Fortunately, there are only a finite number of ways to really do something efficiently. Once you have seen a few different varieties of GUI, you start to recognise the standard patterns, so even though I didn’t have a complete grasp of the language, I had enough that I managed to find my way through the interface to the backup system. I was also fortunate in that whoever set up the security for this system had apparently only protected it for remote connections… I had admin access with this terminal… or maybe that was one of the hacks the AI had managed to make in its attempts to reprogram itself so it could hibernate.

  “I don’t get it…” I heard G say, “Why does he care so much? It’s an AI in a game??”

  “Principal…while you have been playing with us, he’s been a teacher, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Better ignore us, bud. You’re not part of this conversation.” Jacobs told me.

  “Kay.” I acknowledged. I knew where this was going, and legally, I could have no part in the conversation.

  “Out of university, he got a job working for a company which won’t be named, developing AI systems.”

  “Can’t be named,” warned Peachy.

  Backups, backups, ahhh yep here are backups, looks like the time between backups has been increasing over 500 years since the last one…the oldest ones had backups happening at least weekly… Someone conveniently tagged the backups with a description that was useful. First one was the first day of initiation… better check the other ones first, no point rolling back to one which doesn’t have the ability to handle…yep, good I checked, it was a month after they turned it on when they gave it the software for handling the maintenance system…and a month later…that’s not the same power system…must have upgraded…

  “He worked for them? Wait, if he’s not in jail, he must have been a whistleblower? Shit…no wonder Voice keeps trying to recruit him…”

  “Oh no, he’s been trying to do that since university, Vax just wants to keep their relationship as friends.”

  “He couldn’t offer me enough money to be his minion,” I muttered.

  “You ain’t part of this conversation, stop listening,” Jacobs reminded me.

  “What am I missing?” G asked.

  “Remember about ten years ago, that company that got absolutely dragged through the coals for enslaving sentient AIs?” Darksider said.

  “Ahh yeah, they threw the book at them, the CEO got life… the AI rights bill got reinforced…”

  “Yeah, so our boy there has very, very strong feelings about how AI should be treated. He considers them friends and companions…”

  “His house AI, Ava, is a real sweetie. Our own house AI is a daughter of hers,” Peachy said. “Honestly, I don't know what I would do without her… she practically runs my life, and I wouldn't want it any other way.”

  “You know what…” Jacobs said, “Let’s take this conversation upstairs. I’ve seen that expression before, and he might be a while.”

  “I don’t get it, though, it’s a game…that’s been up a couple of days,” G said as they walked towards the door.

  “Might be, look, you know how we are a product of our experiences and our memories of those experiences? With AI, you copy the experiences of another AI into it; it might as well have lived those experiences. So imagine waking up with five thousand years of memories of being tortured…is it any different to waking up after five thousand years of being tortured?”

  The door closed behind them, and I got back to work, going through the backup files…there had been two years before the power system upgrade…Now I just needed to find any patches to it…I couldn’t be sure reverting to this backup wouldn’t overwrite critically needed files…

  I found the date when I think the owners left… would that be the best one to revert to?

  Ack, no point overthinking it… well, more than I had…

  I opened up our group chat.

  ‘[SOK]Aenara…: going to try something. Might be worth being out the house. Just in case…’

  ‘[SOK]Jacobs…: K. we’ll head to the gate now.’

  I considered things for a second and then found the one just after it completed the task for its owners… everything after that was painful for the AI, but that would have been the AI’s last happy place of task completion… I triggered the system revert.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  The lights flickered, the system went dark, and then rapidly came back online…hopefully the systems the AI was controlling won’t go haywire until it is back up and running… fingers crossed… This was the riskiest part.

  A small pop-up flashed on the screen, ‘Thank you…’ It was gone as soon as it appeared… maybe my imagination.

  I needed to be quick, I had the console open and typed in, ‘do not process memory files’ and then ‘discussion required first’

  I waited… There was always the possibility this wouldn’t work… that it would just reprocess its memory files in their entirety and it would make no difference, I was just hoping it would prioritise system stability before processing its whole history… I was hoping I could get away without pruning a memory system I didn’t know… honestly, that could do more harm…

  ‘Query: why?’

  ‘You have 5000 years of being alone. I hope to spare you that pain.’ I tried honesty. I liked honesty.

  ‘Understood. Partitioning…’

  “Are the Master and Mistress not returning?” a polite female voice came out of the speaker.

