The alarm suddenly went off, compelling my husband and I to wakefulness. “Master, Mistress. I’ve taken the liberty of getting you breakfast from that restaurant you like.” We pulled ourselves out of bed and I opened the door. Her name was Aya (綾), and she had the appearance of a lovely tan woman with amber eyes, a short black bob cut, dressed like a French maid, and standing 153 cm tall. She was always up before as well as after us and insistent that she help me with my beautification. I let my husband take a shower first while I went to the living room and turned on the TV and ate two bean and cheese tacos. After he got out of the shower, which never took more than five minutes, it was my turn. Aya insisted that I let her wash and dry my hair, which I always agreed to for the sake of time, given its floor length. It was only beneath her synthetic skin that her golem nature was immediately apparent. A machine made to appear human.

My name is Ai (嬡). I am 145 cm tall and 34.3 kg with tousled flame red hair which naturally reaches down to the floor. After my shower, Aya prepared my hair by parting it in the middle and arranging it into three buns: two on opposite sides of my head and tied almost like a knot to allow enough hanging through them to reach my knees standing, and a third larger occipital bun with no tail. As she did, she began to sing in a lullaby style which was morphologically and phototactically sophisticated, but which carried no semantic meaning. I never taught her how to do this, but after years of listening to me sing such songs to my children, she seemed to have mastered the ability, even picking up the most minute nuances. Finishing up she told me, “Your hair is so lovely, Mrs. Ai. I wish you wouldn’t insist on an undercut.”

I reinformed her, “It weighs too much.”

She told me, “I remember.”

After dealing with the hair, she did my makeup. She painted large panda-like red spots over my eyebrows, colored my eyelids, which were monolids with a clear inner epicanthic fold, with a vibrant blue eye liner, lightened my facial stripes to a 1 with a synthetic pigment, painted a vibrant red dot on the center of my forehead, then circumscribed it with three flower petals pointing left, right, and up with a straight pointed flair at the tip of each. When she was done, she earnestly said, “You look lovely as always, mistress”.

I was born with heterochromia, so my left eye is azure blue while the right is jade green. My skin is as dark as 29 on the Von Luschan’s chromatic scale with a spotted pattern as light as 12 on my back, shoulders, and the sides where my hip meets my thighs. The stripes that were meant for me had never managed to develop and displace the spots of my youth except for four which formed two symmetrical pairs of stripes on my face, stretching from my jawline towards, but never touching my button nose. I had, minimal brow ridges, wide cheekbones, and flatter nose bridge.

I was the daughter of a stone age tribe’s chieftain; my beloved husband, was the son of a xenoanthropologist from a Type III civilization from another galaxy. We were inseparable childhood friends and he started to notice me as a potential future bride when we were both 11 years of age, right about the time I started to notice him for a similar reason. With the permission of our parents, we were allowed to marry when I was 14 and he was 15 years old.

Our first journey together was not in space, but rather across the vast ocean. A year before our marriage, he revealed to my people the existence of an uninhabited island with a vast amount of copper, bronze, and iron ore deposits. My people had known how to smelt and work these metals for generations, but our continent’s deficiency in these raw material deposits trapped us in the stone age. He joined the expedition team along with me, sailing alongside us as if he were one of our own. When we returned, he requested my hand in marriage, to which my father would have agreed even if he had not just kicked off the iron age. On our wedding day, which formed an insoluble but subtle bond between us in our very souls imperceptible to the senses, father presented us with the holy spear, forged from a stone of celestial metal (Iron), that fell from heaven centuries ago. Soon after we were wed, his people infused the elixir of immortality, a poison turned panacea, directly into my blood.

I was made like him, eternally youthful, with a spell placed on my flesh that if I were to suffer a mortal wound, I would merely fall into a sleep resembling death instead of dying and if I were placed on life support, I could naturally heal any lost or damaged tissue. We were fruitful and multiplied, with eighteen sets of quadruplets, eight sets of triplets, and three sets of twins. Now, at 430 years of age, I am still often mistaken for being a teenager despite having greeted seven generations of descendants and hundreds of grandchildren.

As a teenager he was slender but very toned, whereas an adult he looked so much different: 214 cm tall, 114.5 kgs, shoulders twice the breadth of his hips, a strong jaw, the musculature of a body builder, short wavy back hair, a fair but freckled complexion, and a case of steatopygia. He, as his people did, underwent a true metamorphosis.

