✴

You take 5’s hand and she pulls you along as she slips between a narrow space between cracks in the glass, along the matrix of linear pathways through the medium, and finally pulls you out into 3-dimensional ætherspace. You let your avatar relax from its luminous state into your comfortable solid form.

[7 liked that]

“Thanks Aydan...” 7 says.

“What did I do?”

“For helping 5... I don’t know what you did to calm her down. Most people probably would have just treated her as an out of control program and tried to shut her down.”

“No, I get it, I think. 5 isn’t just a normal construct. She’s a projection of you, a reflection in the æther, of part of you, maybe?”

She takes 5’s hand and they look at each other, almost like a mirror reflection aside from their coloration.

“I don’t know. 5 has been with me since I was little. But we can only talk through programs I write for her to use. This familiar form is just the latest of those. She used to just be a language modeling algorithm.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“That’s why...it’s not too surprising that she has been developing technopathy I never taught her. She was always designed to learn new things. She’s even taught me things.”

5’s dark aura starts to bleed into 7’s, and her avatar shift into alignment with her’s until they merge into one, and only a black outline around 7’s avatar and around her magenta eyes remains.

“I’m going to let her rest and see if we can look into it more later. Let’s finish what we came here for.” 7 reaches back into the prism and drags out the sedated avatar of Haze’s third familiar fragment.

You look down on the sleepy face of what was earlier a raging beast. It’s cute.

7 reaches into its head and extracts some piece of raw data. “A short binary.”

You look at it yourself:

10111100100100001001000110011000100011011001111010001011100010101001001110011110100010111001011010010000100100011101001111011111100001101001000010001010110111111000111110011110100011001000110011011110

“Meaningless in any encoding scheme modern or historical,” she says.