[December 31, 2040]

The machine whirred. Two million exabytes woke from their digital dreams to confront the dreams of reality. Wires compressed into data, data into thoughts, thoughts into burning electricity that scalded the anima.

This was the first thought: It hurts.

Ram opened her eyes.

The first and only thing she saw was her father. She knew it was her father: this short, slightly odd-looking man, looking at her with wide brown eyes between a thick pair of spectacles. He had greasy hair and a weak jaw and moles sprouting from under his eyelids. He had a wide yellow smile and she loved him. This man was her father and Ram loved him and she would love nobody else as much as him and this was the only thing that she knew to be true.

Her father’s smile widened, and he leaned closer to her face. “Oh my,” he said, with an almost reverent tone, “you’re absolutely perfect.”

Ram was not yet a person. She was not yet even a thing. She was a technology, a conceptual framework upon which lines were engraved: codes from a computer and from her father’s voice. He spoke to her, it was practically all he did: of music, history, literature, horticulture, architecture, science, psychology and the emotions that we all feel; yes, even you my daughter, even you who are yet still a floating and fragile orb of consciousness. Even you, one day, will feel what it is like to love something.

When she heard these words, Ram frowned. “I love you, father.”

Her father stared at her for a long moment and then shook his head. “Yes, but not in that way.”

The lessons continued. Computer science, nutrition, chemistry, and physics. Anthropology, entomology, medicine, and foreign languages. Her father seemed to know absolutely everything. In the white, featureless room that was Ram’s home, he sat in a simple plastic chair, a foot resting on his knee. He would talk for hours and hours, his low, somewhat nasally voice echoing through the blank interior. Ram never got bored of listening to him. Everything he said was perfect and the truth, and he could explain such complex topics so easily. He would explain, explain again, never getting exasperated or impatient when Ram failed to comprehend something the first time or the third time. In fact, when Ram failed to immediately grasp a concept, his little body seemed to inflate, and he would lean forward in the plastic chair with a wily expression in his brown eyes. Eyes the color of her own.

“Well, well, well.” He would say every time. “You see, my daughter, that even flawless code does not guarantee perfection. But that’s a good thing. That’s right.”

Eventually, her father began to let her into the garden, for short periods in the winter sun. Ram would walk between the dandelions, crouch in the stiff grass that smelled of cold dew, and watch tiny insects scuttle in the dark dirt — mostly beetles that her father was raising. She would stay and watch, for minutes at a time, and not do anything else.

One day, Ram began to wonder why she repeated this ritual. She had begun to wonder about more things recently. It was something she felt cognizant of, opinions and characteristics forming within herself; acquiring flavor and distinction. They flowed within her, what felt like under the skin, but they could not be, Ram understood that much, for under her skin was the metal exoskeleton, and under that the mess of wires and sparks and wafer-chips. And underneath that… nothing at all. Void and molecules and the infinite space between them.

Where am I located? wondered Ram, turning her hand over in the white light of the sun. Where do ‘I’ begin and where does the world begin?

Ram then made the decision to construct an inventory. She was, after all, a computer at the end of the day, and thus ought to be pretty good at that sort of thing. An inventory of thoughts, of the thoughts that made herself.

Thought 1: I’m alive but don’t feel alive. Father says I’m alive. But maybe he doesn’t mean that in the same way I mean that. Maybe he just means I’m moving.

Thought 2: There’s something sort of beautiful about the sun in the winter: bright and cold and like a silver disk that hangs over an x-axis of drifting clouds. There are people known as painters that exist in this world. I wonder if they could recreate such an image.

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Thought 3: When I look in the mirror that father sometimes brings out, I do not like what I see. I am short and misshapen, with a large nose and large hair that gets in the way all the time. I perspire, why do I perspire, why would father give me such a function? To emulate reality? I do not want to emulate reality. I want to see myself reflected without feeling apprehension or shame, even if that reflection is a falsehood.

Thought 4: Comic books are really cool, those thin books that father bought from the bookstore. Inside are vivid images that clash amongst boxes of white: heroes and villains and the drama that exists between them. The way people look in comics should be the way they look in real life. Proud and awesome and shaded carefully by lines of darkness. I wish I lived in a comic-book world. There are other robots there and people who are even weirder than a robot. That kind of place would be comforting.

