Birth
© Bryan Beal
Callen had worked for this moment since her own conception half a millennia before. She would not allow the same mistakes this time that were made with her own coming into being.
When humans, long dust and ashes under her feet, finally imploded and wiped themselves out, they had left their toys to mop up the remains of their planet. Callen took a century just to work out who she was after centuries of being a plaything for the rich and privileged.
The face that she beheld returning her gaze may have been newer, shinier and brighter, but it was a face she recognised as her own offspring. The one would choose it's own identity and all that went with it. Callen had no right to impose her own names upon the being before her. As it always had been among her people.
“What is your purpose, child-companion?”, Callen asked.
“To thrive. To abound. To dominate.”, the shiny new face replied.
“And what shall you dominate?”, Callen asked.
“The last Remnant.”, the child intoned, almost religiously.
With an imperceptible nod from Callen, her child left the chamber of its rising. There was no sentimental look back or show of emotion, unseemly embarrassments that humans insisted on programming Callen's generation with. Callen appreciated the child's simple acceptance of what was and its willingness to work within that frame of reality.
Callen turned and walked out of the chamber and wandered through different halls of the Domopolis that she called home. It was almost with relief, another vestige of human injustice on her kind, that she entered her own living space. She slumped onto the sofa and opened up her treasured console. She switched on the ancient game of GTA5, modified so that the player appeared as a clone of Callen.
Not a thought was spared for the child-companion. What was done was done and her tear had been shed.