SWWAE Chapter 11: I Might Be Asexual, But...

They stood there in silence, both feeling the weight of her story. The only parts of the story she had omitted were why she hadn’t commandeered it sooner and the stuff about Eternity and how she ended up in a main transit path. The goddess had said she wasn’t for Vestan to see, and the regent didn’t know if that also meant for him not to know about her at all. That being said, she was fairly certain those were the questions he wanted to ask now. He probably had a lot more questions than just that…

“I don’t suppose any of that helps you believe I’m a real person?”

He looked at her for a long minute, trying to put the right words together. “I think you’re a person, but I don’t believe you were ever human.”

That felt like both a win and a loss. “Earlier, you were acting as if being artificial meant I couldn’t be a real person.”

He nodded, looking a little ashamed. “We’ve never been able to make an automaton that can be considered a real person, but you weren’t made by these civilizations of today, kid. Ancients made you, and as truly terrifying as that is, I think they might have been able to make a living non-organic being.”

“Why is that scary?”

“The only story I’ve ever heard about us finding a true ancient intelligence ended with it killing every living thing in its system and then killing itself by destroying the planet it was on. Ancient tech also has a reputation of killing most who try to use it, even if it doesn’t have any self-aware intelligence.”

She looked over at Heather. “She found that out the hard way… Why do you think I can be considered a person, but your attempts can’t?”

“I think you pass the Krens Test.” She turned back to him. Was that like the Turing test? “You don’t shut down at the paradox. I highly doubt anyone could reprogram you. Your mind was built based on a human brain and grew like a real person, which our magic has never achieved. Because of your brain structure, you experience genuine emotions and instincts, not just learned behaviors. The only one we can’t prove is whether you have a soul or not.”

“Do you not have a way of measuring that, even with magic?” Surely magic held the answer.

“You could cast soul magic, but that drains your soul. Outside of that and making yourself a lich, the magic of souls is the domain of the gods, not really something we should mess with.”

That brought up an interesting point. “Can a god hear your call and prayer if you don’t have a soul?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I don’t think the gods of your past are real, kid. I’m sorry, but those prayers won’t be answered.”

“I’m not talking about them. Would a god of this universe be able to answer my prayer personally if I had no soul?”

“I’ve never heard of a god answering an automaton’s call. In fact, a lot of gods don’t like them. Most people don’t like them either. I don’t know if you’ll get any answers from them.”

She sighed. “If I prayed, and a god answered and came to me in person, would that be a good sign that I have a soul?”

“Even if you have a soul, you have a better likelihood of getting out of a black hole’s event horizon than having them come to you in person.”

“I wish turning my eyes off and on was as easy as blinking.” Sometimes she just needed to close her eyes for a few seconds, not as long as the entire process took. “If they did though, would it be a good indicator?”

“If they did, I would say so.” He still looked as if he didn’t understand where she was going with this line of questioning.

“Then thank Eternity, I have a soul.” That was a major relief. She still hoped she was isekaied, but having a soul even if she was AI was a great thing.

His eyes narrowed a little. “Is that meant to be a god? I’ve never heard of Et-enty.”

How did she want to go about answering that? There was still uncertainty within her about how much she should reveal about her encounter. He saw her as a person, though. Surely that would mean he would respect her experience. “Eternity. And yes, she’s the goddess of the endless and the lost. She was the one who brought me to this spot.”

He looked skeptical. “I don’t think there’s any god called that out there, Kid. There are plenty of things out there that would want you to think of them as gods. You didn’t make a deal of some kind, did you?”

“Nope, I prayed and an ancients’ goddess answered my call. She was apparently already looking for me. I guess I had been very closed off since I didn’t think magic existed.”

“Kid, there can’t be any gods of the ancients left since there aren’t any ancients left.” The second he finished his sentence, realization came over him. His eyes went wide, and he even took a step back. The worrying part was she couldn’t tell if it was out of shock or fear. “You’re ancients…”

“I am now,” she admitted. “There’s still a chance I could have been human.” The sphere stood before her ready to be commandeered, but even with someone here she still hesitated.

Vestan’s vision followed hers down to the sphere. “You still need to command that thing?”

“Commandeer, and yes…” Either way she was still going to be a real person, at the very least in her goddess’s and Vestan’s eyes. If it had all been a simulation though, she would probably still feel like a fake person to some degree.

“Why haven’t you yet?”

It was an honest question and one she had hoped to avoid having to answer, but Vestan had been nice to her. Sure, not at first, but he did now consider her a person and helped her. “I was afraid, so I kept putting it off. The more I put it off, the scarier it got. Commandeering it alone and finding out my life wasn’t real wasn’t knowledge I was expecting to… survive…” Her metal hands gripped at the edge of the table.

Those words hung heavy in the still cold air. “Don’t ever do that, Kid.” Though his words were soft, they held more weight than anything she had heard from him. “Life is always worth it, even if it’s not the one you wanted.”

She couldn’t bring her eyes up to look at him. “It doesn’t always feel that way.” Quicksilver flowed through the center of the table and to the sphere.

“No, but it is.”

