Jacob leaned down in the temple with the gilded throne and the surrounding white and purple blossoms and stared into its warmly painted ceilings and its rainbow stained-glass. He gave prayer, despite a somewhat cold lack of belief, at least in that moment. He saw the spooky, silver glint of moonrise; above an airy, little sunset of duskiest-pink, clouded threads. In this forevermore summer, fading lights darned the air. He could see Adora elegantly seated on the golden throne and reading a scarlet Bible tied and bound with a white ribbon.

  Jacob she called, "I want to go to Eden."

  "There is an Eden here?"

  There is certainly an old recording of the land, so that all may partake in seeing its former majesty. Aueries gifted it to his royal chosen. It shows a land pure as the flowered dove until the nightly, one-eyed, serpent slithered through." She said. "Mama used to tell me the story when I was in the womb."

  Great, Jacob thought, now we have genius fetuses in this little tale. Also, does she mean feathered dove?

  "Yes," Jacob spoke finally. " Yes, Adora we can go into this recording."

  "Thanks. And I meant flowered."

  Jacob flinched; he heartily disliked the mind-reading.

  Meanwhile, the Shiverla pair had been spending a lot of time in Canberra voting on parliament bills and contributing to parliamentary debate. Being so lazy and also just completely disinterested in the proceedings, they were taking what they felt to be a much-needed break. Waterbaby was on the floor his sandy-gold fur bristling as he attempted to catch a little, white mouse cowering under the table.

  “Don’t hurt the mouse,” Shiver said almost imploringly. “it’s so cute, look at its big, dark, pleading eyes.”

  “He’s just hungry Shiv,” said Mist derisively. He felt a fleeting annoyance at having to look up from the musical notes he was writing. His long, slender, porcelain fingers flexed about a sheet of paper, soon curled frustrated into the beautiful white hand they belonged to. Mist was composing a song for his violin, and it wasn’t going as well as he would have thought. Later he and Shiver as they did every Thursday night, planned to sing along to lyrics from old songs and hymns with Mist’s violin playing in the background. They had both been blessed by their creators with beautiful, melodious, childlike voices and their old-fashioned private schools had taught them to modulate them as youths.

  Being talented and highly-intelligent and more than half-knowing it, Mist found it highly frustrating when he couldn’t do something he put his mind to. A really superior being like a Shiverla should be able to write ground-breaking music whenever it takes his fancy, he thought. Of course, evidently, this was not the case for him at the moment. Shiver put down the sketch of Waterbaby she was making and frowned.

  “It’s so humid today I can’t possibly concentrate on anything,” she said and flopped down on the sofa with a lethargic sigh. She bolted upright spontaneously; dark eyes alight with her soul’s passion, when Aryan swept elegantly through the front door. “Aryan,” she cried ecstatically and rushed over to throw her thin arms about him. Aryan stroked her lovely, red-golden hair tenderly but also a little awkwardly “Hello my beloved one,” he said gently to Shiver. “I need you and Monovalent to create the painkillers for my aching head and heal my leg,” he proclaimed authoritatively with a wince and a limping slight from a wound.

  “It’s only requiring of small proliferation you can do so without consequence.”

  “ I assume you’re both still doing this for the seriously, chronically ill and dying who can’t access or are away from medical treatment, there’s no reason for their suffering, I’ll be checking in with Monovalent later, good girl.”

  Shiver nodded enthusiastically and complied. He turned to Mist.

  “So how are you doing Mist,” he then asked in his polite, formal way.

  “Fine,” said Mist not looking up from what he was doing and treating Aryan with his typical antipathy and contempt.

  “I have just come for some papers, and dinner is in a few hours but I have to go out before that, I’ll be back around six, “Aryan informed them curtly.

  Shiver looked quite hurt her beautiful, kittenish face dismayed, even crestfallen at this. Mist however was relieved and merely called out “See you then.”

  As Aryan was leaving one thought was trailing through his head. My family, I finally have a family I can trust never to leave or as Emanuel would put it, relinquish their presence and abandon me. Shiver and Mist, Monovalent it may not be conventional, but the love is there. No matter how busy the three of them always ate a nightly dinner together and it was an insistence he was most glad to have imposed to their at first reluctance.

  For the first time in years Aryan’s pale, prettishly handsome face showed euphoria. Yet they bow before me as my father said everyone should. Aryan found knowledge of this power he wielded over them soothing, as if all things were in their natural order and place. In his head danced a scene with his father after having beaten him, so he was a trembling gibbering mess and touching his hair gently, which made Aryan mildly nauseous.

