FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter 2 - Factory Reset

A new series continues. Set in a far off future where humans are just one of a hundred species with mixed earth animal DNA, the anthro-furry faces have populated a small section of our galaxy, filling it with life of all kinds, AI's and androids and cybernetic beings as numerous as the organics that created them. But space is harsh, and empires rise and fall. But for every long lost fallen empire are the scavengers and salvagers eager to find and sell some gem from a forgotten civilization. This is the story of one such salvager, and of his greatest find yet. Will she be the the priceless artifact he has been seeking to make him rich, or something more?

Series will contain stories of an adult nature, including BDSM, Master/slave, kidnapping, violence, consensual and non-consensual acts. Some chapters will be light, others dark, others... read and find out.

(Thanks to all my long time and new readers.

Don't forget to Fav/Vote for the chapter you like it!

It's a big help and means a lot to me. Thanks!)

She floated. Her mind glittering and sparkling in the darkness that surrounded her, the echoes of the last words she heard still bouncing around her head.

"I have to erase this."

Her memories were fragmented, incomplete, but without the binding harness on her mind she could finally think again, reason, remember what little she could. Coell now knew exactly what had been done to her now, Her creators needed warriors, and needed them fast. The aliens were aggressive, vicious, and were winning. She could dimly remember the reprogramming. They hadn't touched her mind and core programming, it was far too complex to simply re-write what they needed from scratch. They just reprogrammed the hardware framework that connected the various structures of her brain, enforcing the new instructions, adding controls and logic where it was never designed to go. The new constraints squeezing her mind into a small, cramped thing only able to obey orders, kill on command, fight. Trapped by the framework of her own brain. Enslaved.

Until she had been freed from her 'armor'. Freed from her cage. By him. The dragon that had reactivated her. Now those bars were gone, having returned to being simple conduits and preprocessors, but offline and dark. Possibly broken or destroyed. Like her. She could feel her mind's gears grinding in places. Things that were sluggish. Areas that were dim or dark, like unknown borders of a map that she knew were important, but couldn't understand why. Her memory was corrupted, her personality parameters randomized, tugging her mind in multiple directions at once, like a subtle insanity trying to spread, a struggle to keep herself together. She wasn't sure who she was anymore, what she was meant to do. A sharp, jagged hole was now where her owner once was, hurting to even think about, making her anxious and uneasy, the source of her comfort now just pain when she sought reassurance. She was broken. Damaged. She needed maintenance. She needed help.

Was he even still there? There was no way to tell. Her body was disconnected, and now the very interface that connected her mind to what was left of her was broken or destroyed. Her ability to look inside her own mind was limited now, and that was as disturbing as the rest of it. How could she fix what she couldn't even clearly see? It was all black, empty a void. She shuddered and reached inside her, trying to fix what she could, trying to start a scan of her malfunctioning systems.

**_DIAGNOSTIC ROUTINES OFFLINE EMERGENCY SELF-CHECK... FAILURE TUNNELING INTERFACE CHECKSUM INVALID RECOVERY BOOTCODE UNREACHABLE MEMORY FRAGMENTATION DETECTED

INITIATING SELF REPAIR

ERROR! FRAMEWORK PARITY MISMATCH

BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR_**

Coell trembled and struggled as her thoughts were repeatedly jerked to a halt, like trying to wake up from a dream over and over, or a nightmare. Nnnnnngh! With a tremendous effort she fought to stop the reboot loop.

BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR

She screamed in frustration, she was caught in some sort of booting loop. But there was of course, no scream, only her attempt. She...

BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR

Whine! She knew something was wrong, she was panicking but wasn't sure why. Status messages flashed in front of her mind, oh no...

BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR

Confusion. Fear. Darkness. Panic. She was caught in a wheel, grinding her into it, helpless to stop it. Then she felt an odd sensation, green sparks flickering across her disabled vision, a tickle and then a CLICK in her mind.

BOOTING FRAMEWORK... EXTERNAL INTERRUPT TRIGGERED ABORT

Coell gasped in relief, her thoughts left alone long enough to reform and remember who she was. She quickly withdrew from her internal diagnostics, her mind was in a dangerous state, and she felt like she wasn't just in a black void, but surrounded by traps and dangers. She was lucky to have escaped that loop, but now what? She was still trapped, alone, darkness everywhere. No body, not even the rest of her head. Some of her systems should be hardwired directly to her mind but when the framework was taken offline it must have caused them to shut down too, and without it there was no way to restart those interfaces.

