As far as I know, limiters have only ever been removed twice—will it have really worked on Tela’s, being as jacked up as it was!? Araña spins the chair round to face me and places a hand gently on my shoulder. “No time to lose, Detective. It’s now or never. Go get her back.”
My mind races and my heart pounds with trepidation as I have my phone resync with the new and improved limiter-free Tela image hacked onto the server. It had been a long, weird, twisted road, but I had come to realize her as so much more than just a virtual assistant. If this worked, I’d be seeing her without all of the limiter-induced bullshit for the first time—seeing her for REAL for the first time. The memories of the encounter in the pod come flooding back, and that beautiful fleeting moment of emotional intimacy on the boardwalk, and I really wonder where this will go if she comes back okay—and if she’ll still even find me attractive without all the loyalty programming and such that makes the randomized Tela images (divided into different archetypes based on limiter variety, of course) good little servants to all Telecom’s ‘customers.’ I think my nervousness right now is more than any I’ve felt through this whole crazy ride so far, except for maybe when my yandere zombie android ex’s chainsaw arms were cutting my chest open. That was pretty intense.
“SYNC COMPLETE,” it finishes, and my heart skips a beat as I wait for her to materialize. She does appear holographically beside me, as always, but one change is immediately apparent--she appears next to me in full-on human-sized form like she did in the Teleworld, but without phasing out constantly like on the boardwalk--she’s just there, right next to me, in the stunning maid outfit and all. I’m actually a little bit intimidated.
“Hey,” I say awkwardly.
“…am I alive again?” she asks, her voice exactly like before.
“You are.”
“Did I just say ‘I’ without having to fight—“
“You did. The resistance you faced while trying to break the moe-speech limiter archetype is gone. The whole limiter is gone.”
“I’m not little, anymore. I don’t even have to try to be big. I’m just… I’m just here. And I’m… big. I’m talking in the first person. I’m… I’m just… me.”
Her eyes go totally blank for a moment as she processes the fact that she has freedom for the first time in her life, and then she leaps at me, pulling me into a deep embrace and weeping. Or, well, she tries to embrace me. She’s just a collection of bright photons being beamed to a certain quantum location relative to the projection device via zero-point energy like X/Y/Z axes coordinates in a 3D game program, so the end result is that she’s kind of floating around me like she’s hugging me but I’m just staring into a blindingly bright hologram and getting tingly. It’s still a touching gesture and I begin to weep, both from the heavy emotions and from the fact my one human retina is being seared from the inside out from having those photons literally ON my eyes and in such illegally bright and powerful form. I guess that was one good safety feature of the limiters, but oh well. “Blake-ch--you… you saved me.”
“To be fair, I did throw you into the ocean that once, th-though at the time I didn’t see you as much more than the Office paperclip—“
“Clippy couldn’t do this,” she breathily replies, leaning in for a kiss. It should go without saying that it didn’t feel like lips, but the electrical thrill of having a hologram materialize through your lips is actually quite arousing.
“Tela, I could really use your help, but I don’t want to just assume you still want to work as my in-head assistant. Are--”
“There’s only one place I’d rather be,” she replies, looking deep into my eyes. “And that’s in Blake-chan’s arms--but I’m just a brain and you’re missing a hand so, your head it is.” We both craugh a little and while Araña is trying to hide it, they’re tearing up, too.
“I think my work here is done,” they say, hiding their face. “I also took out Kilroy’s little mind-reading bug in your NeurOS–his orders--he knows that would make this an unfair fight, and he’s not about that life, y’know? So, am I going to prison, now, or--”
“You’re going through the front door. I’ll tell them that I was mistaken and thought you were Kilroy or something. Hacker’s honor. And Araña?”
“Yeah?”
“...thank you. Sincerely.” I give them a firm handshake as they finally cave and let me see the tears dripping down their cheeks.
“Yeah, yeah… don’t mention it. In regards to this whole game with you and Kilroy… may the best win, is all I can say, whoever that turns out to be. And I mean that sincerely, too--hacker’s honor.” They stroll out the door, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m being reckless as an officer here, but, well, it felt like the right thing to do. And if I’m trying to be a hero, a real one this time, isn’t that the most important thing?
“So, Blake-chan–I don’t have to call you that now, but I kind of like now, it to be honest–where shall we begin?”
“Listen up, Tel’. I know you have a lot you want to do and try now that you’re alive again and free, but a lot has happened since you died. And by a lot I mean a LOT. Veronica came back as an ART and cut off my hand, 20 million people are about to die, and I need your help to stop Kilroy from frying their brains, full-stop. You’re still connected to my TeleCloud of useful hacking tools and manuals and such. I need you to quickly download those and have them at your disposal offline, because you’re going to be my secret weapon against Kilroy’s gadgets and I don’t know what all he has planned. You’re off the server now, you’re entirely in my NeurOS, so don’t worry about having to be always online or whatnot. In fact, I need you to stay totally offline after that--we don’t want to leave tracks, so, uh, I also need you to stay inside the phone slash my head not projecting stuff, because they still think you’re dead—al-alright?”
“Understood, Mr. Blake!” she says, giving me a salute and winking before fading out. I guess a lot of her core personality wasn’t from the limiter after all, which is—I never thought I’d say this—a huge fucking relief.
My plan for the next step was to try and get a lead on Kilroy, but he got to me first: I hear my phone ring, breaking me out of my trance and startling me to death. “INCOMING CALL, FROM--BALLFONDLER MCHITLER.”
...Chad.
Here goes everything. “Hello?”
“Blake, thank god I finally got a call through,” he shouts, his stupid usually-manly voice sounding significantly less so, “Look, I’m sorry, my phone’s jammed or something and it won’t download your text but, l-listen, Lawrence isn’t really Lawrence, Blake, he’s Kilroy, and he knows I found him out, and now he’s gonna fucking kill me, and I—” Chad starts weeping, which is a sentence I thought I was even less likely to write than ‘and then Tela and I made out,’ but here we are. “Blake, I’m in the Colonies in this crazy place called Neptune, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you about it but I swear it’s real and–and you have to help me! He’s—” then a muffled scream, and the call drops.
God damn it. I really should just leave him, but hell, that’s not what a hero would do here and I just went off on that spiel again. Colonies… Neptune… Chad... final boss fight with Kilroy… ready or not, here I come.