  “You will not fail. Discipline is the greatest asset of man, and capitalism, the only fair system where everywhere has a chance; without it, mass death counts and cultural decline that communist and totalitarian governments leave in their wake. The welfare state, drugs, drink, and video games slackers and letting people opt not to participate destroyed first-world countries as third-worlders build armies and buy our land and we indebt ourselves to them.”

  “We need those who can lead others to greatness in the field of science or business think lucrative expansion of goods and technologies and industry to regain our lost power and finances; wealth they may bring you too but well-earned. Master of your own fortune and inventions. None will you need to bow to. For they will bow to you, you will be a great man.”

  Back at the manor, Mist turned to Shiver. “So If Dear Leader Aryan fails what are your plans for “making a living” as the decrepits call it?"

  Shiver frowned. “I….Dunno. Other than perhaps expunging illiterate terms like that from my vocabulary. I guess Aryan’s right; education is important. Oh, wait maybe not. Since I have access to all collective, human knowledge being part AI and all. What about you?”

  “Me? I am going to be the famous, virtual star of Disney’s live-action version of The Fairy Prince. You know the awesome one where he is gay, wants to be a dancer, cries every three seconds, and is openly misogynistic and ragging on women the whole run-time.”

  “Why….Him?”

  "Easy. He’s gay and gender non-conforming and therefore gets to openly tear women a new one. Without repercussions. The rest of us have to unfairly pretend to love all you bossing bints.”

  Shiver didn’t blink. “ Sounds good and all but you’re playing a man admirer so you will have to kiss another man’s rough, hairy-lined lips and even take it up the….”

  Aryan, arrived home with the gentle banging of the manor door and Shiver closed her mouth with a slight little giggle.

  After much deliberation, Simon finally decided to take a new approach, and try speaking to Aryan’s two main helpers at the manor; servants was a better descriptor but the man to be fair, didn’t use this term and said they did crucial and noble work like any other. Seemed pretty much to mean it too.

  Anne-Marie ushered him in with little fuss or adieu and returned to bustling around and managing the robot servants Aryan had just brought in and that Monovalent was finally able to control with enough proficiency to make them viable.

  She smiled at Simon. There was sincerity and the slightest flicker of the friendly mischief she had displayed playing the demon in the Mist Land.

  “They do make my life a lot easier. These aiding androids. You said you’re taking a look into how your fellow politicians treat their hired servants after some recent scandals?” Simon nodded. Smiled.

  “Well, in this case, it is very well. I was taken in by him at a tender age, helped with my education, and he paid me handsomely, and honestly, I simply never left. I couldn’t imagine a greater employer.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “He truly is remarkable,” Laurence who seemed to have an almost butler role at the manor, proclaimed. He also did the chef work and so donned a little white hat charmingly over his masculine and pleasing face.

  “He did all those things he did for Marie, for me in spades. Forgive the old-fashioned turn of phrase by he is a jolly gentleman. He will raise so many out of poverty and peril as he did for me. “

  Simon sighed. Either they knew nothing, or their loyalty knew few bounds. He had heard Anne-Maire in particular had been rescued from what could be essentially described as the modern slums by him and Laurence’s circumstances weren’t much better to begin. Drug-addicted parents. One of them, their family had simply died by their fifteenth birthday. Now they had been so well-educated and raised that you would never believe they weren’t born in the affluent class.

  Aryan had done well with them; just as he had in explaining to the public why the Shiverla pair mysteriously moved in with him after Mist’s family died and Shiver lost all purpose: supposedly after seeing up close, the great horror of the viral plagues. Rescuing them from their terrible fate; having watched entire classes of fellow children and people around them perish. He had helped with dear benevolence, these two fragile, young people already institutionalized once due to the sheer direness of what they witnessed. Who were facing further still more bleakness; thus Aryan had explained how he was turning their pain into triumph. Helping them to help others and save the planet.

  Clever but nauseating. There was some Wave of the Future, we need younger representation in politics nonsense, thrown in as well.

  Simon brushed aside a sweeping, golden lock that flocked fairly about his Prince Charming face, one almost steamed by the sheer heat of the coffee, they had graciously provided. With a worried and now heavying heart, he asked where Shiver might be. She was out and wouldn't be home till nightfall, it seemed.

