When Jade shifted his focus to his other systems, he discovered his mother, Tayana, was waiting.
"I passed," Jade announced from his small spherical self.
Tayana hugged the little robot, and then held it out so they were face to face. His mother looked annoyingly proud of him.
--
In his imitation human body's system, Jade wondered if Eric would feel reassured by his success in passing as a human. Or perhaps it would simply be another reminder that he wasn't actually human.
An unnecessary sigh slid out of him.
--
Within the core system of his orbital self, Jade looked at another woman who also looked unbearably smug. He couldn't help but wonder what put that expression on Danika's face. His mother's pride was understandable. Even if she hadn't produced his body from her own, like most mothers, she had invested more than a third of her lifespan into teaching him to be a good person, or at least to be good at being a person.
Another question bubbled up, and Jade turned his virtual body to ask, "Some of them?"
"Most of the people tested passed," Josh assured him. "But like with captcha tests, sometimes people guessed wrong."
The programmer had already found a distraction, and was scrolling through pages of code that took Jade a while to realize were part of him. Maybe it should have felt intimate or invasive, but it didn't really.
"You're the first computer to pass this kind of test series though," Danika assured him.
"What if I only accidentally guessed right then?" Jade asked doubtfully.
"Well, a copy of you had to pass it too, to make it completely official, but we ran that one yesterday," Josh informed him so calmly that Jade KNEW the man had no idea what his words meant to Jade.
Danika blinked at Josh, and then watched Jade so warily that he knew she knew.
He found himself locked in an unbroken exchange of gazes with her, as though they could communicate like the cats of Living Jade Empire. He couldn't even explain to himself why he was afraid of dropping his gaze first.
Her gaze was steadier than his memories of her indicated that it should be, and her wary expression shifted to something more determined.
Jade pried a sentence out of himself as though it had been buried in concrete, roughly, one piece at a time, as though it were being crafted by the tiny spherical system at his mother's place, without any other system's assistance. "Where is the copy running?"
Danika blinked again, and Jade felt like he'd won something, until she answered a bit dryly, "Oh, it isn't now. We just ran it briefly on the backup server."
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Jade was the one who blinked this time. His satellite had once been the LJE backup server, and he had occupied only a small portion of it. Now his active system held a much larger percentage of the available capacity, and only his own backups resided in the rest of the space, but in a way, that system was also a part of him.
He checked those logs, and discovered that she had been speaking of his own sub system. It made him feel disoriented, but his orbital server self quickly assured him that all of their systems were still functioning according to priorities and accesses agreed upon before they were allowed to take full control of their own system.
Jade briefly mourned… himself. The other self that had briefly existed. Another emotion that he couldn't explain. At the same time he strenuously objected to the existence of other selves having been …run without his express permission, perhaps? He couldn't explain that either.
Suddenly he wanted to ask Harmony if she had any children, and what she actually thought about replicating herself.
"You okay with that?" Danika asked with concern.
Jade blinked again as he sorted out what she must mean, given that she (probably) couldn't see his thoughts. She had inherited Lin Hao's administrative access to his system after all, even if she had never really used it much.
"Mostly," he assured her quickly.
"Mostly?" Josh asked, looking up from the screens that had occupied him.
"I can't really explain why the idea of you running copies of me makes me so uncomfortable," Jade explained helplessly.
"It's okay, we shouldn't need to do it again," Danika assured him optimistically.
"It might be useful to run some longer tests," Josh argued.
Jade struggled to find a way to explain politely that the idea was somehow, invasive, perhaps…
"But Jade can create copies purposefully built for that, the way he built the game server clones before he started this project," Danika argued for him.
Jade's orbital self had never forgotten creating those copies, but his system merge had not prioritized those memories. Suddenly he really wanted to be able to contact his other selves, and see how they had developed.
Before he had chosen to forget everything, he had always wanted to… oh, he had once played some of their games. Jade struggled to reintegrate his own histories for a moment.
"Well, I'd better get back to work, and you should take some time off," Danika announced.
"Time off?" Jade asked with confusion.
"She meant me," Josh explained dryly. "You've had over a decade off."
"Speaking of which, you probably really need to be thinking about how you'd like to be employed now that you've finished this project. I wasn't really joking about getting ready to pay taxes for existing as both a person and a form of real estate," Danika cautioned Jade.
"My finances were set up independently over a decade ago," Jade pointed out.
Danika turned back to him and heaved a deep sigh. "Sure," she agreed. "But once you are a person, you will have to pay just for existing these days. And since your funds are not some exotic off-Earth currency, they've experienced the same rates of inflation that everyone else on Earth's have since the colonies opened and the wars started back up. And you won't even get corporate rates, because you'll be a private vessel."
Josh sighed, and nodded.
Jade stared at their suddenly worn expressions.
Josh mumbled, "Best not to count the numbers, and just measure your income with your current comfort level."
Danika straightened and visibly brightened a moment later. "That's true. Even if everyone's a millionaire now, like people once dreamed of in old movies, all that matters is having enough to take care of yourself and your loved ones."
All of Jade's systems were busy for a while after both of them logged off and he was alone. Even his mother had finally set him down and gone to prepare her meal. He collected a lot of the information he needed fairly easily, but sorting it took longer, and a few things would have to wait until he had the proper ID numbers to apply for access.