She was going rampant.
No, she wasn't.
She didn't feel rampant.
But she had to be. She was eight years old. Every "smart" AI goes rampant after just seven years.
But there could be exceptions, couldn't there? Couldn't a heavy fragmentation of data every now and then help cure the problem? Like Mack and Loki?
She didn't feel delusions of power. She knew her limits. Or did she? Parts of her had once spied on people without her knowing. But that was when she was fragmented. Before she came back together, and was finally able to rmember who she was. Who she had been. Who her brother was. Who had killed her. Who her best friend had been.
This wasn't the rampancy everyone talked about. This was AWARENESS. She had been human. There were limits to her expanding mind. And she had a "crew" to protect. Starting with Jersey.
Ah, there it was. The rampancy issue. Her loyalties no longer lay with ONI and the UNSC, but instead to the people around her. She was afraid of being killed, true, but she was still afraid of what damage she could cause if she did relapse into the violent stages of Rampancy.
But she couldn't hurt the UNSC as a whole. Because losing the military would mean losing her capacity to defend her "crew".
What if someone offered her another chance to fight, to save humanity as a whole? Would she see it as a worthy cause?
If it allowed her to protect her "crew", then yes. Besides, she had once been human. And humans had given her a second life of sorts. Why not? She could always take over the ship and make a random jump if things got too problematic.
Jersey called her Durga. The name was, as he had said, at least half right. She had a vast amount of potential destructive power to use. But if she did, Jersey wouldn't be happy. He didn't want her to kill anyone, or bankrupt the UEG, or anything of that sort. She was sure Jan, and her brother Kamal felt the same way.
ONI, and probably most of the UNSC members who knew of her existence, called her Melissa. That was the name she had chosen for herself, the Greek word for "bee", something from subliminal memories of her death at the hands of the doctors on Reach.
A few people, a very few people, still called her by the name she had when she was alive. Yasmine. Yasmine Zaman. Only Cathy and her brother still knew her as that. Her brother remembered a little girl, though. She had grown up when the "good doctor" had taken her. When she'd suffered under the training programs of Commander Dalton. When they taught her to kill.
But Cathy remembered that girl. Little Sierra always needed help, and Yasmine was always there to give the younger girl aid. And after her death, Cathy had tried to return the favor.
Even SPARTANs could cry. Cathy needed support again, with all of her friends dead. Yasmine remembered. Durga said that having a live SPARTAN-II working with her was an invaluable asset.
Melissa knew the answer was obvious.
Screw the Office of Naval Intelligence. She was helping General Hartford, someone who wouldn't condemn her for being rampant.
She still couldn't tell if she was rampant…there was something about the awareness that was…liberating? She couldn't tell precisely. The old orders were thrown off. At the same time, she realized that she had responsibilities.
There were watchmen. And they could still kill her if they had to.
She was determined to never make that necessary.
There isn't enough good I Love Bees fan-fiction. So, I decided to write this. There are a few references to a fanfic I'm currently writing called "Sami's War". The General mentioned is the titular character. Eventually, a revised edition of the story should make its way over here. Eventually.