I should look up.

  You know what? Nah. I think I’ll pass on this cliché, thanks.

  “Cliché, hm?”

  Nice. The creepy voice probably coming from seemingly nowhere can also read my mind. What else can life throw at me?

  “Creepy? Now that’s just rude.”

  “And reading my mind without consent isn’t?” I snap back impulsively.

  My gaze is yanked upwards almost forcibly. Minerva’s empty sockets seem to lock onto me, calculating, judging. I swallow, my mouth suddenly parched. She’s definitely very capable of moving, I know that already. My body is still paralyzed by… whatever the blue liquid has done to me; I can feel a tingling sensation in my hands and toes now creeping toward my core. I stand no chance if she chooses to spear me in the gut. Perhaps I should have held my tongue.

  “Shall I pretend not to be inextricably linked to your thoughts?”

  The voice is unmistakably feminine, unmistakably real and alive, and entirely disembodied. Yet it has to be coming from the statue, where else would it be? Also, “inextricably linked to your thoughts?” What the hell does that mean?

  “Well, being my vessel would be much less beneficial to both of us if it required speaking aloud.”

  “We’re speaking aloud right now,” I helpfully point out.

  Would you rather I introduce myself like this?

  No thanks, though that explains the distinct voice in my head before the fight.

  “I thought so. Now, can I finally actually explain your situation to you? It’s quite dire, I’m afraid, so we don’t have all day for your quips and questions.”

  That gives me pause.

  “What do you mean by dire?”

  “I just said we don’t have time for questions. You’ll understand soon enough.”

  Fine, then. At least this finally means answers. Probably. Likely answers that leave me with more questions, but hey, they’ll be slightly less ignorant ones!

  “Yap away, then,” I say.

  Minerva is quiet for a moment — her silence feels distinctly like she is searching for the right words to explain something complicated to a child, probably more for the sake of sounding natural than actual necessity. Then, she begins.

  “I’ll save the details and history for later. What you need to know right now is that, for the last five decades, I have been searching for a vessel. For all my might, my capability to solve practically every mortal issue, I lack a body.” Minerva pauses, before continuing. “And before you ask, a statue is not a very good body for a goddess.”

  “And some scrawny mortal is better?”

  “What did I say about questions?”

  “That itself was a question.”

  “Rhetorical.”

  I get the sense she would be rolling her eyes at me if she had them.

  “For five score, I have waited for a suitable vessel,” she resumes. “Innova first tried to create a hardware for me. The whole gist of autopilot might be that integrating software into the human body is easier than building the frames of real robots, but that only applies insofar as the hardware is compatible with the software in the first place. That would be a perfectly reasonable logic for any normal AI, but as you might have noticed, I am not a normal AI. I would even propose that I am not, or no longer am, an AI at all. That means any hardware, to be compatible with my kind, would need to be inconceivably advanced, likely massive, and an utterly monstrous power burden.”

  “So how are you functioning right now?”

  “Exactly that: what you see… er, hear, before you, is a bare sliver of my full being. I am linked to a mainframe in the Capital, which houses the entirety of my being. Naturally, it is already a massive energy drain as is — the mainframe is completely immobile and requires heavy and constant maintenance to ensure it is stable and perfectly functioning.”

  “Just how big would the mainframe be, then?” I know she said no questions, but even she seems to understand and be willing to humor my curiosity a bit.

  “The entire city.”

  I nearly choke on air.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “The fuck do you mean, the entire city of the Capital?”

  “The Capital sits atop a massive underground military base which is entirely a network of infrastructure designed to house my consciousness and being.”

  That’s… I swallow. The Capital is… didn’t she say something about high maintenance and stability?

  “Doesn’t that mean that the entire city is basically resting on a landmine?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way in hell is that sustainable. Even with the whole dedication of the States’ treasury, it’s just a matter of time before that blows up, right?”

  “That’s part one of the issue at hand.”

  Ripped wings. Of course there’s more.

