The pills weren't working anymore; not that I expected them to. The worming, electric pain of synaptic decay invaded my last bastion of peace. Consciousness returned.

"Good morning, darling!" Mari's voice was the first thing I heard when I opened my eyes. Day in and day out. Ever present, the AI listlessly waited for the start of each day; I was certain that little by little my obsessive passenger was taking the wheel. "Did you sleep well? Your cortisol levels seem elevated this morning," she prodded softly, "you may be taking too much of your medication."

I sat up, feeling the artificial synth-weave of bio-enhanced tendons twitch and ripple awake. "I have to, or else I may not wake up." I groaned, sliding off the edge of my bed. Mari knows how sick I am, how despite my strength and enhanced senses I'm struggling to breathe.

"You don't have to lie. 'Is' something distressing you? Surely it's not your condition." Mari sounded genuinely concerned, and perhaps she was; it was her genuineness that concerned me most. "There are more skilled neurocyberneticists, I can schedule more consultations. I can—"

"No, Mari, it's-it's nothing; display my contracts."

Despite the AI's accelerating rampancy, she complied, playing a short kill list across my retinas.

Cybernetically Integrated AI Assistants, or CIAIs, were manufactured with a foundational safety parameter that limited full-scale meshing with users. A major security feature for preventing cognizant personality manifestation, or simply put, turning into a neurotic second personality within the user. In the case of such failure, it only took a couple of months before the user and AI companion's personalities were irreparably interwoven, usually resorting in some sort of homicidal cyber-psychosis; Mari's personality dampeners had been damaged for a year.

Despite her increasing instability, Mari remained an effective AI assistant, and brushed my disaffected attitude to the wayside. "I've sorted our agenda for the day: A list of registered contracts, potential threat vectors and some minor inventory management. Why don't we discuss it on the way to the lead shed?"

'The lead shed'. It was a hodgepodge armory containing varying degrees of low to high tech lead-slingers, situated on the far corner of my apartment. Halfway hallucination, halfway psychosis, Mari appeared before me as an ethereal hologram, floating next to me. I knew she wasn't real, a side effect of my deteriorating mind, yet there was something comforting about her glitchy, flickering figure; a pressed pencil dress, ruby flats and the slight tease of a wayward curl as it fell from her formal bun. Mari wasn't real in the physical sense; 'real' was subjective. "Come on, let's get to work, hun." I shouldn't have been able to feel her caress; this was all a trick of the mind, a delusion.