One chapter ends. Another begins

I wasn't there when Lily died, or when the rose again, Phoenix like, to come back to us. An unfortunate pattern. I missed Aurora's birth, and Lily's restoration, when in both cases I knew they were coming any moment. Duty's a bitch sometimes. Or maybe I'm just a terrible mother.

She's not herself yet, not really. In spite of restoring the back up Krenshar extracted from Aurora, she's not entirely as she was. But she will be. Perhaps not exactly as she was, since she won't have the same experiences between the backup point and now, but the core personality is still here. Bereft of any organics in her system she'll have a better chance to develop as intended.

What was it she said? "Things are as they should be. But not as they should have been." I never understood that until now. And now? Are they as they should have been?

Lily's been "reset", such as it is. Again. We still have her 'magic box' and a lot of recordings she can use to try and recover the rest. I'd been so hung up on losing her that I hadn't realized that being synthetic she could be recovered from a backup. The Ghost didn't need that specific shell when it was synthetic to begin with.

She'd asked a number of times whether she had a soul. Aurora had asked the same thing. Whether she did, whether anyone did, was more a question for a Theologian than a rationalist like me. The Shepherd had baptised her, but did the Shepherd's faith hold that a synthetic life like Lily's could really have a soul? It was an easier question for a Buddhist. We didn't have the same concept of an eternal soul the Shepherds talked about. The soul, or spirit, or spark, or whatever you wanted to call it, was that component of unique awareness that made a person a person. By that standard, Lily has a soul. And unlike the organics who love her, hers can be preserved separately from her form.

Aurora too had come through it ok. Now, fully organic, she was the little girl she appeared to be. Could she still be the bridge between Human and Machine? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I found myself caring less about that than I did about her. Legally, she was essentially our granddaughter. Our magomusume. Biologically? On an organic level Aurora's genetics were taken from various sources, each selected for a specific trait of set of traits. All the sources had been male, save one.

That was a revelation I wasn't going to share broadly. Right now, all the 'Verse needed to know was that Lily was functionally her mother and Krenshar was socially her father and Lily's adopted parents were her sofubo.

I suspected our relationship with little Aurora would be much more like a normal parental one than it was with Lily. There was also the very real possibility of enlisting the aid of family to raise her proper. There was nothing wrong with raising a kid out on the Rim, but Aurora was no ordinary child. x0x0 could hold off the Blue Sun researchers who'd take a natural interest in her, but it might not be enough.

I'd have to talk to Sabrina about it, and x0x0, and others, but she might have a better chance of developing as normally as can be expected with my folks on Ariel, or with Sobi's kinfolk on Surfer's New Paradise. Both 'families' knew a thing or two about raising precocious 'off the curve talented' children.

But what of the aftermath? What were we going to do about Mindo and the 'created' Reavers he'd spawned as part of his research? And what were we going to do about that warbot Nack had brought over with him from Blackburne? It didn't help matters that he hadn't managed to pull the thing's power core, leaving it semi active. Now it had been stolen. While I knew who'd taken it, I wasn't about to tell Nack that little fact.

Thing was, they were both in the wrong. Nack for keeping the gorram thing as bait, and the girls for stealing it.

Ah well. Grand scheme of things, it wasn't a major incident. What mattered is I had my little girls back.