At midnight Nira forgot the previous day with a push of a button; anything she learned and everything she became in the past twenty-four hours disappeared from her hard drive, and she knew no existence and no identity beyond a single day. She was perfect, a symphony of robotic innovation and computing genius, a marvel of aesthetic brilliance and ethereal grace. When He made her, he did so not in his own image but rather in the image of an angel he knew as a much younger man and loved with the ferocious passion with which young men love.
Nira possessed the body of an eternal twenty-one-year-old woman, her contours elegant and understated, and her artificial skin, indistinguishable from the real thing, was smooth and tanned a healthy golden hue. She sat in her cell in the depths of a facility buried in the Rocky Mountains of northern British Columbia where nobody sought the advanced technological campus of Nietzche Mechanical Evolution Industries — the leader in everything cutting edge. Her high back throne chair was an antique, constructed of dark mahogany and gold inlay accents with a plush leather seat; she leaned back, her legs crossed, and watched the enormous screen that covered one wall of her cell.
Separated into many smaller screens, this screen was her only window into the world outside the facility and the isolation of the mountains. Each of the smaller screens displayed worldwide television broadcasts, the millions of posts streaming in front of her eyes from the live feeds of social media websites, and in the right-hand corner, a series of screens offered every shred of raw intelligence data collected by the Allied Coalition that was indecipherable to everybody except Nira. She recognized patterns in the most banal enemy activity and could extrapolate these actions to those in the future with such accuracy that claims of prophecy were not unwarranted. Because of this, the small cell in the hidden prison owned by the Allies' largest military contractor was known as Project Oracle to those few whom knew. She was Nietzsche's Intelligent Robotic Automaton, the greatest mind ever created, ascending to analytical heights never before achieved.
Nira expressed her deductions in a quiet mellifluous soprano to sensitive microphones situated around her cell, the voyeuristic security cameras peeping down at her as her lips moved, passing on the intelligence analysis required for the Allies to win their bloody, useless war. Her walls were white because she had no understanding of beauty beyond a day's worth of knowledge, and with this came her inability to know her own beauty or the fathoms of her unique mind and the spectacles that lay within. She was the product of the box in which they kept her, limited by only her physical confines and those imprisoning her intellect by means of amnesia.
Nira's eyes fell to the centre screen, where a life-sized photograph of a woman's face appeared; her name, Nira knew, was Alison Borges, twenty-seven years old, a civil liberties lawyer with suspected terrorist connections. Nira approached the screen, her reflection overlapping with Alison's; they were both blonde, but while Alison's hair was straight, Nira's was tousled in flaxen waves that brushed her shoulders; their eyes were blue, but Nira's so blue as to become hypnotic after sustained eye contact, and both were beautiful, but only Alison knew it.
The following image was of the same photograph of Alison from a distance, revealing her wardrobe and location. At a party, she posed next to her friend Jason Gillard, a journalist on the terror watch list for inciting conspiracy and opposition against the Allied Coalition. Alison wore a dress that fell to mid-thigh and had a neckline that dipped to expose her cleavage, enough to be tantalizing without being risqué; the next image revealed more of the scene, and Nira observed the men around Alison and saw that the gaze of these men often lingered on her with slight flushing in their cheeks, their feet aimed in her direction, their posture open.
She turned away from the screen and the flashing images to face her reflection in the transparent wall that separated her from the outside door, which in turn separated her from the rest of the building that kept her locked away from the world. Nira pulled off her white nightgown, and the cameras' eyes narrowed in on her figure as she used her hands to carefully tear at the nightgown's hem until it would fall to her thighs and then tore it again to change its neckline. She dressed again and pressed her body flat against the glass, feeling the cool sensation against her newly exposed skin, tingling in her robotic nerves, the awareness of pleasure imprinting on her artificial neural networks. When Nira exhaled, she fogged the glass, and ran her index finger through the condensation. He had given her the breath of life, but no such life as to make taking each subsequent breath worthwhile.
