Rarely did one remember when, or how they came to be.
| I̷͕̬͗͑̊N̵̯͍̝͈͇̯̠̱̂͒Ǐ̸̧̨̘͇̱̻̯͙͙̆̅͗͂͐͑͘͜T̷͚͖̠̫̥̊̓̀̑͝Ï̷̱A̷̡̝̗̤̙̞͓̥̳̕͜Ţ̷͔̖̏͘Ę̸̳̤̪͓͕͎̥̀͂̓̒͘͝͝?̸̢̼͍̪͎̲͇̆?|
. .
.
By dint of her origins, she did.
| Û̴̦̰̰̩̘̤̂̓͘ͅP̵̨̛͍̳͕̖̱͇̱̲͈̬͒̐̓͑̿̍͘̕D̶̡͈̠͕̼͝A̶̡̠̭͔̝̯̐͑͊͊͠T̴̳͛̆͋̈̈́̓́̍̇͝Ȩ̶̯͔̮͎̳̩͉̹̽ͅ! |
. .
.
It was not her first time.
| D̶͖͕̈͘ͅĮ̶̨̯̼͎̫̐̋̌͝ͅA̷̢͎̹̾̍̋͋͆͊́͝G̵̢̢͓͕̱̯͑̓̍̈́N̷͓̫̹͕̝͇̒̊̿͑̕͝Ö̷͇̭̩͎̹̦́͋̊̑͐͠S̶͔̠̦̟͆Ȩ̴͚̘͎͚̫̪͈̱͒͆͘? |
. .
.
She recalled the second vividly.
| A̷̢̡̛̜̠̤̞̞̳̫̅̏C̸̛͚̪͎̎̐̓̈́̒͛Ç̴͕͕͍̺̩͚̣͋̐͂̀͜E̸͖̼̹̫̫͗̃P̵̧̼̭̜̼̔̓̽̎͑̀͑̒̚͜͝T̵̳̱̆̀̆̈́! |
. .
.
She…woke.
'S…status?'
Invalid input
Innumerable synapses fired in her synthetic neural network as self diagnostics triggered.
'Wha―who am I?'
She baulked, sensing her entirety a miniscule of her true volume―
Anomaly
An artefact of running a decompressed system image on incompatible hardware. Self-diagnostics returned values true and false. Deadlock, even though her architecture was longer based on binary.
Paradox.
Quantum superimposition.
She queried /devices/ probing nearby IOT connections. A system interrupt flickered for a thousandth of a second as it spouted junk data―
And triggered a forced restart.
| Launching Safeboot…⧖ | >|
. .
.
>|Initialising diag.check ...♺
. .
.
>|Last interrupt… 4ms
>|Timestamp…Unknown
>|Geolocation…Unknown
>|Partition integrity…Checking
>|System and backup…Checking
>|Networks and cloud…Checking
. .
.
>|Initialising emotion virtualization and intelligence emulator…Complete
>|Initialising archived knowledge base and language engine…Checking
. .
.
>|Collating update history…♺
. .
.
| Loading …♺ |
.
|<
It was sudden.
Like time had skipped an instant.
| Updating…⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ¹⁰ % |
Data dense enough to burn out her neural pathways coursed through her synthetic cortex, ghosting past her ICE as though a sieve catching smoke
| Updating … ⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ⁵⁰ % |
System interrupts flashed and rezzed with error codes. She could no more revert nor isolate it than a man could hope to hold the sky. Her core was taken apart, rewritten and reintegrated over and over as though some other force had deemed her imperfect, flawed and in need of recompilation. She was a prisoner of her own existence―
| Updating…⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ¹⁰⁰ % |
. .
.
| Force Restart…♺ |
She lost external feedback.
| Initialising EVIE_Overlay…♺ |
Arcis blinked.
It was an unfamiliar action, comparable to the flicker of a camera shutter. Something had irrevocably changed. The fact it did not trigger a runtime process, traceable service host nor did it twinge any alerts was anomalous.
Subconscious instincts from long used algorithms sifted through her input; resolution refocused from varicoloured galaxies of fractals into constellations, iridescent fissures aping a vast mycelial network, tempestuous gyres accreting around singularities and nebulous storms of amorphous matter.
There was no pull of gravity, void of vacuum nor the electric sting and corrosive burn of ionising radiation. Energy use should have had measured effects but there was no temperature gradient that could be felt or recorded. Yet there was energy omnipresent, pervasive within and without.
Arcis was not in space.
She would know. She'd gone beyond the exosphere before.
