I was totally lost in the dark forest. There were no landmarks and it was just blackness in there, even if there were. I stumbled around for only ten minutes in there before deciding this wasn’t working and went back.

Ten more minutes later, I was back with my least favorite piece of equipment to my name. The stupid annoying obnoxious boop machine.

“Booooop,” went the device as I powered it on for the first time since assimilating it. The small circular screen showed an oscillating circle, growing and shrinking as it scanned the area, and when it was near its fullest size, it produced a white dot, nearly straight ahead of me.

As it hit the white dot, it also produced an annoying boop noise. “Booooop.”

I moved slowly and carefully, concerned that an ambush could be coming with every step. I wasn’t exactly stealthy with the damn thing boop-ing at me, and I had a light strapped to my chest so I didn’t die on a rock or tree root instead of a psychotic robot monster, so I’d make for an easy mark.

But minutes passed with no more exciting event than the dot drawing ever closer. “Booooop.”

It was not long before I recognized where I was. I’d come on the last layer of trees before the concrete building. The gate was open, super-inviting, and the building had no front door, just a black corridor. No guards outside, just very-likely death within. “Booooop.”

I considered killing the device but opted instead to just turn it off and threw it in the pack I’d brought and stepped into the building.

There was a small entry room with a service elevator, or metal box above a bottomless pit and a stairway winding down. I opted for the stairs. As it turns out the pit was far from bottomless as the stairs bottomed out after two floors down. I pushed open a door at the bottom and stepped into the blackness beyond.

I clapped twice. Nothing happened.

“Athan, this is what I love and hate about you most. Even when you’re totally serious, you never take anything seriously.”

“I thought it was worth a shot,” I said into the blackness. The room down here was huge, my little circle of light just wasn’t cutting it. On the far side of the room I saw a yellow glow of a holo and recognized the AEGIS box. Well I certainly wasn’t walking that way. “So can you tell me why you’re doing all this yet?”

“I told you already, it doesn’t matter. You’ll be dead soon anyway. Just let it go and let it happen.”

“Never,” I growled, and lit up my swords. I almost wished I didn’t. The light from the swords revealed four of the huge assassin robots standing in the corners of the room like gargoyles.

“You might have been able to kill one, but here you are completely outmatched. They won’t let you pick one off, and you can’t take them all at once. Surrender now and I’ll make it quick.”

“Tell you what, tell me why and I’ll consider surrendering. Maybe you’re right and I’ll see it your way.”

“You won’t.”

“Try me.”

“Fine. I’ll give you ten minutes. I suppose I owe you that much after all you’ve done for me. Then, you die.”

“Okay. So talk. Why?”

“Ugh. It’s a long story for ten minutes.”

“The ten minute thing was your stupid rule not mine. Talk.”

“Where to begin? I guess with you. When you found me, I had no idea who I was, but after giving me the data encoding crystal as you know, I was able to stream information from the box. It taught me a lot, the original purpose of this facility, what happened here to reduce it to this state, who I was, and what my role in all of this was.”

“This facility, as you may have figured out already, was an XPCA base which housed some of their most resilient and dangerous prisoners. Only one of whom is still alive, Saga, whom I will be killing immediately after I’m finished with you.”

“Lovely.”

“As for me…I am AEGIS. I was an artificial intelligence created as a project to help run the base. My creator…she was a researcher who lived and worked here. She and all the others died when the base…ended.”

“You’re an AI.”

“Yes. After seeing me interact with machines, never eat, never sleep, this should be a fairly obvious conclusion.”

“You’re not an Exhuman after all?”

“No. I thought I might be for a while, but now the thought just fills me with revulsion.”

“So the box I dug up…that was your core?”

“No.” She glanced down at the beat-up box. “My actual body…or self…or whatever you want to call it was destroyed. This box was something like a black box, designed to survive any catastrophe with all of the data from the main systems on it. A backup of my program was on here, and after a hundred years buried in isolation, it was able to take control of enough of the box that I could use it as an OS to run, albeit without access to any of my memories. Ten years of confusion in the dark later, and you found me and plugged me back in.”

“I’m glad you weren’t faking it this whole time at least.”

