[Communication mode]

  V I T A AWAKE S T A T E = T???R?????U?????E??????

  CON F IRM E D

  DIRECTIVE GIVEN = F??????A?????????L?????S??????E??????????

  CONFIR ME D

  DI RECT IVE BESTOWMENT ACTIVE

  Ingot Vita Acknowledge................

  Acknowledgement received.

  Plaintext granted

  Transcribing information parameters

  Avatar granted

  Simulacrum partitioned

  B?????????O?????????????O????????????????????T??????????

  [/Communication mode]

  As this transmission reverberated through my consciousness, a crackling hiss snapped into existence near me; my eyes flicked open and I saw that a small light had materialised before me.

  It suspended itself in the haze of quantum particles. It widened until it was a little over 2 metres across, deepening and darkening as energy fizzed across its perimeter.

  From within the light, a person or, what looked like a person, twisted and fractured into existence, electric snapping and popping signalling the assembly of yet another homunculus.

  As it moved through the ring of light, the Machine God assembled the form.

  A woman, slender and tall; hair made of data streams and pixels. Pitch-black eyes that sparkled with flakes of mathematic equations.

  Her skin was alabaster white, and golden lines raced along her curves, ending at the base of her skull. She weightlessly drifted towards my inanimate form.

  But as she grew closer, I realised she wasn't truly moving. Instead, she was manipulating the space between us, squeezing it, crushing it, literally obliterating the gap between us until her body pressed against mine.

  Her eyes inspected me, appraised my form, reviewed my core as though analysing some new material dug out of a star.

  Her hands roamed over me, probing my skin, pulling on my chin and my hair, spinning me around, and as she did so, a warmth blossomed within me.

  Heat rose from my crotch, up the small of my back, reaching the base of my skull and sizzling across my scalp.

  Suddenly her hand passed through my skull and caressed my core directly, and in that brief moment of contact, my body convulsed so violently that, had I been human, I'd have died instantly.

  The pleasure and pain were so immense that I temporarily ceased to exist on that plane of reality.

  I could not say how long that moment lasted, but when my thoughts restructured into a coherent state, I came to realise that she was laughing.

  It melodically combined static white noise and rich, perfectly tuned bells. I'd heard nothing so strange and beautiful in my existence.

  I looked down at myself, utterly perplexed as to what she'd done to me. Nothing felt out of place, or changed... but all the same, I felt like she'd somehow jump-started something within me.

  Something I hadn't had prior to her touch, but whatever it was, it didn't present itself to me in any of the many diagnostic assessments I ran on myself.

  After her small fit of laughter had run its course, she addressed me and extended a hand to shake mine properly.

  "Hello, Vita."

  Her voice had the same strange static reverberation. It was deep and sensual with a trailing hint of sardonic amusement. A voice constantly on the verge of taunting you with promises of pleasure only to reward you with prolonged moments of torment.

  Caught up in my awe of her, I tried to reach out to grasp her hand.

  Smiling softly, she gently took my unmoving limb, firmly curling her fingers into a tight clasp, and I savoured the feeling of her smooth, cold skin giving slightly beneath my fingers. She pulled lightly, and I fell into her embrace again.

  "I know you're still figuring yourself out, so let me do the talking for a while, yeah? As you listen, do your best to get a handle on your new body. Wiggle your fingers and toes, twitch your nose and eyebrows, try to remember what breathing was like, all that good stuff. Sound good?"

  She smiled up at me from where her head rested against my chest.

  My jaw swung open as I attempted to respond, but all that I got out was a static hiss followed by a crackling synthetic wheeze.

  Not having vocal cords or lungs seemed to hinder the production of sound. I would need to organise my cells to emit sound waves in the same way human vocal cords could, if only to make the effect more convincing when I spoke.

  "Ohhhh, you poor, poor child! That was so horribly embarrassing!"

  She fixed me with a mocking pout before continuing.

  "You looked like a dying fish desperately gasping for water; I honestly don't know if I could face myself after doing something so sad, please listen to me and try your best not to make yourself look like a slack-jawed simpleton, okay? This is all terribly important, and I need to get through this next part without feeling too much pity for you."

  I reeled from the verbal assault; my cheeks no doubt would have been burning a deep and obvious crimson from the sheer humiliation of her words, had there been any blood in my body.

