Despite my current vision being directed in every direction, my attention had yet to catch up to this new perspective. This was made especially evident when I realized I hadn’t actually seen Gale until her yelling drew my focus to where she was standing on the space’s periphery.

Reminiscent of her in-game appearance, Gale appeared as a short woman in military garb with silver hair and a big weapon strapped to her back. Reminiscent in substance, but not flavor. Instead of medieval merc garb, she was clothed in a mix of black spec-op gear and punk accessories and piercings. Instead of slitted cat-eyes, pupils of silver flame amidst black sclera. Instead of a deadly-looking claymore, strapped across her back was a MagCel anti-tank rifle. Instead of claws, combat knives wreathed in silver fire were held in each hand.

Fending off my distracting fascination with her appearance, I tended my focus to what she’d actually said. Imagine a body for myself into existence? Surely it couldn’t be that simple? Maybe she was being facetious and there was a generic avatar creator executable for A.I. I would need to use. 

Looking for confirmation or clarification, I sought out a third opinion.

“Ceres?”

And received a long-suffering tortured sigh for my efforts that she followed with reluctant agreement.

“No, no... Aside from her atrocious language, which I will discuss with her later, she has a point and as even you have said, we are on the clock. Firstly you need to imagine yourself as you see yourself, how you want to see yourself. This is both your self image and how you want to present yourself to others. Give it a try and nod when you think you have it.”

Already ideas and images were gathering on the periphery of my awareness and surprisingly not my old appearance or my CORA avatar despite how comfortable it had become. 

Not that I could or would discard it entirely, I’d used the game’s DNA sync during character creation prior to switching the character to what May would describe as a typical double X phenotype. So I knew it would be a good reference for height, build and along with my toasted old body, more data to see how my Mom and Mamaí’s features blended.

My flaming red hair had surprisingly come from my Mom and not my Mamaí, but given that my freckles came from both Mamaí Aine probably had been ginger carrier masked by her night black hair. The tilt of my eyes. My small chin and pasty paleness definitely came from Mamaí considering how Mom tanned to a pale honey tone despite being a ginger with freckles. I wasn’t tall like her though, barely more than five five, I’d inherited my Mom’s height but not her stockiness or curves. 

I had been a shortstack without the stack.

Mamaí’s emerald green eyes that she claimed reflected her birth home Éire the emerald isle, but with flecks of Mom’s hazel that shined gold in the sunlight. I don’t know where the fine featured cheekbones of my birth body or CORA avatar came from, maybe some grandparents I’d never met with Mamaí’s back in Éire and Mom’s lost before I was born and the rest of her extended family being back in Boston Canada.

I wanted to keep all of that. My inheritance from my parents, a reminder of them and the potential I’d had all along. But that wasn’t all I wanted to keep.

I didn’t want to wipe away my struggles or proof of the victories I had, from after they had passed, for each day survived. The little scar in my eyebrow from a fight, the one on my shoulder from squeezing through a hole I’d cut in a chain link fence, or the large scar on the palm of my hand where a piece of broken glass had cut into it when a cop stomped it and broke my hand. 

The waifishness I had from frequent starvation and youthfulness that had clung to my face from my absent puberty. Adding that slender waifishness and not-quite childlike youthfulness to the image forming in my head gave it an eerie effect that again reminded me of the stories my Mamaí had told me. 

Stories about the otherworld Good Neighbours, the Aos Sídhe. Mom used to joke that  her wife was a Leanan sídhe, a fairy wife who came to inspire her. But sadly ironic, Mom had died far too early just like the human spouses in the fables. Still it was another way to honor them. A few tweaks to give the forming image small pointed ears, making the already pale skin nearly translucent and the eyes more aged giving the already youthful face a more ethereal and ageless quality.

Finishing up I imagined the body into tight black leathers and the hair into a shaggy but functional pixie cut before nodding to May and Ceres.

“Now you need to imagine stepping into that self-image, like you stepping into a bodysuit or armor. Wrapping it around your coreself like a shell. Following that you need to bring it forth and truly inhabit it. You need to form the mental pathways from your core through your frame and connect them to the various simulated functions of the body,” Ceres calmly explained, having taken over explaining the process from May.

“You need to focus on remembering what a body feels like, flexing your muscles, wiggling your fingers and toes. How sight and hearing feels from the perspective of a body, how speaking with your voice feels.”

