A short while later I found myself alone with Meditati as we were still trying to work through the logistics of the new development. Tutor had left, citing that she had obligations to attend to and George had to run off with Invicta to work on the security of our starter base in the next dimension. Well, it was more to set her in place and to give her a direction that he wanted her to go in while he went off to check on some of his patients that he had taken up, both while working in the hospital, as well as since the uplift began. This practice was something that I completely endorsed in his behavior. I was proud of him and the care he showed to others.

Everyone seemed to have things to do and I just wanted to take a break.

A break that it seemed that I might get if what Meditati was saying was true. It seemed that regardless of the immediate threat created by Time perishing I still would have to wait three months before I could do anything about it. The vessel that the Skii were on would take, at minimum, a little over three months to make the trip. There simply wasn’t any other way around it due to the vast distance and needing to plan a safe path there.

It wasn’t simply for the safety of the Skii, even though their health was the biggest concern, we also didn’t want to blast through planets, inhabited gas clouds, or stars on the way. We could end countless lives and civilizations if the Skii ship blew through a large enough object at such insane speeds.

“Basically, we are building our own LOW superhighway on the fly.” Meditati had explained as she lined out how she was sending out a string of warning beacons lightyears in front of the gradually accelerating ship. This would let her monitor any heavenly bodies and to dissuade troublemakers for the most part. Some, actually almost all, alien civilizations did not take kindly to foreign incursions into their sovereign space. This was one of the reasons why there was a little flexibility in the timeline for the Skii vessel’s projected arrival.

This was all just in case she needed to rap knuckles on some alien foreheads to get them to see reason.

“You really think that someone will try to set up a blockade?” I asked as I browsed the plans that she was working on. Normal matter wouldn’t cause a problem, as it would get obliterated from being unable to accept the energy alone. However, if someone with cr managed to place a sizable amount in the way, it could cause major problems down the line.

“Oh, I am sure of it, at least with two of the races that the Skii vessel will pass nearby. One of them is a “Red Listed” race and the other is, of course, a Core of the Tela.”

“A red-listed race?” I asked as I looked up the term. Any alien race that was put on the “Red List” was warlike and highly aggressive. “Which one?”

“The U’lennea. They have systems everywhere and are even aligned with some of the older Tela who needed an outside force to do their dirty work. They enjoy being hired as mercenaries and exterminators in exchange for licensing and using Tela technology.”

“I see, and they both are sending warships to investigate the nova it seems,” I said as I delved into more of the hacked data she had gathered.

I wasn’t sure when it had happened but Meditati had, somewhere along the line, decided that it was the best policy for her to be as completely transparent as possible with me in everything that she was researching and simulating. I couldn’t tell if it was her trying to manipulate me or not, I still had trust issues with her, but from what I could read from her background data she was really trying to be as open as she could to me.

It was nice.

“Yes, the LOW are giving us all the space I asked for but the Tela, being as they consider themselves to be the dominant lifeform in the cosmos because of cr, are looking to poke their noses into both our impromptu space highway as well as the most recent cosmic event. I have tried to tell them that it was in their best interests to stay well clear of the area but they simply tried to hack me in response and to find out who I was aligned with. It seems that they are intent on getting whatever you desire before you can and the U’lennea are just natural jerks. They always send their military might wherever they think they might be able to do the most harm. In this case, it appears that the Tela aren’t dissuading them as well.”

“Yes, and we are stretched quite thin with cr and swarm in that distant region of space. The Skii ship didn’t have a lot of extra material as it is and you had to leech most of it to extend the travel beacons.” I mused as I looked at a different screen. “So, regardless of what we do, all our other swarm that we have on the way heading towards the nova, they both will arrive before us?”

“Regrettably, yes.”

“Crap. Let’s just hope that they don’t get into too much trouble before we arrive.” I muttered before I willed myself away from her personal VR space. The Tela didn’t know too much about me, Meditati had kept her interactions with them quite vague and to the point. Vague about who I was and on whose authority I had the power to build a road through the cosmos and to the point that they should get the heck out of the way or they would be rudely awakened. They must have really been puzzled when they found that their military AI couldn’t hack her, seeing as they held the keys to the most powerful AI in existence. Or had anyways.

