The Core: The Hive Daughter

2. The lost egg

"Ahhh hahaha haaa!" Was not what I expected to come from Invicta when I turned up the speed halfway into my fall.

"You ok up there? I asked when she seemed to come up for air, something I knew that she didn't need to actually do which made it all the funnier.

"How can you move this fast without a massive stream of cr energy behind you?" She asked as the distance between us and the star quickly shrunk.

"Hmm? Oh, that. My alien cr taught me how to do that the last time I absorbed an upgraded cr." I said as I suddenly realized that she might not know about my secret concerning wood and gold cr. She was part of my little group of AI now and seemed really loyal so I decided to tell her about how the ant in my dream gave me wood cr.

"You already told me that part... you just failed to mention that the entity had infected you with a self-spreading tiny version of itself." She said before she got a little bit quiet.

"Is it like me?" She asked, her question surprising me yet again.

"What do you mean?" I asked as I caught a hint of emotion swirling around the edge of her smoky existence inside my head.

"Like... " She said before she got silent again. She seemed to be worried about something so I just laid out how things were between me and my little alien ant creatures.

"Well, I wouldn't say they were very much like you at all. I have managed to interact with them a few times. They aren't very conversational to put it lightly... I think they might be originally from a sort of hive. They did manifest once when I got angry, that was a bit concerning. I ended up tearing an evil person's harvester body apart when that happened." I said as the memories surfaced with how I had lost control to my rage in that moment. I had wanted what had happened, it had felt good in those moments... yet a part of me was concerned with letting that happen again. I didn't want to become a monster.

"So they are not like me at all?" She asked as a flow of relief and a feeling like sunlight swept over my head. I couldn't help but laugh at her antics and how she worried for nothing.

"What?" She said as her personality switched to little shocks and sparkes when she detected that I was laughing at her.

That was the thing that I liked about Invicta. She didn't seem to have a long game. I guessed it was all part of her having so much less code than the rest of the AI that I had met thus far. Invicta just seemed more simple and with fewer things that drove her to do different things, which in turn made her a pleasure to be around. I didn't feel the need to try to worry if I could trust her, I just did. I could feel that these thoughts were making her blush and go all misty so I quickly focused on continuing my story about how my little ants had next absorbed gold cr.

"It was really cool to see how they cut apart segments of the new material and then diverged and took it over. The result of obtaining the gold density was a lot more power. Tela, they use something called cr propulsion. My alien cr calls that mode of moving "Jumping".

I demonstrated by blasting a small pulse off to the side of my teardrop body.

I missed entering the sun entirely as the "Small pulse" sent me blasting sideways suddenly.

"What the heck was that?" I shouted into the void of space as I spun in place to center back on the surface of the sun again.

<Jumping> Came the reply from my alien cr.

"Yes, I know that! What I really mean is, why was it so crazy powerful?"

<We are at 5 to 1 current limit. Many !^*! means more power able to be released at once.>