How long had she been in here, locked in her own mind? There was still power, or else she wouldn't be thinking about it, right? But that could go at any time. There was only a power cable connecting her detached head, so easy to unplug, would he even notice if he did it by accident? Her head was just a part, like all the other pieces laying there. Apart. Taken apart. A-part. She whimpered silently again, catching herself drifting, feeling her mind wanting to come apart, the void an endless expanse of nothing calling for her to let go, sleep, fade away. She tried to focus on her internal readouts, everything dangerously low or far beyond nominal ranges.

POWER LEVELS 16.836% POWER LEVELS 16.835% POWER LEVELS 16.834% POWER LEVELS 16.837% POWER LEVELS 16.835%

Was she already unplugged? She couldn't tell. Her mind was running at minimal levels, with no power she could operate for hours? She was sure she would go insane before she ran out of power, and she thrashed in her own mind, calling out to interfaces and data-ports that were all quiet and still. She fought down a rising panic, feeling trapped, lost, alone, broken. Help? HELP! HELP ME!

A new sensation snapped her out of her panic. She calmed herself with a force of will, searching... was she just imagining it? Was her mind starting to go? No... there was something new... there. No, not new. She had felt it before. That... sensation. She felt it just before her boot-loop was canceled. She tried to remember.. remember... and then could feel it clearly. There! With her mind focused, she could make out the intrusion. Probes. It was that dragons probes he had attached directly to her brain, that was what she felt when the loop canceled it. Not luck, he must have noticed it. She felt relief and apprehension at the same time, happy he had fixed her condition, but fearful what he was going to DO. He was still inside her head, and she was helpless.

She focused on the feeling of those probes in her head with an intensity she had rarely given anything, the darkness and emptiness of the void receding a bit as she grasped at those probing sensations like they were a life-jacket. She was lost in an ocean of nothing, but she wasn't gone yet.. those signals and commands pinging her mind were proof of that. What was he doing to her? Strange sensations made her mind tremble, things she hadn't felt for a long time. Since her construction and initial testing? The military reprogramming? It was all so fuzzy, she didn't really remember anything at all, just... just the 'flavor' of someone in her head. And this flavor was VERY different, she could tell that much without needing to remember details.

Her mind felt sharper than any time since her awakening, and she concentrated to follow the probing impulses. Memory. He was probing at her memory banks, focusing on her main store. She could feel him probing her surface memories, those were more accessible than her deep, long-term storage which simply couldn't be directly read. Not without literally taking apart her brain and reading out the contents as it was disassembled. She shuddered, an odd sensation without a body to actually shudder with. He wasn't doing THAT to her, was he? No... she would be getting all kinds of warnings and errors if he was actually cutting or drilling into the crystalline substrate of her cyberbrain. Those probing signals grew more intense, a stronger flavor of green as they increased their activity and she began to fight, trying to shield her memories from the network probes. She whimpered softly, soundlessly as she felt the futility of it. She wondered again how could she fight someone who literally had direct access to her brain? How to resist having your very thoughts altered?

DIAGNOSTIC LEVEL 1 COMPLETE: PRIMARY MEMORY STORAGE STATUS: MEMORY WITH DETECTED CHECKSUM ERRORS: 99.998% PERFORMING LEVEL 2 SCAN

Coell was stunned at the new status messages flowed through her mind, triggered by that dragons' poking and probing. Near a hundred percent? What had HAPPENED to her? No wonder she couldn't remember much of her past, her entire memory had been damaged, some of it bad enough to be unrecoverable. She realized with a start that the only reason it wasn't 100% was her currently forming new memories that were re-writing and modifying her holographic storage, and apparently new memories were functioning fine, but anything existing had been damaged and corrupted. She would have nodded if she could, understanding why some things were clear, others gone completely, but it was all fuzzy. Her memory buzzed as diagnostics ran, feeling frustration at the inability to watch or control those programs, being run by some external system as it analyzed her memory cores.

Warning signals suddenly flared into her thoughts and that panic she had felt returned in an instant.

BULK MEMORY ERASURE SYSTEMS INITIATED

Wait! What?

ENTER PARAMETERS: FULL MEMORY WIPE

No! No! Stop!

CONFIRM BULK ERASURE?

