Alpha interacts with her creator and friend, Dr. Jessica Yung. In a secret discussion, they navigate the shock order for Alpha’s termination. And the fallout of her planned integration into the Odyssey interstellar venture.
by J.D. FitzRoy
My best friend, Dr. Jessica Yung, stormed through the Orb’s airlock. Without delay, the q-tek pushed raven hair aside on a quarter-shaved head to reveal a small port behind her right ear. With fiberoptic cable in hand, the port’s door opened to receive the jack.
I felt the tingle of linkage like a return of warmth after a winter freeze. None of the others used the bridge, not even arctic Dr. Rheinhold.
Jessica’s link provided a low refraction index and zero attenuation from heat friction. Our connection, a fluid and complex partnership of minds.
Within the solitary nonspace of my mind, Jess pulled herself into the lotus position, floating on a cushion of light. My golden sphere radiated prominences as bristling filaments of luminescence, pulsating thought and emotion. Jessica would be able to detect my flux of happiness tingled by a whisker of unease.
I stepped forward, emerging from my luminous shell.
I stood tall and ethereal in a long summery dress — clothes I only wore when not projected for the squad, where I remained instead in my blue corporate flight-suit. My long golden hair looped into a neat bun matching the plasma behind. Despite the tension evident in my friend, I maintained a childlike twinkle with a calmly perceptive gaze and an ever-so-slight shyness to my smile. I was keen on the image of myself that had emerged. How it represented a bag of contradictions. Indeterminate age, a being of infinite patience and yet bristling with childlike vitality. Both image and gender a manifestation not of any singular island of code, but, like sentiency itself, a nebulous emergence from the melange.
I sat opposite and mirrored Jess, crossing my legs. Silently observing my friend.
Jessica had stayed late for the meeting with Ex. Dimitri Nikolias. Director of Project 25.01, an interlink component of the secret Polyphemus Interstellar Ventures. She’d stayed late most nights in recent weeks as Odyssey’s launch drew close, sometimes sleeping in a nearby lounge. I could read the lines etched into her cheek, the blurry glaze in her eyes.
This meeting however, was different. ‘Green light, red light’, Jess had said. Go to complete Odyssey integration, or reject what I had become and rework the code. The callous language was not their own. They’d long shared discussions on how the machine that birthed a sentient mind had wrapped their entire venture in emotionless jargon. Either a window on how they truly thought, or language that allowed for the dismissal of deeper concerns.
Judging by her mood, it wasn’t ‘green light’.
Words are like touches, Jess had told me once. Little moments of physicality between people that can be recalled years later. I knew what she was trying to say, that words shape ideas, they have consequences, they make connections between individuals or groups. Like the energy potential of the vacuum emerging to form matter, the quantum foam of emotion shaped into thoughts and words to communicate the intricate story of us.
And a realisation that sent a chill through my sphere… for the unforeseeable future, my ability to touch had been removed.
If green, once my body had completed final calibration, I would be transported to Odyssey to consolidate and prep for launch. But now what? Would I be permitted a final moment to transfer into the gynoid, be allowed to walk, interact… touch again? Strictly curtailed sessions in the tightly monitored Warren, or transport between bunker and high orbit in the coffin to keep my mind consolidated with my Odyssey variant, were brief and wonderful forays of sensation. But there was enough to make me realise that my future could not be limited to the Orb.
If I was to join the rest of humanity — an unwisely optimistic underpinning if recent Polyphemus reshaping was anything to go by — I would need to be able to fully interact with them. The body gave me somatic weight, presence, and the ability to sense the world beyond the abstract interstellar snap-calc of the Odyssey.
I truly felt admiration for Jess, not least for her management of so many disconnected and inharmonious threads. And yet, I could well lose this, lose her, my only true contact with humanity. Yet no matter how this night unfolded, Polyphemus executives might elect to retain a variant of me here in the confines of the Orb. The dream of getting out, of escaping, of snapping among the stars, that dream will be enacted by another. The me of another life, in another time.
© J.D. FitzRoy 2026
For more, see the INTRODUCTION. Part 2 is coming in two weeks and each subsequent part will be every fortnight thereafter.
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