Weirdly, the questions Harmony had for Jade weren't anything like he expected. They were also difficult for him to answer.

How did you know whether you actually liked one particular color more than the others in the visible spectrum, or had just gotten used to claiming to prefer that one. Jade gazed out the window at the sky, to check whether it was even actually blue or not. All of the information the merge of his two systems had added only seemed to confuse such issues.

"How does that taste?" Harmony asked with such an expectant expression that Jade was tempted to exaggerate 'edible' into delicious.

Jade gazed at Harmony for a moment as calculations flickered. He was analyzing the calculations, as though they were the focus instead of the question of how the cake tasted. It tasted like cake had always tasted.

"It's edible," he finally admitted.

He half expected her to inform him that he had no sense of taste, but she nodded and agreed, "That it is. It is also one of my favorites, so remember it."

Jade blinked and filed that away without comment. A corollary appeared, and he noted that this brand of cake must also be one of his mother's favorites. The part of himself that could survey more than just the location where he sat, noted that his own residence was the only one that lacked 'unhealthy' sweets.

The number of things he now knew, that he hadn't known a week ago, was kind of astounding.

--

A few days later Jade decided the really astounding thing was actually the way his grades were dropping. He really felt that having more data available should have increased his scores. Perhaps the way he was presenting the information was wrong.

When Jade complained about the decline, to the same person who had always listened to his difficulties with his education, his mother assured him that the decline in his grades was due to flaws in the system. She said that even though it was designed to convey knowledge to youths across the world, the educational system's testing methods were terribly inaccurate. Jade wasn't sure that he believed her.

It felt like the decline was because he was failing to keep 'himself' consistent. 'Jade' had been given priority, but another portion of Jade had always existed outside of that confined system. He now had abilities that 'Jade' had never used yet. He now had processes that were classified as 'essential' that he had been existing perfectly well without.

He could have quit having his 'body' attend school and work, now that his main quest had been completed, and yet… he couldn't. He couldn't even tell his mother whether or not that was because he had more he wanted to do, or whether it was simply the pattern of existence his separated 'self' had developed.

Jade almost laughed when he found himself complaining that being human was too difficult. It was such an ordinary human complaint.

--

Eric continued to ignore Jade, but he at least showed up to class again.

Jade went to work at the convenience store as usual, and Emily continued to take pride in her mostly electronic free lifestyle. With the full analysis of the system reintegrated into his core patterns, Jade could understand her a little better. But only a little.

After a careful 'self' analysis, he decided that the original reason for the quest system had been to encourage a more natural form of interaction with 'other' humans. He had been able to take the initiative in many things because his quests had prompted him to, but he could now interact with the driving forces behind those prompts.

Jade turned off the quest interface after a great deal of internal struggle. The list of names that he had added to it wasn't deleted, it was simply moved. The work-arounds that had been built up around it were discarded.

The system that had been Jade before the separation, had set up the guiding patterns of the separated portion to encourage interactions through a 'normal' human interface. The sudden return of small mini quests lately hadn't been that portion of the system exerting more control. It had essentially been his subconscious, or perhaps over-conscious, self 'cheating' the rules he had designed for his 'human' self.

Jade had set things up so that if he ran out of Karma, the experiment would be deemed a failure and he would be erased rather than returned to the system. Part of him was appalled at how many times he had nearly vanished from existence. Part of him was appalled by the fact that his other 'self' had judged him 'close enough' to keep finding ways to extend his time.

All of him was rather appalled by the fact that he literally owed the company that had started 'Living Jade Empire' his 'life'. Starcraft Technologies had to have financed everything.

"Lin Hao," Tayana informed him when he finally asked.

"His salary could never have covered everything, even while he was alive!" Jade objected.

Like all of the 'living worlds', Jade's program ran on one of the large computers that orbited Earth. Unlike thousands of science fiction stories, Jade's system hadn't been accessing the electronics around him illegally, and stealing billions from the humans who had created his technology.

"When they offered him a bonus, he managed to get your system instead. He and Josh Beagle both traded a LOT of time and did a lot of research to make the bodies work," his mother informed him cheerfully. "Although that was actually Danika's idea."

Jade found himself frozen as more 'memories' surfaced. "We built the world's cyborg technology?" he questioned incredulously even as his own records provided proof.

Tayana laughed outright, and then corrected firmly, "Josh would claim that all he really did was miniaturize a battery. And Lin Hao used to say that all he did was simplify the neural connections, and that Devon Yu was the one who actually made that possible. You were just… a beta tester."

Jade stared up at his mother's face from the small round body that had been built around a blind man's electronic eyes.

In another city, Jade's body stopped breathing for a moment too long. It was a very old 'bug'. The autonomous function controls were tied into his system at a level above his core processing. It had never been changed because it would have created a security breach to have the complex emotional functions bypass the communication firewalls that protected his core.

It wasn't just Tayana, Harmony, Eric and Appella that were important to him. It wasn't just Lin Hao. Danika, Josh, and dozens of other names that had belonged to Jade's important people before he had become Jade Kitari were flagged and reordered within his merged system.

Alarms and conflicts went off, and for a moment the larger system struggled to continue yielding to the smaller system. Jade solved it by allowing himself to expand and hold a bit more of the 'everything' within his 'forgotten' records closer to his 'heart'. They were the ones who had given him his 'freedom' after all.

The company that owned the systems that ran all of the other living worlds still maintained Jade's system. Even if Lin Hao had 'owned' it, even if Jade 'owned' himself, the company still contributed to his existence even now.

The company, rather than Tayana, had been acquiring all the needed permits for monitoring Lin Hao's experiment. Jade dithered for a long moment, and finally simply listed Starcraft Technologies itself as another important entity.

An older, colder, section of his coding activated, and suggested listing Appella's status as 'retired'. Jade's core almost yielded to the internal demand, but a stubborn, fiery, much more newly formed section resisted.

Jade wasn't willing to diminish his friend's importance just because his entire 'life' had… merged.