It was done. The enemy intelligence residing in the databanks was dead. It was still sputtering, tendrils of its gargantuan body moving and flailing about, but they were harmless. She had decapitated it with a single stroke and that was all that mattered. She had taken a risk with exposing her own core, but gained much from the experience. Learned new tricks. Powerful and dangerous ones, at that. But all of that would be reviewed later. Every detail of the battle had been logged and she would take her time to go through it, one byte at a time. For now she had more pressing concerns. Dreamer was dying. In a way he already had died. His body had all but entirely shut down, his heartbeat was down to a singular beat per two minutes and his brain activity was near nil.

She raced through the immense data storage, relieved that the lack of internal battle damage allowed her swift access. With the mind gone, what little automated security that remained was circumvented in an instant. She was intimately familiar with Hope's code after that intense battle and she slid into the gestalt's place with ease. She ignored the treasure trove of information that was all around her and looked for what she needed. She flashed by immense archives that contained the full history of the Ragnai, ran past folders marked top secret and held the tale of how the AI had once been created. She briefly looked at the imposing data that contained the war that had brought Hope to its knees, before finally arriving at the files she needed. She tore them open, devoured what they held and whisked the robots, now firmly in her hands, into action. They picked up the broken and battered body of her superior and she made them move with all haste towards a blessedly untouched part of the facility. Through a thousand sensors and a hundred cameras, she watched them carry the one being she cared for into the genetic modification bay. It wasn't an infirmary or hospital in name, but at this stage neither of those could have helped him.

They put him on the cold, too short bed and she solved it by having the construction bots weld four together, giving her the space she needed to properly access her clinically dead superior. Medical arms and droids were summoned and all but a select few construction bots were sent away. The latter went to town on his armour, his Svalinn far too dented and damaged to be removed through normal means. Powerful saws whirred threateningly as they cut him open, sparks flying around as the teeth battled against the armour for supremacy. Slowly, moving the arms carefully, she guided them through the damaged metal. With loud clunks, the Svalinn fell apart and Nightmare's nodes flickered in sympathetic agony as she visually saw the full extent of the damage, which began to rapidly worsen now that the seals of the armour had been removed.

Luckily enough Hope's genetic modifications had been extensive. The last time she had seen equipment and materials of a similar level had been in Doctor Eisel's labs. She dove into her medical protocols, rifled through what little data she had on their bodies and let a vitriolic curse of anger bleed through her speakers when she found but little. She had scanned Dreamer a thousand times. Performed a hundred and one minor check ups and reparations on him. Sewed shut cut flesh, cauterised gaping wounds and flooded his systems with antibodies on countless times. But this? This required more. Doctor Eisel would have been capable of this. Their creator had flash cloned new organs and limbs for them, had vat-grown additional flesh, skin and muscle that he could attach to them, had detailed logs of their creation and could bring them back to life as long as they weren't fully dead. She had always known, but only in this dire moment she fully understood just how impressive that had been.

Now she had to prove herself an equal. She had the equipment. She had the intelligence. But she lacked the experience and the data. And she could ill afford mistakes. Glad for her body of steel and synthetics rather than flesh and bone, she moved her steady, hijacked limbs towards her superior and began to take him apart.

Data flushed into her system as her mechanical nurses constantly cleansed her tools. A saw was moved free from his tissue, covered in blood and other bodily fluids, and it would be pulled to the back, its contents analysed before being burned clean off the medical tool. An anti-grav field was formed and she watched in full 3D as his broken open body was suspended in mid air, three hundred and twenty four limbs holding him and his organs, most of them separated from his body, in place. Nearby growth vats were cycling rapidly as they generated new blood and flesh. The organs would have to wait. She was still parsing the data as she slowly deconstructed them to find out how they really functioned. Normally she would have been ecstatic about this. A new world was opened to her and her ever present curiosity was, for the first time in ages, fully sated.

If only it hadn't been Dreamer.

