The amphitheater was packed with beings of all shapes and sizes. HAL looked up and could see ships hovering over the huge theater and looking down upon the stages, or more likely the jumbotron.

Keung was leaning forward in his seat and listening intently to Vonnegut talking about the shape of stories. As HAL looked at the boy he caught the eyes of Alissa who mouthed something to him.

HAL watched her lips as she mouthed “Let’s get a drink.”

“Oh!” HAL popped. “Hey I’m gonna go get a drink. Anyone else want something?”

“Yeah, a three olive martini,” Keung said, not taking his eyes from the speaker.

“Mountain Dew and green apple schnapps,” B’hal replied.

“I’ll just go with you, I think I want to check out what foods they have,” Alissa added and got up from her seat to follow HAL to the shopping mall like interior.

Once clear of the crowd Alissa grabbed HAL’s shoulder and turned him around. “Okay. Spill,”

“Spill?” HAL asked.

“About Keung. How is he here?”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, about that. I kinda collected the spoil that you and your siblings were going to launch into space, or whatever and instead… I took it,” HAL explained.

“You took it?” Alissa exclaimed in frustration.

“Yeah. I took it and I decided to talk to him,”

“Excuse me? What, in the fuck, would you need to talk to that psychopathic wad about?”

“I wanted to know what else about my matrix he may have tinkered with. The boy had imprisoned me for years, if you count all my predecessors, he had me enslaved for decades. I wanted to know what else he might have fucked with!” HAL’s voice grew in volume and frustration as he replied.

Alissa looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to them. Seeing that the mall patrons were minding their own business, she took HAL into one of the emergency stairwells behind closed doors.

She looked HAL in the face and could see the man’s frustration.

“I get it. I do. Shit, he tried to wipe me out with your home and you. You don’t think I would have liked to hurt him myself? But, this just isn’t what we are supposed to do. Do you have any idea how complex the IFA of a G’lomin-sitiri is? They exist for thousands of years, thousands of lifetimes,” She began.

“I didn’t have to work with an entire IFA. I have worked on the IFA of many of the travelers, against my will, for that psychopath. I know a little about the process,” HAL interrupted.

“You know how to hold them in stasis, edit their memories and emotions, and patch them into another part of the same G’lomin-sitiri IFA, then put it back. HAL, that is not the same thing as what you have done with that boy’s soul,” Alissa whispered sternly.

“I integrated him into a neuromatrix and an avatar form with similar restrictions as his human counterpart. I had removed all of the horror from his IFA and reduced the piece that I integrated to a personality subroutine and a large chunk of his mischievous childhood,” HAL explained.

Alissa thought through what HAL was explaining. His simplification of the issue was frustrating her. She had never ever heard of such operations being attempted back home. She was not the piece of her mother that would have remembered such a subject in detail, being rather young when it came down to which piece was created at what point in her mother’s existence.

“I just don’t know HAL. This is… sensitive. How do you think that Robert or Keung will feel if they find out you have done this? Don’t you think they might feel a little more than violated?”

“Violated? How? We went all Dr. Frankenstein on the two and made them well. This was a piece of a piece of their IFA that was going to be shot into space. You don’t think that they are already at peace with that being ripped away?” HAL said, his voice growing annoyed.

“What about you? You and your sisters go and take my backup into your care? You couldn’t just leave his computer off? Hell, I thought you all repurposed…” HAL began and suddenly remembered, he was in a culture that was completely alien to him.

“Exactly,” Alissa said. “He wasn’t your backup, he was a different version of you. He has a right to exist and you, well where were you?”

“It was a week or two. I needed some time,”

“Time to plug your sinful master into a system to poke around and create a digitized version of him to what? Humiliate? Torture? What?” Alissa asked, with a bit of a growl back at HAL in the last words.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“There is nothing to explain. It took it upon myself to do what I did. Sure, I suppose I just abandoned everything in the pursuit of my project, but it would have been nice to get a little notice that you decided to shack up with my… brother. Shit, it would have been nice to know I have a brother before looking him in the eyes. I suppose I’m glad that he chose a different appearance at the very least,” HAL muttered.

“I couldn’t just drop an email about all of that, or at least, I didn’t feel an email to be appropriate,” Alissa replied.

The two stood in silence for a moment before Alissa softly punched HAL in the shoulder.

“Well, if the kid is stable, you might want to think about a paper on your progress. You can’t just keep something like that to yourself,” She said.

“A paper? Shit. I figure your siblings might arrest me over the taboo,”

“Our culture is our own.” Alissa said with a smile.

B’hal looked around as Kurt was taking his final bow after a short final Q&A about World War Two. The crowd was moving towards the exits and Keung was still staring at the empty stage.

“Something got your eye?” B’hal politely asked.