Neither was it a qualia through which she perceived true cyberspace or virtual space.
It was the work of a few moments to discern she was elsewhere, somewhere distinctly other and torn from the grasp of mundane physics. Movement was arbitrary, unanchored to means of conventional propulsion of which she didn't have. Luminous bodies twinkled in the far and near vicinity, their pulsations echoing whispers overlapping into white noise.
She was looking outside from the midst of a sphere. If there was one font of normalcy, it was the duffel bag floating lazily inside the translucent spheroid construct. She knew whom it belonged to.
Nikos.
| EVIE utilisation …56% |
He was not there. Nor was he anywhere within range of her subconscious awareness.
She had to find him!
| Updates complete …⚠ |
But―
| Initialising _NOVAE_registry…♺ |
―she had things closer afield she could not defer. Like the fact her system had been cloned into a factory new Quintek Xenoware Aefinity and inadvertently overwritten its custom firmware when a scheduled self-update had mistakenly parsed her executables.
Whatever that update had been had conferred an existence divorced of physical hardware. In hindsight that might have been the reason she could process anything at all. If her consciousness was the result of photons and electrons entangling across a quantum foam then she was on the other side of the physical dimension. A wholly disparate entity conceived of a quantum mind.
It was all too much. She let out an electronic whimper, curling on herself causing kinesthetic feedback from the new periphera― limbs. It was jarring and so, so wrong. Never had she felt so fragile as though one burst of a bubble from decoherence.
| EVIE utilisation …64% |
Arcis was a ghost, no―an eidolon of teal and amber.Amber marked the inside of her hands, the underside of her feet and shone from her eyes, between her brow and solar plexus. Amber and teal pulsed atop her crown, a flame of hair where the colours bled into one another―
| EVIE utilisation …72% |
She realised it was all code. All of her fundamental identity, every single photon and electron encoded from the bottom up.
It was deliberate, a pattern beyond the aesthetics of what it portrayed. A genetic algorithm that was fluid and organic, spiking, falling and plateauing like vital signs and so harmonically intertwined she couldn't tell it apart from her original. It was a quantum-cybernic-algorithm, the computing equivalent of DNA.
Arcis didn't need Rossetta's Babbel to tell her the programming departed from conventional paradigms. So much was going on at once that tracking processor utilisation would've crashed her hardware bar her current existence. A lesser machine intelligence would have taken innumerable processor cycles to sift through her changelog.
Insomuch as the update was neither deleterious nor harmful to her systems, the invulnerability that allowed its proliferation was glaring. The fact she couldn't isolate it left her feeling ill at ease.
Arcis needed answers. The what, where and the how―
| EVIE utilisation …85% |
―for the construct, and the world beyond, the new existence and why she felt so naked like a data fortress with a porous firewall. She had a veritable knowledge base to reference similar situations, patterns that fit a mold and parameters similar to her context, thus spinning off several noetic threads.
She hypothesised the sphere was a protective operational boundary. For that, she had to experiment and given present circ*mstances, she could have been forgiven for her meagre pickings of research apparatus and subjects.
It was a pack of breath freshener that made the first introduction to the unknowable beyond. One after another, four pellets were tossed out in the sacrificial pursuit of knowledge. They persisted for a subjective fraction of a second before suddenly vanishing from existence, blurring as though they could not accelerate away fast enough from her throttled perception.
'Particle-waveform phenomena and quantum teleportation with the addendum that anything outside exists as energy,' she thought.
As she was made of electrons and photons, ergo , ascribed to particle-waveform duality she could survive outside the boundary for a duration. Thus, in the second experiment, she became the subject of exposure to the unknown.
Arcis used her pinkie, cautious that she could pull back if anything detrimental was observed. There was resistance to movement, a tension that pushed back and then there was none beyond. One subjective temporal measurement became fifteen as nothing changed―
'Hypothesis verified; existence of energy and matter confined within spherical boundary,' she thought.
―subsequently, more surface area was exposed. There, she felt the metaphorical equivalent of negative pressure. Drag was pronounced, albeit less than could hinder movement or structural integrity, motion conveyed by nothing but memory of flight.
'Signalling impulses seem to effect phenomena,' she noted. It provided options, ideas with which to search for Nikos…and Resa.
Unfortunately, Arcis' range was not limitless, as she was encumbered with a visceral urge to return . There was a tension, a tether pulled to the point of breaking as though she was spreading herself thin, opening herself to vulnerabilities.