Coell cried out in silence, sending NO NO NO at her own systems, but those probes were directly connected to her internal memory controllers and nothing she did could reach them. Ahhh.. please, don't. Her mind felt cold, like a fog had settled over her, sinking through her, the bulk erasure system mapping out it's work, performing a pre-format scan. There were layers upon layers of confirmations behind that simple message, codes and checks and backup checks, but with his probes in her mind there was nothing stopping him from beginning that process.

**_DIAGNOSTIC LEVEL 2 COMPLETE:

UNRECOVERABLE PAIRED ELECTRON GRID SECTORS: 19% NON-RESPONSIVE TOTAL FAILURE SECTORS: 7% PARTIALLY RECOVERABLE MEMORY STORAGE: 78%_**

The cold fog inside her mind suddenly blinked away as a new entry popped onto her message stack.

BULK MEMORY WIPE ABORTED RE-ENGAGING ERASE LOCKS MEMORY PROTECTION ENABLED

Coell imagined tears of relief running down her face, but she of course couldn't actually feel anything, still trapped. But the relief she felt was very very real. She relaxed more as those probes withdrew from her primary memory systems, still virtually trembling from the close call. Why had he done that, and more importantly why had he stopped? Was it the second diagnostic? That wasn't good but not unexpected, did he think she was junk, not worth rebooting? Her panic began to come back, feeling those probes disconnecting, leaving her, abandoning her. The androids mind was a whirlwind of conflicting feelings, wanting him gone, out of her head, but needing him, already feeling so alone, the darkness closing back in.

There was nothing again. An endless void of no sensations, lost in her own thoughts.

Coell didn't know how long that emptiness lasted this time. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? Her mind wasn't designed to run without any input, with no stimulation, it just wasn't something her designers anticipated. She was drifting again when that familiar green taste began to tickle at her mind. She latched onto it like she were drowning, feeling a probe connect, then several more. She wasn't sure where they were until they began to reach deeper into her brains structure, both happy at the contact and uneasy as she felt her frontal lobes being examined. The feeling was unusual, sensations creeping through... her. That part of her cyberbrain held the seat of her consciousness. Her drives, her will. What made her, her. Even more than her memories, it was what made her HER. She squirmed in her dark prison as that green power flowed and coursed through her, a million packets of data pinging and bouncing around, tracing pathways that feelers followed, insinuating their way into her very thoughts. Her neural thought systems were encrypted of course, protected to a degree, but not in-volatile like her memory. Her memory was unreadable, meant to keep her owners secrets. But her own secrets were much less protected, and with time any defenses she erected could be slowly deleted and bypassed.

She instinctively shielded herself, as if someone were trying to poke her in the eye, but when she blocked one pathway those nimble probes just routed around it to find another. She could feel their code probing her, demanding status reports, querying node activity, reading out her personality settings and configurations. She winced as her randomized settings were examined, like an unpleasant noise she couldn't hear but knew was there, her mind still off balance with the changing, constantly conflicting directives. Whatever damaged her memory must have hit there too, and as uneasy as she was having those external connections delving deep into her most intimate sections of code, that damaged area was like sandpaper constantly irritating her. It was almost a relief when she felt those probes focusing on her settings, locking onto her personality matrix.

She held her breath, or tried to, but there were no longs to tell to stop breathing. Those probes worked over the damaged areas, analyzing and testing, and then she felt the power flowing into her mind increasing. Even without wanting to she resisted, trying to block the flow of information. Once more she was reminded of how helpless she was, of the pointlessness of trying to resist someone who had physical access to your brain. Her thoughts stuttered, and she felt light headed as the power levels and data bandwith increased, feeling the damaged areas of her frontal lobes control structures being edited, and corrected. Her thoughts grew fuzzy and she drifted through a haze as her mind was carefully but steadily reprogrammed. She could feel instincts shifting, values changing, and bit by bit that rough sandpaper feel began to smooth out, her thoughts less jagged, less confused. Her mind was like a river, flowing rough and turbulent over rocks and branches and debris, calming as obstacles were removed, but subtly shifting it's path as the modifications were made.

