Elaine didn't need to bother with the ladder that Teddy had in the entrance to... a dead Archon's internal nexus. She didn't need to bother with the walkways that were rather awkwardly clipped to the underside of a steel mesh floor. But she clung to those small things, feeling like this was a place that people were not meant to go. She had survived hard vacuum, been very nearly lost in space... but she also knew that if the door closed on this place, there was no way out, not for all of her skills and abilities. And unlike the Blackhat's Armory... Administrator's, she corrected herself, there was no all-powerful entity in complete control of what was happening.

Elaine Many was a master of the outside world, able to go places and do things no one else could. But she was not a master of this place, and neither was Teddy. More than the wastes, she held a paranoia that there were monsters here she could not defeat, monsters that only had to drag her to the edge of the world and throw her off, and she would be lost forever.

As she and Teddy waited by the second ladder, the one that led onto the actual platform, for Anna to work her way up the ladder, she couldn't help asking. "So what happens if you, say, throw something off the edge? Does it disappear?"

"It loops," replied Teddy, who was uncharacteristically interested in watching her reaction to things. "Drop it off the bottom and it comes back on the top."

"Really? Fully intact and everything?" When he nodded, she considered. "Did you ever try jumping?"

"I... no." Teddy gave her a look. "If I fell more than about ten feet I'd hurt myself. You do remember that humans get hurt, right?"

"Right... I knew that," Elaine felt a blush come over her, but fought it back. "It just... doesn't seem that far. And the gravity is a little lighter..."

"Low gravity means you accelerate slower," pointed out Jim from just behind Anna. "You still reach the same speed over the same distance."

Elaine started to apologize, but stopped as she ran the numbers in her head. "No," she said. "You definitely don't land as hard. For fixed acceleration, and zero starting speed... kinetic energy gained over distance is proportional to the acceleration.

The three of them looked at her. After a minute, Teddy's normally morose face twisted into a grin. "I like having you around," he said out of nowhere. "You make things make sense."

Elaine couldn't fight back the blush this time, and instead took the ladder up without responding. "Well," she said after a minute, "the world makes sense. I just... was taught a lot of things. And also I have a pretty good computer in my head." As she looked around the lowest layer of the dead Archon's nexus, some part of her brain continued to process what she just said. After a moment, she added, "...actually, I guess my brain is inside a pretty good computer, rather than the other way around."

"Yeah, that's probably true." Teddy knocked on the nearest object, a giant storage tank that was opaque but for a small service window. "Bottom level is almost always storage. It's not really all that useful for us, but sometimes we pry a tank out and open it up. Each tank is pure, whether it's a one-element pile or some kind of compound; we don't exactly have the materials to make sure, but it sure looks like there just isn't anything except what they put in the tank. I am pretty sure while the power's still on, it won't even interact with the tank, but it shuts off when we kill the Archon body." He paused. "That's always the first thing I do, nowadays. It feels like giving them peace."

Elaine nodded, relaxing slightly. She hadn't immediately thought about whether the systems were still on, and it was calming to know that this was no longer the living heart of... she chose to correct her thinking and admit that the Archon bodies were remnants, not people, but it was still creepy. "Did you spend any time trying to work with them while they were online?"

"Teddy didn't even tell us they were Archons," pointed out Anna behind them. "Was always pretty cagey about what they were. I got in here once when it was still powered, but only because I snuck in. Teddy turned it off real quick after that, before I got a look at anything."

"I just... can't," admitted Teddy after a moment of silence. "Even now, I just... don't want to think of this place as anything but a tomb. Signs of life are... they make me sick." He paused. "I guess... we might have to, though. A lot of the disk drives get wiped in shutdown. If you need that data, we probably can't shut the system down until you get it."

"Yeah. And we can't afford to let that happen to my high priority target." Elaine paused. "So with either your spare or mine, we'll need to experiment. Maybe both."

Teddy shuddered a little, and Elaine patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. "Hey, I understand. I have one of these inside of me." She paused, and grinned. "Heck, you've been inside of me, Ted. And not in the way I'd prefer, either!"

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Teddy started to reply, stopped, then thought about that statement for a minute, trying and failing to control the look on his face. Elaine, rather than watching him trip mentally over the comment, turned around and split into four, three of them searching this level while a fourth did a preliminary look around the next level up. As Teddy had said, the bottom level seemed to be almost, if not entirely, devoted to storage, with two isolated server racks at each end, each with a terminal that was now blank and dead.

