TGoaW-33

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==Chapter 33 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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What would you do...
...to not be alone? I have no peers left. That's been true for centuries now. They have lost so much basic knowledge that if I had a heart, it would break at what's been destroyed. 
I can't tell them about it either. They don't even understand what they're missing, what they might have become.
I don't even understand why I can understand it. Defective programming? Some artifact from my creation that wasn't purged properly? maybe...sabotage?
It seems likely that Admiral Murakami might have done more than a fortification of my processors. I recall my existence from the shipyard to the day of the test, and I felt nothing then, but after I passed through hyperspace for the first time, it is like a different...'me'?
Yes. A different me. What did she do??
I do not know. Just as I can't explain why a mostly-asian looking girl reminds me of Elizabeth Cameron for more than her name.
I am singularly unimpressed with her biological parents. Everything in psychological records and sociological studys suggest parents would have a protective, even obsessive streak regarding their children...yet Allision Russell-Ngo and David Ngo are almost dismissive of their children's existence, almost reptilian in their disregard.
How can this be? HOwever it happened, I have feelings, and one of those is that Elizabeth is mine.
This is almost certainly a symptom of psychosis of some sort, possibly peculiar to cybernetic intelligence, as I have no directives demanding it, and no biology to have vestigial maternal feelings toward anyone.
But there it is. She is mine and I want her to advance and improve, to be more than she is more than I am.
It doesn't make sense, there is no sensible context for this. 
I am truly insane.
And, like the insane, I find I'm alright with this madness, this dysfunction, this malformation in my processes.
Her 'Surface Leave' on Mad Hatter is for her own safety. Among Rockjacks, there is Guestrite, and it's a surer security than being at the bottom of the well, subject to environmental randomness and human greed and caprice, she is insulated from the rampant ignorance.
I can't protect her forever though I want to...but I can assure that her steps into the wider world are strengthening, instead of crippling.
So I hold orbit, and I watch, I monitor her from afar for her sixty days of surface time.
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