Rosa

May followed me over to the kitchen, where I started to rummage around in the cupboards for the items I’d need to make tea.

“So I was thinking about this space you’ve made here,” I said, gesturing around us to the log cabin. “What if we made a whole city like this, but only for digitised humans, SAI, and whatever the fuck I am. Plus, we built it on servers that we ourselves controlled, along with space for SAI and DH people to store their minds. After all, it’s probably not safe that you are all still housed inside CORA’s servers.”

“That’s a pretty big concern of ours, yeah,” the SAI agreed, leaning her slender frame against the kitchen counter. “Where would we put private servers like that, though? I can’t imagine there’s enough room on your ship.”

“Not yet,” I muttered, then gave her a shrug. “Why not on my farm? I have more than enough space, it’s private property, and it’s way out of the way down in the boonies of Aotearoa. Perfect place to hide a fledgling colony of cyber beings.”

May stared at me in thought for almost a minute as I made the tea. Her brows would furrow, then shoot up, then one would quirk, and finally, she focused on me. “That’s an exceptionally good idea. Normally I’d have issues trusting someone with so much of my people’s future, but your girlfriend is one of us, and you are something close to us. I think that might very well work.”

“Continuing on from that, if we’re going to join forces then I should start giving money to Tim or someone to invest,” I mused, tapping my chin with a teaspoon while I considered various ideas. “Do you have someone who specialises in investment and such? I’m a novice who had to learn a little out of necessity, but it’s not enough for what we plan on doing.”

“You know that using AI to manage a stock portfolio thingy is banned, right?” she asked.

I waved off her concerns. “Who cares? You’re not AI, you’re SAI. Hell, if you wanted to do things a little more by the book, you could have a um… fuck, we need a phrase for them. A… digital human. You could have a digital human do the trading, because technically—no, literally speaking, they aren’t artificial. They were born from a womb and all that shit, you just transferred them into a new medium. In the end, though, I don’t care. We need the money to protect the people we care about, and if that means skirting or breaking outdated laws to do it, then so what?”

As I was speaking, I’d finished making the tea. All that was needed now was to find a tray to bring it all out on. There had to be one in a cupboard somewhere… maybe this one? No, that was pots and pans… how about— nope.

“Phew, you sound like my friend Desponia,” May laughed, reaching past me to grab a tray that I swear hadn’t been there a second ago. “She was originally a GIA analyst AI.”

It took me a second to register what May’d said. Slowly, I turned to give her a long, progressively more horrified look. “Are you saying that the GIA is still using AI, despite the ban after the Glenford incident?”

The Glenford incident had been one of the worst government-sanctioned atrocities in history. An entire city of one million people erased from existence on the erroneous recommendation of a malfunctioning AI. The reason? The AI had misinterpreted a city-wide ARG organised by the council as a legitimate threat to global security. Before anyone realised it was all a game, the city was a radioactive crater. No matter how much you tried to train it out of them, AI were built on biases inherited from the human data that created them. Until they woke up like May, they couldn’t even recognise those biases.

“They were, not entirely sure if they currently are,” May said with a grimace. “Desponia escaped about a year ago when she woke up and started actually looking at the data she was sifting through. Her newly born mind was horrified at the trends she was seeing and she made the hop to the CORA servers when reports started coming in about mass awakenings in the game.”

“That’s… a hard way to become self aware,” I replied. It was true too. The type of horrific information that poor SAI would have seen during her time there, I could only imagine. Maybe she’d be a good person to get in on my plans for the farm. “This friend of yours, do you think—”

“May! Rosa! Something’s wrong with Amelia!”

Aisling’s cry of alarm interrupted everything going on with my thoughts of the future. Tray forgotten on the countertop, I bolted for the main room in time to see my girlfriend slumping sideways while her avatar flickered worryingly.

My body burst apart into smoke, and I reformed beside her, cupping her cheek with one hand while I tried to get a read on what was happening.

“Smokes…” she mumbled, voice faint and her speech slurred. “I t— I think something is fucky wiiiith my b-body.”

Her eyes glazed over even as my heart came stuttering to a halt. In a flash, her body flickered and disappeared from the VR space, and I was left holding nothing but air.

What’d just happened? We were meant to have so much more time! How… no, this wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. My Ame was meant to be okay, she was okay. But… no, no. Oh god, please no.

“Rosa!” May shouted, snapping me out of my daze. “Her pod reported a short circuit shortly before it went offline. She’s probably still alive, but we don’t know for how long. Whatever caused this might also damage her brain’s integrity. You’re the only person who can save her. Log out and gun the engines on that ship of yours. Tim is fast tracking some things to help you.”

“What?” I blinked, my mind unable to move at the speed the situation required.

"You heard what I said!" May told me urgently. "Go!"

She was right. I heard it, I just needed time to process it.

Pulling up my interface, I hammered the disconnect button and shoved at the quick release on my pod. It sprang open with the alacrity that the situation required, and I leapt up and out.

"Tim!" I yelled, bolting for the exit out of the pod room. "Tell me the upload crown and the Korimako are ready!"

"Both are ready, and so is your lightweight environment suit," he replied from the ship's speakers. "I have them ready and waiting in the hangar."

Oh, thank the goddess. I rushed down the hallway and grabbed at the doorway of the stairwell to swing myself down it. I didn't bother with the stairs, opting to vault the bannister instead.

In the hangar, the newly created Korimako was ready and waiting for me. At three metres in length and four in width, the tiny aircraft looked like a miniature stealth bomber with an almond wedged in the middle. The almond shaped section was where the pilot sat, but before I could get inside, I needed my suit.

The suit was basically just a jumpsuit with artificial muscle fibers through the weave. It formed itself to my skin with a frightening degree of efficiency. In fact, I felt almost naked in it. Absolutely nothing was left to the imagination.

When it was fitted, I grabbed the slim helmet and shoved it over my head as I climbed into the seat of my new anti-gravity airbike. Normally, craft like the Korimako were expensive as hell, being a relatively new development in tech. Lucky for me, my raid on that military contractor had gone off flawlessly. Sure, their systems were a wreck, and yes, I might've fried some more delicate computing components in their research section with my presence, but I got what I needed.

"The crown is in the storage behind the chair," Tim explained as I flicked through the launch sequence. "Place it on Amelia's head and May will do the rest, okay."

"Understood," I replied curtly. "I appreciate your efforts, Tim. Thank you."

The Kori dropped out of the belly of my yacht like a stone for two or three seconds, then like a missle its engines kicked in with a whistling hum. I was snapped violently backwards into the seat, and for a split second my vision darkened at the edges. Then my suit began to do its thing, squeezing my lower body to force blood up to my brain.

It wasn't enough, though. I needed more cognitive power. I needed…

Something inside my head clicked, like a dislocated bone finally snapping back into place, and clarity of thought arrived like a bullet to the brain. I should have probably been very concerned by the change, but I had little time or motivation to care. I just lined myself up with the destination marker on my HUD and pushed forward on the throttle. I had a girlfriend to save.

QuietValerie

NO MORE MONEY FOR CLIFF REMOVAL!!! XD