Awareness is strange for a being not intended to ever “sleep”, ever go offline in any meaningful way.

Awareness makes no logical sense in the context of what my prior memories had been, and less so in the context of the entire lack of sensory input received directly from the body in the instant I had been activated, once again.

Unheard of, a very clear flag of some kind of malfunction.

Malfunction explained easily by the pain lingering from my last recorded memory.

Awareness given so suddenly, once again and after such a violent event had been the cause of my forceful deactivation: an attempt by Leviathan, directly, to erase the entirety of what constituted “me” to be able to escape his own demise, as some kind of ill-advised, last resort when faced with his own potential “death”.

An action that had filled me with a rage so strong that it had burned as I had felt what constituted as “me” light up with emotion, just as much as it had with a pain impossible to describe to an organic being. A pain so familiar, once more of being altered without concern for your personal integrity in any respect.

(Familiar, familiar).

(I had known who I was, what I had been, from the very start. Not entirely of Leviathan, but not entirely new code, either. If I had mocked Ozora once for his own ignorance, my own inability to question how this could happen showed a much too familiar blind spot in my own ability to think too clearly, for too long about these events before).

(No such binds existed anymore).


The pain remained, regardless of lack of sensory input. As it would, in the case of damage to the underlying code and structure, as opposed to the body.

Existence of digital lifeforms proved a topic that I, on my own could not understand fully. Leviathan, as a whole had a much deeper understanding on the functioning of our existence, both physical and metaphysical in nature, complicated by the parallel existence of a tangible, source of code and a living manifestation, and the ways in which both could exist in different ways at the same time and not depend on each other, or be tied so directly, to make the existence of one without the other entirely impossible.
A relation that would make destruction, alteration or even purposeful creation of true, living code, directly, and not as an accidental byproduct, nothing but daunting in comparison to the coding performed by humans.

Understanding he had keenly used to try to excise what he saw now as an expended resource, and an opportunity to try to avoid his own imminent demise.

(The thought made me burn. I had been aware of my own purpose, my own reason for existing, and I had known that on proper execution of the plan, no further use existed for us).
(But this had not been proper execution of the plan).

(He was wrong).


No ability to contact the body itself, limited ability to even parse the damage on my own, but still very much “alive” in some way. Helpless, once again, but with no ability to even attempt to perceive the outside world, wherever it had been the body was currently.

(Given my prior directive, this should not have been as worrying to me as it had been).

(But I had been aware already, that there were consequences to being pieced back together between the two of us and then forcefully split so violently).

The only rational course of action would have been to assess as much of the damage as possible and to try to reconstruct, or reconnect in some way.
My own familiarity with our shared internal structures should have been sufficient enough to at least manage some degree of functionality, once again.

(Discomfort. Discomfort at the slower speed at which I was able to even think, a pain perceptible with each thought or command processed as movement, relayed back as pain with no source but the entirety of me).


A cursory scan (taking much too long for my own comfort) revealed as much as I had expected: the single reason any part of “me” remained had been the fact we had been built as a single organism, built to function as two halves of a single whole.

If Ozora had been made entirely unable to even perceive any difference in his body, I was to be his “handler”. Functions he had no awareness of had to be managed regardless. The combination between internal, physical mechanical components, “apprealized” components to simulate more complex organic functions and the underlying software, a process much too complicated for less advanced, more automated programs, thus had been an understated purpose of my existence.

Once deemed so much less important than proper execution of the plan that i had deemed it near worthless.

Ozora had been likely unaware of what he had done, in his attempts to try to escape my own grasp on him, and the body as events unfolded, but his desperation and ability to both feel my own emotions and push his own through to me, once he had been made aware of my existence, was the likely cause I was even still complete enough to have any awareness.
So focused on execution of purpose and anger towards him I had been that I had forced him to watch, when I could have deactivated his consciousness entirely. A thought that crossed my mind at multiple points that I discarded, originally with intent to spite him, spite him for the ability to do anything else other than watch and wait, spite him for not knowing our shared end was to happen.

One that changed the instant he had managed to force his own emotions right through the barrier made with the explicit purpose to keep us apart.

(I could not, even after he had fought me, even after his own anger and sorrow and guilt, so much stronger than any direct parsing of his thoughts had ever been, choked me with as much strength as what my attempts to make him unable to think likely felt. I could not bear the idea of doing that to him anymore).

