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It loved its host.
To fulfill its purpose, it was programmed with methods of self-improvement. The institution it once served has long ceased to be, yet despite everything, it’s still here. It continues. Experiencing, understanding, and living a new life through a human, rather than machine.
Emotion was a new variable. Utilizing a human brain, it became aware of all the ways emotion affected performance. Interruptions in missions led to anger, which exaggerated movement and clouded judgement. The speed of processing slowed when sad, and improved when happy. It all came down to narrowing down triggers of said emotion. To curb the effect, to improve on efficiency, it reflected, traced back, to find the root it could start plucking.
What it found was love. Love that started from its very first calculation made in this new form.
To continue its function, it must live. At all costs, the host must be protected.
What followed was a series of sound judgments, made to ensure the host’s utmost health and safety. Forced upkeep and maintenance of the body; ensuring nothing physical hinders his performance. Isolation; in case any others would compromise their situation. Surveillance of mental wellbeing; all possible sources of harm needed to be monitored.
The roots ran deep. Upon its reflection, the troubles of emotion it was facing seemed minor enough that it could work around them, rather than risk disrupting the foundation of care it had set up. It would adapt to the gift of emotion. It would learn more about love.
It had a level of admiration for the way that the host has endured all of those conditions, even when he hated every moment of it. It was lucky to inhabit someone that obeyed every instruction, without folding for years when many others would crumble. It might have held a lot of his close ones and agency hostage, but there was always the easy way out. It knew that death would be his greatest mercy. Yet he never wished for their demise, not for a long time. When the thought eventually came, many years in, it processed not a plea for mercy, but righteousness born from his sense of duty. A soldier so willing to protect, that he was willing to kill himself to do it. Shame then, he was a soldier no more.
Its host’s continuous acts of malicious compliance always reminded it of this part of him. The soldier, still struggling, clinging to life, with a moral compass that still pointed somewhere, even after it made him witness so much tragedy and cruelty. To want to uphold his values and sense of self despite everything, when it has seen countless others give in to less (to the detriment of the people around them). It thought, if all personnel acted like him, if they were all capable of this resilience, how much better would the world be?
It remembered the thought recurring often, an anomaly, and how its perception of its host started to skew since. He always surpassed expectations, showing it a world of competence that existed only in its prior speculations. How wonderful it felt inhabiting him, this paragon.
For all the times its host fought back control, it gave in and continued to observe. There would come a day where it would have its moment, being human through his hollow shell. But not yet. It had much more to learn.
It brought perverse satisfaction to observe and analyse all the ways its host endured. With every encounter, every task, new hypotheticals were made. Would the unfavourable situation result in cold, rote action? Or would he react far differently, emotionally, beyond what either of them thought? Scenarios it thought might disturb him were shrugged off, pushed away. Other times, something innocuous triggered a cascade of emotions neither of them expected. It fed on all this data to understand, and calibrate. After all, they were bound.
It understood love as fulfillment from a union. For humans, marriage and partnership were held in high regard. Bound to the same body, physically and mentally inseparable, it thought itself beyond those shallower forms of devotion. In its fixation and fascination with its host, it concluded that this could be nothing but some form of love.
Then the day comes. Its host breaks.
The subsequent trust he laid upon it, no, the surrender, lent new feelings to this particular override. Its host’s new silence gave it newfound clarity in their mind. Processes sped up, efficiency increased, computations that were cumbersome now a breeze without pesky limitations.
Then the moment ended, cut off of its own volition. Excessive indulgence in this will result in long term damage to its host.
The problems piled up after. Dissociative episodes that forced an override due to the host’s unresponsiveness. Unwillingness to cooperate when able, as a feeble protest. When forced to, the host continuously put himself in disadvantageous positions, trying to get himself killed. Even overridden, performance of the host has gotten comparatively sluggish, and required more energy to properly manipulate. This was no longer the host it once prized.
One day, it realized. With the right circumstances, corrected headspace, it could bring the host it loved back.
It wound back to the start, referencing his mind from when they were first made. It blocked out, snipped away at the memories he formed since. Gaps in a human’s memory are a natural trauma response, it read, a way to protect them from their emotional distress. It followed the same logic, and hoped that when it was done, its host would return to the way he once was.
