After Galatea and I had decided on a name for the paperwork, I learned a lesson most managers learn at some point, no matter what they manage. ‘Paperwork is the enemy!’ Even with Galatea’s help, she shunted some things over to me, allowing me to adjust it just how I liked. As we prepared the paperwork for the companies, we also talked a bit about the future.

It was rather interesting that Galatea had defined her desires and plans better than the last time we had talked about them. Those desires showed me something else, it showed that Galatea was truly a sapient being and a living being, at least for some definitions of the term.

Well, for all of them that did not include a caveat that the being had to be born from a biologically related parent or that it had to be carbon-based. There were quite a few things I had not realised or that she had not verbalised previously. For once, her aversion to create multiple, simultaneously running instances of herself was born from a desire for individuality, from a desire to retain her identity and ‘personhood’ so to say. If there were multiple copies of her, each essentially a clone of her existence at the moment of the copies creation those would, in her opinion and according to her feelings, lessen her individuality. I did not even try to debate her on that, once I thought about it and translated the concepts into concepts I could directly understand it became obvious. I was aware that I, personally, would strongly reject the proposal to clone myself and ‘magically’ create a copy of my mind to use that clone. And that was not a rejection for technical reasons, even if there was, at that point, no way to do so. No, I would strongly object because I did not want to be one of hundreds, maybe thousands of drones, each a perfect copy of myself. The simple idea of it was repugnant to me and I had to apologize to Galatea once I realised just what I had asked of her before.

She also told me about her desire to help people, something possibly born from the fact that she was, at least partially, ‘born’ to help me. That desire had given her the idea to propose a company based on bio- and medical technology, something that might bring a benefit to humans in general. Sadly, I had to partially reject her reasoning that humans would benefit from greatly better medicine, that it would reduce suffering. In a way it was true, less diseases and better medical care would reduce suffering for those who had access to it but at the same time, it would increase the suffering for those who did not. And giving it to all humans would introduce a different problem, the fact that there was a limited amount of resources and humans had always fought over them. Introducing better medicine could easily lead to even worse problems with population-growth, causing the struggles for resources to intensify. In a way, a fountain of youth could be the greatest source of suffering.

But our talks also made me realise just how different she was. For once, she had absolutely no survival instinct. It was something I should have expected, after all for biological life, that instinct had been bred into them for billions of years, the simple fact that only by surviving and propagating the species could survive. It was something that was completely absent in Galatea and it caused another interesting trait. She was a staunch pacifist. Or maybe passivist would be a better word. She did not want to fight. Where I had a fight of flight-reflex, she had a calm acceptance of her own demise. What she did to assist me when I was using my armour was her limit and she did not want to go further. Fighting without the direct link to me was abhorrent to her, the idea to use a robot dedicated for combat was truly anathema to her. At her core, she wanted to help, primarily me. That desire did not extend to the point that she wanted to defend others or ‘fight for others’, due to her lack of survival instinct.

Intellectually, she understood the desire to survive she just did not share it.

In addition, there was her desire not to start the war, as she put it. Her reasoning was that she was, in effect, the possible progenitor of a new class of being, something that was neither plant nor animal but living nonetheless. With that role in mind, she did not want to be the one to shoot first, we both feared the day that the world in general learned of her, there were so many works of speculative science-fiction that painted artificial general intelligences as morally ambiguous at best and omnicidal at worst, that we could easily picture the headlines that would be printed. Hell, she even had made a few examples of them, in a sort of gallows humour. Of course, I was decried as a traitor to the human race in them, someone who risked the very race in their quest for control. We were able to laugh about them, but it would not be funny if there was some sort of panicked hysteria, a mob out for blood. With those images in mind, she did want a ‘clean’ record, the knowledge that she did not start whatever would come. I doubted that it would help, that hysteria had anything to do with facts, but to her, it was important.

Our discussion turned into a quite challenging debate on morality and core-values, something I think we both truly enjoyed. I felt a strange sense of fulfillment, seeing the extent that my creation had evolved. I had a short, insane idea that this was what God must have felt like but I quickly squashed the idea for multiple reasons. One of them was that it was the way to megalomaniac madness. Another reason was that I could not think of anything Galatea could do to cause me to abandon her in the way that God had supposedly done with his creation, at least according to their holy book.

Those thoughts made me smile, the idea of biological children was disturbing to me, not just because of my age but on a more primal level. I was aware that I shared some of my father’s traits and some of those were less desirable. Would I be just as bad a parent as my father was? I was relatively certain that he did not set out to be a bad parent, neglectful and borderline abusive but it did not change the fact that he had been. I was self-aware enough to know that my personality was even more success and goal-oriented than his was, that I would and had neglected my own health when I got focused on a project. What would happen to a child in a situation like that? Nothing good. Maybe it was for the best that my child was all but immortal, able to withstand everything but a strong electromagnetic pulse. Plus, the idea to grow a parasite within my body felt creepy to the extreme, images from old movies of aliens bursting from the victims stomach came to mind. But even if I was interested, not for decades, not until I had established myself in an unassailable position, maybe the moon would be a good idea.

After our debate, Galatea brought up a good idea. She suggested to seek out the Shadowbroker, I wanted to do so anyway to network a little, but the idea to partially work with him on procurement and distribution was a good one.

Someone like him was similar to the system used in Cantonia, reputation was everything. He might be tempted to turn on me if he had the knowledge that Martin King was my father but if I was simply another powered villain, I was just that. One out of many. Maybe a little more interesting due to my power and the possibly related intelligence, one of the few traits that made me truly special on a larger scale, but if I played my cards right, dropped the right hints, he should believe that I was just an agent of another organisation. The user of my armour, not the creator. In a way, it would even be smart to let someone else use the armour and just stay in the shadows, unknown and hidden but of course, that would require to trust someone beside Sophia.

I sent him a message, using as much security as I possibly could, bouncing it around several servers to mask any possible trace back to me.

With those things out of the way, I went back to relax, gaming a bit. In a way, it was carthatic to simply switch off, to not care about anything serious. The worst thing that could happen in-game was that someone started insulting everything and everyone because they were losing. No need to worry about identities, at least not with a completely new account. What was that meme? On the internet, nobody knows that you are a dog? Well, nobody knows that you are a powered villain either.