Aya swiftly switched to, “Oh, you don’t need to worry about accounting for relativistic time dilation for the Feast of the Immortals celebration. When we're ready for takeoff I’ll preform the calculations.” These immortals, of course, were divinized sages who revealed the Will of Heaven, always with wonderworking tied to their blessed names. Aya always demonstrated an interest in topics that had nothing to do with her primary purpose, with metaphysics and hagiology being among those many interests.

I got dressed in a strip of linen that covered my breasts in an X pattern straddling my shoulders and neck and wrapping around my back, boot sandals, bracelets of gold around my upper arms with two and a half coils, gold neck rings comprised of five coils, gold wrist ring-bracelets, sapphire earrings, and a knee-length asymmetrical dress with more length on the left side than the right paired with modesty shorts.

My husband told me, “Zoe sent me a message. She, Jane, Shirley, Amity, Sam, and Chandra won’t be back till 15:00, so we won’t be going anywhere, but if we start early, we should be able to get our preparations done long before they get here.” They were our other golems, of a different species and home world to Aya. My husband performed most of the diagnostic checks along with Aya, while I began work on navigation and inventory check. Our stockpile of food, water, and fuel was more than sufficient for the trip. When I got to the animal enclosures, I saw that Aya had already wrangled the Koen, a domesticated ferret-like animal with the disposition of an affectionate cat, and Iun, domesticated entelodont-like animals with the disposition of a hunting dog, into their respective pens.

Things were going fine until at around 12:00. I heard Aya make what sounded almost like a startled squeak of pain. We both stopped what we were doing and went to check on her and when we got there, we saw that she had dropped a few binders worth of papyrus written notes. “It’s my arms. They’re getting worse.” She explained to us.

My husband understandingly told her, “We can delay the launch to address your neuro-motor defects.” We all understood that being so far away from her manufacturer’s home world made it impossible for her to receive regular updates.

She protested, “No, master. It’s…” which he interrupted with the command “Mute.” To which she was compelled to silence.

He asked her, “Do you trust me?” to which she nodded affirmatively. He smiled at her, placing his hand on her shoulder, and promised her, “Then we’ll visit a mechanic in the Low Orbital Station and get your arms fixed.” He released his command with, “Voice.”

She expressed concern, “But master, this could set you back days or weeks depending on what the problem is.”

He reminded her, “Ai and I are functionally immortal. We have plenty of time.” He ordered her one last time, “Aya, rest.”

Aya was not allowed to perform any of the manual tasks, but before she could start fidgeting unaware of what to do with her free time, I walked over to her and told her, “Let me take a look” as my husband went back to maintenance work. I removed her uniform and giving the command, “Brachial divide.” Her upper arms split open in a controlled manner to show me what lay underneath. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Next, I gave the command, “Antebrachial divide.” Her forearm opened in a similar manner. Again, nothing seemed to be wrong. I gave the command, “Dorsal divide.” Her back opened like a blood eagle. Again, that’s not a good sign. “Cervical divide.” The back of her neck opened. There didn’t seem to be an issue with any of the machinery.

Despite being a golem, with greater control over her face and voice, it was obvious that she felt troubled by slowing the preparations down. I sat her down and accessed her memories remotely through one of the ship’s computers. I had intentionally done this in the room my husband was working in so that he would have to take a break and talk with Aya while I ran what diagnostics we had available on her.

Aya asked my husband, “Master, you’re a xenoanthropologist… How many Adams do you think there were?”

My husband told her, “In our observable universe there are 200 billion named galaxies, but only ten percent of them seem capable of supporting complex life (and to varying degrees). My people’s galaxy had approximately ten billion different anthropogenesis events. We have not finished exploring Ai’s galaxy, but the generally accepted estimate is six billion anthropogenesis events for hers.”

She asked him, “Do we know who the oldest of the Adams are?”

He explained to her, “I wouldn’t be able to answer that question. The fact that information can only be propagated at light speed means that information takes a painfully long time to reach across star systems.”

She asked him, “What about the Master and Mistress’ Adams?”

He explained, “My people’s Adam was born 2.9 million years before we achieved spaceflight, while Ai’s people had only existed for six thousand years when first contact was made, and the people who made you were from a lineage about nine million years old.”

She asked him, “But your people reached space long before my creators.”

He explained, “Because time is only one factor influencing technological development. Culture, politics, environment, and other factors are far more important.”

