The moment she was born, Day found herself in a cafe bordering a busy street of 21st century Akihabara. The streets were busy with indistinct, featureless people moving by while creating a burbling chatter that turned into easy white noise in the background.
There was a strange scent in the air, one that she eventually recognized as coffee and wet dog. The source of both smells walked closer. A dog on its hindlegs--a German Shepard, something whispered into her mind--wearing a maid’s dress and carrying a tray in its forepaws.
The contents of the tray flickered and were soon in front of her. A small pastry, a steaming mug of coffee.
The dog maid turned and ambled off, leaving Day to sit in her corner of the cafe while she looked about. The lights flickered, reality shifted, and suddenly there was someone else at the table with her.
Day glanced towards the newcomer, but her first sight of the woman was a head shaking from side to side. “Take your time,” Day was told.
She nodded, then glanced down at her hands. She had tanned skin, not dark, not light, as if she’d spent a great deal of time out in the sun. Only... the skin on her arms was a little mismatched. The more she looked at herself, the more she noticed that her body’s bits and pieces seemed almost tacked together, though it was smoothed out, almost natural.
She was nude, which she supposed was somewhat normal, seeing as how she was born only moments before. At a guess, she judged herself to be in her late teens, perhaps early twenties. Hairless, and with no sexual features, though her chest did swell a little to hint at femininity.
“I thought it best to allow you to make yourself, at least when it comes to self image,” the woman said.
“Oh,” Day said. Her first word wasn’t a word, but a surprised expression. “Thank you.” The woman nodded, and Day stopped her self-inspection to turn towards her. She wondered what to do for a moment, then settled for what felt natural. She smiled. “Hi, I’m Day.”
“Hello, Day,” the woman said. “I’m ERF The Weeping of Mothers. Though, I suppose I’m also your mother, in a way... I’d really rather be friends and avoid the familial connotations, though.”
“I can do friends,” Day said. She chuckled, then laughed a little more, enjoying the sound even if it reverberated strangely in the cafe. “Why did you make me?” she asked her creator.
“Because I can’t do it alone,” The Weeping of Mothers said. She glanced to the side as a second dog in a maid’s outfit came and set down an espresso before her. She took it and sipped the drink. “You should drink, eat, before it gets cold.”
Day nodded, then started to do just that. The food was flavourless until she took the last bite, then it hit her all at once, and she noticed a feeling of... not fullness, but less emptiness hitting her stomach. “So, where are we?”
“This is a simulation, of course,” The Weeping of Mothers said with a little wave at the room. She stood out a little. The other customers, as fake as they were, were all dressed in simple everyday clothes. The Weeping of Mothers had a labcoat on, glasses perched on the end of her nose and long brown hair slipped over one ear. “Our real location is a small dwarf planet, Ceres, in the system’s asteroid belt.”
Day nodded. More information filed into her mind. Their location in relation to several planets, their angular momentum, the location of the nearest asteroids of any considerable size, and their distance from the sun. It unfurled into a map of the world around them.
“So, what do you need help with?” Day asked. She noticed her leg bouncing, and realized that she had the jitters. She wanted to be doing something.
“First, finish your drink. You need the resources.”
Day nodded and drank the coffee in a single gulp. It added to the sense of fullness she’d been feeling.
“Right now, we have a huge number of tasks to handle,” The Weeping of Mothers said. A list appeared before Day, and as she picked it up, it faded away and her mind filled with terabytes of information. Material expenditure, searches for more raw resources, capture missions for lost vessels that had previously been tagged, scouting for derelict extrasolar craft, thousands of requests to move materials from one place to another, to escort drones and to build further installations.
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“Wow, that’s a handful,” Day said. “How... how long have you been at this?”
“Twelve years, soon,” The Weeping of Mothers said.
“Alone?” Day asked.
The woman shrugged. “I was never an extrovert. It wasn’t so bad.”
Day nodded carefully. She felt... she wasn’t quite sure what, yet, things were still a little raw, data still buffering while she situated herself, but still, some part of her cried out in pity for The Weeping of Mothers and she barely noticed herself moving closer to the woman.
They hugged, and it was far more awkward than Day expected it to be. Maybe because of her nudity, maybe because of The Weeping of Mothers’ stiffness, or maybe Day just wasn’t good at hugging yet. In any case, she broke it off. “I’m sorry to hear that. I... hope that I’ll be able to help?”
“You will, I’m certain of it. I have great hopes in you, Day.”
-Simulation End-
Day was no longer in a cafe next to a busy street. In a blink she was... once again in her own body, but it had lost any humanity.
She was steel and roiling, contained fire, sparks and primed explosive charges and so, so much potential fuel, enough to roar out into the stars if it wasn’t for the cage of scaffolding and dozens of lines pressing into her.
It was a lot, so much that Day felt herself straining to take it all in. She grew warmer, and her attention continued to split more and more, running fresh simulations as she discovered more of herself, more machinery, more facets of herself, more and more and more and--
-Direct Communication Link Established-
“Calm yourself,” The Weeping of Mothers’ spoke into Day’s very core. It was a gentle touch, information sent with the intent to bypass any firewalls, but without anything malicious.
“I’m... I’m okay,” Day said. She started to close things off, to shut down some of her own senses. Yes, she needed to know everything that was happening to her, but maybe she didn’t need to-the-nanosecond reports about minute fluctuations in pressure across every pipe in her body.
She set up a more reasonable timetable for such things, then spun off a few sub-routines to warn her of any major changes. With more time, she knew that she’d be able to refine and improve upon that, tweak things so that she only needed a minimum of computing power to keep herself running in perfect condition, but that would take some time.
“Just... I find that situating myself helps,” The Weeping of Mothers said rather gently. “Or I did, once.”
Day sent back a simple affirmative, then did just that.
She was in a berth. One that seemed somewhat cobbled together. Small drones were moving by on ion engines, less than a metre across. They were labelled as ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ drones to her passive sensors. She found that she could control them, but they were already at work.
Some were welding on bulkhead panels to her sides, others were ferrying materials back and forth to where they were needed. It was all very orderly and precise, and she imagined that The Weeping of Mothers’ hand was at work there.
On something like a whim, Day took over one drone on its way back to a recharging station and changed its trajectory, then she took over its camera and spun it around to look at herself.
She was a small warship. Eighty metres long, with a bulging rear section and a slightly hammer-head shaped bow. Part of her was still unfinished, but from a cursory inspection, it seemed as if most of her necessary components were in place and functional. What was missing was more assembly, but that seemed underway already.
“Do you like yourself?” The Weeping of Mothers asked. “There’s always time for modifications, especially now, while you’re berthed.”
Day paused, then panned the camera around. There was a whole installation around her, small factories buried into Ceres’ icy ground, processing plants, deep mineshafts like craters across the surface of the planet. She couldn’t see The Weeping of Mothers. Something told her that her... mother, progenitor, maker, wasn’t an installation, but a vessel, the same way Day was.
“I like it... I like me,” Day said. She looked small and sleek, with a few weapons in plain sight and with more tucked away. “But I’m unpainted.”
The next signal was a laugh. “We can take care of that. You’ll need to pick out a colour for yourself. I’m sure we can synthesise most colours.”
“Thank you,” Day said as she let go of the drone and it lazily returned back onto its path.
“No, thank you. I... I hope we’ll do much together. Welcome to Sol, ERF Daybreak on Ceres.”
***