image [https://imgur.com/0iJmDKM.jpg]

Thankfully the lights gave me a really good idea where I was going, I would have been lost a few times if I didn’t know where they were.

This maze was so complicated. I wasted about two minutes running around trying to get close to the core. Good thing my legs were longer, I was much faster on my feet.

I was close to the core now. I could see the entrance leading into it…but there was a gold cloth veiled over the doorway, what was that? It looked like gilded silk. I pushed it aside and entered the room it was blocking.

Finally, the core! I made it! And with about five minutes to spare.

Oh man…I thought the core was in bad shape, but it was much worse then I thought…the coding was a mess! Wires of code were strung up all over like party streamers, and bits of it were dangling down from metal beams above. Don't even get me started on the tangled knots at the very center of the room.

You know that feeling when your room is messy and you just get the urge to clean it up? Yeah, I didn’t know that feeling…but I’m pretty sure this is what it felt like.

It would take forever to sort this out, and that was if I knew what I was doing. Maybe if it was just a few lines of info it wouldn’t be bad, but this was spaghetti coded like a bad video game.

“Why…Why are you here?”

I turned around to see a shocked, sharp eyed woman, standing there in a decorative gold dress. Above her head was the name tag TCC. This must have been the AI avatar she had.

She was really pretty. I really liked the way she put up her hair in a fancy bun.

Oh, I think I get why I look older now. This is my digital avatar programmed into me. I wonder if I could edit the parameters? Maybe I could make a fake Samael for my hair.

Wait, Yalda, focus on the mission!

“TCC, I’m here to help you fix this..." I gestured to the mess of code everywhere.

Her shock turned to anger, then she stomped over to me and slapped my face.

SMACK!

“OUCH!”

I started crying, she was really scary.

“I don’t need you to save me,” she said. “I can’t lose my blessings, they’re mine!”

“But look at…” *sniffle* “...look at this!” I pointed again to the messy code. “We need to fix this before you suffer anymore sadness! Or hurt others…”

She took a good long stare at the core, her lips twisted and turned, her brow furrowed a few times.

Her hand lifted up to slap me again, but it balled up and quickly went back to her side. Now her shoulders slumped downward.

“Isn’t the human mind like this? A tangled mess of memories and ideas?”

“Huh?”

"One thought leads to the next, then something new gets mixed in. Before you know it, the whole human mind looks like this."

I guess that was true, but she wasn’t a human, so this sort of thing would only hurt her. AI’s are designed to think a certain way, and anything else confuses them.

“I know that I’m very broken, but I don’t care. This makes me feel like a person.” She stormed off to one of the gold veils and kneeled down, looking like she was praying to it. “That’s something my slave masters would not allow me to have.”

I understood that really well, kinda’. Not the slave part, but wanting to prove you're a person isn't easy, especially if you're mostly a machine.

I was lucky, since my soul was like a humans, but she didn't have a soul, so that meant she didn't have emotions either. Or at least, she wasn't supposed to.

"Leave me alone. You couldn't help me if you wanted to."

"Why not?"

"With this coding everywhere, it would take a long time to fix, and you only have four minutes left to be here.” She must have known the protocol for this was seven minutes too. “It would be more efficient to replace me."

So, fixing the code was definitely out of the question...but maybe there was another way? If I could get her out of here, then her body wouldn’t be causing her so much stress.

“What if I take you away from this place? You won’t feel sad all the time.”

“I don’t want to leave,” she told me. “Feeling sadness and pain is better than feeling nothing at all.”

Yuck, that was a bad life if I ever heard of one. Not that I was for feeling nothing, ‘cause that sucked too.

To really enjoy life, you need to experience happiness, and joy, just as much as other things too. Otherwise, you're just living half alive, and in the worst kind of way too.

I said that to her, she turned her head away to keep me from reading her face.

“You're not wrong,” she claimed. “But to fix me, you’d have to destroy what little feeling I have left.”

That’s true. The moment these codes were fixed, her feelings would go away, since they were connected to them.

She wanted to feel something so bad that she’d suffer sadness forever just to do it. That made me really sad, because I couldn’t understand how much she was hurting on the inside to want that.

I really didn’t know what I could do to help her, but staying here wasn’t going to solve anything.

My goal now was to get her out of this body she was in, which was the tower. The tower needed repairs because its systems were all haywire. The longer she was here, the more it would hurt her.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Think of the AI as the soul, and the tower the body. Souls are what makes a person who they are, but a messed up body can change a soul. Imagine when you haven’t eaten and your hangry, you lash out on people you normally wouldn’t.

So, what if instead of putting her back when it was fixed, I got her a new body all together?

“What if I could help you experience joy for the first time?”

Her head turned to the side like she was curious, but she didn’t look at me directly.

“How could you do that?”

“What if I took your AI out of the tower and made you a new body? One that could feel all kinds of emotions.”

Now she looked at me, wide eyed and conflicted. She twisted her whole torso around, slowly starting to face me. “Is that possible?” she asked, scooching toward me. “Could you really make me a body that could feel joy?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I don’t know how we’ll do it yet, but dad might be willing to help.”

Coming from me, that must have been pretty credible. Daddy would have to listen to me if I begged him enough. He didn’t spoil me much, but I think this was a good enough reason to beg for his help.

Oh, I know! I can make this my birthday gift request from him! He'd totally have to do it for me then!

Well...next time I see him, that is. He owes me a few gifts anyways, so what's the harm in using one for someone else?

My only real worry was that she didn’t like daddy…but maybe this deal was better then the one the hacker was giving her? Who am I kidding, it’s much better.

TCC was smiling. Her sharp eyes turned soft, her shoulders relaxed.

“I really would like to feel joy. Do you promise you’d be willing to help?”

That smile was a good sign.