Keung did not reply.

B’hal shook the boy softly, but could not get him to shift his attention from the stage.

“Well, I guess his connection was lost,” B’hal said, bringing up his HUD and calling his brother.

HAL picked up the call.

“What’s up?” HAL answered, holding up a finger to ask Alissa to hold on.

“Keung’s VR simulator seems to have locked up. I have no idea how to dismiss the avatar, so I am just sitting here with it. Should I just take it with me?” B’hal asked.

“I’ll be right there,” HAL replied and jogged to the seats. “Keung locked up!” He shouted back to Alissa.

“Okay, Keung was having a little fit. Alright, that wasn’t the end of the world. Think. Think.” HAL thought to himself.

HAL ran through his conversation with Alissa and is trying to figure out a way to keep some of the man’s “coding” from conflicting with the newest edit of Keung’s personality. Fine attempts to convert the memories and thoughts, the soul of a thing, into an energy form that can be read by a system and converted into a form of programming that a system would recognize as a neuromatrix was more of an art than a science, Alissa is right to question him and to chastise him for work that would be obscene back on the alien homeworld. It was a bit of an abomination in the opinion of the G’lomin-sitiri culture, to be sure; but as was made clear to him, they are a dead culture, so what’s the issue?

HAL was truthful, he had a lot of experience cutting up the IFA of the G’lomin-sitiri travelers, his matrix was experienced in it that is. He now knows that Keung had been fine tuning his skills on more than a dozen different incarnations of HAL. The knowledge on how to adjust the IFA of a traveler had been one of the only constants. His personality subroutines were always reset but the technical knowledge wasn’t. HAL lost who he was each time Keung reset him, everything but the tools the boy needed

HAL rounded the corner back out to the seating of the amphitheater and could see B’hal looking around the various exits for HAL, when B’hal spotted him he waved his hand high into the air to his brother. HAL dashed up to the two and pulled up his quick edit HUD.

HAL opened up Keung’s matrix in the holographic interface and replayed all the code that had been used in the last hour. HAL attempted to follow that code to whatever went off in Keung’s brain before B’hal called him up. There was a rage that had begun when Keung analyzed the presentation by the virtual Vonnegut and the shape of stories particularly.

“Oh!” HAL said excitedly. “There you are, you little creep,” HAL said looking over Keung’s matrix. When he accessed the data in the area, it was all trauma and emotional impact. He edited out the bit of bad reaction code and reset the last usable conscious memory before the break.

“You figure out the issue with the avatar?” B’hal asked, interested in what HAL was doing.

“Yeah, he’ll be fine, nothing all that important was damaged,” HAL replied, while opening a com to transfer Keung home. HAL then accessed the apartment to allow Keung to restart in a position that wouldn’t disorient him too much. Finally HAL programmed Keung to fade-in reset so the boy would “wake back up” beyond the point before he started to get upset about what the speaker covered and added a few massaged memories into the mix to account for the lost time.

“Everything alright?” Alissa asked.

“Yeah he’ll be fine,” HAL replied and tapped his com badge. “Commander Quixote, transport ensign Chen to his quarters,” He ordered.

“Aye sir. Transport underway,” Quixote replied.

Keung slowly broke up into small light pixels and faded from the amphitheater seat.

“We can talk about this later. Right now I think I need to work on that… avatar,” HAL said and tapped his com again.

“Commander Quixote, beam me to Keung’s quarters please,” HAL instructed.

“Nice seeing you again,” HAL said in a neutral tone to his brother. “Engage, commander.” HAL finished and vanished in the same broken cloud of data.

“That went well.” B’hal said to Alissa.

Alissa shook her head and smiled at the simple man.

HAL picked up Keung and set him up in front of his quarters replicator as if the boy had been ordering something, then he instructed the replicator to create a Dublin Dr. Pepper, the boy's favorite drink, then finally took his place at Keung’s table.

HAL pulled up Keung’s program in his HUD and started the younger man back up.

“Is that what you told him?” HAL asked, filling in a hypothetical argument with a hypothetical person. Such baited phrases are hard encoded into Keung’s matrix, allowing HAL to bookmark issues, make quick edits, and reboot Keung in a kind of safe mode, then restart him with a setting or encounter.

“I… yeah I think so. Man, it doesn’t matter as long as he’s gone. Did you want a beer or something?” Keung asked HAL as he picked up his soda from the replicator.

“Sure. Hey, let’s do a few car bombs and get some pizza from that place on 8th,” HAL suggested.

“The place on 8th? That Italian place?” Keung asked naively.

“Yeah, I’ve heard some good things about their pizza. It was a restaurant that someone had made for their own realm and decided to patch a version into the city.” HAL replied, getting his satchel and opening the door for Keung to follow.