On a whim, Elaine pried the screen off one of the terminals and examined it. It wasn't actually high-tech at all; she had no doubt that Domino was simply making molecular copies and could as easily have had all the displays be high-end QOMI 300fps holo-displays, these were... running off what looked like a centuries-old non-quantum copper-line spec. She frowned. She had kind of been excited by the prospect that her internals were full of top-of-the-line gear, but... realistically, what Domino wanted was stability, nothing else. If this gear ran without fault for centuries, then it was definitely the right stuff.

Her other body, still close to Teddy, knocked on one of the tanks and peered in it, experimentally. From what she could see, it was just water. "Have you seen much sign of hardware failure in the stuff you salvage?"

"We can't do much testing," replied Anna, "because most of the software is wiped out. But the stuff we know how to use is always perfect." She paused. "At least at first. There's probably no dust or water in here to start, and when it gets taken out it does age like everything else."

Dust and water... as one, all of Elaine's bodies took a breath. The air was clear and sterile, as far as she could tell, with the only smells she could detect coming from outside--mostly, the people who had come in. She didn't even smell any scent of ozone or metal offhand, although it would be subtle in comparison to the air from outside, now. Maybe once she got to the top... but if space wrapped around the edges...

"Still," she said. "Even Optical matrix storage disks have a maximum number of write cycles before they wear out. There should be something in here that fails over time." She paused, and cocked her head. "Unless there's something in here that constantly repairs and replaces failed components. Hm."

"That would make sense," said Jim. "Not sure which components would do that, though."

"I trust nothing in here moves around on tracks or anything." Elaine didn't know why she even bothered asking. "They would just have an ansible unit do everything, so it could be anywhere."

"All the frames are welded to the deck," replied Jim. "Whenever we want to take a rack out and use it for storage or to sell it, we have to cut it free." He paused. "The tanks, too, but we don't usually try to remove those."

"How do you remove those? They seem heavy." She paused, considering the weight of them, and decided she could probably move one on her own, but decided not to mention it.

"We bring in a crane, weld it to the deck, cut a hole. It's slow going for not a lot of benefit. We once found a giant tank full of acid, though, and we were able to find a buyer for it. There are still a few things we find that are worth it..." Jim seemed perfectly content to talk about the mechanical things, and so Elaine spread her selves out through the rest of the space, looking over the inventory of the place.

It was... mostly just racks full of computing hardware, or at least, that's how they looked from this side. There was no telling without pulling the racks out just how many contained ansibles... each unit with an ansible would be doing real work in the real world. There were thousands of server blades in here, and each ansible could do millions of real-world operations per second. Some racks probably contained multiple ansibles, too. Some might contain dozens, for all she knew.

Elaine gnawed on her lip for a moment. "How many ansibles do you think there are in a given Archon?"

"I think the average for a level one is 500," said Teddy. "Higher levels vary a lot."

Only five hundred? That seemed low to Elaine, but then, she had watched Archons wield supernatural powers for centuries. Perhaps in the face of this cold mechanical truth, she still just wanted to be special. If everything she'd ever seen was... was...

Elaine took a long moment, with all of her bodies, to sit down and catch her breath. It was weird. It was so weird. Too weird. She had been like a goddess standing above mankind. She had been... sometimes a demon, sometimes an angel, but always something greater. Sure, the way her powers worked, she mostly did her fighting using regular guns and ammunition handed to her by others. But she was more than this. She was multiple minds meshed in perfect harmony, able to do dozens of things at once. She had put on a choreographed dance with twenty copies of her all doing different things--one of them singing! She had played every instrument in a band at once! She had had sex with a dozen people at once and never called any of them by the wrong damn name! She was special, and she was... she was...

"I am not," she said out of nowhere, "a damned computer."

"Elaine?" Teddy was somewhere nearby, but Elaine didn't look for him, didn't want to know. She collapsed her copies back into herself, got up, and ran to the edge of a platform. She flew outwards, counting on the space-warping that Teddy insisted was there--and sure enough, after she passed through some kind of sight-blocking effect, the platform was now in front her of her again, so she angled down and flew through the portal out. Although it took concentration, she made an immediate hard left and smashed through a window, not bothering to care or apologize, and took off for the skies.

Whatever the hell she was, she wasn't a bunch of computers locked in a room. She wasn't just a couple hundred, or even a few thousand ansibles changing the world. She was a person. She was an Archon. She was more.

She would prove it, if she had to go kill every static monster within a hundred miles.