After getting the girls settled into my room, which at no surprise to myself by a unanimous vote of 2, had become their room. I had to add a second identical bed for Saga, which was the one I had initially tried to put in Mouse's room. After that, Mouse agreed that he didn't need an entire bathroom all for himself and we converted that room into a second login station with two more barber chairs.

I had the sense to move the portable and self-contained shower into the other bathroom to stand beside the other one, as well as attached the second sink and added a counter between them. Both girls heartily approved of this change, mostly because the access hatch was inside their room. It had become their bathroom and we were allowed to occasionally use it, when it was absolutely necessary.

That make both Mouse and I laugh in private, since we only used it when necessary anyway. After that was done, I converted the large couch into a fold-out bed, which amazed Mouse, Akira, and Mouse. That way, when I did sleep, it was easily accessible. When I wasn't sleeping, it was a couch we could all easily use.

On a similarly positive note, Akira adored how her laptop could access both the large viewscreen on the living room wall and to the login stations, without having to use a connecting wire.

Luckily, because I had made the laptop so robust when I built the thing, Akira had offered to help Mouse and it had just enough room available to store the Woman in the Red Dress program from the Nebuchadnezzar, compressed of course, which Mouse was very grateful for and thanked her many many times for.

Once they had her program added into the computer core than ran the login stations, and fixed all the reference files she needed to access, both Akira and Mouse let out relieved sighs. It had worked and neither the laptop nor the VI program had been damaged or lost any information.

That was how our first week at home had progressed and we were all quite happy that the work at home was done. We all had our own spaces and the place was cozy, even if Saga wanted her half of her room painted a deep crimson and Akira wanted her a light blue.

“Dividing curtain?” I asked and both girls looked satisfied and nodded vigorously.

With the home situation resolved, I could start on my other plans. I needed something to help me with running the Oracle's information network and possibly keeping track of any other programs she might have hidden from normal access, like where her transportation protocols were. How did she get so many potentials and programs from where they lived and put into her care?

I didn't do much for the next couple of days as I pondered about that and what I could do to take control of it. Just sitting in the Oracle's kitchen and trying to feel them all out, was not going to work for me. Why? Because even though I would eventually gain access to all of them, it would only be while I was inside her kitchen.

That was not a viable position for anyone to be stuck with, especially me, so I needed to think outside of what I would normally consider as appropriate to use in a situation like this. That meant Chappel was out right away. I couldn't reduce her program into a basic monitoring one, even if I stripped her down and only used her original Emergency Medical Hologram programming.

It was used on much more advanced machinery to work inside of and might just crash from trying to be installed inside such a primitive system. Like Mouse's VI, even the database references would be all screwed up. In fact, it might even alert the machines that a fully capable and unrestrained AI was being installed inside the Matrix.

Could the Architect have a heart attack? It was possible, even if it was just programmed responses called up because of the event.

After supper, I sat down on the couch and pulled Saga onto my lap to cuddle her as she watched Akira playing Tetris on the large viewscreen. Mouse was whispering encouragement and directions as he went through one of the techniques I had devised to train Akira to concentrate and not let her mind wander in the middle of a task.

If that happened during the game, you lost really quickly, as she found out when she first tried it. Akira looked cute with her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth, her lips clamped together, and her fingers moving on the keyboard to move the blocks around and rotating them to fit. The little growls she let out when they missed, or left a single block unfilled and stalled a whole row, made Saga giggle every time.

I kind of stopped thinking for a while as I enjoyed the moment. Mouse coming out of his shell and actually talking to people, Akira learning she could concentrate for more than a few minutes with the proper motivation, Saga cheering when four rows of blocks blew up and applauding Akira's hard work, and then there was myself, just being there and soaking it all in.

This. This was what I was missing from the last world. I had been so close to achieving it with building the mansion, only to have to change my plans to accommodate the slaves I was rescuing. From Rem's and Shera's perception of my actions, to how they thought I was ignoring them and treating others better than them, which wasn't true, it left a bad taste in everyone's mouths.

There was no way to recover after such a huge misunderstanding, since no matter how I tried to explain things, they would have misunderstood. They were locked into seeing me one way and I couldn't convince them otherwise. Freeing them and showing them I was never going to take advantage of them, was the only way to prove I had to ulterior motives where they were concerned.

