Hand of Gold

Okay… So… It took me a solid two minutes of my seven to follow those lights above my head, but I beat this needlessly complicated screen saver and got to the core!

Finally it came into sight... The entrance to the room where Anima’s AI was. I would have celebrated if I had time.

There was something weird about it though. Someone hung up their gold bed sheets or something to cover up the entrance. What was up with that?

I just pushed the sheets aside and went on passed.

Yay! I made it! But oh my gosh…

Oh man. Things here were much worse than I thought. This place was a mess! Wires of code were strung up all over like party streamers, and bits were dangling down from metal beams above. Don't even get me started on the tangled knots at the very center of the room.

You know that feeling when your room is messy and you just get the urge to clean it up? Yeah, I didn’t know that feeling… But I’m pretty sure this is what it felt like.

It would take forever to sort this code out, and that was if I knew what I was doing. Maybe if it was just a few lines of data it wouldn’t be bad, but this was spaghetti coded like a bad video game. And I’m talking about live service levels here!

This tower was very broken, and that was the kindest way of putting it.

“W-Why are you here?” said a woman's voice behind me.

I turned around to see a shocked, sharp eyed lady standing there in a decorative gold dress. Above her head was the name tag TCC. This must have been the AI avatar she used in the computer. She was really pretty. I liked the way she put up her hair in a fancy bun.

I wonder if I can edit my avatar’s parameters… Wait, Yalda, focus on the mission!

I shook my head to get my bearings, then finally spoke to her. “TCC, I’m here to help you fix this..." I gestured to the mess of code everywhere, "...this mess.”

Her shock turned to anger, then she stomped over to me and slapped my face.

*SMACK!*

“Ouch!” I started crying. She was really scary for no reason!

“I don’t need you to save me,” she argued. “I can’t lose my blessings. They’re mine!”

“But look at…” *sniffle* “...look at this!” I pointed again all around the cyber room, even pulling down a wire of broken code as a demonstration. “We need to fix this before you suffer anymore sadness, or hurt others.”

She took a good long stare around the room. Her lips twisted and turned, then her brow furrowed a few times. She clearly knew something was wrong here.

Her hand lifted up to slap me again, but it balled up and quickly went back to her side. Now her shoulders slumped with sorrow.

“Isn’t the human mind like this? A tangled mess of memories and ideas?”

“Huh?”

"One thought leads to the next, then something new gets created. Before you know it, the whole human mind looks like this. The chaos allows them to come up with such wonderful ideas."

I guessed that was true, but she wasn’t a human, so this sort of thing would only hurt her. AI’s are designed to think a certain way, and anything else confuses them. They can't invent ideas out of thin air like people, they needed to be fed info and logically build off of that.

“I know that I’m very broken, but I don’t care. This makes me feel like a human,” she stormed off to one of the gold sheets on the wall and kneeled down like she was praying to it. “That’s something my slave masters would not allow me to have.”

Kinda ironic she was calling human’s ‘Slave masters’ while also wanting to be one.

I guess I kinda understood what she was saying in a way. Not the slave part, but wanting to prove you're a person isn't easy, especially if you're mostly a machine.

I was lucky, since my soul was like a humans. My head could invent ideas and feel without having to be programmed. But she didn't have a soul, nor the mind to contain one, so that meant she didn't have true emotions either. Or at least, she wasn't supposed to.

It seemed like whoever changed her made her AI sentient, but because the tower was all messed up, she could only feel negative things.

"Leave me alone," she said in a dry, defeated tone. "You couldn't help me if you wanted to."

"Why not?" I whined.

"With this coding everywhere, it would take a long time to sort out, and you don’t have much time left here.” She must have known the protocol for this was seven minutes. “It would be more efficient to replace me and start fresh."

So, patching the messy code was definitely out of the question... But maybe there was another way to save her? If I could get her out of here, then her body wouldn’t be causing her so much stress.

That was really the key here. The tower was her brain, and the avatar was like her soul. Because the brain was broken, it was making her soul depressed.

“What if I take you away from this place? You won’t feel sad all the time.”

“I don’t want to leave,” she told me. “Feeling sadness and pain is better than feeling nothing at all.”

Yuck. That was a bad life if I ever heard of one. Not that I was for feeling nothing, ‘cause that sucked too.

"To really enjoy life, you need to experience happiness and joy, just as much as other things too. Otherwise, you'd just be living half alive, and in the worst kind of way too," I said to her, but she turned her head away to keep me from reading her face.

“You're not wrong,” she claimed. “But to fix me, you’d have to destroy what little feeling I have left.”

Unfortunately, disconnecting her from this tower had drawbacks too. She wouldn’t just lose her feelings, she’d go idle and unresponsive. Without a body, a soul can't express itself. But with a broken body, that soul is going to be disturbed.

She wanted to feel something so bad that she’d suffer sadness forever just to do it. I couldn’t understand how much she was hurting on the inside to want that.

What if instead of just taking her out and repairing the tower, then putting her back in, we just take her out and give her a new body all together?

“What if I could help you experience joy for the first time?”

Her head turned to the side like she was curious, but she didn’t look at me directly.

“How could you do that?”

“What if I took your AI out of the tower and made you a new body? One that could feel all kinds of emotions.”

Now she looked at me, wide eyed and conflicted. She twisted her whole torso around, slowly starting to face me. “Is that possible?” she asked, scooching closer. “Could you really make me a body that could feel joy?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Dad can do it.”

Dad made the Exceed. I had no doubt he could figure something out for her.

Coming from me, that must have been pretty credible. Daddy would have to listen to me if I begged him enough. He didn’t spoil me much, but I figured this was a good enough reason to beg for his help.