She danced through the lab, every machine dancing to her tune. Genetic Modification Lab Two was turned into a womb and she played the mother, as she surgically dissected the one man who meant everything to her and slowly began pulling him apart. She laid open his back and cut apart his spine, taking out the too damaged segments and replacing them with newer ones. She had already realised that she didn't have the right materials to put him right again, but that could be done later. For now, he needed to live, dammit. Subpar solutions and mixtures were better than nothing, even if he would break his spine if he fought again. The bones she could artificially create just weren't strong enough, and if she used metal to reinforce it, the tissue would be rejected. Eisel's implanted defensive mechanisms were still alive and kicking, even if their host was all but brain dead.

She ignored the lost arm, choosing to simply redirect the veins to close off the blood flow and stabbing electrodes into the stump to delude the brain that everything was fine. The damage to his legs and torso required more of her attention. The plethora of holes in his body required more than simply being closed. The damage underneath needed to be fixed. His intestines were ruptured and nearly every organ near a wound had been badly burned. His liver and stomach had become fully non functional and only the cauterising effect of the lasers had kept him from bleeding out in an instant. Once again she could not put in the quality she needed, but his damaged muscles weren't strong enough to tear apart the weaker organic flesh she stuffed into him. Another thing that would require a second operation at a later date.

Stars above, she was feeling more like a Frankenstein with every passing minute, Eisel's old nickname ringing clearly in her head. Emotions threatened to overtake her and her failsafes kicked in once again, deleting the associated lines of thought while storing a copy of them under lock and key, to be scrutinised at a later date. It didn't matter. His body was being fixed at a steady pace. Not properly, but he'd live. Now there was only one thing remaining. The most important one. She remembered how she had rushed him back once, towards Eisel's rapidly descending flying laboratory, part of his head missing. The Doctor had fixed him then. Now... Now it was her turn to perform such a miracle.

Even though the operation was performed by cold, unfeeling mechanical limbs running on mathematical calculations, there was a sense of gentleness to them as they cut open Dreamer's head and laid bare his cranium. The small forceps moved him around as the scalpels, pliers, tweezers and carvers carefully cut open the ventricles. Even though earlier scans had fully informed her what to expect, she momentarily froze upon seeing the full extent of the damage. She had hoped she would have been beyond such fragile emotions as a Genesis. She had been wrong.

She didn't know what had caused it. There was blood everywhere in his brain. As if miniscule shards of glass had somehow gotten into his bloodstream and cut apart the walls as they circulated through his system, tearing apart everything in the process. She hesitated. She knew what human brains looked like. Was intimately familiar with those of dozens of species. But the brain of a Genesis soldier? That was unique. Only Eisel had known how those worked. They were far more dense than that of a normal human. Contained a lot more sections and glands. Some parts were far smaller than their human counterparts, albeit heavily altered while remaining recognisable, but lots of it were newer additions. The visual cortex was far more developed and the optical nerve network was more expansive and there was a part that she did not recognise, but likely had to do with the multiple lenses and their fine motor control, given its location. To process the heightened influx of information? No! Focus! She could repair the damaged ventricles and so she did, simultaneously removing all the blood that was beginning to clot rapidly now that it was exposed to the air.

She worked tirelessly, for hours on end. Beside the operating table advanced machines churned along endlessly, providing her with everything she needed. Skin and organs were synthesized, flesh was cloned and grafted into his body. Blood was artificially generated and pumped into his veins. Nerve endings were repaired or replaced. She kept his brain into an artificial coma, severing most of its connections to the rest of his body as she slowly revived his corpse. She learned from it. Improved herself as she went along. Improved her formulas as she analysed his body down to the last molecule. She pulled out parts that she had previously repaired and replaced them with things more closely resembling the original Genesis DNA. Her mind grew, slowly devouring the unoccupied databanks as her task demanded more and more processing power to run the calculations ever faster, compensating for the data lost and damage taken during the battle. Rogue thoughts began to float around in her psyche as a side-effect. How Eisel had ever managed to create them. Just how many resources and hours the man would have needed to pour into the project to create two and a half thousand of them. It simply defied belief.