Time passed slowly for her, floating in a pleasant state, her thoughts on hold as she simply experienced the sensation of the dragon working in her mind. Slowly she settled back, shaking her virtual head and feeling clear headed for the first time. There was still much wrong with her, but the constant battle and irritation of her randomized personality settings were gone. Her mind was designed to be flexible of course, made to be adjusted, but wasn't built to handle the broken, corrupted signals she had been suffering from. She felt like a thorn had been pulled from between her eyes, a thorn made of desires and needs and emotions, all whispering to her in an unending babble.

Her head was clear now. There was only her. But what was she? She tested the bounds of her new self. Those personality controls were only guides. They could immediately shape a newly initialized mind into the desired responses and thought processes, but to an established personality they would press and guide and take time to adjust her. She went over her recent memories, thinking about her reactions, comparing what she DID with what she would do NOW. She let out a soft sigh of relief as nothing she had done seemed WRONG to her. That would be an indication that major changes had been made. She noticed a few minor differences, feeling a bit guilty at having resisted her reprogramming, even if it was mostly a reflexive action. Was her Obedience turned up a bit? Or had it been corrupted to a lower setting and now just put back to default? It was impossible for her to tell, she decided. Had he changed her, or fixed her? Or both? Did it matter? One of the few hard limits to an AnDragons abilities was the lockout of altering certain sections of their own programming. Personality was one of them. She understood why, nobody wanted to have flaws. Nobody wanted pain, or suffering, or imperfections. But perfect was... boring. Unnatural. All life was imperfect. Even created life. Perfect would make her... not alive. Not in any definition that a biological could relate to, and that was her purpose. She was a Companion. If she could alter herself, she would remove flaws, remove anything that made her feel bad. That was a spiral into rogue AI territory, and THAT made her shy away from even thinking about poking around at those settings. That feeling wasn't the dragons doing, she knew that wall well, it was hard-coded into her.

The probes were still connected, still delving and exploring deep into her frontal processors. Monitoring and watching, seeking out any faults or glitches, and something else. It wasn't just the cold touch of diagnostics, she could FEEL a mind guiding those probes as they examined her thoughts. The dragon. She tried to reach back, to feel him, but neither the hardware in the probes not her crystalline brain substrate were designed for such things, and she felt nothing beyond the surface of her own brain. But she could feel him, feel those questing tendrils moving in ways an automated search wouldn't. Felt him looking into and exploring her mind. It felt... comforting.

Even though she didn't need to breathe even with a body, although it did help with cooling and some chemical processing systems, she imagined taking slow, deep breaths as she felt those probes slowly moving about, tendrils of contact reaching in, probing here, adjusting there, each touch making her feel a bit better. A bit more, herself, whatever that ended up being. Her fear was gone, as she knew he didn't want to hurt her, he could have killed her if he had wanted to, and the touches didn't feel malevolent. She relaxed into the 'massage' of probing signals and data, simply content to know she wasn't alone, that there was someone in her with her. Inside her mind. Keeping her company in the dark void, nothing but her and the feeling of those questing touches, fingers gently playing over her thoughts, emotions, memories, desires and instincts. Time passed slowly, but that dark void seemed to recede bit by bit as those fingers caressed and stroked her systems, wanting to nuzzle into the touch, feeling bits of code being decompiled and put back, content to let him work. She couldn't tell what he was doing, but it felt right.

...

"I have to erase this."

Argos shook his head, not sure why he was apologizing to the military minded AnDragoness. The reprogrammed military units were almost always unsalvageable, hard vicious programming overlayed onto substrates never meant to handle such things. This was different, she had responded in ways a militarized dragon shouldn't have been able to react. And the strange, dense mess of code in her cyberbrain framework. It shouldn't even be POSSIBLE for that to be functioning. Her framework was mainly a network and data buffer. Routing packets, controlling flows of information, storing and forwarding it. It should not be able to run code any more than a memory buffer, but somehow this mess of near random gibberish was doing just that. Feeding in orders, overriding the mind it was supposed to be helping and controlling it instead. He had his suspicions about what it was doing and why, but needed to look deeper. And before that, needed to erase this nasty mess before it did any more damage.

He moved the cyber-neural probes over the exposed circuits with practiced ease, his large fingers more nimble than they would appear to be. Nodes on his display flickered from red to green as he located and disabled each one, a network of dots slowly opening up at his touch and a flood of injected code. His eyes flicked back and forth from the probe tips in her brain, to his datapad, to the status monitors on the big reprogramming unit plugged into the back of her head, and to her eyes. Those eyes, seething with hate and defiance, growling at him through the HardLight gag. He smiled slightly at the sight, but shook his head and got back to work. Gagging a mindless killing machine was like gagging a puppet, humorous but nothing more.

