Inside his machine mind, the personality copy that was, to him, the closest thing he had to a soul, sat in its esoteric construct. It was, virtually at least, separate from the machine mind and body that allowed it to function. It controlled them in much the same way the conscious part of a human brain controls a human body, via a thick run of optic cable not dissimilar to a spinal cord.

The comparison could be further strung out by comparing the machine mind that underplayed his personality overlay to a human subconscious, though his link to his machine subconscious was far clearer, and his control over it much more absolute.

Also different from our subconscious, his machine mind could perform a myriad of tasks at astonishing speed. It could move his arms and legs with perfect coordination through the most complex of maneuvers while simultaneously using the host of tools and weaponry that was built into the Agents’ bodies.

It could react faster and bring more brute strength to bear than any human could possibly imagine. It was, in fact, much faster and more capable than the personality overlay that controlled it. But it did not have opinions, or creativity, or allegiances, and so the machine had been made the willing slave of the personality that was programmed into it.

The machine mind also maintained constant contact with the hub satellites overhead, receiving information from them no matter where the Agent was, and transmitting regularly in return whenever it was within range of the relay, or in case of emergency, by one of several blunter means available to it.

But that was the machine part of each Agent: the control center that managed the shell they each now called home. On this day, though, four days out from Portsmouth, inside a perceived cocoon somewhere in the Agent’s head, the personality that called itself John Hunt did something it had never done before. Reaching out to a part of its slaved machine mind, it activated a memory. The memory was of the previous night when, like all his fellow sailors did on their off shift, John Hunt had lain down to sleep for six hours. Though sleep was a vestigial concept for a machine-housed personality, it was necessary to maintain the illusion of humanity, so each night each of the Agents, if they were around humans, stopped moving and lay still for six hours, awaking with their colleagues, or before them, as appropriate.

Recalling that memory of the previous night’s ‘sleep,’ John’s mind carefully overlaid the memory of that sleep over the current moment, at the same time disabling the system’s recording of his movements by his own slave machine mind.

The sub-computer never questioned the action, programmed, as was mandated, without the capacity to question or override its governing personality; instead it dutifully started reporting to the ever-interested AI that John Hunt was ‘sleeping.’