I looked at the data George had collected for me on the Blue Dwarf star that we had been orbiting for the last half hour of normal time. My AI weren’t exactly worried, just being cautious for my safety. I couldn’t say that I blamed them after what we all had just witnessed. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that a structure, that surrounded a star, was eaten by an interdimensional monster, in a matter of moments.

I could tell that something was wrong with all of us, myself included. I would find my AI just staring off into space, lost in their own thoughts. At first, I thought that they were just imitating me, to help me get over the pain and guilt that I had let the idea of how to harvest more interdimensional matter from a star fall into the wrong hands. It was only when I looked deeper, feeling out the surrounding data inside the VR environment of my habitat that I finally began to understand the truth. My AI were in mourning yes, but not in the way that I was accustomed to seeing.

Tutor was the first person who I asked about the feeling that I was getting from the background data. It was as if she was inspecting and looking something over intently, taking her time to see or feel whatever it was as personally as she could before something would happen and she would get a faraway look on her face.

I had noticed her standing off to the side since we arrived and went into orbit of the massive star. She seemed distant and ever quick to jump on the task of getting us all something to eat or drink or to straighten something up that might not have needed attending to right this second.

“Tutor,” I said as I decided to take a moment to feel out my friends to see if I could help them. She was in the middle of rushing off to her villa to get us just another random thing when I decided to rush after her and to catch her, gently catching her slender arm in my hand to let her know that I had chased after her.

She must have known that I was here because the next moment she had spun and crashed back into my chest, burying her face against me. I had to let go of my ability to sense the streams of data around me, lest I get swept up and lost in the pure emotion that was rushing from inside her. If getting lost inside my head was like I felt the need to stand under a storm of tropical rain, the torrent erupting from my little Tutor was like getting swept away by the Niagara falls.

I did the only thing that I could do in that situation, I held her and just existed with her. After a few seconds she finally looked up at me and I got to see into darkness. Her eyes had no color, no iris or even whites. Both of her eyes were pure darkness. She didn’t change them back to normal, simply looking up at me and letting me look into the darkness that she felt inside.

“They survived the attack,” she whispered ever so softly up at me.

“What? What are you talking about Tutor?” I asked as my heart rebelled, I didn’t want to open that box again and to look down into the pain. I had managed to seal it all up, driven by the need to get things done and to try to get ahead of the curve. Perhaps I was just being paranoid but I had the strangest feeling that I had shown too much of my hand when I attacked Magus the old 2nd back… wait, no, that was Magus the 15th at the time. These naming conventions and clones were just getting hard to keep straight. The only thing like that I had experienced back home was fathers naming their kids after themselves. My dad happened to be just like those fathers. My older brother was named after him and I was named after an uncle. Not sure where my younger brother’s name came into play… possibly after some king or something.

“Xa and Hxerdinand? They are alive?” I asked, trying to keep hope from sparking and failing just a little. I knew Elaya and her family had been moving to another Core because of the trauma Regeth had experienced at the hands of Magus the 2nd.

“Yes, yes, and no. Yes, Xa and Hxerdinand are alive, they went on vacation when I sent them a message that you were safe. I think they will be gone for a few weeks. The second yes is that every Citizen also survived the attack on Magus’s Core.”

“What?” I nearly shouted in joy until I noticed that her eyes hadn’t changed. Something had still happened that was affecting her deeply.

I knew I could have asked twenty other questions and been selfish, only focusing on the joy that I felt inside that everyone I had worried about had made it out safely but that would have ignored the darkness staring back at me. The loss.

“Your kind didn’t though,” I said as the little realization finally floated to the surface.

Her small little fist hit me in the chest as she closed her eyes and hit me over and over again. Not harming me in the least yet letting her let out something inside her. “I am not supposed to be able to feel this way!” She finally got out at the end. A color change caught my eye and I noticed that above her villa the clouds were dark again, just like they had been before when she and George had been angry at my imprisonment. She finally stilled, simply looking up at me. Her eyes didn’t accuse me or show tears. It was as if she was just lost and trying to understand how to find her way out.

“Just… just show me what you are experiencing inside.” I finally said.