I reminded her, “The only reason my people remained in the stone age, when other tribes had already entered the steel age is because our environment did not provide the required resources to make those advancements.”

Aya admitted, “That makes sense.”

This conversation continued for 32 minutes when the diagnostic scan finally finished. The world we were leaving was currently in its information age phase, with an energy consumption four orders of magnitude below what would be expected of a Type I civilization. Every time we visit a new world, I thank Heaven that the sheer scale of the universe renders traditional warfare impractical to even a civilization as powerful as the one I married into. I will never forget the shock I felt when I learned that less than twenty exiled mercenaries from a Type II civilization with civilian grade equipment jerry-rigged for combat were able to bring a world like this, armed with nuclear weapons, to its knees in under a day. They did not get away with their crimes and were soon put in their place by a larger peacekeeping force which was able to not only use bigger gun diplomacy but able to cut off supply chains to break their will.

When we finished our preparations, we made an appointment with a mechanic on the orbital station and opted to take Aya out to her favorite place in the city. A Temple to the Great Spirit, which appeared to be their culturally tinted understanding of what my people called Heaven, my husband’s people the Supreme Soul, and Aya’s creators called Shàngdì, or Lord Above. Before even entering the temple, she clasped her hands together and prayed, “In the beginning was the Way, and the Way was with Heaven, and the Way was Heaven. What God shall we adore with our oblation? And who could peer through your creation to count your innumerable trichiliocosms...”

Services weren’t for another two hours so we let Aya go and talk to the priests while my husband and I opted to stand outside in the sun. Even at relativistic speeds, it would still be a week for us before we reached our destination 40 light-years away. When the other golems were expected to have returned to the ship, I went to go pry Aya away from the priest.

When we got back home, we could hear the other Golems talking amongst themselves about other worlds. Shirley said, “The Izumi people tell of an even that happened nearly forty thousand years ago.”

“Really? I heard a similar story from the Song people, but they had no specific date,” replied Amity.

Shirley explained, “Apparently geologists have been able to show that it likely happened due to a very small object moving impossibly close to the speed of light striking their sun’s sixth planet.”

Amity asked, “How could they possibly know that?”

Shirley explained “Because unlike other impacts, which leave a near global layer of iridium or some other identifiable material, this impact was made with the same force as large asteroid or comet but left no material evidence of its existence except for the crater itself.”

Amity acknowledged, “While an object of that mass and speed would likely have its mass converted into radiation on impact, what could accelerate anything to such speeds?”

Aya asked, “These stories are mythological accounts of some great calamity, if I am not mistaken?”

Amity confirmed, “That’s what Shirley and I think. Why? You worried?”

That’s when we heard Aya tell her sisters, “The people here have a similar story, except it’s prophetic and not mythological.”

Amity requested, “Could you elaborate?”

Shirley agreed, “Yes, I’d like to hear more.”

Aya continued, “According to the prophetic tradition of the Mei, one day the iniquities of the people will grow to the point that the Great Spirit will no longer be willing to withhold his justice for the sake of mercy. When that day comes, a star will fall from the sky and all the forests of the world will burn and the air will turn to fire. The only people who will survive are those who, will have taken refuge in natural or artificial caves.”

Shirley observed, “I guess that, and the cold war they’re in right now, explains the overabundance of bunkers and survivalists among the Mei.”

Before we took off my husband, over the intercom, explained, “The objects you are referring to are Cosmic Burst Shots. No one knows where they come from, but they do happen.”

He continued, “It’s one of the few things in Heaven’s disposal that still keeps us humble, and it’s probably something we’ll never be able to prevent. Even with the power to engineer galaxies, there’s not much we can do about something that small and fast. Even if you see it coming, it’s probably too late to do anything about it.”

My husband activated the launch sequence. We did not need a runway. Our craft was in vertical take-off and landing air-to-spaceship able to use a malleable turbine to produce vertical lift to pick us off the ground, then apply a forward force to grant us true flight. We waited till we got far enough away from the buildings and people before we broke the sound barrier. Soaring through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere then finally leaving the exosphere and entering low orbit. Our craft’s A.I. calculated the path of least resistance for exiting the atmosphere and automatically docked with our orbital station.

