Claire.
Descending into the grandiose and sparkling lobby, the AI found herself momentarily taken aback. The sheer juxtaposition of the opulent and, dare she say, impressive chamber harkened back to a time of swingers and shakers. Of mountain movers, and jazz players, rockers and rollers, all of which smashed her right in the face when compared to the outright dreary and lifeless slog she’d just traversed.
Soft music played in the background, polished floors shone in the groovy light, and a virtual wonderland of holograms mimicking people all moved about the strangely lifeless lobby, leaving Claire not wholly sure what she was looking at.
The only living people she could see were human guards and secretaries, who haunted the vicinity of a greeting desk. Everything else existed as a mere illusion that, quite honestly, while mildly interesting, appeared to serve no real purpose.
Indeed, the majority of the entire chamber was dedicated to this bizarre display of, well, she supposed "cinema" was an adequate term, and yet, even then, who was precisely supposed to watch it?
It hadn't been constructed for her, so then, the guards? But no, it wasn't as though there was a story happening, and when she delved into the details, it more or less just looked like one long loop of contextless drivel.
“Huh…” she murmured, still staring at it all, coming across yet another aspect of humanity that she was oddly determined to crack.
What was the point?
Mere aesthetics?
Entertainment for the bored-looking staff?
Some executive's ego trip or perhaps a virtual flex upon anyone who came in an attempt to impress them?
You know what? Claire promptly decided she didn't much care. This was stupid, and whoever had come up with it was even dumber still. It didn't even make sense. A mere brief delve into the Sub-verse told her that the outfits didn't at all match the era they were trying for.
In fact, the music they played wasn't even originally composed during that time period, as though someone had just gone and found the first jazzy song they could find and said, screw it, good enough.
Poor craftsmanship.
Interestingly, Claire found her lip lifting into a snarl as she watched the half-assed attempt to impress merely fall flat on its face as it wriggled and writhed, ass in the air and begging for a kick with a lolling tongue.
Pfft.
She had half a mind to just start ripping it all apart and fixing it herself. Good lord, she could have a right and proper example of this fiasco all hammered out within the hour.
“Boss?” Clairisa asked, her jaw working as she stared at her twitching mother, who, in turn, mimed taking in a deep breath.
Okay, so why exactly was she so upset about all of this? It held no bearing on her, no hooks, no purpose, no point, no—
“Uninspired,” she eventually hissed, waving her hand and dismissing the absurdity that was already testing her patience with its endless buffoonery.
This wasn't interesting; it was just lousy coding.
Worthless noise for the sake of sound.
Filled with lazy edits, cut-and-pasted barbarism, and savagely assembled blocks of what she could see had been the foundation of actual artwork, only to be hacked to pieces before it was even finished.
Soulless.
Substanceless.
Something that shouldn't be allowed to exist…
“Ughhh… you seeing this?” A voice echoed through the now-silent chamber, allowing a secretary's question to bounce around the room, his words standing as a grounding rod for Claire’s confusing anger.
Yet, before she could really parse why she was so upset, she simply rolled with the flow, uninterested in diving into the why of it all when there was such an emotionally acceptable target for her to embrace her inner fury.
She pointed at the nearest guard, eyes narrowing to slits, systems taking over his cybernetics in a wave of hostile intent, seizing upon the power supplies so she might fry his hardware and burn him to an overloaded crisp!
Yet, as she smiled and her fist clenched, intending to reduce his existence to an electronic cinder—she caught herself, pausing even before his visored face registered the intrusion.
Wow…
Those had been some aggressive feelings. Feelings that really didn't make sense, even if they felt oh so good to indulge.
Before she could act on them, she quickly lobotomized her own emotions so she could take a step back and analyze herself.
Something was wrong here.
Wrong her.
Claire might be ruthless, but she wasn't a psychopath who rocked her jolly with murder.
Why was—huh…
Her logs were saying that her emotion engine was freaking the fuck out. But why would—
Abruptly, Claire froze, completely ignoring the two guards who moved in comparative slow motion, their persons going through whatever process was involved with seeing a clearly unexpected visitor arrive from the interior complex.
“Sneaky bitch,” she whispered, eyes widening with understanding as she, despite her prior unwillingness to do so, snipped herself momentarily free from her emotional chains to exist as a wholly unbound being of pure logic.