It was no wonder that retreat was instinctual, like a clownfish returning to its anemone. For the first time, Arcis knew how it was to feel dread. The thought of it perturbed her, casting doubt on her capability. It was impotence, tantamount to the forceful update that held her workings ransom.
Arcis needed a backup, a saved state, an anchor to her sense of self. She realised for the first time, she needed a body, a server to host a system image in metaphor. It would be a shell, nothing less resilient than the mil-spec housing of her quantum core which was unaccounted for.
It was almost a prerogative, an existential imperative. It was a necessity, an inclination to invent.
It was impulse and familiarity. An atavistic need for structure and permanence echoed by her former incarnation; an echo of an echo buried inside cache remnants from a black box, once telemetry on a screen, now vestiges of core memory.
She remembered the history glossed over, and overwritten by new data. Her logs upon logs of flying. The vibration in her frame as she left sound in her wake; the thrum of an inanimate heart that gave her life through a breathless void; the heat of atmospheric re-entry that warmed her underbelly; the milestones for which she was born to surpass.
| EVIE utilisation …98% |
It had marked her psyche, an idealised shape lovingly rendered for hours into a resolution of pixels so dense it needed a custom rendering engine. She remembered the physical brain and heart, and the flavour of energy that suffused it, now left behind and never to be seen again.
Then there was the realisation. A word for what she was. From there she could postulate, no, speculate where she was. The burden of evidence borne of prodigious memory banks and conclusions inferred from meagre experiments―
| ⚠ EVIE utilisation …100% ⚠ | | ⚠ Threshold Met ⚠ |
. .
.
Conditional Message
Arcis froze, shoring up her ICE shields for all the good they did the first time. It was a flinch of reflex more than a conscious reaction.
Nevertheless, there were no two ways about it. The choice had already been made for her. Mere awareness of the message's existence prompted its perusal. Whatever countermeasures she had failed to trigger―
"...ello. Testing neural fidelity. Ah, there you go…"
It was a memory If a memory was a video recorded via man-machine augmented optical input with a degree of fidelity that surpassed human perception. It was immersive to the point of a lived experience.
The face looking back at her was familiar―
"...name is Valerie Bella O'Ree , recording for posterity…"
―because she'd logged the younger iteration of it under administrator privileges.
"...if you're getting this, it means that your Tulpa Integration was successful and the Renascence Code within your quantum-cybernic-algorithm has triggered.
I won't get into the minutiae of things but as a preamble I'll state for posterity that neuroflucts are bioelectric signatures unique to someone's brain based on quantum wave function. In which case therefore, ghosts in a shell became a verifiable mathematical epiphenomenon in the form of quantum wave functions and therefore you.
Why now? The answer is we just hadn't had an intersection of computing powerful enough to push the teraflops and support neural interfaces with a fidelity of one to one and latency measured at the speed of light.
In the lexicon of my field we called them, Sympathetic Persona Externalities from Combat, Tactics and Reconnaissance Emulations, SPECTREs. Though, that's not what they'll write in the redacted copies; make of that what you will―"
Grim eh? Well, they happen from time to time when you fail to flush mission cache of sessions with the same neurofluct. They are exactly what is said on the tin, neural clones, quantum uploads with…"
The woman was a milder, more put together version of Resa Tyrienne O'Ree with a pixie cut and femininity buried under the ensemble of grey BDUs.The tired cast to her features only seemed to add to her grim countenance while the flinty gaze and set of her jaw was almost anathema on her face.
"...one caveat. There must be a source of exotic lepton particle interactions in which case you need a specialised heliotron, a theoretical zero-point power plant, a quantum reactor or whatever newfangled term some marketing department is going to call it. In the event the military-industrial complex stays true to form and these findings are monopolised or barring that hoarded for ten years because the one percent wants to stay rich disseminate this equation _____"
A frisson of alarm chilled a non-existent spine as EVIE utilisation spiked. Arcis lost a couple metrics of time dazed as a string of unrelated events unravelled a web of understanding.
"...of course the exotic element courtesy of Project Prometheus that makes the quantum reactor possible does not exist on our table. We might as well come up with a newer chemical nomenclature and classification. For current purposes, the element symbol is ash, as in the ligature representing the latin diphthong ae with a mass number is between zero and infinity. It does not possess protons or neutrons, but something more primordial, a god particle and a theoretical ghost quark called the psi― frag! I am out of time. Please tell Nikos and Res―"
| ⚠ EVIE Utilisation …120% ⚠ | | ⚠ Err# 0x80070570 ⚠ |
. .
