As Max lay in bed the next morning with Nico's sleeping head on his chest, he carefully analyzed his mistakes, shortcomings, and every possible deficiency in his training, then determined that it was simply, mathematically impossible for her to be that good at diverting conversations and getting herself out of trouble.
She would be taking over all of the Terraforming paperwork for the next two weeks, and the excess paperwork that her little joy ride with the Envoy had generated was also tasked to her, but Max knew full well that she could complete both as a background process in her augmented mind without actually putting any conscious focus on it.
He had briefly mentioned the fact to the Valkia envoy last night when he informed them that Nico would be taking over the paperwork duties for the next few weeks, and the Alliance Legal team had seemed utterly horrified that the humans would let sensitive legal matters by handled by Artificial Intelligence as a background process, with only rudimentary oversight by an actual living person, if that's how Nico was still classified.
There was some dispute among their ranks about that. Cyborgs in the Alliance were usually partial conversions, and Nico's self-modification had already changed the genetic and organic composition of her final organic components, namely her brain and some nerves from the spinal cord, so much that the Alliance didn't officially classify her as human at all, so the thought that she might have self-evolved into a biomechanical android was one that had occurred to the legal team, and the fact that someone mentioned that brought with it a host of difficulties, as Alliance Law didn't consider Androids to be individual persons, but the property of their creators.
But if she was the property of her creator, and she turned herself from a human Cyborg into a recognized Android without outside assistance, would she be the property of herself? Would they have to recognize the System, as the Artificial Intelligence that drove the nanobots was known, as a legal life form since it assisted in her endeavour and could be considered a co-creator?
It was unprecedented in their legal history, and it had all come to a head because of an idle comment by a legal assistant when Max punished Nico by making her do the paperwork.
The Hunters thought it was absolutely hilarious. They didn't recognize post-conception genetic alterations as changes to one's species. They simply gave it an addendum, such as born human, now biomechanical.
That way, if there were a question about the difficulty or validity of a hunt, they would have a full and complete picture of what had happened since not all changes would necessarily increase or decrease difficulty ratings, and some could be deliberately misleading if you didn't know what the Hunter in question had started life as.
Making a full-grown Huntress look like a small Innu child was within their capabilities with organic engineering, but that didn't make her future hunts as difficult as they would be for an actual Innu child since she would retain Huntress's instincts and training.
The various trains of thought on the matter were already giving Max a migraine, and he was still in bed. There was an easy cure for that, though. He focused intensely on Nico's dreams and tuned out the rest of the brainwaves around him, an Illithid trick usually used to help them fall asleep in crowded spaces.
This morning she was dreaming of a battle from her past life on a planet nicknamed Venom, after its intensely toxic atmosphere, filled with naturally occurring organic toxins that closely resembled the venom of a viper.
One after another, she took joy in using the blade of her Mecha to slice open the faceplates of her enemies, a species of giant six-armed centaurs, and letting the toxic air fill their lungs before they could react and bring up a secondary forcefield.
It was gruesome, but the simple joy in her mind and the little smile on her face as she dreamed were enough to relax his mind and help the headache recede.
He couldn't put the chaos off forever, though. The lawyers needed answers.
Eventually, he mustered the energy to draft up a summary, with an attached copy of the compiled Reaver's treaties and regulations on the rights of living beings, that clearly stated that while you could lose the right to represent your species due to poor character or criminality, you never lost your status as a person, so Nico would always be considered a Reaver by Reaver law, and a Human by birth.
Then he attached the documents he had gotten from the Hunters that said basically the same thing and forwarded them to the Giants so that they could pore over it with a hundred different sets of eyes until they made their own determination and sent something back that would decide if it was a violation of Alliance law to have Nico take care of the workload, and if she would be allowed to use the AI to process it for her in the background.
How they intended to stop her if the finding was that she had to consciously process the paperwork, Max had no idea, short of having an Illithid watch over her every second of the day, but he already knew from experience that it would be a futile cause.
It was impossible to tell her conscious thoughts from her subconscious thoughts when she was actively using her System Functions. They were both just streams of thought in her head to the Illithid and to Max, though he had gotten better at telling which was which by the context.
If it was interesting, it was likely conscious, and if it randomly changed directions, it was definitely conscious. If it involved him naked, it meant that she knew he was listening in.
Max checked in on the Envoys aboard Terminus and found them in no better shape. They, too, had been harassed all day for an answer that there was no possible precedent for, and the lawyers were driving them quickly insane. Enough so that the Giant Envoy had ordered an entire gallon of Mimosa and a quiche for breakfast.
It was a good experience for them, Max thought. They wanted to come to see the humans and discover new things, well here it was, the chance to discover something totally new and write an entire section of the Alliance Legal Framework for Biomechanical Living Organisms, as the Legal Team had officially decided to declare Nico, after reviewing the Human and Hunter laws relevant to the matter.
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