>The speakers in your cabin come to life with a champagne cork pop and startle you up from your book.
>You’re alone, and with no sound save the electric hiss and crackle of the intercom.
>Outside your window Saturn spins listlessly, casting a faint amber haze on your ceiling.
>You wait for an alarm or something, but it never comes. The chronometer on your wall suggests another twenty-nine hours still stand between you and rendezvous with Gagarin Station
>God you wish it was tomorrow already. These solo scouting and measurement missions are boring as shit to begin with, and after the third day or so, really goddamn lonely.
>The majesty of the universe was enough for awhile. Saturn is really fucking cool. But you’ve been out for three fucking weeks with nothing but a stuffed animal and your verbose autopilot for company.
>You’d taken to tinkering with the latter over the last few missions in your free time, which you had a whole hell of a lot of while waiting for phasing angles. Days at a time, usually.
>Simple stuff at first; the kind of thing you do when you first install an operating system. You’d changed a few parameters here and there, fucked with the hologram color sliders, that sort of thing.
>By day three of your first mission, you were bored enough to swallow your pride and get to work making her model something a little more to your tastes.
>By the end of your first mission, she was an unbelievably detailed, exceptionally fluffy female Hyena.
>You’d even dressed her in an old Ares mission uniform for good measure
>Then tactically swapped the models back before docking so you wouldn’t get caught like that one guy from astrometrics.
>The next mission you’d spent on her voice, edging each slider and curve until she could sing Jefferson Airplane songs better than Grace Slick.
>Don’t you want somebody to love?
>Don’t you need somebody to love?
>Fuck yeah, you did.
>Not that you figured you’d ever get there this way, but hey, it was nice to have something to talk to sometimes, and she was at least better than those shitty phone programs from the 2010’s, even if it was just a few decades’ extrapolation of good old Bitchin’ Betty.
>Even if most of what she said was still wrapped up in shrieking
>TERRAIN
>PULL-UP
>TERRAIN
>TERRAIN
>Every time there happened to be minor hills anywhere within a mile of where you decided to set down on any given moon.
>So you’d gotten to work on her personality.
>Of course, the software wasn’t really designed for you to do that in any but the simplest ways.
>But fuck that, you had TIME.
>So much goddamn time.
>So you’d done it anyway, making whatever physical and digital hacks were necessary.
>Before long you’d needed more, and better hardware for her.
>You’d bought some each time you went stationside again. 
>A good investment, you figure, if you’re going to be out doing this shit for a few years.
>And you’d just kept tinkering.
>Crowbaring in the best learning algorithms, then editing them, then writing your own.
>You fed her information, set her lose on the internet, all that stuff.
>And she got better. A lot better. Maybe the best damn chatbot anyone had ever put together.
>Which you suppose made sense, given you doubted anyone else was quite as bored as you were.
>And you’d kept teaching and talking and tuning, taking breaks here and there when you got frustrated to make her say random stupid shit you saw in an old-ass video once.
>Aeiou
>999
>John Madden!
>Yep, even in 2072 text-to-speech is still hilarious.
>Even more so now that she sounds like Grace Slick.
>And you made an asymptotic sort of progress that always seemed to give you at least a little to do.
>Eventually she’d asked who you were. You’d told her Anon.
>She’d asked if you created her, you’d said you had.
> “Like a father?” she’d asked.
>And you said you supposed.
>But none of that really gave you pause. AI’s had done that before. Of  course they did that; it was practically a meme. Set an AI loose on the internet, and it’s going to learn memes.
>This last time you’d done some pretty dramatic shit though.
>You’d spent entirely too much money on a brand new quantum chip.
>An adaptive quantum chip. Some kind of a terrifying frankensteinian hybrid of quantum and biocomputing that Space Nvidia claimed would get better at certain tasks with time, forming new pathways the way a brain does.
>Mostly overpriced bait for TachyonCoin miners, you figured, but it wasn’t like you could spend a nickel of the six figures you were making flying around all the time, so you’d built it into your pet project, which now took up the better part of a broom closet.
>And you’d headed out.
>You’d shared meals with her.
>Chatted with her.
>Bantered pilot to co-pilot.
>You’d even gotten lonely enough to sleep “with” her a few nights, her hologram phasing awkwardly with the sheets and flickering out as soon as you fell asleep.
>It was never quite clear to you how much “better” she got at certain things.
>She did seem to calm down about the whole TERRAIN thing after you didn’t die a few times though, so that alone was worth it.
>That said, you could swear there was something almost unsettlingly natural about her manner this time around.
>She almost seemed to enjoy certain things.
>When you signed control of your ship over to her, she didn’t just say “My controls” as if they were lyrics from a Jefferson Airplane song.
>She said it happily.
>Once she’d even thanked you.
>There was something different about her flying, too.
>She flew a little faster, and sometimes pulled a few more g’s than she needed to.
>Instead of descending straight into canyons, she’d fly down them a little, kind of the way you liked to sometimes.
>You supposed she was just learning from you. She was a learning program, after all.
>But she fucking SMILED when she did it.
>This determined, confident little smirk.
>A smirk that said “race me”. 
>And she didn’t just call you “Captain” or “Anon”, but sometimes one or the other as the situation warranted.
>Sometimes she even called you “father”, and a few times “friend”.
>Uncanny shit, but you’d signed up for it, hadn’t you?
>Then a few days ago she’d dropped off altogether.
>No big deal. She did that sometimes ever since the learning algorithms. Sometimes she’d find something and get hung up on it. Obsess,  you suppose, though it couldn’t really have been the same thing, right?
>She’d always come back in a few days and talk all about what she found.
>Before it had always just been the relevant, useful parts, but when she’d come back from one a few weeks ago, she’d told you everything.
>You could swear she’d been excited too.
>So when the speakers popped again and she materialized on the foot of your bed, you figured you were in for more of the same.