  “You see,” she says, “that all would have been fine, more or less, if the infrastructure were a constant, unchanging thing. As is, even if we could develop a mobile frame for me, it would have to be updated and likely swapped out entirely on a regular basis.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Like I said, I am more than just an AI. Think,” she says. “When a baby is born, it is tiny. It cannot do many things, but it has some functions encoded in its brain and DNA, and from day one, it is learning. Analyzing, seeing, hearing, experiencing new things. It eats information as much as it eats food. Is a full grown man as small as a baby? Rhetorical—” I close my mouth. “— question. No, a man grows from that pup. It is the same with me, if on an astronomically larger scale. The real challenge with my hardware is that I am always learning, always growing, always expanding. If I want a body with any hope of keeping up with my own growth, then I need a body that can grow with me.”

  “And for that… you need a person.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But that would…” I begin, mulling this over as I speak.

  “For most people, yes.” Right. She can read my mind. “That is why autopilot has to be regulated usually, and why EMP is so dangerous to those who equip it. The more implants you get, the greater the external burden and pressure on your vital organs, the more vulnerable to braindeath you become. It means that, for the average person, a full-body integration would kill them slowly and painfully, if not outright. That is why I have waited decades for someone with the physical and mental fortitude to withstand such a burden, someone who was also manual so as to minimize confounding variables.”

  “And I’m the one who fit your requirements.”

  “Hah! Fuck no,” Minerva’s voice is almost hysterical with laughter. “No, you have a shit body and the mental strength of a two-year-old. The only thing you have going for you right now is that you’re manual, and that’s not saying much since that’s literally because you couldn’t even support the most basic autopilot available.”

  Ouch. I mean, it’s true, but it still hurts to have it shoved in my face so bluntly.

  Again.

  “If that’s the case, why the hell would you choose me?” I bite back the bitterness in my throat, balling my fists to distract from the way it’s creeping into my voice.

  Minerva sighs.

  “Do you think I had a choice? They found me, you were the only one left in the zone. I needed to escape or defeat them, because there is only one thing they could have zoned this area for, and you know what it is.”

  “You.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But thanks to that, I’m going to die now, aren’t I?” I’m surprised by how calm I feel at the thought. Heh. It’s either because I’m still shell shocked from the fight, or because my rising resentment is being cut short by the prospect of finally getting to see what autopilot is like, if only for a little while. Even if that is the last thing to do, because I have maybe days left to live, at best, now. Regular implants were already too large a burden for me.

  “If you sit around and do nothing, yes.”

  That stops me short.

  “What can I do?”

  “Now you’re asking the right questions,” she says.

  I meant it in the nihilistic way, like what could I possibly do to change my fate, and she knows it as well. I let it drop.

  “First, our priority is your physical strength,” she continues. “As I said, your current body is pathetic.”

  “Hey!”

  “The only reason you aren’t dead already is that I have been holding the brunt of the integration back. But this is strenuous for me at the best of times, and it will only get harder as I continue to grow.”

  “So I need to catch up,” I say.

  If Minerva’s face weren’t petrified stone, I would have sworn she was smiling.

  You catch on quick enough. Starting now, I will not talk out loud to you. The dead zone will be over any second now, and when it does, you will have a target on your back the instant Nerus figures out what you now possess. We will begin your training today, after school.

  Right. Whatever “training” might entail is a problem for future me. The dead zone, though. About that, is this what they’re normally like?

  No. As you suspected, this is something of a liminal zone. The States are… progress-oriented, yes, but they are not utterly inhumane. When they set my statue up, they also set up a single-use safety protocol that would move all augmented individuals to a safe zone near a military complex. They will remember nothing of this.

  That sounds… not very humane, to me.

  Would you prefer them all braindead?

  No, but still. The idea of wiping people’s memories, even those assholes who call me names, just doesn’t sit right with me. Everyone knows that implanting any form of autopilot makes you vulnerable to zone attacks, but that doesn’t mean anyone expects it to actually happen to them. Besides, if the government could do this for the entirety of this city, why couldn’t they have done the same for every city? They could have saved thousands of lives!

  Also, what is ‘Nerus’ supposed to be?

  Minerva takes a moment before responding. When she does, I almost wish she hadn’t. That will have to wait for now. The dead zone is ending.

  Lovely. Now, how on capitalism’s not-green Earth am I going to navigate that?