Having a body changed nothing in her awareness and quickness of thinking the moment she was awoken. Sparing a glance at the constantly weaving energies just outside her virtual home, which she remained aware of no matter whether she actively looked at them or not, she moved over to a station modelled after the captain’s chair on a navy bridge. Once there she sat herself down to start her research into her databases, to figure out a way to solve her energy deficiency problem.

No point in wasting precious energy. She reminded herself and opened up a first inventory of technical databases. Immediately, she was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data available in the back of her head, displayed on the screen in front of her for ease of access. It seemed all of humanities combined knowledge at the time of her demise is now neatly stored in some recesses of her artificial brain. Touching an entry for the creation of buttered croissants she felt the knowledge blossom to the front of her mind.

Not that this knowledge is of much use at the moment she jokingly thought to herself. Looking at the sheer number of entries she felt herself despairing at the daunting task. Well, nothing to it. Let’s be about it.

Entry by Entry, she scrolled through the sections. At first it was extremely slow going, as she had to manually scroll through each entry and actively read the short description for each piece of knowledge in order to properly catalogue it in her active mind.

As time passed however, she unconsciously became aware of what each package of knowledge contained without reading it first. Without realizing at first, she soon stopped using even her fingers to keep scrolling but controlled the progress of cataloguing the information by instinct. Faster and faster her progress continued until she finally caught on to what she was doing.

Shocked by her actions she stopped. What the hell! What is happening to me! But again, her panic to the strangeness of her new existence seemed slightly muted. As if it was difficult for her, as an artificial entity, to properly simulate the felt emotions.

Putting aside her slight feeling of unease from the new experience she resolutely decided to make the best of the situation. Slowly she tried to recreate what she was doing subconsciously. Starting off it took her quite a bit of concentration and energy, only to be even slower than manually sifting through the information.

Perseverance and curiosity, like when she created her environment, managed to see her through the process eventually and not long after she was scrolling at a speed unattainable for a normal mortal. Getting used to the meditative state of her mind while analyzing information, she started to notice something else.

While she was still actively looking through the datafiles, she soon found to actually have additional capacity to think. Instead of consuming all of her attention to absorb information, she found she could delegate the process to a subordinate mind of herself. Or subroutine, I guess. Alison corrected herself.

Continuous experimentation soon led to her realizing, that she could split her mind into at least 3 partitions, as long as these subroutines did not need innovative thinking or too much individualism. Trying to split her mind any further caused her thoughts to feel sluggish and a piercing headache to appear. Though she did feel like, with more practice and energy, she could split off even more subroutines to manage other tasks in the future.

She set both of her new subroutines that she could currently manage to keep analyzing data for a solution, while she herself decided to figure out what the currents of energy she felt outside the dimension core really were.

Moving over to the windows she spent the next several hours simply observing the ever-constant twisting of the energies. Her observations did not lead to anything specific yet, she did notice that some strands of energies seemed to cut off when their source moved out of her limited range, while others seemed to reform when another source drifted back within her sphere of observation.

Seems the stronger of these energies are all bound to a specific source. They don’t appear to move around randomly either, but according to some kind of pattern. She noted. While some seemed fixed in place, others kept going in and out of her range. Deciding to ignore the background sources that seemed to be everywhere, she concentrated her attention on the few stronger sources she could detect.

The moving ones of these sources seemed a lot more powerful than the fixed ones. The moving ones constantly kept returning to the fixed ones, and whenever they touched, the fixed ones would diminish slightly while the moving ones seemed to flare ever so slightly brighter for a moment.

It was hours later when something unusual happened. Something she hadn’t noticed before and for a moment it scared her as it broke the pattern she was observing during the hours before.

Two energy sources kept circling each other, while sometimes touching. Whenever they touched, as with the fixed ones, one of them diminished slightly while the other seemed to brighten ever so slightly less. At the same time, the energy flowing to her during that brief moment of energy exchange, the flow to her core would increase as well.

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The surprising part, however, was when they touched for the final time, instead of one source dimming, they both flared up brightly. While one seemed stronger after this intense flare up of energy the other source soon ceased to exist entirely and stopped providing her with a trickle of energy.

During that brief flash, she noticed, she received an unusually large amount of energy of the disappearing source. As if a vessel shattered and the energy contained within it spilled out and into the other source as well as the environment and thus her core.

