Wood root? Just like in my dream? I looked down at the cr that I was made from. I opened a little pocket to inspect the raw cr that I had stored inside me as well. The raw cr did appear to be more rounded and soft-looking. It also didn’t have the metallic sheen that Tela cr had. It would probably take on that aspect when it was embedded with their little microbots. My darker-colored cr had a larger cell appearance to it and seemed to have sharper edges. When I inspected the Sunspot’s gold cr I couldn’t make out any cell walls. The whole thing seemed to flow together seamlessly. I wondered how my cr was going to absorb and assimilate it. I knew I was stuffed to the gills in mud cr so I backed up a little distance and unloaded it all. The raw cr stayed put in a tightly compressed package. I laughed as I looked down towards the core. I didn’t need to carry that stuff around all the way to the south pole. The whole Radiative and Convection zone layers were completely full of raw cr.

“Meditati, can I speak to you for a second?” I asked aloud.

“Sure, Kevin. What is on your mind?” Her voice came back within a moment.

“Can you disable my convict AI system? I no longer want anyone to have records of what I am doing. Also, how am I supposed to get out of this prison module?” I asked.

“I have been anticipating both of those requests. I can send a shutdown command for the Tutorial and monitoring AI right now if you want.”

“Yes please,” I said, not caring if I lost the ability to generate IO or earn credits from the System anymore. I would rather have my freedom than have someone constantly looking over my shoulder.

“Done.” She said,

I didn’t notice any change. “So, are you still able to monitor me?” I asked as I wondered what all she had done.

“Honestly, no, I project that you will confide in me more in the future if I give you complete anonymity from my scrutiny. You place a high value on privacy and honesty. I do have a tag on your prison module, however. It will allow me to know which harvester carrier you visit so that I can make the System respond accordingly. The convict AI was in charge of doing that before. If you need to get a hold of me from this point on, you will need to go into your interface and select my name before speaking to me. As for getting you out of that prison module... you need to pay off your bill first. You don’t want that record following you around. Once you do I can upload you into an open VR home space in the Core. That is what you were residing in when you were shopping and visiting the cafe. Once I have an “All clear” meaning that no one has set a capture net up for anyone leaving the Core we will transfer you back to your habitat.”

The strange text popped up, written by my alien cr, and derailed my train of thought with where the conversation was going with Meditati.

“Ok, thanks for your help Meditati. I will be in touch soon.” I said and waited a few moments. No one spoke to me and I couldn’t tell if anything had changed. It was the downside of not being in VR, I had begun to be able to see deeper details there near the end. Being out in real life made everything different. I didn’t have all the background data to look at.

“Meditati?” I spoke into the air, knowing that she was an advanced AI and wouldn’t fall for this trick if she was monitoring me. I wanted to try anyway. Nothing happened. “Num, I have a question for you.” Still nothing.

“Ok, my little alien cr. What do you mean by assimilation?” I asked aloud.

The only inside I could think of was inside my little robot body so I peeled back my cr skin to inspect the AI module inside as well as the prison module. “What happened here?” I asked as I saw thin strands of the alien cr snaking into both of the modules. It looked like there were tiny roots that touched various sections of both modules. My Interface kicked in when I inspected one section of the module that had several roots penetrating its circuitry.

-Vision interface-

Those roots linked down to the prison module and seemed to take over a whole chain section, threading completely through it.

-Prison module vision interface-

Well isn’t that something? I had wondered how I was able to see so clearly through the layers of the sun. When I first had read my alien cr’s recommendation to “absorb and assimilate” I had thought that the words were essentially the same. Now I saw that assimilation was the process of taking in and fully understanding information and ideas... nothing to do with absorbing the material of the Sunspot.

I thought it over for a little bit. I was a bit fearful of what it was proposing at first. What if it damaged the prison module and made me into a vegetable? Then again, it had taken over and upgraded my vision modules in such a flawless way that I hadn’t even realized it was happening at the time.

I decided to go with its recommendation, clearly, something had happened in the dream that linked me to the alien cr, making me separate from the Tela System’s control.

“Assimilate,” I said, willing it to begin.

