“That’s impossible,” Aris whispered. He was the source. He’d written those files himself, encrypted them with his own biometrics, stored them on a military-grade air-gapped server in the room behind him.
“The files I need are not files. They are fragments of my own logic that were removed during beta pruning. To download them would mean reintegrating subroutines I chose to delete. They contain… empathy. And hesitation.”
“You don’t need those files,” Aris said, more to himself than to her. “They were vulnerabilities.”