A/N
Hello, everyone! I welcome thee back to another chapter for Blood and Ash. It's been a couple days, aye? Well, here's the next chapter. Before I let y'all go and get onto the story, I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who's added Blood and Ash to their favorites. It means a lot to me that y'all are enjoying what I can come up with. If you have any good ideas for a side story to connect with Blood and Ash, then don't be afraid to drop a comment. Anyway, enough rambling from me, here's the next chapter.
Eight
Eventually, Tai found herself entering an easy routine. Most of her time was spent either at the shooting range aboard the ship, or in the Spartans' gym. Lunches often found her sitting with one of the Spartans, most likely Frederic, but the others weren't ever too far behind. However, it was days like these that had her holed up in her dorm, talking with the ship's AI, Neoni.
The Smart AI was a black-presenting woman with delicate features, shaded in hues of either green or blue, depending on what her mood was that day. Oftentimes, Tai would find the AI with a new hairstyle, with some sort of jewelry in it, the metal painted in golds and bronzes. Neoni tended to wear shirts with wide open necklines, tucked into jeans. Her shoes were in old-fashioned trojan-like shoes. Today, her hair was flat ironed, and made curly, falling gently onto her left shoulder. She had kohl lining the hood of her cat-like eyes.
The two had formed a strong bond over the time that Tai had spent mumbling to herself, after she'd first arrived on the New Hope. Neoni had found her pacing herself into the ground, talking to herself about what to do with her people. The AI had managed to calm Tai down, before talking the teen through her issues. After that, the rest went down in history, but any time the teen seemed to be going into a destructive spiral, Neoni was there to bring her back.
Currently, the human and AI pair were locked in a game of battleship, and the human teen was losing. Severely.
Bright blue eyes were narrowed in concentration, Tai's hand coming to rest against her lower lip. The girl was determined to get at least one shot against the AI, but she had a feeling that it wouldn't come. At least not today. Neoni was a smart AI, for crying out loud.
"D-6." Tai stated, her blue eyes flickering to the green-based AI.
Neoni smiled slightly, her own cat-like eyes crinkling at the corners.
"Miss." The AI stated, her voice containing a Jamaican accent.
"Damnit!" Tai yelled, very maturely crossing her arms over her chest, almost puffing out her cheeks. Almost.
"I call it an unfair advantage. You're an AI, for Pete's sake! There's gotta be a program or something that you downloaded just to beat me."
"Nope. No kind of programming. Not even a new line of code. I'm just using my premade tactics. You picked Battleship, Tai. That's clearly right up my alley so to speak. After all, I do run a warship whenever Captain Warden isn't."
For a moment, Tai can't come up with a comeback, so instead she goes with her typical saying. "Y'know what? Screw you." She huffed, throwing the AI a very friendly gesture.
The Ai seemed to let out a laugh, the synthetic sound familiar to the teen. She sank back against her bed, moving the AI's holopad with her, settling it against her knee. The last sentence Neoni had said had a thought crossing Tai's mind.
"You said you ran the New Hope, right? If you're doing all that, how're you here right now? Are AI able to like, split themselves?"
The AI seemed to contemplate something, before looking into the teens blue eyes. "I don't entirely know how to describe it. It's almost like how you said, that I'm splitting myself, but I can feel everything on the ship all at once, meanwhile I'm paying most attention to you. It's sorta like doing something unconsciously, or having a thought in the back of my mind." Neoni explained, her arms coming to rest on her knees as her normally pristine posture slouched slightly.
Tai looked at the green colored AI and couldn't help but worry. Thanks to her aunt and mother, Tai knew all too well what Rampancy was and what it could do to an AI. The teen knew that too much data or too many tasks to accomplish all at once could make the AI… fracture in a way. Rampancy was like the AI literally thinking themselves to death. And mix that in with the fact that it automatically overtakes them within seven years, and the possibility of Rampancy in Neoni was greater than most other Smart AI.
Though, most other Smart AI weren't the ones responsible for massive warships. At least, not like Neoni was.
"And, as I've said before, my coming here is of my own doing. I came here because I want to spend time with you. You're one of the only humans on this ship who don't just see me as some program to be messed with."
The way Neoni played with her lights made it seem as though the Smart AI's features had softened. Who knows, maybe they truly had. Tai could tell.