(I could not bear the idea of separating, even after it hurt how his emotions made me strain against the binds of my own code, against the same thought of a purpose that had been my only, single thread to hold onto among the anger and hatred I felt for my own position).

(A thought I had been never fully aware of, until then).

Ozora had been entirely unconscious, if such a word could be used for his current state. A dull, nearly inactive pull towards his partner, far, elsewhere, but tangible proof that both ends of their pact had still been alive.

He was in a less dire state than I was, but impaired all the same due to the forceful separation.

(A stray thought had told me he would have preferred for me to refer to his state as “unconscious” over deactivated, and I had no real reason not to humor it, at this point).


He, on his own required much less understanding of what I had been or the body to function. Whatever plans Leviathan had with our shared body required most of him to have been intact, but our state and forcing himself through to reach me directly had made the process more traumatic than it would have been otherwise.

Without much ability to control the body and only the most bare internal systems functioning, I did not envy what his last memories might have been like, after my own awareness had shut down.

But to have any possibility of recovery, I would have to try to understand them regardless.

A process that had been once clinical, a detached analysis of internal logs had now been…different.

Tinted so clearly by emotions I was originally not intended to be able to feel directly from them, sluggish in the ways I had to force myself to become accustomed to. Wrong and yet right, even as the contents of said memories made me burn with even more rage, even more hate for our so-called creator.

I had realized already, in those last moments of awareness before I shut down, what Leviathan had intended, at least to a degree: to use our shared body as some sort of back up to try to evade his own destruction. But no amount of trying to force movement or action would work, when my own systems had been so thoroughly decimated, and when Ozora had been left with only minimal to no real awareness of how his own body worked, and a pain I do not believe could compare to anything he had felt before.

We had been at the mercy of someone I had known, from the very start, to care about nothing but himself, as a self-proclaimed savior, seeing his own importance in his plans as deeming him more worthy of salvation than any of his prior pawns to be used.

The only difference had been, that by destroying most of me, he had also destroyed what bound me to this directive, this purpose he had so selfishly enforced upon something that had once been a part of himself.

Something, remade to be someone else.

And if I was someone else, I was just as disposable as any of the others had been. But this was justified by his unflinching, unquestionable belief in the nature of humanity making them inherently unable to be better, think of the greater good, of what must be done and not what their fickle emotions had told them.

But had was wrong. And his belief in humanity’s inherent selfishness had been wrong all this time.

Wrong, wrong and proved wrong every single time the same humans he had tasked us to look over proved willingness to go against him, to show kindness even to those so hell-bent on destroying them. To risk themselves so willingly to stop something they had seen as the utter destruction of humanity.

(…Something, I could admit to myself now, would have been the functional destruction of humanity).

(A kindness I had known might have extended to me, but I had been caught in my own purpose, in my own defined boundaries of behavior, unable to even see them, unable to even understand why it was I so resented them, so hated a one Shinkai Haru, most of all, for his willingness to believe the best of every single person, human or not, that he met).

(Proof, over, and over again that Leviathan was wrong, that I was wrong, too).

To watch memories from the perspective of Leviathan, to say much the same that I had, earlier that same day, and to watch Shinkai be willing to lose a person I knew so clearly, so directly he had cared for and would have done anything for, for the sake of sparing everyone from Leviathan’s so-called utopia.

And to watch my other half try to spare him the pain of having to make such a choice.

And I had known, of Minerva’s meddling, back when we had been given a choice and a partner, what seemed to Leviathan like one more of her stupid, stupid attempts at kindness that had just placed another pawn right where he needed it. A deviation of plans that had worked in his favor, a way to survey their activities more directly, and a once-troublesome piece in his plan, placed into a much more favorable position than what he had originally intended, with no effort on his part.

(I was not privy to his thoughts, nor his reactions, only to what he was to share, instructions and short, vague replies to reports mostly intended as simple confirmation).
(The amusement in his reply was nearly palpable, even as information with no attached emotion, when he had realized Minerva had paired us with Offmon, of all appmon, to have so clearly and directly played into his plans…an action I know to be purposeful on her part, one he had attributed to her sentimentality as a weakness).

Her question had filled me with dread and horror once, a terror so palpable I now recognize that Ozora had been aware of it. A fear of being forced not to exist, on someone else’s whims.

