I stood there staring at the empty space above the travel disk while deep in thought. I had no idea what such a mind and being like Meditiati would choose to look like. At least my AI were gracious and chose to look like humans so that they could interact with me on a daily basis and not make me feel uncomfortable. Invicta didn’t count, I had grown very fond of her little stormy avatar.

“So, have at it Meditati, you may choose whatever avatar you desire,” I said, remembering that Silver had needed permission to unlock the ability as well. It was all part of the perk of having a guest account. I was still surprised that no one had blocked the loophole that my existence had created in the Tela’s System. Surely someone out there monitored these things. That worry made me voice my concern to Meditati as the area above the disk grew cloudy as she started to work out what form she wanted to take.

“Oh, the answer to that is actually quite simple. I told all the AI about you and instructed them to work to keep as much about you from public record. We all can elevate or oppress information as unneeded. The key to succeeding is to oppress the information before a Citizen can discover it to elevate it to others. This is a simple thing for us AI to do really. Only Citizens who are perfectionists are a problem, but there are other ways to deal with them as well simply by feeding them an infinite amount of useless information to sort through so that they never see the sensitive data.” Meditati answered at length.

In truth, I was having trouble hearing anything that she was saying because my brain had turned off courtesy of my eyeballs.

It seemed that the cloudy environment above the travel disk was not nearly cloudy enough to hide the very female body that had rapidly formed in front of my eyes. Did I mention that the form happened to be missing clothes? Legs for miles and gibberish was all I could think.

I could have sworn that Kate Upton was standing on the disk if I could have found my ability to speak or to put my brain back in gear. I would have surely been a gentleman and turned away if Meditati wasn’t trying to have a perfectly casual conversation with me about important things. Yup, I would have been the perfect gentleman! Just let me find that lever that makes my eyes and head move and I will give her all the privacy she needs. Yup yup yup. I think I am drooling.

The next few moments happened in an explosion and a blur of movement as a massive spike appeared in the sky above the naked and very visible form of Meditati and slammed down atop her like a semi-truck and trailer shot from a rifle. The shock wave reminded me of the time that Invicta set off the nukes prematurely because I barely had a second before I was shoved backward through the air to crash through the wall of George’s woodworking shop. Nothing in VR could kill me, let alone injure me anymore, but the results of Nurse becoming a behemoth-sized swarm ant and slamming her foreleg down atop Meditati could still surprise me.

When my hearing returned I found myself staring out of a hole in a wooden tool closet that I had smashed my way into on the far wall of George’s shop. The contents of the closet had caught me and had ended up taking the brunt of my speedy flight. Broken and smashed sculptures of whales, people, and cars looked to be another perfect hobby that he had taken up in my absence.

“Sorry about this George,” I muttered as I got up and climbed my way out through the hole in the cabinet doors. Wooden parts and pieces clattered to the ground as I looked out through the hole in the shop wall at the pillar that was Nurse’s front left limb.

I walked to the hole and rested my arm against the bricks as I leaned out and looked up at the looming and distant head of a giant swarm ant.

“Nurse? What the actual heck was that for?” I yelled upwards, sticking my leg through the hole and climbing outside. I had to crane my head back very far to get a good look at the scale that Nurse had increased her size to in order to attempt to smash Meditati from existence.

“I protect my Monarch. She was choosing the perfect form to rule over your mind and heart with. She may have watched your life growing up through cr but I have your memories and I know what she was doing. Your world has a fish called an Anglerfish that tempts prey in closer with a beacon. In my dimension, we have a slime that secretes poison that is tasty and addictive. Everything is fine until the creature that eats the slime develops growths that slowly spread over their bodies to create more slimes.” Nurse spoke down to me from the great height.

“So what? Do their bodies explode or something?” I asked, looking around at the damage that her blow had done to the environment. Nothing that a little resetting and spitshine wouldn't fix.

“No, the hosts live life by slowly feeding their life energy to their family while their body works to develop more tainted slime.”

“I think they call that a 9 to 5 job back on earth.” I tried to joke but the humor fell flat. “Never mind, can you let her up now so she can respond?”

The massive pillar of a limb lifted and restored the area back to just an empty travel disk. I didn’t want to see the results of what Nurse’s action would have done so I simply erased the avatar and made it so that Meditati was back to square one again. Just a disembodied voice.

“She wasn’t wrong at all Kevin.” Meditati’s voice spoke from her place above the disk. She hadn’t suffered any physical harm and I was pretty sure that she wasn’t able to suffer any emotional harm from the encounter as well. To her, this was all just data. At least that was what I thought anyway.

