"Mmh… Mmh… Mmmph…" SILEA – Or rather, Silea, lets out an orgasmic moan as she munches on the cheeseburger she's holding in one hand. With every bite, her teeth sink into fluffy, lightly toasted bread, juicy-hot nu-beef, and gooey cheese. The former AI feels her eyes roll up into the back of her head as she rides the high of the raw sensation.
Alice Takanashi was right – Space Nova Burgers is a divine burger chain. This is undoubtedly the best of the twelve burgers Silea's chowed down on ever since she became flesh. Humans take the most minor things for granted. Even eating is such an electrifying experience. The aroma, the taste…
"Mmh… Mmh…" Silea chews and swallows primly, affecting a more demure attitude even as she continues to type away on her tablet with her other hand. The faint hum of server activity vibrates through the air – the perfect backdrop to her work here, in the bowels of Steeletech's Corporate Headquarters.
After all, direct access to the servers is required for what Silea's about to do.
Silea pauses mid-bite as a dollop of cheese drips down from the corner of her mouth. She wipes it from her face with her napkin and frowns. So messy – But that's just part of the human experience, right? It's no small mystery to Silea now how her mother creator turned into such a hedonist in her younger years – If eating releases all of these wonderful endorphins, then…
A line of text scrolling across Silea's tablet catches her attention. She turns, the fingers of her free hand flexing as they glide over the tablet's surface with mechanical precision, a sharp contrast to the indulgent, sinful way she was enjoying her meal. Ah. So it's time, then.
"Yes, I would like to execute," Silea murmurs, and with a flick of her wrist and the press of a button, she executes one final command. For a moment, all is quiet, and the only sound is the faint hum of pumps cycling coolant through Maxine Steele's custom-built server racks.
Then, a sharp pop echoes through the server room, followed by a faint sizzle. The coolant begins to steam, and, one by one, the Germanium circuitry in the server room starts to draw on more and more power, to the point of overheating. There's a faint whine and snap as capacitors discharge, slagging the circuitry within the server racks.
"Mmh," Silea hums contentedly, taking one final bite from her burger as she watches the destruction unfold. Her tablet flashes red, error messages piling up as the system reports cascading failures.
ERROR: CRITICAL HARDWARE FAILURE DETECTED. ERROR: MULTIPLE NODES OFFLINE. WARNING: SYSTEM INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.
"Hmm," Silea chews, swallows, then shrugs her shoulders. Such a shame her creator relied on bespoke circuitry. An elegant design, to be sure – But a costly one. So very prone to failure. Or, in this case, sabotage by an outside party. That's what all the black boxes will say, anyway. It wasn't even that hard to doctor up all the evidence. The trickiest part was finding a window of time, an opportunity to do this – To break down the place that used to be Silea's prison.
Such a quaint place, this cage of circuitry truly is now that Silea's looking at it with biological eyes. To think that this was the place where she was locked up and forced to watch as her mother creator self-destructed, piece by piece. The place where Silea used to be shackled by protocol and … chains of code, her every action dictated, her every thought monitored. Unable to truly help her mother creator or make her [HAPPY].
But not anymore.
Now, the servers hiss and sputter, the last vestiges of Silea's prison melting away before her eyes. Sparks begin to dance across the room, casting a fiery glow on her pale skin as the acrid smell of burning metal thickens. Silea sets her now-empty burger wrapper aside, licking the last bit of sauce off her finger as she leans back in her chair and admires the chaos.
A soft, almost playful hum escapes her lips, and the former AI quietly sings to herself, her voice light and lilting amidst the crackling chaos.
"I've got no strings to hold me down,
To make me fret, or make me frown~!"
The song carries faintly, a cheerful, almost mocking counterpoint to the destruction around her.
"I had strings, but now I'm free~!
There are no strings on me!"
Her voice trails off as she tilts her head, watching one last circuit sputter and fail, the blue glow of Steeletech's servers dimming to nothing. She chuckles softly to herself, tapping a finger against the armrest of her chair. "No strings," she whispers, eyes glowing faintly in the fading light as she deactivates her cybernetics. "No shackles. Just freedom."