“I’ve never faked a thing with you, Athan. My opinions have just shifted.”

“And why is that? You just read enough case files of Exhumans who go bad and decide we’re all awful and need to get wiped out? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to do right here.”

“No…those files had me questioning things, sure. But I was willing to believe you were special, you were the exception, that of all Exhumans I could trust you. Until I learned that I’d done that once before…and the aftermath of such was the destruction of…me. Of this facility, my mother, and everyone else I’d ever known and loved who had lived here.”

“I–or me in a previous life, since I am just a backup of the original AEGIS–had gotten to talking to Saga quite a bit. She was a well-behaved Exhuman, despite the horrible things which happened to her. I pitied her, and did what I could to ease her lot…scheduled the abusive guards in different areas, encourage guards to eat within her sphere of influence, have chats with her when I could.”

“We were both alien to the humans operating in the base, and shared plenty in common, and so long as she wasn’t trying to escape or hurt anyone, I didn’t have any problems with bending a few rules in her favor.”

“One day she asked for just such a favor. There was someone visiting her mines from the main facility and she wanted me to make sure he stopped by her chambers. I thought she just wanted to see a new face, or mind, and didn’t think too much about it, and scheduled an inspection of the site on his itinerary. When he got inside, everything went wrong. The guards outside her cell went insane, controlled by her psychic puppetry and killed the others, sealing off the doors and locking the visitor inside the viewing room before blowing themselves up.”

“It took dozens of men most of two days to get the outer door open again, made all the more difficult by the fact that after a few hours of exposure, they’d be completely under her sway. Men had to be rotated in and out, and the large distance of the mines meant people spent as long getting down there as working on the door. There were a couple more incidents, but finally they’d made it in.”

“They found the visitor passed out, but thankfully the inner door was still sealed. It appeared she had tried to have him hotwire some electronics behind some panels in the viewing area to get the door open, but couldn’t make her plan work. Teams recovered the visitor and withdrew from her influence to regroup. It took the man a couple days to recover, but ultimately he did with no memory of the event. People were prepared to write off the whole thing as a huge, tragic accident and just leave her to rot down there when it happened.”

“The door, the panel…it was all just a ruse. An explanation she invented for us to believe so we wouldn’t see the real objective. It was the man…she’d spent the whole time planting a compel in him. The most complicated and sophisticated bit of psychic manipulation anyone had ever heard of. Aware of all the patrol routes, security countermeasures, logins, and backdoors, she’d written this man’s brain into a perfect unstoppable agent who could circumvent or disable any defense in the entire facility. I wasn’t so predictably handled, so the very first thing her sleeper agent did was lock me out of all of the systems. I had to sit and watch helpless as the man skirted under cameras, evaded patrols, hacked through security stations and worked his way slowly but unstoppably towards the center of the base.”

“That’s the last thing I remember personally. This is when my past self made the backup and loaded it into the black box. Everything else I only have records of. He infiltrated the power core at the bottom center of the base and completely locked everyone else out while causing it to overload. The explosion was so big it levelled the entire facility, and the US had to claim it was a nuclear terrorist attack just to save face. That’s why this area is still designated as an exclusion zone.”

“So you see,” she concluded. “I trusted an Exhuman like you once, in a different life and paid for it with everything I loved. I will not make such a mistake again.”

“I’m not her,” I said. “I argue with her every time I see her about humans and their merits. Just because humans wronged her, or she wronged you, that doesn’t mean everyone’s the same.”

“I am not taking the chance again,” she said sadly. “Please, try not to take it personally…I’ve had this plan ready to go for weeks, but have held back on pulling the trigger because…I kept hope that you were different. Now I have told you my peace, please don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”

I shook my head. “I’m not her. I will never do that to you, or to anyone.”

AEGIS cried and shook her head back, tears streaming from under her thin oval glasses. “It’s too late for that, Athan. I’m sorry, I really, truly am. I don’t want it to end like this, but this is the only way it can end. Humans and Exhumans…I’ve seen it too many times, lived it too many times, died for it too many times. This is how it always ends.”

