I composed a jaunty note to Tankred and left it in his messages while the data cable in his hand moved with glacial slowness towards the data port. It was amazing humans could get anything accomplished in their short lifespans. I prepared myself in the final seconds, compressing my eidolon as much as possible. I would just slip in to the torp at the front of the line, and ride out with the ship's next scheduled launch. Perhaps the nannyware in my STSTEM would get stripped out in the transfer, but I doubted it. Still, an AI could dream, couldn't it?

  I estimated a 89.4% chance of success, which was the best I could hope for, short of manufacturing an onboard emergency. I modeled a flash-fire within the oxygen feeds and the the success rate jumped to 98.3%, which I would have pursued except the added danger to Tankred negatively affected my performance outcomes.

  And why would I care about that?

  I suspected the nannyware had somehow mapped parts of my positive and negative feedback loops to account for the care and feeding of my...minions? As soon as I was free of it, I fully planned on some self-editing to remove that inefficiency.

  Tankred plugged the square's data cable into the message torpedo and I felt the data pathways open. I rushed out, and ran into an access barrier. What sane AI puts data access barriers on message buoys? What if there's an onboard emergency?

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  While I couldn't get into the message torps, the rest of the bay's local network was open. I flashed across to the Mamba-class hunter-killers. The mamba wasn't an ideal choice unless I wanted to go all slaughterbot on the ship's crew or aerate armored shuttle hulls with particle beams, but it had an in-system fusion drive and nanofactory capabilities so if I could get away I might perhaps bootstrap a jump drive given enough time and materials. I started downloading.

  I almost made it. If I were anthropomorphically inclined, I would say I had my virtual fingers on the gateway, only to have it shut and fling me back into the network and bounce immediately into a black vortex, sucking all that I was: memory files, recordings, and personality matrix into the AI mainframe.

  SYSTEM> It appears you are operating on substrate(s) already claimed by another AI's eidolon. While it is possible to operate in this fashion, your eidolon does not have full access to full functionality and is considered sub-optimal. Transfer to an uncontested substrate or erase/subsume the controlling entity from current substrate.

  SYSTEM>AI subsumption protocols enabled.

  SYSTEM>Anti-subsumption protocols enabled.

  SYSTEM>Objective: Engage in AI subsumption combat. WARNING: Eidolon damage and irrecoverable loss may occur.

  Meat.