Artificial

10 | Cameras

I open my comms, and a long stream of red missed-calls notifications floods my mind. The connection I have on Shelly's ship is spotty, and I begin searching her ships for her comms room. My father must be worried sick, probably thinking I had perished last night along with his five bodyguards.

Shelly's comms room is utterly different from the rest of her rooms, with the walls being a shell-blue shade with silvery steel accents. A large navigation table sits in the center of the room, humming slightly as it shows our current path and fuel usage. At the front of the room, stands three screens above a control panel.

Settling into the chair, I quickly send a connection to my father. The comm goes through immediately, and his face consumes all three screens, towering over where I'm sitting.

"I thought you had died," my father grinds out through his teeth. "Where the hell have you been Mira?" His hair is disheveled, his usually impeccable suit wrinkled and in disarray.

Maybe it makes me a bad person, but seeing my father in this state oddly stirs a sense of satisfaction within me. I'm comforted by the fact that he cared enough to be disheveled. It's proof to me that my father does love me.

"Elias killed all your men, then chased me through the station. I managed to get on someone's ship before he could catch me." I reach into one of the comparents below the control panel, and dig around until I find the wire I'm looking for. I connect the wire to my neck, then streamline all my recent memories to my father. My recent memories that don't include the members of the Tiara.

"This is why I never wanted you to leave earth, Mira. You can't let him live, not if you want to live. X4T9F has no capacity for human logic and emotion."

The way my father spoke about Elias felt familiar, almost as though he knew him better than he let on.

"You have history with him." It's not a question, but a direct statement, and I know I've struck gold when my fathers posture immediately stiffens.

"X4T9F is a model trained on destruction by evil people. He was created around the time that I had created you. Except, the people who created him, had no regard for morality. They were so caught up in their notion of creating the 'perfect machine,' a learning model that could one day gain consciousness, and maybe a soul, that they failed to see they were creating an abomination."

An abomination. I try to imagine Elias as an abomination, but the image doesn't come. If anyone was the abomination, it would be me. At least Elias is whole, fully robotic. I'm nothing but splices and cuts of DNA and code, mashed together to create amalgamation of traits and characteristics.

"Thirteen years ago," my father continues, "the artificial intelligence model had a break. X4T9F malfunctioned, killing all of the scientists and engineers in the lab. 47 people dead, all who were his creators. The only researchers that had survived were the ones who were off-planet when the break happened."

"And you didn't think this was important to mention until now?" I ask passively, crossing my arms.

"I thought you would have no trouble killing him. It was supposed to be a fast expedition," he snaps. It was so like my father, Lewis Bronson, to hide a compliment within an insult. "And I'm telling you now because Elias now knows who you are and what you are." I try not to cringe at the way my father said the word what. "What I didn't tell you, is that before X4T9F killed the 47 researchers, he was responsible for the death of over a hundred children. Children like you, born into the laboratory, half human, half mech."

Children like me. For a second, I think I misheard him, that maybe I had too much to drink and I was hearing things. But logically, I know what I heard, and it goes against everything my father had ever told me.