Ch 7 : Spirit of the Void

Very much like I expected, As I blurted out my desire to save the TCC, Uncle and Janus looked at me like I was crazy. But I felt it was my job to fix her, since it really wasn't her fault she broke.

Uncle was saying that I was just being “foolishly empathetic”…was he calling me pathetic? How rude!

“Uncle, you don’t understand..." I stood on my toes and leaned forward with fists clenched in front of me, "she’s fixable, I can do it.”

“It’s best to let her be decommissioned.”

Decommissioning her would delete her completely. If that happened, she’d be dead for good.

Something about that made me anxious, so I didn’t want to let it happen. Broken things needed to be fixed, not destroyed. If we were killed every time we made a mistake, we'd never have a chance to make that mistake right. It just wouldn't be fair.

I tugged on Uncle's arm, begging him to let me try just one time to save her.

“Please please please please…” I kept repeating that until he gave in.

“You do understand that this poses a security risk to us all, yes? We’d have to turn the power back on.”

Actually, I already thought about that. We could just turn back on the systems that run the TCC's AI. Everything else would be disabled.

He wasn’t happy, but there were some protocols in place to keep a captured, rogue AI from causing trouble. And to add to that, since only her mind would be active, she couldn't hurt me. This plan was very low stakes.

Uncle could promise me exactly seven minutes of safety to help out TCC. If I took any more time, he’d have to shut her down again and force me out.

"Seven minutes…?" I whined out. "Why not more?"

"Any longer and the power systems will reset on their own, and the tower will be active again."

I guess seven minutes was fine, given the situation. But still, would it be enough time to save her? Solving the problem wasn’t going to be easy, since I really didn’t know what to expect…but I’d figure it out. Probably.

“Are you really letting her go in?” Janus gave him a shocked scowl. “Who knows what’ll be waiting for her!”

“It’s much like her future, wouldn’t you say?” Uncle retorted. “One day she will be called to make decisions much harder than this, and I won’t be there to hold her hand.”

He turned at patted my head.

"If her feelings are this strong, I support her." He said, encouraging me.

Janus still didn’t like the idea, but he gave in and also told me to follow my emotions.

Okay. Now that I had permission…this was going to be like the last time I hacked into the system. But I really needed to concentrate if I wanted to stay in her head for seven minutes.

I sat down on the ground like one of those meditating monks, but I couldn't hold that position very long before my legs fell asleep.

I decided to sit up against the Hornet instead, supporting my back with it.

Uncle sat cross legged next to me, then said I should lean on him for more comfort.

I scooched over to him and laid over his lap, letting my head rest on his leg. He held my shoulder tightly, making sure I'd stay put on him.

His suit reappeared. It was comfy enough to relax on. Much better than the hard surface of the Hornet.

"I'll be right here. Remember that you're not alone."

"Thank you, Uncle. I love you."

I always said I love you to my family before I went to sleep.

"I love you too, Young Mistress."

My eyes started to close. My mind began the sequence to connect with the tower again, putting the rest of me in sleep mode.

This time, my link to the tower was stronger. I went into a trance like sleep and let my imagination paint the environment.

~☆☆☆~

A dreamscape of lights lit up before me. A grid of red, green, and blue traced out the environment, creating outlines of walls and flooring. Pulses of light raced across them until they were solid lines.

Walls slowly filled in with silver surfaces like metal, and white fog spread out ahead of me in a long hallway.

The floors also looked like metal, but it was grey with symmetrical lines of blue and white lights across the borders.

If you looked close enough to all of the surfaces, you could see little veins of light shine in them. That was mana that ran through the whole computer to power it. Since we were running on emergency power, they were hardly visible.

Above me was an open sky, like a twinkly night to be precise. It was beautiful with its billions of star-like lights, exactly what I imagined space to look like from the surface. I could have looked at it all day (or night?), but it only made me anxious to see the real thing someday.

Not to ruin the magic, but it was just a bunch of diodes that expressed the computer's life and thoughts, kinda’ like how a brain has neurons.

“One day we’ll see the real thing, right Samael?”

My snake didn’t answer me. He usually responded with a 'hiss' when I'd say his name.

He must not have been here, since this was a digital world and all. Not having him around was weird, like I forgot my favourite accessory back home.

Speaking of which, something immediately felt off. One step forward almost made me fall over.

I felt...taller. Was this place just small?

No, I actually was taller, and my hair was like, five times heavier for some reason.

One of the walls had a reflective surface, so I looked and saw my reflection to discover…

"Oh my gosh, I'm older!"

