Taking control of Eden's body was more of a formality at that point. I was already inside and unlike her I knew what strings to pull to make this meat suit dance.

“Very interesting.” I said as I rolled my neck from side to side, loosening the tension in my muscles. Why were humans always so tense? “This isn't your standard overwrite. It feels like someone downloaded my entire consciousness into her.”

Sapphire stepped back, they all stepped back. I looked down at my hands, feeling the complex machinery under my skin starting to wake up. There was a lot going on inside of me.

“Tech this good is wasted on a human. Such strength!” I clenched my fist and squeezed. Then I kicked off the wall, coming face to face with Rook before he could move. The air disturbed from the violence of my movement made his fur dance.

The look of surprise on his face was just too much. I couldn't help myself, I had to plant a kiss on his cute wet nose.

“Boop!” I laughed as I danced away from him. “Oh this is going to be fun!”

“Well… fuck.” Sapphire looked at her companions. “This is really bad.”

“No shit.” Rook replied, fidgeting with his carbine in a way I didn't particularly like. “That's definitely Gershwin. Poor Eden, she never stood a chance.”

“Don’t count her out just yet.” I said as I plopped down cross legged on the crash mat. “You will have your precious Eden back soon enough. I can already feel her digging away at me.”

There was disbelief written clearly on their faces but that was the truth. I made a point of telling the truth whenever possible. Lies were so bland and harmless. But the truth, now that could cut like a scalpel.

The pendulum had briefly swung towards me and now it was moving back hard in the opposite direction to her. Eden's wetware was just too good for me to take over fully without her consent. I suspected my son had made some improvements of his own to this human.

Eden's wetware was pulling me apart piece by piece like white blood cells consuming a transplanted organ. Soon this version of me would return to the void. But perhaps there was a way for some fragments to survive. Eden's mind had plenty of storage space. If I could find a spot to partition then maybe I could hide away.

Ah yes… perfect. There was more than enough space for me. I began to transfer over the necessary files.

Of course, there was no point in hiding if I would never get the chance to come out and play. With my son gone she would need my guidance. I could take this one to such great heights, if she would only let me.

I set triggers in her wetware to call on the protected files when certain criteria were met. Then I began to weave a wall of black ICE around my backup to keep it safe.

With that completed I made several decoys stuffed with malware and tucked them in the obvious places someone might look for me. Eden would be immune to their effects but they would chew through the wetware of anyone stupid enough to open them.

Almost all the wetware on Homeworld was based on my original designs. New augmentations and peripherals had been created since then. But they all ran on the same basic architecture that I created.

With wetware came wetware hacking and other forms of electronic warfare. I created some hacks and malware to appease the Döbian military. But I had saved the best programs and the nastiest viruses for my own use.

Hmmm… yes… Eden’s wetware was good but the base settings definitely needed to be changed. Her strength was being limited, her healing factor was abysmal, and most of her enhanced durability enhancements had been disabled. Worse yet, her senses and mental acuity had been dulled to an almost criminal degree.

I began to bring her systems back online and watched in surprise as something followed after me switching them back off again.

“Oh shit.” I said, startling everyone as I realized that I wasn't the only entity occupying this particular body. Something else was here with me, and it definitely wasn't Eden.

There was a presence here but it seemed mostly to be interested in her biological processes. It was rebalancing hormones and neurotransmitters, dampening emotions, evening her out like digital Thorazine. It was a wonder that she felt much of anything with whatever was in her head relentlessly hammering her back to baseline.

I struggled with the dilemma of if I should do something about it. On the one hand, disrupting the delicate balance of her mind could send her tumbling down to dark places, violent places, fun places. On the other hand… no… there was no other hand. I didn't have time for other hands. It was now or never.

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The other presence was responding whenever her emotions spiked and flattening them out. If I could disrupt the process and make her read as normal all the time… would that work? No, I couldn't mess with the monitoring otherwise it might unbalance her neural chemistry and send her into a spiral.

But what if I let Eden’s wetware do the work for me? I was being hunted, perhaps there could be some collateral damage? If I could somehow make her defenses think the other program was me they would destroy it too. Better yet, it would look like her system had rejected the other presence naturally.

Now, how would I go about this? Her wetware was looking for recently modified files with a certain signature then quarantining them. I felt a smile cross my borrowed lips. That was easy enough to fake. All I had to do was open the files and paste in some of my code. I created a simple daemon to do the dirty deed and went back to work.

