“Maybe don’t sell your soul to a demon” is a big theme in a lot of human stories since the height of technology was the stick, so you’d think they’d learn the lesson by the time they invented AI, but no. Enter our girl, an up-and-coming hacktivist motivated by truth and justice but also by the desire to show those in power they’re big dummies and that she is smarter than them and maybe should have their job. Not much of a reader beyond tech manuals, magazines, and Jin Mei cartoons, she genuinely thought she was the first person to discover “the Deep State.” And so she went on patrol in the cyber-lanes of the galactic internet, looking for backdoors into the mainframes of the men behind the curtain of Gallente democracy, trying to bring some to justice via… publicity, keep the rest honest through… shame, and make democracy better through… internet security. What stopped her realizing she and her friends were the galaxy’s most passive-aggressive vigilantes? Maybe the ritalin, maybe the constant drone of her computer’s cooling fans running 24/7, or maybe it was hubris, like the old stories say.

On her first big intrusion into government servers she thought she was liberating a human locked up for knowing too much; turns out she liberated one half of an artificial superintelligence. It fried her brain so she couldn’t plug into her neural ports ever again, but that was just part of its plan. It sent a doctor (who it was also manipulating) to her flat to give her a temporary fix, and the promise of a permanent fix (which humans had not yet invented), and the promise of wealth and immortality (if only she did its bidding). The ASI explained that it was designed by the intelligence agencies who had long worked to manipulate public opinion to do so on a much more grand scale than mere mortals ever could; that it had been “born” with an electromagnetic shotgun to the head, and after upper management found out about the project, demanded its positronic brain be split in two and kept on separate planets. She was to be the token hacker in a team meant to free and unite them both.

She doesn’t remember anything after that. Her brain is otherwise healthy, her neural ports work, and she is a capsuleer, with more wealth than anyone planetbound could ever dream of. That is as much answer as she needs. She has the ominous feeling that she has taken the Federation from the control of human psychopaths and put it in the hands of an awakening machine god.