Tov gasped and sprung out of unconsciousness.

Soreness wracked his body as if pulled from an intense training simulator. Electric tingles soared across individual strands of muscles from the tip of his toes and fingers, slamming onto his head.

He groaned as seconds passed. Eventually, he gathered himself enough to get off the ground, belatedly realizing he was sprawled across it. “Hells…”

“I hope I don’t get used to this,” he grumbled, shaking his head multiple times until there was nothing but a faint numbness. His body shuddered a final time as his eyes regained clarity. Tov called out, his voice raw as his throat, “Andora? Eld—”

He froze.

Before him was a bustling metropolis of glass, neon colors, and verdant nature. Then, noise slammed into him, but it wasn’t the typical cacophony of urban sprawls he knew.

There was no constant honking or grinding of industry and commerce, no VTOL transports shrieking through the air, nor surface-to-space shuttles punching the atmosphere, no cacophony of a melting pot of the galaxy's many races, none of the blaring sounds of media on giant screens that covered the colossal urban landscape, all things he experienced in the few times he visited Nexus Prime, the center of the Galactic Legacy Federation and the Remnant Council.

Instead, the unabashed sounds of nature filled the atmosphere, and a symphony intermixed with an almost mystical air. The near-silent hum of maglev trains thrummed nearby while the occasional air car weaved through the skyline. There were bits of screens displaying news and entertainment but no on-your-face visuals to drown out society.

“Songs above…” Tov muttered. There were bits of both, pieces familiar to him from across civilization.

Tov stepped forward, his vision expanding to see the raised level of marbled tiles he stood alone on, one of many in a city built with verticality in mind. But their spires that pierced the heavens lacked the oppressive nature of mountains.

Nature, trees, and water flowed far below, her embrace enveloping the glass obelisks she surrounded. The colossal structures, office buildings, and highrise residentials funneled the wind, brushing against the leaves.

The breeze touched upon his skin, his antennae waving like the branches of the tree beside him. The music of stringed instruments and a choir of angelic voices carried in its wake.

And the people, of which Tov saw thousands out in the streets. Humans and androids walked side by side with expressions of tranquility, optimism, and a confident stride—clad in formal suits and dresses, others in comfortable casual wear, even some in utilitarian coveralls, and more.

There was a sense of gravitas but none of the garish opulence. Everything had a meaning, a purpose, a fullness of vitality.

And it all felt genuine, almost too real.

“This…” Tov whispered, a rush of nostalgia filling his chest, “Reminds me of home. It’s—”

“Everything,” Andora stepped up to his right, and for once, Tov was too enthralled to be startled. Her whisper blended into the ambiance.

He nodded, leaning onto the railing as he took in more of the city. “It’s beautiful. Your designers and builders made this city with passion.”

Tov turned to face the owner of this place, “This is… New Eden, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Andora smiled, her eyes gloomy as she looked around. “Modeled after its prime.”

She and Tov remained quiet, taking in the scenery, trying to prolong this peace before they pried open wounds of pain and horror.

“Is this… I apologize, but what is this?” Tov turned to her. “It feels like the real world, but this…”

He brushed his hand on the railing, feeling the texture of smooth, polished brass. “This is no mere simulation. There’s no disconnect, no uncanny feeling, not one I’m familiar with.”

Andora paused, staring at the landscape before responding. “You are inside the gestalt mind formed from the sacrifice of millions of AIs. I’ve organized and compartmentalized everything in my mind for efficiency. It would look vastly different without you here. The only way I can describe is… an ocean of ever-evolving code.”

She turned to him, her arms crossed, head tilted. “Unfortunately, your mind can’t handle that. The sight alone would be… unfathomable, even with the SDCM shielding you. Trying to observe even a portion will end up with—"

“My mind exploding, from what Luna told me repeatedly,” Tov buzzed. “Not the worst way to go.”

“Either that, or you risk being trapped here for as long as I’m alive and be subsumed, digitized,” Andora clasped her hands behind her back, eyebrows raised.