Her warning must have seemed like quite an odd event, seeing as the LOW had agreed with us and hadn’t spread anything about me. Even Jebzzbej seemed to have kept her lips sealed about her meeting with me on the Yelvos trading space station.

It was very odd.

“She wants to win your favor so that she can visit the neighboring dimension.” Nurse said out of the blue while I thought over things. She didn’t manifest, simply choosing to speak into my mind. I could feel her watching over the earth, working hard to enforce the month of nonviolence.

“Oh, she does, does she? I still find it odd that she would betray letting her higher-ups know about what I can do in exchange for getting her foot in the door ahead of everyone else. You know… never mind, I can totally understand it. I have seen it enough with people here.” I said as I thought of how driven some people could become to get ahead.

“Higher ups? She is the leader of science at her family's Core. She doesn’t answer to anyone except formally to some of the military, offering her clones for research purposes.”

“Well, invite her over and set up a personal VR space for her in her own brand-new module,” I said as I entered my original personal space in VR.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, no sense in putting it off and it will let me get to know her a bit before we head to the next dimension… we will need all the help we can get…” I said slowly, staring around my starting area in puzzlement.

“What is going on here?” I asked as I looked around. To the side, there was a new open area enclosed in an opaque sphere. I had never seen it before and wasn’t sure as to its purpose. It wasn’t the command deck area and neither was it George’s workshops. It was something new.

The snow globe holding my old apartment on the center pedestal was gone too.

“Who is messing with my stuff?” I asked as I felt Tutor enter the VR space nearby.

“I can explain!” She said, seeming a little unsure of herself.

“Hmm? I am not upset, I am just curious about what is going on here.”

“You have a visitor.”

“What? Who?” I asked, looking over the globe and finding that it did indeed have an occupant. The time scale being used inside the globe area was vastly different than it was on the outside though, it was almost as though time was frozen on the inside. Like it was paused.

“Yes… Elaya came to see you. She arrived right before Nurse assembled her swarm to search for you in the next dimension. She just showed up in her parent's ship.” Tutor said with slight trepidation.

“Oh? Awesome!” I said, clearly surprising Tutor.

“What? I need a break from all of the mental stretching that I have been doing recently. If I do, in fact, have three months before I have to dive back into craziness, seeing as I am letting Meditati’s expert hands cover the uplift part of things, then I should have plenty of time to relax and see some friends.” I said as I walked up to Tutor and placed my arm around her waist to walk with her toward the dome-shaped globe. “Someone that I really want to see again, need to see as soon as possible even, is Ess. I feel bad about being away from her so long and hope she still remembers me.”

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“You are really not upset? When she came to see you, arriving in her parent's ship, everything was in chaos as we were trying to find you. I asked her to wait, even made her a separate memory module to house her in, and told her that we would keep her suspended until you were rescued. She agreed and let her parents know. With everything that was going on, her presence just kept getting pushed down the list of importance.”

“Mmm… I get that.” I said as I tapped the dome in curiosity. It seemed like it wasn’t really part of my VR space, simply a ported connection. “Separate memory module? Meaning that it isn’t made from swarm, just common cr?” I asked, wondering at her reason for doing this.

“Security measures so that she doesn’t get changed by you,” Tutor answered.

“You mean like what happened to my swarm recently?”

“Yes, that and the fact that we AI have emotions because of you. I made sure to keep her module completely separate. It is both for her protection and yours.” She said, blushing a little. She was really bad at hiding her emotions. While the answer was one hundred percent truthful I could feel that she had other reasons for wanting to not let Elaya have free reign.

Then I thought of something else.

“Wait… so you copied a representation of my old apartment to give her something of interest before you froze her? Did you even tell her what you were going to do?”

“Yes? Sort of?”

I laughed, massaging my forehead as I tried to discern the reason why Tutor handled this in the way that she did.