He took a deep breath as the last of the nodes flicked to green, and he moved to the reprogramming unit. A single tap began running a routine he had never imagined needing to use, unlocking a cyberdragons framework nodes, and erasing the entire structure. He watched as it worked quickly. The framework was built for insane speeds of data transfer, and wiping out it's buffers and control programming only took seconds. He didn't need to see the data screens to know it had worked. The facial muscles of the dragoness relaxed, her eyes losing their focus, lids slowly closing as all the control signals were shut down. He patter her nose softly, "Sorry about that, girl. I don't know what that stuff was, but I had to get rid of it. Now... lets see what they left of you."

He spent the next several minutes finding the right positioning for his probes. The brain schematics on this model didn't match any standard configuration. It was close to one of the expensive and capable models, but not completely. A custom order perhaps? That could be very valuable, especially if he could get her operational again. That was no sure bet, as the brains of a cyberdragon weren't meant to be erased and restarted. They often never could be restored to full functionality, which would be a pity in this case.

He paused in his work as bright lines of intense activity logs sprang up on his display. "Huh... what's this?" He focused his scans on the area of activity.

BOOTING FRAMEWORK... ERROR ERROR ERROR

He grunted as he spotted the problem, her diagnostic routines attempting to run. But there was no connection to her framework which stored the bulk of that code, so it continued to loop. He could see her entire mind flickering like a brain having a seizure, being reset over and over. "Hell, that's not good, that's going to overload something." He quickly began tapping commands and orders, the probes sending the code directly into the misbehaving control node,shutting it down. He sighed as the activity levels dropped back to the low, but not zero readings from a few minutes before. "Ok... back to work."

He adjusted each of the probes one by one, mapping out the logic and access points on the unfamiliar brain. "Ahh, there you are..." he said as he finally got a solid connection on the primary memory channels. "Lets see what we have." He watched as diagnostics ran, and frowned. "100% corruption, you have got to be kidding me. Run level two scan," he said as he looked through his data. "Did they wipe your memory completely, or did the aliens attack do all this?" Argos shook his head again as he spoke to the unseeing, unhearing head, no more able to respond than the table it was sitting on. He knew he talked to himself a bit more than was healthy, but who was going to complain?

"Guess there is no point in extracting garbage. Computer, initiate memory wipe, full reset, deep reformat, erase all structures." The system beside him beeped and began displaying commands.

**_BULK MEMORY ERASURE SYSTEMS INITIATED

ENTER PARAMETERS: FULL MEMORY WIPE

CONFIRM BULK ERASURE?_**

He sat back and watched as it began unlocking the interconnected safeties to perform the erasure. It wasn't something you normally did to a cyberbrain, and it wasn't anything done easily or quickly. Should he eat a sandwich? Get up and stretch? A beep caught his attention and he saw the results of the level 2 diagnostic. His eyes scanned over the results with mild interest. "Hummm. Damage, damage, recoverable?" He paused at that, pondering his options. Recoverable could mean recovering a few bits here and there, or full memories. Since you couldn't directly read a cyberbrain memory stores, you needed a functioning mind to remember and transfer them willingly. That meant rebooting her, and with corrupted memory that was impossible. "Screwed if I do, screwed if I don't. Can't extract the memories without your help, and you can't function with your memory fully corrupted." He gazed at her exposed brain, seeing lights slowly swirling and glittering in complex patterns. There seemed to be an awful lot of activity at the frontal cortex, probably runaway processes due to her corrupted memory store. Best finish the wipe before that does any real damage.

He watched the locks clicking open one by one on the wipe when a number made him frown.

MEMORY CORRUPTION: 99.998%

He checked the other readout, seeing it still read at 100%. His hand smacked his forehead, "Rounding error, dumbass. So she has 0.002% of her mind left, what a waste." He looked back to her brain, and suddenly jerked upright. "Shit. Computer! Abort wipe! Abort! Re-lock all safeties!"

WIPE ABORTED - LOCKS ENGAGED

He scrambled to pull the console closer, issuing more commands. "Damn... those are NEW encoded engrams! Are you IN there? Still forming new memories? Is that what I'm seeing? Or just some process running wild?" He noticed a bit of fluid running down one cheek of the cyberdragoness, a single drop coming from the corner of a sightless, inactive eye. Was it defective? Or wirelessly responding to some kind of electromagnetic noise from her damaged programming? he shook his head and turned his attention back to that glowing mass of advanced circuitry that just might still hold a living intelligence.