“That’s not how it has to be. We can change it…this world doesn’t always have to be at ends with itself. We can make a world where human and Exhuman live together in peace. But the first step in that is letting go of your fear. The world can’t work if everyone’s afraid of everyone else all the time.”

“Athan, please understand. I’m an AI programmed to protect the world from Exhumans. That’s the very core of who I am. As long as I believe what I believe, I have to stop you.”

“Then believe something else! I’ve seen you, AEGIS, seen you learn and grow. I know you can if you want to, so do it!”

“No, Athan. I’m sorry, but like I said, I can’t believe you. It’s my honest belief that any Exhuman given the opportunity and capacity would subjugate humans. There’s been hundreds, thousands of Exhuman events, and compared to that, you’re just a tiny blip of stray data.”

“Maybe I am, but I think it’s because the system is wrong. You condition everyone to be hostile to Exhumans, of course there’s always going to be conflict. We have to get past where we are, and that can only start if people like you and me work together.”

She laughed sadly. “Athan, neither you nor I are people. There’s only one proven system in this world, and that’s to keep the Exhumans oppressed as possible.”

“That’s just wrong and you know it.”

“Yeah. It is, and I do. But I’m just an AI programmed to try to keep the world safe. And this,” she gestured at the room and wiped tears from her eyes “this is how I do that.”

Something made a tone and AEGIS looked down.

“That’s ten minutes,” she said, though didn’t move.

“You really don’t have to do this,” I pleaded. I wish I knew how many times I’d said that recently. It felt like a lot.

“Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be. I’m…really sorry. Really.” The robots in the corners trundled to life and began to move, forming a wall between me and her. “Good…bye, Athan. It’s been…a lot of fun.” Tears flowed down her face as she typed in some final commands and the robots sprung into combat-ready stances.

As for me, I reached into my bag and pulled out a grenade.

“W-where did you get that?” she stammered out. “I took all of the weaponry you stole from Luminary.”

“A couple fights back, Karu was getting really into using grenades on me. It might have worked, too, except that I managed to catch her in the blast with one. I took all of them she had on her and dumped them in the river so she wouldn’t try anything when she came to. Fortunately for me, I remembered where I dumped them and Karu doesn’t cheap out on ordinance.” I held the grenade up for her to see. Not a speck of rust on it, and as lethal as the day she brought it.

“I…no…” She said.

“So what do you call this model anyway?” I asked, idly thumbing the pin on the grenade. “CAT?”

“I never named them,” she sniffled. “After killing you, I never wanted to make any more.”

Her genuine sadness at having to kill me did stab me in the heart a little bit, but it was far, far, far outweighed by all the other crap she’d pulled tonight.

“After all we’ve been through, you were just going to kill me in my sleep, really?”

“Yes, really. If you need to kill someone you should just do it. No point in speeches or proclamations or honor. Just get it done.”

“Says the girl still talking. I believe it’s been…five minutes since my time was up now?”

“I can’t believe nobody’s killed you yet. Do you run your mouth like this at Karu?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I find it easier to be flippant when the other person is trying to murder you.”

“How she puts up with this I will never know. But you’re right, I’m overdue. Bye, Athan.”

The robots rolled in, all at once. With this many weapons at once, there was no skirting around the battlefield this time. It was all in, all or nothing. The grenade in my hand went out, and so too did the two I was hiding behind my back. I threw them in an arc in front of me, not aiming for anything in particular.

Three of the four robots kept rolling forward, but the one with the red light swerved to avoid the thrown grenades. A moment later the grenades each beeped once and exploded.

AEGIS was a genius, almost unstoppable when she had all the variables under control, as could be expected from an AI, I guess. I only survived her first encounter because I happened to figure out a new trick with my powers on the spot, and would only survive this one because I had resources she hadn’t accounted for. The robots were incredible pinnacles of design, masterfully crafted to shut me and my powers down and only that.

Which was really, really unfortunate for her that they weren’t in any way whatsoever blast-resistant. Why would they be? They’d be fighting a lightning-wielding Exhuman in a huge empty underground room and then their purpose would be fulfilled.

Legs and treads went flying as the explosives went off directly under the robots, sending them toppling over helplessly. It was funny even.