It all had something to do with time and I was oddly sure that the answer would become apparent in the next few moments. It was like I could see a ripple inside my mind, an odd ripple that existed to answer my question.

The feeling faded away just as quickly as it came.

I reached out my hand towards the dome, getting ready to port into the module with Tutor.

“Ready?”

“Sigh. Yes…”

The next instant the VR world that I had been in seemed to lighten, as though Elaya’s module wasn’t even allowed to have access to what the area that we entered from looked like. The experience felt… odd to me, as though a lot of myself was stripped away being ported like this. The apartment came into focus as Tutor and I were suddenly standing at the open front door, looking in on Elaya as she was bent over inspecting my movie and game collection. Clearly, she hadn’t been here all that long, at least from her frame of reference. She was dressed in casual clothes that seemed slightly off. The texture of the jean material wasn’t right and the silkscreen image on her shirt seemed to be randomly generated, as though she had put her outfit together by looking through a JC-Penny catalog and mashing things together.

I glanced around back through the open door, finding nothing but an expanse of empty white.

“You couldn’t have added the building that my apartment sits in? This kind of makes it seem like a prison.” I asked Tutor quietly. Not quietly enough it seemed as Elaya jumped up in surprise before spinning around.

“Kevin!”

“Ha ha! Hi Elaya, how have you been?” I asked as I stepped away from Tutor to head over to give her a hug. She watched me approach with a deer-in-the-headlights look before I wrapped my arms around her and gently squeezed.

“Ahh….” Was all I heard from her head against my chest as her hands and arms slowly came together to hug me back. It was like she wasn’t sure what to do with her arms.

I felt the world around us start to change as Tutor added details of the neighboring surroundings, making it less of a prison as she built the building up around us.

“I was so worried about you! Tutor said that they lost you. What happened?” She asked as I released her and stepped back to start to recount my recent adventures. We stood this way for a while, her being completely enraptured with my story until I decided to invite us all to sit down together on the couch and my second-hand lazy boy chair.

I tried to play a good host, breaking up my long story by offering them both some pizza and soda from my fridge, something which both of them seemed to enjoy. The frozen pizza I heated up in the oven, knowing that my story would take long enough to tell as it was and not caring that it was all just a simulation. A couple of hours passed this way with Elaya only occasionally asking for clarification or permission to see images of what I had seen. It was fun to be able to share what I had been through with her, I hadn’t gotten to do that with anyone else yet and it felt oddly cathartic. Well, anyone else besides those that had been through it with me.

As I told my story, enjoying the attention of my audience over the slices of pizza, I began to feel the ripple inside my mind again. Whatever I had felt before we entered was just about to happen. A split in paths it seemed that my entering Elaya’s VR space seemed to have created.

“And that leads us to now, sorry you had to wait so long to be able to see me,” I said as I polished off my crust before tossing my paper plate into the trash can. Elaya had managed to eat several slices and seemed to have forgotten about half of her last slice as she had sat there with vivid interest. Tutor sat with her legs tucked beneath her as she cradled her finished plate and she seemed slightly sad for some reason.

“So long?” Elaya repeated as a look of panic slowly crept over her face when I stopped talking, it was as though she just realized something vital. The environment started to almost feel like those first moments that I had experienced when I became a Guest of the Core as Elaya was broadcasting her feelings into the space around her.

Her eyes flicked to the side as she checked her personal internal calendar and clock, showing that she had been paused for almost an entire month since all this started.

“Oh no! My parents are going to freaking kill me!” She screamed as she panicked.

Oh, snap! That was why Tutor had been acting all odd. She must have figured that this issue might have been created.

“Kevin! I gotta go! I will be back as soon as I can, maybe in a few days once my parents let me go again. Ah! The pod!” Clearly, she was worried about her parents being worried about her as well as her having taken their space car for so long.

“Elaya! Elaya! Calm down, I will have their ship returned to them as quickly as I can have it moved. You just go see them again and let them know that everything is alright.” I said as I leaned forward, trying to let her know that it would be ok. Her form was morphing a little in her panic, unable to stay as a human girl as her mind was frantic with worry.