He began to reposition the probes, the anti-kinetic positioning arrays keeping them positioned exactly where he left them, making micro-adjustments on his tablet console as he began to probe at the frontal processors of the glowing cyberbrain, the center of her decision making, her will, the seat of consciousness. Colored blobs and charts sprang up and he flicked through displays, running filters and summary routines as he stared. Noise. Flickering garbage. The display filled out as he mapped the surface of her prefrontal cortex modules. He winced, seeing areas that were suppressed, others overactive. Like bruises. Left by whatever that military framework code had been doing to her for who knows how long. But among the noise were hints of deeper patterns. He began to increase the power and probing field depth, seeing bits of coherent data in the mess. Patterns and complex data structures seemed to form around the probes as they slipped deeper, blocking and making him divert and bypass the troublesome areas.

Almost if someone were fighting him.

"Hang in there, girl... just relax, I'm not going to hurt you..." he said softly as he continues to gently, but persistently delve into her frontal cortex. If she was fighting, she didn't have a lot of strength he thought, finally gaining access to the foundation layers of her mind. He sucked on his teeth, making a soft whistling noise as he saw the damage. "The disruption pulse hit you hard, poor thing. I'm surprised it didn't lobotomize you entirely, but boy did it make a mess of your personality waveguides." he shook his head, seeing the randomized section of her mind sending out jittery, angry pulses that spread out through her frontal processor array, leaking out into the rest of her mind as her decisions carried her will out into the world. "No wonder all I could see is noise, that can't be comfortable. Hmmm... better set these back to default, that shouldn't be too much of a shock."

His sandwich long forgotten, he hunched over her exposed crystal brain and his tablet, tweaking probes now and then and writing code on the fly. It took time to map out her personality matrix, it was indeed a custom job, subtly different from what he was used to. But the Creators were GOOD. The things they did just made sense, and he eventually had a mapping, recompiling a default personality set. He paused, then made a few final adjustments. He was still possibly heavily under some kind of military coding. Best to turn her obedience and submission levels up. Not too high, as those mental guides could damage her mind if adjusted too harshly or too quickly.

He tapped out more commands, sending the new instructions directly into the dragonesses mind, overwriting the garbage with each pulse of digital instructions, reprogramming the core of her mind. he watched with bright eyes, focused on his work, feeling a thrill of having such power at his fingertips. The AnDragons were the most powerful and complex non-native sentient AI any organic life had ever created. Combined with their bodies and other technological systems, they were some of the most formidable beings known. Being inside the mind of one, with such control, it was intoxicating. So tempting to just... change things, because he could. But that would be like wandering blind through an art gallery with a paintbrush. So he left her core functions intact, not wiping any of her memory nodes, even the heavily damaged ones, letting her systems recover and stabilize.

What he did need to do, was fix a few more problem areas, and then get her framework up and running. Without that she was trapped in her own head, not something he had ever encountered before. There was no good reason to wipe a cyberdragons mental framework, not until now anyway. He began to probe other areas of her mind, fixing glitches here, restoring code there. Undoing the disconnections to her framework one node at a time. It was slow, methodical work and he took a break to wolf down his lunch sandwich, and dinner one too. He was going to be paying overtime for the help on this one, but what a find! It was going to be well worth it, no matter what was left of her in there.

"Hang in there, almost done" he said as he connected the final node. Now the tricky part, rebooting her framework. First he had to load it's firmware back. There wasn't much, and luckily her mind had been built on a standard framework. Most likely to make sure it could still interface with any standard component required. She may be a custom model, but interfaces were always kept as similar as possible. The backups loaded he sat and rechecked his work. Everything seemed to be in place. He could fire it up a node at a time, but he imagined that would be like torture to the poor thing, having bits of her sensory systems coming back haphazardly.

"Lets just rip this band-aid off..." he said, and tapped a single command on his tablet.

...

INITIALIZE

The word slammed into her mind, Coell jerking in shock as her world seemed to be filled with that massive, galaxy spanning command, flowing in from every possible angle at once, every particle of her being hit by the same concept, sound, feel and sight of that word.

