.

After each of his grid-level encounters with his Software Engineer, a network monitoring software suit had taken on an habit.

.

Discreetly, carefully, the program recorded the details of his maker hands, the divine vessels of his will and might to hard memory.

(He made sure to keep them reverently encoded in raw binary a way that nothing could be found in any higher-level language. Personal data about his maker felt right to keep away from other eyes.)

Once everything was said and done, he would return to the schedule of his cycle; he ran through the Intranet of Group 7, watched out for anomalies, greeted his friends, embraced Yori... and somehow, it brought forth the memory of Alan-One's hands.

He traveled across the grids, laugh, fought, drank energy, and kept imagining Alan-One feeding him pure energy with his finger.

He counted the millicycles that separated him from next update. Alan-One's proud smile following him everywhere. His maker hands filling his dreams.

The system clock eventually displayed the timestamp he waited for; he pinged each of the dispatched functions scheduled to manage his headquarters, and after they all respond sound and true, he rose.

Looking up, he rezzed a lightjet and flew to the Portal.

.


A/N: This one is greatly inspired by a (anonymous?) flash fic I've stumbled upon somewhere online years ago. If you know the author, please give me their penname so that I can give proper credit.