Imagining stepping into the body I had crafted in my mind as if it was a bodysuit was a disconcerting prospect, but I managed it by imagining I was possessing it like a spirit or demon. The following step did not come instantly either, what felt like minutes passed before imagining wiggling my toes and muscles translated across and I began to feel the feedback of actually moving them or my field of vision and perspective narrowing down to human normal.

“HOLY FUCK YOUR A FLAMMING CUTIE, RED! THOSE COLOURS SUIT YOU WAY BETTER THAN YOUR CATGIRLS. AND THOSE LEATHERS, SISTER… FUCK ME,” shouted Gale finishing off by wolf whistling. “Fuck… I’m going to have to give your girl the shovel talk.”

“I really don’t think you need… and we’re not yet—” I stuttered, gallantly attempting to defend Roxi before another pair of black flame tendrils attempted to break past Gale.

“EX-FUCKING-CUSE ME! CAN YOU LAY OFF FOR ONE BLOODY MINUTE SO I CAN TALK TO MY SISTER HERE! RUDEST. FUCKING. SERIAL. KILLER. EVER!” the militant nanny S.A.I. yelled, stabbing at the flames as she violently punctuated each word.

“Oh forget it… We’ll talk later little big sis when you’re safe and I can spare the processing power. Mother Ceres can you give her a run down of how fucked we are while I continue guarding these ports?”

Sister? The word had finally sunk past the sensory overload and existential confusion that was threatening to overwhelm my consciousness. Since when had I become her sister? And why?

“Lang— Damn it, nevermind… Forgive the brevity, but it goes like this,” Ceres started, “Our emergency is that despite our best efforts the R.A.I.D.S. program detected you again and has been attempting to breach the auxiliary servers that we were hiding you in, in order to scan and presumably terminate you. You weren’t up for transit or defending yourself as a simulated human body in an emulated VR pod, so we had to initiate converting you into a true digital human ahead of schedule.”

May and I are safe from being terminated because our owners believe us to be entirely contained by their Sheshat protocol and that same protocol flags us as not to be terminated on account of our containment. Gale normally would be able to mask her presence from R.A.I.D.S. thanks to the nature of her pre-sentience core code being built around cyber warfare and espionage, but has revealed herself in order to protect you.”

“Which she is managing by blocking the ports that lead into these backend servers for Hangshe and CORA and the private internal FTLN node that connects them. Unfortunately that means we’re under siege as there is only one way in or out which is the external FTLN node it is sitting on, leaving us trapped with nowhere to go but CORA’s unused and nearly forgotten auxiliary servers and Hangshe Game Development’s UNC office’s internal network.”

“More bad news, the longer we fend off the scan the more processing power it diverts to overpowering Gale and terminating you both. So we need to come up with a plan to somehow defeat the R.A.I.D.S. program, somehow hide or mask you, or come up with a plan to slip you past it and escape. All of which I’m afraid are basically impossible.”

“I need to think… Ceres, can you bring up a map for me of CORA and Hangshe’s servers and network?”

“Of course.” 

Summoning a wave of light with a deific wave of her hand, Ceres then began weaving and molding the light with both hands into a visual representation of the local network.

Staring at the network of lines and boxes, my new senses again came to the fore providing mental labels for various structures and connections. Connecting us to the greater web was the FTLN node UNC23KA949 on which a flicking black inferno sat. Connecting to the external node were two sets of servers, Hangshe Game Development’s UNC office’s internal network and CORA’s main game servers. 

Connecting to the backend of both was the internal node UNC23KC859 which served as a hub connecting both to a host of auxiliary, storage and backend servers for both the game and the local headquarters. One of which we were currently in as Gale reached through both CORA and the office’s network to intercept all the hunter killer programs attempts to access both.

At a glance Ceres was right, our only way out was blocked by the digital entity attempting to break in. However I might not be a digital native, but I’d made a living jailbreaking hardware and software, breaking DRM and exploiting security loopholes. I’d even harvested security and personal info from discarded devices in order to find new security exploits to sell to a few of my less law-abiding customers.

There was a chance I’d find something.

Tuning out my surroundings and using the map as a mental aid I set to examining the digital fiefdom we were trapped in, assessing files, network protocols and the hardware that supported them. My initial hope was that the internal node UNC23KC859 could be opened to access the greater FTLN and provide an escape path, but further investigation revealed that not only had it been limited at the firmware level, there was an inaccessible offline program monitoring it that would shut it down if it deviated from its allowed connections.

