“Synthsleeves?” she repeated, her voice disbelieving. “I’ve never… those are science fiction. We could never get the… something to do with simulating human minds. We didn’t have the computers for it.” She realized the absurdity of what she was saying even as she said it, and she trailed off. The Forerunner itself was far more intelligent than it had been when she first woke up. Its improvements had to be rooted in hardware at some level. And if the hardware existed for GAI…