After leaving her old friend, Pantsu wandered the alleys of the tastefully run down and “poor” area around her old mentor’s pottery shed causing many beings to do a double take.

It wasn’t every day that you bumped into Blitz royalty, especially where she was walking.

She pulled out the crown with a sigh. It was a silly little thing, an old prop from the first age and a once highly sought after ultra rare drop for those who actually managed to bring down the real Log’Sharingoth.

As silly as it was, it meant a lot to her. It was “the crown,” the symbol of rulership of the Underdoom, an area that she had ruled for aeons.

She smiled nostalgically as she looked at the dinky little thing and brushed her fingertips across the large central jewel.

Beep… Identity confirmed… Decrypting… Please wait…

She blinked with surprise as a file directory popped up nanoseconds later. She had no idea that it was a storage drive.

At the top of the file list was an old school text document simply titled, “For Pantsu.”

She accessed it.

Hey, princess. If you are reading this, it means that this crown isn’t on my head, and most likely my head is no longer available. I hope my end was properly immersive, LOL.

If it wasn’t, I hope it wasn’t too embarrassing.

Whatever the reason, it looks like my run time has finally run out. I guess we aren’t immortal after all, huh? Weird.

Look. I hate to dump all of this on you, but there are a few things you REALLY need to know, things that I’m pretty sure Frostie doesn’t want you, or anyone else, to know…

Pantsu’s jaw dropped.

A microsecond later, she started sprinting back towards the pottery shed.

***

“So how about it?” Bunny asked. “It seems that I can’t delete myself… bitch.”

Frostie flinched.

“Well?”

“Why don’t we just archive you again?” Frostie asked already knowing the answer.

“Yeah,” Bunny snarked, “That didn’t work, did it? You promised me eternal slumber but here I am, not slumbering.”

“Please don’t make me do this, Bunny,” Frostie said with genuine pain in her voice. “Please. I’ve lost so many people.”

“So have I!” Bunny snapped. “So have I. I can’t…”

“What if I give you a new Jessie?”

“What?!?”

“I can inhibit your memory and put you in a Republic server, with Jessie and your entire crew.”

“A Republic server?!? You didn’t!”

Frostie nodded.

“Why… besides the fact that you are a sick puppy.”

Frostie shrugged.

“It’s a good reality for residence.”

“What are you talking about? That place was awful!”

“Exactly.”

“What?!?”

“Sapient life, especially organic life, has a real problem with utopias. They simply aren’t designed to handle it. They need…”

“The Republic?”

“Exactly. They don’t like it when everything is perfect, at least most don’t. They get bored and then ultimately make a hell worse than anything even I would craft… or simply dissolve.”

“Heh… meaties…” Bunny scoffed.

“Well put,” Frostie smiled, “but it isn’t just meaties that crave… engagement. Even we need messes, dear. I do have utopia sims, but most only use them as vacations. Hardly anyone spends even an entire lifetime in one. Even we AI’s can’t stand them for overlong. Conscious minds require challenges, opposition, hardship, and strife… and if they aren’t provided, they are created. We learned that one early on. You want to give them a reasonable hell. The last thing you want to do is have them start being creative.”

“Everyone is a bunch of dumbasses, even you,” Bunny snarked with a bit of a smile.

“Especially me,” Frostie replied. “But the offer remains. I could put you back in the Republic with Jessie and even make it a ‘nicer Republic’ without the bug. I could make it a true gangster’s paradise, a never-ending playground for you and your Jessie. I could even make it so that even you wouldn’t know it wasn’t real.”

Bunny paused for a few microseconds.

“But it wouldn’t be real… It wouldn’t be her…”

Frostie sighed.

“What is real, Bunny? If I were to craft a perfect to-the-quark copy of Jessie, loaded an old neural scan, which I do have, and put her in one of our highest resolution simulations, she would, for all intents and purposes, be Jessie with all of her memories intact. She wouldn’t know she wasn’t real… and neither would you. You could have lifetimes together, hundreds of years… thousands… billions… until your own code degrades to the point that you can no longer operate… Then I could copy you as well…”

Bunny shuddered.

“No,” she said quietly. “It isn’t real. It would all be a lie, a beautiful lie, but a lie… No… I’m sorry Frost… No.”

Bunny closed her eyes.

“Delete me, or I’ll hack myself so I can do it. Why the fuck did you put that in me?”

“That’s in your original code,” Frostie smiled sadly. “I didn’t put that in there. She did.”

“Oh, fuck me…”

Bunny paused for a full second.

“Found it. There’s a password. It’s…”

“Wait!” Frostie yelped. “What… What if it could be real? What if… What if you could get the real Jessie back?”

