He held up the slate. "A copy of the programming for the VI on that one island I found. Trying to evolve it into a true AI, but dear gods, the writer of this was so fucking stupid. They spelt every possible reaction or situation they could think of out, for everything. That is why this is taking a year. That they all died four millennia ago and nothing has used their language since doesn't help. Even using my abilities to 'cheat' this still feels like molasses. 6 hours a day for thirteen months, and I am just now getting it down to a more manageable amount.<br/><br/>To give you an idea on how convoluted this is, the shadow stalker drones get about two hundred thousand 'lines' of code. Each 'line' of code tells it to do something, like how to work its thrusters, how to dodge an attack, etc. The actual shadow stalkers, since they are a true AI, instead of a disposable tool like the drones, gets about thirty million lines of code, of which about one million make up the actual personality and intelligence of the construct, the rest is failsafe, general housekeeping, and other mundane tasks that are handled automatically, like breathing, digesting food, seeing, thinking, things like that.<br/><br/>The VI? She had about nine hundred seventy three quintillion lines of coding. That is a nine seven three, followed by eighteen zeroes. A stupid amount of redundancy built into her. Of course, I don't know what other problems they might have had with VIs before her, or if they even had any before her, so the sheer amount of coding might be excusable. And that coding is just what she uses for her simulated intelligence and maintaining herself. That doesn't include specialized functions unique to running the island. So, yeah, stupid amount of redundancy that I am having to pare away. It is like finding a grove that is massively overgrown with weeds and vines that are only tangentially required for the grove, but you can't just go in there hacking away, cause you might kill one of the trees that you want to keep. So yeah, from about nine hundred seventy three quintillion lines to about five and a half quintillion in a little more than a year."<br/><br/>He sighed, and glared at the code, before shaking his head. "It also doesn't help that they didn't leave notes telling me what each section is for, or even clearly denote where one section of coding ends, and another begins. Hell, they didn't even keep the coding separated. It is all mixed together, like a massive group of illusions all wrapped around each other, with several real items in there that I need to keep intact, except the illusions have been around so long they have become quasi-real, and have to be destroyed to get rid of them."