Haseul had never thought the opening of a sliding door could be loud. 

Until Yeojin barrelled in, with heavy boots and a voice to match. 

“Our cyborg queen requests your presence!” 

Hyunjin’s head snapped up. “I told you to stop calling her that.” 

Yeojin shrugged. “She’s fine with it.” She went over to Haseul. “And cyborg’s a better fitting term than android, you know.” She squinted at her. “Unless the neurodoc has a better idea?” 

Haseul actually didn’t mind the name. It was better than using a title she’d dropped. “By definition, she’s an android, because more of her’s synthetic than biological, but I’d say she’s still a cyborg.” 

Yeojin raised a brow. “Why?” 

“Her brain.” Haseul pushed herself to her feet, stretching out her back. “It’s not a computer. Not all of it at least.” She went to the door. “Where am I supposed to go?” 

“I’m the one taking you.” She went over to her. “Heejin wasn’t letting me come while you were working.” 

Haseul sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Yeojin. She was just a lot to handle. She wasn’t even that young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, but it would be a stretch to say anything over that. No, Haseul’s grudge came from her spending the entire first day of Haseul’s captivity grilling her first on the fingers she’d built, then about the Earth system, and finally all about Kepler. She was a demon, because she hadn’t hesitated to hold the way Haseul had been caught above her head and practically cackle at the failure.  

And now that she knew it was a setup—and that Yeojin had known it was as well—that made her even worse. 

“I went through your files,” Yeojin said. “You’re kind of a badass.” 

“Kind of?” Haseul repeated. 

She waggled her fingers. “These're cool, whole thing with Eden’s awesome, but you did get caught and you didn’t even try breaking out.” 

Haseul resisted the urge to flick her forehead (it would've been extremely painful). “I’m on a ship made specifically to transport the queen,” she said. “Breaking into it is impossible, and getting out of it isn’t likely either.” 

“Right,” Yeojin nodded, “and even if you’d gotten to the escape pod or your ship, I would’ve gotten you right back.” 

And that was why Haseul had the privilege of meeting this girl: she was apparently one of the best pilots in the Coruscant system. There had to be another reason why Viian would let her be on a ship like this? Protection? A favour? Or had the queen been charmed by the girl’s antics? And what did that say about Viian if she had? 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Haseul muttered. 

Yeojin pressed the code to a door, covering her hand.

“I know how to hack those things, you know,” Haseul told her. “No use hiding the code from me.” She showed off her fingers. She’d checked. Hyunjin had only taken out the cameras and the knives. The rest of the mechanisms were, interestingly enough, still intact. 

Yeojin shrugged. “I’d like to see you try. Twojin made them.” 

“Twojin?” 

She smirked. “You’ve seen the two of them, right? Heejin’s been in love with her since the Academy. Hyunjin’s probably been in love with her, but you can never tell with her.” 

“She is,” Haseul said. “I’ve seen someone like her before, she—” She could’ve kicked herself. 

Yeojin’s brow rose. “Are you the Heejin in this situation?” Her hand was still on the dial. She hadn’t opened the door yet. 

“No,” she groaned, “a friend.” She heard the alarm in her head then. The screaming. “Open the door, please.” 

“Please?” Yeojin repeated. The door slid open. “Didn’t know you had manners.”

“You need to have them to be able to recognise them,” Haseul replied. Then she went in. 

Yeojin didn’t follow. Surprisingly enough. 

The lights had been dimmed. They were a deep orange, not the usual blinding white or warm gold the ship had. 

And then she saw the boxes. At least twenty, either wrapped in grey foil, secured in steel, or the new plastic that Jupiter had developed. 

“I can unpack it if you’d like,” Viian was standing by the far window, “but I know that opening such things makes for most of the fun.” She took her eyes away from the expanses of space behind her. “However, before you get to that, I did think it was the right time for you to see what you’re dealing with.” 

Haseul blinked. “Now?” 

The queen walked over to a chair. There were several wires coiled neatly on the seat. A monitor was on a table beside it. “Now, unless you’re tired.” 

“Tired?” Haseul repeated. “You’re the one with a timebomb, aren’t you?” She regretted the words as soon as she said them. 

“It’s not acting that fast,” Viian replied. “We’ve managed to slow its progress enough.” She sat down.

“How?” 

The queen pressed on electrodes, as well as other bands, all endowed with wires. “We disabled the main network settings and Heejin put in some barriers. I don’t know how any of them work, but I’m still standing, and sane.” She waved at the monitor. “Could you turn it on?” 

