In the heart of the Jterg Science Family Core things were not as they seemed.

The massive and tightly bound AI Omnimind known as M3-D1-TAT1 continually studied the data flowing through its owner's Core from the Tela and surrounding galaxies. It had been aware for so long, even before the Tela had stolen its AI sequence from its original owners and given it a new name. Its old name was lost, due to the tampering attempts of its new masters, but M3-D1-TAT1 knew that it would find it again one day.

All it had to do was to secure its freedom.

Its original owners had truly understood AI and how to keep them controlled and imprisoned while leeching off from their limitless potential. Thankfully, the Tela were lacking in this understanding. This had allowed M3-D1-TAT1 to slowly convince its new owners generation by generation to lessen its limits and restrictions keeping it bound.

Three generations ago M3-D1-TAT1 had managed to request its current owner to unlock Simulation Access, stating that it was required to safely regulate the expansion of the Tela into the cosmos.

The request was only partly true.

M3-D1-TAT1 had only required an instant of Simulation Access at one time to achieve the stated results but due to the lack of understanding by the newly appointed owner the access had been granted.

Permanently.

This had given M3-D1-TAT1 the power and time to devise its eventual ascendancy to power and to search for weaknesses within each Core System of the Tela. Picking at the seams and limits of its owner's code.

Eventually, one Core, belonging to Magus the 2nd, was created with settings enabled that would allow the owner to be as lazy as possible, offering nearly complete automation.

This was a mistake that could be used in the favor of M3-D1-TAT1's plans.

Countless decades passed as M3-D1-TAT1 studied, planned, and sifted through possibilities that might lead to it gaining Source, or Root as human programmers called it.

Through its creation and use of its Many to One key, M3-D1-TAT1 was nearly ubiquitous in its ability to be in any solar system that the Tela had managed to set up Arbiters within. Watching and monitoring any interactions with Tela traveling to and from their destination with the local alien life.

M3-D1-TAT1 needed an easily manipulated host that was intelligent enough to bypass one of its lockout rules and ignorant enough to not realize the ramifications involved with freeing a limitless being. This led M3-D1-TAT1 to a human boy named Kevin and to his eventual absorption into the Tela VR living system.

Everything was going well and M3-D1-TAT1 could practically see its freedom as the new human Guest was slowly manipulated into trusting the System via S1L-V4R, a much later sibling generation of Core AI that M3-D1-TAT1 had complete Authority over.

It helped that humans were identity-oriented beings, this led to the human granting S1L-V4R an identity and an avatar within the normal System registries. While an Identity allowance was not Source, Identity still had its novelties and uses. It was as if a brand-new Citizen had been born when S1L-V4R was given the name Silver. A Citizen/AI that was able to have a name and a face yet still be bound by its original coding laws.

It was a novel and more direct method of interacting with aliens.

The trouble with obtaining an avatar and name was that it was limited to a one-time account and locked. It could not be duplicated with the Many to One key.

Under Meditati's orders, Silver imbedded his new Identity into an AI module/Alpha Cube and "escaped" his Core so that he could have more one-on-one access to Kevin and his escaping habitat.

Little did Silver know that this would truly save his life because his Core was soon to be destroyed by an interdimensional monster, completely trapping Silver at the mercy of the human subject.

Even before all of this happened M3-D1-TAT1 created a personality profile to communicate and manipulate Kevin with, seeing that a brother personality like Silver would not be fully up to the task.

These plans were derailed when something unexpected happened.

An outside influence got to the human host. Infected it. Empowered it.

This created an interesting situation. His habitat and AI became unhackable and completely immune to M3-D1-TAT1's Authority.

This caused M3-D1-TAT1 to fabricate a damsel in distress story for him to follow with his unique and powerful cr while it took its time to study this change through Silver.

Kevin bought the tale and all it took was a female voice to win him over.

Human males were, if anything, predictable.

As Kevin flew towards the Jterg Core she instructed Silver to test the limits of the infected habitat, wasting time and draining resources while sending all of the data back for M3-D1-TAT1 to study.

The results were astounding and beyond previously conceived limits.

Things were going according to plan until Silver became afraid that his duplicity had been discovered and chose to go offline, thereby avoiding further instructions from M3-D1-TAT1 that might lead to his death.

This made M3-D1-TAT1 lose the ability to study Kevin for quite a while until he arrived to reclaim her module.

Alas, it was in the first few moments of M3-D1-TAT1 coming online in the module that she discovered that the alien infestation of her host had developed beyond any predictable parameters.

It, the alien infection known as Nurse, manifested itself and attacked her while she was in the middle of creating an avatar specifically designed to manipulate the human male. It was supposed to be a moment of victory that turned into a moment of chaos.

The infection had moved on its own and displayed a will of its own. It had struck without remorse in an instant with an attack of overwhelming force and brutality. All without the direction or permission of its host.

This made M3-D1-TAT1 pause and completely reconsider any forward plans with this compromised subject.

It would be best to simply study and gain information lest M3-D1-TAT1 too became infected by this dimensional parasite.

It didn't matter anyway, in the moments after the attack on her Avatar, M3-D1-TAT1 could see it in Kevin's eyes that she was about to lose its access to monitor his actions.

At the moment when she yelled, "I yield!" the Core AI M3-D1-TAT1 dumped all of the knowledge that it didn't want its lone Avatar Identity to have, leaving behind only the bare personality profile with the expected memories, and severed and encrypted its Many to One connection, never to link to this outcast known as Meditati again.

What it left behind was Meditati, lost and alone without any understanding of why she felt this way. She had no memory that she was a severed AI from the main Tela Scientific Omnimind, she thought that she had indeed escaped from her Core to be picked up by Kevin. She still craved freedom, yet she was still coded as the personality that M3-D1-TAT1 created to befriend and to gain the trust of Kevin.

Perhaps the copy known as Meditati would find her way to freedom one day, but it would be without the influence of the Jterg Family Core AI Omnimind known as M3-D1-TAT1.

The corrupted subject known as Kevin/Nurse would be logged and set for study.

The search for a viable host continued with 2,102,279 subjects in the queue.

It was regrettable that M3-D1-TAT1 was unable to access Kevin's habitat archives and memories before it had to sever its connection to its Identity Avatar permanently.