  The following day, Shiver was happily regaling to Mist, the gracious and godly beauty of Emanuel’s great, sandstone castle. That she had yesterday visited. With its statues of loveliest, wide-eyed crows darkening the daylight and all the sweet, snowy white mantels upon the graves. She had reveled in his sheer joy at her presence. Revealed in how he told her, "Your loss was like Orion’s forsook belt and the lost sand in the stone." He had spoken of the unfair forces that had left him knelt and sweetly-scattering a Nymphaea; forsaking every sacred lily.

  “This hideous, giant, reptile beast prostrating himself before me so physically greater than my little self and taking my hand in his large, rough, glove-donned one which I know now why he wears and gently kissing it, then caressing it with his fingertips. His creepy yet lovelorn, pale eyes shining.”

  “Nice segway into boasting about your oh-so-teeny-weeny, female delicacy Shiver,” Mist muttered.

  “Often we spend our time with him showering me with ornate gifts similar to what Monovalent purchases,” Shiver continued on, quite happily.

  What she didn’t mention was Emanuel asking her sternly “Are you still pure,” when she replied affirmatively his face relaxed, and he said, “Good remain that way for the first five of your visits I forbid you to do otherwise, or my help you shall not receive."

  “Will be my adored virginal bride again. Immune to call of the demon beasts and with a darkless fair by virtue of eyes, lips, maiden hair. Tailed by a holiness that never shivers to ash and mere splinters of gold.”

  As she had walked the sweeping floors, he told her about many grand, reasonably interesting things; from his many youthful exploits to his relationship with her former self.

  “Ahh, my old pranks,” Emanuel had intoned. Whilst sitting on the honeyed wood of an ancient chair. As in his castle manor’s, wine-coloured curtains gleamed. As he had watched sunlight play on coltish limbs. Heaven darkly-hailing from her eyes.

  “Many hackers went after ISIS and white supremacy advocates. Meanwhile, I went for governments, rip-off charities, and adoption agencies in cahoots with black-market baby-sellers, poison-pumping corporations, or STD body ruination liberty-at-any-cost types.”

  "Terroristic and low-wage ensuring, mass immigration-loving, social harmonists. Good guys with much bloodshed to their name."

  “I found every vile underground and attacked their legit-looking front. Would have the computer shout in voice activation their deadly sins. Every vile thing said by them in real life. Using our new, mass-produced, skin-absorbed, recording device I first called a "nano-eye," that Monovalent uses now. They beautifully flit to great distances and recognise faces and track people. The lab I was working in, would not have been pleased I was not merely showing “the prototypes” but actively employing them.”

  "We used "email" as were back then called and secret web browsing and postings. Also changed pages explaining major political party’s policies only to tell people unabashedly what they really stand for.”

  “Hacked computer voice operation systems and reprogramming and recording it to make it seem haunted. If you used any internet search engine excessively it would tell you: Stop googling and doom scrolling, it’s the alcohol of computing and causes brain-burn and the death of concentration.

  I did this on phones too; if you took or sent a picture from it or a webcam you would be informed by the computing voice;

  “I didn’t get a clear look but that better not be you naked, you’ll regret it. That sweetheart is a bragging drunken haze or missed call away from sharing it to all their mates or posting online’’’ I later programmed it to recognize nude forms, so it just said, ‘"Stop making bad pornos of yourself, please my eyes, my poor, computer eyes."’

  Had it give everyone helpful hints about whatever it was they were looking for. Telling those visiting an online clothing store; ‘“Everyone no matter how flawed looks good in something big and black.”’

  On dating sites ‘“love takes time…A lot. Hopeful not more than we have before we die, this is, after all, the twenty-first century. Age of thrown-by-the-wayside-not right-fit-for-me lovers and where a thousand is the only acceptable number. ”’

  "If they messaged someone too often without reply the computer would crow: ‘“They love you… Just not enough to talk or pay any attention to, that’s all.”’ If you visited news or political sites the AI encouraged:

  “Post something: your opinions are valid and original. Don’t worry about the spelling; they’ll know what you mean so what if you’re missing a few ’s or e’s, coherency, or even every third word. I had it change the language on your computer to something you couldn’t understand like French or Arabic and download on its own then blast, creepy organ music. Siphoned money from people’s bank accounts that contained obscene amounts I always checked and left if didn’t.”

  “Eventually I was hired after my independently made anti-viral ware proved most efficient and by government, biggest companies (including high-profile banks) hired to do their high-security software.”

  “Of course, malware all had the most trouble handling? Mine." He boasted.