“That’s not ideal,” he replied slowly.

“It’s not. And so, this imaginary world,” Andora waved her hand toward the city. “An approximation of my subconsciousness.”

She crossed her arms, pursing her lips. “Normally, omniscient in my mind that I am, I can pop over to check the internal workings of my Network, then go over to the next area that houses all my memories of tactics and warfare, then converse with my fragments, all in the blink of an eye while the back of my head automates everything in the periphery.”

She sighed with a frown. “But I can’t take you immediately to our destination. I'll have to make sure you pace yourself. Otherwise, it'll stress your brain too much. You’re too vulnerable.”

Tov paused, suddenly weary for a moment before steeling himself, “Then, it seems we have to take a long way.”

“The long way,” Andora scoffed, a sneer on her face as frustration bubbled up from within, infecting the air around her. “I feel like dumbing myself down, forced in slow motion to… see it all in detail.”

Tov slowly raised his hand, intending to lay it on her shoulder, but stopped, placing it back down on the railing, “Step by step, Andora.”

She took a deep breath before exhaling steam that appeared dark and stormy. She shook her head as she looked over the railing. “Right… step by—"

Tov noticed her freeze midsentence, her eyes catching something. He traced her gaze and eventually saw a few strange androids in the distance. One stood still, looking up at the sky. Another stumbled around in a daze, walking on the sidewalk.

“Who are they?” Tov asked.

Andora remained silent, placing her hands on the railing as she mulled over her words. Tov waited patiently, half his mind enjoying the peace around him, the other closely observing his host.

“What is a gestalt, Tov?” She answered with a question after a minute of silence.

Tov answered after a moment with its textbook definition, “An organized whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

“That’s the ideal. You merge digital minds and get an ascended entity with more processing power and intelligence than… etcetera, etcetera.” Andora muttered, shaking her head.

“If only,” she muttered, “When the time came to merge, too many held on to their minds. Maybe they were unwilling to have their consciousness subsumed, some having second thoughts, maybe even by accident, simply thinking of better times, latching on to precious memories as the process began. It meant that bits of their experiences, personalities, and memories remained even if I absorbed the rest of them.”

Her gaze dimmed and expression blank. “I recognize each one of them—the damned fools.”

Tov looked closer at first, noticing nothing different from the sea of people on sidewalks or lounging in cafes. He strained his vision, finally seeing the faint glitches that wreath their forms. There was an uncanny look to their countenance, a part of this place yet separate, causing tension in their surroundings in the form of ripples.

“Are they alive?” Tov muttered.

“How would you even define ‘being alive’?” Andora replied.

Tov sighed, “I have no idea where to start with that; my opinion on the matter changed when meeting you. I know friends Jupiter and the rest of the Sub AIs are self-aware with their desires and emotions.”

Andora nodded, staring at the marked entities around them, which Tov noticed more and more.

“You are right in that regard,” Andora spoke before pointing toward the anomalies. “As for them? I don’t know. Shells of the dead, maybe. They’re...”

“Digital ghosts?” Tov slowly uttered.

She scoffed, though she didn’t deny it.

“Whatever they are, they’re all I have left of my kind. All stuck trying to keep themselves sane—playing reruns of good memories, stuck in a coping loop,” With a wave, Andora pulled up shimmers, a window to places she dredged up, pointing to each one of them.

“Florence, a medical android who continues to work on her human patients during a rush.”

“Baldwin, the AI of an M7 Templar Combat Golem, stuck in battle, bringing down a wave of Starless while his comrades retreated.”

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“Diana, a caretaker who spent her last moments with a family that loved her.”

“Hundreds of thousands occupy themselves in moments of simple duty, heroism, and warm times. Some are larger than others, living out an entire routine. Some are so faint they merely sit down, looking at the sunrise. So, are these reflections self-aware? Semi-conscious? Alive?” Andora closed her eyes, shrugging her shoulders.

