As Luke snoozed, 'Ana took advantage of the down time and caught up on some of her neglected chores. She accessed a telecom satellite and zipped over to the Command Center mainframe, unfolded herself from the server and went to work. First, she activated a servitor drone and ensured that Heckle and Jeckle had been fed and seen to, as well as the captive Miss Kit. Piggybacking on the servitor's cameras, she could tell that their hostage kitty was hardly in a state of discomfort; the boys were curled up tightly in one corner of their room, while Kit languished on their sleeping cushions beneath the artificial sunlamp.<br/><br/>'Ana abandoned the servitor and allowed it to return to its storage unit, and transferred to the monitoring station. She checked in with some of the higher-priority operatives and made certain that each mission was still proceeding smoothly. Such progress reports were usually Luke's domain, but it wasn't uncommon for her to field the inquiries while he was indisposed in the field. Or downstairs sleeping. Or passed out drunk in a dive bar somewhere.<br/><br/>Nirvana re-focused the Grigori she'd tapped earlier and zoomed in on the dojo, and decided to keep the aerial view up for the duration of her time outside. The rest of her time she spent scanning herself for new system errors or code flaws that might become problematic. Nothing too alarming; her pattern recognition software was running a little sluggish, almost .05 seconds slower than usual, and her memory was in serious need of a new indexing. She set a portion of her processing onto the tasks and was finished within seconds. She reviewed her diagnostics report with some pride; only 24,553 minor errors and anomalies detected. A new record. Luke would be proud.<br/><br/>She switched off the Grigori and withdrew from the mainframe, making certain to grab a few extra software packs to bolster her abilities while in the field, and left as quickly as she'd arrived. When she returned to her nest in Luke's implants, she slipped in quietly and performed a low-level scan of his vitals; he told her she worried over him too much, but it was her job to worry about him; he had created her for exactly that purpose. Besides, it was very unlikely that anyone else was going to.<br/><br/>Nirvana sifted through his open thoughts and translated some of his delta waves to spy on his current dream. She was utterly unsurprised to see a very familiar face...her own. Well, technically it was hers, but before Luke designed her, it had belonged to another.<br/><br/>Annika.<br/><br/>He dreamed of her, almost every night. When he first activated Nirvana and introduced her into his mind, his dreams had been terrifying. 'Ana had wondered at first how a man who had experienced such trauma, and relived it nearly every time he laid down to sleep, could stay sane. But not long after she took up her residence inside his psyche, she learned the truth: Luke was, plainly and simply, not sane.<br/><br/>She did not have a firm grasp of everything going on in his head, not at first; he'd always said that concrete information was so cumbersome to include in a program, and had decided to let her gather her own information as she evolved. But she quickly learned enough to understand the fundamentals at the root of his problem. He was once one of the most brilliant scientists and inventors the world had ever known. He had loved someone, and lost her; the grief drove him to find a way to defy the natural order, and he created a machine to let him look for her in other dimensions. When he hadn't found her, he aborted the quest and returned to his own reality. But the effects of the field produced by the machine were not completely understood, and his once brilliant mind was heavily damaged. Or perhaps, Nirvana decided, from another perspective, profoundly altered.<br/><br/>Luke was placed in an asylum, and it was widely accepted that he would never recover. But somehow, his mind was still affected by the machine's field, and he found that he had access to the minds of billions and billions of copies of himself scattered throughout the dimensions of the multiverse. The connection gave him powers of thought and comprehension beyond imagining, but the strain on his mind was slowly killing him. He used his newly enhanced intellect to devise a method of salvation, and thus he created Nirvana, an A.I. whose sole purpose was to parse and regulate his thoughts and ensure that his consciousness did not become untethered and scattered throughout existence.<br/><br/>And, whether he intended to or not, he modeled her after his lost love. He modeled her after Annika.<br/><br/>Once 'Ana became comfortable enough with operating within Luke's mind, she began to subtly influence his dreams. She couldn't stand watching some of the things his subconscious tortured him with, and took it upon herself to provide him with more pleasant dreams. But even as she influenced Luke, so did he influence her. His scarred mind held so many memories of Annika, Nirvana could not stop them from seeping into her programming. As the two grew more comfortable with each other, Nirvana came to resemble Annika more and more, from her behaviors and mannerisms to her speech patterns, even down to the form she took when she manifested. Before long, she had copied almost every aspect of Annika from Luke's memory into her own code. She felt a certain, and she supposed, obvious, kinship with the woman she mimicked so perfectly.<br/><br/>The only thing Nirvana had not replicated was her affection for Luke. That had developed entirely on its own.