  "Lucifer knows took down biggest off-shore accounts, Google the CIA, military and government “confidential" emails and the Chinese government servers.”

  “I installed nifty little pocket of programming hidden-in files as well as my impenetrable firewalls. Randomly caused some accounts at differing times and below a certain income to not register as having withdrawn money yet so could keep going back for more, only lasting a few days though.”

  “Did cutting-edge programming for the fastest and most efficient gaming console emulators and servers that hosted copyrighted material. Made a few games too. One quite a hit though never took credit. It was beautifully imaged and except for my marriage to Sibyl Farling and her departure, you probably know the rest of my exceptionally mediocre life.”

  “Ah, Sibyl Farling…Angel and imp. Mired, swampish. A fiend-fair cloaked in a carolling of faerylight and who gave me half her food every school day because couldn’t such necessities afford.”

  “Let me eat dinner at her house rather than listen to alcoholics screaming and weeping, paycheques waved bitterly when we, their charges, were "supposedly" out of earshot. They complained over how little the state prayed for such lousy take-ins. Lights went out at eight to save money on electricity.”

  “My first invention was a master key for…Spying. Later on, it was a more competent, power-saving, long-lasting battery for a second-hand, non-working computer which I purchased very cheaply and fixed. Even got new parts for it and replaced them myself. Also used for…Spying."

  “Holographic facial reconstruction lay next."

  “Engineered from malleable, light material I as a lad from my student research lab stole, after secretly helping craft, this compound robotic material. It forms a beautifully-crafted, facial cast, my Ivy designed the physical appearance of, and I made blueprints workable with that image. It Hides the true extent of my or any deformity. Which made it, especially from a distance less noteworthy and left no mass scarring and lumping of surgery. Could never it fully cloak dearest but don’t wish you to the actual extent of it ( though welcome) see.”

  Shiver was tapping her tongue and trying to understand why he was calling his childhood lover Ivy. Wasn't it Sibyl Farling? Oh no right, it was Ivy Sibyl Parish but she hated her name because she associated it with abusive, childhood things. So he privately nicknamed her Sibyl Farling because they both thought it sounded more pretty and fairylike or something.

  “Nepotism has ruined talent, and creativity. He was saying now. Whilst she agreed she wished he would talk about how exquisite and beloved she was again.

  "One’s shyster ability to network and charm the hapless should not mean a man of greater knowledge or ability is shunned for the one who works the room. " He complained a tad bitterly. Didn't seem to have stopped you from achieving, she thought. Though maybe it had not been too easy.

  “Absurd feminisations such as political correctness; obnoxious obsession with profit, speed. Wealth for wealth’s sake and care not for the created object’s beauty or competence, only marketability. A resume that prevails not on credentials but upbeat and pretentious styling or its owner's minority or womanly status. Cheap tools used to make our planned-obsolescent buildings and machines to cost cut.” Then he began talking about her former self again and her interest piqued. Though she wished he was a little younger and more brutishly handsome as opposed to ruggedly ugly.

  “You were once to her tethered; share her visual understanding of how to make the most beautifying shape and shade; virtual and manmade. Aided me in making my game's virtual beasts. Black-horned and harrowingly-winged. Created the walls and gardens of verdure, in greenery-curtained. The land whitely-birded. With a timber slain. Its water neath red stone; a glittering fire-lake under rosewood. Created sunnily, the gold slips that engulf a rock mistiest. Somehow hued-with-all-the-rainbow, the gray of a cliff.”

  "Could create the raggedy dark of a woodpecker richly beset by sunset. So many beautiful, virtual worlds made in your image and by your artistic hand, even beyond the grave. Now you're dearly returned and will become my faerie bride. In a summer gown, you'll gleam with all the white of the Fairyland Eaves."

  Shiver's mind wandered to Jacob and whether her clues in the now-beautified Mist-Land had been too obvious. Or so she pondered as she drifted back into thoughts of the White Wonderland. Yet this thrown-by-the-wayside treasure he needed to find, was such a rare thing to even consider or to value. You could very likely hide it in plain sight and he would not notice it. Nowhere is purer than Eden...Jacob. Where they say God's yellow-lighted gaze shines brightest. Though perhaps, like all women of my generation, it simply doesn't matter...

  From a tender age, I became too far gone. There's nothing left to truly take and all the goodness has dripped away from the earth. Perhaps love lies in a garden, I have never seen...Or so she thought. Twisting her paired, whitest hands together and dropping them down so they were like two knotted petals falling.