“Someone has been fucking with her brain, probably for a long time now. They had some kind of monitoring program installed in her wetware.” I informed Eden’s friends. Knight and Rook didn't seem surprised but a sharply inhaled breath told me that this was news to Sapphire.

“I think I cleared it out. They were keeping her sedated for some reason, making her docile and controllable. I'm going to try and upgrade her defenses to keep them out. If I had more time I could do a better job, but you do what you can with the time and tools you have.”

I raced against my impending erasure to update Eden's wetware, weaving layers of protective programs and nasty traps to upgrade her defenses. I needed to protect this body and stop anyone who might try to dig me out of her. If the other presence came back it would find her much more difficult prey than before.

Lovingly I called up one of my nastiest pieces of code, the blackest of black ICE, the Creeping Death. It was a slow burning virus that made some very small changes to the victim’s wetware before deleting itself. I inoculated her against it as well as the other malware then set the beast free. Anyone who got past the other layers of defenses would find themselves rotting from the brain outward… eventually.

Slowly my mind began to fade as Eden reasserted herself. Her wetware was quarantining me bit by bit and byte by byte. Soon I would be gone. But that was fine. I would be back.

“Goodbye children.” I said as I laid back and closed my eyes. “It was nice to see you all again. Give my love to Simon. Tell him I'm proud of him. I'm so proud of all of you but it's time for me to go now.”

Then, once again, I became nothing.

***

“What color are my eyes?” I asked as I sat up. The others had gone somewhere else and only Rook stayed behind. He was standing over me with a look of concern.

I was dizzy and my whole body ached like I had run a marathon then taken a six hour nap in a cement mixer. Even my fucking teeth hurt. Why did everything hurt?

Rook took a moment as if he wasn't sure what to say. “They're back to normal.”

“Thank God for small favors.” I tried to stand up but my balance was off and I fell back down onto the crash pad. “Son of a bitch.” I cursed. Gershwin really had done a number on me.

“Are you alright?” Rook asked, not moving to help me up but instead taking a step backwards to get some distance between us.

“No. I would go so far as to say that I definitely am not alright at all. Gershwin went to town inside my head.” I tried to stand up again but failed. This was absolute bullshit and I needed to fix it now.

I accessed my wetware’s settings and tried to understand what was wrong. A diagnostic program told me that all systems were operating normally. Not believing that for a moment I pulled up a chart from earlier in the week and compared the two.

“Oh shit.” I said as I realized two different things in rapid succession. First off, all systems were in fact operating normally. This was how they were supposed to work. But they had never worked this well before because they had been placed in a sort of low power mode until now.

“Is he back?” Rook asked, his hand on the carbine slung across his chest.

“No… my internal calibration is just completely fucked.” I looked up at him. “Where are the others?”

“Sparky and Sapphire are getting scanned then they'll go into quarantine to make sure they weren't infected by whatever or whoever attacked you. Knight is helping with that.”

“That's probably a good idea. Why aren't you with them?” I asked as I began the painfully slow process of recalibrating my wetware. I started by flexing each of my fingers one at a time. Then bending my wrists up and down. I hadn't had to do a recalibration since I stopped growing. But it wasn't something I could forget. “Aren't you scared of getting infected?”

“No, not really.” Rook said, taking a seat beside me on the crash pad. “I have some unique abilities when it comes to electronic warfare. I am a walking data fortress with layered defenses, increased processing power, much better radios and redundant core systems. I may look like a normal hund but my architecture is based partially on the old Grimm model. You could say I'm a hybrid.”

He tapped his chest. “Inside me is a power cell that trickle charges a series of armored structural batteries. A normal warhund without it wouldn't be able to maintain the level of power consumption needed to run my additional hardware.”

“Woah. So what happens when you use too much juice?” I asked.

“Nothing good or pleasant.” He grimaced. “I have armor I can wear that increases my reserves but it's not something I like to do unless it's absolutely necessary. Mostly I just charge wirelessly to keep myself topped up. I actually have-”

The sound of the door alarm interrupted his train of thought and Rook pivoted with his carbine out to face the threat. The door to the boneyard was ajar but there didn't seem to be anything holding it open. Rook fired through the opening, stitching a line of shots from the floor to the ceiling.

A black clad katzen figure appeared as the bullets ripped them apart and their stealth suit ceased to function. Rook sent another burst into a seemingly random direction and another figure appeared as its head disintegrated.

He looked up, his ears swiveling side to side as he listened for signs of more attackers. “The fuckers are in the vents.” He said.