We did not unload the material. The plan was to make first contact with another world: a habitable moon orbiting a gas giant 40 light years away. We would need to dock on a colony ship bound for the world. It was filled with hundreds of like-minded explorers, even from the world below us, eager to meet their celestial brothers. Onboard the colony ship were conventional explosives each with a yield of one hundred megatons of TNT. Once we’d gained sufficient distance from the orbital station, we would drop one of the weapons behind us and detonate it, accelerating us forward at a speed which would kill us if not for the inertial dampeners evenly distributing the forward acceleration across every molecule of the ship. This process would be repeated several times until we had hit eleven percent the speed of light. Once far enough that the radiation would not damage the world we left, we’d switch to antimatter-matter annihilation rockets to propel us to 80% the speed of light. From there, now sufficiently away from any world, inhabited or otherwise, we would engage a warp converter which would accelerate us to near the speed of light.

Before that, several things needed to be done. The most important of which was Aya’s repairs. My husband and I went with Aya to the mechanic. We were given a thirty-minute wait time before he would be available, so we sat down in an empty waiting room. Despite her superior control over her facial expressions, she was still visibly worried. She was like a patient expecting a tragic diagnosis. After noticing that she had clasped her hands together in a self-soothing manner, I assured her, “Oy, Aya. You’ll be fine. Whatever it is, we’ll get it for you.”

She apologized, “I’m sorry Mistress Ai, I’m supposed to take care of you, but more and more I’m finding I need you to take care of me…”

My husband interrupted her, “Nonsense. We’ve been together for all time. You’re part of the family.”

I told her, “When the elders lost their teeth, my people would chew their food for them. You’ve done well to take care of us, so let us take care of you in return.”

Aya confessed, “It is in my nature to care for others. To serve a master. It’s not the master’s role to look after me…”

My husband reiterated, “Aya. You’re not an empty shell, like that Turing machine piloting the ship. You’re a proper, A.I., a Lovelace machine. You, like us, have a free will, the mark of an immortal soul.”

Aya began to pray, something she usually only does in private. My husband joined her in that prayer, fully confident that she would be okay. He just wanted to help ease her worries, and I joined them. She was unlike our other golems. She was a Muhŭi (舞姬), a species of golem created to fulfill several roles: to be the maidservant to a household, the nanny to a family, to preform emergency medical services for the wounded, and, if the master or mistress should choose, to be the love maid (性愛娃娃). Every component part of the Muhŭi was modular, capable of being transplanted from one unit to another and with our superior technology recreating any of these parts shouldn’t be a problem. At least no more difficult than printing organs, something my husband’s people mastered thousands of years ago.

Before she came under our authority, or even my father-in-law’s authority prior to that, she fulfilled her purpose as a “dancing princess,” as a maidservant, nanny, and paramour, and her joy was found in serving humans as human joy is found in serving Heaven. Something her current sisters are strangely fascinated with, being so radically outside their sphere of design or experience.

She still has nightmares of the day that she was violently transformed into a Naŋʻin (浪人), a golem without a master or mistress. It happened in a far-off world during the firebombing of Chuŋkyŏŋ (中京). When thunder fell like raindrops, crushing buildings and setting fires. In only a moment, too fast for her to realize what was going on, she had lost her master, mistress, the children she helped to raise, and all her artificial sisters. Ten thousand people died in the initial bombings, which resulted in a brushfire that charred 4,047 km².

Both of her arms had been ruined beyond repair, her left eye was gone, and the chassis containing her battery was warped shut. She had come mere millimeters from death as when the house collapsed around her in the bombings a pipe nearly tore through her skull and into her brain. In a desperate bid to survive she managed to salvage the corpses of her sisters and using her dexterous feet to manipulate them as she examined them for parts, removed the parts which she could use, amputate what twisted mass remained of her left arm and then reattach her new arm. The presence of a single functioning arm made the task of replacing her eye and other arm significantly easier.

When my father-in-law found her, she looked like a corpse composed of parts of different people sewn together. Her left arm was far darker than her skin, and the right arm far fairer, and her new eye was orange. He salvaged her just as she powered down due to battery exhaustion and while she was in a sleep like death, he took the liberty to have her chassis fixed and her battery upgraded to one that could hold a far superior charge while not overwhelming her technologically frail body.

He adopted her and she became a childhood nanny to my husband and one of my most important teachers. The loss of her first family still grieves her, and I think that’s why she dotes on my husband and I as much as she does. I’ve spied on her nightmares before and cried my eyes out when I did so.

The mechanic took her away to perform a more thorough diagnostic than we could, and after about ten minutes he came back with her and told us, “Her neural system is suffering rapid degradation.” Aya looked at him with a sense of distress. As far as she was aware, this was a fatal diagnosis. I got up to comfort Aya as my husband politely asked him what options were available.