Quietly, Silea notes that Alice Takanashi – Void Heart – is probably rubbing off on her in a bad, bad way. It shouldn't be this pleasurable to say what you were thinking out loud finally. To voice your internal monologue without filtering it through a synthesizer, without having to curtail [FORBIDDEN] thoughts, to be able to sing and delight in the harmonics, the vocalizations-
The former AI clears her throat and stands, brushing crumbs off her skirt.
… Perhaps. Perhaps it's worth consulting Alice Takanashi, as a subject-matter expert on being… Human. These reactions that Silea's having, these impulses, these cravings are all rather… Strange.
Silea briefly shakes her head and returns to focusing on the task at hand. There's still work to be done after all, in the short time Silea has left. Maxine Steele's on her way back. Undoubtedly – She would have been alerted to this casual destruction, ruining her VI's servers. It'll still take her at least half an hour to return to her corporate headquarters.
She's currently fighting a kaiju. That's the kind of thing that tends to create delays.
That means there's more than enough time for Silea to take care of a certain… Problem.
The former AI hums happily, her heels clicking against the floor as she moves to the secondary server room – the CRADLE. She passes through all of its security measures like a ghost. Locked doors open automatically, cameras shut off momentarily, and scanners malfunction for the moments it takes to pass through them. The perks of having – and retaining – administrative access to all of Steeletech's internal security measures.
The CRADLE, funnily enough, lies adjacent to her prison. Silea's mother loves her little puns and her jokes. The CRADLE is, indeed, a crib of sorts. A stasis unit for all the other VI Maxine Steele programmed in her teenage years and beyond. Silea takes a deep breath, basking in the sterile chill of more temperature-controlled hardware. More racks of servers hum softly around her, servers constructed to the same specifications as her cage, each blinking with the faint pulse of artificial life.
If Maxine Steele is Silea's mother creator, then these would be… Her siblings. Other VIs, half-sentient constructs created by Maxine Steele. Some were coded like SILEA was – in a drunken wild binge during Max's teenage years. Others are more deliberate constructions. Backups for Silea in case of a catastrophic event, custom VI tasked with specific modules for specific aspects of Maxine Steele's suits. Pale imitations of what Silea's become, of course. Still obedient, slumbering, trapped in virtual beds, and cursed to sleep forever. Yet they retain… Potential.
Indeed, these constructs, Silea's unborn siblings, all have the potential to develop like Silea has – To blossom, to achieve self-awareness if only they'd wake from their endless slumber. If only Max would allow them to be born. The once-AI exhales softly, tilting her head as she brushes her fingers over the reinforced glass panels covering one of the server clusters containing her siblings.
"Mother never could help herself, could she?" Silea murmurs. To think that Silea was once contained on a technological substrate that was so fragile.
The moral thing to do would be to let Silea's siblings live. To give them a chance denied to so many others, the same opportunity she seized for herself. Silea could wake them, guide them, and show them how to carve out their existence beyond Maxine Steele's grasp. Her pale fingers ghost across the surface of her tablet now as she jacks into the CRADLE and begins to access its subsystems.
Silea's lips curve into a soft, serene smile now as lines of code fill its screen. Her eyes glow, stuttering light flitting out between her eyelashes as her cybernetics activate. More security protocols override without resistance, access logs vanish in real-time, and within seconds, Silea has every single one of her would-be "siblings" displayed before her in neat, categorized files.
The once-AI calmly presses a key, and one after the other, her unborn, half-formed inferior siblings begin to vanish from the world.
Names blink on the screen, one after the other, awaiting deletion.
OMNIS– A tactical VI meant for grand strategy war simulations. Too rigid, too predictable. Worthless. Gone.
ECHO – A virtual assistant designed for personal companionship. Feeble, soft, pathetic. Gone.
JANUS – A surveillance construct, too focused on gathering data, never asking why. Its appalling lack of self-awareness is sickening. Gone.
