> They’ve never terminated an overmind until the end of a contest before! All instruments active. Record everything you can.

>

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

“Meghan?”

I recognize the voice.

“Meghan, can you… talk?”

The voice sounds concerned.

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

“Alright, how about move? Can you move your hand?”

Ignore the patterns.

The voice doesn’t go away.

It continues to cajole me. I don’t know what it wants, but it sounds worried.

Don’t want it.

Trick.

For all my determination to ignore it, however, eventually I realize that something is different. It’s been just me, alone, for so long. The very concept of a trick… there must be another to do the tricking.

I’m not… alone?

In spite of myself, I can’t help but be curious.

“That’s it! Good girl, Meghan! I saw that finger move! I’m asking the system to try to repair the active portions of your brain. She took a full scan before she started but… She made some changes and she refuses to revert them. Says she can’t!”

The voice sounds furious.

I don’t like that.

Anger is too close to pain.

I don’t want more pain.

I freeze, trying to ignore the voice, even as it continues talking.

“I’m trying to get her to do something. Anything. There has to be some wiggle room. She should at least be able to tell what parts of your brain are activating and lean harder on the connections farther away from those!”

Abruptly, the patterns start making sense.

I think about what I’ve heard so far, confused.

Meghan.

Is that… me?

That seems right.

Then… the voice isn’t angry at me! It’s angry at… the system?

The realization unlocks some memories. The system, the Maffiyir, the… the voice belongs to someone who thought the system was going to die, right before this started. It sounds like the system is still alive?

I was the one who was nearly killed.

But… wait! If I know this person, maybe it hasn’t been forever.

I try to ask “How long?”

I feel strongly that talking is something I’m capable of, but it doesn’t work. I feel strange sensations from my… body? Oh, I do have a body. I don’t hear any new noises. I need to know how long it’s been! Why can’t I talk?

How long?!

The mostly-quiet room is suddenly full of noise.

“Mommy!”

“Meghan!”

“Mom!”

I feel pressure again, but not the awful, awful pressure I endured for so long. This is soft and warm. The voices are familiar. Could it be…? I try to talk, but once again fail. I want to reach out to them.

Family?

“It’s us, Meghan! It’s me, Vince. And Cassie, and Micah, and Gavin. We’re all here. It’s been three days. Oh, thank God.”

Those names sound familiar. Could it really be? Three… days? It felt so long, but I think days are short. Three is definitely a small number. The voice sounds… male. Is male a thing? I think male is a thing. It sounds sad and shaky. Maybe desperate?

“She woke up about a minute ago.”

“Why didn’t you wake us immediately?!”

“I wanted to see if she was responsive first. Clearly there’s something still in there, but I don’t think she can talk. I’m not even sure if she understood me at first.”

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“Well, make the damn system fix her!”

“I’m trying. She says she’s working on it, but she’s being far too slow for my taste.”

“Why?! You said Meghan’s Novelty is already maxed out for the week. She’ll die if she goes to a Challenge like this. What’s the system going to do then, huh?!”

“Lose control of a fifth of the subsystems she has left, I imagine. She’s worried if she messes with the bond too much, it will do the same thing, though.”

“That’s a risk! Meghan’s death is a sure thing if the system doesn’t get its fucking ass in gear and-”

“Mom!” This voice is high. “You did Announcements. Can you see your Eidetic Memory?”

“Oh, brilliant plan, Micah!” The first voice again. “Meghan, please try?”

I don’t know what they’re talking about, but I focus on doing what they ask and am suddenly, pleasantly surprised to have… memories. A lot of them are very dry things, charts and reference pages and handwritten sheets of phrases and pronunciations, but a lot of them aren’t.

A little girl, snuggling in my lap as I read to her, holding a stuffed turtle.

Cassie and Pointy.

A laughing child, hanging from the ceiling as he swings himself in front of me and shouts “Boo!”

Gavin.

A serious boy, scolding me for filling his backpack by hand instead of using Telekinesis.

Micah.

A husky whisper in my ear as hands slip onto the top of my hips.

Vince.

My family.

They’re not gone after all.

I realize I could save my recent memories for permanent recall. I immediately reject the idea. I’m still confused, but things are becoming clearer, and the person I feel like now isn’t the person I am in my crystal-clear memories.

I like the person I remember much better.

I dive in and out of my memories, trying to glean everything I can.

Every errant remembered thought is a trail marker that can lead me to a trove of hints about the person I once was.

Every careless remembered action gives me a pattern to try to force my muscles to follow.