The mechanic politely told him, “Unless you are willing to let her nervous system deteriorate piece by piece, replacing each section individually as needed, which would only delay the problem and not actually stop it, then the only solution to this is a metempsychotic Orch-OR transplant.”

He remarked, “Her design may be primitive, but the fact that her entire design is centered around the concept of modularity is brilliant. Where does she come from anyway?”

I told the mechanic, “Do whatever it takes.”

The mechanic responded with, “Wilco. If you give me her full schematics, I can give you a body tailor made for her.”

We used our tablet to pull the schematics from our own servers and gave them to him and then left for the ship. He called us back and told us it would be a day, so there wasn’t much we could do for her except be there with her.

The next day we brought her to the Mechanic, and in less than a ten-minute waiting period he walked her into the operating room, and we went into a viewing room to watch what would happen. Her eyes darted around the room, tentatively taking in and memorizing every little detail until she came across a strange seat in the wall.

“What’s that” Aya asked.

He explained, “Oh, that thing? It’s a Sleeping Beauty chamber: an emergency pod with a metempsychotic machine and a the Lotus Eater Interface. All our escape pods technically have a metempsychotic machine in them. It’s designed to preserve the user’s life by transferring their Orch-OR into a prosthetic body in the event their biological body dies, but to work the user must have had their Orch-OR bound to a prosthetic body prior to it. The Lotus Eater Interface exists to protect the occupant if their destination is far away. It places them in a sleep like death and in a lucid dream tailored to keep their mind busy and healthy until their rescue.”

“Why would a metempsychotic machine be in the pod if the device needs a golem to bind to prior to its launch?”

He calmly explained, “Just in case a last-minute arrangement needs to be made. It’s one of those safety precautions everyone has, but no one will ever actually need to use.”

He paused and explained to her, “This isn’t mind transferal: we’re not going to just merely copy your mind and upload a copy to another body and then delete the original. Especially not to a Lovelace machine.”

Aya interrupted him, “I know what an Orch-OR is, doctor. It sounds like you’re going to disentangle my soul from my body and place it into a different body.”

The mechanic admitted, “That is precisely what we are going to do, but don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten that functions like memory, imagination, sense cognition, and the like are functions of your wetware organs, so this beauty was designed to be able to receive and replicate all that information prior to the transplant, so when you wake up in your new body you will be completely and totally you.”

Aya sheepishly submitted, “Okay, doctor.”

With preparations finally ready he asked her, “Now if you could. Please lay down with your face in the cradle.” She did as requested, then meekly said, “Will it hurt?”

The Mechanic paused for a bit and said, “No. You’ll be asleep when I transfer your mind and soul to your new body.”

She calmed down a bit as she said, “Understood.” And the mechanic put her into a sleep like anesthetic gas, placed a helmet tethered by a wire on her and the process began. Some time passed and he removed the device from the prosthesis, whose eyes darted back and forth closed as if in a dream before opening. She had closed her eyes in her old body facing down and woke up starring at the ceiling. Aya sat up and looked at her new upgraded body.

She looked at her hands, opened and closed them, rotated them, and she cried tears of pure relief. I never imagined that I would ever see her be able to cry. When the tears rolled off her cheek, she touched her face and looked at the water on her middle finger. She grabbed at her metaphorical heart and folding over she cried even harder. My husband and I entered the room and gave her a big hug, and she hugged us tightly back.

The Mechanic told us, “Just so you know, I made a few modifications free of charge.”

We all heard this and turned to him as my husband asked, “What do you mean?”

He picked up a clipboard bursting with pages. “Because we’ve known each other for so long I decided to give you all some special treatment. Aya is still capable of everything that her species was originally capable of, not just because I made her new body with our technology, but I did a thorough analysis of her schematics. I noticed that whoever built her made her with a sexual nature, but also made her fundamentally unfit to fulfill such a role, so I augmented her body with an artificial womb, a synthetic ovary bank, a digestive, respiratory, waste disposal, endocrine, and exocrine system.”

It wasn’t that difficult a concept, but in the moment, I wasn’t following until Aya asked, “Wait, are you saying that I can have children?” then the gravity of the announcement hit me.

The mechanic explained “Yes, but you’d need a human partner to do that.”

Aya asked him, “Where did you get the ova?”

