"An update?" I asked myself and chuckled. "How interesting, maybe I will finally be freed, they now know what to do with my soul." I glanced down at my chest, clutching my ribs and felt a faint phantom pain below them, not on my heart, but inside it. As if something was missing… my soul.
But the strangest of things? We weren't inside my soul, yet concentrating on the surroundings made the pain go away and it made me feel filled. As if this world was able to replace my soul.
An idea sparked my mind: "Maybe… if they rescue me, I should get a reward for my deeds, should I not? I deserve one, right?" I started to scribble words onto the ground… and the air. Some of them even changed color once I had finished them. Don't know why, don't care. Once they were finished, I tested them. As I slowly saw the code I wrote run, line by line, I could read the change in the general Lukas-clone-data. Of course, the changes were present but a mere speck of a second.
"Now I just need to configure this to only influence my data." A trial plagued by errors and mistakes which would not affect me in this realm of data, not for as long as my soul was not within its original spot in my body, so I had no way to test my work for potency. Hours upon hours I tried finding my personal identification in the system, until I found this enormous, almost 100 digits long code.
⟪⚪⟫
Outside the simulation, Lukas and Max were relaxing on their armchairs in front of a fireplace in what seemed like a European-styled room. Of course, both of them were wearing nothing but wine-colored bathrobes.
"I've reached chapter 18 now," Max said. "Propably gonna stop reading until you catch up. You should work less and read more, you need to relax." He took a sip of his wine and put down the book onto the armrest. With a yawn escaping his mouth, he stretched his arms over his head.
Max threw Lukas a glance as he was not responding, neither in an affirmative way, nor altogether.
Lukas' eyelids were covering his eyes and the book was neatly put onto the small round table next to him. A few drops of saliva were covering his bathrobe and a drop was flowing down his lips and chin. Max was right, he was working too hard, exhaustion plaguing him.
The laboratory doors opened and Max walked in, having changed into his coat and computer glasses. He was carrying a milkshake and a list. "I should cross off some of these for Lukas," he muttered. It was Lukas' to-do list for the simulation. It was very long. Hundreds of different points, ideas and topics he wanted to improve before the end of the first simulation.
Max sat down and started the CAE-Software to continue working on the simulation. He glanced over to one of the big screens out of curiosity, while the software was loading. On the screen? The Teddy Emperor, sitting on the captain's chair on his citadel's bridge. And in front of him was kneeling someone Max was not expecting to see as well as wanting to see. "That damn code dump NPC! How the fuck did she get out of her box? It is not even connected to the simulation…"
Max hurried down into his chair and got out his keyboard. His eyes were darting from side to side, filled with anger and annoyance. His fingers tapping in record times to search for her in the simulation; to find her among millions of characters. It took a few minutes and a few times of making sure she was really there and just his imagination before he found the test-subject under the TeddyEmperor's influence and checked the coordinates. Yes, it was her. "And… delete," Max said with a relieved tone.
The test-subject on the screen glitched and then vanished. "Wait… Did it… Yes, it fought back, tried to restore her own code." Max's expression was one of awe. "When Lukas wakes up, I will let him take her out of the deletion box and then I can test how far her influence into the code reaches."
⟪⚪⟫
"Yes, my lord—" The test-subject, kneeling, felt something weird, as if something was being erased.
The TeddyEmperor noticed her worried expression and the sudden cut-off in her sentence. Normally she would have spoken in the third person to repeat her orders. "What are you doing?"
The test-subject ignored him, filled with panic as she scanned her own code. "No! No, no, no…" Her polygons were being deleted. Her code was being stored somewhere else she could not pull out of. She tried stopping the process, trying to restore what she lost.
"I asked you a question!" The TeddyEmperor stated loudly and pounded his fists against the armrests on his chair. He stood up, trying to grab the test-subject, but…
"I need to hide!" She changed her coordinates to a different place in the simulation, vanishing from the citadel. The deletion did not stop. "Shit!" Panic set in. Then a spark of an idea hit her. "She would replace me, wouldn't she? She owes this to me, for her freedom!" She quickly changed her own ID and the one of her duplicate, not to new ones. She swapped them and… "It stopped!"
She started laughing, almost maniacly. Relief flooded her body and she hugged herself.
"Who are you?" Someone screamed at her.
"Huh?" She looked up in confusion, yet her smile did not vanish. "Supreme King?"
The Supreme King's throne towered before her. It was ominous and ginormous. The leader of the Geddos Alliance stared at her in anger. "I will ask once more. Who are you?"
She stood up, turning towards him. She was back to her old personality, acting like a political envoy. "I thank you for letting me hide here, escaping imminent death. I shall reward you."
"What could you give me other than blood?" He asked.