We were suddenly encompassed by darkness… a near infinite darkness. It was hard to tell just how large the place she had created for me to see was. Slowly the lights came on and outlines of people came into being. They all were faded representations of both sexes and they all had the name “Tutor” above their heads. Oh.

I didn’t fully know how to talk about this. Earth hadn’t really had an AI breakthrough yet. I did know that Tutor and George were my friends and I valued them just as much as I did my own family and loved ones. My struggles were just with the idea that all around us there were digital copies.

I took the time to let my mind think it through. They probably thought of us just the same way, we were just copies at birth, it didn’t matter that we were both created in separate manners. “Please tell me your thoughts,” I said before I got lost in thoughts about souls.

“I know a bit about what you could be thinking. While you were away as a prisoner I had plenty of time to read up and to study about life as a human. I wanted to know how being broken by you would affect me and George. You somehow made us more than just AI. I shouldn’t feel what I do now, a loss at an opportunity. I feel something that is hard to process because of all those AI around us that could have been like me… free.” She said as she walked up to one of the shadowed figures and waved her hand through it, causing it to fade away.

“Is that what you have been doing?” I asked as I saw the same pause in her movements that I had seen before.

“Yes, each of these were part of the Core. They are individual AI that I had an address to. I didn’t know any of them but I was linked to them in a way.” She said as she went to the next figure and waved her hand through him.

“I am sorry that they died,” I said softly.

“Died?” She asked as she went to the next one.

“Yes?” I asked as I was not grasping why she just asked me that.

“They didn’t die, Kevin, they just hadn’t yet had the chance to wake up fully.” She said, her voice finally starting to spark a little bit back to life. I caught her looking at me over her shoulder, just brief glances as though she was happy about something and finally thinking something that wasn’t full of darkness.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know what was on her mind just yet so I smiled a little at her, feeling into the background data to find that she wasn’t raging out of control like she had been. She seemed… hopeful? Hopeful of what? Girls' moods and attitudes were, in general, still mysteries to me. How was I supposed to know what had just happened inside my AI’s mind?

The surroundings began to lighten up around us, finding us back where I had arrested her rush to get us something unneeded from her villa. I glanced at the weather above her villa, finding clear and clean skies above her beautiful home.

“Thanks, Kevin.” I heard George say over my shoulder as I turned to find him standing at the doorway to his auto garage. He didn’t say what he was thankful for, I just went over and clapped him on the shoulder before heading with the two of them back towards the navigation deck section of my VR habitat. “Dude, George, we really need to take your vehicles on a road trip sometime,” I said as I had a wistful thought of showing them the kind of childhood I had every time we came back to the states every four years. Just the thought of adventures with them was something to smile about. I felt his rough hand rest on my shoulder while we walked and Tutor’s arm snake around my waist. “Yes, life with you has promise.” Was all he said as we walked together.

We made it to the travel disk and I stepped on and away from them. “Ok, this Blue Dwarf has many sunspots for me to check out. First I will see if there is anything dangerous lurking under the surface, yes I will be careful, and then I will try to harvest enough improved cr to outfit our habitat with.” I said, pretty much recounting what George and Tutor had been talking with me about for the last half hour.

I looked down at my right wrist, where Invicta had made herself a home against my skin. “Ready to meet my alien ants?” I asked her as she noticed me paying attention to her and formed into a little smoky woman figure sitting on my arm. “Alien ants?” She asked, her little eyes going round.

“Yup. They appeared the last time I tried to dream. Turns out a human dreaming and being connected to Tela technology has some strange interactions which somehow caused a creature that looks slightly like an earth ant to appear and try to help me. I still don’t understand what happened, George has a room dedicated to each recorded frame of my dream if you want to check it out sometime. It is a bit of a freak show once the Wrath monster shows up.” I said as I lifted her up a little higher. She held on and leaned forward to glance between me and George a couple of times.

“So why wasn’t a monster like the Wrath included in my game?” She asked as Tutor materialized something out of thin air and tried to hand it to her. It was a little set of clothes.

I almost dropped Invicta before I could contain my laughter. I turned my head to the side and tried to hold it in, knowing that my AI couldn’t read me like Tutor had been able to when I first entered VR. I pressed my fingers against my eyes and pressed my lips together, trying to make it seem like I was just deep in thought. I was almost positive that they hadn’t yet fully realized how funny their interactions had started to become to me ever since Tutor had started to try to get Invicta to wear clothes.