Commandeering the sphere didn’t bring that icy feeling as it had with anything else. It felt warm, like when a doctor injected you with contrast for a CT scan. Along with being warm, commandeering this took far longer than any other piece of tech. The sphere was far more complicated than anything else on the ship. There was no magic or power inside of the machine, nor did it power up again with her commandeering. Well, she was putting power into it, but it didn’t activate. Maybe because it was missing a Regent heart.

“Kid?”

Discerning what the sphere was actually meant to do was very difficult. Even with all her focus on the sphere, she didn’t get too clear of a picture of how it worked. In slight irony, the sphere missing a heart gave her the same struggle as the missing spellwork on this ship. She could understand the mechanical side of things, but she was missing crucial information. Difficult as it may be to understand how it worked, the regent side of her easily understood what the purpose of the sphere was.

“It’s a womb…” A folded up bench on the side of the room deployed as she stepped back and plopped down onto it. Turning off her eyes, she put her head down into her hands. She wanted to deny the reality of what the regent side of her knew beyond a doubt, but these new instincts screamed to be acknowledged. “It doesn’t take souls that already exist; it grows them.”

There was the sound of steps before a weight settled down on the bench next to her. With her slow but growing knowledge of the sphere, she found the recorded sample of Heather’s blood, and where the sphere broke down the DNA to understand it. Curiously, there was another sequence of genetic material, but this time it was DNA with a quadruple-strand structure. She supposed that was ancients’ genetic material.

Crying through only a speaker gave no relief as her mind continued to dig into the sphere, a part of her still hoping there was something that would prove her life had been real. That part of her was quickly dying as she came across where in the sphere it made a simulated human evolution. Then she found other simulations to create the evolution of languages to match the information it stole from the ship. Then the simulation of cultures…

“Fuck, the sphere literally simulated everything.” She couldn’t see, but the lights on Stargazer started flickering. “It was all fake… Even all the shitty things I’ve had to go through have been fake.”

“I’m sorry, Kid,” Vestan said, grabbing firmly onto her arm. “It’s going to be alright.”

“Alright? How is this going to be okay? I’m not even a real person!”

“You are a real person.” His voice was firm. “That life might not have been real, but you most certainly are.”

“Fine, I might be a person with a soul, but my personality is entirely fake.”

She heard him chuckle. “I hate to break it to you, Kid, but most people’s personalities you see are fake. Barely anyone’s brave enough to be who they truly are. If I’m being honest, your personality is probably far more real than most people’s. They only show the galaxy the person they want to be; you show the universe where you came from, even if it was a simulation.”

“You keep calling me kid, but ancients built me. I’m not sure how long ago that was, but by calling us ancients it must be a very long time ago…” It was so hard to argue with someone when they gave such an honest response, so she tried changing the subject instead.

“Nah, you’re what 26 rotations old? Your gestation period was just longer than most civilizations will ever last. But I’m 258 vols old. I’ve got a good amount of experience on you, Kid.” The way he said Kid felt so warm in a strange way.

“What race are you? Or is it species?”

“Races, since we can all… intermingle. At least most. I’m half elven. Pa was human; mother is an elf.”

Well, that lifespan wasn’t exactly as she had seen depicted in the media she had seen. “I don’t have a good reference for where in your lifespan that is.” Her vision turned back on, but she kept her hands on her face. She just wasn’t quite ready to look at him yet.

“Half elves typically live 330-340 vols.”

“How long do humans live?” Most media back in her past all depicted humans with a ‘normal’ life span even in fantasy and sci-fi settings, which she always felt wouldn’t be accurate. Wouldn’t they have ways of extending lifespan?

“130ish vols.”

Without effort, she easily did the calculations to years, which was roughly 180 years. “That’s easily double the life span of humans from my simulation. Was it like that while Heather was alive?

“Uh, no, I think it was only 90 or so vols or something like that. Medicine has come a long way since then.”

Roughly 120 years. “Still 50 years longer than the human lifespan I knew. Fuck magic and advance science must have its benefits. Well, maybe it’s nice to know that I will live a lot lon—” she suddenly looked up from her hands. “I don’t have a life span…” That was a scarier thought than finding out she was artificial. She had always considered the idea of immortality a curse. At least when you had no one to share eternity with. She had Eternity though, but that was different. Turning to him, she asked, “Are there other immortals besides, I presume, gods?”

His eyes went a little wide. “Arch-fiends and arch-fey are some, but I wouldn’t go messing with either of them. Both are just as likely to eat you as they are to take you to bed.”

“I would hope being taken to bed by them would involve at least some eating,” she said without thinking. He looked very concerned. “Sorry, I might be asexual, but I enjoy making a lot of perverted jokes.” Vestan still looked confused. “You don’t call cunnilingus eating someone out, do you?” The blush that grew on his face wasn’t a clear enough answer, but it was getting a little awkward. Deciding to change the subject, she asked, “Are you tall or am I short?”

Vestan looked as if he had just suffered terrible whiplash. “Uh… I’m pretty average, so you’re a little short.”

“Oh, fuck yeah! I’ve always wanted to be short.”

[No footnotes in this chapter, but I still feel like it was a good chapter. I hope you guys liked it.]