"Hey, I never said it would be easy. Or that it was easy," Jaime said, a slight smile on his face, warmth and good humour warding off the doubt he could hear in Blue's words. "I'm just saying that it's possible that artificial life here is like artificial life in my world - it's still alive. It's capable of change, whether it's something made to do evil doing good, or something made to be good doing evil. It can work both ways, for better or for worse."

His bet was on the latter. He doubted that someone sat up one day and expressed their desire to make an artificial intelligence to be the world's new Evil Overlord. No, he thought that somewhere, someone out there probably thought that they were doing good, but no one person, no one entity was meant to rule over humanity. That went for humans, aliens, and computers alike.