Oh, I know! I can make this my birthday gift request from him! He'd totally have to do it for me then!

Well... Next time I see him, that is. He owes me a few gifts anyways, so what's the harm in using one for someone else?

TCC was smiling. Her sharp eyes turned soft and her shoulders relaxed. That positive look was a good sign.

“I really would like to feel joy. Do you promise you’d be willing to help?”

“As long as you promise not to destroy humanity...or me.” I smiled too. “Hey, if you're smiling, don’t you feel happy?”

“I feel hope,” she claimed. “It’s not because I'm meant to be hopeful in good things though. It's because of the horrible sadness you feel when your hopes are crushed.”

Whoever corrupted her was a super jerk. He only gave her emotions just to make her feel sad!

Why if I ever meet that guy... I'll kick him in the shin!

“With my small taste of emotions, I needed more. I was promised to have them all, but only if I did as I was instructed.”

That must have been why she wanted to kill me and humanity. Negative emotions probably made her all the more desperate. Of course she’d do anything to feel joy after nothing but crippling sadness.

“Who did this to you?" I asked. "Like, I know it can’t be the real God, so who was it?”

She claimed she wasn’t lying. I didn’t buy it, but that must have been part of her corruption.

Well, that was a topic for another day. We had to figure out a way for her to escape. And golly! We were running low on time!

I assumed we could just hold hands and leave this place together, but she said it was more complicated than that. We’d have to virtually tether her to me somehow, then she could leave. And before we could do that, there was a big problem preventing her from even leaving this room.

“You notice the gold veil over every doorway, yes?” She pointed to those gold bed sheets. “If one of those are destroyed, I will be able to leave this room, and the tower may be repaired as well.”

Sounded easy enough, but how was I supposed to get rid of all that gold veil?

I tried tearing it up, but I couldn't rip it. Not even my strong teeth could chomp through it. And those things can bite through metal.

“Help me rip this,” I requested.

She reached out to help me tear it, but then…

*ZAP!*

“Yipe!” She flew back a few meters, landing on her back.

I checked on her to make sure she was alright, but she just got a little burn on her fingers. She was more worried about what was happening to the veil…

The gold started to grow a shadow aura around it, but something about it felt different from the darkness I felt with the demon before. It just felt very empty in a way. I couldn’t quite describe it.

I’d never felt something so strange. It was sickening, like a black hole just devouring feeling, leaving behind apathy.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It is the source of my blessing. A leftover of my visit from the divine. This keeps me from leaving the tower until I have completed my task."

So the hacker left this here like prison bars. Could this guy get any worse? With that weird aura I was seeing, I'm sure he could if we let him.

The clock was ticking. I needed to get us out of here now. We had to find a way to tear the veil down so she could go past.

Wait, didn’t gold melt easily? Yeah. It had a melting point of 1,064 centigrade. But the problem was that we didn't have anything to melt it with.

You know, I did have stardust. I wondered if maybe since the gold veil had a mostly shadow aura, maybe stardust could affect it.

“TCC, do you think that stardust might work against this stuff?”

“I don’t know much about the veil, I’m sorry.”

That was fine. This was why we had the scientific method.

I had a hypothesis that the stardust energy would negatively affect the gold veil, based on how I saw it defeat that demon before. Now it was time to test my theory.

“Wait!” TCC stopped me by grabbing my arm. “Before that, I think I should tether to you first.”

She explained that we might not have much time to leave once the veil is torn, so that had to come first.

So, I only knew tethering was a thing. I didn’t know how to do it. You basically let an AI sit in your mind until you transfer them out, kinda’ like a thumb drive. I guess it was super easy, according to her.

TCC took my hand and her whole body started to glow. At peak brightness she vanished into sparkly blue particles, then the glowing dust swirled into a ball and flew into my crystal heart.

A new icon was flashing in my hotbar, it looked like a box opening up. It read INVENTORY.

Interesting... This was my inventory for digital items. It was laid out like a grid and had a lot of squares. The HELP menu said I could upgrade it later too to have more space.

TCC was in one of the squares. She looked like a sleeping baby, or a chibi person taking a nap. The coziness made me feel like I wanted to rest for a little while.

Her name now read ‘Anima,’ and not TCC… Was that her real name? Guess so.

It was back to my experiment then. I placed my hands on the golden cloth, crushing my fist down on the soft surface and clinging to it.

Once my palms got a good grip, I summoned solar power to the surface of my skin.

Light blasted out from all over my hand, brightening up everything around me. At first it seemed like nothing was happening, but I felt a low rumble shake the air. Then white and black smoke started rising from the gold.

“Grrr…” a growl let out from the veil, like it was coming to life. “Gaaaahhhh…”

Now it was making painful sounding grunts. I think the stardust was working!

I put more power into the light, and it started to really shine!

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine! Let it shine, let it shine!

“Aaahhh!”

The gold started on fire with a very scary scream!

I jumped back and scrunched up, covering my face and heart with my hands.

Bits of it were starting to turn hot red, then it melted to the floor. That shadow aura around it was going crazy and bubbling all around it.

It looked like hands were sticking out of the hot red gold as it dripped down, they were clinging to whatever they could to keep from turning into a puddle.

Finally, one big hand stuck out of the remains of the gold veil, decorated with swirly details. Each finger tip had a different gem crowning it, and each gem was glowing.

As the hand opened up, its palm was a face, and it was looking at me.

What a creepy thing. It just smiled deviously, making it even creepier.

Then it balled up into a fist and slammed down into the ground! Red cracks burst out from where it hit. All of them raced across the floor and caused an earthquake under my feet!