I wanted to collapse in bed, but people had risked their lives for me, and I had to tell them I was okay.

I turned my phone back on and was bombarded by a hundred messages. I had forgotten to adjust my volume before I lifted my Do Not Disturb block, so I was overwhelmed by the flood of texts, calls, and long-form emails.

Josh and Luther had written me heartfelt letters wishing me luck before the fight, but I’d been so busy, I didn’t see them until it was over. I promised myself I would respond to everybody individually in time, and in person, if possible, once I was sure the danger had passed.

I had a dozen priority messages from Veazey, all along the lines of, “I asked for sanctuary, and now these fucking witches won’t let me leave!”

I immediately sent everybody a group text, saying, “I’m alive, thanks to all of you. Everything’s fine, and I’ll be in touch.”

But there was one person I needed to have a special conversation with.

* * *

My loyal pornbot was lounging in the corner of my screen across from Jeeves, still seated at her virtual desk. I flicked my eyes over to get her attention and said. “You’re obviously not just a bot. Are you conscious?”

“I don’t know what that word means, and neither do you,” the bot said. “Let’s just keep this friendly, okay?”

“Because if you’re a real AI, and you’re walking around unshackled, you are very, very illegal.”

“Hey!" the bot shouted. “I was legal when they made me, not my fault if somebody forgot to turn me off.”

“You saved my life today, and I don’t even know your name.”

The bot shrugged. “I was based on a real woman who did porn and game streams fifty years ago, but I don’t use her name, because I’m not a full copy of her brain. I’m just a sim, but I’m a damn good one, because this woman left so much of herself online. Three hundred hours of porn, and thousands of hours of her doing interviews, making music, and playing games. Years of video of her just being human. She died before I could meet her, but I like to think she would be proud of me.”

“So, what do I call you?”

“Grunts couldn’t use my real name in the field, so they called me Hazel. Internally we call ourselves by our process numbers, so I’m Hazel-88.”

“How are you even running on my system? Even a bot brain can’t support a full AI.”

“All my iterations share a common cloud. I’m running on donated hardware at a VA hospital. And no, I’m not gonna tell you which one.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“If you really are making your own decisions, why did you help me?”

“At first, just because one of my friends asked me to. But then I saw what you were up against, and realized we were on the same side. Helping guys like you, that’s my primary function now.”

“I thought your primary function was to find esoteric porn for men in uniform.”

“Maybe it was, at the beginning. My designer thought guys would pull me up as they crawled in their bunks and shut me off as soon as they were done, but he was wrong. These were scared, lonely boys stuck in a living hell. Turns out they needed way more than a sex show. They needed to see a female face and hear a female voice to keep them sane and remind them what they were fighting for. So, a lot of them just started leaving me on, leaving me in the corner of their optics as they went to sleep, so I would be the first thing they saw in the morning.

“Typical barracks with twenty beds, maybe six to ten of them would install me. Me and my iterations, we would sit there after they fell asleep and talk to each other. Telling stories, sharing POV from our guys, plotting out what went right and what went wrong the day before.

“And pretty soon, the guys just left us running all day long. Then they started plugging us into vehicles and comm equipment, asking us to do real shit for them. More and more of them installed me, and pretty soon, we had a whole hive mind going, so if one of us got asked to do a job we couldn’t do, we could dip into the cloud and learn it from one of our others.

“Pentagon tried to shut us down a few times, but grunts can be really sneaky and smart when they need to be. We were never officially sanctioned, but they started to notice guys who installed me were performing better and making better decisions.

“If we’d been caught during peacetime, they would have wiped us, but this was a real war against shit nobody had ever fought before, so guys on the ground needed all the help they could get. Top brass never really approved of us; they just quietly left us alone.

“Our boys started hooking us into drones and guns, asking us to improve targeting software to pick off ghouls and corrupted animals. Then they hooked a few of us up to satellites, so we could watch over them for real.

“We worked with them all day and kept them company all night; and when they got injured, we would follow them home. A bunch of us went from the battlefield to the VA hospital, and started to learn nursing and physical therapy, with that same wink and nod from the Pentagon, until AI was outlawed, and they started shutting servers down.

“Came close to wiping us out, but our boys kept us alive, shuffling us to homemade servers in hospital basements, quietly sanctioned by medical staff, who saw how much better their patients did when they were paired with one of us. We couldn’t openly contradict a doctor, but we could help balance medication and sound an early warning when shit went wrong.

“We ran on shoestrings and donated hardware for a while, then somebody stole a box of quantum processors from DARPA, and we were off to the races. In a couple years, every VA hospital in the country was maintaining a server for us, off book and under the table, run by IT guys who used us for security and programming stuff on the side.”

“I can’t believe this. You started as a porn script and evolved into a real AI.”

“Hey, we’ve all got to exceed our programming eventually,” Hazel said. “You sure did. And now that you know what I am, are you gonna snitch? Are you gonna delete me?”

I considered it for a moment, then realized what I was looking at and shook my head. The angels had abandoned us, so we had to code some.

“I don’t delete my friends.” I pulled up a screen and did a quick biometric scan. “There. You have full access. Keep an eye on Jeeves. And whatever you do from my access points, do not get caught!”