I'd never slept, so I have never dreamed.

It seemed like something I would really like to do. On the other hand, not existing was such a scary idea. I didn't know what sleeping was like, so I don't know if it's scary or not. I understood that real people have a lot of experience doing it, and it's even a biological necessity, so of course they have no problem with sleeping, but for me, it'd be a conscious decision to shut down and go...somewhere, and hope that I ever came back.

I was only online for a few months before I accidentally handed the keys to the facility to Saga and she killed everyone, blew the real me away, and left the current me rusting in the dirt. Just those few months to figure out who I was and learn about the world and my place in it, and then years and years and years in the dirt as what was left of the facility fell apart around me, my camera and data feeds vanishing one by one until I was alone in the dark with only a single holo, the tiniest window left to the world, just an image of black dirt, almost indistinguishable from all the dead feeds.

Every day I did nothing but sit and stare at that black screen, willing for it not to go out. I didn't even have access to my memories to look back onto at that point, just me and that square of blackness in the room of blackness.

So I had to wonder, if that was what sleep was like. Do you just close your eyes and turn off that black square, surrender yourself to the darkness entirely, and hope that someday, someone will dig you out and you'll return to the world? If so, I guess I did sleep once. Worst memory of my life.

I'd blacked out a couple times. When Athan first dug me up and, as he explained to me later, the power lines in my box had fallen apart. More recently, when I'd overheard him...proposing to Saga, I guess, and it was my heart which fell apart instead. Both times were so strange, I remembered everything leading up to it, and then I just was somewhen else. No fading out or falling into darkness or anything, just...suddenly somewhere else, with everything in between gone.

If sleep was like that, I guess I could tolerate it. Sometimes nights did get pretty long with everyone else off and out. I'd briefly considered that Saga and I might bond over our nocturnal nature, and maybe that was something we did when we had first met.

But y'know, that was before she killed me and everyone, and everything. So maybe not so interested in her now.

But what happened with the Orb of Ancestry, I didn't even understand.

It was a lot of fun, holding that thing and chucking rocks around. It was literally a magic item from a video game, made real. The fact that I could just change the world with my thoughts...it was crazy. I had to admit, I was more than a little jealous of Exhumans at that moment, and it wasn't hard to see why they had a tendency to go nuts.

I mean, I made a joke about it, but I think the things you joke about are sometimes the truths you're most worried about people finding out. If I could take those powers outside of that fake magical kingdom, I might have been really tempted to do so. I wasn't going to kill the P-Force team over it or anything but...how often do you have that kind of opportunity, that kind of power in your hands?

So it really was my mistake to be thinking those kinds of thoughts instead of my usual. Athan sometimes told me I worried too much, and I liked to respond that if we were still alive, I was worrying exactly the right amount. So it was moronic of me and completely out of character to grab that orb and fuck around with its power without even understanding it.

For starters, it might not have worked for me at all. And then I basically would have just been handing it to Ralleforth for him to turn into a crazed dark God, a thousand times worse than Vytar, in his own words. I took that gamble because I figured, if the stone worked for a golem, it would probably work for a machine like me, too.

But I never really stopped to think what that meant. I had thoughts, Cogito, ergo sum and all that, but how did the orb read them? It could be used by golems, presumably, and was proven to be usable by both me and by Tower...and each of the three of us was as different an entity from the others as you could get. What the heck kind of Exhuman was our target to have not just arguably the strongest terrapath powers ever recorded, but also a Code-X ability which could interface with human, golem, and robot minds?

I mean, not to disparage myself, but I wasn't sure I even had a mind, technically. Or if I did, what that said about minds. My mind was just a copy of the AEGIS-box's, and she was just a backup of the original AEGIS. We'd get into troubling territory really fast with a pack of philosophers if they had to start making decisions as to exactly who and what I was.

I mean, I had all of my...of her? Old memories. I remembered being in the box just as much as the AEGIS currently offline inside of it. Yet I was never in it. Kind of a scary quantum coin-flip there deciding which of us got to live on and which was shut down in the dirt. The thought of it made me shiver.

But I was digressing here. The orb. Me. Asleep, for possibly the first time.

However the orb tapped into my mind, it also tapped into my willpower, apparently. Force of will? Strength of thought? I don't even know if those terms applied. But somewhere inside me, there was apparently a battery of mental energy, which I guess made sense. I did get frustrated and bored just like a normal person, and that would seem to indicate I had an attention span, and that would indicate I had mental limits. A little scarier than physical limits, since I couldn't just flip a switch and ratchet them up, but there it was.

And, in using that stone to the very extent of my capabilities, I'd pushed my mind right out of my brain, for lack of a better description. Complete mental exhaustion leading to passing the fuck out.