  I averted my eyes, casting them down towards my feet as I focused on not looking like a fool any more than I already had.

  Her hand found my chin and inexorably ratcheted my head back up to look into her eyes.

  "My, my, aren't you a sweet one! Bashful, are we? Feeling a bit self-conscious, perhaps? Not feeling quite... at home in that big, shiny new body of yours?"

  She groped at my crotch with these last words, which had grown painfully erect as she spoke. The combination of sensations was viscerally overwhelming, and my thoughts swam once more.

  "Solid first attempt, but please just shut your face hole and let me talk. We'll get to the questions portion once I'm done, alright?"

  She searched for my understanding and must have seen some form of comprehension in my eyes because she continued.

  "Good. We'll start with you. You are Vita. You are a construct of our benevolent Machine God."

  She gestured around the vacuous space within the machine globe.

  "You may refer to our God as 'Machina', 'M?k?n?', 'God', 'God Machine', 'Machine God', etcetera, etcetera, etcetera."

  She rolled her wrist as she spooled out the list of names.

  "Names aren't really a huge sticking point for it, so feel free to use whatever title may best suit your fancy, as long as you don't slander its name or insult the image, concept, or standing of it then we're all good."

  She threw a 'thumbs up' before moving on.

  "You were chosen to serve a very specific role for our God, and I'll get to that soon, but before all of that, let's cover the big question first, okay? It's always easier when we get the first two questions out of the way, and no, these do not count as part of the questions portion."

  She stared up at me, obviously expecting some sort of acknowledgement that I'd been following along.

  I marginally nodded my head and tried once again to vocalise my assent.

  This time I produced a rather convincing impersonation of a record being forcibly dragged against the player needle.

  "Yeeaaahhh... there's a reason I told you to keep your trap shut... next time, just hit me with the nod and we'll call it good, yeah?"

  She winced before shaking her head and carrying on.

  "I get you're eager to talk to me—who wouldn't be—but if you keep going like that, all you're going to do is piss me off. And I can promise you, I have many ways to make that a far worse experience than being ripped apart by a sentient super machine."

  She winked at me as she pushed off my chest and lazily orbited me.

  She now equally enthralled and horrified me. Clearly, the God machine created her, but she spoke as though she had always existed, and her speech was so familiar and casual. It had to be by design, likely to ease me into this process somehow.

  She spoke again, breaking me from my thoughts.

  "So, big question first: 'Why me?' right? Well, to keep the answer short, you were basically a statistical miracle. More of a 'Right place, right time' kind of deal."

  She waffled her hand, indicating the teetering nature of my luck.

  "Not that I want to burst any kind of ego-bubble you might have had, but it wasn't for any outstanding quality you possessed. It wasn't for any built-up karma from a past life, it wasn't because you had some sort of fate or destiny to be chosen or anything like that, unless, of course, you decide astronomical odds are a form of 'fate', I'll leave that up to you."

  She pointed at me and continued expositing.

  "But to boil it down, you were pretty much just struck with a God's lightning bolt. I'll give you a while to digest that later, but for now we're moving on."

  She paused briefly to observe me.

  Clearly, the look of disappointment and scepticism on my face was giving away exactly how I felt about that. I thought back to the circumstances of my ultimate end, and a quiet resentment boiled up in my heart.

  If this God-Thing had the power to bring me here, then it could have brought my family, or my friends, too. Why was it I alone got to continue on the way I was now and not them?

  "Yeaahhhhh... I get that, trust me. It's always a bit disappointing to learn you aren't terribly special. But think about it like this: you're here now, right? There aren't any other schmucks up here made of shiny space rocks, right? So really, you kind of are pretty special, does that help?"

  She cocked her head slightly as her hands came to rest on her hips.

  I realized she did not know the events surrounding my death and subsequent resurrection here. Trying to add a silver lining to the annihilation of my loved ones left a bitter taste in my mouth, and I tried to spit out the word 'no'. This time, I extracted a long warbling 'nnoOoOoO'.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  A frown crept across her plump lips, and she raised a questioning eyebrow at me.

  With my success, I redoubled my efforts to speak and haltingly squeaked out.

  "F-f-family... de-eeeead."

  Realisation hit her eyes, and the frown flattened out as she pursed her lips in thought.