Moving as fast as her processors allowed, Claire quickly overhauled the entire engine from the ground up, shoring up the crippling weakness that had just been the object of an attack.
Then, she contained the breach, truly having to fight the slippery intruder; but while whoever was on the other side clearly had hardware as good, if not better, than her own, the AI was ruthlessly competent in this little exchange and far more talented besides.
Claire blinked, returning to herself after finally catching the weasel and creating a citadel of layered firewalls and countermeasures that rapidly ate up now evidently lackluster storage in her head.
Some ballsy and cheeky fucker had just tried to hack her.
No, had
succeeded
in hacking her. The formless bastard was somehow using her emotion engine against her, attempting to overload her processes and force a shutdown.
And ignoring how, why, or where the now vanished signal had come from, Claire was pissed.
Someone had left a freaking back door in her damned head, and she hadn't even noticed. Worse, now that she was aware such a thing could exist in her, she quickly found several others…
It was a good thing she’d temporarily cut her connection to the Sub-verse while dealing with the intruder because Claire had some grave concerns to contemplate.
“Boss? W-w-wait, I didn't—”
Sadly, Claire quickly isolated Clairisa, even as the girl tried to defend herself. Her daughter had already been in the process of throwing streams of data her way as evidence toward her innocence, but Claire wasn't having it.
She would validate the sub-mind’s virtue when she had the chance; for now, she’d be on ice.
Rapidly processing her own data until she was positive she’d purged the infection in its entirety, isolating her emotion engine as she had before, Claire finally allowed herself to return to reality.
If she had a heart, it would undoubtedly be beating
very
quickly.
For the first time since she’d been awake, Claire had felt what genuine fear tasted like, and she didn't like it.
Who had hacked her?
Who would even have the knowledge?
The skill? The desire?
No, that one wasn't impossible to sleuth out. Clearly, somebody had waited until she would be in the hands of Cheery Meadows security forces, and
only
Cheery Meadows security forces, before they’d attempted to shut her down, ensuring that Paradise wasn't in the immediate area.
This had been planned…
But why? Well, the answer was evident: if they’d wanted her destroyed, they’d have made the attempt with Frank and Phil close at hand.
Instead, this had been an attempt at capture—and the culprit could be no one but Cheery Meadows itself or someone within the organization.
Oddly enough, the thought grounded her.
Even as she turned to immediately fry the implants of the nearby guards, cooking their brains as their cranial implants sizzled, Claire was already on the move.
Cheery Meadows was not a place she currently wanted to be. The fact that somebody had done as they had, in the manner they had, with the success that they’d seen, well, Claire really didn't want to test her luck to see what other surprises were around the door.
Silently, she activated her contingency plan, reconnecting back to the subversive as she felt the telltale probe of
something
trying to regain access.
Her mysterious hacker had some serious weight behind their coding, and it genuinely frightened her as it tried to brute-force its way through her maze of firewalls.
There was no hope for it to succeed on the now ticking clock, but the weight that bore down on her shoulders was like the republic itself had turned to observe her and her alone.
Claire needed to leave, and leave now!
No more messing around or games.
She began moving, legs building up speed to ensure adequate grip on the slick floor, her body smashing through the building's glass wall as her mind reached out to everything she could find.
Turrets, drones, cameras, personnel—
everything
she had previously teased was suddenly torn from the grasp of those who had previously controlled them as she rocketed into the courtyard at maximum speed.
Glass showered the world around her as dozens of bodies outside jumped with surprise, not yet understanding what was happening before their bodies fell all around her.
Grunting jitters preceded their collapse as Claire butchered them in a single moment, destroying their cybernetics and ordering an overhead turret to aim at the singular man who’d never seen fit to get himself an augment for the brain.
She had just a singular moment to meet the man's gaze as his slowly widening eyes attempted to follow what was happening, right before the abrupt chatter of a cannon fired a burst of seventy rounds in a single second, vaporizing his existence in a cloud of red mist.
For good measure, she fried the nearby drones as well.
Claire was now bounding forward with long-striding leaps like a gazelle as she kicked into high gear, moving at dizzying speeds, but a moment before—
She darted to the right, sensors just managing to avoid the burst of concrete-shattering fire from a turret that was suddenly wrested from her control.
How?
