Phoebe had been plagued by sleeplessness for a week but that night she slept unusually well. She supposed that the memory transfer had something to do with it. Still somewhat sleepily she looked over to the clock that stood on the bedside table inside of her container, it was early in the morning but she felt like she wouldn't be able to fall asleep again.

She decided to get up and get dressed, then stepped through the door into the expansive warehouse the lab was located in. The only people she could see were the guards they had brought with them, since they didn't approach her she assumed that they had nothing to report. After giving the room a second look she noticed that Gerald was sitting at one of the scientists' workstations.

While Phoebe walked over to him she wondered if he had been there all night, it wouldn't surprise her. Gerald had a tendency to ignore his biological needs if he was especially interested in something and this software most definitely qualified. Phoebe's speculations were confirmed when she reached Gerald, his eyes looked strained and he was even paler than normally but here he was, relentlessly hammering away at the keyboard in front of him. He was so immersed that he didn't seem to notice Phoebe at all. She decided to not break him out of his focus and instead just sat down on a chair behind him.

Whatever Gerald was coding there was far beyond Phoebe. While she was definitely adept in some languages she was nowhere near Gerald's level, she usually was in charge of the human side of intelligence work rather than the technological one. After a few minutes Gerald did seem to notice her but instead of greeting her he first finished what he was working on.

Once he was done he turned around in his chair, his voice sounded noticeably tired. "Hey Phoebe."

"Hey G. What are you working on there?"

Suddenly the tiredness in Gerald's voice disappeared, excitedly he pointed to the screen. "I've been working on improving their software. Don't get me wrong, I still very much admire what they have done but in some regards they definitely had some weaknesses. The actual biological interface is near perfect and I'm not familiar with the field so I left it alone." He raised a finger. "But! But. There were some major shortcomings in their communication protocols, in the context of the server as it is now they are more than sufficient but when it comes to direct connections it gets problematic. Anyways, I ironed that out and then got to work on something they hadn't done yet."

Phoebe said: "I can confirm that direct connections can lead to problems."

Gerald continued: "So, what we now have is something like a conference call feature, it's much safer than a multi-brain link but the connection doesn't go as deeply so things like directly sharing memories or controlling another body won't work. I didn't want to lose out in the convenience and efficiency of memory sharing completely though, instead of directly transferring memories you can instead project them into the shared mind. I already tested everything on simulated minds and it's worked perfectly. Now once everyone is awake I'd like to do a real test run."

Phoebe said: "I think I got what you mean, you might have to repeat it without the lightning speed though."

Gerald didn't answer, instead he just turned around again and resumed with his work.

A few hours later everyone was awake. Phoebe had made herself some breakfast with whatever she found, which turned out to be quite a lot, the stores were almost completely full.

At some point Gerald stepped out into the middle of the room and announced that he now wanted to conduct his test. In the meantime he had also jury-rigged a device that would allow everyone to connect to the shared mind. All of them gathered around the device except for Harald, who preferred to remain disconnected.

The device consisted of a metal ball mounted on top of a computer tower. In order to connect to the joined mind all you had to do was touch the ball. Gerald was the first to connect in order to make sure everything worked correctly, the others followed after.

As Phoebe touched the metal a familiar numbness went up her arm, it was way less intense than with the direct link with Sarah so she managed to remain standing until the connection was complete. When she opened her mental eyes in the shared mind she found that Gerald had set it up like a conference table, the others gradually appeared in their respective seats.

There were a total of five people present, there was Gerald, Hannah and Phoebe herself, Sarah and Anna had also successfully connected.

Gerald spoke: "Alright. This seems to be working. Let's test the memory projection then."

After a few seconds the memory Gerald had chosen for the test appeared in the middle of the conference table, it seemed to be a tesseract.

Gerald said: "Great, seems like even concepts like an additional dimension work in here."

Phoebe was the next to speak: "This here should help us figure out more of the situation we are in. Now we can better share information that could lead to us finding those hackers. From what I gathered already we can't track them using this software, they seem to have taken steps to avoid this."

Anna said: "Yes, they could be behind any of the connections the server has open right now and we have no way to access the server's system itself so we can't brute-force guess our way to them."

Phoebe asked: "Before we get to the hackers, I'd like to know a bit more about your software so we know what possibilities are open to us. Besides the obvious applications, what else have you used your software for?"

Anna explained: "We made use of the calculation capabilities in order to do some simulation involving genetics, Peter's body on the server was part of those experiments. Later on we used the Mencur-Besh collective to automate various experiments that were similar."

"Results?" Hannah asked.

Instead of the scientists, Gerald was the one to answer: "I had a look at the results myself last night, they are fascinating. They completely decoded the functions and interactions of all human genes, they also did the same for multiple animal species. They also have a complete genome of the bodies the Mencur-Besh collective uses."

As he spoke he projected a transparent human body onto the table that rapidly underwent changes to demonstrate the effects of various alterations.

Sarah added: "So what it boils down to is that things like the Mencur-Besh's bodies are theoretically possible in the real world too, the thing is that we don't have the tools to reliably construct a full genome from scratch, neither do we have ways to incubate a Mencur-Besh body."

"Any other projects?" Hannah said. "If not, I'd like to start finding those hackers."

Sarah projected something that looked like the molecular structure of a material, then said: "We also did some research into discovering new types of materials, the methods and results were similar to our genetics project. Most things, while theoretically possible, can't be created due to lacking technology."

While the others were talking, Phoebe had been going through the memories she had received from Sarah again, she then realized that in one or two of them there was a woman she didn't know, she hadn't noticed her during her first round because Sarah had never focused on her in those memories.

