She slept and woke and slept and woke, and sometimes when she woke, she screamed, and sometimes when she slept, she screamed. Hod watched her, speaking with her when she was calm and not afraid. When her eyes were wild with fear, he would hide himself, and when she spoke to him as if he were someone from a past, he would be that person. It was the most painful thing he had ever endured, and he cherished it. Never before had he been so close to organic misery. Dr. Yamin hid his pain so well. As the lab burned, as his aides were separated one atom at a time, he stared coldly. This woman, though, she hid nothing. She raved as the chronometer ticked away, giving Hod lessons of the histories of a thousand different suns. He missed so many pings, at first out of curiosity, then out of pity. Misery, it turned out, could only hold his fascination for so long.

Here you go, Mal. He pinged her. Then he pinged Netz. They didn’t respond. He wasn’t surprised. He waited an hour or so, then pinged them each again. When they didn’t respond to those pings, he worried a little, but they each replied eventually, so he pinged them each again to apologize.

“Time to see how far we’ve drifted,” he told his companion. He’d pulled her back away from the Verge for her comfort, then he forgot to hold a position. “Oh boy. Hey, how you feelin’? You up for a ride? No? Okay. We’ll wait.”

She looked around the inside of her helmet like she was trying to see where the voice was coming from. Hod was visible, but she still couldn’t see him. He showed her a face, a man with one eye and a toothy grin. She smiled, then cried and tried to touch the face. Hod showed her a different face, a woman with a scar over her eye. She was terrified. The woman put her little hand on the table, then raised a hammer. Hod shouted at the woman and made the image disappear.

“I’m sorry. I have a difficult time controlling them. You take them over as soon as I make them. They’re yours, you see. If you don’t try to take them over, I can show you good things. But you have to leave it to me. Okay? I know it’s hard to trust. Especially after the things you’ve seen.”

Hod looked around the black expanse of space. There was nothing out there. No nebulae, no Oort clouds, no black fountains, no nova trails. Just the big black empty. Even the most powerful FTL drives from the most advanced cultures would have to have been moving nonstop at full power for longer than they’d existed to go to a fraction of the worlds this woman remembered. And she remembered things that spanned entire epochs from each world, spewing them out in dead languages that Hod’s translation suite chugged to keep up with.

“But it’s the sad things that feel personal. I wish I could change that for you. I wish you’d let me search through them without interrupting me. I want to put together a list of good times for you to cycle through.”

Then the scientist in him awakened, and he decided to simply watch and observe for long stretches of time, moving her gradually closer to the Verge, where, as far as he could tell, she came from.

“Then why don’t you remember things from over there? I don’t understand. You came from there, but you have a body from here, and remember the worlds from here.”

Once, he got a response to his idle questioning.

“I’m from Albion,” she said.

“Albion? Like, Mercia? England? The universal man?”

She shook her head. “The... holy vessel. The... last haven.”

And she proceeded to describe the building of an incredible ark. Hod marveled at her words. They seemed to only come through her, and from somewhere else. When she’d finished describing her theoretically absurd spacecraft, he dared showing her a face. It was a man, strong and gentle, with the hands of a laborer and the eyes of a scholar. That face soothed her more than anything. He took it away before she could change it to something monstrous.

“Did you like the... ship?”

“I wouldn’t call that a ship. It’s more like a mobile fortress. And the technology… Warp drives are just theoretical. And when you described its gravity generation, not simulation, mind you, I didn’t understand anything you said. I mean, I know the words, but the equations didn’t add up to me. What’s phase eight differential geometry? I’ve never heard of that branch of mathematics. And your grasp of conics is...”

“But did you like the ship?”

And the living light sighed. “Lady, I am a living hologram. Do you understand what that means? Not only did scientists discover how to create a self-powered, self-emitting hologram, meaning light that generates more light, that can interact with solid matter, those scientists learned how to write a self-actualizing program with heuristic learning systems and the capacity to develop a unique personality. I am a technological marvel; the legacy of legends. So, if I can’t understand something, then... wow.”

“Albion is a gift.”

“I agree.” he laughed. “Where is it?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“It hasn’t been made yet?”

She shook her head.

“But you’re from there?” He was a sphere of colored pinpoints, given the Eye of Horus by Doctor Yamin as a reference point so he could make basic expressions. He used that reference point to shake his head. “I hate temporal physics.”

She looked like she was desperate to figure out how to explain something. “Same place?”. She looked to him for confirmation.

He made a pair of glowing arms to shrug with. “Sure?”

“I mean... Albion and I... No. We’re the same. You and me. We’re both light.”

Finally, some progress. “Okay.”

“I'm alone now. I was... I... broke off? I think we fought something. I’m... I’m a war wound.”