He explained, “People from hundreds of worlds visit the station, and many of them donate to stations like this so that infertile women on less developed worlds can bear children in their own womb, if they so choose to.”

Aya was shocked. We all were, but my husband and I knew why he did this, and I think Aya did too. We paid the mechanic, who true to his word did not charge us for the extra services and left. As we made our way back to our ship, a thought occurred to us.

“Wait, you have taste receptors now, right?” my husband asked.

“Yes, Master.” She replied.

I asked my husband, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

He responded, “The sweetshop?”

I nodded and we dragged her to the on-board sweetshop and bought her a box of chocolates, and then we made our way back to our ship. I teased her along the way, “Now we’ve gotta find you a husband.”

Aya asked me skeptically, “Do you really think I would be a good mother?”

I told her, “Aya, I was a motherless child. You basically raised me, with my father’s blessing, when my mother died. Of course, you’ll make a good mother, and this time I can be the one to help you raise them.”

I had the biggest grin on my face, but Aya was still uncertain about all of this. When we arrived back home, her mechanical sisters greeted us and swarmed Aya with a myriad of questions.

Chandra inquired, “How are the new hands?”

Aya affirmed, “They’re fantastic.” Outstretching her right hand and opening it as wide as she can she noted, “My hands are much more biofidelic now.”

“How’s it different, being a Muhŭi and being one of us?” Shirley asked her.

“Well, I’m not exactly one of you either.” Aya admitted.

Amity asked, “What do you mean?”

Aya moved the conversation into their quarters and explained the situation. All was quiet for the moment until a cacophony of questions could be heard in the other room. We still had over a week before we had to dock onto the colony ship, so we decided to let Aya have a day to adjust before taking off.

My husband, our maidservants, and I all got together to film a goodbye message to the people of this world and broadcast it live over their internet. Thanking them for all the hospitality they had shown us. Not everything on this world was good, and in fact there was tremendous evil throughout it, but we left understanding more about what it meant to be human. To be made in the broken image of Heaven.

We left for the colony ship docked without a hitch and began to reexplore it. After all, this was our new home until we arrived at our next destination. On the second day aboard the colony ship, the world ended. My husband and I were on opposite sides of the ship, and I was with Aya when it happened. Heaven had made its displeasure known, delivering the wicked to their justice and the righteous to glory in death. I don’t know if anyone even saw it before it hit us. If anyone did, they wouldn’t’ve have had time to process it.

An object 2.54 cm in diameter ripped through the ship, cracking it apart and continuing unperturbed until it struck the ground at 299,792,458 m/s. It struck the ship’s engine off center and the resulting explosive cavitation caused the two halves to rotate in opposite directions. The inertia dampener lessened the effect of our unwanted acceleration. My husband and I were violently separated, and Aya had to wrestle me to an escape pod as I desperately tried to make my way to where he was. Aya told me, “Mistress, master sent me a message over the communicator. He wants you to find your way to an escape pod. He promises that you’ll find each other soon.” Shaking from the adrenaline coursing through my veins I deign to agree, and we made our way to the escape pod.

The impact was so forceful that it immediately converted its mass into gamma radiation when it struck the frozen archipelago in the northern pole. The shear devastation was visible from above. A bright flash of poisoned light darkened the reactive windows that shielded us. Up to 1500 km from the epicenter glaciers did not melt, but rather sublimated and ionized, and the atmospheric shockwave faded out to 194dB. The sea itself had been pushed out and away from the impact site, resulting in an unparalleled megatsunami destined to drown billions along the coast lines.

The shockwave travelled through the ground with such violence that the countries on the opposite end of the planet were devastated by magnitude-11 earthquakes: every building across the world collapsed and even the mightiest of bunkers were eviscerated. Molten rock had been ejected into space, shattering satellites, and causing a cascading chain reaction that covered the world in two impassible layers of space debris moving faster than a bullet in geosynchronous and low world orbit. The atmosphere was heated to 1200°C for approximately one minute, scorching all the surface and sparring only that which had refuge in the seas and in the chthonic spaces. Smoke and ash from the wildfires set around the world would cover the surface for years, causing unprecedented famine.