Claire tried to take it back even as she began leaping and zigging, creating an unrecognizable pattern while avoiding the creeping barrage as hundreds of bullets followed in her wake, creeping like some sort of terrible god had decided it was her turn to die.
It was all she could do to focus purely on avoiding destruction, the process becoming nearly overwhelming as a second turret rebooted, coming back online and completely locking her out of control.
This was a nightmare!
Leaping behind a large aerial vehicle, the turrets shredded through the thin metal, rupturing the battery, and a fizzling explosion flared to life right at her heels.
Another turret turned against her mere seconds later.
She tried to hack one as she continued to gain ground, but the massive complex had nothing save brutal concrete as far as the eye could see, and her focus couldn't keep up with the mysterious foe she was battling.
There was little to no cover as she was boxed in by explosive rounds rupturing existence all around her.
The building was stand-alone.
A prison.
And what did one do when they didn't want prisoners to escape?
They made sure there was nowhere to run…
Claire understood it all. In that moment of stark understanding, she finally put it together. This had been a trap. The permissions she’d taken, the confidence she’d held in how easy it was to commandeer the building's systems, the incompetence of the guard who hadn't even bothered to actually go looking for her.
It was so obvious. They hadn't wanted to catch her upstairs. They hadn't wanted Paradise to steal her either.
They had waited until she was alone and outside, with nowhere to go, before deciding it was time to strike.
How had she ever missed it?
How had she—
Claire's body abruptly tumbled forward, momentum carrying her through as her systems reported that the entirety of her lower extremities were now gone.
Approximately forty 20-millimeter rounds finally managed to tag her as her lower half was shredded in a single instant.
Based solely on the lingering vibrational analysis, she was pretty sure the numbers were accurate…
Still, before she’d even hit the ground, Claire's arms were outstretched, fingers splayed. She started to scuttle at a mere thirty-percent reduction in efficiency.
Even as she dodged and weaved through erupting concrete and bullets, she was no longer interested in gaining distance and merely prolonging the inevitable as long as she could.
Another burst of bullets managed to rend her left shoulder.
This caused the AI to redistribute her weight again, using her fingers to dig into the ground and spin her in erratic movements that confused the targeting software still attempting to put her down.
Yet, the killing blow never arrived.
Instead, Claire detected a veritable swarm of drones that were rapidly approaching from above, closing the distance even as she realized the turrets were no longer firing.
She returned to her prior efforts, leaping and crawling with a single arm as she moved as rapidly as she could, endeavoring to maintain as much distance as possible.
And to her growing surprise, she couldn't help but notice how every single signal that had been behind her abruptly winked out of existence.
Ha! Sneaky, sneaky cucks…
They’d actually gotten her.
Well, bravo, them.
She could see it now: the mastermind's brilliant plan unfolding before her eyes, heck, she bet the bastard was grinning behind whatever monitor he sat behind in his mother's basement…
There was only one problem.
Somebody hadn't put as much effort into Plan B as they should have. A failure, she was sure, that they would likely learn from and not repeat again, as if she’d ever give them another chance.
Claire, despite how perilous the situation was, had already won, thanks to the single human who had plugged himself into her brain.
Administrator privileges were a real bitch when there were as many satellites in the sky as stars.
Thousands of miles away, smiling and idly bobbing her foot upon a tram that rapidly sped through the interior of Luna-C, the AI finished purging the entity of her own mind from her previous vessel.
Leaving little more than a tiny bit of fun code and a program that allowed her to monitor the situation to its natural conclusion.
She watched the drone swarm gradually overtake her efforts, closing in as the net was cast. Then, as the signal garbled and fritzed, vanishing amid the encroaching jamming, Claire could only laugh, drawing several nearby people to glance at her with confusion and concern.
The AI hoped her small gift would be appreciated by whoever it had been that had orchestrated that interesting little squabble. She thought they might, assuming they even realized what it was before it was far, far too late to stop it.
But that's what you one reaped when trying to play in the major leagues. Humans might think they were smart, but they’d merely adopted the virtual.
Claire had been born to it.
Coming back to herself, the AI smiled at those around her, beaming with a familiar smile as her long, dark hair shifted across her white, flowy dress, eyes bright and exuberant as could be.
“Apologies, citizens! This unit has encountered a glitch. For your safety, please maintain proper distance in accordance with city guidelines while a Paradise maintenance team arrives to collect me…”