Chapter 70: C: Emblazoned

Rafaela sat back from the drone she'd been disassembling and stretched. 

Her eyes moved to the screens of the two cores still strapped firmly to what had resumed being the floor. The progress measuring bar had not filled in any faster or slower the entire time the copy had been in progress. Sys20si was far more accurate in her estimations than most of the systems Rafaela had ever worked with, but the speed was being bottlenecked by something on a hardware level. 

She had so many questions, but the precautions she'd insisted on were making it so that the data would remain inaccessible until the copy was completed. The AI wasn't like a human, who must automatically read anything it wanted to copy into its own memory first. Or perhaps it did, but immediately forgot. Nothing that was being copied was accessible to the AI yet because it might be more dangerous without extra layers of security between the data and the core of her system.