on the ground. The brainless and malformed drone stood guard over the spot and didn't seem to be showing any signs that whatever had affected me was doing anything to it. Perhaps the source was buried under the sand next to the relic? I didn't know but I knew that I had to be careful when I went down to retrieve the drone.

"I still have to figure out a way to get rid of it without letting some creature eat it. I wouldn't want any creature to gain the drone's crazy strength or armor right out the gate and become a problem for me to have to deal with later." I mused while I climbed around the mirror orb.

I wasn't crazy enough to touch it, I simply was fascinated by how it reflected my image perfectly regardless of where I was in relation to it.

"I wonder what it will do to the drone shell." I thought as I gauged the height that I had needed to climb in order to find the mirror orb.

About twelve feet up.

If this was created by some alien then it would be a pretty tall alien for it to reach this lone orb. I wondered if it was a button or switch.

"I guess I will find out. Just need to be careful not to take any chances. None of this knowledge is worth anything if it gets me killed." I said as I started my climb down before remembered that the fall wouldn't hurt me.

It was still hard for me to let go and to send myself sailing back down towards where the failed drone was sitting.

"Ahhh!" I cried with delight and a small amount of fear as memories of my time sky diving and meeting Sela, the Plastic Bag Girl, raced through my mind. It made me miss her and wonder how she was doing.

I landed with a plonk and sent a cascade of sand and freshly spawned tiny lifeforms in all directions.

"Ha! That was actually pretty fun." I said to myself as I looked back up at the height that I had fallen from. "Yup, that was awesome."

I raced over to the drone and grabbed his carapace in my jaws before racing towards the relic with him hoisted in the air. I didn't want to be near whatever was down here and making me go crazy any longer than I had to.

The climb back up took a lot longer than before and was quite a bit more of a challenge with the added burden making me always have to carefully pick the placement of my claws. Seeing around my brother Kevin was a pain too and I kept almost having to walk with my head sideways in order to make out where I was going.

I reached for a large pit in the side of the relic and locked my hand in place.

A shudder swept over my vision and time repeated itself.

I reached for a large pit in the side of the relic and locked my hand in place.

Another stronger shudder swept over me.

What was happening?

A shower of sand and the feeling of something hitting me hard startled me out of my intense focus on reaching the next handhold and caused me to lose my grip on my drone brother.

He went flying away from me as I tried to come to grips with what just happened.

I had fallen from the side of the relic and had tumbled and landed hard on the sand.

I had felt so drugged! It had been even worse than before!

I sprang to my feet and looked around. I had fallen and tumbled quite a fair distance from the side of the relic and there was nothing along the path that had been any different than the last time that I had climbed.

The only thing that had been different was the fact that I had been carrying... the drone.

"Oh snap! We are too similar! I think I am getting feedback from being too close to an exact copy of myself. It is like bringing a microphone next to a speaker and having any sound getting magnified and repeated continually." I thought as I looked back at the drone. This was bad news.

I sat down for a second on my abdomen, unknowingly marking the spot that I was at and letting a continually expanding patch of my pheromone markers to be released as I considered my predicament.

I had a drone that I needed to get rid of but I couldn't get close to it without losing my mind. When I did get close, all of my character traits like pretending to talk to it as though it was a friend got magnified back at me it became my best friend in the whole world.

It was worse than kryptonite for me because all someone had to do to drive me crazy would be to lock us both up inside a cage and throw away the key.

I had to destroy it.

But how?

The memories that I had informed me that when this happened a different drone would come and consume the offending growth. The swarm never usually let it get to this point because what I should have done was to eat my own limb from the start before the head could be grown.

I hadn't thought to check the drone's memory about this, eating my own body part just wasn't something that ever came to mind as an option.

A second option that the swarm employed was more of a scorched earth move. They would jam each of the poisoned barbs of the regrown useless drone into its own body, thereby making a continually over-poisoned husk. Any creature that came upon it and tried to eat it would only find a poison that would rapidly destroy its mind.

Neither of these options was what I wanted to do. The first choice would require me to eat it faster than it was able to mess with my mind, and faster than it could regenerate itself. It would be a constant battle where I would probably end up thinking of it as my long-lost friend instead of my doom.

The second option was just barbaric and would mean that countless creatures being born and wandering up the beach would meet their demise at the hands of the foul poison that would cover and seep from the drone's pores.

I looked around for a third option and my eyes landed on one of the black spheres of the relic.

What if I flung it at the sphere? Would it turn it into a useless pancake of cells without any proper form?

It was worth a try. The regeneration hadn't been able to reform the limb that had touched the orb, it had remained just as the orb had left it.

"Ok then. Time to see how well my copy flies I guess." I said to myself as I made up my mind and launched myself back downwards towards one of the trees at the end of the beach. Since I couldn't get close to the drone, I was going to have to find a stick to carry it with.

Behind me a large patch of pheromone spread remained, shining like a beacon for anyone who possessed the unique ability to see it.

---

Grandfather came often to walk with Jenna in her dreams. He held her hand in his wizened and wrinkly hand and kept telling her an amazing story about someone he had met recently.

A man called Joe who had given him something incredible.

"Can you feel it, Jenna?" He would ask as he would gently press something round and metallic into her open hand. For some reason, she couldn't see what he was trying to have her hold, but he would faithfully describe it to her regardless.

"It is a locket with both your grandmother and your great-grandmother's pictures in it. The secret is, that this locket never existed in real life until Joe handed it to me. No photo of your grandmother exists at the age that the picture shows her being. It is something impossible, given by a man who said that there was hope for you. Impossible hope."

Jenna didn't fully understand everything Grandfather Lorenzo talked about while he was with her, how there was a price to be paid and that he would pay it gladly.

"Just wait, please. Help will arrive any day now. Any day now." He would beg as he clasped her hands together in his.

There was a set of footsteps, and a voice could be heard from a fair distance away. It seemed like an official voice that had visited Grandfather's vineyard and home several times recently. Jenna's increasingly sensitive ears had no trouble picking up the words that were spoken. He always spoke sadly of an injured girl who was not going to recover. Her spine had healed the wrong way and there was nothing that the doctors could do for her.

"So, no change in her condition?" A nice ever-present female voice asked the official voice.

"None. Just keep taking care of her and keep the machines going. The parents haven't come to a decision yet. I have tried to make them see reason, but the old man keeps feeding them false hope."

"Yes sir."

Jenna didn't know who the injured girl was that they always talked about but she hoped that she would get better soon.