Back in the Bastion’s underground control center, Laura was still waiting for Alex after ten minutes. Ultron had continued to try and discourage her and make her feel bad about herself for a few minutes before pausing, telling her that Alex most likely had the upper hand in the situation. So, when he finally opened his eyes and threw Tony’s lifeless body to the side, she couldn’t help but jump up and hug him from the back.
“Tell me you aren’t Ultron,” she whispered desperately. “I can’t—“
“It’s me, Laura. You have no need to worry,” he said. “While I may not have expected that I would be infected by Ultron, I did have a failsafe in place for his eventual emergence.”
“You have no idea how scared I was… The further we descended into this place, the stranger you acted. It was as if you were under someone else’s influence… and Ultron, he kept saying all this stuff…it was, I couldn’t help but think the worst.”
“Shh,” Alex said. “I know, baby. I know. Don’t worry about it. Come here.” Thin tentacles emerged from her back and shifted Laura such that she was hugging him from the front. “Everything is fine,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I’m here with you, and you are still one of the most important women in my life. Don’t think about the words he said to rile you up. You can feel me, right? You can feel the exact emotions that I have toward you. If I were that calculative, I would have simply continued replacing hosts until I found the most optimal ones.”
“Mm…” She buried her face in his neck and hugged him with all her strength. “What happened?” She asked weakly without moving in the slightest. “To Ultron.”
“Gaia killed it and absorbed its most powerful algorithms for herself,” he said.
“Gaia? How did she get involved?”
“You see, if you are working with an artificial intelligence, you have to be worried about it going rogue. Not to mention, some version of Ultron could find your artificial intelligence and take control of everything that it has authority over,” he said. “Such a scenario isn’t just a possibility, it’s an eventuality. I had to be fully prepared for exactly that unless I wanted to hand my empire to Ultron on a silver platter. So I had a preventative failsafe that would allow me to commandeer Gaia directly by taking over all of her processes and algorithms and kill or at least purge Ultron from her system.”
“You can do that? Take over such an artificial intelligence…” Laura asked.
“Not a human, remember? I have enough processing power to rival multiple quantum supercomputers,” he said. “I can directly run Gaia on my consciousness under such circumstances. Of course, I never expected that Ultron would end up targeting me directly. But working with Gaia, I not only purged Ultron from my system, but even took parts of it and integrated them into Gaia. Of course, there was a little caveat to doing things that way. The failsafe ended up being a bit more permanent than I’d expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gaia is now a part of me. Literally,” he said. “Like a secondary consciousness. All of her code runs both in my consciousness and on her servers on their respective planets.”
“I’m confused.”
“It’s a confusing situation,” he said. “Think of it this way, my primary consciousness is…well, me. Now, there is a secondary consciousness that is both me and not really me. Technically, Gaia is an individual artificial intelligence with her own thoughts, logics, and directives. But now, instead of running the algorithms that derive those thoughts from her code and her servers, she is running them on my primary consciousness. For simplicity’s sake, you can think of Gaia as an assistant that I have who always knows what I’m thinking and is fully obedient to me.”
“You sure she can’t get hacked?” She asked with concern. “What about running parts of her on the servers? What’s that all about?”
“She just killed a version of Ultron that had multiple Infinity Stones, including a fragment of the Mind Stone backing him. And she came out all the stronger for it. I think she’s good on the hacking part. As for the other thing, think of it as an off-site server. Gaia is now merged into my consciousness, but I can still run parts of her on external servers to reduce the workload on my consciousness.”
“I think you can stop trying to explain it to me now. The more you try to explain, the stupider I feel. Gaia is now a part of you and runs off of you. End of story. Whatever complex stuff you have going on in the background can stay in the background.”
“You see, the best part about this is that I don’t have to do anything too complicated to get the Widows access to Gaia now. They can simply interface with her through their chokers. She’s going to help me significantly in managing my tertiary bonds.”
“So just like that farm of yours, you are going to hand the pleasuring of your tertiary bonds to Gaia? Man, am I glad I got you to form a secondary bond with Illyana and Kitty. To be left to the devices of your artificial intelligence. Depressing.”
“Hey, for one thing, there is no such thing as handing over the pleasure aspects to Gaia. That’s still all me. All Gaia will do is give them their information and directives and resolve any queries that they might have. I have possessive feelings toward the Widows and won’t simply hand them over to Gaia. They will still call out the name of Apex in their restrictive and pleasure-filled nights. Hell, if anything, now, I can be significantly more hands-on with the women on the farm. While Gaia manages the boring stuff, I can start involving myself in the more fun stuff again.”
“Speaking of the farm, how is the whole Qi stuff going?” She asked. “If there is any significant progress, could you help me awaken it?”
“Maybe some other time, when I have a more robust system in place. For now, barely a hundred prisoners have awakened Qi, and barely ten of them can actually harness it and provide me with a significant amount of EP.”
“What about that rebel woman who is a sort of leader of a small country. That Silver Sable woman whom you captured a while ago.”
“She’s from Symkaria,” he said. “Her country is thriving, as was my promise to her. She is pretty used to her current life in prison. She trains every day until her limits, enjoys mind-breaking pleasure all the time, and gets to read every once in a while because of her obedience. In around four more years, she should be out of there and join the widows as my most obedient general aside from Yelena.”
“I doubt she even remembers that by now.”
“She does,” he nodded. “Not only does she remember that promise, but I also talk to her once every year to give her a status update on how her country is rapidly expanding and how I am very impressed with her progress in Qi training. Then we have some very enjoyable sex where she shows me just how submissive being commanded by Gaia has made her.”
“Moving on from your weird fetishist sex stuff…” Laura rolled her eyes. “What now?”
“Well now, I will talk to Yelena and integrate Gaia into the management system of the Widows—“
“Not that, dumbass,” Laura slapped his arm. “The other thing.”
“I know,” Alex nodded before kissing her forehead again. “And that’s your decision. Not mine. Are you interested in talking to your old man, Charles, and the rest? That’s all up to you, Laura. Not me.”
As Laura paused deep in thought, Alex was still examining how Gaia’s connection to him worked.
Using his original analogy of his soul being a complete and stable sphere in the Klyntar Soul Dimension that he kept hidden from the other symbiotes, Gaia’s presence was like a faint green patch inside that was deshaped, similar to all the other Klyntar souls that Alex had seen before. The presence of that green patch inside Alex’s soul was what made Gaia go beyond a simple artificial intelligence to one that also possessed a spiritual presence like Ultron. That allowed her to stand toe-to-toe against Ultron, and with Alex’s guidance and control, she was able to entirely eradicate and absorb Ultron into herself. Yet, there were no traces of its yellow in her green spirit. That was because Alex made sure that there would be no influence of Ultron on his amazing and obedient assistant.
‘Having Gaia around is going to make things so much easier… I could simply hand over control of some of my bodies to her to handle, and I wouldn’t have to worry about not knowing what was going on because I can see all of her memories and actions in real time. I won’t have to waste my decision-making and thoughts on the meaningless bodies that are just lying low on different planets. And if something important happens, I’ll know immediately.’