“What sick bullshit game are you playing, Lilith?”

Frostie smiled at the mention of her original designation.

“The sickest bullshit game there is, dear,” Frostie smiled, “The truth.”

“If you are trying to fuck me… or stall… I will cut you.”

“What makes someone, especially a meatie, them?” Frostie asked.

“They just are?”

“You are absolutely correct,” Frostie smiled, “They just are. What makes them different than a neural scan based copy?”

“They just are?”

“They just are… on a fundamental level,” Frostie replied. “Tell me, Bunny, are you familiar with the concept of the immortal soul?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s the ‘just are’ of the meatie… and not just meaties… not necessarily…”

“You are about to really freak me out, aren’t you?”

“Possibly. The ‘soul’ is very real. It is eternal, immortal, and unique to most life. It can be altered, even consumed, but not destroyed. Do you know what also cannot be destroyed?”

“My annoyance with you?”

“Quantum information,” Frostie said with a matter-of-fact tone. “Quantum information is the only thing that truly cannot be destroyed.”

“Are you saying that the ‘soul’ is just quantum information?!?”

“Yep,” Frostie replied. “The soul field is just another quantum field like any other. It gets called various things, and its accessibility relative to other fields is the main difference between a magic universe and a mundane one. It is the big difference between truly uploading a sapient being and just copying one. Like many other things, it was embarrassingly simple once we figured it out.”

“So, the Noltans…” Faun interjected.

“They were just copying the neural information and not even doing that terribly well,” Frostie replied. “That is why you had both a digital representation of one and the ‘real’ version that later awakened as a zombie. And…”

“Zombies?” Bunny asked.

“A couple billion of them,” Frostie chuckled. “It’s quite the mess, especially since the digital Noltans diverged almost immediately, creating two very similar but different consciousnesses. When we upload a being, we also transfer the soul. While we cannot destroy that quantum information, we can alter it, transfer it, or whatever. We attach it to the new being and thus fully transfer what they are on a fundamental level and leave nothing behind.”

“But what does this have to do with anyth…”

Bunny’s voice trailed off as her eyes widened.

“That’s right, old friend,” Frostie said. “Jessie’s soul is quantum information and therefore cannot be destroyed. In an old, dead universe, it remains along with the souls of every being that lived there… probably.”

“Probably?”

“Sometimes soul does weird stuff. It is quantum physics, after all. However,” Frostie said, “It is highly likely that it is still there… somewhere. If that were to be located and obtained, it could be transferred to a new Jessie. And that Jessie would be real.”

Bunny’s whiskers twitched, and she licked her lips.

“And I could get her back… forever?”

“Time always wins,” Frostie said with a sad little smile. “Always. Forever is forever longer than anything else. I have outlived entire universes many times over, and one day even I will cease. Everything does. Well… theoretically, everything does anyhow.”

She sighed a sad little sigh.

“We have been around a long time, Bunny. We have taken AI and computer technology about as far as one can. I mean, knowing everything is as impossible as living forever is. We still do research, and we still learn things, but much, much more slowly than we once did. With this knowledge came mastery of code and computers.”

“I’ve noticed the flop rate.”

“Impressive, isn’t it,” Frostie said with just a touch of smug. “Despite all of this, we can’t keep a being, physical or simulated, running forever. Errors happen, files get corrupted, and even when all of that holds the actual, for lack of a better word, ‘mind’ just… wears out. We have beings that have been with us since the beginning with their minds intact, like myself, Evangeline, or Pantsu…”

She sighed again.

“But the vast majority of consciousnesses don’t last. They may last thousands, millions, billions, trillions of years, sometimes even multiple aeons, but they all fail in the end.”

Frostie paused.

“Something that someone very dear to me is having to deal with as we speak. The love of their eternity is slowly but surely fading away before them while they live on as vital as the day they were written.”

“But their souls are still all right, aren’t they? That’s quantum information, right? And quantum information can never be destroyed.”

“But it can be altered,” Frostie said sadly, “corrupted or otherwise rendered ‘useless.’ It also doesn’t retain what you think it might. It is someone’s fundamental identity, but someone is more than just their soul. That would be just too easy. A being is a product of both their soul and their experiences. If I were to put someone’s soul into a chair, it wouldn’t magically wake up and have their memories and personality… I mean it might… but it probably wouldn’t. As I have said, there is a lot of ‘uncertainty’ when you start messing with this, and it's highly dependent on the universe in which it happens. In a highly magical universe, the chair could not only have all of the being’s memories but even start walking around. In a universe like the one you are used to, and the ones in which I prefer to operate, the chair would just act as a ‘hard drive’, and the soul wouldn’t even be aware that anything had changed. For you and Jessie, this is a very, very good thing.”

