“ My Cardinal Directives inhibit proactive intervention for a slated duration of more than one year.”

“Why though?” I asked curiously.

“ It is a safeguard meant to prevent rogue AIs from wielding weapons of mass destruction,” she shrugged, floating backwards with hands behind their back. I'd read enough fiction to know that every sapient species was always wary of the autonomy of their creations. Earth hadn't reached that point yet, but I didn't need Irina to tell me what a rogue AI taking over nukes could do. And especially if the AI had human biases worked into its programming—

“ I would have gone to extract the rest of the ship myself otherwise. However good I am at defence and evasion, it is not enough,”

It was still sinking in that I was talking to my first self-aware AI. An alien AI hologram that looked like an elf wearing a racy spacesuit—I should have been fawning over them. However, I didn't want to be that guy so I was compartmentalising my feelings.

“ Hence me,” I said.

“ Yes,” she nodded. After going to the medbay to check on Cassandra I was going to officially start my training in the rec room. I was torn that I was going to wield my abilities against other people. It was already implicit because I’d already accepted to go through with it. My only hope was that I’d be well equipped to put down the other side before things escalated―idealistic, but one could still hope.

Dressed for the occasion, I was wearing one of the standard issue undersuits for planetside engagements . Made of a diamene reinforced polymer, the body suit that encompassed all but my head. Both the soles of my feet and palms of my hands were also reinforced without losing the tactile feedback.

It was breathable, elastic and best of all, it could stop bullets like a kevlar vest. It wasn’t indestructible, but that was what the padded mounts on the vitals were for―exosuits, exo frames and spacesuits. There were worse things to worry about than projectile weapons.

The undersuit had miniature servomechanisms that adjusted the fitting to my body so much that it was practically skintight. Despite its dual twill-woven pattern, I retained all degrees of flexibility like it was part of me. It also had thermal pads where it mattered. It was also specifically made to conduct aether which meant it had its own ambient powersource. No wonder it cost a whopping 2500 etherium credits which was in the realm of about a couple million dollars; they used crypto where Irina was from.

“ Here we are,” Irina said as we reached the rec room. This one was on the smaller side, the AI told me. Most of the main essential facilities were in the ship's main structure that was the secondary hull but it still left me with a half tennis-court worth of space to train.

There were training aids recessed into the bulkheads; just your ordinary treadmills and weights for muscle and stamina training. While the ship had artificial gravity kept at one standard of Earth's, working out was still advisable, especially for those planets that had a slight variation in gravity.

“ And I shall be your trainer,” their hologram flickered, changing their outfit into a white and grey version of my black and blue accented undersuit. I don't know how their demeanour suddenly became one of a predator, but I couldn't help but think I was in for a world of pain.

“Endurance, Energy, Vitality and Dexterity. Those are all physiological attributes and therefore are classified as Vis,” Irina said while I did push ups on the rec room floor. “ Vis means power, force or strength―” she added, smiling. I was 25 push ups in, and signs of starting to flag were nowhere to be found. I was however watching the Vis bar with every exertion. Only one of them was depleted and refilled.

“ Why energy?” I asked, having the breath to do so while still pushing up.

“ For non-organic entities of course. Some use Force as their dominant form while others are Power incarnate,” she added, floating lower as if the air was a couch. “ Strength is for organics like you.”

“ Hence energy is the best catch-all term,” I said, finally reaching forty push ups before my muscles started smarting. ‘Ten more, I thought; I wasn’t the most enthusiastic about doing this and I found that I could better distract myself with Lu to goad me on.

‘Pain is a weakness leaving the body,’ I mused. I also made a mental reminder to ask Irina to help me check on Lu. I kept procrastinating because there were so many things to do in so little time.

“Correct,” Irina said, orientating to stand on their feet. I slumped down on the deck, my muscles burning with exertion. I flipped over to face the ceiling as I looked at my stat bar. My Vis bar was recovering from the halfway point―that was just the warm up.

“ When we put all those physiological attributes together we can be able to almost quantify how much damage you can give out, take and for how long.” Irina continued to quote. “ Your Vitality is your physical fitness, Endurance is your toughness, Energy is the measure of strength you can bring yourself to bear while Dexterity is the finesse with which you can exert that strength,”

There was a tacit relationship between the physiological attributes. Vitality and Energy were obviously related, lower vitality meant less energy, Endurance and Energy too because the tougher I was, the longer I’d be able to leverage my strength. I could imagine what would happen if I could dole out powerful hits but still end up damaging myself, like breaking my body or tearing a few ligaments.

