SOMA (LGBT-scifi-romance)

Chapter Twenty-Four: Aster and Isabel

Sector 74: Hunter Green

Nov. 25, 446 AC

Fifteen Years Earlier, Elsewhere...

Aster was made from the body of a five-year-old African girl, dead of radiation. Aster never knew her name, nor retained any of the girl's memories, but there were no marks on the girl's body, and Aster always thought she was loved.

Aster was programming: a complicated assembly that took seven sessions to write, and by the fifth, she knew how to scream as currents of data burned into the creases of her mind. After she was made, she spent months at Sanctuary, stored in a gel bed with a screen for stimulation and a latch just beyond her reach. She stretched and strained in the gel for days, and then weeks, as her programs cycled and filled her newfound body.

Finally, when Aster reached the latch and unlocked herself, the Sanctuary staff had toweled her off, dusted her skin with stinging disinfectant powder, and presented her to the family who had commissioned her.

It was a young couple: Nathan and Nadia Sall, who wanted a strong, clever syn to watch over their difficult daughter. They brought Aster to their lunaroid home, to a modest rock with a garden and a blue-crystal fence encircling the property. The long, paved path up to their hatch was lit with orange nuclei. Around them, their miniature barrier shimmered. They kept their oxygen levels higher than recommended.

Aster's legs shook like a newborn deer's as she stepped over the threshold.

The first time she met Isabel Sall, the girl was decapitating a stuffed animal on the floor of the living room, flinging up fistfuls of stuffing. Isabel had a small face filled with brown eyes, and messy black hair that curled with humidity. She was boyish and thin-limbed, with dark skin that glowed. When her parents berated her, she screamed and locked herself in her room. Aster thought her a perfect monster.

Isabel Sall was special.

A lot of synthetics believed their owners were special, but in Aster's case, it was quantifiable. Isabel measured one-eighty in new intelligence quotient tests, breathtakingly high even in a society built on engineered children. But Isabel Sall was also born wrong.

It took her four years to speak, seven before she spoke in full sentences. School made her nervous, and she lashed out at teachers and students alike. Even Isabel's parents were frightened of her volatile tempers and barbed tongue. When she broke a boy's arm in grade school, the Salls decided to purchase help from Sanctuary.

Isabel had thrown a tantrum the first few times they met. Even struck Aster across the face and thrown things at her head. But slowly, Aster realized that school and society were poor measurements of the girl. She did not resort to violence because she was unintelligent.

She did it because humans did not fit the algorithms in her head.

It took Aster a year to earn Isabel's trust. Once, six-year-old Isabel struggled with a kata in the virtual game Aria Eternal. Her fingers were still too clumsy for fine motor controls, even if her mind could solve the puzzles in an instant. After ten minutes of struggle, Isabel flung her red headpiece at the cushions and turned to Aster. "Get me lyre," she demanded brokenly.

"I am a syn. I cannot interface with games," Aster said. Instead, she put a hand over Isabel's and switched functions. "I will teach you instead."

Isabel never fought her after that, and eventually, even the insults about Aster's weight dwindled. Isabel unfurled: talked about school sometimes, ranted and cursed her classmates and teachers alike. After their first summer together, Isabel clung to Aster like a leech during meals and cried when they took her from Aster's side for school.

Isabel hated school. She lived most of her life in the gloom of her room among codes and matrices, with Aster playing translator to her tantrums. An imprint of her headpiece was permanently carved around her eyes, and her ears were bent from it. She saw all her school marks before they were released, read all the news and events of the moon rings before they appeared in colonial announcements. She tried to blackmail their sector owner once, and published three mathematical hypotheses about the aliens in the dragon-horse nebula, beyond the Vela supercluster. Isabel even, and she bragged of this, knew the Man of Means' true name.

When they were both a little older, Isabel brought home a copy of Excape Online.

"Syns can play?" Aster had breathed.

"Yup. EO's created by some old water baroness on Old Earth," Isabel bragged. "It hijacks the official coms towers, but uses different arrays so it can't be traced. Technically, it's not even legal in the colonies, except apparently, every other kid at school has a copy compacted and stored away on a com." And I never knew because I was not their friend, was left unspoken.

"Sounds mysterious," Aster said, scrolling through a myriad of alien races to create her avatar.

"It's supposed to be mind-blowing," Isabel crowed. "Come on, syn, play with me."

They played. Isabel did not find the game particularly special, and quit in a rage after three days. Eventually she returned, but only to use the system for her web of illicit information exchanges and lucrative transactions.

For Aster, EO became her new life. In those virtual boundaries, Aster was no longer just a synthetic, but prince and lover and adventurer in a way her programming never allowed, and most importantly, Isabel's equal. Over the course of four years, Aster made Isabel's the third-ranked crew in Excape Online, and through blackmail and information deals, Isabel made herself a pre-teen millionaire.

Sector 74: Hunter Green

Mar. 03, 454 AC

For a brief period when Aster's physical body was thirteen, their mother Nadia moved out. Nathan Sall had been angry and inconsolable, and one morning when eleven-year-old Isabel had been at semester school, the man had pulled Aster into his study and pressed fervent, punishing kisses to her face and collarbone. Hands invaded. Aster had taken the onslaught with a rigid, trembling terror, retreating back to memories of Isabel. After a few moments of frantic groping, Nathan Sall had been the one to break away, falling to his knees and babbling apologies. Aster stalled out. She trembled next to the man for the better part of an hour. Finally, when her processing had computed the situation, she switched functions, gathered her clothes, and put a hand on Nathan's shoulder. "Calm down, dad," she said, "Mum will come back. I promise."

Nadia returned, and immediately saw through Aster's skittish attempts at normal functionality. Aster hid in Isabel's bathroom, pressing her hands together and breathing raggedly through her mouth. Below, Nadia toppled shelves and howled. Aster fantasized that Isabel might miraculously arrive home from her elite boarding school to save her. Eventually, Nadia found Aster squatting in the tub.

"I do not want to leave you," Aster told her, partly because her processing supplied placating words, and partly because it was true.

"It's not your fault, and we'd never get rid of you," Nadia told her. Even though Aster calculated there was a thirty-three percent chance Nadia Sall was lying, she nodded. She returned to the ruined living room holding Nadia's hand. There, Nadia had bent down and gently kissed Aster on the corner of her mouth, close enough to simulate but far enough that no bad bios triggered in Aster's mind. Across the room, Nathan turned pale.

Nadia straightened, "Twists your stomach, doesn't it?" she demanded. "She's thirteen. And she might as well be your daughter. Aster, I want you to tell this lowlife what you think of him." Try as she might, Aster's synthetic mind was not programmed to hate. She leaned heavily against Nadia's side, watching as Nathan came undone. Isabel's mother pressed Aster against her, and hissed, "Next time you touch my daughters, I'll kill you."

Nathan never touched Aster after that, regarding her with fear and reverence. Nadia never forgave him, and their relationship never reset, manifesting as clipped, barbed exchanges that made Isabel scream. Still, Aster considered hers a happy existence. Most syns, she knew, had much worse.