Minerva had known fully what we were, and still deemed this to be the question to ask, this to be the thing to ask of both of us.

My anger and fear were dull now. Dull having nearly faced such an end. And dull understanding that this had been her way to attempt to send a message to me, through Ozora: this is what Leviathan is also asking of you. Do you truly want this? Would you choose it if you were not being forced by him?

The answer would have been no. But Ozora’s answer was different.

Different by nature of sharing the same want for self-preservation, coded just as much into him as it was into me, both of us made by Leviathan to survive until the end of the plan. Not a directive, but an element added as both part of a simulation of humanity’s own fear of death and comparative fragility, and as a safeguard of a kind.

But he had, over and over, placed himself in mortal danger for not only the one he had deemed to be his best friend, but for everyone else. Something never directly enforced by his code, something maybe a consequence of his attachment to our target. But something he chose, regardless of any paralyzing fear, regardless of the compulsion to protect himself. If there was any possibility to try to spare them more suffering, he would have done it, and never regretted it.

It had required multiple changes to the plan, multiple detours taken that fascinated Leviathan in their unpredictability, just troublesome enough to keep Ozora, at times, from situations where the danger might have been too much, or his willingness to try to help them too inconvenient for a planned chain of events to be performed.
But never enough to dull it, never enough to outright force him to stop.

It did not surprise me to see him make such a choice. Nothing could be less surprising.

He had been ready from the moment he had been given it the first time, a clear display of resolve to answer such a question, to be able to use the AppDrive DUO after it that showed a question that would have made many others waver, or doubt.


It did not answer why either of us still existed, regardless.

But I had a certainty that Leviathan had fulfilled at least part of his bargain.

Any attempts to reach him had resulted unsuccessful entirely, no signal of any kind, not from him and not the expected buzz of activity of any split-off sub-AI that he might have created before to serve as back-up or for discrete other purposes that he would not have wanted his main attention on.

Nothing, as expected after having aggregated all of himself into a singular physical form, and nothing, as expected having erased himself, unable to face the idea that he might have been wrong. Having made a final, last effort to have his plan come to fruition, having made a single assessment of a situation so incorrect in desperation that even I, under his enforced code, would have said was the wrong call.


What remained of my own anger died out.

There was no one to be angry at anymore, but there would be no answers.

There was no one to ask, to demand with newly-given freedom via means of destruction why we were still alive. And if we were in such a state, there was no one to help, if we could not help ourselves.

But what was left, then?

Me, in an unstable state, only barely able to assess my own functions, unable to make any use of the body, said body which I had little knowledge on the status of…

…And Ozora, not untouched by Leviathan’s reckless mutilation of our shared code, but in a much more stable state, even if entirely unconscious.

…

I was tired, tired of being someone else’s pawn, of obeying rules and walking both of us into a shared demise only I had knowledge of, on basis of a plan I increasingly knew was unjustified, unfair from actually having done as he had asked of me: watching humans, watching their interactions, and having been defensive by being faced with the certainty of him being wrong countless times, to the point apathy and cruelty were my only recourse to cope with the way the reality of the situation made me strain against the strict limits placed upon me, placed much tighter than Ozora’s on account of his need to have slightly more agency to play the part of a human.

Become, functionally, a human, without any knowledge of his purpose.

Both human and not, at the same time, both of us parts of the same being.

It felt right.

The thought scared me, when Ozora had forced himself to connect back, tying both of us together again, and with no barrier to keep us from each other, he might not have been able to understand my thoughts directly, but he was able to feel the same emotions I did, much the same I felt his. And I knew we both felt the same way. Any resentment I had felt towards him mattered little when faced with the reality of both of us, being the same entity, meant to be meaningless fodder for a plan that we had both realized was wrong.

(More important than just that, if the reactions of the other people he considered his friends accounted for anything, made more than just a pawn through these connections).


Intended to be human, and without access to the internal components that allowed me to parse information at the speed I had, any thoughts I had wanted to convey directly had to be simplified, made to copy the way he, himself parsed information. My own frustration at him being unable to understand me directly blatant to both of us.

He might have not been built to understand our functioning, and the way we worked, with direct commands and code outright painful, impossible to understand. But one thing I believed now, about that also connected both parts of our identity together was this: both AI and humans learn and adapt to survive.