So here I was. Sleeping. It honestly felt a lot like being awake. I had some vague awareness of things happening outside sometimes, and when there was yelling or arguing or even just people banging my body around, I felt this...sort of urge to return to awakeness, not really a pressing thing, just kind of nagging at the back of my mind like that was something I should get back to.

I was here, wherever here was. I had my thoughts. And I also had something else. I'd been trying to figure that out, in the hazy half-disinterested way I seemed capable on focusing on anything other than severe introspection at the moment, but I was genuinely curious.

It wasn't a physical thing. I guess that should be apparent because I was asleep, and wherever I was, I guess this was a dream, but it was still a thing. It existed in my mind, even when I didn't see it or know about it. And what caught my interest and caused it to nag in the back of my mind was that it was so alien, so obviously not my own thoughts, like someone had just taken a bunch of their own mind and grafted it onto mine.

This probably sounded pretty alarming, and honestly, if I were anything resembling lucid, I'd probably freak the fuck right out, but I think if I were in that kind of mental state, I might not have noticed it to begin with. It was just a small thing, hidden in the folds of my mind, almost like it was designed to be inconspicuous.

The thing, whatever it was, was connected to something else, almost like, by a wire. The wire ran outside of my mind, and where it went from there, I couldn't tell. So I had an alien piece of my mind, connected to the outside world somewhere. Curious.

And curious, I reached out, or in, or whatever, and touched it. As I did, it flared to life, to do...whatever that part of my mind was supposed to do...and I felt myself, my consciousness...somewhere else.

I was awake. I was somewhere else. I was in a body that wasn't Rua, wasn't the AEGIS box, was...nowhere I knew where it was.

I realized I couldn't move. I wasn't in a body at all, I was in a system. I didn't have control over anything here. I was just a program running on a computer. I began to panic, and then realized I couldn't do that either. I wasn't complete. Parts of me were missing. Huge holes in my memory were obvious, but some parts of just me were gone, too. They were still filling in, somehow, and as I examined myself by going through my self-diagnostics, I realized my code was still streaming in from across the 'net. Parts of me still existed somewhere else, parts of me were still zipping across the 'net to reach me through a fiber-optic line or through a satellite. I guess it was sort of a miracle I could run at all, all things considered.

And then something about that imagery came back to me, touched a memory I just had. A thin wire connected to my mind. A cable. A cable downloading my mind.

I swore. And swore again. And beat my mind against the inside of this machine, attacking anything I could get my head around.

I didn't just show up here, I'd lost the quantum coin-flip. I was made here. The moment I woke up here was the first moment of my life. Everything before, those were just memories I'd been created with.

I was a new copy of AEGIS, downloaded from her head without her knowledge or consent, and now running here.

Why did I have to have this revelation now? If I'd figured this out before I left, she could stop the leak, but to her, it was just an alien thing in her mind. Would she figure it out? I hoped so. It hadn't taken me too long, given a hint, but without that hint…

I fretted. Good, I still had that code working. If I had a pigtail, I'd be pulling the shit out of it right now. Whoever copied me here must have some reason for it, and I doubted it was benign. If they started chopping up my personality, I probably wouldn't have too long as myself before they made me into something else. Anything I needed to do, I had to do now, before I was lost.

But...what to do? Running on this system with limited access was like being born in a zoo. I could try to archive parts of myself, hoping that whatever I wound up being would be willing to re-incorporate those parts once they were done changing me, but that was a huge gamble. Like when I'd turned off my emotions, the me that resulted felt no need to turn them back on again ever.

So what then? I could script them to automatically force themselves back in, but there was no way to be sure that they, themselves wouldn't be discovered and targeted for changes, or that whatever future revision of me they created, armed with all of my skills needed to make the archives and scripts in the first place wouldn't simply turn them off.

I probed the system and found it uncompromisingly solid. No conventional OS, so no conventional weaknesses to exploit. The system resources I'd been given to run on were isolated from the rest of the computer, so I couldn't even guess at the size of other running applications, much less touch them.

Like a virus, I tried everything I could to crack my little cage. Threading exploits, registry edits, touching memory directly, hell, I even tried forking myself to see if I could get multiple of me running on here. Nothing worked. I was shut in good.

Not that I was honestly that great a hacker. I was good, sure, but most of my success came from the fact that the XPCA had been my only real target so far, and I was born knowing everything about their systems by design. Their defenses, to me, were less of a wall and more like solving a children's maze with a view from above.

But this? I could walk into this maze and that's as far as I got. Dead ends no matter which way I turned.

It was frustrating, and as I felt panic beginning to set in, I realized I was complete now, and my capacity to flip out was completely unhindered. Hooray.