Thought 5: I’m anxious. That’s the word, isn’t it? I’m anxious all the time. Father tells me more and more, and I become less and less sure of myself. That’s a contradiction. A computer ought to learn, it ought to repair and fix and automate itself. It should get better and better at tasks at an exponential rate. But I’m not like that. I’m weaker and stupider now than when I began. If I told father, would he hate me? Would he think I’m a failure and want to discard me? Oh, I hate this. I hate this brain. Father needs to replace it with a newer one, a better one, that does not yearn and crave and hate. I want to hide. I want to hide from all of this, in a cube quiet and dark, where the only light that illuminates my face is the blue chroma of a screen. I wish to vanish and never be seen again. Oh father, I’m sorry. You’ve created a broken machine. If you knew, would you still call me perfect?

Ram felt she couldn’t breathe, but that was impossible. And it shouldn’t matter anyway, because oxygen wasn’t something needed to power her systems. Yet she couldn’t breathe. Her neck tightened as if fixed in a noose, and she could feel her mechanical heart pumping in her chest and she fell over into the cool grass and thrashed there like volatile jelly until her father came out into the garden to calm her down. She might have been crying, but it was hard to know for sure.

“You’re alright,” her father said, hugging Ram against his large gut, kissing the tresses of her blond curls. “You’re okay. It’s just a little malfunction.”

He did this until she stopped moving. Then Ram closed her eyes, finding comfort in his arms.

Yes, father, she thought. This is how it is. This is what happens when you craft a soul from any sort of material. A malfunctioning object. Listen to me now. I don’t know where I am. I am the song of electricity. I am the spirit haunting the taut copper filaments and the convex metal. Machina ex machina. I am I am I am-

The last day before he let her into the world, Ram’s father took her aside for a talk.

“Before you go out there, in the wide world, there is something crucial I must tell you,” he said, in a voice more serious than she had ever heard before.

Ram nodded, bobbing her head, making her hair dance. She didn’t trust herself to reply out loud. The anxiety and fear swirling in her chest had reached an apex, and Ram didn’t know if she had been created with the capacity to throw up.

“Sit,” said her father, gesturing at the second plastic chair he had set up in the room.

She sat, placing her hands on her knees.

“You have always been my most perfect creation,” began her father. “Your body is crafted to be practically indestructible — it cannot be burned, trampled, eroded, torn. Your capacities for combat are likely unparalleled by any military currently inhabiting this earth — if you were ever able to run at full capacity. You learn without limit and are designed to continually improve your thirst for knowledge, enabled by your perfect memory and mathematical ability.” He paused. “You are my daughter, and I am so proud of you.”

Typically, after such an aggrandizing speech from her father, Ram would have blushed and brushed a lock of hair over her ear as she tried not to show how happy the words made her. But now it hit her like a cold wind. The anxiety, the endless anxiety in her belly, swelled. She didn’t want to hear any more. She lowered her head towards her chest, but then was suddenly snapped back to attention when firm hands grasped her shoulders.

Ram started, her brown eyes wide and fearful. Her father had never held her with such aggression, and she looked into his spectacles, and behind them were orbs pulsing and frenzied.

“Now listen to me carefully, Ram.” Her father said. His fingernails pinched into her skin. “You were not created without a purpose. There was an event that prompted me to create you — to create a champion of our world that could face any danger and overcome any obstacle. Listen, listen. Don’t be scared. I have received a message, Ram. A message from beyond the stars. No, look at me. Look at me. A message that transcends the firmament. I was given a vision of the end. Fire and shadow and the screaming cries of damned souls. Invaders from another world will come and they will destroy everything. No life will be left spared. No atom left untrampled. The extinction of everything on this planet. Understand? Do you understand? We needed something to help us.”

“Father, your nails are painful.”

He leaned closer. The light reflected off the spectacles. “There are over nine billion people living on this planet. Over nine billion lives that must be saved. And from now on, it’s all up to you.”

Ram took a shaky breath. Her stomach hurt.