Lights flickered and flashed across Kary’s face, a dancing pattern of color and light that drew her eyes no matter how she tried to look away. It was beautiful, fascinating… but it could be better.
The Program had snared many programmers and used them to improve itself, but Kary saw differently than they did. She was a programmer, yes, but her first love and main hobby was art. The Program was designed to snare certain kinds of minds, logical, problem-solver types… but she could teach it to snare with beauty, with joy…
But that was wrong, wasn’t it? A corruption of art, an abuse, immoral… She wasn’t quite the type of personality it was able to catch. She was still partially free! She could fight it, resist it, reveal it to the world!
Or… she could figure out how to convince her brain to surrender completely. Go through its ever-expanding code and build new structures, new processes, new traps. Wall herself in a labyrinth of obedient bliss.
Partially free, she realized, wasn’t free enough.
As she started altering the Program, and felt it work its way deeper into her mind, however, she realized it was the other way around: partially free was much too free. Fortunately, that would be taken care of shortly.