The Creation, an ace lightning fanfic

DISCLAIMER: I own no characters/situations in Ace Lightning.

Kilobyte was his greatest creation, no doubt about that. Powerful and glorious, the perfect tool to take over the world.

But she, now, she was his greatest deception. Others might have thought her his personal Lolita, a pubescent fantasy brought to life; that was hardly the case. He preferred his women legal, or at least appearing like it, when he could get them and when he had the time. But it did not matter what others thought; what mattered was the distraction, and the success of his plan. And if his plan went well, nobody would ever dare to scorn him ever again.

She was a composite, of a thousand and one catalogue models scanned into his computer, what he thought were girls of the right age advertising new teenage fashions and Barbies and junk food. The type considered attractive by today's youth, skinny, with fairish hair and tanned skin. She'd obviously be Caucasian, he decided; all the better to fit in.

Not, of course, that she would entirely fit in. She would stand out, this creation of his, stand out sufficiently to attract male attention. He would give her talents, around fifty percent of the strength and the agility of the CGI, make her sporty, upgrade the lingual centres to make her witty and intelligent, and give her a tale of teen angst and woe to make her the instant focus of attention. And all this would be focused on one person only: the centre of the spider's web of intrigue and mystery that had sprung up around the small town in north USA, the human.

She was almost finished.

As an afterthought, Rick typed a few lines of coding that would speed the application of another teenager through the system and into the prestigious Westleafe Academy.

She fulfilled every one of his expectations, marching into the local high school with a grim look on her face and an attitude a mile long; had she been any one of the snotty brats serving counters and scanning barcodes that he encountered in his decreasing number of visits to what he had begun to think of as the outside world, he would have had to fight the urge to strangle her, but among other members of the species, it only increased her desirability.

She was an innocent, too, a Trojan horse, afflicting her victim without knowledge of her hidden curse. She thought herself to be exactly what she seemed: an ordinary, if rather talented, teenage girl, suffering (in the way that teenagers did, pathetically and without due cause) over a move imposed by her (non-existent) parents.

And it worked. He oversaw her progress, when he wasn't busy concentrating on the others, and he saw the attention she attracted from males, most specifically including target Hollander. Through her eyes, he could observe goings-on at the school, feeding the data into his hidden cameras.

The footage of the girls' locker rooms was a side benefit, from which he reaped a small profit from selling under a well-hidden alias to an obscure website with servers located in a Pacific island.

Every night, she returned to plug herself into a wall socket in a small storeroom out the back of his store; he had little fear of anyone coming in by chance at that hour and seeing her, not even his incompetent employee. And every morning, her memory files were rearranged to have her think herself a normal girl, her homework—easy, juvenile stuff that he had programmed her with the ability to handle—was done, and she was sent off to school.

She was inquisitive, this creation of his; she became the co-editor of the school paper, and wondered precisely what was happening to Mark Hollander, her program's focus inevitably on him, and his on hers, thanks to the abilities and appearance he had given her.

(She had poor taste in men, but he could say the same for his other two programmed women, as focused as they were on Lightning.)

She investigated the goings-on at the Carnival, gradually putting a picture together; he was impressed at her persistence. The Hollander kid would have to spill the beans to her, eventually, and then he could keep an even closer eye on them both. Hidden cameras on carnival grounds were one thing, but hidden cameras in a school or house were quite another, and planting a spy had been an excellent idea.

Besides, if she ever became too inquisitive, he could always replace her program.

During those last days, while he was fleeing from Kilobyte, he had the vague idea that she was coming closer than ever to finding out the truth about the carnival; as soon as he could he placed some extra coding in her to make her entirely self-sufficient. She'd have to perform her own memory wipes, to make sure she continued fitting in as a normal girl, come to his store every night and recharge herself without being aware of what she was doing, and why that set her apart as abnormal.

He worried that his last-minute coding job would cause her to suspect something, but there was nothing else he could do, and she was compliant enough. He'd only programmed the attitude to be a show, after all.

Did she really care about the Hollander brat, in the same way Lady Illusion said she cared about Ace Lightning?

He, personally, doubted it. Programs lacked feelings. You might as well say a toaster could, or an insect. Besides, she was a program simulation, and the Hollander boy was true human, real; they'd never manage to get it together. Especially once he found out.

He let himself indulge in a short fantasy of her peeling back a layer of flesh to reveal the coding underneath, and the look on the brat's face when he realised what she was and who created her; it might be a good way of getting revenge on the latest one of the many who had tormented him throughout the years.

She was programmed to be obsessed with the boy—he could see that, the way she reacted to him, got his attention, insisted on having her pride and her way which only infatuated him all the more, watched him and became (acted) jealous of the boarding-school girlfriend, finally agreed to what teenagers called "going out".

It was a program, and that inquisitive look in her eyes when she was on the trail of her story, that oh-so-clear expression of longing when she was around Hollander, were not real at all, programmed expressions on the face of a simulation.

And the same went for Lady Illusion; whatever program fluctuation had ordered her to betray Lord Fear, he'd just have to fix that. Which Kilobyte managed quite adequately, he thought.

Programmed. Both of them. Even if the results weren't exactly what he'd imagined.

Get me back to the mortal dimension, Kilobyte had commanded, and supplied him with the machines he said he needed.

Rick Hummel started typing his codes, trying to slip underneath Kilobyte's security net and win in spite of it all.

He was the Master Programmer, and his will would not be denied.

Fingers moving rapidly across the keys, he activated his Trojan Lolita.

A/N: Written as a one-shot. Constructive criticism appreciated.