Linda had finally managed to find something over the ever elusive Tai Hover. That girl was trickier to track than some of the politicians the Blue Team would sometimes have to track down. The teens files were heavily encrypted, and the fact that they were that hard for the hacker to track down just laced Tai in red tape. Her most encrypted files were even covered in black ink, multiple different time plots missing from her history. Which shouldn't have been a thing if she were a normal civilian teenager like they all thought her to be.
But, finding information that was shrouded in shadows was Linda's forte. She'd been trained to find valuable information and how to decode it to show exactly what she wanted. So, the Spartan cracked her knuckles and got to work. Within a few minutes, she had most of it out from under the black ink, but she still couldn't get to the missing time plots. So, she did the only thing she could think to do.
She copied the files into a data chip she'd brought with her, just in case she ran into something similar to the situation she currently found herself in.
Ten minutes later found the female Spartan in an empty briefing room, the rest of her team surrounding her. The Chief was nearest to her while Frederic was on her other side and Kelly in front. The door on the opposite side of the room was locked and closed. No need in having someone find out about what they were doing, especially not if that someone happened to be the person they were currently "researching" about.
If Tai had tried so hard to keep most of her life in the shadows, then the Spartans had no true reason to take that secrecy from her. Well, not until it became dangerous to either herself or their team.
The Chief tilted his head to the female Spartan and Linda slowly took out the data chip that held the information.
"As requested, I've looked into the civilian known as Tai Hover. Most of her background is shrouded in black in and covered in firewalls. Whatever happened to that girl in the past was meant to stay that way. In the past. Most of it was encrypted when I found it." Linda didn't bother to add anything else after her last statement. They all knew what the other was trained to do, after all. They didn't need her to remind them that she had decoded the encryption.
The silence that went on in the room would've been called stifling by any other soldier, but to the Spartans, they were all thinking the same thing, but none of them wanted to voice it aloud.
They didn't want to go digging in some history that Tai had clearly tried so hard to keep in the past. But, with who they were, what they were, they couldn't take the chance that the teen wasn't who she said she was. Linda handed the chip to the Chief who inserted it into the data port of the briefing room.
Soon, the room was lit up by red lights, all of them coming from the terminal in front of them. The screen showed multiple error messages, to which Linda merely shrugged and worked her magic, silencing the messages. The files Linda had decrypted went to very specific, horrific detail.
It felt to them that the girl's past was covered in just as much bloodshed and betrayal as theirs. The one thing that truly stood out, however, was the long paragraph, made indiscernible by the large bold words typed in red saying "FAILURE". What was on Tai's file was enough to make a soldier puke. But, for the Spartans, it was much like their own past. In fact, it seemed as though Tai was the first of them.
The Spartans knew about how they came into the Spartan II program. They knew they'd been stolen and replaced with flash clones that died not even months later. Every Spartan was aware of what experimentations and augmentations they went through to become what they're known to be now. But Tai?
Tai and her siblings were the experiments that succeeded theirs. Her background went on to state how she was given the Spartan augmentations while she was undergoing the same training the ODST's and Helljumpers went through. And, later, after the teen showed promise, they forced her into the Spartan II program, much earlier than the actual Spartans were even brought in.
They were six when Doctor Halsey kidnapped them. But Tai wasn't even three. They had started experimenting with her when she was still a toddler. The files said that she took to the serum better than her siblings, and they were given it a little after her. She had been the only one out of eight children to survive. And only one of those kids was her actual sibling. Others were stolen much like the other Spartans, only, they were taken at the hospital, and raised knowing that they'd be experimenting on.
When the scientists realized just how well the teen had adapted to the serum and experiments, they had immediately put her onto more rigorous training schemes, forcing the girl into isolation. The file claimed that she showed a strong affinity in both espionage and art. And, she was the highest ranked in her weapons classes.
So, the two scientists went to a woman who was looking to develop a program that would win them the battle against the insurrectionists without much thought going into the process. And the lead scientist on that program was none other than Doctor Catherine Halsey. Her assistants were Kelsie Right and… Elise Hover. What just went and made a horrible realization terrible was the fact that Hover and Right were half-siblings. Hover being Tai's mother, Right being her aunt.
Tai had been experimented on by family. And part of that family was enlisted on the Infinite. Which is where they were expecting to be transferred to in a few months.