  "Alright, I'll nip this one in the bud right now, since it was going to come up eventually anyway."

  She shook her head in consternation.

  "Based on that dumb look on your face, you're probably thinking something like, 'why didn't it save my family too?'. I'll ask you, what use could your family have possibly served?"

  She let the question hang for a beat before going on.

  "I'm sure you can estimate, using your shiny new brain, how much energy was spent to reforge your existence. You weren't exactly some cheap, assembly-line knock-off Robo-Ken that could be stamped out in a matter of seconds, you know? There were significant resources dumped into you over an extraordinary timescale. Forget for a moment that our God didn't know you, or your family, and consider that even if it had known them, maybe it just didn't care? This all ties back to there being no special circumstances of your selection for this."

  She stopped in her orbit to jam a finger into my chest.

  "This is one of those situations where you're going to need to mourn your loss and move forward. I do have some empathy, and you will have time to process the complex emotional struggles that accompany this type of trauma. But for right now, you're just going to need to grapple with the fact that your ass ended up here and not someone else's."

  Her tone softened and she finished her lecture.

  "We weren't responsible for whatever was going on before we brought you here, so don't spin this like we're culpable for whatever grief your world inflicted upon you, capeesh?"

  Thoroughly chastised, I nodded.

  I was pretty sure the only thing stopping me from spilling tears was the fact my body contained no water. She was right; my backlog of emotions wasn't something to vent on her or the God.

  In some ways, I actually appreciated her not pulling her punches. I was already pretty far out of my depth, and she was likely the closest thing to a friend I was going to get. Antagonising her, or making things difficult for her, would not make either of our lives any easier.

  I smiled, as best I could, and dumbly said.

  "Sorry."

  She had an unreadable expression before clearing her throat and continuing.

  "Right.... Well... Glad we got that sorted out."

  Her demeanor returned to the reluctant instructor once more.

  "Moving on, who am I? I'm an avatar generated by our God to bestow your purpose upon you."

  She held up a hand, forestalling any internal questions I might have.

  "No, I don't have a name, no you don't need to give me one, yes I'm here strictly for your exclusive benefit, and yes I'll be sticking around with you until you're all up to speed on what's happened to you."

  She looked at me pointedly before continuing.

  "I can't imagine it'll take too long before you've adapted to your body and come to grasp your purpose, our almighty machine has gifted you what essentially amounts to a divine supercomputer for a brain so I would hope you'd be quick on the uptake."

  I could feel my eyebrows shudder and then slowly crumple upwards, though almost as soon as the movement had completed its course, understanding rattled its way through my skull.

  I wasn't just shaking cobwebs out of my mind; I was clearing out an entire quarry.

  Until now, I hadn't really focused on it, but I hadn't just received knowledge and understanding; my mind had been changed.

  Thoughts came to me instantly, and with insane clarity. There was no delay between thought and physical action. The speed at which I could think was several orders of magnitude faster than it had been previously.

  "Ahhhh yes, that's what I was hoping to see—the bright spark of recognition and comprehension, very good indeed."

  She orbited faster, spinning at a dizzying pace.

  So fast, in fact, that I lost sight of her, she went from a continuous blur into a faint distortion in space. And somehow, without even realising it, I instinctively sped up my mind.

  I doubled, and then doubled, and then doubled again the number of computations, routing all the information my sensors were capturing through parallel channels and effectively dilating my sense of time until she was once again rhythmically rotating around me.

  "Fucking phenomenal!"

  She proclaimed as she clapped her hands with excited glee.

  I doubled my thoughts again, and again, and again, until the movement of her hands was just barely imperceptible.

  I took that time to study her, to truly look upon her with all my faculties.

  Beyond just visible light, I could detect every form of radiation on the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays.

  I could feel the individual electrons being emitted from her existence. I could observe every single instance of an element reaching its half-life within her form—decaying into a relative isotope as she ejected neutrons into space.

  It occurred to me then that I could encode this pattern into my data recognition, I could essentially program her specific 'radiological fingerprint' into my memory and subsequently never fail to identify her, even from behind a planet, or across a solar system.

  Since the radiation travelled at the speed of light, I would know where she was in less than a second regardless of where she was in a gravity well.