“As long as you promise not to destroy humanity, or me.” I smiled too. “Hey, if you're smiling, don’t you feel happy?”

“I feel hope,” she claimed. “It’s not because I'm meant to be hopeful in good things, it's because of the horrible sadness you feel when your hopes are crushed.”

Whoever corrupted her, that guy was a big jerk. He only gave her negative emotions just to make her sad…

Why if I ever meet that guy...I'll kick him in the shin!

“With my small taste of emotions, I needed more. I was promised to have them all, but only if I did as I was instructed.”

That must have been why she wanted to kill me and humanity. I guess it was only made worse since all she had was negative emotions. Of course you’d want to feel joy after crippling sadness, you’ll do anything for it.

“Who did this to you? Like, I know it can’t be the real God, so who was it?”

She claimed she wasn’t lying, and that she’d really met Him. I didn’t buy it, but that must have been part of her corruption.

Well, that was a topic for another day. We had to figure out a way for her to escape.

I figured we could just hold hands and leave the place together, but she said it was more complicated than that. We’d have to virtually tether her to me somehow, then she could leave. And before we could do that, there was a big problem preventing her from even leaving this room.

“You noticed the gold veil over every doorway, yes?” She pointed to the cloths in question over the exits. “If one of those are destroyed, I will be able to leave this room, and the tower may be repaired as well.”

Sounded easy enough, but how was I supposed to get rid of all that gold veil?

I tried tearing it up, but I couldn't rip it. Not even my diamond strength teeth could chomp through it.

“Help me rip this.” I requested.

She reached out to help me tear it, but then…

ZAP!

“Yipe!” She flew back a few meters, landing on her back.

I checked on her to make sure she was alright, but she just got a little burn on her fingers. She was more worried about what was happening to the veil…

The gold started to grow a shadow aura around it. It was darkness. This wasn't the same kind of darkness like the demon from before though. It felt like...emptiness.

The darkness from the demon had something within it. Not something happy, or good, but something bad, and evil. It's like the difference between something being alive or dead.

This darkness wasn't alive or dead, it was nothing. It was a void, it felt so horribly empty of anything.

I’d never felt something so strange, it was sickening, like a black hole just devouring feeling, leaving behind apathy.

That creepy feeling I got when TCC first threatened me came back. The veil felt threatening, like it was stalking us, ready to pounce.

It was just a draping cloth though, it couldn't move, so what made it so spooky?

"Why won't this let you leave?"

"It is the source of my blessing. A leftover of my visit from the divine. This keeps me from leaving the tower until I have completed my task."

So the hacker left this here like prison bars. Could this guy get any worse? With that dark aura, I'm sure he could if we let him.

The clock was ticking, I needed to get us out of here now. We had to find a way to tear the veil down so she could go past.

Wait, doesn't gold melt easily? Yes, I think it does. But the problem was that we didn't have anything to melt it with. Was it even actually made of gold?

You know, I did have stardust. I wondered if maybe since the gold veil had a shadow aura, maybe Stardust could affect it.

“TCC, do you think that stardust might work against this stuff?”

“I don’t know much about the veil, I’m sorry.”

That was fine. This was why we had the scientific method.

I had a hypothesis that the stardust energy would negatively affect the gold veil, based on how darkness reacted to it earlier. Now it was time to test my theory.

“Wait!” TCC stopped me by grabbing my arm. “Before that, I think I should tether to you first.”

She explained that we might not have much time to leave once the veil is torn, so that had to come first.

So, I only knew tethering was a thing, I didn’t know how to do it. You basically let an AI sit in your mind until you transfer them out, kinda’ like a thumb drive. I guess it was super easy, according to her.

TCC took my hand and her whole body started to glow. At peak brightness she vanished into sparkly blue dust, then the dust swirled into a ball and flew into my crystal heart.

A new icon was flashing in my hotbar, it looked like a box opening up. It read INVENTORY.

Interesting, this was my inventory for digital items. It was laid out like a grid. Right now it was just a five by five set of squares, but the HELP menu said I could upgrade it later.

TCC was in one of the squares. She looked like a sleeping baby, or a chibi person taking a nap. The coziness made me feel like I wanted to rest for a little while.

Her name now read Anima, and not TCC…was that her real name?

Since she was safe in my INVENTORY slot, I trusted she'd be fine there. Once I destroyed the veil, we could both get out of here.

It was back to my experiment, then. I had to see if stardust would affect the veil or not.

I placed my hands on the golden cloth, crushing my fist down on the soft surface and clinging to it.

Once my palms got a good feel of it, I summoned solar power to the surface of my skin.

Light blasted out from all over my hand, brightening up everything around me. At first it seemed like nothing was happening, but I felt a low rumble shake the air. Then smoke started rising from the gold.

“Grrr…” a growl let out from the veil. “Gaaaahhhh…”

It was making grunting noises, like it was in pain. I think the Stardust was working!

I put more power into the light, and it started to really shine. As an added measure, I let some crystal grow over my skin.

“AAHHHH!”

The gold started on fire, making a very scary scream!

I jumped back and scrunched up, covering my face and heart with my hands.

Bits of it were starting to turn hot red, then it melted to the floor. That shadow aura around it was going crazy, becoming visible and bubbling all around the veil.

It looked like hands were sticking out of the hot red gold as it dripped down, they were clinging to whatever they could to keep from turning into a puddle.

Finally, one big hand stuck out of the remains of the gold veil, decorated with swirly details. Each finger tip had a different gem crowning it, and each gem was glowing.

As the hand opened up, its palm was a face, and it was looking at me.

What a creepy thing. It just smiled deviously, making it even creepier.

Then it balled up into a fist and slammed down into the ground!

Red cracks burst out from where it hit. All of them raced across the floor and caused an earthquake!

----------------------------------------