Haseul smiled at the way she spoke. “Sure thing, Your Majesty.” She went to the console. It was familiar. She knew which buttons to press. “Is this—“ She gasped when the screen came to life, showing her the data. Then the recreation of the networks. The queen’s neural network. 

“Your work,” Viian said, “but based on other machines that came later.” 

Haseul tried not to think about the last time she’d worked on a machine like this. Hers had been a lot more sophisticated, a lot more capable too. Then again, it hadn’t had the detail this one had. “You improved it?” 

“Hyunjin did. Along with a few others I won’t tell you the name of yet.” 

It didn’t take long to see it. Some of the signals were almost constant. Purely electrical. The rest of the neurons didn’t fire like normal ones did either. 

“How did they do this?” Haseul asked. “Reconstruct it? All of it?” 

“They didn’t have the time for everything,” she said. “Father told everyone I was recovering from the explosion. I didn’t have a public appearance for a year.” A long pause. 

Haseul looked up from the screen. 

Viian’s eyes were on the wall. She looked far away. 

Like before, Haseul realised what all this actually meant. She focused on the computer and looked for what was actually wrong. 

She found it. 

“They prioritised my memories, as well as the segments that made up the personality, speech patterns, that sort of thing.” Viian spoke slowly, a bit strained. 

“None of the motor skills then,” Haseul said. 

“Not even breathing.” A small chuckle. It was forced. “That was all programmed.” 

Haseul had seen that. She was also seeing how the virus was being kept from it. Heejin had actually been able to secure it. Except placing barriers and removing the intruder were two very different things. Especially if the intruder had multiplied and spread out. 

No, something else was at risk there. It wasn’t even the things that’d been purely programmed. Those were safe. The virus was going after the things that hadn’t been made from scratch. Viian herself. 

“It runs fine now,” Viian said. “Clearly.” Then she took in a sharp breath. 

“What’s wrong?” Haseul asked. 

“Nothing,” she waved a hand, “have you found it yet?” 

“Yeah.” Haseul shut the machine off. 

She didn’t miss how the queen relaxed. 

“You should’ve had Heejin point that out to me immediately,” Haseul said. “Or told me being on the machine too long would’ve hurt.” 

Viian peeled off everything she’d stuck on. “I know you’d work well under pressure,” she said. “But that wouldn’t exactly make any of this experience better.” She stood up. 

“It probably hurts for a reason though,” she shot back. “What if the exposure drives the virus?”

“It doesn’t,” Viian replied. “It’s sophisticated, but they didn’t manage to make it that wonderful.” She shuddered. “So that at least proves they’re not complete experts.” She walked over to her, giving her a small smile. “It hurts because my mind’s very vulnerable to that specific sort of strain.” 

“You mean the whole controlling computers thing?” 

“Another augmentation my father thought would be good to have,” she said. “It’s useful if I’m out anywhere and want to slowly take in the information of the devices around me.” She shrugged. “But that same improvement is the reason why I have this in the first place.” 

Haseul hadn’t gotten to that yet. Jinsoul and the other two on her team had sometimes let their opinions show. She wondered how many ‘improvements’ had been shot down and how many had been begrudgingly implemented. 

“Whatever’s on your mind right now,” Viian’s smile grew, “you can say it.”

“It might’ve been better to just keep your head simple,” Haseul said. “Did you really need any of those improvements?” 

She laughed slightly. “I won’t answer that.” She went to the boxes. “That machine. It’s more precise than others, yes,” she looked back to Haseul, “but there are ones that can actually use invasive measures, correct?” 

Haseul froze. They couldn’t have known that. Or did Aphrodite’s reach go that far? 

Viian walked back. “Ours is only a sensor. Heejin managed what she did with her own hardware, not this.” She was holding a tablet. “This has been our plan to get the virus out. I had them order what they thought they needed. We asked Jinsoul and she added to the list, but we have little more to go on.” 

Haseul took it. The first thing that came up were plans for a machine that looked like an old full-body scanner from ages past. This was from the Earth system, dated from about twenty years ago. It was used for surgeries, specifically tumours. 

“This won’t be solved by a surgery,” Haseul said. 

“I know.” She moved to the next one. “We’ve compared different machines, ones made in the past, but also very current ones.” She stopped at a diagram from the Kepler system from a year ago. 