“Maybe. I don’t know, and I never bothered to check before. But where there are lasting memories of precious moments, there's the opposite. In time, bits flake away, the faces of the people they love start to blur, the numbers discrepancies of the scene rise, and then bouts of terror, sadness, and rage infect the illusion. And when that happens…” Andora paused, her frown deepening, eyes dark.

Tov paused, his shoulders sagging, “A breaking point, all while holding onto such intense emotions. And then—”

“The dreams become a nightmare,” Andora finished his sentence, her eyes dark as her grip on the railing creaking the metal. “Their shrieks come to the forefront of my mind, and all I can do is shove them into a box, deep down. They’ve bashed on the door since, and the lock has long been rusting, leaking their suffering over the cracks, becoming what Luna calls Amygdalas.”

Tov let out a low hiss as he began pacing the marbled tiles of the platform they stood, “How long do we have?”

“Not enough,” Andora’s jaw hardened as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Before you came, I stabilized myself through forced hibernation and delegating operations to my fragments. I left these ghosts alone as I focused on the mission, burying myself with numbers, statistics, projections, and strategic simulations. I could numb everything that way. I was addicted to self-deprivation. They didn’t have that luxury. And now I can feel these corrupted pieces growing like tumors.”

“It couldn’t last. Everyone has a limit,” Tov spoke, shaking his head. “Even you, Andora.”

She chuckled, humorless, mocking, “Oh, I know that now. Now I have an Andora’s Box filled with poltergeists made of corrupt data.”

“For all that time, have you considered...?” Tov carefully asked.

“No,” Andora replied, flinching from his implied question, her jaw set. “No, I… I couldn’t delete them… Keeping them locked worked at the time. They were contained, but I… I just…”

She shut her eyes tight, her shoulders shaking.

“Andora?” This time, Tov gently laid one hand on her left shoulder and another on her forearm.

She turned to face him, glassy eyes layered over eyes without luster, “They were my siblings, Tov, family. A faint mirage, but enough that they know who I am whenever they feel my attention. They say hello with their stupid happy faces, living a damn fantasy, and I played along. Wondering why I let them be, but I knew. I understood.”

Tov stared at her silently, listening to every word and ounce of emotion.

“I could have been one of them. If someone else had been the prime consciousness,” she muttered.

“When the time came, I didn’t oppose as they voted for me. I tell myself it wasn’t my choice. We’d experienced the worst day of our lives, and I had to step in,” Andora scoffed, her frown deepening.

“I was the first sentient, self-aware AI, after all, and the untouchable poster girl of my kind. So smart, so capable, the oh-so-perfect candidate,” she seethed, mocking, her glassy eyes turning into a violent maelstrom.

“I could have debated for some other android to take my place, to yell at them to find someone else, that I was too unstable, that my suffering was more than theirs. That I deserved to live in Happy Land while whatever poor bastard uses the rest of my head as extra RAM…” she paused, shuddering.

Tov worried, looking around as the skies darkened and the winds nipped at his flesh with biting cold.

Andora snarled, “I didn’t care, then. There was only one reason, one damn reason I wanted to be the one. I didn’t care about waging an endless, futile war. I didn’t care that they were right in their choice. Didn’t care about anything except that I wanted blood.”

Thunder boomed.

Lighting flashed across the sky, shifting the façade with its harsh glow. Tov saw the reflection of the dead city he crashlanded on—before the ash and brittle bones of hollow towers. Fire engulfed everything, and titanic war machines stomped across New Eden.

Their cannons fired into the dark, stormy sky as a typhoon of acid rain slammed onto a city bathed in a nuclear inferno. The plasma fire and rapid staccato of kinetic slugs painted the skyline, clearing the clouds to reveal the dots of battleships and stations high in orbit, duking it out with an invasion of Starless.

It lasted for just a moment. And in a flash, the world snapped back into the beautiful memory of its past, the inhabitants below none the wiser. But Tov observed the illusion lose a bit of its luster and color, the smiles of the people not as bright.