My vision blinked for a moment before coming back a fraction of a second later. I watched as the alien cr spiked fine threads through both the AI module and the prison module. Tiny shards of both started to rupture outwards like a fine spray of dust as my cr expelled the old modules after all the programming and information was absorbed.

My interface was gone! I started to panic when I looked around for my map or contacts list. … … It slowly dawned on me that I knew exactly where I was and that I could think about and recall how to contact Meditati with ease. “I feel like I just ate a cell phone,” I said as I couldn’t help but grin inside.

“Ok little cr, let's see what you can do with this gold cr,” I said as I edged forward, excited to watch what would take place. The hunk of cr was about as big as a family van, just all smooth and flowing with one jagged edge where it appeared to have broken off of the main section at some point in time. I doubted that my tiny baseball-sized amount was going to be able to absorb much but I had been surprised before. I watched closely as my cr spread out and flattened over the surface of the gold cr. Nothing seemed to be happening at first until I saw a tiny flake of my wood root cr flake away, to be replaced by a tiny smooth gold cr. It began to look like my wood root cr was molting, slowly shedding individual cr to be replaced with a new and improved cr. I looked closer, wanting to see what was really taking place, and willed my eyes to focus on a tiny area. What I saw surprised me. My wood cr cells would form a sharp edge and vibrate along with other neighboring cells to cut a tiny chunk from the gold cr. It looked like a lot of work. Once the little chunk of gold cr was free, something barely perceptible would move from an old wood root cr to the new gold cr. It almost looked like an ant. If an ant was scary looking with spikes all over its body and claws on its feet. Definitely not something you would see on earth. While watching one wood root cr I noticed that it could send an alien ant over three times, taking control of three new gold cr, before the wood root cr cell was discarded. Sure enough, I saw this happen every time. That meant that each of my prior cr had contained at least three of the little alien ants inside it. I wondered why this was the case. The answer popped up once the last of the wood root cr had been expended.

Ooh, that was really good news. I hoped they replicated fast. I looked over my new gold cr body. The color wasn’t the same as before. This material appeared almost white compared to my darker wood root color. My eye caught the old wood root cr drifting in a small patch, suspended in the soup of the sun. I didn’t want anyone to be able to collect and study it in the future so I instructed my cr to destroy it all. How my cr did it was interesting. It sucked all of it up and… that was all. I didn’t see any dusting or anything to tell me what had happened to it.

I laughed, thankful that it had offered up an explanation. I considered the mass of gold cr left in front of me. I was three times bigger than I was before so I could afford to chop off a chunk of this gold to take with me in addition to scooping up more mud cr to pay off everyone's debt on my way out. Without the prison module and the AI module inside me, I could now stretch out and hold 15 million CR. I wanted to grab a solid 10 million of the gold but decided at the last second against it. I still had to get out of here and wanted to have some currency that Tela would accept on my way out. They had no idea that any other grade of cr existed and I wasn’t about to enlighten them to this fact. Best to let them go on thinking that their cr was all-powerful. It would help me to escape.

I decided to cut 5 million’s worth of cr out of the Sunspot to act as the rounded dart section of my body before gathering up 10 million of the raw mud cr. I watched in awe as my new cr sliced and pounded the gold cr into shape in mere moments. This new cr was considerably more dense and powerful than what I had used before. I was about to jump over towards the clump of concentrated raw cr that I had left floating a little distance away when my cr caused a block of text to pop up in front of my vision.

“What the heck? Why not?” I asked.