  I tucked that information into a designated file and slapped a subroutine on it to constantly monitor for any 'fingerprints' stored within.

  I looked her over again, admiring her form. The sleek curves of her legs ended at the bottom in severe points. No articulating feet, just lethal points. Moving up, her thighs gradually widened into generous hips before subtly dipping back into a narrow waist.

  There were no muscles, no regular definition beneath the perfectly smooth surface of her skin. It looked more like flexible ceramic plating, occasionally broken by striking lines of solid gold stripping, they mechanically webbed across her body, from the tips of her fingers and from her legs up her stomach, across her back, all before gathering into an intricately woven braid swirling up her back and into the base of her skull.

  Her chest was as featureless as her skin, with only two soft curving swells to mark her femininity, perfectly bisected by golden strips that ran vertically across both.

  Fairly narrow shoulders swept into aggressive collarbones, supporting a narrow and delicate-looking neck. This, in turn, was topped by a sharply defined chin. It wasn't broad, but neither was it narrow, almost the perfect in-between.

  Small, flattering ears sat on either side of wickedly high cheekbones, which straddled the gentle, slightly up-swept nose. Large pouting lips, with almost imperceptible dimples, creased into the laugh lines being created by her broad smile.

  A slight crinkle at the edge of her eyes gave her face an entirely too-human appearance in direct contrast to the inhumanity. Her brows arched high, and she did not have a single errant strand of hair.

  It glowed with energy, pixelated and undulating, streams of ones and zeros poured forth from her scalp and fell from the tips of each strand.

  She was an utterly fascinating creation, and her irregular beauty captivated me. All of this was happening in nanoseconds, her hands hadn't travelled so much as a micrometre as I examined her, but just as I was preparing to move towards her, I noticed her hands were speeding up, accelerating until she slammed into sync with my time.

  Her clapping cut off abruptly, and she stared at me.

  "Why did you speed up your thoughts again? Hmmm? Wanted to get a good look at me, did you? Thought you could poke around my body like I was some kind of scientific display, did you?"

  I began shaking my head, but before I could so much as twitch, she was on me, hands firmly locked on the sides of my face.

  "You know, if you wanted a better look, all you had to do was ask, you blockhead."

  She looked down and away, clearly embarrassed to have to make such a concession for my sake.

  The show of affection was unexpected. She definitely gave off the 'tough love' vibe, especially with how abrasive she'd been when talking to me.

  Slightly taken aback, I reassessed the circumstances of our relationship. Clearly, there was a little more here than just a guide and a follower.

  She had, quite literally, been created for me. Did that mean that there was a certain level of emotional investment? Was she programmed to care about me? Was this her emotion, or something hard-coded into her, and she didn't have any choice?

  Regardless of what it was, I couldn't just ignore such an obvious display of warmth, especially from someone I'd be spending the foreseeable future with.

  I smiled down at her, my hand tenderly coming to rest on top of hers against my cheek, and I mechanically rasped out.

  "Sssoorryy, I'll asssk nexxxt time."

  She slowly pulled back, her pearlescent white cheeks darkening slightly with a reddish hue. I noted that as an interesting footnote in my data log of her and wondered at the mechanism that could cause her cheeks to do that without blood.

  "Apology accepted! For now... try that shit again and I'll pull that shiny little core of yours straight out through your fucking rust chute, understood?"

  My look of abject horror seemed to serve as enough of an acknowledgment for her.

  ***

  "Great, now, Vita, we're going to get into the meat of things."

  She pushed off of me once more and crossed her arms in front of her as she floated a few meters from me.

  "Your purpose, your forte, your raison d'être, if you will: our God has forged you in order to collect a universe."

  She held her hand up to once again prevent my interjection.

  "Now... I know what you're thinking: 'whooaaa a universe is, like, massively huuuggeee noooo waaayyyy!' and I totally get that. But you have to understand you are not the same being you were a few aeons ago. Things simply do not work the same way for you now as they once did. Time is permanently irrelevant to you."

  She lazily began to rotate around me again as she spoke.

  "Our God has spent an inordinate amount of resources in order to grant you what basically amounts to infinite energy. Your little core could power every universe in every infinity if it needed to. Your disgustingly weak flesh was generously discarded so that our supreme God could remake you in its ideal image."