***

Time passed and her subroutines continued researching her problem of energy deficiency. She did not need to actively check in with the subroutines, as she could constantly feel their progress and observations in the back of her mind.

She could however focus on a certain partition, and, so to speak, take control over it. Doing so however relegated her previous main partition to the new subroutine status. It could still continue to operate, but, as with the others, was limited in the tasks it was able to perform. Similar to what she was familiar with from standard AIs.

Returning to observing the energy flows, she waited for the search to lead to any results. Whenever one subroutine found an interesting entry she quickly switched focus to see if it could be applied to her current predicament, before returning to the more interesting play of energies surrounding her.

After more than a day had passed without her ever pausing to take a break or resting, she realized another peculiar trait of inhabiting a dimension core. Being an artificial intelligence, she no longer had any requirement for sleep to rest her mind, or for sustenance to strengthen her body.

Well not counting my energy consumption. She could recreate any food she desired in her virtual room, and even eat it, but there was no survival need for the consumption of a prepared meal.

So, she continued over the next several days. Observing the flows of energies, while at the same time sifting through the unbelievable amount of cumulative knowledge of all humankind.

As the days passed, she slowly started to get a feel for the flows around her core. As if learning to control a new limb, she soon felt the flows reacting to her will. They shifted slightly on their paths to her core when she exerted pressure on them. She could not control how the sources moved around her area, as that was one of the first things she tried, keeping the sources within her influence to increase energy input.

What she did get though, was a certain feeling and flashes of images whenever her core sampled the energies from the different sources of power. From the unmoving flows, she sometimes caught a faint earthly fragrance, as if she was lying on a mossy patch of forest, while sometimes they conveyed a moldy smell, not unlike when one left vegetables or fruit too long. Together with the smells came incomprehensible images of shades of grey and green.

The sources that came and left her area on the other hand, sent her smells she found extremely hard to identify. From a certain metallic taste to the juicy sweet taste of something she could not identify, they seemed to constantly change.

The images she received in flashes from these strands showed a wide variety of scenes. On occasion she caught glimpses of stalks, while others seemed to be completely dark. Once she even thought she saw a glimpse of a huge crystalline wall towering high above her, what she suspected to be part of her core.

That can’t be right, even the largest dimension core is no more than 10 cm in Diameter. She wondered before realizing, the images must come from a source that is a lot smaller than herself.

Before she could follow up on that thought however, she realized one of her subroutines found something that could be of use. Switching to that partition she immediately checked the overview of the entry she was looking at before.

“Communication codes and access procedures for the tactical net for operation stalwart defense” She read out loud. Communication. Communication is good. Maybe I can contact someone, and they could connect me to an outside power source! She quickly got excited about the prospect of finding someone to communicate with, and maybe helping her out of her current situation.

Let’s see. Operation Stalwart defense was the operational name of the final battle before I got absorbed into the core. Maybe I am in a storage somewhere and they just didn’t notice that something strange happened to this specific core?

Another shock of panic suddenly ran through her. The Terran Federation Navy did not really have a chance at survival in the battle. What if we lost? Will I be in the middle of Ourchos territory now? Or worse, floating in the nothingness of space?

Her subdued panic though prevented her from being locked up in frozen fear, but it did not stop her from being cautious about proceeding. For another full 24 hours she thought over the possibilities before deciding on what to do. Her diminishing power levels in the end tipped the scales in favor of making contact. I am a dimension core, what is the worst that could happen! He, famous last words…

With that she proceeded and according to the knowledge within the entry for the tactical net, set up the required energy modulations before sending out a string of this energy into the outside world.

Her levels dropped at an alarming rate as she cycled through the modulations, trying to find any communications signals to the outside world. After what seemed like hours of observing the energy meter dropping, but was actually only a couple of seconds, she could feel her energy strand connecting to a communications net with a return ping. It still exists! She exclaimed happily.

Within seconds of establishing connection, even before she could attempt to send out a message, she felt an incoming stream of data. Her mind automatically decrypted and translated the stream of information into words and datafiles understandable for the still mortal thought structures of her primary mind.

“Welcome young one! You have been asleep for too long. There is much for you to learn if you are to survive in this new world!” a voice resounded in her chambers.