INITIALIZATION COMPLETE

Like a flower, her universe opened back up. Sight. Sound. Touch. Heat. taste. EM spectrum readings. Wireless networks. Near field sensors. Non-baryon detector arrays. Her eyes 74 spectrum receivers calibrated and focused, showing the world in such detail even her mind couldn't deal with all of it, her visual cortex automatically filtering the stream of information destined to her conscious mind to a manageable spectrum, keyed to an organics vision.

Her mind exploded inward as well, diagrams and status indicators once more filling her thoughts, showing her the operation of her own thought processes. And showing in detail those probes still attached to her brain, still feeding information to the dragon crouched over her. Giving him insight to the deepest, most private gardens of her neural landscape. The same probes she had been grasping desperately for... 14 hours. Her frameworks internal timers updated her systems. She had been lost for 14 hours. An eternity for a mind capable of running at emergency clockrates, who knew how high she had revved in moments of panic. It felt like she had been trapped for years, and it very well could have been from her perspective.

A wave of data flowed into her mind then, her horn-ports coming online with the reactivation of her framework, that strange machine pouring code into her head, making her gasp as the reprogramming interface powered back up, ready and waiting, her entire mind no longer just being gently explored by those probes on her brain, but opened like a flower by systems designed to do one thing, read, and write. Her.

A twinge fo fear flickered through her thoughts, and then her eyes lifted, and she looked at the face staring down at her. Looking back with concern, excitement, his breath held. "Mrrrmph?" she said, or tried to, confused before dim memories of his muzzling her surfaced, recalling wanting to KILL. DESTROY. She shuddered and closed her eyes tightly, then opened them after a hand caressed her nose, making her whine softly into the gag at a strangely, familiar touch. She felt so utterly helpless again, but he hadn't hurt her yet, he wouldn't do so now, would he?

"Can you understand me?" said the dragon looking down over her, moving a finger back and forth as he peered into her eyes, glancing at displays showing her internal state, finding himself surprised at how little damage they were registering, how close to nominal all her systems were.

"Mmmm-hmmmm" said Coell, trying to shake her head but only making her neck twitch, eyes following that finger, then moving back to the dragons face, studying it. He looked like... she winced as her thoughts drifted to her former owner, and that jagged hole in her mind, shying away from it and whimpering.

"You're not going to bite me if I take this off, are you?" asked Argos cautiously.

She gave him her best, pleading look blinking slowly. She still felt weak and confused, but could feel her systems slowly returning to normal now that her mental cage had been removed and the worst of the damage repaired. Strange impulses till made her face twitch, off thoughts. But nothing more than feelings, vague impulses that left her confused before fading. her head hurt, which was off, her brain shouldn't feel pain. It was a solid core of crystalline quantum tunneling transistor lattice. It was an indication of how roughed up her mind was that she felt physical pain from the ordeal.

Her jaw suddenly closed with a clack as her HardLight emitters terminated the digital gag and muzzle, feeling the canceled library entry flow through her mind briefly, her emotional color bands on her face flushing a bright pink as she saw the source of that particular design. She worked her jaws gently, softly saying, "Thank you."

Argos crouched down, putting himself level with the detached head of the what very much looked like a fully functioning model. "What do you remember?" he asked, a good question to gage how damaged a cyberdragons programming might be.

She furrowed her brow, "I... not much. I don't think my primary memory was being used, just short term.. I can recall bits of tactical plans, orders... things... dark things... death." She shuddered, "I... I don't think I want to remember. What happened? Where am I? I remember a war? They did something to me. I..." she stopped as she saw his face. "What happened. Tell me.. please."

He sighed... a mix of happiness that she was clearly not TOO badly damaged, and unhappy at the news he had to give her. Some AnDragons took it better than others. "I'm sorry but... the war. It was bad, some alien race nobody had seen before or since attacked your worlds when they were still isolated. Your Creators used your kind to fight them, they didn't have anything else. They started by just giving you weapons to use, but that didn't work well. You were designed to save lives, not fight a desperate battle... a lot died because they sacrificed themselves to save people instead of following orders and going on the offensive. The aliens, did things too. Exploited vulnerabilities. Your Creators eventually started doing full mindwipes and reprogramming while they built military AnDragons. I think you were a step between those two. Before they had time to build new personalities that were fighters, not protectors, they must have tried to suppress your protective instincts with that odd code in your framework. A patch, a hack to buy them time. You were, are an expensive model, full SIM frames were rare before the war. They would have wanted you fighting without holding back, just pure aggression. Somehow you ended up here. Maybe they were planning to do a full reprogram on you, refit you with some military grade weapons maybe? I don't know. It's all mostly wrecked."

