Goddess's Kiss
Meyneth had wanted to create life that could feel, first of all; perhaps spiteful, she was, to remember the accusations of an unfeeling earth, one where no one could find true companionship or (let alone) power, and to draw on that thread, a measureless crystalline wire of lavender and lace, in order to create - lovingly mold and fashion - a creature which facsimiled feeling far better than it had any right to.
A battle android. A waking walker with a visor and a vendetta. A body that saw without eyes, felt without a mind.
(No mind? No soul? Of course, not, but then, Meyneth had always been the rationalist, once upon an ago. She had always been wary of the creep of the layman's AI.)
Meyneth showed, in her creation of KOS-MOS, that she understood feeling. She understood care, love, sacrifice. She understood the promiseful blossom of new beginning.
And she loved KOS-MOS, of course.
Her red eyes. Her pale indigo hair. Her gentle, stern affect.
Her infinite efficiency, or else her endless quandary of instructional despair.
Once upon a time, Meyneth's example would have been the assemblage of a peanut butter sandwich. The pinnacle of mundane - again, layman's - algorithm, patterned duly to the routines of a mid-century scientist, a century and an unbreakable lightyear dehence. But she and KOS-MOS, beings of the beginning of the rest of the world, did not eat. Neither did the Machina, who came next, and imbibed ether-infused water.
The Machina were less innately human than KOS-MOS was, decorated with externalized unplugged wires and impossible spindle heels. They reflected the otherworldliness that Meyneth herself now felt, clad in headdress and arcane tattoos.
KOS-MOS was simple. KOS-MOS was minimal, like a machine. But of course, she was much more than that.
She did not know the things the Machina knew. She learned them, instead. She started from the beginning.
The questions KOS-MOS asked of her goddess were only those briefly intuitive from the knowledge which she had been bestowed. She could not make the type of inferences that perhaps might have been best suited to a world burgeoning, a Titan erecting itself from out of the barren bottom of the sea.
(No coral, in this ocean. No bacteria. No untserlife.)
"What will you do, Meyneth, if you expire before the Machina?"
What will I do. I will be expired, of course.
"This is why I have you here, KOS-MOS. I do not believe this world truly has a need for gods, but if you are so good as to act in my stead..."
"I did not create your children," KOS-MOS dutifully points out. "I cannot know how they will respond to a new...figurehead deity."
Oh, Meyneth doesn't like that at all. KOS-MOS is more a partner mother to the Machina, a secondary soul of the Mechonis that history will not know (indeed, the likes of Neonik are not knowledgeable about KOS-MOS; sometimes Meyneth wonders if they can even see her).
KOS-MOS doesn't call her Lady, and Meyneth had firmly forbidden the idea of Mistress.
"You will guard me, KOS-MOS, will you not?" Meyneth allows herself a smile. "That I might not expire, before it is my due time."
KOS-MOS makes an expression approximating the pinch of a frown. She stands silent for a moment, arms at sides though Meyneth can sense the tic of a cross.
"I do not know when that is."