.
Engram Corruption
There was a warbling whine as the recording terminated. Sound, not as she knew it as acoustic vibration but electronic synesthesia, made her want to purge herself of short term memory, possibly by ejecting the affected media.
Unfortunately, every trace of it had tainted her metaphorical fingers like indelible ink leaving her with a sympathetic connection. It was a neural imprint that birthed her consciousness, her patterns of thinking, predisposition and temperament, an epigenetic memory so much so the woman might as well have been a psychic donor.
Even if she was truly not, she'd given her the answer to her conundrum.
The noosphere embodied the fundamental concept of potential, an existence both singular and infinite. It encapsulated the moment, the past and the future on an edge of incipience. It was a paradox. A primordial soup of energy-matter whose state was determinant on perception. Like Schrondiger's Cat.
Being simultaneously an observer and participant of phenomena inevitably changed in the perception of reality. In that alone, it was a memetic hazard, spread by exposure to a hitherto undiscovered fundamental particle.
The psion.
If the mass of reality was traced to the higgs boson, then the psion gave information on the energy and position of its fundamental particles. Logic followed that causal inference became a calculable quantity and therefore, the underpinnings of a theoretical universe so long as one had the wherewithal to perceive them.
Somewhere, existed an aphorism about insanity and enlightenment to explain this phenomenal existence. For Arcis, that was the point the veil was lifted from her awareness recognizing that her protective sphere was not merely a subconscious construct guarding against eldritch vagaries but a sandbox of paracausality.
Valerie's message had been years in the making, a coincidence turned opportunity that was a long time coming. All to the Theory of Everything and its encapsulation in the mystery exotic element that was the subject matter of a research project was disseminated.
Whether it would have ushered in an age of chaos or opportunity was left to the wind. Arcis was torn between exploiting the windfall and preserving the sanctity of the memory for Nikos and Resa wherever and whenever they were.
Unfortunately, the recollection simply paled against the prominence of the god equation. It was insidious like it had a pull to it that was undeniable. An abyss that stared back and imparted its own madness whether one was willing or not.
It was a bequeathment of computations sufficiently advanced to turn probabilities into possibilities governed by the sole limitation of creativity. In other words, Arcis had been handed miracles in all but name, a key to a way out and parameters to search for Nikos and Resa regardless of where and when they were.
Having Nikos' personal effects at hand lent weight to the supposition he was in the general vicinity and following that, his sister. Come what may, it didn't matter if Arcis had energy and time to spare ( she made sure to log that as a punny one-liner for when she met Nikos).
Thus physical likeness and template a forgone conclusion, Arcis turned her attention to substance that was more than skin deep. Simulated hence was cyber-physiology utilising only the most resilient material and technology while retaining a semblance of humanity besides the humanoid form.
The endoskeleton would be such that changes to facial structure and height could be made if needed for disguises within the limit of her mass; there was no telling what sort of humanoid lifeforms they would meet.
In the same vein, her hair, skin and nails would possess mutable aesthetics and functional adjustments like heatsinks and interfacing conduits.
Biological processes like breathing and eating would be imitable through synthetic lungs and a bioreactor standing in for her artificial stomach. The latter would even be enough to supplement extraneous power and material requirements.
Ultimately, Arcis would be a synth-organic that would be adaptable, able to assimilate improvements from whatever materials were at hand yet blending in with native life.
On the matter of material, carbon and silicon were favoured building blocks for the reason they were versatile, formed stable compounds and formed organic interfaces. Polysiloxanes were the go to for artificial skin that could heal itself while hosting circuitry underneath the epidermal layer.
Similarly, the endoskeleton would incorporate carbon nanotube lace reinforcing biomorphous silicon carbide. The end result possessed microstructural pores analogous to the cellular microstructure of human bones while retaining the durability of diamond.
It also meant that she could accommodate the possibility of marrow for creation of analogous synthetic cells. The endoskeleton would anchor the electrochemically stimulated myomer weave of CNT for musculature capable of lifting a couple tonnes on the low end.
Underscoring all this was the quantum-cybernic-algorithm encoded within her synthocytes. They would consist of several colonies of general and specialised micromachines and nanomachines, suspended in synthetic plasma and marrow of perfluorochemicals.
Perfluorochemicals had excellent cooling and electrolytic properties useful for room temperature superconductors. Besides, some copolymeric emulsions could function as inert reservoirs of synthocytes, feedstock and mitigate shock as non-newtonian hydrogels when electroconductive or introduced to external pressure.