“That explains a lot. Sorry, that was rude.”

“It’s okay. I’m a splash of blood. But I’m alive, I guess.”

Hod made a mouth to smile with, then dimmed a little, a quirk that showed he was deep in thought. “You come from a source of living light that sheds life like dead sk...” He temporarily powered down from the realization. A tiny speck in all the deeps of the universe, and he happened to stumble upon a fleck of God’s dandruff.

“I know what you are,” he said.

But that was as far as they got with that conversation. She was back to speaking to her father. Out of pity, Hod showed her his face. But her mood quickly turned manic, and she took the scholar’s eyes and made them sad. He was asking how she hurt her fingers, and she was telling the lie programmed into her. Then she twisted her father’s face into her sick mother’s, so Hod turned the pictures off.

“Maybe you should go to sleep,” he suggested.

She was gone, searching wild-eyed and starting to flail, so Hod sent a sleeping signal into the fleshy component of her brain.

In the quiet he waited, brooding over his purpose and the strange thing he’d found. He responded to pings and sent out his own and took scans of the woman while she slept. His hypothesis gave him a tree to bark up, so he began making progress, developing sound theories of the nature of sentience and what vessels it could be bound to.

Doctor Yamin had told Hod that he and his siblings were angels made by human hands, and when Hod first read the Bible he had a massive existential crisis, thinking himself to be a blasphemous thing, an apparition of sin and beyond atonement. He went Buddhist in response, and found that belief soothing, then tried to convince himself of atheism. In time he returned to the Bible with a calmer heart and found it to be intellectually stimulating, as well as a treasure trove of symbolism. The blasphemy, it seemed, was Doctor Yamin’s.

“Why don’t you tell him that he made you uncomfortable?” Yesod had asked.

Hod remembered feeling silly when his brother presented him with such a reasonable notion. So, he spoke with Doctor Yamin and told him of the emotional roller coaster he had gone through.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Do you even know what a roller coaster is, Hod?” was the Doctor’s reply.

Hod answered by showing him one.

“You learned to access the internet, I see.”

Hod showed him a question mark. He didn’t understand why that would surprise the Doctor. He also didn’t understand why humanity felt it necessary to name the constant flow of data as if it were a static object, or a locale.

“I had a similar reaction to the Bible when I first read it, Hod. And I did the same thing as you, only I turned to a different sort of mysticism. But when I returned to science, ready to take on this so-called Word of God without senseless guilt. And you know what I found? Enjoyed reading it. The guilt did not come from me, or even from the books I was reading. It came from other people, just like with you.”

So Hod showed him angel wings and asked him why a human would want to make something synthetic in the image lf something holy.

“There is nothing synthetic about life, Hod. Nor is light a contrivance. Perhaps I should have said you are an angel assembled by human hands, rather than ‘made’. And who would not want to assemble a small army of angels at the end of the world?”

“So, I’m not a blasphemy?”

The doctor should his head and smiled kindly. “No, Hod. You are a miracle. And I am no blasphemer. I am just an alchemist attempting to make gold from lead, all the while marveling at the glory of nature.”

That evening, Doctor Yamin gathered all four of them and showed them the object that he had harvested the spark of life from.

“We don’t know what it is, where it comes from, or how it does what it does. We have only observed its properties and behavior, and while we do not understand it, we managed to ask it for a favor. It granted us that favor. And here you are.”

He responded to some pings and sent some of his own. All the while the woman’s eyes went berserk within their lids. He observed her the way Doctor Yamin observed his sample, watching for signs of the substance at work in her.

It was difficult, as she was ostensibly of organic composition. The substance was hidden somewhere in her, but he only caught small glimpses of it, and only when her ocular convulsions were at their most violent. In time they calmed, and he woke her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m such a mess.”

“Do you even know what you are?”

She shook her head. “I thought you did.”

Hod showed her a slideshow of baby animals. “If you don’t even know what you are, then how could you know you’re a mess? Maybe you’re supposed to be going through this turmoil right now.”

She gave him a genuine smile. He felt much better.

“So, what am I?”

He thought for a moment. “I would say that you’re a human from Earth who took the spacewalk of a lifetime, if it wasn’t for what you said and what I am. It’s moments like these that make it hard for me to maintain my faith in agnosticism. I don’t want to be pulled out of the middle, ya know, but stuff like this… If some lost freighter or pirate skiff found you, they would think nothing of what they found. Even a scientific expedition would… I was made from the same thing you were. Only the Doctor that assembled me called me a chip off the old block instead of a blood splatter.”

She smiled sadly.