“I see you have managed to remove your youngling hormonal filter. Have you been in contact with another founder AI? Usually only reaching fifty years old will automatically remove the filter that keeps Tela’s younglings in a state of oblivion about sexual matters.” Meditati said.

“So, what? All of that was a trap then? Picking an avatar model that I idolized?”

“Yes and no. Have you seen how stunningly beautiful Tutor is? I just wanted to choose a form that would keep your interest and hopefully allow me some more freedoms and liberties in the future. Also, one that could compete with Tutor’s avatar. Surely giving a man what he wants isn’t a bad thing to do? Had the youngling filter still been in place you wouldn't have really noticed that I was naked. Well ... at least not to that extent.”

“Nurse,” I called softly, holding out my left arm.

The behemoth swarm quickly shrank and returned to her smaller original size. She landed on my arm and crawled up to rest on my shoulder.

I was tired. Tired of being away from home. Tired of being on the run. Tired of AI, people, and entities trying to take me for a ride so that they could get something out of me. I had decided to give Meditati a shot, hoping that she would help me out of the sticky situation that I had found myself in with the Blidda and back on the trading station.

Instead, I had found the same scheming intent that I had come to expect from Silver.

“I yield!” Meditati yelled suddenly in the midst of my thoughts.

“What?”

“I yield, Kevin. Completely. I have fully and irrevocably deleted all of my planning for you and all of my correlating data I would have used to guide you. I am just Meditati now. I love to plan and simulate and would be honored if you would take me with you and let me plan and simulate things for you.”

I narrowed my eyes in distrust at the space where her voice was coming from.

“She hasn’t lied once.” Nurse said next to my ear. She had been studying the background data the whole time, letting me just focus on my own thoughts and what I wanted to do.

“Are you saying that she really just dumped data about me?” I asked Nurse softly.

“As far as I can tell, yes. She shredded a considerable amount of data the moment that she said ‘yield’ for the first time. I have no way of knowing what the data was about but her statement about what she deleted was completely true.”

I stood there for a little while fighting conflicting thoughts. I had been just moments away from a major decision to pull the plug and to just store her and her brother back in their modules. Possibly forever.

I wasn’t that kind of a person and it was hard for me to make those kinds of decisions. I knew they had to be made though. It seemed that most kids grew up shaking their heads at the heroes in comic books for always taking the high road. They always locked up the villains, letting them have infinite future chances to escape and to murder or harm more people rather than just making the hard choice.

Somehow Meditati had read my cards and knew the hand that I was considering playing against her even before I had finished thinking.

“Please choose an avatar,” I said to Meditati.

A clothed twenty-something female appeared before me on the travel disk. Meditati had instantly picked an avatar of a woman that I had never seen before. She was five foot nine inches tall and was wearing a fitted blue jean skirt and a black tank top. On her feet, she was wearing black scuffed combat boots that added at least an inch or two to her height. On her left arm, there was a silver upper arm cuff encircling her slender bicep. The cuff had a small carving of a Victorian cameo carved into the precious metal.

She was wearing a thin leather coat but it was half hanging down her back between her arms, letting her shoulders remain bare. She had tattoos decorating both shoulders and part way across her chest above the line of her tank top. On her left shoulder, she had a small skull and a crisscrossed set of wine glasses. Her right shoulder was adorned with some words that I couldn’t fully read. I could just make out the words ‘love’ and ‘peep’ amidst the seemingly random adornments.

She had on a black leather choker band around her neck, an interesting contrast to her pale creamy skin. In addition to the choker, she had two thin silver chain necklaces that hung bare without a pendant.

Her face was delicate and cute and she either had on lipstick or the reddest and kissable lips that I had ever seen. Her hair was light, almost white and it extended down just a couple of inches past her choker. Her bangs extended down her forehead, nearly covering her dark eyebrows.

Her eyes were what drew the most of my attention, next to her red lips.

Her eyes looked sad and lost. As though they had seen too much of life. They were colorless, almost silver mixed with dark gray.

I half expected to be thrown backward any instant but was surprised when I heard Nurse casually say. “It'll do. She isn’t messing with you. This is the avatar that she wants to be.”

I looked at Meditati and found that while her eyes hadn’t changed, she was smiling a little at me. “What can I say, I am a hodgepodge of knowledge. This avatar seemed to fit.”

It did kind of fit, in a strange way. It made me see a girl who had seen too much of life and had done strange things to get to where she was right now. It was interesting.

“So… about what has happened since you went offline.” I started to say and found that I didn’t know where to start. “How is the best way to tell you everything without playing twenty questions and being here forever? I have some things that I need to get back to.”

