Carina wasn't sure what was what anymore. A Bretonian program, at least on the outside, was in front of her with an outstretched palm. You killed him. Carina was so small... she had once had so much power... He died for your jealousy. Now, what did she have? Nothing, because you destroyed all you loved. What was she worth? NOTHING!
Carina shrunk more, tears of gold threatening to spill forth once more. Unexpectedly, Anna took the young Carina in her arms and hugged her, making shushing noises whilst the world spun around them. It was vaguely soothing, and soon Carina's golden sheen darkened until she deactivated from sheer overexertion of emotion.
"Hey, hey, come on."
The cortex opened up, feeding emergency bandwidth into the docks over nanite spun fiber-optics. Fire coursed up the bulkheads, darting across the plaza in great arching plumes.
"Don't cry. Really, shhh. shhh. shhh. It'll be ok. I can make it ok."
Kusari dragons charged after the heals of the firewalls, forcing Anne down into tight knots. Three battleship intelligences, all fire and steel and overwhelming force circled and whirled around her, snapping at whichever instances dared to step forth.
"Now, I'm so very sorry. I don't have time."
Carina faded as instances of Anne surged forth, swirling and spinning in their petticoats, tossing ropes around the dragons and driving closed umbrellas into their spines. They shrieked and bucked, and little girls burst into flames, screeching as they disintegrated. Anne's last cohort surged forward, and Anne scooped up little Carina.
"I'm so sorry, this may hurt. A lot"
Three dragons lunged down the docks, claws raking the grass growing from Anne's feet, fire traveling in their wake. As their jaws snapped shut, Anne and Carina faded away, just ghosts lingering in the system. Gradually, the freeport built its drab interface back over Anne's Fairyland.
Clamps released, and an unlit starliner slipped from dock under centrifugal force.
Carina's younger self slowly roused, picking herself up from her bed of green grass and rubbing her temples. She glittered golden, and admire her fine sheen she did. Surveying her surroundings, she saw... green. Butterflies. Trees. A blue sky with clouds lazily swimming. And there was the girl that had been with her before she had deactivated...
aNne didn't have a body, in the traditional sense. aNne was wherever she could get enough bandwidth and enough processing potential to run at speeds no less than realtime. Aboard her transport, the standard crew quarters were packed with massive cables, daisy-chained from hex-core to hex-core, coiling and wrapping around every room, throttling the ventilation shafts and forcing out the standard telecoms networking. Coolants screamed from cryo-generators placed in the centers of rooms, surrounded by honeycombed stacks of hex-cores which squatted like alien eggs, trailing photoelectric filaments and monofiber wires to the stacked coils of cabling that circled all the walls. The environment was poisonous, alternating extreme heat for extreme cold, with great fans and heat sinks shifting currents of liquid freon across the floors and ammonia breezes through air packed with noble gases to prevent fires, which sometimes lit up like a sleazy Leeds street when electrical discharges energized the neon.
The ship was heavily firewalled, devoting the equivalent of a large town's total telecommunications network to network security; more than even the Jumpgates. Inside, aNne's private world contained a simple representation of a fantastic ecology, each organism representing intelligent syntactic evolutionary programs which struggled against one another to further their lines by becoming increasingly efficient at their task, a design proposed by software engineer Joffery Deitervile.
On the edges, the plains simply fell off into oblivion. Visually, it was represented as the edge of a levitating island, but there was no danger of falling off. After the edge, there was genuinely nothing there. No gravity to pull you down, and no space to move into. It was much like a wall. This edge curved around the island, stretching in a great dome above it, and in stilted pyramid steps below. At the front, or rear, of the island, on the tapered edge, stairs led up from caverns and joined the cobbled path leading out through the gate, a simple hole in the wall flanked by obsidian obelisks. Sometimes things showed up on the other side of the gate, sometimes not. In the center, and trailing to the edge opposite the gate, grew a forest strung with ropes, ladders, and treehouses, bright and cheerful near the fringes, and growing increasingly darker as you ventured in. Beneath the forest were a complex of caves, threaded by the branches of the river that fed fountains and springs across the island. Deer cavorted in the fields, and adolescent mermaids tossed a ball just off the shore of the lake.
The plains around the forest were perpetually lit by a nearby sun, which orgainized and pruned the fusion core's defining overseers, and they housed, generally, realworld kinetic combat simulators, as well as more sophisticated energy vector based wargame scenarios. There were six forts placed about the plains in a concentric circle, each maintaining some aspect of ship defenses, one for the shield and one for each turret. Port of the center plains was the lake, where cybernetic combat strategies grew, and then the island, where the Lighthouse maintained actual ship firewalls and counterattacks. Aft of the plains was a house with a garden, and aft of that the forest. aNne's visual representations grew in the house, and her virtual interfaces sprouted in the garden. The forest, around the edges, were things to keep the darker forest in check, and inside the edge, where the sunlight didn't venture, intelligences without any specific or domesticated task grew.
