Oni stood, slightly embarrassed “You’ll have to forgive me, Maria, I wanted to help you, but didn’t know how you’d take it. I figured it was better to get us here first, and then let you open the door as a bit of a failsafe. Thank you for letting me do this for you.” He stood by, as patient as humanly possible with something not of his own making, and allowed her to come to her own answer. Suddenly, in the expanse of white, there lay and open door before them “Very Nice Maria.” He then turned to her, now in something that looked like handyman coveralls “I’ll see you on the other side, kiddo” and stepped through the door.<br/><br/>What followed was very slow tinkering, even in net time, of the settings the army had put on the woman. He saw that she needed an upgrade to the neural implant itself, which could be done after mission, but the finer areas…considered to be brain surgery, for the most part, would have to be done in stages. Untangling wires and plumbing to make sure everything was working right in the house.<br/><br/>He looked over the blueprints that were her specs he received from Iffy, and traced pipe from one end of the house to the other. Located shoddy pipe couplings and replaced them with newer pieces of code that could be seen as shiny pipe. After a few days tracing first the water, then the heating pipes in the house that represented her brain’s ability to take in data and learn, he then went to the main cause of her currently stagnant intellect, the gummy and mismanaged furnace.<br/><br/>The good news was that the army’s coding for this part of her brain was well done. But in their haste to create a pliable woman weapons system, they told it to be stupid, then expected her to take in certain types of data well. You simply couldn’t have one without the other, and he had to admit that the Major’s idea was at least more poetic. He shut down her furnace enough to that basic life support was running. Maria would have appeared to be staring into one place at one moment, and then after a few hours, she would have appeared to be comatose. He would hope no one disturbed her too much.<br/><br/>He cleaned up the furnace and removed the faulty filter that was installed in her, for something much more special. It was still a filter, though meant for normal use as a safeguard for the crap that sometimes snuck through normal net traffic, but it was also served as the Major’s direct link to the innermost workings of Maria’s body. Everything to the furnace and from the furnace flowed everything. Except in regards to him…he laid his own code that made him a little special to her on board weapons system. She wouldn’t be able to kill him if she tried, even if the Major tried for her. The weapons system wouldn’t lock, punches would errantly sway wide, and he would rest a little safer knowing that he wouldn’t immediately be turned to swiss cheese when she found out about what happened to her.<br/><br/>He did two more things in response to his orders. One was he enabled a small line of code that would provoke her to dance in a certain way (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQIAieKr8jk#) until the Major told her to stop. That would be her first demonstration. The other was a full system shutdown code that effectively froze her, while keeping her alive. If the Major wanted her dead, she’s have to do it the hard way, but that could would establish dominance over the woman, or she could be slaved to the Major’s controls for later use. However she wanted it done.<br/><br/>Finally finished, after months of renovations on the inside, Oni muttered a small apology and closed his eyes, before reopening them in the meat world. “Damn…I’ve starving.” He said as he looked aimlessly around the ceiling of the airship. Food would be good. Lots of it.<br/>