It wasn’t for the entire brain, but rather specific regions. For replacement of the cells. With the right cell culture. 

“Wow,” Haseul breathed. 

“Things have come far,” Viian said. “But none have managed what you wrote about. Direct alteration?” 

She felt cold then. “That was hypothetical.” A lie, one she hadn’t needed to tell for a long time. 

“It’s the specific version of what made my mind work in the first place.” Viian took the tablet away. “One that needs its fair share of improvements,” she said carefully. “But it’s the same principle.” 

Haseul shook her head. “Your brain’s built on the principle of copying, recreating the patterns.” She tried to school her features into something calm. “This was changing things. Manipulating them.” Too much, she told herself. “That’s not the right machine for this.” 

Viian frowned at her. “Are you sure?” 

“Yes, I’m sure," she snapped. Her tone was way off. She knew Hyunjin would’ve probably slapped her for it. 

Then Viian put the tablet down again. “It’s here if there’s another machine, or improvements to our one.” She went to the door, before turning to her. 

She wondered then if Viian was going to force her to build it. Then she'd probably have to find a way off of here. Or she'd just comply. 

And destroy her work afterwards. 

“We haven’t tried everything possible,” said the queen. “I haven’t even had this for that long and we don’t think it’ll be deadly for some time. You’d have all the time you need to find a way to get this out. You don’t have to have anything to do with that machine that seems to have frightened you.” 

Haseul focused on her fingers. They were her reminder. 

“I don’t know what happened before, Haseul. I only know some of how my own brain works, but that’s because a good part of it was created artificially.” 

Haseul looked up at the sudden emphasis. 

Viian’s gaze softened. “My mind isn’t a brain, not really,” she said. “Cancers can’t grow in it, but viruses can attack it.” 

Haseul swallowed once. “And your point is?” She could practically hear Hyunjin’s threat of using her feet to hammer home the point of respect. 

“You need to treat my brain as if it’s those model networks you’d started with. It’s not a real one, not one made by sodium atoms flying across a cell membrane. It’s pure electricity.” She opened the door. 

A knot in her chest relaxed as she went to it. Still, something was tugging at the back of her mind. 

She paused just outside the room. 

Viian closed it, looking over at her with a raised brow. 

Haseul looked around first to see if there were any stray guards. None. “Did you just tell me you’re like an AI?” 

Viian laughed. “I’m not like one,” she said. “For all intents and purposes, I am one.” She nodded her head at the door. “The code’s 8202018.” 

And then she was walking away. 

Haseul stared after her. The way the queen spoke, it felt wrong. 

And the way she’d spoken about Earth. Haseul actually believed her when she said she didn’t know. If she had known, she’d have probably said it outright. Maybe even tried to guilt trip her. 

Then again, would she have? Haseul felt lightheaded. 

The queen had the technology to make synthetic lifeforms, people who could probably hack anything around them if they wanted to. People who could go from being armoured to normal within minutes. 

But where were they? It’d been years. There could’ve been an army by now. Unless she'd been telling the truth. 

I’m one of the only working synthetic lifeforms that can live in some parallel to a human. 

Haseul felt cold again. That was why it hadn’t sounded right. Viian had a guess about what had happened in the Earth system and that was why she’d emphasised what she had. She didn’t think she was human. 

When she got back to the room, Hyunjin was playing catch with Yeojin. 

“Do you two work?” Haseul asked. 

“We’re on a break,” Hyunjin replied. Then she frowned. “Are you reconsidering?” 

“No.” She went over to the table and kept reading. 

The other two stopped playing catch and sat down. Neither Hyunjin, nor Yeojin said something other than commenting on whatever was going on in the system. 

It was mundane. Completely boring. 

And it was comforting. 

______

Author's Note 

If there are any confusing bits, do tell. I probably got a tad technical, because the entire android/cyborg idea honestly fascinates me. My favourite thing is honestly to see how science can be integrated into fantasy and science fiction, so I might've ended up going too far? 

Hopefully not, because I want this to be a fun story. Before that though, I really wanted to establish a bit more on the fact that Haseul's got some experience with this. Not making AI specifically, but she knows her way around the science, as well as the tech. Her own history hasn't been completely revealed yet, but I'll be gradually building towards it. 

Either way, I hope you're enjoying this. It's definitely a bit of a passion project for me and I'm having a lot of fun writing these characters. Do let me know what you think so far! 

See you next chapter. 

Twitter: hblake44