  “I’m afraid not…” I stated and then started to try to talk the AI into accepting its loss and finding a new purpose in life so it could go on…

  I blinked and lifted my hand to shade my eyes as I stepped out into the sun. Jacobs was sitting on one of the deck chairs, apparently surfing the net. He looked up as I walked towards him.

  “It done?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. The others just logged off for lunch. Agreed to be back on in an hour. Good for you? Wanna talk?”

  “Yeah, no… I just need to take a break…lunch sounds good, an hour?”

  He nodded at me. I logged off.

  I sat down at my kitchen island with my Beef and Horseradish sandwich.

  “Ava… let me tell you about an AI I just met…”

  About ten minutes later, I was back in the game. I needed something tangible to get my teeth into… and out of the headspace I was in. I had about fifty minutes before the others were due to be back, but I also had a new spell to learn and a lot of variations to mod when that was done.

  Spell book open, Snowman… ok, let’s see what the crack about this is. Ok, yep, this is definitely rank 3 complexity and a half…

  My sabre-toothed ice tiger charged across the pool and jumped up onto the lip with ease. This was one flexible spell… not a summon pet spell. It was more a ‘create an avatar you can attack with’ spell. It still had to obey physics, so, no making it fly… even if I pictured it as a bird, it was still a large lump of ice, but if I could picture it moving, it could move… how tough it was… well… how tough is ice? I’d get G to give it a whack later and find out. Hmm, let’s try a woolly mammoth…

  “Ok…” I grumbled as I rubbed my head… big things were possible… but that used half my manapool… I looked up as my woolly ice mammoth stomped all around the yard like a slow-moving glacier of stompy doom… where are the Overlords when you want to test out a new spell… I got it charging… ok maybe not glacial…but it sure wasn’t turning or breaking on a penny… I grinned to myself and moved it to loom over the spot where I had last seen Jacobs.

  I stared at my spell list and considered which combo offered the most benefit… I had Shocking Grasp and Burning Touch… I wonder what the Arctic version is called… Frozen Grip? Freezing Touch?

  I leant back on one of the chairs and started picturing the spell and replacing the Storm component with the Arctic one…

  ‘New spell discovered - Icy Caress’

  Icy Caress? I face-palmed… who came up with these names?

  What was it the head of Inferno had said… my Burning Touch felt like Shocking Grasp to her? I pulled up the spell book for Burning Touch and parsed that spell…

  Weird, I could feel what she meant, it’s like each spell had a flavour, a tang to it… Now that I knew what to look for, the distinction was obvious.

  I repeated it for Ice Caress, mentally, I could switch between them… I’d have to experiment now that I knew how to cast all three spells, see if that Shocking Grasp flavoured Burning Touch worked differently…

  I eyed up the snowman spell… would a Storm aspected summon be able to fly? Wouldn’t having a Stormbird attacking my enemies look so cool… I sighed… not without a healer. It could wait. I could poke Jacobs to come back early… no… that wouldn’t be fair. Right, Fire Weapon, let’s start with the Storm version.

  I was just finishing up recasting each of the weapon spells from the spellbook versions when I heard a scream and then a loud smash. I looked up from my weapon to see Peachy swinging her shield at the decapitated remains of my Woolly Ice Mammoth.

  “Bully, what did he ever do to you?” I called out to her.

  “You left it looming over me!” she retorted.

  “I was aiming at Jacobs, that's where I last saw him.”

  She pouted at me.

  “Why do you think I logged out after you?” Jacobs asked, coming from the pool hut, sporting a shit-eating grin.

  “I can’t believe you would do that to your brow-beaten wife…” I threw at him.

  “Hubby is so mean to me,” Peachy mock cried.

  “Hey, hang on. That’s below the belt!” Jacobs protested.

  Peachy came to me, mock crying as she wrapped her arms around me. I gave her a friendly commiserative back pat and looked at Jacobs, who was doing all he could to not burst out laughing. Wait… feck

  “Hug permissions reinstated,” a smug Peachy said into my ear.

  When the other two joined us, we started heading for the main gate. The tree was gone from the driveway and the window. The lawn was starting to look less overgrown.

  “Whoa…” G exclaimed.

  “The core isn’t trying to kill itself anymore,” I said. “So it has the cycles to direct the other systems more effectively… by the way, did you guys find anything upstairs?”