Gunpowder Sirens

Aptera

                                                  Hera

           HUB-16 Ara Metus Habitat, ATK Private Research Facility

"Which one is your favorite, Qai?" I ask in the Vine. My voice seeps across the virtual space, decompressing and compressing in pixelated reverberations that roll through the digital landscape, one yottabyte at a time. Aptera tries to compensate for the disturbance via real-time code restructuring. But the protocols fail to execute as expected, and everything in this virtual world only ends up echoing on itself.

Her mercurial eyes shine brighter than six moons when they shift to focus on me, each pair a pixelated imitation of its predecessor while Aptera fails miserably at resolving her six eyes into one.

"The one with the 3Ai leg," she replies, her voice as smooth as thousand-aion-old whiskey despite the programming glitches. A glint flashes in her eyes as she looks back at the women bleeding all over each other in the holographic steel cage.

"The God of War."

"She is fantastic, isn't she?"

"Indeed," she replies in the Vine. A smile goes supernova on her pale quicksilver-blue lips. The God of War is the only other person in the Helio worth the risk of doing what we're doing right now. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a pang of utter dread threading through my Core® at this very moment. Aptera is my pride and joy, and Qai the pearl jewel sitting in its virtual crown. To expose them to the universe like this is foolish at best, suicidal at worst − the shareholders will surely kill us if they ever find out. But by the Gods, all the bullshit from Mars' fattest cats is worth the stress if it brings a smile like that to Qai's face.

"Ares is quite the showman, isn't she?" I laugh in the Vine. Aptera takes my voice and replicates it into a million pieces of shattering glass floating in the air.

"Cage rings like this are such a waste of her talent," she says. "She should be in the big arenas on Ganymede fighting for real money."

"Not everyone has had an easy time readjusting after the war," I offer. Without thinking, I place a gloved hand on her naked shoulder. It's only then that Qai realizes her security filters have slipped, and that she is directly exposed to Aptera's unstable environment. Skin as pale as stardust glows beneath the spot where my fingers touch, worry flashes in her eyes for a moment. She quickly pushes the lines of glowing code back into place.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to deSkin."

My heart hurts hearing such things from her, knowing that she'd give anything in this Helio and the next to dance naked between the lines of coding without worrying about how much damage she could do to the network. But Erwin frequencies and the otherworldy laws which govern quantum entanglement can be evil at times, especially when they exist in the trans-dimensional cracks formed between the repurposed couplers of Ryswick engines spinning in series.

"It's alright, Qai. The firewalls are still in place," I try to reassure her as much as possible. Instinctively, she brushes a lock of transparent cable behind her left ear. Yes, a lock of transparent cable instead of flowing hair like that of a normal human being, for Qai is far from even being anything remotely human. She is a marvel of modern technology and human ingenuity, Life itself birthed between lines of code and governed by unmastered physics. Hard to believe that just two aions ago, she was just a scale shaken loose of the back of a leviathan that had brushed up against a trawler's phase-nets, just a collection of alien DNA caught between this dimension and the next by a network of Erwin frequencies. But as soon as I saw that leviathan scale, I knew that it could become so much more. That it would be the key to unlocking the universe. As soon as she drew her first breath, I knew that the Blockchain and DNA computing, Intersystem Data Nodes filled with Gaian processors churning yottabytes upon yottabytes, selling their bodies and their future so that the Heliosphere keeps turning...

Data is pure. Data is life.

...all the things that made humanity the rulers of the Heliosphere were suddenly as ancient as electric-powered cars. There would be no more failures in the system, no more glitches in the code. No more Martian war sloops like The Irra imploding mid-flight and killing thousands due to shitty programming.

The future is now, the future is Qai.

And one day, the shareholders will come to see Qai as more than just Șzabos filling their Cryptoledgers, more than just a modern marvel in DNA computing or the next evolutionary step in Quantum Artificial Intelligence. They'll see her as I do, as a living goddess. A siren of spacetime.

If only I can get Aptera to function correctly.

"It's so unfair," she says.

"What? Ares?"

Aptera echoes on itself again.

"Us," Qai says quietly. "Me."

"Qai," I sigh, "we've been through this before, haven't we? It's not safe out there in this dimension for you. You know that already." Who knows what such a gap-jump would do to a high-dimensional creature like her!

"And is it any safer in here?!" she pouts. Aptera rumbles in response to her sudden burst as yottabytes of information jostle about in this tiny world crafted between the coding. The roar of Holo-simulation of Ares' match vanishes instantly, replaced by the grumble of a vast rolling ocean of swirling colors and an unseeable shore far beyond the horizon, sure signs that Aptera has reset itself to the SafeMode in order to avoid a BlueScreen shut down.

Her mercurial eyes look out at the expanse of emptiness. All life is drained from her now, her smile fading, her shoulders sagging ever so slightly. And in that moment, I feel like a failure of a man for bringing her into this strange new world of mine and abandoning her to its doomed fate. What good is it to have the rarest creature in all the universe, if there's no cage to put it in?

"I'm building a better world for you, Qai. All I ask is that you be patient."

Qai doesn't pity me even a passing glance. She just continues to stare out into the nothingness from her perch on the rock formation that sits in the middle of the swirling ocean.

"I'm dying in here," she whispers to the computer-generated sea breeze.

All I can do is echo the emptiness of her soul. "I know."

:-D

Will Hera's dream to create a better world lead to the death of Qai? Who do you side with here - the creator or the created?