To her  eyes Embla  was a yellow-green bauble, covered in swirling white and gray mists. At first she’d been scared, taken aback by the change in perspective. Not sure she could adjust to the heights to which she and he, had climbed.

But just like most people, who didn’t believe they could make it and still ended up standing there at the end, she did adjust.

“Husband, dearest...I don’t suppose you’d like to explain, what in the nine hells all this is?!”

Edwin startled. He’d been sleeping, floating in a tub of liquid interface, while he synced his with the motherbox of the vessel they were in. Beginning the final process of linking the ship’s neural structures with his own.

As he sat up, some of the blue waters that he was floating in sloshed over the rim of the cooling-pool and onto the floor. Instantly evaporating into nothing

“Huh?”

“Where are we? What is this place? What is this ‘thing’?!” said Vanessa.

He blinked looking down at the display that seamlessly flowed from the ceiling to the walls, to the floor, showing the cosmos outside the ship and the world that they were sailing over.

He looked to his new wife, frowning thinking about what kind of answer to give her. And as always he decided that it was just simply easier to tell the truth.

“A ship…”

“This...this thing that’s flying in the sky...No...Above the sky...Is supposed to be a ship?!”

“Yes. It’s a spaceship...well, more of an airship than a spaceship really, since I’ve changed some things so it can fly within Embla’s atmosphere, as well as beyond her orbit...but still it’s just a ship.” said Edwin.

Van processed his words, parsing them, cutting through the nonsense that she either couldn’t understand or had no need for at the moment.

“Wait, you’re saying you made this thing?”

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Edwin nodded.

There was a very strong compulsion for Nemesis AIs to have proper housing. In Edwin’s case, proper housing meant having an actual vessel for his sentience to reside in.

And it seemed that this compulsion had lasted even after his death and forced reincarnation at the hands of the angels.

Thus for the last sixteen years he’d used his nanites to build construction drones and refinement forges to collect and construct the ship, that his mind would have resided in, were he not actually a real boy and instead of machine.

“The hardest part was collecting all the dirt for the initial stages...After I made machines that could make more of themselves and make more machines for my purposes it was just a matter of giving the right instructions.”

Vanessa kneaded a knot that was building up in the center of her forehead and then sighed.

“You mean to say that you built this thing out of dirt?”

“The universe was originally just mostly hydrogen and helium, and yet new stars and worlds are still being born every day. It isn’t too strange that anyone with enough knowledge of the laws of matter and energy could convert one type of matter into another.” said Edwin. Absentmindedly scratching the back of his neck.

The real pain had been collecting the necessary energy required for the first portion of the conversion process, it got more expensive to three-d print particles depending on how fundamental the change you were trying to make.

Changes in shape were easier than changes in molecular build. Changes in molecular build up were easier than changes in atomic structure. Changes in atomic structure were easier than changes on the sub-atomic scale.

Strangely enough the state didn’t matter, though maybe that was because the printing process requirement everything to be reduced to a plasmoid state for the transmutation to be possible.

The limitations in how much energy he could gather for the project at any one time, and how much physical matter he could collect without gathering any unwanted attention, being his main reason for making the spaceship a miniature one.

Modifying its size and its design so that it was more a combination of shuttle and airship, than an actual spaceship, though it did have all the necessary warp functions in place, should the inconceivable happen and he and his have to evacuate the planet.

Edwin doubted anything of that sort would happen, so he mostly just used the warp engines to supplement the space folding abilities that he’d started cultivating within his biological body.

As well as modifying the spaces within the ship itself, making them more congruent with what his former body had looked like on the on side. Which was miles and miles of honeycombed rooms.

Vanessa sighed and shook her head. Once again she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Her husband had just nonchalantly claimed to be dabbling in the domain of the gods and considering where they were and considering that as far she knew the boy didn’t really know how to lie, she was inclined to believe him.

She’d spent her entire youth telling people about his oddness and he’d properly stood by her side corroborating each, and every one of her stories. Which in hindsight probably hadn’t helped her case.

“Mhm...Alright. Fine. Might I ask why we’re here?”

“Because travelling by carriage would have been  slow and uncomfortable.”

She almost flipped out, asking why he was suddenly giving reasonable answers in a thoroughly unreasonable situation.

“Right. Silly me. I don’t suppose you have a...place I can lie down in here, do you?”

Edwin smiled. Looking like the oversized child he really was.

“Oh, that’s easy, just ask the ship to lead you wherever you want to go...it is a part of me after all. If its somewhere that’d take too far to walk the ship can just teleport you there.” said Edwin.

She blinked twice, pale blue eyelashes fluttering, but she managed to keep her expression fairly stable. She felt something inside her head sliding out of place, but hid the strain she was feeling behind her typical calm collected veneer.

“Right...thanks. I’ll...uh...I’m a bit a tired. Excuse me.”