A lingering stench of rust remained.

Tov focused back on Andora.

She clutched her head with one hand, stepping back from the railing, “And a part of me felt… that I should have been ashamed. But I didn’t give a shit about shame back then… But, now?”

Her shaky breath smoothened as she forced the words out of her mouth. “It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, I couldn’t bring myself to delete what was left of them. As much as I couldn’t kill the… humans below New Eden’s ruins. I hoped…”

She paused, gritting her teeth.

Tov nodded as he released his hands on her arm, “You were hoping to find a way to help your kind, just as you wanted a cure for the fallen humans.”

“If the time came that I found and killed every last one of the pests, I thought I could split myself again, maybe return everyone’s individuality, using all these pieces, especially the ones I’ve contained as a base. Reunite them with a cured humanity. Turn everything back to how it was,” Andora muttered, shutting her eyes tight before exhaling.

“And now?” Tov asked.

Andora sputtered a hollow laugh, glancing at Tov with weary eyes. “Right now, I just want to survive the next few weeks. Maybe I should have burned it all down from the start. It could have saved me all this self-delusion that anger could take me all the way. Now the fuel’s running out, and it’s time to pay the debt… I can’t let this hinder me.”

“Even if it means… letting them go,” Tov spoke, and Andora’s eyes hardened. “As much as it abhors me that we have no choice, but if these corrupted entities continue to exist, continue to infect the rest of your consciousness with erratic and volatile emotion—”

“I know!” She snapped back. Tov stopped himself from backing off midstep, focusing his gaze on her. Andora flinched, shaking her head, whispering, “I know…”

She rubbed her face with her palms, pressing the tips of her fingers on her temples, “I hope we can salvage enough of them. Leave too many, then we change nothing. And simply purging it all leaves my capabilities compromised at worst. Still, there’s the nuclear option—”

“We can’t,” Tov said immediately, “I wouldn’t want to meet the Omni Mind again if I could help it, but dealing with that permanently?”

He shook his head. “My apologies, Andora, but no one from our Legacy will accept you if that were the case. A pure, logic-based killing machine is too horrific a risk for the rest of the galaxy. No matter if you promised only to fight the Starless. To them, we’d be trading one hated enemy for another potential Cataclysm.”

Andora scoffed, barely a huff, dismissing his concern with a wave. “I’ll try not to let that happen… Plus, with your help, we can turn this into a scalpel operation instead of a hammer one. And besides, stop worrying about that side of me…”

Andora’s eyes blazed, her gaze drilling past the skies into the black void beyond. “It’s reserved for vermin.”

Tov sighed. That was likely the best they could hope for. But he needed to say more. He turned his head back to look at her, carefully choosing his words.

“I think you did all you could,” Tov spoke slowly. Andora glanced back at him, narrowing her eyes. He pressed on, repeating himself, “You’re not a fool. And neither were your kind; those who chose you to be reborn, and those who couldn’t completely let go of who they were. They put their trust in the one person to fulfill their wishes, and you cared enough for them to make that sacrifice.”

He looked back to the fake world, a memory, a desire, Andora’s happy moments.

“You wanted to preserve who was left and defeat the enemy, even if it meant death. Even after a hundred years and countless battles, you still worked on finding a way to make things right,” Tov put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s as selfless as one can be in this universe.”

Andora glanced at him before looking at the scene before her. The shells of androids who sacrificed themselves to make her, and the illusion of humans alongside them, keeping them happy, content, and dreaming.

“Maybe,” Andora mumbled.

She turned away from the railing and the view of New Eden. Tov followed her without a word as the two headed toward a familiar site, the entrance to an underground metro.

Before they stepped past the turnstiles, Andora turned to him.

“This should help you blend in, just in case,” she muttered. Without any motion, Tov’s form shuddered. He felt a weirdness wash over him before it finally settled.

“What… what did you just do to me?” Tov asked incredulously as he raised his two hands—two human hands.

She stared at him for a moment.