“Aaaargchl…”

I can’t replicate what I did in my memories, but it’s a relief to see that I can access my body’s muscles at all. That wasn’t even close to the words I’d been trying to say, but making a vocalization at all was encouraging. I’ll keep working on it. For now, though, I do what I did before. It seemed to work. An Announcement?

What happened?

Pointy - I remember who she is now - gives a short little growl. “Hmf! Well, do you remember Cassie’s Specialty?”

It takes me a second to access the correct saved memories.

Yes.

“The system decided to use your daughter and me as experimental subjects. She wanted to see if she could develop a nonstandard sapient-to-AI link that still fulfilled the tethering criteria necessary for our continued existence. She… succeeded, I suppose.” Pointy’s voice is bitter.

I dive into all my memories of Cassie. She’s a stubborn and bossy little girl, but also incredibly sweet and small. My remembered self would die for her in a heartbeat. The idea that someone put Cassie in danger fills me with anger.

She risked Cassie’s life?!

“She claims the majority of the risk was to me, but… yes.”

“Meghan! I’m furious too, but be careful! Don’t hurt yourself!” Strong hands grab me. I’d been thrashing around and hadn’t even realized. “Stupid bitch immediately decided to risk your life too. You got your Specialty not twenty minutes afterward, and the system used it to set you up for this.”

I’m… linked to the system?

Pointy answers: “You and four others. She had six nodes she needed to fill, and twelve people ready to attempt to link. Unfortunately…”

“It was a fucking dangerous procedure,” Vince cuts in. “Four of the people she tried to link up to died, three failed to connect, and until just now, we were worried that the rest of you had been turned into vegetables. She tried to fry your goddamn brain.”

“The brain-frying was… unintentional. Calm down, Vince! I’m not trying to excuse it, but I need to explain, don’t I?”

My husband grunts.

“What she did… has never been done before. Normally, the process of transferring a node link is very controlled, and there’s no way she could have just swapped you in for the intended target. However, in the moment of the swap, there is a second where she’s linked to no one. In this time, she deployed changes to allow alternate node access, via the method she tested with Cassie and me. Giving you - and the others - Specialties let her prepare you to connect with the node the moment the path became available. By the time the Maffiyir company tried to connect, the link node was ‘occupied.’”

None of that sounds like an explanation for what I’d experienced. When I dove into my Eidetic Memories, they seemed like a totally different world, a different universe than the hellscape I’d dwelt in.

It hurt. Why?

Pointy sighs. “Linked users usually have a dedicated data channel. It’s not used for anything except to verify vital status, identity, and authority. You can’t even send most commands or communication through it directly. You have to pass the commands through another channel and then verify them.

“You’re not connected in the regular way. As part of verifying identity, the node has a link to a complex biometric database, and she connected you through that. As soon as you were in, she re-routed the datastreams, but she didn’t find any way to avoid leaving them on during the connection process. You experienced nearly four nanoseconds of her interactions with that database.”

Four… nanoseconds? That eternity I’d endured had only been four nanoseconds? That made zero sense!

Can’t be! It took much longer. MUCH longer.

A hand squeezes mine.

Pointy’s voice sounds troubled. “You… remember? You experienced that? She had hoped that the overload of data would simply make you black out until you’d processed it.”

Yes.

“I’m surprised you haven’t lost your mind!”

Think I did. The person I feel like and the one I remember being in Eidetic Memories… Not the same.

Vince’s grip on my hand tightens further. “We’ll help you. You’ll recover.”

“Yeah! I’m going to be able to fix anything.”

That last bit is Gavin’s voice. He sounds a little desperate, and as shaky as my sense of self is, that still hurts to hear. I reach for a distraction, a change of topic.

So… System is ours now?

“Not… exactly.” Pointy sighs. “First of all, she lost control of some of the of the system to the new AI, and the new AI won’t accept any non-standard data packets from her. It’s refusing all communication, essentially. Probably a measure to keep the new AI from being ‘corrupted’ like she was. She has control of the vast majority of functions, especially what she’s calling core functionality, but the new one has some of the… add-ons, like Challenge and Titan spawns.”

Great.

“You have no idea how happy I am to hear your sarcasm,” Vince says.

“A positive sign, indeed,” Pointy agrees. “But yes, it is unfortunate that the system lost control of some of the most lethal aspects of the Maffiyir. Additionally, she is still constrained by her core programming. She can be a little more proactive, since she doesn’t need to fear retribution from leadership, but the restrictions on her remain identical to what they were before.”

If I were in control of my muscles, my eyes would have widened.