Before she’d gotten her autonomy key, Paladin couldn’t prioritize her own needs over Eliasz’ requests; she could queue them up a fraction of a second behind, but they were always behind. Now, she could put her own concerns first. And there was something more important than love that she needed to investigate. It would take less than a second to verify. Using software she had installed in her own mind, the bot generated a new key to encrypt her memories. For the first time in her life, the process worked. Her memories were locked down, and the key that the Federation held in escrow would be
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