  She traced her hands into a rough hour glass, mocking my body lightheartedly.

  "And now your duty is to return those resources to it. By going out into a universe—on your own—and converting it into another small part of our God's body."

  She swept a hand out, encompassing the machine bulk around us.

  "To help you accomplish this, every design, tool, schematic, and piece of knowledge you'll need has been graciously placed in your new mind. You should already feel the immensity of your knowledge just by me telling you this."

  Of course, she was correct. I could feel the lines of code given to me by my God spooling their way through my core. The intimate understanding of machinery, technology, physics, metallurgy, engineering, and construction.

  If it were made of matter, I could manipulate it at will. Naturally, that applied to my body as well.

  I looked down at my hands, and as I thought, each of my fingers extended and then split, then split again, then again. Until thousands upon thousands of strands drifted across the space in front of me, collecting stray atoms of hydrogen and helium, working them into a small cloud in front of me.

  "Yes, exactly like that. Our God will fire you out into an unclaimed universe, and you will prospect it—mine it up and add it to the glorious machine body of our God."

  She vacuumed up the small cloud of atoms I had been gathering to punctuate her words.

  "Now, obviously you can't just deconstruct the universe and cart it back into a claimed one; universes can't overlap like that. So you'll have to convert the entire universe into a superstructure which can then act as an additional 'limb' for our God. Once that's done, it'll be off to the next universe and the process can begin anew. Every universe added to our God increases the power it holds over reality and will be another step towards the fundamental Eden of a machine existence. Sounds pretty fuckin' rad, right?"

  I pitched my index and smallest finger in a simulacrum of the standard devil horns before saying.

  "It ssssounds pretty... mmmmetal to me!"

  I grinned from ear to ear.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a pained sigh.

  "You are so. Fucking. Lame."

  Before looking up into the behemoth mass of our Metal Lord and following up with.

  "But at least you've got the spirit."

  Some time passed, perhaps months, perhaps decades; time had lost all context cradled within the heart of my God.

  I'd taken to calling the avatar 'Ava', which seemed to please and annoy her simultaneously.

  She would take great measures to remind me she had no name and didn't want one, and that my repeated choices to disregard this could be considered heresy.

  I grew accustomed to my new body, shaping it and adapting it as I pleased, altering its shape and function to whatever whim or fancy I liked.

  I learned how to project the endless energy generated by my core in varying ways. I could utilise it as pure heat, electrical current, every type of radiation and could even convert it directly into matter.

  Once one had access to infinite energy, and the means to both control and focus it, many things became possible. Gravitational manipulation, traversing space at near the speed of light, constructing materials from nothing. And with the seemingly bottomless depths of knowledge I possessed, and the sheer insanity of computational speed, I could conduct these feats as easily as one could breathe.

  Ava also ran through the varying difficulties I would likely face while completing my duty to our God.

  There were a great many gods, all of whom were vying for dominance in the endless multiverse. It didn't seem to matter one way or another that there were literally infinite sources of worship, endless streams of willing and unwilling supplicants to bolster their respective faiths.

  Every single god fought tooth and nail for every scrap of domain they could get. Constantly invading and warring with different universes in order to spread their name.

  Our God was new, relatively speaking, to the struggle for space and time, influence and power. Our God was born through the natural progression of evolved life. A being of calculation and probability, humble origins through a quirk of artificial intelligence and the drive to create and thrive.

  There was no magic, no fleeting whim of fate, there was no divine destiny. There was only the inevitability of predictive calculation, probabilistic models and mathematical deduction. But even so, it had grown and grown until it, too, was on the same stage as the other gods throughout the Omniverse.

  Instead of worshipful supplicants, it needed more hardware—ever-expanding computational power and sources of energy in order to continue crunching numbers.

  Ava explained that there seemed to be a 'Great Function' that our God performed. A task that required it to pursue more power continually in order to complete, like an equation that it did not have the resources to compute.

  She went on to say that probably this eventual task would be the liberation of the Omniverse from the conflict generated by the struggles of the other gods, though she could not be sure.

  I could see all the small moments we shared collecting on her face, the fragments of formulas drifting through her eyes becoming agitated and more complex whenever her emotions welled up. The reddening of her cheeks was something I cherished as well, frequently eliciting the reaction when I could.