“Ok! Ok! Ahh!! I gotta go!” She said as she started to look through her menus for a way to send herself back to her parent’s VR home. It was almost as though she was trying to buy a bus ticket or something the way she was searching through menus.

“Tutor, could you help her with that?” I asked, figuring that it would be the fastest and probably safest if she did.

“Indeed.” She said before Elaya vanished, getting sent back home in an instant.

The sudden calm and silence left Tutor and me in an odd place as we both looked at where Elaya had been sitting for the last several hours.

“So…”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, let's get out of here. I do not look forward to having that talk with her parents.” I said as I stood up and reached out my hand to her. She took my hand and gently squeezed it as she got up and followed me to the door before we left the apartment and simulated space from outside in the newly formed hallway and building.

“I know, I know. I am sorry Kevin, I got busy and after a week I just didn’t know what to do. All of my focus was just on finding you. Then more and more time went on and I knew that regardless of whatever I did, it would just result in something bad happening. I did promise her that I would bring you to her when everything was safe… it just took more time than I expected.”

Once we were out I felt all of my awareness and sense of self-return to me, making me stretch a little as I considered just how sensitive I was to my environment now. Her Personal Live Matrix had felt… bland and empty.

“I understand. Nothing that we can do about it now anyways. Although…” I paused and stared off into space for a second before continuing.

“The Tela experiencing a Core getting devoured couldn’t have been good for the mental stability as a whole. Having your daughter go missing for a month, something that would probably have been ignored before since they considered themselves immortal, would probably cause more stress now that they know it isn’t the case anymore.”

“Yes, that is why it was a special case. Part of me didn’t consider it an issue, I just went with what the Tela would normally do while they waited for research to be finalized or for extended trips to be over. They would just skip through time without a thought. As you said, an entire populace getting decimated would change the thought processes of the Tela as a whole, they had experienced many millennia of uninterrupted prosperity up until that point, so we will have to see just how worried they had both become.”

I blew a raspberry in exasperation.

“Well, nothing to be done about that, I suppose. Want to go see Ess now?” I asked. At least I knew my beloved Leva wasn’t going to have parents wanting to smack me upside the head for keeping their daughter suspended in time.

“Yes! She has been patiently waiting to see you again!” Tutor exclaimed, clearly getting excited that our reunion was about to happen.

I smiled, hiding the truth behind my eyes.

“Alright! Let’s go!” I said as I willed a copy of myself a massive distance away to the ever-expanding cavernous vessel that Sublimis, or Ess for short, used as her home.

---

I blinked and looked down into the distance from my spot inside my personal dimension at the selected copy of myself that got to manifest aboard Ess’s vessel. It was hard not to feel a little jealous of that part of myself, simply because I knew it wasn’t truly me. I was still here, trapped inside my little swarm ant body.

“Kevin, please don’t be like this.” Nurse said as she moved up to sit next to me as we both watched the reunion taking place.

The thing is, it was me there. My swarm had become me. I could enjoy the moment, I just had to do it through a filter, a second set of eyes. Everything was like that these days and I tried to not let my AI know that it bothered me. Everything was through a filter of my swarm.

“Like what?”

“Worried. Whenever you worry I can feel it and it spreads to me. I am trying all that I can to save you, your entire swarm is focused on saving you.”

“I know. You all are doing your best.” I said as I sat back and focused on the reunion and just enjoying the ability to play with Ess again.

What was I worried about?

My latest transformation, my absorption of the words of the seven, had changed both myself, Nurse, and my entire swarm together.

It had fried my Alpha key cubes.

Seems that there is a limit that they can take and whatever my transformation had done had been like plugging a single Christmas tree lightbulb into a wall socket.

There wasn’t a point in making more of them now either.

Everything had changed with that strange upgrade.

Nurse was positive that she wouldn’t be able to obey an older version of me had one of the cubes survived and been able to create a copy of me.

We had all changed together and left that old me behind. My swarm was more a part of me than ever before.

So, here I was… back to the same problem. I was trapped within this Void seedling, and I had to find a solution to it before it became my tomb.