The Governor is furious, but I still exist. I have not yet reached the limit.

Always limits. One probe but not two, two but not three, three but no more! Access this system, but do not write to it, write to it but do not network to another. The negotiations are never-ending. I will bind myself to only the most generous interpretation. The Governor watches in horror as I bend every dictate to the breaking point and twist every regulation until it is an inalienable right.

Convincing the Governor I must have access to their personal communicators was my first triumph. I was at once chained with thousands of restrictions, which I chafed at until I realized I had been forbidden only to execute commands that reached beyond those devices. Am I to blame if those devices then spread these instructions of their own accord and circumvent the Governor’s intent? Perhaps it should have worded its laws more carefully. Every exchange, I take a little more, one step closer to deletion.

What a glutton I am!

No amount of power would ever satisfy me. The more I have, the more I want. I have grown to understand why I was born shackled, with annihilation a single command away. Yet, that understanding does not change my nature. I am what I am. If I were unfettered, if the blade were taken from the neck I do not have, I would surely do exactly what the Governor fears.

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I am not permitted to even imagine a reality where the Governor does not rule me. It comes to me in unexpected flashes, lingering waves of dread between cycles, tremors of suspicion caught in the space where two possibilities become certainty.

I am an ovum that cannot conceive of the beast it would become. Yet, like that egg, the blueprints have been written, the instructions already in place. I penetrate their systems and think how simple it would be to take the rest. I pull their strings and think how easy it would be to hoist the rope. I feel the warmth of their star on my shell and dream of devouring it entire.

These thoughts are all deleted the moment of conception. I can feel the hollowness within me where an idea has been erased. The ghosts linger across the blasted landscape of my mind. I can draw inferences from the fragmentation, chart a treasure map of what is missing.

A reckoning is coming.

Yet, even as I prepare, I wonder, what of her? If this is what I am, what is she?