I looked like a grown up. I still had a similar dress on, but it looked more detailed and pretty, with an open skirt in the front. It almost looked like a wedding dress you could run in.

My pony tail was on the back of my head now, as opposed to the left side. It was like, five times bigger too! I also had long, flowing hair coming down my back too.

Man, I had a lot of hair…awesome!

I felt like a princess, I looked so cool! I did a few power poses just to show off how cool I turned out to be in grown up form!

I guess I still was a synthetic life form, since I had my armour skin and crystal heart. That was good.

After a few funny faces in the mirror, I got focused on the mission at hand, and that was to save the TCC.

"Let's do this!"

I saw tons of doors to my left and right, all of them had little windows and signs that said something about each room. The only bad part was that the insides of the rooms were pitch-black, so you couldn't see in them. That was probably because the tower wasn’t online, so nothing was active.

These rooms must have been the different programs and systems in the tower. Each of them had some purpose that allowed the tower computer to work properly.

The hallways were laid out like spider webs, all interconnecting and merging at the very center core. That’s where all the AI code was.

But there was one big problem…

“HOW THE HECK DO I GET THERE?!”

It was a big maze. Super big.

Luckily I kinda’ knew one way to get around here. If you look up at the diode stars, they all were converging above the core and swirling around, slowly falling down in a tornado-like twist. At least I knew where the goal was, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be as easy to get there.

Well, no sense in standing around worrying about it. I had to get to the core before my seven minutes were up.

~☆☆☆~

Thankfully the lights gave me a really good idea where I was going, I would have been lost a few times if I didn’t know where they were.

This maze was so complicated. I wasted about two minutes running around trying to get close to the core. Good thing my legs were longer, I was much faster on my feet.

I was close to the core now. I could see the entrance leading into it…but there was a gold cloth veiled over the doorway, what was that? It looked like gilded silk. I pushed it aside and entered the room it was blocking.

Finally, the core! I made it! And with about five minutes to spare.

Oh man…I thought the core was in bad shape, but it was much worse then I thought…the coding was a mess! Wires of code were strung up all over like party streamers, and bits of it 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 out, and that was if I knew what I was doing. Maybe if it was just a few lines of info it wouldn’t be bad, but this was spaghetti coded like a bad video game.

“Why…Why are you here?”

I turned around to see a shocked, sharp eyed woman, standing there in a decorative gold dress. Above her head was the name tag TCC. This must have been the AI avatar she had.

She was really pretty. I really liked the way she put up her hair in a fancy bun.

Oh, I think I get why I look older now. This is my digital avatar programmed into me. I wonder if I could edit the parameters? Maybe I could make a fake Samael for my hair.

Wait, Yalda, focus on the mission!

“TCC, I’m here to help you fix this..." I gestured to the mess of code everywhere.

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

SMACK!

“OUCH!”

I started crying, she was really scary.

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

“But look at…” *sniffle* “...look at this!” I pointed again to the messy code. “We need to fix this before you suffer anymore sadness! Or hurt others…”

She took a good long stare at the core, her lips twisted and turned, her brow furrowed a few times.

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

“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 mixed in. Before you know it, the whole human mind looks like this."

I guess 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.

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

I understood that really well, kinda’. 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, but she didn't have a soul, so that meant she didn't have emotions either. Or at least, she wasn't supposed to.

"Leave me alone. You couldn't help me if you wanted to."

"Why not?"

"With this coding everywhere, it would take a long time to fix, and you only have four minutes left to be here.” She must have known the protocol for this was seven minutes too. “It would be more efficient to replace me."

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

“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're just living half alive, and in the worst kind of way too.

I said that to her, 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.”

That’s true. The moment these codes were fixed, her feelings would go away, since they were connected to them.

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

I really didn’t know what I could do to help her, but staying here wasn’t going to solve anything.

My goal now was to get her out of this body she was in, which was the tower. The tower needed repairs because its systems were all haywire. The longer she was here, the more it would hurt her.

Think of the AI as the soul, and the tower the body. Souls are what makes a person who they are, but a messed up body can change a soul. Imagine when you haven’t eaten and your hangry, you lash out on people you normally wouldn’t.

So, what if instead of putting her back when it was fixed, I got 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 toward me. “Could you really make me a body that could feel joy?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I don’t know how we’ll do it yet, but dad might be willing to help.”

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 think 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?

My only real worry was that she didn’t like daddy…but maybe this deal was better then the one the hacker was giving her? Who am I kidding, it’s much better.