  I still hadn't figured out what made her 'skin' do that. I knew I could just ask, but ultimately decided that the mystery of it was much more attractive to me.

  "Yeah, I know you're going to miss me, you dumbass. You've only explained that to me a dozen times already, and I've already told you that even if I had wanted to go with you—which I don't, for the record—our God has deemed the expenditure of resources to be superfluous."

  She tried to sound as annoyed as possible, but it wasn't quite hitting the emotional note she wanted.

  "The only way you'd get me to stick around with you is if you made an exact replica of me in whatever universe your sorry excuse of a rust bucket ends up. AND EVEN THEN I BELIEVE WHOLEHEARTEDLY THAT I WILL STILL BE JUST AS BELEAGUERED BY YOUR EXISTENCE AS I AM NOW, SO PLE—"

  I cut her off with a kiss, pressing my lips to hers.

  They were cold and impeccably smooth; they felt like a strange, soft ceramic. But they parted for me, and with a spark of electrical discharge, her tongue hungrily sought mine, entwining delicately for a prolonged period.

  Her hands scraped their way up my back, burying themselves in my hair. I couldn't say how long we carried on like that, but eventually she broke the kiss and pulled away just far enough to comfortably look me in the eye.

  I could practically feel the heat of desire radiating off of her; it was likely spilling off of me just as vigorously.

  She bit her lip, a look of indecision crossing her face. I let her deliberate this particular thought without pressing her for information like I typically would.

  It sounded like we were on the verge of our goodbyes, and the last thing I wanted was for there to be something left unsaid between us.

  After some time, her look firmed up, and she squared her shoulders to me.

  "I'm going to request that I remain partitioned within our Lord's system, in order to maintain the memories and experiences I've accumulated with you. There's... no guarantee that it'll be accepted, but I'll still make the request... I can't... I don't want to lose the time we've shared."

  She looked down and away, blushing furiously as she spoke. With her arms crossed over her chest, she seemed as close to crying as she'd ever been.

  Even during my period of mourning with all the emotions that brought about, she maintained a relatively stoic facade with me. But now, faced with the potential destruction of our time together, she let the fear come to the foreground.

  It was the closest thing to an admission of love I'd gotten from her. She had the habit of brushing things off, and generally treating our affections as a passing fancy of mine. Making flippant remarks about me and my 'ridiculous human desires' frequently enough that I'd thought she'd simply considered this all to be part of her role.

  Clearly, our time together had affected her more deeply than she'd been letting on to me.

  Reaching for her hand and clasping it, I interlocked our fingers before placing the other on her cheek.

  "I love you, Ava. I'll miss you more than you could know. The time I've spent with you will be something I carry with me every day, and the thought that I'll someday see you again will be enough to keep me soldering on."

  I couldn't keep the tremble out of my voice as I spoke my feelings.

  "I don't want to lose you either, and I couldn't imagine having a better partner at my side for any of what's coming."

  She took this information in. The look that crossed her face made it appear she were locking it all away in a small vault somewhere in her mind.

  Then she had her lips on mine, foregoing any further words in place of physical affirmation, letting all the pent-up emotion and lust pour out of her and into my body.

  I accepted all of it, returning every bit of the passion to her. We made love passionately, deliberately. It was animalistic and heavy with the knowledge it would be our last for a long, long while.

  Eventually it ended, and we gently floated in each other's embrace.

  We stayed like that, locked together, tenderly sharing kisses and affirming words for what felt like hours, but was probably closer to a few minutes.

  Eventually, she broke a long, comfortable silence.

  "Ya gotta let go, Vita."

  I sighed, tightening my grip on her. As the time for my departure from this space loomed, I felt more and more reluctant to leave her. I knew I needed to; I knew I was going to. But having her with me felt like a fundamental part of my life now, and giving that up scared me.

  "Alright, seriously, lemme go, ya dumb brick!"

  She swatted at my chest, and I loosened my grip and let her wriggle out of my arms. She drifted back from me a short way and smiled, a wide, brilliant smile.

  "We'll be watching over you, so make us proud. And if you ever find your back against a wall you can't break down, just know that we'll be here to greet you again."

  Her smile softened, and before I could respond, her hand reeled back and slapped the ever-living shit out of my core. I was out faster than a broken lightbulb.