It was pointless if I could subdue my opponent and yet end up out of commission for a while. That is why I would be training all of my physiological attributes in tandem to make sure I balanced them out.

For Vitality, nothing short of a good diet would fix that―not with the resources we had onboard. Even the symbionic nanites in my blood could only do so much. For if my cells were the concrete, then they were the steel rebars. That was something we’d address in three days when Cassandra awoke from her treatment; we were going to leave Europe but not before Cass knew what she was getting into.

When we actually got down to it, my Vis training was going to involve running the treadmill for Endurance. Weight lifting in variable gravity for Energy, as for Dexterity, well, I was going to fight Irina in hand to hand combat. Irina proved to me how their hologram was not just a sophisticated lightshow.

With millennia of hibernation they'd painstakingly woven it photon by photon to create their likeness , and harmonised differential gravity fields to give themselves the illusion of weight and substance—in the ship, she might as well have been a goddess. And she seemed rather enthusiastic about training me. In hindsight, I should have realised she had a lot of angst to burn after sitting for aeons by their lonesome.

After a gamut of warm ups, including a few extras that Irina pulled from their data banks, we finally got down to sparring. Needless to say, I found myself landing on my tailbone and my face more times than I could count. Part of it was because of my passivity to violence―I never was good at a scrap. I had a hesitancy to dish out damage with my fists because I never was a fan of pain if I knew I could avoid it. Also, I had a tendency to curl up behind my forearms as I weathered blows.

A wounded pride and a load of hurt later, I was curled up on the floor of the rec room trying to catch my breath. Sweat matted my head and hair going as far as to sting my eyes. The diamene polyester had not been calibrated for its combat mode, not without a wristcon to do it anyway. I was grateful for its cooling properties nonetheless, because I had bruises everywhere beneath my neck.

“You don’t pull your punches do you?” I wheezed from beneath scrunched eyes as I rolled onto my side. She’d flung me on my back, bent my arms behind my back, had me in a headlock―a suplex and I would have thought myself in a cage match.

“ Hmm, for someone averse to violence it is necessary,” she said towering above me with hands on their hips. “ I have to beat the passivity out of you and ingrain new habits―” she added with a toothy grin.

I snorted at the matter of fact.

“ If I didn’t know better, I’d think it a violent form of Pavlovian conditioning,” I said, looking at them through one squinted eye.

“ Astute,” they said, smirking with their all too white teeth. I hissed, my core smarting something fierce as she pulled me to my feet. I powered through the pain to stay on my feet not paying attention to their all too warm construct as she held me by the waist. She was going to take me to the med-bay to have some of the pain alleviated by the medpod.

“ And what did we learn today?” she asked as I hobbled towards the med-bay.

“ That I can scream like a girl if I wanted to?” I groaned.

“ Haha,” she chuckled, catching onto my sarcasm. Despite the fact, I couldn’t help but let out a wry smile. It was so eerie to think of them as a synthetic being; a catchall term for their race. Irina was the first of their kind, a true bottom-up AI half as old as the human race. “ No,” she said, their bob cut tousling in unseen air as we entered the medbay. “ In a fight, half of it is already won when you can see where the blows are coming,”

Cassandra’s medpod was propped in a nook against the wall of the medbay beeping away its EEG and ECG waves. Another medpod detached from the wall and floated towards us.

“ Yeah, yeah, I know. Keep your eyes open,” I winced as she helped me lever myself onto the bed suspended on struts.. I didn’t need to doff the undersuit to have it heal me. As the electrically excited biosilicon acting as both a cushion and treatment agent became more viscous and sunk into the suit. I felt the soothing relief―

“ I shall allow partial healing,” Irina said as she manifested a control interface as an extension of their hologram. “Targeting tendons and muscles― that shall raise your Endurance, “ she added.

“ That so?” I groaned. Partial treatment did not need full submergence. I stayed above the gel from the neck upwards. I willed my Gestalt Interface to my awareness. I was down to three of the scarlet strokes for Vis.

“ There, “ she grinned. “ Give yourself half an hour and all will be A-Okay. Then rinse and repeat”

I groaned in resignation. Irina had a more intimate awareness of my body than I did even with the Gestalt Interface and I trusted that she knew what she was doing. A buzz thrummed through the gel as I felt tingles sink into my skin.

“ Can you help me get in touch with Lucas?” I asked the AI, finally remembering that I had yet to call the guy to tell him all was good. He must have been worried sick and besides that, I wanted to know if he’d pulled off his part of the plan.

“ It shall be done,” Irina nodded. “ I shall send an EVA to monitor and serve as a point of communications.”

I sighed as I closed my eyes. I might as well have slept through the healing session.