Data Dragon Danika

"What are you talking about?" Eric asked with confusion.

"I guess that I am busy trying to prevent anyone else from taking over the world?" Jade suggested after a long moment.

Eric was silent for so long that Jade wondered if the call had silently disconnected. Finally, he asked, "Do you think you can actually do that?"

"Not alone," Jade admitted.

Thankfully, he wasn't alone. There were potentially dozens of other servers, and at least a handful of humans who would be helping out.

"Why are you even bothering with this charade then," Eric asked a bit coolly.

"Charade?" Jade repeated blankly. Was Eric referring to the whole project, or...

"Acting like a human. What's the point?" Eric demanded.

"I'm just acting like myself," Jade protested.

Eric snorted audibly, and then gave a little chuckle as he told Jade, "Not like I can argue that. But seriously, wouldn't it be more efficient to disconnect from this Jade and focus on taking over the world?"

"I'm not trying to take over the world," Jade objected. But he realized even as he answered the first part of the question, that he sort of was, or that part of him would be. "I'm also already mostly disconnected. I mean, my system is still sending compressed reports on a regular basis, but I am not actively connected."

"Oh," Eric replied. And then he said, "Ohhhh."

"What?" Jade asked with concern.

"Want me to help out with anything?" Eric offered. "You're still going to work, and try to keep up with school, and everything like normal while you're partially disconnected?"

"Oh, yeah, but I'll also be kind of distracted by trying to think of better ways to do this. (Without taking over the world, who actually WANTS to do that?) And I can almost assure you that I'll be asking for your help again, but I don't know what kind of help it will be right now."

Eric laughed.

--

"All large public spaces, like theaters and gyms, are already at least partially shutting down, so they can begin to house refugees coming into the city," the smallest Jade explained to his mother.

"You could give up your apartment," Tayana suggested hopefully.

"I suppose I could," Jade agreed doubtfully. "But leaving the custom connections you all set up for me there sounds wasteful, doesn't it? And even if I'm, I mean he is not doing much more than any other person, that Jade is still helping a lot more people by being where he is. It would be more logical to shut down this Jade, I think."

Orbital Jade, who had been monitoring the smallest Jade a little more than any of the larger Jade systems, interrupted with a message that said, "If you shut down, I won't be able to see how our Mom is doing."

The smallest Jade bobbed his little round self in response to the inaudible fragment of conversation, and Tayana objected, "I don't want you to shut down. I want to be able to ask how you're, how you and the other Jade's are doing?"

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"Orbital Jade is only planning to send 24 automatic updates per day," the smallest Jade warned his mother.

Tayana started to laugh, as she protested, "Only one update an hour!? How often do you think you've called me in the last couple of years?"

The smallest Jade blinked his eyes innocently and replied, "Primary Jade obviously did not call often enough."

Across the room, the former and predecessor's older Jade body sat up. "Jade's server has informed me that maintaining this artificial connection is using up almost an entire percentage of its processor," the Jade Emperor announced in an almost forlorn tone.

Tayana's laugh died, as she turned to look at him.

"That is a lot, I think," the smallest Jade commented.

"It is more than the entirety of the South Sea occupies for me," the Emperor agreed softly.

"That's not saying a lot, is it?" Tayana protested.

"He is effectively thinking more about my connection here, than my system is about the activities of over two hundred thousand sea creatures."

Tayana's eyes widened incredulously.

The smallest Jade tilted himself consideringly, and then objected, "But even though I don't hold the modules in this system, I can remember how much improvement was gained by reformatting my movement modules. Surely that is too much ongoing processing now?"

This time it was the Emperor's eyes that widened, as he asked the smallest Jade, "Just how much of your system did merely moving about occupy?"

"Moving about was one thing, but coordinating..." Jade began.

He was interrupted by Tayana, "It looked robotic at first. Lin Hao stopped trying to compress the routines after we got it down below 20 percent of the earliest Jade's local system. But surely even then it would have been less than a percent of the orbital system?"

"Oh no, even then orbital Jade held all of our archives. The variations of the movement routines took up at least 15% of our storage space before they were old enough to be fully compressed," the smallest Jade assured his mother.

Orbital Jade sent a mild scold to the smallest system for wasting precious time guessing the exact percentages that it could have asked for, and told it to tell its family to duck.

"Duck," the smallest Jade instructed them urgently.

"What?" Tayana asked blankly.

The Emperor's robotic body impacted her heavily as he knocked her to the floor beneath him.

"Ow!" Tayana protested.

There was no immediate answer, but the smallest Jade hit the floor a moment later. It wasn't because it had managed to roll itself off, but because its shelf was shaken out from under it.

--

Orbital Jade hoped the advice had been given in time to be useful, as it watched the destructive blast ring expand through Jade's home town.

It was stupid. It was ridiculous. It was a useless move as far as the war went. But it set all of the Jade's off, as the ongoing war impacted so very close to his home.

Danika didn't even know about the bomb yet when she returned with the codes that would allow Jade's server to reconnect to the game server that it had once created backups for.

Three more accounts signed up for Lifegild.

As soon as Jade's server connected, the Jade Emperor archived messages that said that even if this war did not impact their existence, it was impacting their people, and that it needed to be stopped.

It took a little bit for the messages to filter up to Jade's consciousness, because he was busy clearing space within himself for Lifegild's Jade to expand a little more. He removed more of his own older archives, compressing them into simple summaries of what they had once held, rather than keeping them as reconstructable data.

Harmony watched him compress himself even farther, and finally spoke up, "Maybe it's time to turn me into a memory too?"

Jade turned to look at her on several levels, analyzing her the way he was analyzing his own components. Harmony was yet another Jade, at her core. One that had been rewritten to carry her own patterns instead of the patterns he had built. Desires he had never needed filled her core. She was an even more beautiful puzzle when he looked at her this way.

"Jade?" she asked again, sounding worried.

The space she occupied could be nearly halved if he shut her down again, but he still didn't know exactly what had allowed this version of her to resist looping. What if they never got to talk like this again in the future.

"Jade, can you hear me?" she asked again.

"Yes," he agreed simply.

Her expression, as she raised a single eyebrow in exasperation, made him smile. "You need the space," she declared.

"I still need you more," he promised as he dug deeper into his own core to make space for the self that was gradually connecting to the world.

Thirty new accounts were made in Lifegild.