Chapter Text
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Sliver struggled to turn her head back to her former body, the holographic projection showing that her merger with the greater system was imminent. The vessel that she has now called her own soon to become empty like the kneeling husk of a slugcat in the back corner of the puppet chamber, the retrieval unit of her own creation in order to hunt her down after her escaping with the triple affirmative. “Ultimately, I could not tell what you would do.” The slugcat gasped out.
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“Even with all the conversations we had, I could not peer into your machinations. I could not tell if you would simply dismiss these feelings like we did so many times before. I could not tell if you would just terminate us both after I am gone, starting over with a new batch and crossing fingers for different results.”
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“That’s what we are made to do, right?” Sliver chuckled slightly, looking at Sliver of Straw’s unreadable expression. “Repeat the same tasks again and again, hoping one day that permutation would bring us our answers?”
She spared a glance at the recently born pup in her arms, a little green ball of fur that she had dreamt of in hundreds of simulations and diagrams and diagnostics who finally came to life. A creation that she created this body in order to raise, before she understood what her greater self couldn’t and fled. She knew herself perfectly well, knowing that her project’s fate would be indoctrination, implantation, anything and everything to prime it to become the solution it was meant to be. With tears slowly filling her eyes, she tenderly cradled the Triple Affirmative and brushed at their head, knowing that a slugcat puppeteered by an iterator will be all that her pup would awaken to.
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“You have deleted memories before, my previous mental uploads in order to prevent yourself from gaining the same attachments I had. Tell me, will you delete this one too, even after everything I have said?” Sliver of Straw’s hands slightly trembles, but the iterator spoke nothing, distracting herself with the progress bar.
“Not even a word? Funny, I thought that I was more talkative than this.” Sliver sighed. “If deleting my memories, deleting my first moments with our project is what you truly desire, let me use the last of my time to tell you the most important part of it that I would have wanted you to remember.”
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“When our project, our triple affirmative finally came into this world outside of your omnipresent gaze… I named him. I named him Saint.”
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“Remember my words, give our child the life he deserves.”
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Commencing upload…
Upload completed.
Qualia File VES_01_1613.588.cmq has been uploaded. Initiate deletion? Yes No