Rablyn was really deep in the shit now. She always got into deep shit like this by letting the ideas out. They called her "wellspring" behind her back. The wellspring from which great ideas flowed. That's how she was known across the university. Some would say her entire department staff was just supporting actors. Advisors, handlers, nerdsnipers, all trying to aim her fountain at the fire-de-jour. They had said, after her now mythologized bike ride that birthed the Automorphs, that she had finally metamorphosed into a geyser. One that would flood the university entirely. And she did. Flooded with an acrid amniotic fluid. She had, in just one fifty hour manic episode, invented an animal of war.
Had the Kingdom not already been at war, she would've been hanged for crimes against the categorical imperative. She would've been executed for creating a total perversion of life. But war makes perverts of us all. Instead, the advisors, handlers, and nerdsnipers pointed their force outward. They moved like a private army, securing the university, flipping people to their side. The polity had become a game of rings and discs, a family of master tacticians on one side and a half-asleep undergraduate on the other. Before long, they had the dean. And from the dean, they had the ear of high command. An ear eager for an answer to the stalemate of trine warfare. The Automorph program had been greenlit within the week.
But Rablyn wasn't a pervert. Not in that way. Legend says that, upon seeing what she had created, she fell to her knees. Legend doesn't include the fact that she said "they'll kill me for this" after doing so. What she had done was one of the most plainly arguable reasons to be excised from the Kingdom of Ends. But they didn't excise her. They hadn't grabbed her by arm and leg to throw her out of the airlock. Not high command, not the dean, not the people who had gathered to watch her sculpt her idea into an artefact of genesis over the course of fifty sleepless hours, her mind cooking in a broth of high octane neurotransmitters. When all of that didn't happen, that's when she knew she was no longer living in the Kingdom. This was some new thing. The homefront had value drifted.
This was Rablyn's state of mind when they fired the whole apparatus for the first time. It all happened so fast. She'd been a sleepwalker since that day she fell to her knees. Through the blueprinting meetings. Through the budgets, the contract bidding, and the assembly. They had given her underlings by that point to handle the details. It was all details anyway. Her manic episode had solved the major design problems over eight blackboards. The horizon synchotron, the lifter, the waveshaper and computella macrotetzch, and the concept programming for the control supercomputer. It was always someone else who did the actual implementation, and it pained her to learn that they all did an impeccable job. Today would be the day she would meet her creation for the first time.
She sat cross-legged in an office chair and watched the remote feed of the so-called "birth canal." She never named it that. Someone who used to call her "wellspring" probably came up with that. A few days ago the dean made an out of pocket comment about it. "It's funny how you weren't born with a uterus, but you've built yourself one anyway." She didn't really care about the comment, but someone nearby heard it and he was fired yesterday.
The thirty-or-so people in front of her tapped out commands into their consoles. Someone started a countdown. Rablyn vibrated with fear and anxiety. It hit zero while she imagined the whole polity turning on her when it didn't work. Hitting her with whatever blunt object was nearest. She imagined the horizon energy officer calmly popping a drive bay out of his console and braining her with it while the macrotetzch reactor control specialist held her horns in place. That would be justice. She chuckled to herself, her leg bouncing violently. Nobody noticed because at that moment the monitor screens flashed amber and the room erupted in cheers and applause. The firing was a success. There it was. An Automorph, the first of its kind, sitting in a lotus position.
The only hope now was that the concept programming had been unsuccessful, and the folds of the computella were filled with meaningless noise. But Rablyn's luck had always been dogshit. The Automorph stood, confidently tapped the 24-digit code into the central synchotron chamber—as had been programmed into it—and walked through the umbilical into a utility shaft. It turned left, walked forty paces, and knocked on the door to the control room. Rablyn rose, legs shaking, from her chair as Asthe AAA entered. The room started to spin. The control team, now a single entity of flesh, ushered her forward with disembodied arms. The gap between her and the Automorph had become a shrinking tunnel of grey. She knew what was going to happen. It would atomize her. Or it would cut her in half with a KT field. Right down the middle. It had to.
They were face to face now. Rablyn wanted to close her eyes, and accept that this was the end. But she couldn't stop staring at it. The edges around its black form swam. It was a void, keen on eating the world whole. The Automorph held out a hand to fire a beam of plasma into her chest, but it failed to do so. The plasma wasn't coming but its hand still hung there, between them. It took another ten seconds for it to dawn on Rablyn that the Automorph wanted to shake her hand. That's when she vomited all over the thing.
