Well, nearly a year after I started this, I'm updating. It's pathetically small, but better than nothing.


He coalesced into being beside the heart monitor, giving no warning at all. The room was sterile, typical, giving no indication of its occupant’s personality.
She sat in the hospical bed, a white sheet drawn up over her legs, beautiful as he remembered. Her coppery hair had been rebraided. Her ivory fur showed faint bloodstains and was patchy in places, very short where it had been shaved away.
Her large eyes were fixed on him, wide and grey as the clouds outside. She looked lost, and so very, very afraid. He remembered that look. He remembered seeing it through security cameras as she ran ...
“Hey,” he said awkwardly, wondering what he could possibly say to put her at ease.
“Hi,” she said in a small voice, fear and uncertainty in every line of her body. She recovered enough to finally ask, “who are you? What are you?”
“I’m ... uh. It’s hard to explain. I don’t really understand it myself. They called me Evaluator.”
She was not reacting as he had expected. The fear was not of him. Her responses were not those of a normal person; he supposed she was still recovering mentally.
“Why?”
Her question was so childish and yet so sincere that it caught him off guard. He fumbled for an answer.
“I - I was part of an experiment, I guess. I think I used to be like you, before. I’m not sure. I might have been something else. Anyways, I can remember them asking the evaluator for progress updates, and then I started answering for it. They thought it was still the evaluation program. After that, they just never bothered to rename me.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, the fear ebbing away visibly. “They thought you were a program?”
“They .. transferred me, I guess. Into the computers. I changed ... I can come out like now, but mostly I stay in the system.”
“Why?”
“I’m free there,” he said simply. He couldn’t begin to explain the limitations that were removed when he was in the system, when computers were his eyes and ears. He could be anywhere, everywhere, all at once. He could do anything.
“You don’t remember anything from before,” she said, eyes fixed on him. He shook his head.
“Me either,” she said softly. She looked down at her hands.
“I know,” he said.
“I remember being chased,” she said. “I think he caught me. And then I woke up here.”
“Nobody told you what happened?”
“No,” she whispered. “They asked me questions - what did he look like, did he say anything, did you recognize him - but I couldn’t tell them anything, so they went away.”
“We were ona research station,” he said finally, debating how much to tell her. “Different kinds of research, but one of the projects had to do with weapons, I think.”
“You were there?” she asked, tensing up again.
“I told you I was an experiment,” he said mildly. “Anyways, someone found out about the weapons and next thing we know there’s activists breaking down the door and storming the place. I remember you running, and you went into one of the restricted areas where I wasn’t allowed, and the doors got shut behind you. And somebody was following you, but then the activists destroyed the camera system and I couldn’t see anymore.”
She was quiet for a long time, watching the rain patter on the window.
“Why are you here?” she asked finally. She sounded so very, very tired.
“I had to know if you were okay,” he said. “Had to tell you. And - to apologize. For not stopping him.”
“Why didn’t you,” she said, still not looking at him. He flinched, almost lost control and fled back to the digital world.
“I was so afraid,” he said miserably. “I’m still afraid. I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know what to do.”
“Neither do I,” she said, looking at him once more. “But if I could ... I’d find the guy who did this to me, and I’d ask him why.”
Evaluator felt frozen at the thought of facing the monster he had glimpsed, of actually trying to find him. He wanted to tell her she was insane, crazy, didn’t know what she was dealing with.
“If you mean that, I can help,” he heard himself say. “I can help you find the activists.”