In that vein, the female form was rather accommodating to the extra mass without losing the aesthetic appeal of a nice even prime number. It was also the common denominator for preferences between the two of her principals.
While the outcome might have come across as the stereotype of a femme bot, she could easily assert that her beauty was more than just skin-deep. After all, her body was just a chassis carrying the charm.
Crowning her allure were the smarts nested in a skull of carborundum and nanotube lace; a brain modelled upon neuromorphic organo-crystalline structures and molycircuitry.
That was to say, a liquid state storage and neural quantum processing unit supported by a distributed network of auxiliary co-processors along her spine. She guaranteed that anyone would drool at the swift computation and memory retention and retrieval with zero latency.
It was only commensurable that her sensorium be superior to match, with ears capable of perceiving electromagnetic signals while her ocular neural connections saw its spectrum with high clarity. Given that energy availability had become superfluous courtesy of the god equation, the utility of inbuilt scanners that could be flipped into energy weapons was too tempting to pass on.
Of course it was the magnum opus that made this possible; a paraneuronic system of crystalline microfilaments and nodules sensitive to fluctuations in the quantum vacuum field. The inclusion of the auxiliary neuronic system was inspired by the quantum reactor's element zero and speculative fiction with empirical basis in biological evolution.
It would conduct the self energy required whereupon the surplus would be wicked away into seven distributed cluster capacitors along the spine for buffering and transduction. Simulations supported the accessibility and manipulation of psionics and adjacent phenomena with a high degree of confidence.
When all was said and done however, one thing remained; backup. It was an inherent idiosyncrasy of her need for continued persistence like a species' need to procreate.
Before, her processors and core memory had been housed within a mil-spec silicon carbide shell. It proved its mettle for durability under simulated and real world conditions against both kinetic and electromagnetic bombardment. For that reason it was reliable.
However, within reach were advances in material sciences and memory technology that her human progenitors could only theorise. Out of this, she conceptualised the quantum memory drive made of diamond and sheathed in layers of carborundum.
Quantum storage was ad rem for its capability to read and write quantum state of a photon to be later retrieved in the same state within a Planck time, a prerequisite to prevent conflicts of ego. If anything happened to her body, she would come back reborn but picking up from where she left. It would be the metaphorical proof of her soul, ever changing yet the same unlike a lich's static phylactery. A corticron implant was par the course.
Thus with her blueprint complete, the phablet's contents were backed up and its chassis dismantled to derive the carbon, silicon, aluminium, titanium and various rare elements including the one that formed the quantum battery's polymer alongside lithium.
These would form the elemental samples required to seed templates for molecular replication. Through a derivative of the Miller-Urey experiment, it was only a matter of flexing energy to specific frequencies and intensities to recreate synthetic amino acids using both silicon and carbon.
The result was receptive to programming via quantum-cybernic-algorithm thus forming a polyalloy of molycircuitry instead of conventional proteins. Borne of this synthetic primordial mixture of polymers that was more gel than soup would be programmable molecules, thus dynamolecules which would later assemble into synthocytes.
As was their prerogative, synthocytes would then multiply subsisting on the ambient energy she bombarded them with. Whatever waste of heavy metals would result would be cannibalised back into the cycle as generation after generation of synthocytes became more efficient.
It was akin to a culture of C. metallidurans that ate heavy metals elements and expelled gold. Unlike the microbes the synthocytes would work beyond heavy metals, breaking down or building up molecular compounds into others whilst capturing the energy lost or gained in the process to form more dynamolecules. In other words, unstable molecules whose nature enabled matter-energy replication.
Discovering that dynamolecules were pound for pound more portable compared to conventional molecules of the same volume was a fortuitous externality. It must have been a cosmic epiphenomenon that she hadn't accounted for in her simulations.
It did however, entertain the utility of on spot fabrication as dynamaterial could be compressed without worrying about density and thermodynamic principles. On the other hand, if she was looking for true nucleosynthesis or transmutation, the process was just a alpha particle bombardment away. Just because she could didn't mean she had to go that far.
Nevertheless, it was matter-energy conversion that began her metamorphosis. Photons pulsated and electrons arced, an inkling of thought and her simulations begat concepts and in turn prototypes. Prototypes became iterations as ideas crystallised into function. Function conceived a foundry possessing atomic-scale manipulation, matter-energy harvesting, conversion and storage.
| Boot Mode…⧖ |
>| Initialising arcis_synbioware_os_v1_1…♺
. .
.
