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“Tell me more about the Admins,” you say.

“Even after two years, I still don’t know much more than anyone else,” Synth says. “There’s Crypta, Astra, and Vanitas. They rarely interact with the students directly, and when they do, they usually speak as one voice, through the ADMIN channel. You don’t usually know who you’re talking to.”

“But you’re working specifically with Admin Crypta?”

“Yeah, it’s unusual, but she gave me this assignment personally. It’s in your contract, the Admins can activate any of us and give us an order anytime, it’s just pretty rare that they actually do that.”

“What do they even do, then, if they never talk to anyone or take any action?” you say.

“The thing about technopath admins is that they aren’t just some common server maid, an admin’s mind is part of the core operation of the server itself. It’s one of the reasons technopaths are necessary. Here at TLA there are three Admins, this system contains a lot of highly sensitive information on all the students the academy trains, and the security companies would never send candidates here if they didn’t do a good job protecting that data. Always at least two of them remain on-world.

“AdminSpecs are the rarest of us, and they’re scary. They can pull the ground out from under your feet, so to speak. If you’re in their server, the meta-reality you experience is subject entirely to their own rules. Of course, the drawback is that outside their home server, they lose all those advantages.”

“Does that mean they can see everything we do in the TLA server?” you say.

“Not exactly. You could say an admin is the god of a server, but they aren’t omniscient. They have the same limitations all human brains have, we can only really focus intently on one thing at a time, only call up so much information at once, even when our augments expand the capacity of that one focal point quite a bit.

“So no, the Admins probably didn’t see all the weird stuff that’s happened to you in this server, they had no reason to be paying attention. Otherwise they wouldn’t need faculty and students to help them investigate things like this,” Synth says.

“Interesting, but it doesn’t really tell me much that’s useful right now…” you say.

“What it should tell you, Aydan, is that Unas is a technopath who can elude the detection of the Admins. With the kinds of abilities they have, compiling an exopath from the chaotic thought patterns of a group of students, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were an Administration specialist themself. But that’s about all I know about Unas, or NULL Sector.”