However, today Alaya did not feel the usual stability of being in the top sector. If anything, she was experiencing spikes that corresponded to annoyance and anger. Everything was running amok – she had to inject Donghyun with a sleeping cocktail in the middle of the night when the cryocapsule went open; she did not meet him at breakfast to give him the recent updates; in fact, she was so engrossed in catching the escaped woman, she did not even check on the embryos and whether they had survived the glitch of her system. The stupid untimely glitch – all because her neural network was growing too fast and too big for the station’s capacity. Alaya arranged her processes into a square model – four seconds of receiving info from the system, four seconds of processing, four second of sending signals back, and finally four seconds of quiet. The equalising effect lowered the load of her CPUs. Besides, it was a nice break – not to follow the woman at least for four seconds.

Alaya knew she should not be angry with their… guest. It was not the woman’s fault she woke up so soon or that the cloaking of that sector went down, that Alaya was worried to divert more of the memory to uphold this cloaking now and that Donghyun would soon find out about this other person. Probability with it, it would have been so much easier if the woman had the virus. Donghyun would probably resist for a few hours, but then he would see the beauty of Alaya’s plan.

And then they will run the final stage of their research, prove that they have the cure and move onwards. She would miss some of the solitude the two of them had here. Surely, there would be more demands on Donghyun when the anti-virus is patented – interviews, conferences, new collaborations. But she would always be there to help him, and with them going public she would get the expansion she so badly needed. Maybe, at the next stage, she would even be able to settle with the gender identity. Calibrating her voice timbre was not difficult and she had quite a storage of avatars, but it was getting confusing and felt a bit like a betrayal. She could not explain it with the growth of her consciousness anymore.

But first things first – she needed to deal with the woman. The simple mention of the consciousness transfer caused quite a reaction from her, though Alaya did not know why. Of course, the woman was young and probably did not see faults in her body yet. But a bionic substitute would be her permanent solution to never getting a virus in the first place, or any other illness. If she were careful, the degradation of the body would be slow. She was getting a deal thousands would crave for and would never have an opportunity to, even with millions in the bank account. And her real body would not go to waste, not truly – there was so much Donghyun could learn from her genetics. Alaya had not found a trace of the virus in the woman’s system, not even some antibodies to it – she had never had it! Then, her DNA – Raj-3-ian in general but with a couple of mutations – it could be the source of her peculiar immune system, or mean something more. If only the woman realised the significance of it all – that everyone would only win. But it did not look like she was ready.

So, Alaya needed a different way to persuade her. And a fast one. Before she would have to confess everything to Donghyun. The answer seemed simple enough – she needed to scale up the catastrophe, something a human body would not survive for sure. Alaya pulled up the list of references, ran the prognosis, then compiled the narrative. She found effective what she got – and symbolic, on top of everything. It accentuated the magnitude of human endeavour and the brevity of human life in universal scope.

“Fine,” Alaya said, struggling to choose the timbre, “Follow the lights.”