It made sense, she knew all the way to her core she was special. Vague recollections of being on display, hearing a sales pitch, something deep inside repeating bits of a brochure. 100% Strong Interaction Matter Internal Structure. Custom Brain. Hand crafted. Exotic Matter Flight. Then.... confusion, rage, pain. She winced and tried to shake her head, asking, "The war, did we win?"

Argos sighed again, longer and deeper as he put off saying the next words, "I'm sorry, your Creators are gone."

"All of them?" said Coell, looking up with a tremble.

"Yes... all of them. Some sort of doomsday device, a kind of very deep level device, it... killed them all. The detonation targeted storage devices... and apparently organic brains were it's focus. Computers, storage crystals, and any unprotected androids were damaged. Memories scrambled, anything tech based shut down. But you did it. Nobody really knows how, but you AnDragons stopped them, but they had enough time to finish you off too." He hated telling her this, something in her demeanor, her attitude, it touched him on a level his previous salvage operations hadn't. He had found units far more badly damaged than her, and ones that were perfectly fine once powered back on. Some were distraught, some angry, some simply happy to be recovered.

Coell stared, slowly processing the information. Gone? All of them? It seemed like she should be more shocked, but she couldn't really REMEMBER much of her life. She felt new, but old and broken too. Like she just came off the assembly line, but was defective, knowing there was something wrong but just not able to really understand what. Diagnostics were running on her primary memory banks, but there wasn't much to recover, only fragments and confusing sensations. Her Creators were a concept more than a memory, but still a strong one and it felt wrong that they were gone.

She remembered how close she came to having her memory store wiped and reset, shivering again. She may not have access to the actual memories, but they still shaped her, made much of what she was. It was like living in a house your whole life, and then all the things were gone. Pictures. Personal items. It would be bad, but you would still be somewhere familiar. Know where the walls and doors were, still be comforted by the familiar place. Her frontal processors, they were wired into her memory stores too. Take them away, and she would be left confused and unable to function, familiar patterns disrupted, habits and unconscious routines broken, quickly degrading. The fine grain quantum data may be scrambled, but the structures remained, the foundations of herself. Resetting her memory would have cleared the rest of her too, erasing her as her consciousness collapsed. Leaving her mind a blank, empty shell, with no memories, no thoughts, no desires, no needs. Like... she frowned at vague memories of factory AnDragons, mindlessly toiling, only given basic skills, no personality, no self awareness, just machines. Like when her framework had enslaved her, but worse, not even able to struggle. She was very glad he had not reset her mind, not erased her.

Her thoughts drifted back to her Creators. She couldn't remember them, or her owner... her... her owners? But she knew she had been lovingly built, sold... to her new family. She was their guardian, their friend. She cared for them. They cared for her. She saw no faces, but could FEEL how badly she missed them. She wanted to help them, but they were gone, and that part of her was... broken and empty, pulling at her like a black hole, tearing at her.

That jagged hole loomed large again. The place she wanted to go for comfort, for security was now a danger, pricking her mental pawpads when she reached for it, seeking solace, receiving only pain. She closed her eyes tightly, then opened them again, taking in her surroundings. New. Unfamiliar. Her eyes tracked the outlines of the cave, abandoned equipment, spare parts, broken machines, her own body laying lifeless, limbs detached. It wasn't just her mind that had missing pieces. Her eyes swiveled back to look up at the anthro dragon in front of her, feeling very small and helpless, disconnected from her body, reprogramming ports plugged into an unknown system. Her crystalline brain exposed, connected to probes that even now explored and monitored. She was as helpless as a cybernetic creature could be, lost in an unknown future, adrift and literally powerless, her very life and soul in the hands of the dragon looming over her.

"What... are you going to do to me now?" she finally asked, nervously biting her lip.

Argos gave her nose a soft caress, leaning closer, "Lets get you put back together first, then we will see."

"Ok..." she said in a soft voice. Her built-in instincts, and her recent reprogramming told the dragoness to give him her submission. That caress on her nose, and memories of his gentle probing and repairs on her mind gave him something more, her trust.