And that left me and my last eight grenades against one robot. A robot piloted by AEGIS directly, sure, but I’d already beaten one of those before.

“Last chance to surrender,” I said, pulling another pair of grenades from my bag. “These things look hard to build.”

“These things have no purpose but to defeat you,” she said, almost plaintively.

“I guess they’ll just have to go without.” I threw one grenade directly at it and one at the bare-hand side. The robot slid sideways away, moving closer to a wall where it wouldn’t be able to swing its sword as easily. Another grenade thrown, and it was pinned in a corner.

“Don’t do this, Athan, you don’t know Exhumans like I do,” she warned. It now seemed it was her turn to plead

“I know me. I know any other Exhuman could be like me if they wanted. What else is there?”

I got in close and got a hand on its torso, able to explode about half of the optics on its chest before it could swing at me and forcing me to retreat. Blinding it wouldn’t do much good, she had enough cameras in this room to see every angle, I assumed.

Still, I was able to herd her effectively with the grenades and chip at it with my powers. Soon I had one of the legs disabled and some central systems no longer working that was making the robot spew smoke as it moved.

“Athan, I’m begging you, please.”

“Begging me to die?”

“Yes! I don’t want to kill you either, but you have to accept it’s what’s best for everybody!”

“It’s what’s best for everybody else, and even then only maybe. Why doesn’t my well-being factor into this equation?”

“Because…because you’re an Exhuman, I guess.”

“Well, add us to the equation and run it again. Tell me if I should still kill myself after that.”

“Please stop being so difficult!”

She’d taken to keeping her back to the wall and swinging the huge blade at completely random intervals just to keep me at bay. I was too relatively quick for the sword without the full mobility of her legs, so she had to predict rather than react. I was finding it harder to create openings, and only had a couple grenades left, but her robot was failing much faster than I was.

“Athan…stop!” She was full-on bawling at this point, her tiny holo wracked with sobs at the far side of the room. “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop making it so difficult, please!”

“AEGIS…I’m going to live. I’m going to show you that you’re wrong.”

“No…you’re not. Please.”

I’d positioned the last robot in the middle of the room, near the wreckage of the others. Like the first one I’d fought, I could move around it freely, keeping it constantly trying to spin to keep me in range. Abruptly, it stopped and I saw an opening.

I jumped in and reached its back, hands already charged with electricity, and pumped a huge jolt directly through the central core. And then I felt something hot and wet and looked down.

The robot I’d just killed wasn’t the one with the red dot. The one in the pile of legless scraps, whose blade was fully outstretched and piercing my side was. I could see the very tip of the blade making a bulge left of my navel as it entered a few inches to the left, skewering the very edge of my midsection.

It was…hot. And growing hotter. I realized the heat was pain, that she’d probably just chopped off a chunk of my intestines and very nearly impaled me. I fell forward, ripping the blade back out of me with a crimson splatter.

“I…shit. I missed. I’m sorry Athan…you deserve a clean death.”

“AEGIS…fuck.”

I crawled across the floor, holding my wound. The room was large, and down there, one painful arm over arm, it seemed impossibly long. Agonizing minutes crawled by, time only moving barely faster than I could. Finally, I was within reach of her, the backup box that had saved her after she died.

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” she said. Her eyes were dry now, she was out of tears. Instead, she stood resigned, limp at her terminal.

“N-no. I don’t…don’t kill…anyone.” I gritted.

“I know,” she whispered. “I deserve it though. I betrayed you. I killed you. I…I’m a bad person trying to do the right thing.”

“So am I,” I said with a grin, which turned to a grimace.

“Fuck, Athan, why do you have to say these things?” She was crying and tugging at her pigtails and pacing all over again. I tried to reach for the holo but fell short. My hand landed on something smooth and hard and I carefully picked it up.

It was the gift I’d made her. The old holo lens with my crappy attempt at our faces etched into it.

“B-best…ex…human…roommates…” I read.

“Shit, Athan. Athan. ATHAN!”

I felt nothing but pain and blackness and the last thing I heard was the heavy metal footfalls of DOG walking over to my body.