The woman was short, had long brown hair and very pale skin, Phoebe couldn't exactly see her face. She proceeded to throw the best projection she could manage onto the table.

"By the way, who is she?" Phoebe asked.

Both Sarah and Anna sharply inhaled.

Hannah clearly noticed and asked: "What are you hiding?"

Sarah slowly began: "I… might have excluded some memories. I really didn't want to involve her."

Gerald asked: "Why?"

Anna continued in Sarah's place: "Our project was well underway and the server had just entered the phase where it could accept a nearly unlimited amount of people. Naturally we reported our progress to Peter. Now, you must know that Peter never talked about his private life more than was absolutely necessary, at this point we had known him for a few years but we didn't really know much about him."

Anna took a deep breath.

"That day he seemed to have decided that we are trustworthy enough for him to tell us a bit more about himself. Well, a bit might be an understatement. He more or less told us his whole life story, among it was that he had a sister."

Phoebe said: "So that's her then."

Anna nodded. "Yes, but there is more to it. He told us that from birth she had suffered from some kind of mental condition that caused her to refuse to trust or interact with anyone but Peter, not even her own parents, it also caused irrational fear of anyone but him. He then said that he now was sure that we could help her in some way, the only problem was that in order for us to help her she needed to be here in the warehouse."

Phoebe said: "I can see how that could be problematic for her."

Sarah took over again: "It took him three months of convincing to even get her to come here with him and another month for her to not immediately try to run when she saw us. At that point we wanted to take some simple measurements, figure out what her problem actually was. But when I formed a mind link with her, something interesting happened. Inside of our shared mind she seemed to be completely unaffected by her condition. What I realized then was that she had effectively been a prisoner in her own mind for a bit over thirty years, she probably would have completely gone insane if not for her interactions with Peter."

Gerald leaned his head on one hand. "That's heavy, I mean I had my own share of conditions and therapists when I was younger but I've never heard of anything like that."

Phoebe asked: "What did you do then?"

Sarah replied: "Well, first and foremost there was the problem of getting her to leave our joined mind. She begged me to stay connected, she didn't want to go back into her mind-prison after experiencing freedom. It required some actual mental strain to disconnect, I suppose I should have seen that as a warning of some sort."

Anna said: "Harald suggested letting her use the server while we figured out some solution to her problem, in the end we went with that. We called in some favors with a few doctors we once helped, in turn they helped us create some sort of life sustaining setup for her. We figured that it would be best for her mental state if she didn't have to leave the server at all."

Gerald asked: "So, how long was she in there?"

Anna said: "When it comes to the time spent on the server, roughly five-hundred years. In real time, a few months. We really wanted to make sure that nothing could happen to endanger her, especially not since we know first-hand what it means to have people die due to you own mistakes. Our solution was radical but overall low-risk. We would first extract her personality and memories from her brain, then effectively reset it and put personality and memories back and have the rest of her brain rebuild itself based on that."

"Don't know, doesn't sound low-risk to me." Hannah interjected.

Sarah explained: "The only reason why there was a risk at all was because we were unable to copy her entire mind as a backup, without an empty brain as temporary storage that just is not possible. There was also the problem that in order to minimize interference her consciousness needed to be in a neutral state, which we couldn't induce from outside. Peter used the Mencur-Besh collective to conduct research into how to achieve such a state with the methods available on the server."

Gerald said: "Ah, so those are the strange diagrams labelled 'Ascension' talking about elements, runes and stuff."

"Peter was so kind as to document the procedure." Anna paused for a moment. "When we finally did come around to following through with the procedure everything went according to plan. The relevant aspects of her were extracted and reinserted properly. The first thing she did when she disconnected from the server was jump up and give everyone a hug. Also since from her perspective she never really had a name she assumed the one she also held on the server, Shadow."

Hannah said: "Still doesn't explain why you tried to hide her."

Sarah said: "There was one thing that didn't go according to plan. Her brain reconstructed itself in a way that was completely different from normal humans, so different even that whatever her brain turned into was so overwhelming that I was forced to immediately terminate my mind link when I tried to check up on her. We don't know if some external interference caused this or it was just random chance. We cautiously did some scans and simple experiments, any simulated mind we tried to connect to her was almost immediately overloaded and warped beyond recognition. What's more is that a few months ago, out of nowhere she gained the ability to interface with computers without implants like mine."

Anna slowly said: "We… are not sure what we created when we saved her. For now, she helps us keep the server free of troublemakers. But I still can't help but feel that we somehow made a big mistake. She's able to focus on a nearly unlimited number of things at the same time, able to control technology with a touch, more or less able to kill with a thought."

Phoebe said: "Yeah, but she's your ally, right?"

Anna said: "Well, a few days ago I would have no doubts, then she suddenly disappeared without a trace and we have no idea where she is now."

Hannah nodded. "Bad."

Gerald raised his voice: "Let's not get sidetracked here, sure she could potentially be problematic but the hackers are still the more pressing problem. But please, from now on no more secrets."

Phoebe browsed through the memories she had available, then started asking detailed questions that might help them find out who wanted to harm the scientists. In the of her mind however she once again thought about how absurd this entire situation would have sounded the day before. Each time she thought she had seen everything, something new would come out to surprise her, first the mere existence of the brain-computer interface, then its memory transfer capabilities and now the existence of what sounded to be a potentially dangerous superhuman.

She sighed, now was not the time to muse about the vast expansion her horizon had experienced in the recent days, she had hackers to catch.