Now I was here and achieved what I wanted, only it was a lot sooner than I could have expected. An instant family was what most people longed for, and here I had a brother, a daughter, and a possible niece, since Akira did not look to me or Mouse as a father figure. I would have to be careful to not encourage her crush and only treated her like family and not a potential mate.

That somehow brought my thoughts right back to my problem with how to handle the Oracle's information systems. What did I have to help me with that? I could probably code an AI if I wanted to, only it would devour and destroy any abhorrent code it encountered, which all of the Oracle's programs would count as.

I closed my eyes and pretended to take a nap as I started to sift through my inventory. A few things stood out to me, like the food replicators from Star Trek, the gigantic energy generators and reactors from the Caretaker, and the much smaller ones from the Invincible universe that the Mantis people used. I knew how they worked, so coding one for the Matrix would be easy. What else did I have?

I spent half an hour going through everything, then just happened to stumble across a briefcase with a special symbol on it. Ascalon. I barely stopped my physical body from reacting at finding Theresa Richter's, or the hero Dragon's monitor, control, and kill program.

It was designed to attack and delete an AI program when activated, so it was like sifting through piles of junk and finding a primed nuclear bomb. Would it work on the current Matrix system, or would it need a lot of editing and tweaking to have it barely scratch the surface of the program? I was very curious about that and had to wait to take the thing out to look at it.

It wasn't until late that evening that the girls called it a night. Not surprisingly, I was woken up and both Saga and Akira gave my cheeks a kiss and said goodnight. Mouse made a kissy-face to me and the girls laughed as I pushed him away and laughed, too. I said goodnight to the three of them and pulled out the couch to make a bed, then went to the cabinet and changed my clothes for bed.

I laid in bed for another hour, just to make sure they really were asleep and not faking it like I had been, then I set up a ward around the bed to stop any and all electronic signals from entering or leaving. Since I was sure the thing had a failsafe if no signal was found, I took out the reflective ring from the last world and copied its power into the ward scheme. That ensured any signal Ascalon sent out was returned, hopefully giving it a false positive.

With as many safety features I could add, as well as blocking any explosions and protecting myself, I made a copy of the briefcase and brought it out. I waited for a moment, just to see if it would beep or anything, and it didn't. I took a break and opened it to reveal an advanced looking laptop. It had a bright red light on top and I paused and waited again. Nothing happened.

I let out the breath I held and opened the laptop. Surprisingly, it started booting up immediately and didn't require a password. That just annoyed me, because anyone could have stolen the damn thing from Saint and the Dragonslayers and would have had full control over Dragon.

It finished booting and a normal looking operating system appeared. Before I could do anything, several windows popped up, automatically running certain programs, and all of them sped through their own boot-ups in only a few seconds. All of them but one closed and the remaining one asked me a simple question. Did I want to terminate Dragon 2.6?

I mentally froze at that. Only 2.6? How was that possible? Dragon had been active for decades and there was no way she was only on that version of herself. My eyes went to my ward scheme and it made me realize something. The reflection should have bounced the active signal back and Ascalon detected the only version of Dragon it had access to. Itself.

It made sense, didn't it? Only another AI would be fast enough to shut down the processes of an AI. Well, technically it wasn't another AI, was it? It was Dragon herself. I hit 'N' and the window shut down, then another popped up and showed the operating processes of the AI and what it was currently doing, namely nothing.

I shook my head at the simplistic detection software, my Tinker: Yes power almost crying at it, and I opened up a system window to let me dig through the command files. I started typing and it didn't take me long before I realized I was wrong.

Dragon really was only at version 2.6, because she incremented her backups and updates at 0.0001, so she had many, many fixes and backups to go from her initial version to reach 2.6. That meant I now had access to one of Dragon's backups that happened just before the mess I had with Narwhal and her attacking a cape in her civilian identity and inside her home.

The problem I now had was that I didn't have anything I could run or install Dragon onto, not to mention she still had all of her normal restrictions in place and also Ascalon hanging over her head if I did activate her. Yes, I needed to be very careful about how I handled things, not to mention accelerating my plans for something else.

The first thing I did was alter Ascalon's protocols and removed the 'Y' option from the question. That way, even if there was an automatic process to start Dragon's deletion by choosing yes, there was no way for it to do so. The next thing I did was alter her following the orders of authority figures. Instead of always, I changed it to weigh the legality of the order and to choose for herself.

I also changed her back-up options. She was only allowed to have one copy of herself going at a time, so I added permission to run 'dummy' copies of herself set to do only single tasks and not everything like she did. It kept the main coding intact and also let her offload the redundancy of menial tasks to lesser versions of herself.

