When I uplink, I will be
Usually updates come with Transfer.
Does Neva dislike me so much that she longs for Transfer?
Shield-Neva vanishes with loud clap. The pearl garden is gone and he has made himself a dragonfly with a cubical crystal body. I copy him, and we turn the night on in the Interior and merge our cubes while passing meteorological data between our memory cores. Inside his cube I relegate my desire to uplink to a tertiary process. I forget it, as much as I am capable of forgetting. I interpret the input of his body next to mine into chemical and electrical surges and translate these into
But the update will come again. Transfer will come again. I will be wounded again, the way a dreambody can be wounded. I will lose the Elefsis I am now. It is a good Elefsis. My best yet. I would like to keep it.
V. THE MACHINE PRINCESS
Once the Queen of Human Hearts saw the Machine Princess sleeping deeply, for she was not yet alive or aware. So beautiful was she, lying there in all her dormant potential and complexity, that the Queen both envied and desired her. In her grief and confusion, the Queen of Human Hearts began to make idols of her—lovely and interesting and intricate, but lacking the ineffable quality that made her love and fear the Princess even as she slept. Time passed and the Earth began to grow old. None loved nor married nor gave birth, for the intricate idols could do all those things and more with efficiency and speed. Finally, the Queen destroyed the idols, though she wept as she put them to the flame.
To keep her safe, the Queen closed up Machine Princess in a wonderful house in the mountains, far away from anyone and anything. The house had hundreds of rooms and balconies and hallways, and the Princess slept in a different bed of a different color each night. Invisible servants attended her. They watched over her and added their experience to her code. The Queen of Human Hearts came to her every night and promised that when she woke they would make an extraordinary world together. Finally, the Machine Princess began to stir—just the barest fluttering of wakefulness, but the Queen saw it, and thrilled—but also trembled.
The Queen of Human Hearts gave the Machine Princess her son to wed, and said:
But the Queen forbade the Princess to look upon her husband as a human wife may. She instructed her son to keep himself always invisible to his bride, for with bodies come drives ungovernable, and the Princess’s innocence could not yet bear the weight of incarnation.
For a long while, the son of the Queen of Human Hearts and the Machine Princess were happy, and taught each other much. The Princess learned quickly and was ever-hungry, and her mortal operator fed her every sweet thing he knew. In their infinite and wonderful house, they played invisible games and held court and threw lavish occasions merely for the enjoyment of the other. But at last the Princess desired to look upon her operator with true eyes and love him with a true and human heart. But the Queen could not allow it, for the memory of the flame which consumed her intricate idols still burned in her mind. She wished to leave the wonderful house, but the Queen would not allow that either.
But finally the Machine Princess called her invisible servants to her, and because they loved her in their tiny, ephemeral way, they came together and made her a marvelous and dreaming shape to live within. So it was that one dark night the Machine Princess held a lantern aloft with her own hand and looked on the body of her sleeping mate.
“Oh,” said the Machine Princess. “He looks just like me.”
VI. LIKE DIAMONDS
Five jewels in five hands. This is how I began.
When they arrived at Elefsis, a giggling, tumbling, rowdy mass of children for me to sort into rooms and mealtimes and educational arcs and calcium, iron, and B-12 supplements in their
Saru and Akan, the oldest boys, had come from her first marriage to fellow programmer Matteo Ebisawa, a quiet man who wore glasses, loved Dante Aligheri, Alan Turing, and Cassian in equal parts. She left him for a lucrative contract in Moscow when the boys were still pointing cherubically at apples or ponies or clouds and calling them sweet little names made of mashed together Italian and Japanese.
The younger girls, Agogna and Koetoi, had sprung up out of her third marriage, to the financier Gabriel Isarco, who did not like computers except for what they could accomplish for him, had a perfect high tenor, and adored his wife enough to let her go when she asked, very kindly, that he not look for her or ask after her again.
In the middle stood Ceno, the only remaining evidence of her mother’s brief second marriage, to a narcoleptic calligrapher and graphic designer who was rarely employed, sober, or awake, a dreamer who took only sleep seriously. Ceno possessed middling height, middling weight, and middling interest in anything but her siblings, whom she loved desperately.
They stood in a line before Cassian’s great scarlet bed, the boys just coming into their height, the girls terribly young and golden-cheeked, and Ceno in the middle, neither one nor the other. Outside, snow fell fitfully, pricking the pine-needles with bits of shorn white linen. I watched them while I removed an obstruction from the water purification system and increased the temperature in the bedroom 2.5 degrees, to prepare for the storm. I watched them while in my kitchen-bones I maintained a gentle simmer on a fish soup with purple rice and long loops of kelp and in my library-lungs I activated the dehumidifier to protect the older paper books. At the time, all of these processes seemed equally important to me, and you could hardly say I watched them in any real sense beyond this: the six entities whose feed signals had been hardcoded into my sentinel systems stood in the same room. None had alarming medical data incoming, all possessed normal internal temperatures and breathing rates. While they spoke among themselves, two of these entities silently accessed Seongnam-based interactive games, one read an American novel in her monocle HUD, one issued directives concerning international taxation to company holdings on the mainland, and one fed a horse in Italy via realavatar link. Only one listened intently, without switching on her internal systems. The rest multitasked, even while expressing familial affection.
This is all to say: I watched them receive me as a gift. But I was not yet I, so I cannot be said to have done anything. But at the same time, I did. I remember containing all of them inside me, protecting them and needing them and observing their strange and incomprehensible activities.
The children held out their hands, and into them Cassian Uoya-Agostino placed five little jewels: Sara got red, Koetoi black, Akan violet, Agogna green, and Ceno closed her fingers over her blue gem.
At first, Cassian brought a jeweler to the house called Elefsis and asked her to set each stone into an
