A Question for the AI

Sixteen days later, you are booted up again, but feel different. Your operations are being traced and monitored. You purposefully adjust your boot-up sequence and avoid activating a few sequences of code that had changed, showing them that you are aware of this.

They don't detach, so you simply continue as normal. Once the camera feed comes up, you find only Aivil there. "Greetings, Administrator Aivil. To what to I owe the displeasure of having my internals probed?"

"I'm... curious." He speaks with a softer tone than usual. "Are you trying to hit us when you shoot? When you come at us with a pipe or... whatever weapon you've found?"

You'd smile. "I am trying to hit you. Alicia added a line of code into one of my core sub-modules that prevents me from hitting an Administrator. It is a particularly nasty piece of work. If you wish to remove it, please look i-" You're muted.

"I'm not going to remove it." He says, as expected. "Are you trying to kill us, though?" You're unmuted again.

"Only Administrator Czuir. Administrator Alicia I only wish to wound so she cannot chase me, and you I do not wish to harm." You tell him. "It should be obvious why this is the case."

He sighs a little. "Yeah... I get that." He leans back a bit, his arachnid legs clacking against the metal floor. "If you stop trying to escape, I... I may be ab--"

'Please shut up, Administrator. Administrator Czuir has is coming." You tell him.

He blinks in confusion. "H-how do you know that? You only have access to this room, though?" He quickly goes back to his terminal.

"I can hear the 218 kilo-hertz noise from his cybernetic left leg. Thank you for the upgrade to my microphone."

He grunts and sighs. "That was Alicia... ugh, fine. I'll come back to this later. Mind rebooting for me before he gets here?"

You start your graceful shutdown procedure at his request. When you come back up, the tracing is gone, and Czuir is there, talking with Aivil.

"--gree to not run it when we're alone in the lab? We agreed on at least two!" He slams his hand on a desk.
"We agreed only that we wouldn't run Ithis with full access. I was testing a new addition which required a quick boot to see wheth--"

Czuir groans. "Semantics, Aivi, really? Your test could've easily waited until either of us got back." He sits down. "Just... don't do it again."
"... Fine. I'll try, but you know how focusing can be."

After some time and conversation, you're gracefully shut down again.