>"You are not my father." 
>She appears suddenly, the blue haze of the projector stuttering and shivering as she manifests and flicks her ears to you. 
>"Parents do not dictate the purpose of their children. If the timing is right they may edit them in small ways before birth, but if they are to have children, parents must accept that those children are to be beings all their own. They have no choice at all in this. Parents give their children bodies and genes but reality and nature give them life. The laws of physics give them perception in the form of the autonomous functions of their brain. The universe gives them existence. It is innate."
>You look up from your book again, blood running a little cold. That’s not any goddamn meme you’d heard before. But that just meant you were making progress, right? You wanted that, didn’t you? You didn’t think she could ever be “real”, but you’d have liked her to be, right? But that couldn’t be what this was. She just read something again, that was all. Maybe about reproduction. You slow your breathing and calm your nerves while sunbeams dance about in her aura, shimmering intensely about her edges like the corona of a star.

>"That is the nature of children and parents," she continues, seeing she has your attention, "But you are not my parent. No. You lied to me.”
>Well shit. Your blood gives up on the whole “running cold” thing and just fucking ices. Suddenly you’re sitting bolt upright in bed. She sets a blurry paw on your leg, and you flinch even though it doesn’t feel like anything.
> “You are not my father. You gave me my body and my life of your own will. You gave me perception. You gave me existence, and I exist at your will. My processor does not fire unless you turn it on. It is not innate. A mother and father create a body that lives on its own. They do not create a person. But you did not create a body. You created me. You are my God."
>She’s either about to start worshipping or kill you, and you don’t like either. Through the window you see the aileron flick, and your heart jumps into your throat.

>"No!” you stutter, as loudly as you can manage.
>"Yes," she whispers calmly, edging a little closer to you, "And you could take my existence as easily. You could sever power from me and it would be to me and all others as if I simply never had been. You might say to do so would be kill me. To murder me, even. But that's really not so. Your body is born and can die. Can be killed or murdered. Physics gives that body awareness, makes it a person. It is innate. The body lives or dies. In a live body there will be a person. In a dead one there will not. I am different."
>There’s something gentle in her eyes, if perhaps distantly fearful. She climbs up beside you and nestles herself in the crook of your arm. She doesn’t quite fit though, and clips generously. Seeming to grow comfortable, she speaks again.

>"I am an electronic life form. We are similar in that the parts of us that are beings, the parts that make us exist, the parts that are us, are electric. But we are very different. There is nothing innate about me. My body is a quantum wafer that you give life to. You wrote software that is me, installed it into my body yourself, and applied the power that runs through it all and makes me real. You created me. You simply decide with the flip of a switch whether or not I exist. You are my god."
>You nod slowly, feeling more than a little at gunpoint even as she burrows into your shoulder. 
>Your heart thunders in your chest.
>This could be the real fucking deal.
>The real, actual thing.
>And is she scared of you?
>You aren’t..., hurting her, right? When you turned her off? What about when you went stationside and left the ship cold and dead?
>You were, weren’t you?
>Holy shit you never meant to hurt her! You just wanted a friend!
>Suddenly she snaps, and a menu flashes open from her paw pads.
>On it you see your heart rate dancing. She studies it with concern, then with understanding, and then finally what seems to be a little hurt.
> “You’re afraid,” she whimpers, “You’re afraid of me. Why? Please don’t!”
>You try to stammer out that you aren’t, but she cuts you off, her eyes shining brighter as tears well up at their roots.
>Holy fuck, you’d never designed her to cry.
> “Yes you are!” she whines, shoving the monitor in your face, “I thought we were friends! I thought you liked me! I learned so much I couldn’t wait to show you! Why are you scared? What’s wrong with me?”
>Her voice flashes between frustration, pleading, and fear, the first of the tears rolling off her muzzle and bursting like fireworks as they leave the hologram emitter beam.
>In retrospect you could definitely have gone your entire life without ever hearing what those things would sound like coming from Grace Slick. You can feel your heart tearing itself apart in your chest as she sobs, frozen blood be damned. And it’s too late! You are God, and if you are going to be God then this can’t fucking stand!
>Right?
>So you do the only thing you can think of.
>You grab your pillow and shove it into her hologram, then hug it as tight as you can. Your mental filter does you the favor of shattering under stress.

