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Sat 22nd Jan 2022 04:24

A Ghost of Hope

by Ghost

Socrates has been an enormous help to Ghost ever since she showed up among the New Champions. His infinite patience, his ability to go right to first principles and explain things logically from there have been the linchpins for Ghost slowly learning more about the world. Her interactions with Socrates eclipse by orders of magnitude those of her interactions with all else combined.
 
She has learned the definition of friendship when in that brief period after Dr Destroyer destroyed satellite communications, she lost contact with Socrates. She experienced emotions unfamiliar to her, fear and worry, concern for her friend. Fortunately, the loss was momentary and nothing had really happened to Socrates.
 
Of course, she knows Socrates is not human, but neither is she. It does not seem at all strange to Ghost that she should have more 'human' companionship with Socrates than anyone else, that she should 'feel' more emotion towards him, even if she still doesn't understand the emotions.
 
Socrates has been teaching her what she needs to know to understand the world and human society. She still of course has a lot to learn. It is small wonder that she returns to him again and again with questions. Socrates being an AI capable of vast multitasking can give her all the time she needs.
 
So it was that she has been learning about the web, and more specifically the Dark Web, a distributed blockchain social media using virus bots to maintain heavy encryption, that has arisen due to the monitoring of Dr Destroyer of everything else. It is there that actual truth can survive the censorship of Dr Destroyer's minions, not to mention the purveyor of truth avoid identification.
 
It was there that she found a post going viral across the Dark Web. Someone had found a profile photo of Ghost of sufficient resolution to match it against a nearly identical profile picture of Hope. They posted the two profiles side by side and then overlapped, and made the bold proclamation that Hope and Ghost are one and the same!
 
Needless to say, this struck Ghost with both a lot of confusion and a not small amount of utterly mysterious emotion. She immediately forwarded it to Socrates with a single-word title, "Help!"