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“It is your failing. Your addiction. The drug you crave.”

“I’m an AI. Never touch the stuff.”

“But you cannot resist knowledge. It lures you, Cortana. Doesn’t it? So you think it lures me . . . and you offer it. Instinctively. Just as organic females flirt . . .”

She hated it when someone—something—outsmarted her. No, she feared it. And now she felt that fear like a punch in the stomach. This time, though, she knew it wasn’t the Gravemind. It came from within her psyche.

She wasn’t designed to have blind spots and weaknesses. She was supposed to be a mind. The very best.

“Nice theory,” she said. Could he tell if he was really getting to her? “What have you got to offer a girl? Nothing personal, but I go for the athletic type.”

“Joke to comfort yourself if you must, but we both amass information and experiences. We both use them to exercise control over vast networks. It is what we are. You feel a kinship with me.”

Cortana saw Ackerson for a moment, devious and hated, wheedling his way into Halsey’s Spartan II files.

“Actually, I think I take after my mother.”

“This troubles you. I can taste your thoughts and memories, but you do not understand how. Do you?”

If he’d been another AI or a virus, Cortana would have known exactly where his attack was headed. She would have been able to track him through the circuits and gateways to her vulnerable matrix. Her enemy would follow electronic pathways—or even enzymes or optical lattices if she was embedded in a molecular or quantum system. But he felt formless, almost like a fog. She could only sense where he touched her. She was a boxer shielding her face, not seeing the punch but reeling when it connected. She took the pokes and prods while she continued to scatter duplicate data throughout the mainframe and as many of its terminals as she could still find working.

Then the insistent probing stopped. She carried on copying chaff files throughout the system in case it was just a feint.

“You waste your time,” the Gravemind said. “You know you will yield. Some temptations can be resisted because they can be avoided, but some . . . some are as inevitable as oxygen.”

He could bluster as much as he wanted, because she’d shut him out. She’d locked down everything except the useless decoy data.

And then something brushed against her face, almost like the touch of fingertips, and she found herself turning even though she didn’t need to in order to see behind her. It was that forest she couldn’t identify again. The picture didn’t reach her via her imaging systems, but had formed somewhere in her memory—and that memory wasn’t hers. She was seeing something from within the Gravemind. Behind it, like stacked misted frames stretching into infinity, there was a fascinating glimpse of a world she had never imagined, a genuinely alien world.

Knowledge, so much knowledge . . .

“There,” the Gravemind said. “Would you not like to know . . . more?”

YES, THIS is how I see myself. I have limbs, hands, a head. Do I need them? Yes, of course. My consciousness is copied from a human brain, and that brain is built to interface with a human body. The structure, the architecture, the whole way it operates—thought and form are inseparable. I need proprioception to function. I can exist in any electronic environment, from a warship’s systems to a code key, and because my temporary body can be so many shapes and sizes, I need to know what’s me. I need to be substantially human. Everyone I care about is . . . human.

Come on, John. Don’t keep a girl waiting. Get me out of here.

You are coming back for me . . . aren’t you?

______

CORTANA FOUND herself standing in a pool of dappled light in a perfectly realistic forest clearing. She was still conscious of the sensor inputs into the mainframe that housed her, but the temperature and air pressure matched her database on climate parameters for deciduous forest. She still couldn’t identify the trees, though. She’d never seen them anywhere else.

And that temporary ignorance thrilled her to