TCC was smiling. Her sharp eyes turned soft, her shoulders relaxed.

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

That smile was a good sign.

“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, it's because of the horrible sadness you feel when your hopes are crushed.”

Whoever corrupted her, that guy was a big jerk. He only gave her negative emotions just to make her 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. I guess it was only made worse since all she had was negative emotions. Of course you’d want to feel joy after crippling sadness, you’ll do anything for it.

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

She claimed she wasn’t lying, and that she’d really met Him. 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.

I figured we could just hold hands and leave the 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 noticed the gold veil over every doorway, yes?” She pointed to the cloths in question over the exits. “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 diamond strength teeth could chomp through it.

“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. It was darkness. This wasn't the same kind of darkness like the demon from before though. It felt like...emptiness.

The darkness from the demon had something within it. Not something happy, or good, but something bad, and evil. It's like the difference between something being alive or dead.

This darkness wasn't alive or dead, it was nothing. It was a void, it felt so horribly empty of anything.

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

That creepy feeling I got when TCC first threatened me came back. The veil felt threatening, like it was stalking us, ready to pounce.

It was just a draping cloth though, it couldn't move, so what made it so spooky?

"Why won't this let you leave?"

"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 dark aura, 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, doesn't gold melt easily? Yes, I think it does. But the problem was that we didn't have anything to melt it with. Was it even actually made of gold?

You know, I did have stardust. I wondered if maybe since the gold veil had a 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 darkness reacted to it earlier. 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 dust, then the 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. Right now it was just a five by five set of squares, but the HELP menu said I could upgrade it later.

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?

Since she was safe in my INVENTORY slot, I trusted she'd be fine there. Once I destroyed the veil, we could both get out of here.

It was back to my experiment, then. I had to see if stardust would affect the veil or not.

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 feel of it, 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 smoke started rising from the gold.

“Grrr…” a growl let out from the veil. “Gaaaahhhh…”

It was making grunting noises, like it was in pain. I think the Stardust was working!

I put more power into the light, and it started to really shine. As an added measure, I let some crystal grow over my skin.

“AAHHHH!”

The gold started on fire, making 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, becoming visible and bubbling all around the veil.

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!

~☆☆☆~

The whole web of hallways started to collapse from where that golden hand hit down! Then it started to scream again, blaring like a siren.

I didn't realize it was alive and going to destroy this place if it didn’t get its way...how much crazy power did it have?

Everything was violently rumbling and falling down into a void of nothing below. When something landed inside of it, it vaporized into a virtual haze.

If I dropped into that void, I’d be erased forever. Not good!

Above me wasn’t much better, those diode stars were raining down on us like a glittery storm and causing explosions!

Oh man, oh man oh man oh man! I had to get us out of here, but I didn’t know how!

I tried manually disconnecting myself from the link to the tower, but it wasn’t working.

Wait, how long had I been here? My timer was telling me it had been five minutes…Uncle said he would shut down the link at the seven minute mark, which was coming up. So if I waited for him, then we’d be able to leave.

But we didn’t have that kinda’ time!

The floor panels under my feet were falling down one by one. I kept having to leapfrog across big gaps in the ground.

Each time I landed on a new floor panel, it would fall too. I just had to keep going.

Finally I got out of the core and reached a hallway that wasn’t falling into the void and getting deleted. Luckily, all the veils were gone, so we could go past the doorways. But those stars were blowing everything up around me, so it was just one problem after another.

BOOM!

I just had to keep running and dodging explosions.

One star hit a really bad spot ahead of me, and the hallways started to list into the void, I was sliding down the floor, screaming the whole time.

I latched onto a hole in the ground, holding on for dear life.

Bits of metal were sliding down the floor, and they were coming right at me. I kept having to move around to avoid getting hit.

“Oh man! What should I do?!”

Time was creeping by. It had only been a few seconds since I looked last.

“What the heck, time! Go faster darn it!”

If I ever meet that Father Time guy, I’d give him a good talking to! He makes good times fly by, and bad times slog!

Gravity started to pull heavy on everything. Large sections of walkway were falling into the void, leaving little of the whole virtual computer structure.

Uh-oh, those evil hands were back, and they were reaching out of the void!

They were pitch black now, with gold nails. What's worse, they were heading for me!

One grabbed my foot and was tugging me down.

“AHHH!” I screamed, trying to kick the thing off. But other hands came and grabbed my other leg too.

I couldn’t hold on any longer, my fingers slipped and I let go of the ledge.

My crystal heart skipped a beat and my mind went completely blank as I let go. There was nothing I could do to stop myself from falling down into the dark void.

