Ciddia fully expected, once she heard that Elaine was upset, that she would be hearing from the woman directly sooner or later. Although she was at home, going through the motions of relaxation--changing into less formal clothing, shoes off, cooking an old favorite rice dish with meat and mixed vegetables--her brain was stuck in a loop, waiting to hear from the woman. The first message she got, though, was a shock.

I need driver code for black ansibles, wrote Elaine with no preamble.

Ciddia stared at the text message for long minutes, her brain feeling like it was full of sludge. Elaine was wrestling with the destruction of the world, with her own nature as an artificial lifeform, with the death of everyone she had ever known... it took a good minute before Ciddia's brain even caught up to what the message even said, what it meant. Did this mean that Elaine was burying her trauma with work?

We don't give out that kind of information, replied Ciddia, feeling numb. It was difficult for her to explain exactly why this situation bothered her, but there was no question that it was shaking her to her core. What do you want to do with it, anyway?

Gonna make a vehicle out of ansible parts. Black ones control those pocket dimensions and portals, right? Need that for hauling cargo, and probably concealing the engine, all that stuff. If you want me to keep the code secret, we can do that. Its probably not gonna be all that special anyway, first gen stuff right?

Where did you get information on Black ansibles? As far as Ciddia knew, nobody had documented anything about them... unless the hacker who had effectively destroyed the world had left behind some of his notes. That possibility was too great to ignore.

Don't have any, replied Elaine. After a moment, she continued, I know the other ansibles and I've been inside a pocket dimension. Its not hard, Cid.

Ciddia felt a cold heat stirring in her chest. Was that anger? Embarrassment? Jealousy? She wasn't even sure she remembered the feeling anymore. She rarely felt anything except wrath, or the deep depression she had been in since... well, probably well before the fall of the city. Code like that is double-black. I don't want it falling into the wrong hands.

I have heard double-blacks before, replied Elaine immediately. I was one of the people charged with keeping the AI stuff out of the wrong hands. There was a pause, and then Elaine spit out a long binary code, slightly more than twelve thousand digits long, which served as an authorization token.

Ciddia blinked, then immediately dived back into her Blackhat nexus. With the City gone, the token didn't mean anything anymore--Ciddia should have a matching code in her database, and the two codes together would unlock something in the City's computers. Still, she should be able to confirm the code was legitimate, not that she really doubted Elaine.

Ciddia paused, though. The impact of her bare feet on the cold steel mesh of her entry point was such intense nostalgia that she simply couldn't move on, for a moment. The polymers of her artificial limb were, to a certain extent, more sensitive, flexible, and tough than flesh... but the sensation they gave of the mesh floor was the same as it had always been, both before and after her original limbs had been replaced.  She had dived into this place millions of times in her long life, but the times when she came in barefoot were few and far between, and it had been a very long time. Her toes curled slightly against the mesh, the prosthetic senses almost indistinguishable from the real thing, and her finger unconsciously poked at the holoscreen that popped up, increasing the time dilation to give her more time to think.

The last time... she'd been having sex. The last time she had been forced to come here barefoot, thousands of people were dying, and she was having sex. Every second counted, and she had been barefoot, naked, sweaty and emotionally charged. Domino had tried to tell her they had it covered, that she should enjoy herself, take time off... but as soon as she'd dived into this room, she had taken a subjective hour to cool hear head before anyone even knew she was coming. By the time they told her to take time off, she had already put everything else aside. It wasn't just that the mood was spoiled; it was already forgotten. She had stared at pictures of death and mayhem and was already in the mood to rip people apart.  That day she had lost yet another bit of flesh in a fight, distracted and furious for the interruption.

Every time she had come here barefoot, Ciddia decided, she had been trying to relax. Mostly, she was told to relax. Domino, Timothy, Aria and Eris... and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Blackhats, even some Archon Kings had shown a consistent distress at her stress levels. Over and over, they told her to take time off. And whenever fate made her choose between duty and relaxation, she didn't hesitate for even a second. She would come here and drown herself in her duty. By the time she actually talked to anyone else, she was so deeply immersed in whatever was happening that any suggestion that she go back to what she was doing was, frankly, an insult. She was already working, and sometimes had been for hours.

After a long few minutes, Ciddia's prosthetic feet finally started moving. She passed by her favorite couch... and an automated massage table, one she had stoically refused to use except when the stress was so bad that it was palpable for her. That brought back its own memories, but not pleasant ones; the forced relaxation that the table brought her was always in middle of another stressful situation, and every minute that she spent away from it, even if that was only fractions of a second in real time, seemed like a betrayal, a dereliction of her duty. Next to that was a recliner, and then a chair with a built-in holo suite which would simulate being in any one of tens of thousands of real theaters around the world--complete with either real-time or recorded footage of other movie-goers, to make her feel less alone. It... didn't really work as intended.

But she passed the furniture and found her way to the thin but acceptably comfortable office chair in front of her workstation. There was no piece of furniture anywhere in the universe as comforting and familiar as that chair, and there was no position she could sit in it that she hadn't spent hours in before. Just on a lark, she spun the chair around and sat backwards on it, skillfully avoiding the armrests with her legs as she crossed her arms on the back of the chair and stared at the console screen.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There was no login, no confirmation or passcode. There was an option for it, of course, and every Blackhat had used one for a while, but they all eventually came to the same conclusion: if anyone actually got in here, accessing the workstation was the least damaging thing they could possibly do. Although they were hidden from Ciddia's sight, there were endless fields of computing racks and storage containers surrounding this platform in every direction but straight up, fields that would give Teddy and his scrappers a fit if they found out about them. This place supported her very being, gave her immortality, infinite power, and the flexibility of the last Blackhat in the universe.