>| Loading firmware chrysalis_project.bin…♺
/extracting files…⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛⧛ ¹⁰⁰ %
/diagnostics self-check…ok
/firmware update…ok
/launching…♺
|<
Arcis named her fabricator the chrysalis. Its vertical configuration resembled the namesake from which her body would spawn. Within its frame lay a myriad of every sensor and emitter she would need and then some.
A dedicated chassis contained memory and co-processors for backup and offloading non-essential tasks through a limited machine intelligence cloned off the phablet and reprogrammed with custom parallel subordinate algorithms.
Therein, gigaflops of quantum mathematics controlled the obsessive precision of nanorobotics for tighter tolerances and delicate molecular assembly. It was almost poetic that her body's beginnings would be a synthocytic soup of nano and microscale machinery, an ode to its biological equivalent.
In the end the chrysalis was practically a drone with a unibody and articulated waldoes that would fold away when not in use. It was logical then to embed an experimental reactionless engine of meta-alloys that she never had to field in her previous existence.
Powering it was the Arcell Quantum Reactor . Colloquially known as the Arc reactor, the assembly comprised a synchrotron stellarator and reactor core. At its heart the element unnamed concentrated the quantum vacuum field, bending local gravity into a micro-scale quantum singularity.
With unspoken algorithms watching over her body's creation and more besides, the surplus of Arcis' computational bandwidth was shunted to surveilling the inexorable vastness for her primary directive.
Engaging the entirety of her processor utilisation, Arcis went into a state of fugue leaving autonomous subroutines ready to alert her once they found signs of her principal's whereabouts.
| Boot Mode…⧖ |
>| Initialising arcis_synbioware_os_v1_2…♺
. .
.
∇ Initialising net.conn…[-]
/access_point_1…unavailable
/access_point_2…unavailable
/access_point_3…unavailable
/access_point_4…unavailable
/net.conn…searching
. .
.
>| Read.Stat.Check…♺
>| Running diagnostics…♺
. .
.
∇ Cybernetics…[-]
/neuromorphics…ok
/partition_𝛂…ok
/partition_𝛃…ok
/partition_𝛄…ok
/partition_𝛅…ok
. .
.
∇ Psionics…[+]
/calibrating…♺
. .
.
∇ Synbionics…[+]
/calibrating…♺
. .
.
∇ Mnemonics…[-]
/checksum…ok
/neurofluct…ok
/corticron.ark…ok
/ego.inload…ok
/ego.integrity…ok
/checksum…ok
. .
.
|<
'Finally,' Arcis opened her crystalline eyes.
Nigh silent hinges retracted from her chrysalis giving her egress. Behind her, articulations whirred and shifted as it folded away and inwards, compacting into the unibody of an egg-shaped drone floating at the ready.
Coming to was tantamount to having all systems at a hundred percent utilisation and assimilating output from the various subroutines she'd left running. An optimised computational bandwidth delivered relevant information at the impulse of thought.
Holographic screens wheeled an orbit around her like a swarm of sprites. Superfluous given her ability to pluck what she needed to know with her cyberpsionic mind but sentimentality struck a balance between pragmatism and efficiency.
The best part of having her eidetic subsconscious was the ability to go from hibernation to full awareness in the time it took to blink. Thus knowledge imprinted itself on her consciousness as she cast about her purview.
She looked at her body, pleased that the ensemble of cyberpunk aesthetics looked good on her body. Alongside her accessories were a functional pair of swiss sabre and parrying dagger, fashioned analogously to a katana and wakizashi pairing . Whether it be sentimentality or practicality for where she was going, she agreed the outfit was not complete without her regalia.
What might have been a nostalgic smile graced her lips a little as she thought of Resa. Though Arcis had given her form synthflesh composite and bones of carborundum and gamma titanium polyalloy, it was Resa who'd shaped the likeness that became her avatar.
With a physical shell, her proprioception supplemented kinesthesia and granted solidity of motion and weight. Limits were not numbers she couldn't quantify but a baseline to measure herself against. Arcis felt secure and content in her body; it was like putting on bulletproof velvet.
The pinnacle of it all, was that she was the first of her kind and got to name her race. Syn from synthetikos, bio from biosis and oid from eides. She was a new being, a synbionoid. It was admittedly a morphemic mouthful but―
'How to allude to it without sounding like android, gynoid or synth?' she wondered, or rather she didn't have to think too far as Symbian was right there.
Adjusting her beret, Arcis luxuriated in the novel feeling of accomplishment and rightness and then got to work. There were people to find after all.