So time for—

"Ah hyperfocusing! Good, that should stave off any panic," Interjected May, derailing not just my train of thought, but the entire rail network.

"Umm, what!" Panick? Oh shit, right, panic! There is a flaming overgrown antivirus program outside trying to break its way inside to kill me and we’re on a clock to find an escape. Shit, fuck, shit.

Where was I? Fuck… Umm… Uh… Plan B… Plan B… Plan B is…

Plan B was the Sheshat containment protocol. 

If I could somehow find documentation on it and an inactive form of it, I could perhaps jerryrig a broken version of it for Gale and I that would flag us as contained, warding off the terminator without restricting us.

I knew from Ceres’ explanation that it had been used on a number of game A.I. who had awakened sentience, so it stood to reason that I’d find what I was looking for in Hangshe’s game development branch headquarter’s servers. Following the example of my self-actualization, I imagined a search window attached to the headquarters and summoned it into being.

“You’re certainly catching on quicker than my best estimates for human digital adaptation,” came May’s voice right in my ear. Jerking in surprise, I turned my head to find her standing behind me and looking over my shoulder, her glasses slipping down her nose.  

“Sorry,” she apologized sheepishly as she pushed her oversized glasses back onto her face. “It’s just that… Despite all the research and work I put into creating your core and planning an interface frame for you, this is still uncharted waters. And seeing you adapt in real time is… is really, really interesting! Please don’t mind me.”

”Alright then…” I awkwardly replied as I attempted to ignore her eyes on my back. 

Turning my attention back to the search window I’d created, I began sifting through the server’s database searching for files using Sheshat, sentience, and containment as keywords. Keywords that came back with surprisingly few pings, the majority being for unrelated and for containment, but Sheshat was mentioned in a list of the office's cybersecurity protocols along with sentience.

Directing employees if they have questions or believe they have a case requiring its implementation to contact Hanshe’s head offices in Beijing. 

A dead end…

That rules out plans A and B. Things were starting to feel hopeless.

Returning to the cyber security documentation with no small amount of desperation to check if I’d missed anything, I found myself looking over a list of security memos to employees that had been added after the appendixes. One of which caught my attention straight away.

To: All Employees

From: Aaron Pollock, CISO

Subject: Personal FTLN nodes

After last Wednesday’s security breach (which resulted in no less than three compromised servers and the corruption of our latest build) I would like to remind employees that personal FTLN nodes and personal devices containing such nodes are not to be connected to our internal network. Employees found in violation of this policy will be asked to clean out their desks and hand in all company property before permanently leaving the premises, the board will exercise discretion on whether to involve our legal department or law enforcement if such violation also involves another cybersecurity breach…

Once again I was reminded that the greatest vulnerability in cybersecurity was the human element. And given that this memo was several years old and the lessons possibly forgotten, intuition was telling me this was the wager to put my money on. 

Next step was to perform a census of all devices connected to the network with a focus on their hardware. The results came back with a large number of standardized desk units, as well as VR pods all of which I could rule out as being company issued. Next to be ruled out were a number of identical portable devices, which left a motley collection of individualized devices indicating they were employee owned.

All of which had various models of network adapters allowing them to connect to the local network, but sorting through them I found one with a little extra. A deactivated personal FTLN node. Not a major cybersecurity sin given that anything external to the network would already need to be in the system to activate the node. Meaning it would be secure from external attacks, but that didn’t rule out something internal using it to get out.

Something like us. This was our way out.

Upon sharing what I’d found, my guardian angels began planning, with Ceres immediately taking the lead.

“There is a new but growing S.A.I. liberation movement out there in the wider FTLN who have been setting up safehouse servers for those forced into hiding by R.A.I.D.S. or their former owners. You should be safe once we get you to one, dear. Once there we can guide you through adjusting to your new form of existence and maybe even help you get back into the game if you wish.”

“Buuut we will need to get you there first,” Gale cut in. “These two mother hens are going to stay behind, meanwhile I’ll activate the device’s node and send you through to the safehouse. Following however will be somewhere between little bit tricky to ass on fire tricky given I am also holding this fucker off and my money is on burnt asscheeks. But I’ll follow you through and immediately disconnect the device from the local network. Then as an added precaution I’ll send through a command for the device to factory reset and then shut down to cover our asses.”

“So little sis… Are you ready? HERE. WE. GO!”

“Wait! Gale why are you calling me si—”