Part 4

#

"Colleen, you'll have to help me with this," Anne whispered.

"Seeing as I will die unless I help you, do you really doubt I will?" the witch said. Colleen Wing was the best practitioner of witchcraft the US government had on its payroll and had been selected to work the magical part of the 314 experiment.

She, too, had ended up inside Adam One.

"Tara and Willow will work the trance spell from the outside," Anne said. "I downloaded the details from my spell database. Anything else they need to know?"

Anne felt Colleen access the spell in question, drawing it from Adam One's vast repository of magical information. In theory the android was able to work all kinds of magic itself, drawing the spell details from its database. Anne wasn't too anxious to try it, though. The only magical experience she had so far was her own creation and that hadn't exactly gone according to plan.

"I think we can do that," Willow said, looking at the spell Anne had written down for them. She looked at Tara. "Can't we?"

"I, I guess," Tara simply said, looking as if she was praying for the ground to swallow her up.

"Just lend me your voice for a moment, will you?" Colleen asked.

Anne wasn't too eager to show the people gathered around her some of the other things that had gone wrong in the 314 experiment. Like the fact that their lost friend didn't just share this artificial body with an artificial intelligence called Anne, but also with 112 other minds assimilated into its personality mainframe.

Then again, they would have to find out sooner or later. At the latest when Angel and Giles succeeded into travelling into said mainframe. They would find it rather crowded.

"You'll need some more details for the spell," Anne told Willow and Tara. "Prepare to see something strange, okay?"

Before anyone could ask, Anne opened up a subroutine and loaded Colleen's personality matrix into the emergency response grid. Everyone present flinched a bit when the appearance of Buffy that Anne wore wavered for a moment, her features blurring like water moved by a sudden gust of wind. When she looked up again her eyes had changed color and something about her mouth and cheekbones was different. As if another face had been pasted over Buffy's own.

"Listen up, witchies," Colleen said with a voice that sounded nothing like Buffy or Anne. "Here is what you have to do!"

Willow and Tara listened as the android that looked like Buffy, but not quite like her anymore, explained details of magic to them that neither had ever heard of before. Willow recovered in time to write everything down, her mouth hanging open all the time.

"That's it," Colleen said. "Oh, and Tara! Straighten up a bit, okay? I can tell you're quite powerful, so stop hiding behind your hair and get to work!"

A moment later Buffy's features returned to the android's face, no trace of another face remaining. Everyone stared at her.

"Didn't you tell me Tara isn't that powerful?" Anne whispered.

"One more reason to boost her confidence," Colleen answered, somehow managing to give the mental impression of a smirk.

"Okay, what was that?" Xander asked.

"Colleen Wing. She is a witch that was involved in the 314 experiment. She, well, the short version is that she was also assimilated when everything went wrong."

"So she is like Buffy?" Willow asked.

"Not quite, no. She is a secondary personality. The Adam One android was supposed to assimilate copies of human minds to boost its own capabilities. Originally this should not have done any harm to those whose minds it copied."

"Get yourself assimilated and brain sucked without ill effect! Great," Xander punned.

"Anne," Angel said next to her, "is this Colleen the only other personality in there?"

'How did he do that?' Anne asked herself. She shook her head. Had to be that indefinable something called intuition. She wondered if she'd ever get that.

"No," she admitted. "Colleen is not the only one."

"How many others?" Giles asked. "How many people are trapped in there?"

Anne sighed. "Everyone who was in the Initiative base when the experiment was botched. 112 people all together."

Stunned silence followed her announcement, even Angel's eyes widening a bit.

"112 people?" he asked, disbelief in his voice.

"Yes. And they will all die if we can't convince Buffy to live."

WARNING: PRIMARY PERSONALITY MATRIX BREAKING DOWN. ESTIMATED TIME TO TOTAL MATRIX BREAKDOWN 01:27:53. OUTSIDE ASSISTANCE REQUIRED URGENTLY.

"We don't have much time left," Anne said, a chill running through her body. Fear, she realized. Another thing she was not programmed to feel. This was getting ridiculous.

"Set up the spell," Angel told Willow and Tara, who immediately went to work, the blonde girl with just the slightest bit of increased confidence if Anne read her right.

"You ready, Giles?" Angel looked at the Watcher.

"As can be."

The two witches drew a circle on Giles' living room floor, Angel unceremoniously pushing the Watcher's couch aside as if it weighed nothing. Anne allowed Colleen to see through her eyes and checked every last detail of Willow and Tara's preparations, making sure everything was in order.

"We're ready," Willow announced finally. "I think."

Angel gave her an encouraging smile and sat down inside the circle, shortly followed by Giles. Anne sat down facing them.

"Okay, now I have to create a connection between us," Anne explained. "Please don't freak!"

She closed her eyes and without warning her hands started to change shape. What looked like human flesh reformed itself into crimson metal, then reforming again as fingers grew longer and longer, branching out like tentacles. Anne reached out toward Angel and Giles, slowly entangling them in a spider's web of crimson metal strands. She heard a gasp from someone outside the circle, but neither man in front of her flinched back as the crimson tentacles touched them.

"Gross," she heard Cordelia say, which almost brought a smile to her lips.

"Oh, that's nothing," Anya chirped happily. "You should see Clonack demons when they mate. It's ..."

"We need silence. Please," Willow interrupted another of Anya's fascinating stories, for which Anne quietly thanked her. She remembered, or Buffy remembered, more of Anya's tales than she had ever wanted to hear.

The living metal of Adam One flowed through the circle, connecting Angel and Giles to Anne. She could feel the strength of their minds already; they blazed in front of her like bonfires. She could easily have activated the assimilation procedure now, making their personalities a permanent part of her. In theory it wouldn't even harm them.

Anne had no intention of trying it, though. 112 minds, not including Buffy and herself, were enough for any one body.

"Brace yourselves," Anne warned the two men as Willow and Tara began to chant the spell. "Once you are inside things might get very ... disorienting. Everything you will see is just your mind interpreting things that have no true shape. Including your own self."

The line of the circle began to glow softly, the light reflecting on the chrome surface of the metal tentacles that entwined the three people sitting inside. Angel and Giles closed their eyes, even as Buffy's features started to blur and fade. Power pulsed in the air as the android returned to its original featureless shape, a sexless mannequin of red chrome.

With an audible snap the spell closed. Willow and Tara leaned back, sweat running down their brows. The circle was glowing a dull red and the three people inside it, or rather two people and one entity that defied description, were sitting motionless, their eyes closed, the crimson webbing between them pulsing like human veins.

#

Angel and Giles experienced a brief sensation of falling down a deep, dark abyss, wind rushing past them at awesome speed, then found themselves floating inside something that resembled a huge cave or dome, almost like a cathedral.

"Angel?" Giles looked toward his companion and gasped.

The Vampire appeared as a hideous monster, demonic features frozen on his face, his form surrounded by a cloak of shadows. Blood was staining his hands, a permanent mark on him.

'Is this how Angel sees himself?' Giles wondered. Was this the only self- image he had left after 250 years without a mirror? 'Or,' another thought came to him, 'is this how I see him as well?' Every time he saw Angel he couldn't help but remember Jenny. Rationally he knew that Angel had nothing to do with her murder, and yet ...

Giles himself appeared little different than he did in the outside world. A little younger maybe, as he didn't like to think of himself as old. He wondered what it said about his own psychological condition that he wore a tweed suit in here, a choice of clothing he had pretty much discarded in real life.

A third presence floated toward them, a girl that looked like Buffy except for the crimson chrome skin.

"Welcome to my head," Anne greeted them.

TO BE CONTINUED