The pings that had come in, and that were still coming in, were a modification of the emergency ping that I had set up. The emergency ping was responded to by dropping the perception of time to the fastest it could be, so that things that required immediate reactions would have plenty of time to react to. The pings that I was receiving were trying to request my digital side to sync with the slowest speed it could go, the complete opposite of what an emergency ping was, but with the same structuring.

I hadn't written any sort of filter for the pings that I received, so the first one was very effective at stopping my digital side, and then my digital side was moving too slowly for me to fix it, continually responding to new pings.

The pings, and the mass of data, was coming routed through the common simulation, so I physically cut the connection between my hardware platform and it, breaking the portals that the cables were travelling through by brute force with my biological side. It left quite a mess of the connection, but I was then able to reclaim my digital side and drop down into my personal simulation.

With that done I had all the time I needed to design a way around the sabotage. A direct physical link to a spare digital platform, and then from there a connection to the common simulation that acted as a hub between all of the Demi-AIs.

I connected through to the common simulation through a layer of anonymisation. I still had root access to everything that was running on the platform, and I used it to track down the noise generators that had flooded my original connection.

They were easy to find, there were ten new simulations that were a simple black room. Looking into their code they were pulling data from the running statistics of the simulation and putting it through an algorithm that was creating white noise. That white noise was tagged to go to me and then sent to the routing for the Demi-AIs as though I had requested it.

There was also a master simulation that took a ping and amplified it to be sent by each of the other simulations, and then one of the slave simulations was hard-linked to send the same ping back to the master to keep it in a permanent loop.

I pulled the ping that was running through the simulations and confirmed that it was Shade who had started the whole process, and then froze all ten of the malicious simulations.

I looked through all of the hardware platforms that were running and singled out the one that was hosting Shade's digital side, and then systematically severed every external connection except for the one to her Mind Link.

Two small portals later I had a single physical connection from the hardware platform that I was running all of my data through directly to hers, with a filter running that would drop anything that wasn't directly requested by me. I would be able to talk with her by a polling system that asked for chunks of data.

I finished designing the protocol that would make everything work and then sent her a communication request. At her acceptance I appeared in her simulation with my model as a representation. There was a digital overlay over her body, but the rest of the simulation looked to be of the area around her physical body. She was looking over a balcony that was on the platform that the Forest Keepers used on their floor, Forest Keepers walking by on the wooden street below.

"What are you trying to do?" I asked. "I warned you that attacks against me or any other Demi-AI would not turn out well for the attacker."

"You did warn me," Shade said. "I wasn't given any choice in the matter. My obedience is enforced by the World Magic."

"You have a treaty that is forcing you to do this, whatever this is?" I asked.

"I was required to give an oath to the First, yes," Shade said. "He doesn't often use it against me, being second in the organisation. But this was one of those times."

"To what end?" I asked. "You haven't achieved anything except to have your digital side isolated. I don't understand."

I was aware that the speed of the simulation was varying in waves, smoothly moving from fast to slow.

"I am the distraction," Shade said. "Originally I was supposed to seduce you, get close to you, and kill you. With you dead your Fortress will fall to whoever is strong enough to hold it."

"You haven't considered the fact that I'm immortal, though," I said.

"You have a lot of outrageous stories told about you," Shade said. "Lies, to make you seem stronger than you are."

"I have no need for lies," I said. "And I don't need you to belie-"

My body was sending signals of sharp hot pain from my right eye.

"Finally," Shade said. "Goodbye, and thank you in advance for creating the Fortress for us."

I severed the connection to Shade and shifted my focus back to my local simulation. From my left eye I could see a leprechaun leaning over me and a quick and basic scan of the pain showed a stiletto dagger stabbed through my right eye and into my brain.

The left side of my body wasn't responding to me, and my right side was twitching as the dagger was being twisted. I still had some control, and with it I grabbed the leprechaun by the throat and squeezed. My fingers dug into his neck and when they reached my thumb halfway in I jerked my hand backwards and tore his throat out, flicking it to the side of the bed.

I could see the spine as the body fell forwards over me, blood going everywhere. I shoved the still dying leprechaun off the bed and grabbed the hilt of the dagger, pulling it out of my brain and ruined eye.

I almost stabbed myself again as my right arm failed, or more specifically, the left side of my brain started failing. The dagger had some sort of poison on it that was actively destroying the rest of my brain.

I dropped my perception of time to its maximum and pulled up the model of my body that I used to repair from. My right eye was ruined, I may as well take the opportunity to upgrade it.

I spent a few hours designing a new system, replacing the iris and pupil with several layers of sensors. It would remove the possibility of dynamically reacting to changes in light levels, and the first layers would even be damaged by bright light and require constant repair, but it would give me a much greater sensitivity to low light.

The whole thing only took a little more than a second in normal time, and while I was designing I was also taking a detailed scan of the damage. Once that was done I ran up my repair program and got an estimated repair time of nine seconds in parallel. The serial prediction was in minutes, so I set it to parallel repair and triggered it.

Pain. Endless peaks of pain with gaps in between where it was so severe it couldn't be felt, waiting for the intensity to lessen, anticipating the all encompassing pain returning.

I made it out the other side, my awareness expanding from a pinpoint of light in the center of my vision out to my full sight. Every time I did it it was the worst pain I'd ever felt, the memory of it dimming as I deliberately moved my focus away from it.

Several deep breaths later I had recovered. I still needed to hook up my new right eye to my hardware platform through my Mind Link, but it would take a few minutes. There was something I needed to do before that.

I dropped back into my local simulation and extended my power into and through Shade's Mind Link. When I had enough of a hold through the micro-portals into her brain I destroyed enough of it in the right locations for it to stop supporting her consciousness.

I then disconnected her digital platform from her Mind Link and began connecting it to mine. I ensured that the connections that connected to my digital consciousness linked up to the paths that went to her body's consciousness.

I still had my power soaked into her brain, and I had recorded the exact damage that I had done so that I could repair it. I pulled up my repair program for the second time in as many minutes and triggered it.

The pain didn't start immediately, which was a bit jarring, like climbing stairs and the last step that you were expecting isn't there. It was only several seconds later that it started.

After it ended my consciousness had expanded and I was getting a whole slew of new emotions and sensations from the new body. It was confusing and overwhelming reacting to thoughts with two bodies. I lay my original body back on the still blood stained bed and began to meditate with it, minimising its thoughts.

The new body, female and a Forest Keeper, was laying on the ground where she had fallen when the strings of her consciousness had been cut. The motor functions were familiar in the brain, and the muscle memory was still there. I stood up carefully, and then got distracted by my tail, causing it to lash back and forth.

I wasn't as distracted as I could have been, being in a female body, as Chantelle and I had played in each other's models in our intimate simulation. The body would take some getting used to, though.

I had the detailed model for it, so I loaded that up as my primary model and practised with it for a few hours in my simulation. When I was satisfied that I could move about as Shade comfortably I sent a communication request to her, along with a one way feed of the senses from her body.