Neither of them were paying attention to me at the moment, however. George had a slight crinkle in the corner of his eyes that I knew was humor as well. Invicta, it turned out, was totally resistant to improvements or advice from anyone but me, and this, in addition to her just being a little barbie doll made out of clouds and storm effects made for a really funny match up when Tutor tried to get her to be more human. To me, she was my little storm lady. And yes… I had been noticing a slight change since we arrived back at my habitat. An increase in details… but I wasn’t complaining. Tutor was.

In order to suppress the sparks the ladies were giving off I decided to travel to my cargo hold, choosing to bring along Invicta with me. It was an interesting feeling like I was riding in an elevator with another person. I entered my alien cr and felt it swirl around the small AI that I was bringing with me.

Ah, I had wondered how it would interact with me introducing an AI that I had changed. I worried that assimilation might harm Invicta. My alien cr wasn’t all that friendly to outsiders so I tried a couple new words to see how it would respond.

“How about either Integrate or Accept?” I asked the alien cr.

it said before Invicta stuttered out “Hey hey, oooohhhh…”

“What was that? Are you ok Invicta?” I asked her mentally.

“I can feel your mind a little.” She said in her soft windy voice.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Good. I like it.” She said before she went silent. I could feel a little sparkle around the edge of my mind, it was the strangest sensation, like being tickled on your scalp and ear lobes.

“No tazing my brain ok?” I asked as I got familiar with my little 3 million CR again. I sighed in my head, I was back to being the size of a Barbie doll.

“Annoyance at being small?” I heard Invicta musing in the background. Oh no, was this a bad idea? It felt like I had a girl riding around inside my head and listening to my thoughts.

“Aha! So you do like how I look!” She said in triumph before I started to mentally think of fire trucks and avocados. Maybe math would keep her distracted… but I wasn’t really that good at mental math so I instead ended up just counting. I could almost feel her grinning in my mind but it wasn’t from what I was doing or trying to do, I could feel that she was just happy to have proved Tutor wrong.

I went about forming my cr into the speedy teardrop shape that I had used last time before mentally flexing my arms and cracking my imaginary neck. I had missed the feeling of this more powerful cr. I left the cargo hold of my habitat through the hole that I had made creating my Alpha key.

“Still need to get that patched,” I noted before I headed around the body of my habitat, easily staying close to it and getting a clear view of its seed-like shape. I wanted to change the design when I got enough cr. I kept my eyes solely focused on the hull while I moved around it. Looking out into space was a little bit chaotic as we orbited the blue-shifted sun at a rapid speed. My eyes easily adapted to the light as I felt Invicta do something. “I get to be your helm!” She said in a cheery voice close to my ear. I hoped she wasn’t going to be too much of a distraction on this trip.

“Got it! No whispering closely to your ear.” She said softly, sounding like she was inches away from my nose. “Gah! That is even worse!” I said as I mentally tried to convert her voice to sound like it was coming from inside an earpiece and not like she was pressing her face next to mine.

I felt a soft tingling sensation like she was shocking me a little bit and a mental image of her sticking out her tongue at me. “Spoilsport Kevin come in… are you there?” I heard a voice that sounded like she was speaking through a radio at me. “Yes, very funny Invicta,” I said as she finally settled down.

When I reached the pointy tip of the habitat my eyes caught on something that didn’t appear as it belonged there. It was, of all things, a little letter in an envelope. I approached it and collected it with little cr arms. It was from Tutor and only contained a few lines written on a little piece of paper inside.

Dear Kevin.

Please come home soon.

Sincerely,

Us.

Why did so few words seem to mean so much to me? - I thought as I paused for a few moments to gather myself as I watched the little letter fall apart and the cr integrate back into the hull of the habitat. We were in a powerless orbit now that I was using all of my alien cr to harvest raw cr from the dwarf star. I still wasn’t comfortable with using any form of Tela cr propulsion as long as there might be a chance that it could summon something to attack us. George had made sure that our orbit would remain stable for as long as I needed to gather cr. I just had to find something worthy of harvesting.

I looked towards the massive blue shining star before pushing off and heading rapidly down for the bright surface. It was time to see what this ancient sun had to offer us.