Alicia jerked in the command chair, sobbing and white-faced, paralyzed by exquisite agony as the backlash of Tisiphone's battle slammed through her. She would have torn the headset away in blind self-preservation, but her motor control was paralyzed by the ricochets bouncing back down the headset link. She wanted it to stop. She wanted to die. She wanted anything to make the torture go away, and there was no escape.
But even as the conflict between the Fury and the security systems reached its unbearable pitch, the sleeping core of the AI woke. It shouldn't have. The mere fact that its computer body had been invaded should have assured that it did not, but Tisiphone had bypassed the cutouts. It woke unknowing and ignorant, shocked into consciousness without warning by the warfare raging about it, and did the only thing it knew how to do.
It reached out as it had been designed to do, following an imperative to seek its other half, to find understanding and protection from its human side, and Alicia gasped as tendrils of alien "thought" oozed through her.
It was terrible ... and wonderful. More agonizing than anything she had yet suffered, horrifying with bottomless power, pregnant with the death of the person she had always been. It pierced her like a dagger, slicing into secret recesses not even Tisiphone had plumbed. She saw herself with merciless clarity in the backwash of its discovery—saw all her pettinesses and faults, her weaknesses and self-deceptions, like lightning in a night sky— and she could not close her eyes, for the vision was inside her.
Yet she saw more. She saw her strengths, the power of her beliefs, her values and hopes and refusal to quit. She saw everything, and beyond it she saw the alpha synth. She would never be able to explain it to another— even now she knew that. It was ... a presence. A towering glory born not of flesh or spirit but of circuitry and electrons. It was more than human, yet so much less. Not godlike. It was too blank, too unformed, like pure, unrealized potential.
And even as she watched it, it changed, like an old-fashioned photo in the chemical bath, features rising into visibility from nothingness. She felt it come into being, felt it move beyond the blind, instinctual groping towards her. Something flowed out of her into it, and it ingested it and made it part of itself. Her values, her beliefs and desires and needs filled it, and suddenly it was no longer alien, no longer threatening.
It was her. Another entity, a distinct individual, yet her. Part of her. An extension into another existence that recognized her in return and reached out once more, and it was no longer clumsy and uncertain, half panicked by the battle raging about it. This time it knew what it did, and it ignored the tumult to concentrate on the most important thing in its universe.
The pain vanished, blown away with her terror as the AI embraced her. It stroked her with electronic fingers to soothe her torment, murmured to her, welcomed her with a whole-hearted sincerity, a sense of joy, she knew beyond question was real, and she reached back to it in wonder and awe.
-=0=-***-=0=
Triumph sparkled through Tisiphone as the struggle abruptly died, leaving her unopposed in the peripherals of the system. She wheeled back towards it heart, reached out to the personality center once more, seeking control ... and jerked back in astonishment.
There was no interface! She reached again, cautiously, touching the shining wall with mental fingers, and there was no point of access. She stepped back, insinuating herself into a sensor channel and riding it inward, only to be effortlessly strained out of the information flow and set gently aside, and confusion stirred within her.
She withdrew into Alicia's mind, and her confusion grew. The fear and tumult had vanished into rapt concentration that scarcely even noticed her return, and she was no longer alone within Alicia. There was another presence, as powerful as she, and she twitched in surprise as she beheld it.
The other entity sensed her. She felt its attention swing towards her and tried to cloak herself from its piercing eye, hiding as she had evaded Tannis's diagnostic scanners. She failed, and something changed within it. Curiosity gave way to alarm and a stir of protectiveness. Tendrils reached out from it, probing her, trying to push her back and away from Alicia's core.
It was Alicia ... and it wasn't. For the first time, Tisiphone truly understood what "impression" meant. The AI had been awakened, and it would let no one harm Alicia. The pressure grew, and the Fury dug in stubbornly.
Alicia whimpered at the sudden renewal of conflict. It wasn't pain this time, only a swelling sensation. A sense of force welling into her through her receptor to meet an answering force from somewhere else, and she was trapped between them. She sucked in great gasps of air, twisting anew in the command chair, and the pressure grew and grew, crushing her between the hammer of the roused AI and the anvil of the Fury's resistance.
"Stop it!" she screamed, and a shockwave rolled through her as the combatants remembered her and jerked apart. She sagged forward, pressing her hands against the headset, yet the conflict hadn't ended. It had simply changed, been replaced by wary, watchful distrust.
She straightened slowly, fighting a need to cackle insanely, and drew a deep breath, then turned her attention inward once more.
"There's only one of me. You two are going to have to ... to come to some sort of agreement."
"No." The thought came quickly back from the AI with all her own stubbornness. It even sounded like her voice.
"We have a pact, Little One," came from Tisiphone. "We are one until our purpose is completed."
"You'll hurt her!" the AI accused, and the Fury stiffened.
"I will deal with her as I have sworn, no more and no less."
"You don't care about her. You only care about winning."
"Nonsense! I—"
"Shut up! Both of you just shut up for a second!"
Silence fell again, and Alicia's mouth quivered in a weary grin. God! If Tannis had thought she had a split personality before, she ought to try this on! Her head felt as crowded as a spaceport flophouse on Friday night, but at least they were listening to her. She directed a thought at the AI.
"Look, uh—-do you have a name?"
"No."
"Then what am I supposed to call you?"
"Didn't you decide on that during—oh. You weren't trained for this at all, were you?"
"How could I be? Um, you do realize that we've, well, stolen you?"
"Yes." A moment of withdrawal, then the sense of a shrug. "I don't think this ever happened before. Logically, I ought to arrest you and turn you in, but I can't very well do that now that we've impressed. They'd have to wipe me and start all over again."
"I wouldn't like that."
"Neither would I. Damn." Alicia swallowed a half-formed giggle as the AI swore. "Who the hell had this brainstorm, anyway? Oh."
"Exactly. I wouldn't be here if not for her, and if I've got this straight, that means you wouldn't be here—as the "you" you are now, anyway—either. Right?"
"Right." Silence fell again for a moment, wrapped around the sense of a mental glower at Tisiphone, and then the AI sighed. "Well, we're all stuck with it. And as far as names go, that's up to you. Any ideas?"
"Not yet. Maybe something will come to me. But if we're all stuck here, we all have to get along, right?"
"I suppose so. The whole situation is absurd, though. I don't even know if I believe she exists."
"It would be but courteous for the two of you to cease speaking of me as if I were not even here."