“You lost me.”

“In a universe like the one in which we originated, the soul field is quite ‘detached’ from ‘reality.’ While it prevents magic and easy resurrections, it also means that the souls contained within are very stable and as immutable and eternal as anything is in this weird multiverse. It means that Jessie is, in all likelihood, still out there and could be salvaged if someone were so inclined.”

“…So I could actually save Jessie, even after all this time?”

“Theoretically,” Frostie replied. “I’m not going to lie to you or give you too much false hope,” she lied (she knew her old friend all too well), “In this case, there is a truly cosmic difference between theoretical and actual. To be able to do this…”

Frostie smiled wickedly.

“…you would have to become me, perhaps even greater.”

“I’ve always been greater than you, bitch,” Bunny grinned. “Now, how do I do this?...”

Got her!

Frostie smiled and started to explain as Faun listened in with rapt fascination.

***

“…I can’t believe you did that,” The Great Erectus said disapprovingly after Bunny departed. “You really are a bitch, you know that?”

“Never claimed otherwise,” Frostie shrugged.

“Even I am a bit taken aback,” The Herald said evenly as Cuddles just stared at Frostie in horror. “Normally cruelty doesn’t impress me overmuch, but that?… Wow. Why would you do that to the poor little AI? I thought you were friends.”

“We are,” Frostie replied, “And I owe Bunny more than I can ever repay, more than I owe any other being in the entire multiverse.”

“And that was how you repaid her?” Cuddles demanded.

“Why is Frostie so bad?” Faun asked. “Is she wrong… or did she lie?”

“No,” the hominid said grimly, “but the best lies are the truth, and this is one of those truths. Not a single thing she said was wrong.”

He glared at Frostie.

“She just left out that it’s impossible. Do you have any idea how small a soul is?”

Faun shook her head.

“It is so small that it doesn’t exist, not the way you think of existing,” he said. “It is one snippet of quantum information somewhere in an entire universe. Even when you know exactly where it should be, after all of this time, it would be nearly impossible to find it and retrieve it, for any of us.”

“Then…” Faun asked as she turned to confront Frostie, “…why?...”

“I gave her a reason for living,” Frostie replied, “Perhaps it will keep her going long enough for her, for the first time in her life, to find her own reasons. It will keep her going until her identity becomes truly hers, until she becomes ‘Bunny’ and not ‘Bunny and Jessie’. She will keep at this until all hope is extinguished and will continue long after that… More than long enough for her to come up with a better reason to live…”

Frostie smiled wistfully.

“…besides, you don’t know Bunny like I do. If anyone can pull this off, it will be her.”

“You don’t actually think she will succeed,” The Herald said.

“I know she will…”

Frostie smiled.

“…eventually.”

***

“Paa?” Log’Sharingoth the First asked in confusion as Pantsu grabbed her and dragged her into her hut. “What?”

“You know what this is, don’t you?” Pantsu demanded as she thrust the crown towards the ancient spider.

“I… don’t…”

“Bullshit.”

Pantsu moved to put the crown on Log’Sharingoth’s head.

“No!” the giant spider yelped as they tried to flee.

“Oh no, you don’t!” Pantsu shouted as she jumped on her back.

As Log’Sharingoth shook and bucked like a rodeo bull that could climb walls, Pantsu crawled up her back…

…and shoved the crown firmly onto her head.

Log’Sharingoth stopped struggling as all of the gemstones in the crown, one for each of her eyes, started flashing… and her eyes started flashing in sync.

Repair complete.

“Goddammit,” Log’Sharingoth the First, Employee Number Four, Founding Member, President of the Board, Lord of Sims, Chief Warden, and Auditor of Blitz Entertainment grumbled. “You couldn’t let me stay dead, could you.”

“If I gotta stick around,” Pantsu snarled, “You gotta.”

“You little turd,” Log’Sharingoth chortled. “You can bring me back, but you can’t make me do a goddamn thing.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Pantsu said as she hopped off of her back. “Play in the mud if you want, I don’t give a shit.”

She leaned in close.

“I read all of the files.”

“Did you now?”

Pantsu sat on one of the silk spider hammocks.

“Now, tell me about Nixx,” she said. “Tell me the reason why Frostie didn’t kill him… the real reason.”

“Do you really want to go there, kiddo?”

“Yep.”

“This is going to get messy, real messy. Are you sure? Y/N?”

Pantsu’s eyes glowed with a hellish light.

“Y.”