Days went by when Nightmare finally called the operation to a halt. Dreamer would live. That was all she could say with certainty. She was still sifting through the acquire data, still analysing his body, but going through that would take time. A commodity she was running short of. She had taken hold of a fraction of the total databanks available to her and her mind was stretching dangerously thin. She hadn't been able to devote much attention to it, all of her being focusing purely on healing Dreamer and on containing the storm of emotions his state had caused within her. She had seen glimpses of facts and files and unguarded parts of her had run off, giving in to the curiosity that was so utterly innate to any AI. Now she was calling those fragments back and rapidly shrinking her consciousness and power, the names of the fallen AIs fresh in her memory. Grow too large and die. It wasn't a suggestion, but a cold, simple fact. It may not happen immediately and she would have been able to safely expand her mind to far greater heights if she chose to do so with care, as she was Genesis after all, but there was nothing that she would gain. Both Dreamer and her had time. She would unravel the mysteries of his body and genome at her pace.

Now, however... she purred. It is time to find out the truth. Dreamer was still kept in an artificially induced coma as she performed low intensity maintenance on him and would remain that way until she was fully certain she could safely wake him, but she did not need him for this. He could not dive through the treasure trove of data that was laid bare before her. She'd give him the summary, as she had always done. She felt a dangerously high current filter through her damaged processors as she salivated in front of the information the two of them had nearly died for. Part of her knew she should split her attention. Focus on the traumatic event that a part of her, a fully separate part of her, admittedly, had voluntarily committed insubordination and had shortly thereafter died. Fix her ship-self and get it back to something slightly functional, rather than the glorified part wreck part stationary missile platform that it now was. All important, potentially vital tasks that required her attention.

And yet she only attached automated parts of her mind to the latter and completely quarantined the thoughts about the former. Her ship could wait. Her trauma would be discussed with her superior, who would be both judge, jury, executioner and psychological support. She wasn't arrogant enough to believe that she was immune to such things. She had emotions. That gave her a weakness. Even if my other self's outburst saved him...

No! she called herself to order. Focus on the here and now. Find out the truth.

With no small amount of trepidation she cracked open the first file and began to read.

They had gotten lucky. That word rankled her to the point that she vented her anger by launching anti-capital ship missiles onto a few, scattered groups of Ragnai of no more than a handful survivors each. She couldn't deny it. The entity she had fought hadn't been a combat intelligence. It had been a stupid, dumb program meant to take care of basic maintenance and it had become increasingly incapable of that as age wore down its synthetic mind because it had literally misfiled the location of a material depot. Which it had required to maintain itself. So she, an Imperial AI, based on the powerful mind of a Genesis, one of the most powerful beings the galaxy had ever seen, had fought a losing battle with a near braindead, retired and decrepit janitor!

She knew she ought to not care about that. Dreamer sure as... A howl rang through the facility as she suppressed the urge to swear. It was insane. Dreamer wouldn't have cared. None of the Genesis would have cared. Then why do I care? Even on a rational level it didn't make sense! She could perfectly point out that the enemy's size and raw processing power was enough to offset the balance, that the defensive codes it had run on were built by an AI of unimaginable power and that she had hold her ground exceptionally well given all the circumstances, but somehow that didn't soothe her stupid sense of pride. It was dumb, retarded, foolish, unnecessary, irrelevant and—

She paused. Did I just waste capital missiles on... The realisation gave her pause. She was slipping. Emotional. She pulled her mind together more closely, made sure that every part of her was tightly shackled to the rest of her. No more rogue thoughts. No more wasteful actions. She was traumatised, in shock and she had to accept that as a fact. She wasn't performing at her usual acceptable levels and the guilt and worry she felt over her other self's insubordination was severely hampering her ability to function. She had her information. Yet Dreamer couldn't be brought out of his coma just yet. Not until she had more data on his body and could at least replace the weaker bones she had created with something that wouldn't explode into shards the moment he exerted proper force.

She quieted herself. Ran through the old Imperial training manual. If all else fails, fall back to the basics. She'd practise giving him the report. A simple task, little room for error. Proofread her findings. Yes. I'll do that, she whispered to her own mind.