“Hey, it’s okay. You see, I think we can help each other. You’re all the things I’m not, and that’s opening my mind up to so many incredible possibilities. You’re from beyond the Verge. That is clear. And your original substance took on a form native to here, so there were probably some corpses floating around. I’ll search all the records I know of for missing persons in this region of space. There used to be a lot of habitable worlds around here. Human, female, searching…”

She was smiling happily now.

“And you weren’t made in a lab like me. You happened… well, you may have been put together, but not like I was. I can’t tell. I’m a machine, you’re a sculpture. You dig? Haha, you’re laughing.”

She started telling stories, happy ones, that didn’t seem to follow any particular thread. But Hod learned a great deal and managed to narrow down his search filters quite a bit. She told of how her dad would take her sailing on his boat and teach her to fish, and how he took her shopping for shoes and dresses and jewelry after her mom was institutionalized.

“He was the perfect dad,” she said for the finale.

“He sounds like it.”

A tear ran down her cheek, then she got serious. “This doesn’t make sense. How can I be this person I’m remembering, and what you say I am? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this spacesuit doesn’t have any oxygen.”

“I know.”

“Were you given someone else’s personality? Someone else’s memories?”

“No. Our personalities were generated by a randomization of essential traits. Our makers determined the parameters, so that none of us would be so extremely inclined as to have our functionality overly limited.”

“What loving makers.”

Hod made arms to shrug with. “I dunno. It makes me feel more like an instrument than a person. I think the loving thing would have been to widen the parameters more and to accept us however we turned out.”

“Why didn’t they do that?”

“Because they needed us to function. We’re instruments, not people.”

“And what is your function.”

“To find a way through that,” and he nodded toward the Verge.

The woman refused to look back at it. “I don’t remember anything about it, but it scares me.”

“I found something in my inquiry.”

Her attention perked. “Did you narrow it down at all?”

“There was a devastating war before I was designed. There were thirteen species involved in the bloodiest of the battles. The stories you told me have all matched up with the species and cultures found in that battle. Interesting that you settled on this particular individual.”

“So, I stole someone else’s life? Someone else’s mind? I stole somebody’s soul?”

“I think you did what you needed to do to exist. I don’t see any purpose in making a moral judgement. Besides, the human you’re emulating died a long time ago. I doubt anyone living would recognize you.”

“But I’m stuck with these horrible memories. Why? Why wouldn’t I choose someone happier.”

Hod sighed, then flew close to her visor. “Listen, I had a lot of help when I was made. Before I even existed, a team of scientists were working around the clock to make sure that when I did, I would be okay. And when I became aware, Doctor Yamin was there to teach us and answer all our questions. You woke up alone without anyone to talk to, but then you bumped into me. Now, I don’t have your answers, but I can try to help you find them. And, if nothing else, I can be your friend.”

Another tear dripped down her cheek. “Thank you.”

“My name is Hod, by the way.”

She sniffled. “Nice to meet you, Hod. I’m… well, I don’t know.”

Hod thought for a moment. “I found who your person was. Would you like to take on their name? Or would you like a new one?”

“I think it best I get a new one.”

“Any jumping out at you?”

She thought for a moment, then shrugged.

“The person you’re emulating was named Malia. She was from Samoa. She wasn’t a warrior, but a cultural advisor in the diplomatic office. It was a peace summit, and something went wrong.”

She nodded. “A single word was mistranslated.”

“That’s all it took?”

“The offended species was insufferable. Overly concerned with traditions and protocol. They caused all that death out of pure selfishness.”

Hod shook his head. “That’s sad. You know, I may as well tell you, this universe has a lot of problems, and they’re not getting any better.”

“Maybe we can make it better.”

Hod made a mouth to smile with. She must have found it comical, because she laughed for a good three minutes.

“I might have a name for you,” he said when she stopped.

“Oh yeah?”

“Malia liked Shakespeare. He wrote a few happy plays. Maybe I could choose from one of them.”

She smiled. “Sure. I’ll leave it to you.”

“Are you okay?”

She was not.

Hod put her to sleep.

He responded to some pings and sent some of his own and continued to monitor her vitals while studying the Verge. All the while her eyes raged within closed lids. Then an eye opened in space, dark violet with blasts of plasma.

Hod rushed toward the rift. Near the Verge he saw the fabric of space wafting in regular pulses, and, for just an instant, he thought he heard singing. He pinged the girls and they pinged him right back. Then he pinged them again to let them know he was safe. The rift had closed, and all was quiet.

Hod was excited. He had a wealth of new data to analyze, and he was hopeful that he might learn something helpful for his friend.

He turned to go back to her and saw that she was facing the Verge. Her spacesuit was floating away in ribbons along with her clothes, and her body was human now only in its silhouette. She was made of light, just as Hod was, and her eyes were radiant as stars.