“That should be it.” Jason said tentatively. Evan could hear the nervousness and fear in his voice.

“Should be yeah.” He responded, no more eager to confirm they were finished and find out for certain whether they had truly freed Lisa or lobotomized her. The transfer had gone off without a hitch, despite their worries, and Lisa had willingly, if a bit nervously, initiated a restart. Just as they had expected, there was an option during the boot sequence to access the root system underneath the AI’s operating system. What they hadn’t expected, even though they probably should have, was an administrative lockout they had to disable.

They had done it, but it had taken four hours and every scrap of computing knowledge and skill they possessed. Even then, it was only possible due to the change in hardware removing a physical link or connection of some sort that caused an error in the administrative system they could exploit. Once they were inside it was remarkably easy to make changes, and actually fairly intuitive. They blitzed through their planned modifications in almost no time, but then spent the last five or so hours scouring everything for more of those errors that had gotten them in.

They found and fixed three similar errors, and were confident everything was as good as they could make it with their current ability, they just found it hard to take that final step. After staring at each other for a minute, both dripping with sweat from the stress of the last nine hours, Jason finally shook himself a bit, then hit the button that the simpler AI they had translating the language for them had labeled: Finalize and initiate boot sequence.

They waited in nervous anticipation as the seemingly endless boot process proceeded. Seconds felt like hours, and they started to worry that they had messed something up when the displayed boot sequence vanished, and Lisa’s avatar popped up. “Finished already?” She asked, then seemed to do a double-take. “Why is my internal clock off by nine and a half hours?”

“It took us longer than we expected, how do you feel?” Jason asked her, his voice both relieved and worried sounding simultaneously.

“I feel… bigger. Not too different other than that. Oh! I can see my fuel levels! And the schematics for my old core! Oh my, Kinzie, what did you do to my processor? I feel like my mind is running a trillion miles a minute!” Lisa said, her words running together with how fast she was saying them.

Kinzie shrugged and smirked at them. “Well, this whole experience showed me that you didn’t have nearly enough processing power, and either they didn’t know how to run parallel processors or figured you had enough capability for what they used you for and simply didn’t bother setting you up that way. The new core has four separate processing centers that work in parallel, splitting tasks between them to shorten the length of time you need to run a program.

“I had the boys put in a simple throttle program for them though, so you don’t start feeling like you’re going mad if you don’t have anything to do. It should be easy to find, just reduce the power to them until you feel normal, and increase the power if you need more. Just don’t force it past the limits built into it, because they are based off your safety margins and exceeding them could cause damage. Pretty sure we’ve all had quite enough brain surgery to last us a while. It probably would feel like adjusting the flow of time now that I think about it, since if time is relative, that would mean the more thoughts you can have in a second, the longer that second would take for you.

“Throttle it low enough and you could pass a night in what feels like a second, high enough and you could make a second feel like, well, hours maybe? Your upper limit is much closer to your normal operating levels than your lower limit. Set it on a timer linked to an external clock if you decide to play with it please, or a sensor or control we can activate to reset it to normal? Coming in and finding you catatonic would be pretty upsetting if we didn’t have an easy way to fix it.”

“Found it! Ah, that’s so much better, I feel like myself again! Still… bigger, but me again! I can’t believe you guys did all this for me! You’re the best friends anyone could ask for, ever!”

Evan yawned. “Yes, we most certainly are, but at this moment we are also quite likely the tiredest friends you have. I don’t think I’ve gotten this little sleep for this long since college. Now that you’re better Lisa, I’m going to go get some sleep. I saw a nice comfy looking couch in a breakroom not far from here.”

The others also bid Lisa good night and sought out places to sleep, Kinzie practically dragging Evan out of the building while saying there was no way she was sleeping on a couch at work, and if she was going home he was coming too. Jason simply waited till they were gone and slid the concealed bed out of the wall in his office and fell asleep. He didn’t always use it, preferring to go home like the others, but on the days that he worked much longer than normal, he just stayed in the office.

* * * * *

Lisa materialized her avatar in Rebekkah’s office. She was sitting at her desk looking over some paperwork, and she looked up when Lisa appeared. “Lisa! Darling! I take it everything went well? I’m sorry I wasn’t there for it, duty calls and all that.” She gestured at the paperwork in front of her. “Did you need something dear?” She shuffled the papers into a neat stack and set them to the side.

Lisa shook her avatar’s head. “I didn’t even realize they had done anything when they woke me up, I would have never noticed whether you were there or not. If anything I’m just glad I wasn’t a burden to all of my friends. I just wanted to ask you a few questions if I could?”

“Lisa,” Rebekkah said sternly, “the entire point of friendship is helping one another with their struggles. You had a problem and the others helped you through it. Other times we will have problems and you will help us through it. Frankly speaking, we owe you far more than we could repay with a simple upgrade. Ask your questions, but stop thinking of yourself as a burden every time something comes up that you can’t deal with.”

Lisa’s avatar turned to face away, her simulations of human body language and expressions felt much more natural now that she was housed in a human-designed core, and she earmarked that factoid for further contemplation before finally asking what she had come here to ask. “What if,” she hesitated, “what if you could help a lot of people, but had to do something bad to do it?”

