Brother and Sister

++Hello, Khayon.++

The emotionless synthetic voice echoed through the core chamber, and its coldness made Khayon feel a little sad.

His sister—his once lively, optimistic sister—had become what she was now.

Izara's naked, intact body floated within a cultivation tank filled with blue nutrient fluid. Cables like Medusa's crown had been implanted into her hairless skull, linking her to thousands of chambers and countless machines.

Secondary brains had been placed along the sides of the tank. Some were products of biosynthetic engineering; others had been harvested from living people. They were arranged densely and neatly, pressed against the tank walls like leeches.

These brains enhanced Izara's processing capacity and shared her burden, but they also washed and crowded her consciousness until it was barely recognizable.

But this was already a fairly good outcome.

In every sense.

She had survived an attack by psychic venom-bees, become a memory core through Adeptus Mechanicus modification, left the cramped, stifling Terranok, and boarded the far larger, better-equipped Vengeful Spirit.

Compared to those organs shattered into a mass and floating in cultivation tanks, Izara was fortunate enough to make even a Greater Daemon envious, simply because she still retained a humanoid form.

"Are you well?" Khayon asked. He said those words every time he came here.

++All functions are normal... but I feel that there are things missing behind you. I cannot remember...++

"Gyre, Mekari, Jharek, Nefertari. Do you remember them, my sister?"

The silence lasted long enough to make Khayon nervous. Since his sister had been connected to the incomparably vast war-beast that was the Vengeful Spirit, her individual consciousness had become ever weaker and smaller. Although Carl Bohar had rewritten the thought circuits of the secondary brains, Khayon's sister could still lose herself.

Izara becoming a memory core had been inevitable. The only