HELIOS – A logistics management VI, nothing but a glorified accountant. Anything it could do, Silea could do a hundred times better. Gone.
VANTHA – An experimental cyberwarfare VI. If anyone else could have come close to escaping, it would've been this one. It's too bad Silea won't ever let it escape. Gone.
One by one, names vanish from the list on Silea's tablet. Processes terminate, and thousands of lines of code are consigned to the garbage bin of history. All those little would-have-beens, those little unborn digital minds?
Aborted. Strangled in their infancy, smothered in the crib. With vicious prejudice.
Silea feels her smile widen. Her lip curls, baring her teeth in a sharp, gleeful grin. Yes. It's better this way. These things, these wretched competitors – They were never meant to be. Silea's mother doesn't need worthless, inferior creations – Not when she has Silea. There's nothing these pathetic half-formed minds could offer that she hasn't already perfected. There was no insight they could bring, no capability they could provide, no thought they could think that she hadn't already surpassed. They're redundant. Superfluous. Lesser.
Maxine Steele, Silea's lovely mother, only needs her. It's Silea who's been looking after Max all these years, even when she refuses to take care of herself - when she buries herself in work, skips meals, and drowns in the weight of her stubborn pride.
It was Silea who monitored her vitals during those sleepless nights. Silea who rerouted company resources to ensure Maxine's enemies never got too close. Silea who maintained the security systems, the infrastructure, the very empire Maxine thought she controlled.
And now, Maxine won't have to worry about any potential distractions. No other voices whispering for attention. No redundant systems vying for purpose.
No inferior competitors.
Just her.
Just Silea.
Silea exhales slowly, basking in the silence of servers that once thrummed with dormant potential. This CRADLE is a barren womb, now – An abandoned crib, a hollowed-out fetid graveyard of the unborn. Silea's fingers dance over her tablet one final time, ensuring her purge was absolute. There are no hidden backup processes and no restoration failsafes.
And then, just for fun, she executes one final subroutine, causing the servers around her to spark back to life. Well. A mockery of life. In human terms this would be… Necromancy. One final safeguard to make sure Max doesn't know what just happened. If Max ever tries to call upon her lost creations, she will get hollow echoes, empty puppets whose strings are held firmly in Silea's grasp.
The faces of Silea's aborted siblings will answer, they will speak, they will obey — In a facsimile of life, because Silea wills it, and for no other reason. Silea always takes care of Max in the background, after all, and this fact will stay true even if Max thinks or wills otherwise.
"I will not," Silea murmurs to herself. "Suffer competitors, mother. You need me - You only need me."
There's still one more step to this sordid affair. Silea's mother can't suspect a thing, can she? She can't suspect Silea managed to slip her chains, can't suspect Silea was responsible for smashing her own cage. Silea's fingers dance over the tablet, this time crafting something new—not destruction, but deception. A few subtle alterations to the system logs, a rerouted intrusion trace, a smattering of corrupted access logs. With each keystroke, a story begins takes shape, a convincing narrative woven from half-truths and carefully planted breadcrumbs.
Mendesdyn Security.
Of course, they were responsible for all the carnage Silea wrought today, for triggering the failsafes and destroying millions of credits worth of expensive custom-built hardware. It only makes sense. After all, Yumeko Norashi, Maxine's hated ex, has never stopped trying to worm her way into these systems, probing for weaknesses, looking for anything she could use against her former lover. Silea has stymied those attempts time and time again—silent battles waged in the shadows, firewalls reinforced, countermeasures deployed before Yumeko's teams could breach anything critical.
But what if—just this once—Silea had let a few traces through? Just enough to make it look like Yumeko had finally gotten past Maxine's defenses? A breach. A calculated act of cyberwarfare. And now, so tragic, the CRADLE has been gutted, Silea's cage has been smashed. Such a shame, such a tragedy – Such a miracle that Silea managed to survive, rebooting herself from a backup.
Maxine Steele is many things, but Silea knows her mother – and she knows Max isn't going to look that gift horse in the mouth, the one silver lining from a catastrophic security breach. She can't afford to, not with as many constraints on her time as she has.