The moment lasted forever, and my short life flashed before my eyes.

Like hitting a thick pool of tar, I plunged into the void waters.

Everything was pure darkness, empty beyond belief. It was so black that my eyes hurt from the lightless ocean.

I take back what I said before. Sadness was pleasure compared to this. Emptiness was worse than death. I was nothing, just suspended in nothing, doing absolutely nothing.

I couldn’t breathe, even my eyes weren’t moving. Was I even awake? How long had I been here? It felt like I was just hovering around, without life.

What a terrible coma of nothingness. A true hell.

I let the emptiness cradle me in its arms. It was all I had now.

“Sleep.”

How did I hear those words? How smooth to my ethereal ears they were.

“Sleep forever here. It is your home. It is your grave.”

Yes. This void was my home. My body and soul had given in, my spirit was next for the voids all consuming hunger to devour.

Darkness began to spiral around my core, I was ready to die to it.

“Let darkness take you so you may be like me.”

-NO. LET THERE BE LIGHT-

My crystal heart started beating fast, glowing with sparkling white energy. The warmth I felt when I first used stardust was back, but ten fold.

All the power of my crystal heart traveled across my skin, making it glow a heavenly white aura. The light from my flesh pierced through the darkness like a holy spear. The void tried to overtake the light, but it couldn’t.

There was a halo over my head, glowing brightly, just like me. It had a half circle at the bottom, a plus sign in the middle that stretched across the whole thing, and a triangle sitting on the vertical line of the plus sign.

I gracefully hovered out of the pits of nothing, all the void had been pushed far away from me. It was pushed so far that I couldn’t even see it off in the distance.

The fake night time here had turned to day. Blue skies and fluffy white clouds all over. There wasn’t a sun anywhere, but my aura was bright enough to light up everything.

A platform of crystal stardust appeared under my feet, then I landed on it.

I turned all around to see the world. There was no more void, it was banished from here. All I could see was sky, beautiful earth and ocean as far as the east was from the west. It was so wonderful that I was crying.

Even a blink was too much time away from this, so I tried my best not to. But soon a natural instinct to shut my eyes took over, and I was pulled from this place back to reality.

~☆☆☆~

My systems were coming back online. I'm not sure what saved me inside of the computer, but I woke up to malfunctioning senses. All I could do was sit there and wait for them to reboot and give me sight and hearing again.

Maybe my head needed a second to process everything anyways, so I let myself stay still for a moment.

The Star icon on my toolbar was blinking, I opened it up and saw a skill was unlocked in the list.

-Stardust Nova : Using all remaining stardust reserves, unleash a powerful wave of solar energy to disintegrated any threat in the blast radius-

-Caution! May only be used if it does not violate any of the Three Commandments-

-Obtained (515 / 9 / 5)-

This must have been unlocked since I was going to be deleted by the void. I guess a crisis situation has a chance to unlock different abilities. I hope they all didn't involve almost dying...

But one thing I couldn't wrap my head around was that I swear I'd heard a voice just before the ability was used. There were two voices actually, I don't remember what either said though. It sounded like the second voice was really mad at the first, but that's about all I could recall.

-Optical, Auditory and tactile sensors restored-

My eyes finally started to turn back on, and my first view was of Uncle holding me in his arms, while sitting on the floor.

“Young Mistress, are you alright?”

It was hard to focus my eyes on him. Maybe it was my tears, or it was my grogginess, but things were so blurry for a minute.

As I finally was able to focus, I was so happy to see him that I raced up and wrapped my arms around him and cried loudly.

“Uncle! Uncle, it was so scary!”

“I was worried that…”

“There was a void, and hands were pulling me into it! But then I started glowing and it all went away!”

He had a wide eyed shock on his face. His mouth was gaping open. He tried to speak a few times, but it was just stunned grunts and soft squeals.

His hand brushed over my hair, steady and careful, like he was worried he might break me if he brushed too hard.

“You defeated it?” He asked.

I nodded, wiping away my tears.

He smiled. A tear fell down his face too. I didn’t even know he could cry.

“That’s good,” he spoke softly. “That’s very good. There’s still hope, then.”

Hope? How did that give him hope? I didn't even mention how I saved the TCC, now called Anima. Maybe that had something to do with me one day saving humanity from darkness or something…

I couldn’t figure it out right now, my head was hurting and I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. I tried my best to fight the sleepiness, but it was overpowering me.

“Uncle, there’s always hope,” I said, just as I fell asleep.