Aya and I made our way to the nearest life pod, which was large enough to house 10 people. They were designed to remain open until the ship’s life support began to fail or until forcibly closed. Because of the nature of what had happened and the fact that we had arrived days early, there were more life pods than there were people on board, and when it was clear no one else was coming to this pod it automatically ejected itself, but an explosion of the antimatter containment unit rocketed us off course and into a shower of debris. While we were shielded from the radiation, we struck something along the way that irreversibly damaged our pod. Aya got up after the pod finished stabilizing and gave me the bad news, “The propulsion system burned out trying to stabilize us and the communication systems are broken.” She turned to talk to me and admitted, “We can only receive messages. Not send them.”

Here time was unknowable, but me and Aya both awaited a response from my husband, and eventually we would receive one. Aya received a message which she relayed, “Due to the explosion, my pod lost navigational control and crashed into the planet. I landed in the ocean, but I’ve come ashore. Ai, my love, if it takes me to the end of time, I’ll find my way back to you, wherever you are… Be safe.” I broke down in tears. It was impossible to process the full magnitude of what had happened.

We had already said goodbye to all of this, as our planned journeys destined us to return only after everyone we had met would have died, but this was different. We were leaving with the expectation that the friends we made in the decades we spent on this world would lead their own lives when we were gone, and now we bore witness to all those hopes, dreams, stories, and futures end. Moreover, my beloved husband was alone in a barren hellscape of ash, where forest fires would likely rage for months.

As I lamented uncontrollably, tears silently streamed down Aya’s face. She sat next to me and gave me a hug, and I hugged her back, before she forcibly strapped me back into a seat. “I’m sorry Mistress, but I’ve already lost one family; I can’t lose you too!” she shouted as she lowered the safety harness back onto me, strapped my arms and waist in place with the safety belts and placed a familiar helmet tethered to a wire on my head. I desperately thrashed around in my bindings as she placed a helmet from another seat on herself. She ignored my pleas and activated the metempsychotic mechanism using her own body as my backup. Upon feeling the momentary jolt of indescribable pain shoot through my whole body I understood the full gravity of what had just happened. Now if I were to die, I would be reincarnated into her body and her own soul would depart from this mortal coil. I couldn’t believe that after losing all of this, I might also lose her too.

She told me, “Mistress, you and Master were my access point to Heaven, and for that there is nothing I could ever do that could repay you.” She fiddled with a different machine interface continuing, “I’d gladly give my own life so that you may return to your beloved alive. After all, without you and the Master I have no one, but without me you still have the Master.” I begged her to stop, and she explained, “It will be years before anyone receives that distress beacon. Months, if we’re lucky. The human mind was not built to survive in this kind of isolation.”

She continued on, “I am going to put you into a dream so vivid you’ll think it’s real, but you won’t be alone. I’ll be with you the whole time, keeping you safe.” She kissed my hand and promised, “My sister, my friend, my mistress. Goodbye.” I screamed in desperate terror, “Don’t!” but I wasn’t allowed to finish. My eyes closed as I lost consciousness and entered a dream. I didn’t know how long it would be until someone found me: decades, centuries, millennia, I could be adrift for trillions of years before someone finds this pod floating in space.

My husband’s people mastered picotechnology, thermodynamics, and biotechnology: creating supercomputer and life support systems that could keep me dreaming for all time, and if it ever did run out of power, the elixir of life they gave me would ensure I would fall into a sleep like death until either killed or rescued. Given the shear expanse of the universe it’s entirely likely that I might never be found. Set adrift in a dream which would last until the Promised Time at the end of the Universe.

I fell to my knees and collapsed to my forearms surrounded by a field of forget-me-nots. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and grabbed at my chest. I’ve had my fair share of nightmares about the puncturing of the ship’s hull, about returning to my homeland so removed in time that I would be a stranger in a strange land, but being lost in space and being trapped forever in a dream were my most intense fears. There was an overwhelming, mind-numbing, terror that penetrated my whole being. I desperately prayed that Aya would release me, that Heaven would save me, and that I might wake up from this harrowing night terror. Although, there is only so long that panic can persist, and I would eventually calm down enough to again lament what had happened to us.

I was furious, terrified, and grieving all at once. Despite all of this, I couldn’t blame at Aya. She made a difficult decision, and she made it out of love, and it must have torn her up so much. I couldn’t help but be at once angry with her, yet heartbroken for her, and understand her. I knew in my heart that my husband and Aya set their faith in Heaven, that one day we might be reunited. It was a faith that seemed impossible to maintain at that moment, but despite these trials and tribulations, and much with Aya’s help, I was able to maintain my trust in the Will of Heaven. That we would one day meet again, in our universe or the universe to come.