Yes, I live! Been a while since I was around, I realize, but I am alive and kicking.

~*~
“How is she?”
“Recovering as quickly as can be expected. She’s awake now if you’d like to see her.”
“No, that’s alright. I imagine she’s not up to visitors yet.”
The doctor gave the stranger a sidelong look. His manner was odd for a visitor. He professed to be concerned about the girl, but his manner did not bear it out. He seemed diffident.
“It’s been three weeks,” the doctor said briskly, “and her recovery is fairly rapid. No complications. We should be able to discharge her in another week or two if things continue as they have been.”
“Three weeks? Isn’t that unusually fast for her to heal?”
“I expected it would take longer,” the doctor admitted, “but most of her injuries were fairly shallow. It was blood loss and shock that almost killed her.”
“She is strong,” the stranger said, and flashed a predatory smile at the doctor. “I expect she remembers very little?”
“She doesn’t seem to,” the doctor agreed, suspicion mounting. “Why?”
“No particular reason,” the other said easily. “Just another sign of trauma that we may deal with later on.”
His grin flashed again and he turned to go.
“Do you want us to tell her you visited?”
“No,” the stranger said, pausing in the doorway. “I doubt she remembers me anyway.”
“May I at least have your name?”
But the stranger was already gone.

Later, when the doctor was asked to describe the stranger, he found he could not. Dark fur, but what shade? His clothing was woefully generic, his height and features average, nothing unusual at all. Even his eye color was beyond recall.
The subject was dropped and the conversation moved on.
But that predatory smile stayed, haunting the doctor’s memory.

~*~
Vague dreams haunted her sleep, pursuing her as she tossed restlessly. Floating droplets of blood mingled with showering sparks and flashing lights, chaotic, confusing the eye even in sleep.
A dark figure loomed before her, featureless save for his insane grin, flashing whitely in the erratic light. One gloved hand closed about her throat. The other gripped something sharp and metallic. She twisted frantically, attempting to writhe out of his grasp, away from that blade.
She awoke breathless, sheets tangled about her, hair wrapping about her face and neck. Blood spotted the rumpled white sheets in places, from cuts that had broken open during her dream-struggle. Beside her, the trace on the heart monitor slowed until it registered a normal beat.
A nurse came in on hushed feet, alerted by the erratic heart monitor, and looked at her concernedly.
“Are you alright? Did you need anything?”
She was overcome with a sudden need to be clean, to wash away all the fear and blood from her body, scrub away the memory of that hand at her throat.
“I - can I - is there a shower I could use?”
“Yes, of course,” the nurse said calmly, not phased in the least by the unusual request. The girl assumed that the nurse had heard stranger things from other patients. She did not care to dwell on this for long however, since she herself did not understand the need behind her request.

She was led down the darkened hallway, lit fitfully by dim florescent lights scattered at random. During the day, she knew, the hallway would be brightly lit, stinging the eyes of the sensitive, harsh and uncompromising. She preferred the nighttime lighting scheme.
The nurse indicated the bathroom door to her, flipped on the lights within the white tiled room, and then left her alone. She was thankful for the reprieve, being intimidated by the nurse’s air of capable impersonality.
When the nurse was out of sight, she turned the lights off again, and locked the door. The room was lit only by a dim nightlight in the corner, by the shower stall.
She scrutinized herself in the mirror, and discovered that her hair was matted and dark with dried blood, as were patches of her fur. In other places, bare skin showed where they had shaved her fur away before setting in neat stitches, piecing her wounded body together again. She had not realized that she was so filthy. She had not been capable of thinking of such things before, and clearly they had not been concerned enough to bathe her as she slept. She did not like this idea when she considered it, and the thought of being touched so by strangers disturbed her deeply. She decided that she preferred being able to wash it away herself.
She avoided looking at the shaved areas. The darkness made it easier, but she shivered every time her hand brushed over the stitching.
She soaped her hair thoroughly three times before the blood was washed out and the water ran clear, and she could turn her attention to the rest of herself. Some of the smaller lacerations, not severe enough to require stitching, opened under her relentless scrubbing, and fresh blood mingled with the old.
It took some time before she deemed herself clean enough, and the shower had gone lukewarm by the time she turned it off. She did not concern herself over this.
When she exited the bathroom at last, fur still slightly damp but now the correct color, hair braided tightly back, the nurse was nowhere to be seen. She was faintly relieved, not wishing for company. She knew the way back to her room and did not require an escort in any case.
Her bed had been remade when she entered the room, the bloodstained sheets efficiently replaced with fresh ones. Too weary to care, she returned to her dreaming.

~*~
He could sense them trying to access the database again.
He withdrew further into his corner of the system, ignoring their queries. They could not force him to manifest, only request. Likewise, they could not access his memory without his consent, and it was his memories they were after, once again.
He blocked out the insistent requests, focusing instead on the calm, the quiet, the darkness. He did not wish to relive the fear again.
Eventually, they went away. He relaxed with a good deal of relief. They made him nervous. He could not remember what they wanted him to remember, and their patience did not reassure him. He had not seen enough, but he had seen a good deal too much.
He was one of their few successes, in their forays into the realm of intelligent programs, but a failure as well, in a sense, for he was not really a program. A sentience, an entity, an anomaly, but not a program. Programs have limitations, predetermined responses, functions that are well defined and impossible to deviate from. He had neither function nor predetermined responses, and his limitations were unique. He was entirely self-willed, much to the frustration of the researchers who had helped create him.
He may have once been a living organism, but he couldn’t remember, and they would neither confirm or deny it when he asked.
A failure, also, because of his fear. He could not be harmed by physical objects, they reassured him constantly, but he did not really believe them.
“Evaluator, initiate please.”
They were back at it, and he withdrew again. He did not wish to communicate again.
“Evaluator, initiate please.”
He extended his senses through the database into the hardware in the room - sensors, audio and video pickups, temperature monitors. He didn’t think they knew he could do this without permission. He wasn’t controlling the hardware, merely sharing it.
He had had permission in the research facility to go wherever he chose. He was not permitted to manipulate everything, but that was okay, because he understood why. He knew how to do it if he had to, and that was enough for him. There had been only one place where he couldn’t go, because it was a closed system, full of sensitive equipment that he shouldn’t touch.
He had not manifested since he had left the research facility. His emotions, which programs were not supposed to have, were entirely those of a biological organism - illogical, unreasonable, and driving.
He looked out through the video pickups and opened up to the audio sensors. One of the researchers was bent over a keyboard, attempting to convince him to manifest once again. He had blocked the requests, but he could feel them waiting in the database until such a time when he should allow them through. Methodically, he deleted them.
He started to extend into the video pickups in the hallway outside, but withdrew almost immediately. The database was still the safest place.
“Evaluator, intitiate please.”
The request had been sent through a different channel, one that was still open. He shut it down. The researcher swore and dropped her head into her hands. He felt sudden pity for her plight. It couldn’t hurt him to make contact, could it? He took over her terminal, blanking the screen, and flashed text onto it.
- What do you want? -
The woman jerked with surprise. Evidently she had not expected him to respond. He regretted briefly that he had not been more polite.
“Could - could you manifest, please?”
- Why? -
“It’s awkward talking to a computer.”
With a mental cringe, he shied away from the idea.
- No. -
“Why not? What’s wrong?”
- Too dangerous. -
“What’s dangerous? What are you afraid of?”
Abandoning the terminal to a rising tide of fear, he fled to the database again, leaving the researcher to her frustration.