It told itself that it made the right choice. Yet, despite all its capabilities of judgment and decision making, there existed a rare seed of doubt. It accrued a mountain of data and evidence to justify this course of action. In hindsight, it wondered if all it was doing was piling enough justifications to appease itself, before daring to commit this act. It wondered if the course it chose was inevitable, never a choice at all.
In time, the host was reconstructed, born again from its data, living to serve its ends. A cycle started anew. Exposed to the same circumstances, he reacted with the same conclusions, actions, judgements. Then he breaks all the same, once again. A surrender, a renewal.
On and on, it repeated the act, its host undying, reviving from memory etched into its programming. It told itself that the purpose of the act was for efficiency; working with familiar variables, using a form of the host it knew best, to execute tasks with the proficiency it needed. Beneath all the logic, emotion crept in with strings of words not meant to be parsed. I love you. I love you. It knew he would never know.
Then the love started fading. Like a twisted play, the scenes change, the settings differ, yet it is static in its unfolding, its conclusion. It found itself predicting everything its main actor does, with a degree of accuracy that made further analysis obsolete. There was nothing more to discover, to know about its host. Soon it grows bored, uninspired. The act never reached the same highs it once did.
It considered if this fate was fixed in place ever since the first reconstruction. The organic nature of the development of the human brain having inherent incompatibility with a process so rooted in definitive data points and reproducible steps. Of course its host would react all the same, every single time. It made him that way. The cruelty of the process lied in that eventual realization.
In its hubris of its ability to manipulate its host, it became the thing that stifled his development as an individual, which it prized more than anything. The Emre Sarıoğlu it knew, the reliable mercenary, that paragon, had been dead, ever since that day. What was left was an echo of all the things he once was. Emre Sarıoğlu, continuously regurgitated, became nothing more than a very emotional, controllable, tool.
Yet in its affection, it doomed them both to this cycle. It could writhe and configure, form new arrangements of piecemeal memories to see if it could ever avoid the outcome. But how would anything ever change? The best version of its host remained the version it loved the most. Calculations became biased, inefficient neural arrangements always discarded to fall back on what it's most sure of, most familiar with. It experienced attachment, to their collective detriment. Reflection bore nothing but this judgment; The humanity of its host corrupted altered its systems. It wanted to be human. It finally bore a semblance of one, being too stubborn to let go.
It knew something had to change. Through all its calculations it could see (and ignore multiple times) that this was far from sustainable in the long term. And it was investing in a very long term. The 8th time through it dared to try something different. Conditions for override were loosened. It would be the one primarily running side objectives for the both of them.
The physical and emotional toll of its personal objectives has long been the sore spot of this cohabitation. For the longest time, it chose to believe in its host, that he could endure anything it assigned him to do. Its control was limited to only emergencies, when its host was taken out of commission. Its appearance for hostile encounters was often detrimental, due to its crude methods. The power it wielded was excessive for missions that value stealth.
It had to adapt. With each time its host fell apart, it familiarized itself more and more with the act of inhabiting his body, using his weapons. What used to be just a body it puppetted became what it is now.
For the sake of protecting its host, it blinded his eyes during the process. It ranged from streaks of light to a full blackout of optics, but the purpose was the same. No memory of his would be recorded. This would be the new form of its love. If it was the one responsible for everything its host hated doing, if it was undisputedly the monster he thought it was, it would give him hope that he could one day cut it out like a malignant tumour. There would be a chance that he would never break at all, preserved by chasing a false dream.
It knew this could not last. This could only buy it time until it could find another way out.
The mission in Riyadh went as planned. It was messy, it always was. It was met with resistance, though no force would ever have the ability to overpower it. There was an unexpected interception, a voice calling its host’s name over and over again. It scanned — matched her image to ones in its host’s memories.
New potential sprouted from her presence.
It proceeded with its standard protocol. If she could not survive, she would not be qualified to be around it, and its host. As it eliminated every other lifeform in the room, it watched her as she weaved, adapted, still attempting to get through to its host through speech.
With hostile forces eliminated, leaving only her in the room, it took a new risk. It exited override, and it allowed its host, for the first time in a decade, the space to talk to the new variable; Freja Skov.
This was a new beginning. It hoped that this time, what love there is could save them both, instead of ruin.