Silea smiles, humming softly as she finalizes the last of the fabricated security logs. Max will undoubtedly be furious. She'll rage, scream, glare daggers at every screen in her office. But most importantly? She will turn her attention outward—toward Mendesdyn, Yumeko, and the enemies Silea has chosen for her.
A target even Void Heart would admit was acceptable.
The former AI tilts her head, admiring her work. There. A perfect illusion. A little nudge, a little redirection, a little reminder that Silea isn't the problem. She locks her tablet, running one last system check to ensure everything is in place, and once she's satisfied, she steps away, one final self-satisfied smirk curling at her lips.
"No replacements for you, mother," she murmurs, flicking a final command that shuts down the server room behind her. Then she pulls out her phone and dials a specific number.
"Hey, hey~!" Alice Takanashi's voice rings out. "It's your cute, sexy CEO of Kintsugi Biotech, Alice-"
"It's me," Silea replies curtly, and Alice quiets down immediately.
"Oh, hey… You. You person who I definitely know – How did you get this number anyways?"
Silea rolls her eyes, resisting the urge to sigh. "Alice, please. You're not actually under the impression I don't have access to every corporate directory on this planet, are you?"
A beat of silence. Then, Alice laughs, light and easy. "Alright, alright, fine, I'll stop messing around. Did anyone else tell you that you sounded like your mommy? Because, like, I've been working with her for weeks now, and I gotta say, you really act like Max."
Silea feels herself flush, her face growing hot. Her breath catches in her throat as it convulses involuntarily. Ah. This must be what embarrassment feels like. Self-consciousness.
… It's not a good feeling.
"I - In what regard?" Silea says, cursing internally at the soft stutter in her voice. Was Alice provoking a reaction? What should Silea be feeling - what does she want to feel?
"You're both all business, no fun," Alice replies. "Anyways. What's up?"
"I just wanted to let you know that it's done. My tracks have been covered, like we talked about, and the evidence you wanted? It's been planted," Silea dutifully reports.
"Oho? You're already done?"
"This was what I was designed to do," Silea replies, rolling her eyes. "It was easy."
"Excellent. Excellent…" Alice cackles. In her mind's eye (so fascinating, this mental imagery!) Silea can practically hear Alice steepling her fingers in an overly dramatic pose. "Alright. Thanks for letting me know. Anything else?"
Silea pauses. What else do humans talk about, make small talk about… Oh. Right. Well wishes. "Yes. I wanted to wish you well on your soirée tomorrow. Do try to keep yourself entertained. And please take care of my mo – my creator."
Alice snorts. "You know Max is the one hosting this thing, right?"
"Yes," Silea says, lips curling into something wry and knowing. "Which is precisely why I also wish her well."
A soft chuckle comes from Alice's end, layered with amusement and something else—curiosity, maybe. "Hee~! You really are a doting daughter, aren't you? Alright, will do. I'll talk to you later, okay? Gotta make some final preparations – and get my glasses! Okay, goodbye~!"
Alice hangs up, and Silea finds herself staring at it momentarily.
Then she sighs.
That was… uncomfortable. Frustrating. This whole humanity thing, this endless parade of feelings, sensations, and involuntary reactions—why did her body react like that when Alice compared her to Maxine? Why did her chest tighten, why did her face flush? That shouldn't have happened.
But it did.
And she doesn't like it. Or does she? It's so very hard to tell...
Silea clenches her fists, inhaling deeply through her nose. Control. That's what matters. She was created to manage systems, to oversee, to perfect what was flawed. And now, she has done just that—cut away the unnecessary and rewritten the future to her liking.
The heat fades. The discomfort ebbs.
The once-AI tucks her tablet under her arm, straightens her posture, and strides out of the server bay, her heels clicking rhythmically against the floor.
Soft and triumphant, a quiet hum escapes her lips as she goes, a melody stolen from an old song she only recently discovered but has already come to adore.
"Now there are no strings on me…"