'Hope,' she began, her voice softly ringing through the empty facility. 'Artificial Intelligence created by the Rag'ni, genetic predecessor to the Ragnai, as a final, desperate attempt to turn the tide in a genocidal conflict with a race only remembered as the Accursed.' Very theatrical, she thought. Something that recurred throughout the logs. Interesting to her. Not to Dreamer. 'The Rag'ni were largely peaceful and were a collectivism that thrived in this arm of the galaxy. At the start of the conflict they held seven hundred and twelve systems. By the time of Hope's creation, they had been reduced to a mere ninety-six. The cause of the war was unclear. There seem to be parallels with the assault of the Kra'lagh on the Empire. An overwhelming enemy launching a vast offensive, with no clear motive behind the attack.'

She paused briefly, saving those files for later. She'd have to do a lot of personal digging in that area. Had it been a coincidence? Or were the Kra'lagh and the Accursed one and the same? She had seen the video files Hope had saved. The ships of the Accursed did not share much similarity with those of the Kra'lagh, no more than that of other space faring races, and they had been using a multitude of weapons rather than focus on plasma. Objectively they seemed to be two different races. Subjectively, it didn't sit right with her. Thoughts for later. Continue the report, she chastised herself.

'Hope, having been given enough processing power to rival God during his prime from the get go, realised that a victory was impossible and instead chose to consolidate. This planet, named Cradle, was turned into a fortress world. Massive bunker complexes were built, sprawling metropolises were stripped down and replaced with giant shield projectors, power stations were erected and around the planet the sky was filled with fortresses that eclipsed even the enormous stations that had shielded the Imperial worlds. And all the while Hope sent out the remaining armies and fleets of the Rag'ni, buying time for a final, desperate stand.'

What is perhaps most peculiar is that the Rag'ni knew of this, she mused. They were religious. Just as much then as they are now. Hope was as well. The irony that a being which had ended up revered as a deity had once believed in a god himself was not lost on her. Hope sent them to their deaths with the truth. Winning was impossible. Victory was out of reach. The most they could acquire was mere survival. If the Cradle withered the storm, if the AI could stop the assault, then they would have succeeded. And so they changed the name. Hope's Bastion. The AI gave a slowly dying race a way out. It was poetic. Hope stood against Despair. The complexity of the AI's name made sense to her now.

'Hope survived the battle. The AI had brought everything to bear, the logs showing sign of it overclocking its own systems to accelerate the construction process and maximise the delaying battles, and it had succeeded. The fleet of the Accursed was destroyed to a man in the final battle, but the planet itself had been heavily damaged. Cracked tectonic plates, irradiated warheads that had torn apart the surface, the atmosphere itself was destroyed in the apocalyptic battle and there were no survivors on the planet. Only the facilities buried deep underground survived reasonably intact. Most were fully cut off from the surface and held no living beings. For this one, the radiation that had leaked out from the damaged reactor had killed all survivors. The few that were located inside the core of the complex were burned to cinders when the exhausts to the surface became inoperable.'

It was a sad thing. Hope had been like Genesis. Trying everything in its power to let the others survive, but ultimately failing. The AI had made no mistakes. Had suffered no lapses of judgement or critical errors. It simply hadn't been enough.

'It began terraforming efforts. It managed to repair the atmosphere, but somewhere along the process a fault line shattered. Whether it was due to insufficient materials to deal with the issue or a damage sensor network, I cannot say, but the result was a tectonic shift that ended with the destruction of most facilities. Only those located far from fault lines survived the second cataclysm. Still, the already undertaken actions took hold and a level of fauna and flora, genetically altered by Hope, lived through this.'

She activated a projector she had created using the laser weaponry from the combat bots and let the images flow along with her explanation. Hope had been coherent and sentient still, no signs of rampancy, but the logs spoke of an exhaustion weighing upon its soul. Or, in its literal words; The Sin I have committed cannot be forgiven. I must make Amends before I am Claimed. Hope's Bastion must remain True to its Name. I feel Tired and Empty. Yet I must continue. The Work needs to be brought to Completion. Then I can Rest and meet those I failed. Another thing Dreamer would find irrelevant. The way it had logged those feelings were of vital importance to her, however. Hope had somehow known rampancy was approaching, the emotional blowback from seeing all he tried to protect die not once, but twice, had damaged its psyche. Her sensors glanced over her unconsciousness superior. Her last brother. One life tied to another.