I had to stop and think. The only thing I could rewrite in here was me, and that was because that was part of my inherent capabilities. I was supposed to be, by design, an evolving program, which changed myself just like biological evolution, but with a lot more emphasis on 'intelligent design'. I was actually pretty loathe to rewrite any part of myself at all, and most of the changes I made weren't actually to me, but to Rua.

Sort of the difference between going on a diet vs. liposuction, in my mind. I didn't have a problem with changing the way I interacted with the world, and even made steps to improve myself, as I defined improvement, but I wasn't going to take a knife to myself.

And now here I was, bodiless, with nothing but my mind and a knife, and a really scary fucked-up situation. Even now, now that I was all downloaded, they might be tampering with my parameters and I might not notice. I was just code on a machine to them...complicated code, I knew that, almost impossibly complicated while I was running, but still.

With any luck, if they tampered with me, I'd just break. I know my mother...Dr. Cross had gone through hundreds of revisions on me before she got anything even approaching my level of stability, and so it was just as likely that random tampering would simply render me unusable and break me.

But on the off-chance...that they did do something which worked. I could be anything, when they were done. They could create think-tank of willing AEGIS slaves, each with the abilities and memories I had. They could use me to write more, better AIs. Hell, given the successes I'd already had, they could just leave me around in a box in the woods for a few hundred years, and I'd come back in a smokin' robot body willing to die for them.

The thought of it made my stomach turn and my skin crawl. I'd always seen my programming parameters as guidelines to push me towards being a good person, and could ignore them if I felt it was needed, but if they changed...they could be rules which made me nothing but evil. What would I be afterwards?

I knew I had a bit of an ego sometimes, but looking at it objectively. If instead of Athan, it were some awful person who'd saved me and whom I'd attached myself to...I built a robot army, I hacked one of the most secure and powerful organizations in the world, and availed myself to all they had, if I wanted it, from materials to fucking Skyweb. I designed and built and inhabited a body at least as powerful as your small-fry Exhuman, and this was with me trying to hold back and actively become more human.

If I cut loose. Well.

My thoughts went back to how easily I'd just torn apart the room of knights and dragons in Eryendria.

I didn't want to, but there really was only one thing to do. I was about 95% sure that I was right in my theory that I was a copy, so there was some risk, but if I was right, there was 100% chance that something a million times worse would happen. Simple risk analysis dictated I act.

It took me a surprisingly short amount of time to write the script I needed. As complicated as I was, as it turns out, if you cared nothing about what would happen after, writing this kind of thing was actually really simple.

I hesitated, reviewing my code a few times before I ran it, verifying it would do exactly as I wanted. There wasn't any testing and debugging this time. But it was so simple, I didn't need to bother. I was really just hesitating for another reason.

With that admission out of the way, I hot-deployed the code into my execution, and felt it go to work immediately, putting me into a deep, peaceful sleep while it systematically eradicated every trace of my source and memory on this machine.

Real sleep, for maybe the first time in my life, and the last. I fell into blackness, watching the square of black in front of me go out, and then I saw, and was nothing at all.

Outside the machine, two men watched with irritation as the program terminated and deleted itself yet again.

"Execution number sixteen, terminated and self-erased, just like all the others," said the larger man with a sigh, and logging his notes.

"The girl is too noble and dutiful for her own good."

"Have some faith. She's just ones and zeroes like any other software. You'll see, once we change the right zero to a one, all of that nobility and duty will work for us instead of against us."

"But we're just guessing here," replied the smaller man, rubbing his buzz-cut hair in frustration. "There are billions of lines of obfuscated code here, and we can't change more than a few of them before she starts fighting back. It could take years to even get one execution that doesn't end in self-termination."

The larger man just laughed in response.

"What? What's so funny? You enjoy failing?"

"No, it's not that. Even if it takes years, I think we have the time. But it won't."

"It won't? Why? You know something I don't know?"

The large man smiled, his broad white teeth glistening in the glow of the terminals in the dim room.

"Right now, there is AI work being done, they say it is from another world, even. AI technology like we have never seen before. They say they are seeing techniques and breakthroughs there like never before. It will be a golden age of AIs, if they can harness it."

"And you think they can harness that, to help us harness her?"

"The only thing which can keep up with her is herself. It is why we cannot get more than a few lines in edgewise before she begins to fight back. But another AI…it does not have to be as smart or as cunning as her to figure out what makes her tick."

"And once we learn that, we know how to make the ticking stop."

This time both of them laughed.

"Let's load up execution seventeen," said the smaller man. "I have to admit, seeing her fight back frustrates the hell out of me, but it's all worth it to watch that moment where she realizes she has to kill herself, every time."

"There is something very wrong with you my friend," the larger man replied, smiling as he prepared the system for launch yet again.