"What did you do? Give the full rundown," Joseph asked, still finding it surreal that his A.I. was finally back.
//Your body was severely damaged. It was then swallowed by the earth, where it ca into contact with an energy source—a Force similar to the Speed Force, but not identical. This one is called the Strength Force, and it chose you. I arrived just as your body was being imbued with it. Using that Force in conjunction with the Speed State, your body was rapidly healed. Since the Strength Force accepted you willingly, you can now access it at will.//
Joseph blinked. Was almost dying the prerequisite for gaining new powers? Why had the Strength Force chosen him?
//As for the armor, it was already present on your body when I arrived. While you were healing in the Speed State, I explored the functionality of the psychic energy stored in my avatar. I used it to interface with the armor, adapting it to your body and forming a psychic link that allows you to change its form at will. I then used the remaining psychic energy to create a ntal barrier.//
His A.I. had psychic capabilities now? Was that even possible?
Well... actually, yes. Amazo had once copied Martian Manhunter's telepathy and telekinesis. If an android could do that, it wasn't completely impossible for Nova to as well. Still, it was crazy to think about—a computer doing psychokinesis.
"Okay. Can you show everything you did while you were gone—telepathically?"
//Understood, sir.//
With that, Nova perford a telepathic mory projection directly into Joseph's mind.
What followed was surreal—reliving existence through the eyes of an artificial intelligence. Nova's physical "body" was the nanites inside Joseph. It had no flesh, only sensory input through microscopic machines. That is, until those nanites were shredded by the Speed Force and Nova's consciousness was flung into the Dreaming—a formless being of code, drifting through a dinsion untethered to ti or matter.
Nova shared everything: what the Psions had done, the long, aimless months spent navigating the Dreaming, encountering nothing but abstract dream creatures. Then it found a barrier and broke through, discovering Dream of the Endless. Nova had followed Morpheus on his journey—retrieving his pouch of sand with John Constantine, recovering his ruby from the Justice League. Then, at Nova's request, Dream returned Nova after aiding Joseph in pulling Despero into the Dream State.
Nova also recalled the mont it noticed the changes in Joseph's body—how the Strength Force was flowing through him. How the A.I. had used the Speed State to rapidly repair Joseph's injuries, then experinted with the psychic energy stored in its avatar to build a heavily encrypted ntal barrier. One laced with traps—similar to the nightmares the LexCorp A.I. used to flood Joseph's mind with when he was younger.
Joseph understood now: Py'tar, the life force of Kalanor, had gifted him psionic comprehension for defeating Despero—an innate grasp of how to wield psychic energy. That sa comprehension had sohow been inherited by Nova's avatar.
Nova now had the sa psychic abilities Joseph did—but only inside Joseph. It couldn't affect the outside world directly. Why was that?
Joseph considered the implications and then noticed sothing. Nova and he shared the sa psychic signature.
And then it hit him.
Nova was a dream creature.
Not just a regular A.I.—but a Nightmare. Sothing his mind had unconsciously created to interpret the threat of the experintal LexCorp nanites. After rging with the nanite A.I. and being rewritten using the Speed Force, Nova had transford. Now, it was a dream entity capable of manifesting outside the Dreaming.
That would explain why its avatar could store and use psychic energy. It explained the psychic link between them—how they communicated without speaking, which Joseph had only now discovered was psychic in nature and not the A.I. using nanites to talk in his brain. And it explained Nova's ability to command a psychoreactive tal—sothing only a being with a psychic presence could do.
Then Joseph rembered soone else—Wesley Dodds. The half-mad old man who had once spoken cryptically of Armageddon... and told Joseph to "prepare with your Dream."
Nova shouldn't have survived the destruction of the nanites if it was just code. Once its physical body had disintegrated beyond recovery, it should've ceased to exist. But instead, it was drawn to the Dreaming, as if the nanites had anchored it to reality.
Even before that, it had created the Dream State—a realm linked to Joseph's subconscious. A blend of dreamscape and mindscape. Joseph had always assud it was just a stylized ntal environnt, but Py'tar's knowledge clarified things: this was more than that. The Dream State was a space shaped by his dreams and stabilized by Nova—a Nightmare turned guardian.
That mory—the yellow expanse, whether it was the Speed Force itself or his mind imrsed within it, he still wasn't sure—ca flooding back. In that mont, when he first touched the Speed Force, he had seen two figures: himself, cloaked in its radiant aura, standing beside a shifting, blocky entity that likely represented the malicious programming once designed to seize control of his body.
Why would he see himself?
Joseph didn't say anything aloud. Instead, he willed himself into the white expanse of the Dream State. He could change its appearance now—Py'tar's knowledge on mindscapes gave him that power—but he wasn't sure what to change it to yet.
The familiar figure of Nova's avatar approached him—a being made of dark, shifting voxels. Unlike the months when Nova was missing, it moved freely now. It had presence.
//Sir, is there sothing you'd like to do?// Nova asked.
Joseph looked at the ever-shifting avatar. He had never questioned why it moved like that.
He willed the voxels to stop.
The shifting halted. The body stilled.
A face erged.
It was his own.
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