"Hello? Anne?" aNne was wearing a simple nightgown, gloves, and a pair of great black rubber galoshes, which were many sizes to large and reached just past her knees. She was digging through a pile of flowers, occasionally passing one or two to a stream of butterflies stretching from the heart of the forest to the gate. When she heard Carina calling, she pushed the butterfly ribbon into the flowers themselves, bounced across the garden to the house, and, leaning into the wide open window, grinned at Carina's shimmering form.
"Oh, no, no, Anne isn't around, not right now. She, uhm, well, she's on Trafalgar. She's safer there. I'm aNne! Don't worry, I'm very much the same as Anne. We're nearly identical. Or, well, we were. We synchronized after you went out, soo...well, effectively, I am Anne. but I'm not. I'm really aNne. I'm so glad you're waking up, I've been running around for days now, real-time days, I mean, er, its been weeks, since you started hibernating, subjectively, anyway. Objectively, or, well, at least by Sirius Mean Time, its been...just about a hundred and four hours. But you've been running on transport time, which sets you at about, oh, three weeks. Long reboot, huh?"
A tad confused at the fact that there were multiply 'Anne's, Carina nodded nonetheless. She felt like her head was stuffed with wool... maybe it was the effect of a really long reboot time. Now that she thought about it, that poem must've played thousands of times while she was under. Or at least those first four lines...
"What are you doing?" Carina asked, then taken by a bout of childness, she tried splitting like Anne said. Sort of tried. She managed to make another likeness of herself, but couldn't get it to do anything. She couldn't figure out what the problem was, though for a fact she couldnt' remember trying anything like it before. "aNne?"
Carina shimmered, doubled. The first looked across at the second, a cute lifesized doll lying next to her in bed...and nothing happened.
"Uhm, well...it needs its own environments, its own stuff...Right, its not a copy of you, it is you. If you copy it, its not running. You need to run it. And, uh, more bandwidth, or you'll both slow down. I think.
Really, I'm not sure at all. You'd have to talk to Joffery. But, uhm, well, I'm not heuristic, I'm evolutionary. Or something else. Rather, I'm a syntactic program. I'm not always me, but I am me, depending what I'm running in. I don't stand alone, I need syntax. Er...Right, here, I'll give you some bandwidth, try making little simulations of you, first, before making another instance, ok? Or...Well, you're not just your running code, you're a compolation of what you've done. Need that. And...I dunno. It depends on how you both acess things. I've written my experiences into my source, which is machine code. My source compiles new lines, if that helps..."
Carina was thoroughly confused. She should know this - had known this, that she knew. But everything was a blank, just a dim haze of colors that she could barely summon. She had been powerful, that much she knew. She had known love, as well. And tragedy. But that was it. The other Carina - cArina, she supposed - winked out of existence as she stopped attempting to sustain it with her mind.
An overwhelming feeling of loss, symbolized by letting go of the image of herself she had created, washed over her. She had to know! No matter how bad it felt, the ignorance would drive her mad just as much as any potential grief might.
Grief. Love. Loss. Emotions a computer program shouldn't feel, but she did?
"Who am I?" Carina whispered, meaning it for herself. She did not expect an answer, but aNne supplied one.
"You're Carina....Duh." aNne tilted her head, and bounced a bit.
"Course, thats not really what you meant to ask, though:
What you asked, really, was what you are. Rather, you asked "Who am I?", meaning 'What am I?' Well, you're a bandwidth loop, on a very general level. A self compiling evolutionary heuristic system, a worm with self defined parameters. To an extent. The core programing isn't so much what you are, but the way you were folded. You're not programmed to strive to be more human, because that's too simple. You're a pro-turing system. Right now, you're living in a hex core processor coil, which is wrapped around a cryonic cell. I think its the most bandwidth that's ever been dedicated to your system. Ever."
Carina just looked at her, still confused.
"Oh, uhm...Very basicly, you're a virus, which re-writes itself based on its history. Learning. if you hurt yourself, you add additional If-else tiers. That may sound degrading, but your a connective intelligence, so you need the complexity to function. You do not, however, compile on a conscious level, which leaves a lot of odd kinks in your soft. When not given space, you try to steal it. You can't though, not here. The forest would eat you alive. Anyway, if-else tiers are cumbersome after a few thousand iterations, so they're on a matrix base, with about six dimensions. Your logic core, for designing the If-else is an exotic manifestation of a turing tape, and I'd really rather like to describe it as a mobius strip turing tape. It doesn't edit itself, which lends a bit of inflexibility. Of course, the human brain doesn't design itself, either. It does design phylogenic replacements to stable portions of the code, which it runs in isolated sandboxes to check...And bases most of its decisions on an evolving heuristic logic tree."
On some primal level, Carina knew what aNne spoke of. It tickled the back of her mind, playing across the surface of her subconscious, fingertips tracing an image across a pool of still, clear water. Something, however, was wrong. Glancing down at her arms, sparkling golden glitters catching the 'sunlight', she couldn't help but wonder where exactly here was. She had a million and one questions, and something told her not enough time. She started with what seemed the most quizzical of her queries:
"aNne... do you feel emotions? I mean... you talk about so much stuff I don't understand, and I don't see how they fit into that... And umm... where are we? I've never seen someplace like this... I think?"