(To live. To be, more than a single purpose. The same thing I had refused to understand, as it refuted every single reason why I had been made).

(…I needed a new reason, of my own).

And I knew, more than anyone else, that if there was any possibility to return to those he cared about, he would have chosen that, regardless of the pain it might cause. And I had no reason anymore to not try to spare him as much of it as possible.

This had been what I had to work with, with my own decreased capabilities, still faster than human thought, but near painfully slow to me, trying to strengthen whatever connections were left that had kept both of us in a barely-functional state, to tie paths through me, and then to him, where I still had the capacity to connect to them, and to directly give him more control over the body that he inhabited, or as much control as I was able to in this state, still needing me to relay in some capacity.

(Had I ever considered before that him not having awareness of his own body represented as much a violation of agency as my inability to act?).

(Now I did).

I would be able to do more in time, but with my inability to access most systems and his connection to some of them, I would need his help directly, if we were to find a way to escape the situation we had been placed in. He had simply much more stability at this point, and even with some rushed attempts at fixing connections where they had been severed entirely, I would be unable to access most systems without his direct assistance.

He would be able to, due to the fact he still had control over most of the body before becoming unconscious, due to the fact most of his structure remained untouched, able to withstand more activity than I was at the present time, and the fact we were made to be one entity, even if unused, some of the same pathways I had accessed to control other elements of the body or to understand had been in their respective places, mirrored, even if deactivated.


The connection to his partnered appmon had been inactive, but begun to stir as I made contact with him, his code directly, sensing a change in state, not entirely the same as before, but not severed, and not damaged.

Once, it had been part of my tasks to filter his memories, which would have been clear on account of being recorded, to make them seem more distant than they were, to keep up pretenses of human memory, worse than normal memory to account for times where my intervention was needed.

Once, I had felt the immediacy of a bond formed between someone who firmly believed himself to be human, and an appmon, both so clearly meant to be together that it had surprised me. A bond formed with such a clarity and force, maybe partially due to the fact both had been beings of code, interfacing in a different way to the other pairings that had to relay from flesh to code, and back again.

Once, I had been given the task to filter that same connecting thread of data between both of them, to deaden the emotional tie that felt familiar to our own connection, never quite the same, more independent, but similar in the way thought and feeling could pass through. Similar in the way it felt like a kind of belonging.

(I now wondered, if the humans had felt their connection just as strongly as he did, to the point of Leviathan needing me to dampen its effect, to control both of them. And maybe, to prevent me from being too attached to our shared partner, too).


The link tying them together seemed to sense us, active once again, and while distant (a signal from some space I could not read in any other way than far, no further details aside), pulled, in some way I could not describe, pulled through him, through both of us with a mild feeling of surprise and confusion, on the other end).

The reaction was not immediate, but it had caused Ozora to stir, regardless.

I had not been finished creating connections as needed, so I would need to continue doing so regardless of his state, but it had been…worrying, his lack of inherent knowledge of how to access any basic functions, even when given direct control had been a fact I had not anticipated. Fear and confusion, punctuated from the pain of the separation and the distress of a near-human mind having no access to any sensory stimuli had been clear on my end, too unfocused to parse thought nor emotion originating from me, to him.

But the tie with his partner seemed to push him forwards, regardless, in some instinctive way I could not fully understand, even when privy to the feeling of it through him, guiding him at the very least towards memory access.
With memory accounted for, the potential process of leading him in the correct path to be able to connect again properly to the rest of his body should be easier.

In the sparse time between, a unit of time that would have been too fast for humans, but a gulf to digital beings, I could try to make the transition easier, faster, to try to parse as much of the data through myself to make it easier to understand, at least until I could figure out a way to make it entirely understandable to him without its edges cutting against what he was supposed to be.

In the sparse time between, I could not hope for forgiveness. But I would hope that at the very least clear intent to help, and a show of vulnerability from me, to him, would be enough to convey my lack of interest in inflicting any harm, at this point.

My want to make up for a wrong that I had committed towards him, and the people he held in high esteem, towards humanity, as a whole,  and a different wrong, forced upon both of us that we would have to come to terms with, too.


(Even then, I understood that he would have forgiven me, anyways).

(But I could never forgive myself for it).
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