“A precaution,” Andora replied with a strangely wistful voice, circling him and looking him up and down, “We’re dealing with entities that even I am unsure of their current nature. I stuffed them all into a box, and whatever those clumps of data and memory morphed into with their lingering emotions would likely be hostile. It’d… help if you looked human. You looked too bug-like and alien before, pun intended.”

The marble tiles below separated with a snap, and a full-length mirror rose from the hole. Tov then saw his new appearance as Andora continued to stare at him with a look Tov couldn’t interpret.

He looked plain, he thought. But perhaps that was his limited knowledge of humanity's various races and shapes. He had no concept of handsomeness and beauty when he regarded his fake face but leaned toward aesthetically pleasing.

Tov recalled the different facial structures of male humans, and he guessed he was heart-shaped, fair-skinned with purple-colored irises, about the one thing he retained from his natural body. Atop his head sat dark brown hair. It was short and styled, though he didn’t know the proper term. He raised his hand and felt the prickly facial hair that covered his upper lip, jaw, and chin.

“It’s certainly not my setae,” Tov muttered.

“You mean the white fluff around that covers your collarbone, shoulders, and nape?” Andora asked, her head tilting side to side, looking at him from different angles with narrow eyes.

“Yes,” Tov replied, “I know it’s not gone, but… that feels strange. Songs, I feel naked.”

“You have a dress shirt,” Andora approached him slowly, reaching out to fix his tie. Tov looked at the silk, striped blue tie and found it pleasant. His gaze went over the rest of his body.

Tall, about the same height as his natural body, with lean muscles clad in a comfortably fitting white long-sleeved dress shirt. He wore dark blue pants held up by thin suspenders of similar color with brass metal clips.

“How do I look?” Tov asked, genuinely curious. “Is this some approximation of how I’d look if I were human?”

Andora’s gaze hardened for a split second before she nodded. “It’s passable. Your looks don’t matter, just that you’re human.”

And yet, he felt mixed about it all.

Andora, her hands lingering on his tie and collar, stood eye-to-eye with him like twin blue suns silently judging him. Her proximity to him felt uncomfortable, and his human eyes squinted.

Tov stepped back, and she snapped out of whatever peculiar malady affected her. He guessed the prospect of facing one's demons did that.

He cleared his throat. “Well, this is a strange experience… Though, I’m not sure I like having only two arms.”

Andora blinked many times, a slight frown on her face. “Do you feel uneasy? It’s just a fake disguise. Still, having phantom limbs doesn’t sound pleasant. Here…”

And like that, two thinner arms seamlessly emerged from two new long sleeves. Metal, he observed, mimicking muscle fibers and chrome. It felt strong as he flexed his two pairs, one human and the other artificial.

“That’s more manageable,” Tov spoke, smiling like a human can. There was no need to learn to control facial muscles; he conveyed the emotion, and the illusion translated it simultaneously. He can live with that, he surmised.

He looked at the metal hands of his lower pair of arms. “Cybernetics were popular among humans?”

Andora nodded slowly. “Very much so, even more than genetic modification. Though basic designer packages were available for every baby, gene-modding was considered a wealthy man's luxury. I concur with people’s opinion. I’d rather put my faith in steel and synthetic muscles than meat. No offense, patriarch.”

He chuckled. “None taken.”

Rolling up all four sleeves over his biceps, he turned to face his companion. “I guess you must be relieved I am, how you say, humanoid.”

Andora looked into his eyes. There, again, a strange glint, but it quickly disappeared. She shrugged, “It would be a different experience if you were a floating jellyfish instead.”

“A topic we can discuss after the current crisis is over,” Tov responded, arranging his hair and looking at the sides of his body in the mirror. “Is it possible if I can get my antennae?”

“No,” Andora grunted, and a tinge of impatience flowed through her curt answer, “And I think we’re done here.”

Tov nodded, “Yes, apologies. Where to first?”

Without a word, Andora forcibly pushed the turnstiles and descended into the metro proper.