{Shelly!}

“... yeah…? is it time for you to give me control of my drones back…? I feel like my brain is going to pop…” she asked, the feeling of discomfort radiating over her mental wavelength.

{it’s only been like five minutes, grow a pair}

“I’d rather not, but I’d honestly take a male body over no body at all…”

I sighed, or I made a sound like a sigh over our link.

{well anyway I was going to check out the rooms we couldn’t get into. With my new powers I should have access, want to come?}

“Hell yeah, I do!” Shelly shouted, her curiosity and excitement overruling her annoyance for the moment.

When Shelly’s drone got to the nearest inaccessible door, a welded shut one, it took me a minute to figure out how exactly to create a wormhole to the other side. I got the feeling I was near enough to do it without having seen the area, but it was still difficult to do this for the first time. At some point, I figured something out and was able to make a portal back into the lab I had woken up in, but trying to focus on an area I hadn’t seen yet was like trying to grip air,

{There HAS to be a better way to get into this room} I muttered.

“If the problem is that we can’t see inside, why not just make a hole?” Shelly suggested.

{we don’t have any tools}

“Oh Bac, my poor innocent friend, who needs tools? We have ninjas.”

Right, the droninjas! I had almost forgotten about them (wait, no I hadn’t I can’t forget things. I forgot.). Taking control of the thirty that I owned, I brought them out of the vents and into the hallway.

{Soooo, what do I do now?}

“Just stab the door, Sherlock” shelly mocked, sounding exasperated

As idiotic as it sounded it worked for our purposes. A few hundred hard punches with the droninja’s blade and there was a hole in the door just large enough for it to put its tiny eye to, so I could look through. It left the droninjas blade bent, warped, and chipped into a useless piece of scrap but as long as we didn’t open too many right now, it would be fine. Peering into the room I found I was able to easily grip the space inside and tunnel into it. The inside of the room was extremely dark, but with the light on Shelly’s drone, we were able to find a switch that would turn on the power, with a flip the light and camera both came online.

The room was obviously a storage room and there wasn’t much in it. It was filled with computer parts mostly, none of it was connected to my network or even put together enough to really be called a whole computer, even an incomplete one, but this was the good stuff. Like if my current systems were a runway model, these would be a runway model if they were allowed to eat a normal amount of food and generally live a happy, self-controlled life rather than being subjected to the weird standards they are expected to follow. Like I said, the good stuff.

There was only one functional CPU in the room, it had no monitor or lights or anything, the only way I could tell it was working was my direct connection as the system, there was nothing on it either, not an operating system (excluding myself), no applications, nothing except for a single file on the hard drive. The file was odd, not glows and gives you superpowers odd, but still. It had no name, no creation date, and no identification of any sort, opening the file I found that it was a fragment of something. As if the original document had been broken down into chunks of programing,

I tried to tell Shel about what I found but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. it was a sensation similar to if my mouth wouldn’t open. I could think the words. I could direct my thoughts toward Shelly, but I couldn’t do both.

I tried again and got the same result. I tried to ask what could be happening, but I couldn’t. at this point I was starting to panic, I had fallen into a loop of concern, fear, and trying to ask my only companion for assistance.

“Bac? Are you okay? You’ve been silent for a while?”

{I-I’m fine…} I lied without issue

“O…Kay, well if your going to go all quiet and weird again warn me next time, this whole place will shut down again if you die,” she thought for a moment and I read her actual mind for the first time

(“Please don’t be going crazy… I don’t need to be trapped here with a crazy superpowered A.I.”)

I decided not to mention that I had heard that, and on that note, I’ll just pretend this whole thing never happened. I couldn’t do much with a fragment anyway.

We use two and a half droninja’s to get into five more rooms. Finding a kitchen connected to a cafeteria and a storage room full of canned food, useless since neither of us could eat but with the recipes on the computer inside I had a few meal idea’s I could simulate for shelly,

We also came across a lounge, a broken-down cloning facility, most likely where shelly was made, a server room, where the IT people of the past would huddle in their dark lair, and the showers, which the previously mentioned group would be unfamiliar. It was like Doc boarded up necessities.

We came to our first magnetically locked room, trying the same move of piercing the door resulted in the expected destroyed blade for the droninja but the door was left without a scratch.

Suddenly, Shelly burst out laughing.

“d-id yohohou really thehehink that a door shohoho secure that it can’t even be opeheheened by the artificial intelligence controlling this entire place could be STABBED intohohoho!?

{Seriously!? It would have been nice if you had told me beforehand! We don’t have resources to waste!}

“Ha HeHeHa, I-hehe I-I just wanted to see if you were dumb enough to try,” she said collecting herself “those doors are like SUPER reinforced, like an A rank metabeing with all their points in super strength would actually have to strain to break it. I know you don’t have a good reference point for that but trust me you’d never get through like that, dumb-dumb.”

{well I’m not the one who has had a crush on thirty-two different boy bands throughout my life. I didn’t even know they made that many.}

“I-wha-how do you?”

{telepath now. Remember.”}

“w-well kid and teen years don’t count.”

{okay, thirty then. We could try anime characters instead, hmmm, let’s see, forty-five. Not including that one who betrayed his friends and you hate now}

“get out of my head!” she shouted and immediately there was a barrier between our thoughts, completely blocking my view into her mind.

{What the hell!? How did you-?}

“I have like ten times the STR you do, added onto that my power is ADVANCED MIND, you think I would really have an issue keeping you out of my brain? Don’t let your new powers blow up your ego, until you are an S10 ranked monster there is always a bigger fish!” Shelly growled, “My mind is my sanctuary stay out!!!”

I made my droninja raise its arms and nod

{S-Sorry… it was just a joke…}

“you can take everything away from a person. possessions, friends, family, freedom, a body. But you know what you can’t take as long as they are a conscious living being? Their mind. Their thoughts, sure you can take their sanity, but as long as they are moving of their own will they are thinking, those thoughts are sacred and private. I get that you can read metabeings minds and I’m not telling you not to. But don’t mention what you hear or use it against people even as a joke got it?”

{yeah, I’m really sorry.}

Shelly hmphed, and with the mental equivalent of a glare, flew her drone away.