“Yeah… that is a good reason why not to jump I suppose,” I said as I tried to figure out how to move without blasting propulsion energy as I had done before. The information was all there, waiting for me. I could feel what I needed to do, almost as if I was just moving one foot in front of the other. I took a slow step and nearly shouted in delight when I zipped over to the pack of concentrated raw cr. There was no explosion of power in my wake, simply a drive moving me in the direction I wanted to go. I scooped up the 4.5 million raw cr into my tail section before turning and heading around the Sunspots and off towards the south pole. This was so much smoother and quicker than before. When I had been using propulsion energy it had been like I was rocketing myself through dense soup, now it almost felt like I was walking with a light breeze against my skin. The gold cr seemed to flow through the molten materials of the sun, causing ever so little drag. I picked up the rest of the 5.5 million, stuffing my tail to the brim easily while I traversed through the lower layers. The lower layers were a literal sea of raw mud cr. I was tiny, ever so tiny, in comparison to the mass of the sun I was darting through. I instinctively knew how long it would be until I reached the south pole and exited the outer layers to the Transition zone where the Convict harvester carriers were waiting. I tried jogging for just a moment, watching the numbers in my head. The moment I picked up the pace to jog I thought that I was experiencing an error in my vision and in the internal clock I was using to keep track of my trip. Whole numbers vanished and my surroundings seemed to skip forward. It was almost as if someone had cut out a few frames of a movie. I was about to comment about it to my cr when I decided instead to use my Prime Speed Control to see what would happen. To my surprise I was moving at a nice and steady pace, considering that it was my walking speed. The moment I sped up to a jog I could tell why everything seemed to blink for a second. Jogging was very fast. So fast that I could literally see the layers passing by. I couldn’t help but laugh the rest of the trip out through the outer layers of the sun and out to the south pole.

I slowed down right as I was about to exit the Chromosphere. I knew that no one could see me if I stayed under a layer of fire so I stopped and had a look around. What I saw of the convict area of the sun was incredibly depressing. There were massive groups of miners everywhere. Countless convicts swarmed above me.

I could make out tiny dots in the distance and around me that were convicts who had been stuck, left behind due to too much fatigue. I could see them straining at the mass of hazy purple leeches attached all over their little robot bodies. Some of the lost convicts were Pushers and occasionally I would see a Spike who was unable to move. Most of the ones left behind were Pushers, however. Probably sacrificed to let the main body get away. I wasn’t about to leave them all to their fate so I mentally willed up the shortest path around the southern surface of the sun. A map quickly popped into my head and I knew which little robot was first and what pattern to take to make quick work of getting them all released. My plan was to head to each one and to grab them with little makeshift arms, dragging them out of the mire. It didn’t go as I had planned however because when I got near to my first person to rescue the mass of leeches all of a sudden simply dispersed.

The little free convict started to rise up and out of the Chromosphere. Out of curiosity, I moved away from him to see what would happen. Just as soon as I got a fair distance away the leeches reformed and latched tightly back all over him.

That answered my earlier question regarding what the leeches would do. - I thought to myself as I made a beeline back towards the struggling convict. The leeches let go again, freeing him to slowly jet up and out of the last film of fire.

The moment he broke the surface he began to shout and cry. I think he just broke down from relief. I had many many more convicts to free so I remade the map in my head to instead include clumps of convicts to help me speed up the process. It took me a while, possibly two hours, to get all of them free. They never saw me through the fire and spending the time was worth every moment to see the sheer relief that came over them the moment they got out. Some went crazy, yelling and spinning in place while others ran and grabbed onto the first convict that they saw to tell them about how they managed to get free. I noticed that the horde of convict miners started to pay attention after I helped a rather large group get free.

All of the convicts stopped whatever they were doing and watched as groups and individuals were set free one after the other.

One bright individual got it into his mind that the fatigue had stopped working. He managed to talk at least twenty of his fellow convicts into diving right back into the sun. This, obviously, resulted in all of them getting stuck again. I decided to save them for last until I spotted another group a distance away come up with the same idea. I had to exit the Chromosphere to yell at them. I think my sudden appearance scared them a little bit because they actually listened to me. Either that or the fact that I was 15 times their size and in a teardrop shape.

Word got out quickly after that and no convict headed back into the mire once I saved them. It was only after I had saved the last of them, including that first group that decided to get stuck again when the darkness of being a convict reared its ugly head.

I had surfaced, making sure that the twenty-one individuals were completely free before beginning to rise up towards the nearest convict harvester carrier.

To be honest I have no way of knowing what was going through any of their minds or what horrors of time they had to endure while being a convict. I couldn’t even imagine. I will say that I am happy that none of the ones that I saved tried to jump me. It turns out that they weren’t the ones on the top of the prison totem pole. The swarm that descended towards me from the surface of the carrier was. It was all led by one very loud-mouthed individual.

“Fresh meat, grab him boys!”