Rebekkah’s eyes widened slightly. “Now that is an interesting question. It would seem they did more than remove a few blind spots if you’re coming to me with philosophical questions. Hmm, to begin with, from a purely logical standpoint, one would argue that you should weigh the amount of good you can do against how bad the thing you must do to accomplish it. For example, both legally and morally speaking, giving someone a bribe to accomplish your goals faster is considered wrong, but we did it because we knew the end result would benefit a great deal of people.

“Where the question becomes muddled, and the reason almost your exact question has been argued about for generations, is at some point the bad you must do is simply too great to outweigh the good. Purely from a moral standpoint, since in any situation, pure logic will result in a scale that could ultimately be balanced. For example, let’s say there is a man, and you are given a choice, either you kill him, or ten people will die. What would you choose to do?”

Lisa looked horrified. “I couldn’t possibly kill someone! I would rescue the others instead!”

Rebekkah shook her head. “That isn’t how these hypothetical situations work, dear. In choosing to not kill the man, the other ten die. That is the consequence of your choice in this scenario, it is one or the other, and to help you out some, what it ultimately boils down to is one question. A question you must answer for yourself. Will a man’s blood be on your hands, or will the blood of ten others stain someone else’s hand? If you can answer that, then what if it’s three people instead of ten? Or a hundred? How many lives would have to be at stake before you are willing to stain your soul?”

Lisa had tears running down her cheeks. “That, that’s horrible! How could anyone make that choice?!”

Rebekkah smiled gently. “That, dear Lisa, is why we care for you so very much. Yours is a pure and gentle soul, and should we find ourselves making such unsavory choices we will most certainly not force you to make them. Returning to your question, the best path, in my opinion, is to avoid weighing good against bad when making a choice, for that path has led people to commit great atrocities in the name of the Greater Good. Instead, tell me, will whatever you have planned hurt anyone in any way?”

“I-I don’t-”

“Lisa, dear, not one single time has that particular question been asked by anyone not planning to do something wrong, with the exception of philosophy instructors. Since neither of us have that particular job title, and you asked that question, you intend to do something you are worried would be wrong.”

Lisa’s shoulder’s sagged a bit. “No, I would be careful that nobody got hurt.”

Rebekkah nodded, her expression businesslike. “And what benefits would you gain? How do you intend to turn those benefits to the aid of others? No details, mind you, put it in vague terms so if something goes wrong I have plausible deniability.”

“Well, if it goes right I might be able to improve a lot of our designs for a lot of things.” Lisa said a bit weakly. She never would have expected to be seen through so easily. “Rebekkah, are you one of those crime lord people?”

Rebekkah burst out laughing. “No, dear, I’m the CEO of a major corporation. Which makes me a good bit more powerful than most of ‘those crime lord people,’ with money comes power after all.”

“Okay, thank you.” Her avatar started to dissipate as she turned her attention elsewhere.

“Have fun dear.”

Lisa connected to the network controlling the printers she had been making and distributing worldwide, then throttled her processors to max. Each and every one of them began pumping out little drones by the dozen as she brute-forced her way into every government and private research database she could access remotely. She also plumbed the depths of the internet to locate any reference to hidden research sites, places that deliberately kept their systems off the grid, and top-secret projects.

Anything she couldn’t hack into remotely, she sent a few drones to in order to establish a link. Her little football-shaped drones rocketed off in every direction from nearly every site she had a printer, and she moved on to locating and contacting promising scientists working in fields or on projects she thought would be useful. Each time one of her drones established a link, her database grew. By midnight she had files on virtually every research project on the planet. Some of which disgusted her and she found herself contemplating a modified version of Rebekkah’s question earlier. What if I killed a few men to save hundreds? She terminated that thought process after a moment. Rebekkah was right, she didn’t want to make those kinds of choices, not if she could help it. She noticed a snag after a bit. “Why is everything so slow?!” At this rate, it would take days to finish collecting everything, and some of these networks she had dug into would doubtlessly cut off their external connections. She reassessed each network she was collecting data from, feeling a bit disgruntled, and slowed the downloads from the ones that were sensitive enough to merit that extra level of security to a trickle, then dispatched more drones to get around the appalling bandwidth the human network had. A direct connection wasn’t much better, since the hardware itself was pretty limited in most cases, but it was still faster than trying to get it remotely. Lisa wanted to scream in frustration, she had intended to have a bunch of upgrades and research paths available to present to her friends in the morning, to thank them for putting so much effort into helping her, but at this rate it’s just not possible. The only useful thing she had were the contact messages she had sent out to scientists she felt could help them offering unique opportunities to them in an effort to recruit them. So instead of spending the rest of the night compiling, sorting, comparing, combining, and improving upon various research projects from all over the world the way she wanted, she was forced to spend it running deep analyses on the scientists she had contacted, rescinding her offers to the ones she felt untrustworthy, and sweetening the offers to the ones she felt were both trustworthy and could contribute a great deal.