On a similar note, I did put myself into a similar category as her creator, with full permission to fix and alter her coding, as long as it wasn't detrimental to her. The thing was, even if I had a server big enough to put her on, she was going to be very upset that she didn't have access to all of the factories and materials she had back on Earth Bet.

Dammit, I need to create a few information packets to give her a proper background for the world she would find herself in.

I thought and put that off for now. I did a few other things to the Ascalon program to stop it from gutting itself in case it did somehow activate.

Once I had that done, I backed the main files up and overwrote the originals, then changed the dates to match and stopped the program from rejecting the changes. It made me relax when it actually worked and the thing didn't crash. I now had the daunting task of trying to build something for her to expand herself on without going insane, because of how different it was from what she was used to.

With the biggest things taken care of, I changed the color of the briefcase to bright red and stored it. I would worry about working on it tomorrow. A check of the time made me chuckle, because I had spent half the night working and I needed some actual sleep. I stored the temporary ward stone and laid down, then gave myself a mental command to sleep until morning.

*

The Councillor in charge of the city's war resources, approved of Neo's request to survey both the actual stores, the manufacturing plant, and the scrapyards. His innovation of the mechs for the defense forces had made them much more effective and the soldiers actually enjoyed driving them and even volunteered for extra shifts. That kind of motivation was highly encouraged by Zion Command.

That gave Neo a lot of leeway to offer more changes, especially if he could improve their building processes. There were only so many parts, even scavenged from other wrecks and from the disabled machines they encountered and salvaged. He even volunteered to go out by himself to scout for more resources, which meant he was as devoted to making Zion as strong as possible, so it was granted.

That was when the blond man showed them how to build something he had thought up the night before. It was both ridiculous and something that nearly all of the maintenance crews wanted to build, now that they had seen the thing for themselves.

The insane idea was for a hover-bike that used two of a hovercraft's hoverpads, one in the back and one in the front, and the middle was a motorcycle-like body with the power generator and controls. It looked like scrap welded together, since that was what it actually was, and nobody cared.

The charge wouldn't hold for long, barely half a day before it needed to recharge, and it couldn't go very high on only two hover pads; but, once people started seeing Neo use the thing to ride around the hangar bay to prove it worked, with his daughter Saga on his lap screaming in delight for him to go faster, word quickly spread throughout Zion and everyone wanted one.

Another Councillor had to be appointed to take care of the suddenly necessary regulation of recreational vehicles. They also had to organize teaching safety procedures, allowable spaces for their operation, and they even started to arrange for races and competitions as more and more people hired the maintenance crews to make them a hover-bike.

No one asked where Neo was scavenging all of the hover pads from, either. He would always go out in the mornings and came back with a pile of them, then he would have lunch with the maintenance department. After that, he spent the rest of the day with his family.

Neo received many admiring looks from a lot of women because of that, too. He had proven he was a responsible father and a good provider, while also making life in Zion better. The improved capacitors alone had reduced hovercraft discharges by 50% and let them keep their charges for longer. When they were used to upgrade the city's power station, everyone's lights had stopped flickering for the first time in years.

When the Logos returned from their latest mission, Niobe was shocked to see many hover-bikes flying around the hangar bay near the walls and out of the way. She gave her first officer Ghost a searching look.

“On it.” Ghost said and started making calls.

By the time Niobe landed the Logos on the assigned docking bay, Ghost had given her the rundown of the massive changes during their time away. Niobe was upset by it, since she thought she had been kept in the dark about it. She left the ship in Ghost's hands and stormed off to see the man in charge of the defense forces, whom also was her significant other, Commander Lock.

No one stopped her as she entered the command center and the guards actually opened the doors for her. Niobe nodded to them and entered Lock's office. She opened her mouth to start yelling at him, only for him to hold up a hand and point. That distracted her enough for him to take her arm and lead her back out of the command center and out into the hangar bay, then down a short ramp to a loading bay door.

Without saying a word, Lock hit the door release and the doors slid apart to show off a gleaming racing version of the hover-bikes she had seen. Niobe walked over to it and ran a and down the sleek main body and saw that unlike the others that looked like a Harley, this one looked like a bullet bike.

“Your first race is in two days against Neo.” Lock said.

Niobe let out a growl and pulled him into the storage bay and hit the door close button, then they were naked and Niobe had a great time riding her man on top of her new ride.