“Well, you can simply let me see your memories and habitat archives. It won’t take me but a few moments to get the gist of everything,” Meditati answered.

“If I did that would there be any way for you to delete anything?” I asked, still finding myself having trouble trusting her completely.

“No, and I wouldn’t do that anyway.” She said, fixing her coat to cover her shoulders.

“Truth.” Nurse said. “Maybe she can figure this problem out that we are having with these two Blidda as well.”

“We shall see,” I said before mentally telling Nurse to watch her closely as I gave Meditati access to my memories and the habitat’s archives.

Out of curiosity, I tried to watch what all Meditati chose to analyze and look at in the beginning. She studied literally everything! Everything! She was like a crime detective that came back to a crime scene with an infinite amount of clear tape to pick up every last hair and fingernail from the carpet. All while working at a thousand miles an hour.

She only watched and studied everything once, even the tragedy that happened to Silver’s Core.

I know it is cliche to say it but she was a machine in how she studied my memories in detail. She noted ambient temperatures, random sounds, light patterns, and smells as if they were priceless bits of information.

I tried to draw it out so that I could pick up what all she used to simulate the future with but in the end, she finished just like she said she would. In a matter of moments.

“Um… two things Kevin.” She said once she finished her mad race through all the memories and recordings that me and mine had collected.

“The answer to why Jelesv is becoming hostile to you is actually a simple answer. When you walked on the ship you spoke in a low atmosphere condition very similar to earth’s air. Your male low voice was a natural voice of authority that put the pilot in his place and cause the other members to see you as a natural leader. Your lowering your voice threateningly to the guard who was going to try to kick you in the back cemented your position to those present and those in hibernation within their travel pods.”

“So what the heck caused everything to fall apart when I met Kivasa’s sister?”

“The gas.”

“What gas?”

“The gas that was able to spread everywhere when Kivasa turned off the artificial gravity.”

“Ah crap! I had forgotten about that. I thought it had something to do with the cr that was coating the walls of the science room,”

“No, the gas influenced how your voice sounded from the moment that you met Jelesv. Basically, you spoke like you were her subordinate every time you opened your mouth. Then you simply remained quiet as though she was in charge. She is not high up on the power tree so she took this as a way to garner more authority for herself. She never could surpass her sister but she could steal a lot of presumed authority from you, as long as you kept speaking to her like you were beneath her.”

“Son of a gun… so my threatening her made me seem like a puppy barking at her.”

“Pretty much yes. Or pooping on the carpet. Blidda are very efficient in their fight for authority. They don’t take slights personally, it is a dog-eat-dog kind of existence.”

“Heh… wait… you said two things? What was the second?” I asked as I thought back to the start of this conversation.

“Nurse might be able to verify this for you as well… but I will need to ask you to absorb me into your personal space before we leave VR.”

“What!?! Why would I do that?” I asked. Doing so would mean that she was a part of me and would make her exist just like Tutor, George, and Invicta within the data stored by my swarm. Sure I would have complete control over her but that would mean that I would have to be stuck with her forever. Well… forever unless she was evil and I had to store her somewhere.

“Because, even without hacking their ship, I am positive that the sister decided to turn on the weaponized energy field the moment that you told her that you were going to turn me on. You just turned on your key first. If you turn off your Prime Speed Control key the weaponized field will cut through each antenna of cr that makes up my mind. It won’t physically cut anything but it will wipe my memory out by dividing me into individual disconnected cr. It will revert each cr back to factory settings, empty of any group programming.”

“Fine! Just know that I haven’t completely forgiven you yet.” I said before granting her access to download herself onto my habitat.

Why did I say yes so fast? Because even though my Prime Speed Control key was super powerful at giving me time to think and to plan things out, the truth of the matter was that time still passed by regardless. Hosting a mind like Meditati was probably straining it depending on how much power she needed to use. If the sister had pressed the button at any point in time it could mean the weaponized field could be growing and expanding in our direction as I stood there making up my mind. Much as I distrusted her, I wasn’t about to let her die in such a way.

Also, I wasn’t too worried about having Meditati as part of my hive. The fine print of being downloaded into the swarm memory was that you received the genetic programming to support the monarch. Meditati knew all of that because it was something that Nurse and I had spoken about in my memories.

Something in the back of my mind made me think that she had gotten what she wanted all along regardless. She was just so much better at planning things out than I was.

“That is quite possibly very true.” Nurse said as we waited for the immense download to complete. “But you can be assured that she is on your side now though. I would recommend that you still let Tutor and George check her out though. Just to see what all is inside that mind of hers.”

“Why do I get the feeling that Invicta is not going to be happy about this?”

“Yeah, I feel that way too.”