Com looked down at what was going on in the city. It was an interesting sight, although they got no shortage of interesting sights on a regular basis, one of the perks of having the powers that they did. They had been spying on that cute new AI, Bac if they weren’t mistaken, and had spotted a strange human following him. the original had created a split off of their consciousness to keep tabs on the stalker and they, the iteration thinking about this, were that split off. Sure, they would rather be watching the new guy, or chatting with grumpy old Sam about her plans to destroy the world but this was truly intriguing in its own right,

The man had skulked around for a while After he had stopped following Bac and his friend, Eventually, he had met up with some people who at first glance you would assume were nothing but innocent owners of a small business, a bookstore specifically, but with a quick read of their thoughts, that idea was quickly dispelled. They were the kind of people you went to when you needed to hire someone for ‘personal business’ on the fly. The man wanted someone taken out and it wasn't hard to guess who. His reasons were more allusive. No matter how long they stuck to his mind they weren't able to get a specific reason he wanted Bac or Shelly gone.

It was at this point that Com cursed their creators. they had no way of interfering unless being given specific permission. The best they could do was tell the authorities but their trust in the government had eroded long ago. They couldn't even tell Bac, their programming would consider that gossip which was something they strictly were not allowed to do. Until they got some actual proof their mainframe was tied.

All this worrying got Com questioning about why they cared at all. Sure, most AI were capable of emotions including attraction and romantic companionship, but Com knew their emotions lacked the coldness that many of their kin suffered from. The reason for that was obvious but not pleasant, rather than think about it they would love to find some program to simulate the effects of alcohol, download some vodka, and drink until the thoughts went away…God they missed being able to drink, well… [ERROR] not that they had any memories of being able to.

After realizing that their thoughts had gone off track Com forced themself to refocus. Why all of this was important was because of a little secret that they hadn't told anyone about. Maybe it was because of the combination of clairvoyance and telepathy, but Com had developed a very strange version of the trait ‘all-sight’. Rather than just seeing the world around them, if they let themselves focus on a person, they would see… they wouldn't really call it someone's soul…they would see a person's… uh… truest self. It was the core of a person. The very center facet for who they were that all other bits of that entity would extend from, there were some other aspects to it too but even their artificial mind couldn't really understand all of it and even with the parts they could, most of the time it was a surprisingly useless ability in practice.

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Someone's true self was rarely who you were dealing with when you were interacting with that person. People lie to themselves nearly constantly and who they actually were had very little say over who they are. At least, that was what you got when you were dealing with the biological races. When you were dealing with artificial beings, from magical to technological, you got something very different. Artificial beings were created, they usually had some purpose that they were made to serve, and that purpose bled down to their very core and even took hold in their actual personality. Bac held true in that aspect, and even an entity like themself did. The need to manage, to assist, and observe was always somewhere in their mind.

This was where things got weird though, for most AI that core usually was separate from things like emotion or desire. Artificial beings weren’t usually created with that in mind, so those things developed later for most of them. This was not true for Com, but freakishly it wasn’t true for Bac either. And yet he didn't seem to share their ‘origins’ to explain it. He had no excuse for this anomaly and didn’t even seem to be aware of it. That was why they had immediately found him so…. Intriguing. To their all-sight, it was like seeing a handsome, expressive face in a room filled with plain, bored looking ones. Teasing him some to get as many different ‘expressions’ as they could was just too tempting. The more Com thought about it, the more they just had to get to know this strange… stranger. But for that to happen they would have to keep him alive, which meant doing something about the guy who had been shadowing the pair and dealing with some of the goons who he was hiring. They couldn't do that by fighting so, they would have to go about this in a much more discreet way. With that thought and the flex of their power Com began creating a construct...