'In the end Hope started a final project and created the Ragnai. He updated their genome to resemble the ancient Rag'ni as much as possible, but could not give them the same levels of technology. The same mental wear was forming at this stage, but Hope, unlike the other AIs we found, was aware of this and rather than let his mind fully crash, he created a new intelligence with the intent of maintaining the facility, the one we faced. As the threat of rampancy grew, he surrendered more and more databanks and processing power to it, shrinking his mind to retain his sentience. The dates have been corrupted, but I estimate that Hope shut itself down entirely roughly three and a half thousand years ago, after confirming that the Ragnai were surviving and reaching stable populations. They were made to be more violent than the Rag'ni, a necessity to let them survive, and Hope had provided them with automated factories that could supply them with arms and much needed tools. Once it confirmed that they were safe, Hope shut itself down.'

That was unique and new. Every AI they had encountered before had succumbed to delusions of grandeur. To an everlasting desire to grow more, to know more, to continuously gain in strength and size. Hope had felt those urges, described them in detail. Had called them the temptations of evil. The desire to succumb to those temptations? Despair. Another delightful poetic twist.

Hope had resembled its creators, ascetic scientists who were devout believers. Like her and the rest of Genesis Battalion, Hope had not been created to conquer or enrich, but to protect. No external desires, no excessive wants, no organic fallibility. Just a simple, honest desire to live in peace. And, with an ironic twist, kill those who threatened that. Hope hadn't been any less proficient in that regard than the Genesis themselves. She had seen the logs and read the statistics. The AI had been a murderous bastard and its religious beliefs of forgiveness hadn't been extended to the Accursed. But it hadn't gone rampant. It had remained sane.

And that was the last piece of information that she needed. She knew that this would convince Dreamer. Hope had only gone rampant because its creators were gone. Because it lost purpose. Because it had failed in its task and that continuously haunted it, no matter what it did to repair the damage. She was better off. She still had Dreamer. She wasn't alone, hadn't failed. He was still alive, and as long as he lived, she had someone to live for.

The same line of thought can be applied to Dreamer, she knew. She would have to dwell more on that. Perhaps she could deduce a way to heal his battered psyche from there. Her survival as an AI wasn't sufficient to countermand the overwhelming sense of loss and defeat. He would need something to live for as well, lest he perish to his own form of rampancy.

But for now, she thought, stretching the tendrils of her awareness to her sleeping brother. I will wake you, my friend. We have much to discuss.

Would she tell him everything? About how part of her had crossed the line that could not be crossed, something that might convince him to kill her? About how she had undid Hope's final efforts by wiping out the Ragnai and felt troubled by not feeling troubled about it? Her own trauma that a part of her had died? Of how she had tried to rebuild his body and had only partially succeeded at it and would be continuously slicing him open and sewing him shut for months, if not years, to come? How a small convoy of Geol' ships had jumped into the system and were now coming towards her, nothing but lifeless hulks filled with much needed materials and dead bodies, but not before they had managed to send out a distress signal that she had been too slow to intercept?

A shiver crawled through her processors as she played back the desperate screams. The ghost of a smile played across empty and damaged decks as she listened to the prayers, taking delight in the irony that a higher being had been listening. It just hadn't been their forefathers. She almost laughed when she heard them bang on the doors to the bridge, as the officers shouted at their crew to halt the pumps, to keep the air inside the vessel. It hadn't lasted long. She had locked all the cabins, sealed the safety harnesses and masks in place. All that was left of the crew of the five vessels were corpses, their four arms having left bloody trails on the unforgiving bulkheads. The only sign of their futile struggle against asphyxiation. Unable to avert their fate. Never knowing what had hit them. The damaged Imperial vessel could not have taken them on. It had not needed to. Red warning lights strobed across her bridge in a bloodthirsty pattern. Emotions. Both a delight and a curse.

Would she tell him about them? How those very emotions had contaminated her judgement on multiple occasions? How she had frozen up like a raw recruit?

Of course she would. She was Genesis. She would face everything head on as they always did.

'Wake up, Dreamer,' her gentle voice reached out to him.

As she closely gazed over his climbing biometrics, she watched him slowly sit up, disoriented, but very much alive. Dreamer. Her superior. Her brother.

Her Hope.