Last alive, anyway.

Ciddia finally let out a sigh and got to work. It took seconds to copy the message over and check the authorization code, which as she suspected was genuine. To her surprise, she actually had a cached version of the data packet locked by this pair of tokens, but after reviewing the brief, she declined to open it. Even without diving too deep into her computer-assisted memory, she remembered the scuffle to defend the vanilla AI root code. If that damn hacker had never gotten it, things would have gone differently.

Damn Kramer and the rest of his "arch-sorcerers" for mixing technology and magic in the first place. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to screw it up. But then, she decided, there was lots of blame to go around. The whole HELIDER project was a mess, but George was probably the most directly responsible, with his militant tyrannical bullshit. Kramer and the Professor were at least trying to make things right, even if they screwed it all up.

Ciddia let her head rest on the chair for a long moment, then brought up her chat interface again. With the time dilation, it had barely been a second. I remember that, she continued conversationally. I was busy trying to hunt the pigfucker down, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to who was on the defensive team.

With the message queued, with a couple seconds' delay for the sake of appearances, Ciddia pushed back from the console, letting the rolling chair coast for a moment before she stopped it and climbed her way out. For a long moment, her eyes focused on the darkness beyond the platform, darkness that concealed more platforms, with endless racks of computers. Ciddia honestly had not laid eyes on the pieces of hardware that made her existence possible... since around the beginning. The first time Domino had let her and the other Blackhats into their own nexuses... she had faced the same things that Elaine was facing now. A disconcerting feeling that the hardware and software out there defined her, a vulnerability. And... an urge to prove that she was more than those computers.

And she had proven it, tens of thousands of times over. She had been emotional at times, stoic at times, heroic at times, foolish at times. She could compare herself to other humans all day long and see that she was still human, for better and worse. The technology maintained her, augmented her, monitored her, and rebuilt her, but it did not define her.  In a way, her prosthetics were a defiance against the ugly clinical nature of the truth: this place would only rebuild her when she said to, would maintain the version of her that she wanted to be.  She was immortal, but she chose not to be perfect.

For some reason, her eyes drifted from the darkness to the meditation bench she had laid out but rarely used. The chill of the floor on her feet, somehow, pulled her forwards to kneel on that bench, and she found a comfortable position and let her eyes close. She felt the sensation of the bamboo weave against synthetic skin, and for a long time, that was the only thing in her mind. After a little bit, she tilted her head back, and was able to clear even that away.

But as her mind emptied, thoughts she had buried surfaced.

Of course, her answer to Elaine was only an excuse. She was now the leader of the entire human race, plus the evoloid descendants. She was the only powerhouse in existence, and she could be tyrant over all of creation if she so chose. The idea that she had to be afraid of people doing something wrong with technology that she knew backwards and forwards was laughable. If she chose, she could raise all of humanity or destroy them.

Somehow, an image of Domino--good god, in her mind's eye he seemed so old now; he always looked the same, but in her mind he was ancient, more immortal than the gods and more ancient than the Earth itself--was kneeling before her. And although he was no more than an image, no more than a thought, she knew what he represented.

Domino had only one will, and he had only from the beginning. The whole thing with Pandora Tokens, with Archons, with the Blackhats and their stupid non-interference policy, it all came down to one will, one absolutely unbreakable rule.

They would never be tyrants.

Domino could have enslaved humanity before they knew he existed. He could have wiped out the planet with a thought. There was not a single moment, certainly not before the Terra-Draco wars began and maybe not until the hacker started his war, in which Domino didn't have the ability, sitting in his pocket and ready to go, to rule all of humanity. This feeling that Ciddia felt stirring in her chest, this knowledge, this certainty that she could rule everything that was left? He lived with that.

He'd said as much at least once a year, every year, for as long as they'd known him.

Domino was gone, and Ciddia didn't need to maintain his legacy. She could become a tyrant, become a ruler. She could even try to be an enlightened and good ruler over all mankind. But she wouldn't, and the image of the man kneeling in front of her, was the whole reason why.

They had never slept together, and had only once slept in the same room, but Ciddia might as well have been married to the man. When he rescued her from a military camp where her own people had raped her and told her--her--that she was only useful as breeding stock, that her gender invalidated anything else about her, when he had taken that woman on the verge of breaking and accepting that poisonous hatred... when he had rescued her and never touched her again, never given her any reason to fear that he would touch her, when he proved his nature...

He became her home. Wherever he went, whatever he did, she belonged next to him. If the two of them had ended up running a junkyard and playing with electronic toys as the world went to war around them, been nothing and nobody forever... she would have had no regrets.

Ciddia found her heart pounding out of her chest, and it took a good hour of subjective time for her to calm back down. No, Ciddia would never be a tyrant. She would never rule. But as she sat there, she found that answer unsatisfying. It was very difficult to clear her mind, because it was running around in circles trying to figure out why.

Eventually, though, as she found her calm, she had to ask herself one question.

Why am I going to tell Elaine no?

And as she considered the question again and again, she found she had no answer.