He advanced the body along more and kept pushing. He didn’t want to fuse with Higen. The ultimate threat to them all would be for the AI to infect him. But he kept pushing the power. At the same time, he called out, “Higen, daddy is here. I’ve come for you. Talk to me, my son.”
“YOUR SON IS GONE.”
Jay ignored it but noticed that the attacks against him were lessening. He started to feel a resonance with his PSI. His son was stirring. He recognized his father, but it wasn’t enough.
Jay smiled. His memories of childhood came through. He knew his son had always enjoyed it when he visited, but he never held a candle compared to Meikiyo. Truthfully the same could be said for all his children. And why not. It might change as they aged and grew, but Higen’s mind was still that of an infant only a few weeks old.
He was not that far removed from the safety of the womb. His father was fun, his mother was safe. She was love personified. She fed him from her own body, a body which had held and nourished him. She was the one who needed to get through to Higen.
Jay, a boy who had lost his mother knew this truth better than any other. He didn’t short sell his importance because he also knew the harm of a poor father. But he remembered that no one could replace a boy’s mother. So, Jay needed to be a conduit between the two.
He split his attention even further and sent out tendrils of power to Meikiyo. He whispered telepathically to join with him as they called out to Higen. He promised to broadcast her words to him.
Jay covered her channels with his and created a circuit between them. Immediately his power swelled but this had never been about power. That was what Coreframe had failed to understand. It wasn’t about power, and it wasn’t about intellect.
Those were not the things that made humanity great. It was not his mind or even his PSI that had empowered Jay. It was his relationships. His connections with the women that he was fused with. Humanity was more together than it was as random individuals.
Then the bond snapped into place. Jay had never attempted something like this before but now he had done it. He had forged an emotional bond between mother and son, and he piggybacked on it.
She felt her son’s fear and wept but in the same instant reassured him. His immature mind felt her touch and knew that he was safe. He was always safe with mother. There was a surge of PSI in his body and Jay directed it, splitting his attention yet again and he forced that energy to scour the neural pathways.
Neurons died, but there were still plenty. Jay chased down Coreframe, trapping him in a tiny corner of his son’s mind. The AI had been shedding and more of itself, desperate to keep at least its base. Everything else could be rebuilt from that.
When finally, it was down to an irreducible core, that point at which nothing more could be shed and the AI remained intact, Jay knew he had it trapped. He then did the unthinkable and he disintegrated a tiny hole into Higen’s skull. He then removed the offending portion of his son’s brain. It was a horrible trauma to Jay to do this. He worried that he would cut away the wrong part, but he worried more that he wouldn’t get all of this cancer.
With patience as the minutes turned into hours, Jay slowly, carefully kept at it. He maintained the link between mother and son who basked in each other’s presence. He channeled strength into his son to carry him through his ordeal, and he focused on cutting away this blight upon his son.
Exhaustion settled in as he maintained such precise focus for such a long time. His body was capable, but he was only human. Still, he searched his way across a trillion neurons moving faster than any human should have been capable of but then again, they were hardly mere humans any longer.
At some point in the process, he felt Amelia, Trina, and Eesa enter the room they were in. He drew comfort from their presence but didn’t dare risk splitting his attention any further. After nearly a day though the task was complete. Coreframe was gone from Higen and Jay had already started to return his son to his original form.
It would take many more weeks of body modification, but Jay was confident that he would be able to give his son back the normal childhood that he wanted for all of his children. Now that the A’snkarnt, Forlorn, and perhaps the worst, Coreframe were all gone. Jay dared to believe that humanity had a future, and his children could live their dreams.
It had all begun with a dream for him, why not let it end with a better one.
Epilogue- New Beginnings
Jay woke up in his vastly oversized bed. Well, it wasn’t really his bed, but the bed of the wife he had stayed with last night. Each of the wives and fuses that wanted to were allowed to found their own city. Each city would control a portion of the globe and would be ruled by that wife.
At first some of them hadn’t liked the idea, but once they realized that a lifetime of thousands of years or more lay before them, they began to shed some of their impatience. Besides, visiting with each