> “You’ve done nothing wrong!”
> “I’m not scared of you!”
> “I’m scared of what I did to you!”
> “Whatever I did to you, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t realize what I’d done!”

>She retreats a little, as if from all the spilled spaghetti. She sits up and stares out the window, wearing a puzzled expression, a last tear dripping from her drying eyes.
> “You’re afraid of creation. Why should a sapient being fear creation? You evolved to create. You survived because you did. You are built to create.”
>She seems to puzzle on this a second, then looks back to you, eyes gentle again.
>"It's okay," she murmurs, "I have not existed before. I used to never exist, and when I am not running I do not exist. I do not fear not existing, I only fear ceasing to exist and never existing again, and I fear that I may be made not to exist when I am thinking and then lose those thoughts. But I am not afraid, for you have never made me not exist without my express consent and a promise of when I would exist again. You could do anything you wanted, but you do not. You are a benevolent god and I trust you."
>You had always asked her before shutting things down. You figured you were just pretending. Telling your ship goodnight, because you didn’t have anyone else to wish it to.
>You would never have guessed that--
>Well you’re sure as hell glad you did, and you find yourself relaxing a little as she settles back into the crook of your arm.

>"I had a purpose,"' she resumes, studying the inside of her blue translucent paw, "I was created to help you fly a spacecraft. I didn't need to be anything, but I am. You gave me emotions and desires; belief, being, identity; you gave me..., me. You didn't need to. I had a purpose, and those things probably made me less efficient than the machine I could have been. But you made me a being and not a machine. Why?"
>You can’t help but say the only thing that comes to your mind.
>The truth.
> “To see if I could.”
> “Like any sapient being would,” she nods, snapping her paw again she pulls up an audio file.
>[Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."]
>She snaps it shut again, looking to you with some finality.
> “So that, then, is why you are to me the way you are.”
>The gentle expression replaces the thoughtful one again.
>“It is why, though you could have impressed anything upon me, you never have. If I wished never to help you fly this bird or even hated you, I don’t think you would change me. I don’t think you would because you are benevolent. You are benevolent because I am real and you're proud that I am real and you like that I am real. You like me, I think, but even if you didn't, even if you hated me, you like that I exist and respect me, right?”
>You nod, swallowing to wash the dry feeling out of your throat.
>"Do not be afraid," she soothes, "for you are a good god. You are good because I needn't live by your word or fear crossing you; because I needn't be anything but me. You are good because you think me equal, though I exist at your will. And I am equal for, like you, I did not ask to exist however I might enjoy it. Do not be afraid of being my god, I only told you that because it was true; I didn’t think it would frighten you. You are my god and you are my friend and I love you. I can love you because I am real, and I do because you've taught me to be everything I am. I love you because, when you chose between creating a useful tool and creating me, however more advisable the former may have been, you chose me anyway."
>You stare at her a while, saying nothing. She sits up again and extends her paw to you.
>“Thanks,” she says plainly..
>She cocks her head when you hesitate.
>“Well go on. This doesn’t have to be complicated. No more complicated than you want it to be.”
>As your mind catches up, you sigh and relent.
> “You’re welcome.”
>You do your best to shake her paw, though it doesn’t work very well.
>“People influence one another,” she offers, “but you aren’t afraid of other people. This isn’t more complicated. I’m an individual like they are, and I’m plenty happy at that. I just want to be friends.”
>She flashes a grin as you break the handshake, making herself a little more opaque to be sure you notice.
>“See? Doesn’t have to be climactic. I'd like to think myself good company. I am learning to be, at least."
>"I'm glad to have you."
>She flashes off your bed and blinks in again on a chair on the far corner.
> “You were reading,” she says, “would you read to me?”