Jacob passed by Adora half-hanging out a window and realized she was growing; fast. Too quickly; she now appeared to be at least fourteen years old. He rather missed the sweet child. Outside he could see some of the sooted ones and what appeared to be their little shadow-children. Pale imps but ones black-edged and bedraggled. The only darkling in this fairest land. They were huddling outside on the fair white castle's path of beautiful ivory.

  "Should we help them?"

  "Only God may spare them," Adora replied, "you can toss them some milk and peppered honey and some roasted things though."

  Jacob wasn't sure what peppered honey was. It sounded like a chicken sandwich topping.

  "Bread with chicken honey pepper, a good idea for dinner Jacob!" She called out to a passing by Android in an adorable chef's hat.

  "Can you make that Claurie?"

  "Yes, Miss Adora."

  "Does your...Half-deity status make you age more..."

  "No, my gentle growth is sweet and most timely to serve my Lord. Tonight I will become a maiden of sixteen. Tomorrow, I will finally be a lady. As all the opening flowers become wined and the apple tree drips white dew. Can't wait to receive the light of my majesty and my reigning crown of gold. To celebrate this bright and birded and most musical milestone in the Garden of Eden. Jacob, please take my hand..."

  Shiver and Mist were busy. Organizing a streaming sponsorship for the cause and had to work hard on it since Shiver was on thin ice after having gotten thrown from her feminist group. Leaving Aryan’s momentarily necessary alliances with women’s organizations to aid in his power bid, just that much weaker.

  Yet young men especially, were not impressed by any feminism even under the guise of Shiver’s welcoming, fey prettiness. Strikingly reminiscent of fire and snow. When she deigned to bother, Shiver had a flirtatious, girlish affinity with men that shone.

  Yet they still somehow struggled to win male hearts over. It was a wearying task to try and make women's issues seem slightly more palatable to a generation of men tired of being frequently badgered for trivia. Whilst many true abusers hid behind wealth or superficial charm or minority status. To evade punishment for their crimes.

  Mist as he prepared for the recording to start, turned to Shiver hidden sweetly behind by locks of reddish-gold.

  “So the involuntary celibate king, is our only means to salvation. Also did he ever even feel the tender hand of his so-called lover, Sibyl Farling, or was he just simpering and stalking?"

  Shiver’s sweet little head snapped up a tad indignantly. “He is no incel. People throw that word around till it loses all meaning, anyway. He lost his virginity at fourteen. When he and she decided to “get married” and consummate their love in the eyes of the Lord. I mean due to their age it wasn’t legal but they had a ceremony."

  She called out to Monovalent and he obligingly began streaming footage from a proto-type virtualiser. In it, a young girl, with elfin ears and a horribly deformed boy were standing under ghost gums. As the image played out, they were soon in a church with a grand steeple. The boy’s young face was utterly illuminated by some golden-as-the-rye, richest longing but the half-grown girl was the startling one. She was looking at him as if he was quite the most magnificent thing she had ever seen.

  Mist was impressed. “Shesh, how did he pull that one out of the hat? She looks like she’d pray to him.”

  “Masculinity is forceful and persuasive. It doesn't always need a pretty decoration to succeed. He was clever and romantic and beautifully silver-tongued. Just listen to his vows." Shiver crowed.

  “My one so honeyed, do you know the origin tale of Beauty and the Beast? For the sacrificial sake of her father, came a beyond-the-self-love, unknown today and from obsolete rafters springing. In a land still full of frosted, untouched delphinium but where Titans aren't veiled bluely."

  “Within plentiful walls of imprisonment, she dreams of a handsome Prince, bold and dashing. Yet it is only when she learns to love the beast, that there arises that first-sallow sprig; new, hourly-flick of a palest light that’s gradual afire you must slowly, firstly-handle. Laboriously calls upon the kindlier wick, at the scarcely visible entrance, to a place past the limited depths of shallower shells. Only then does he transfigure and become the very Prince she had always seen as she sweetly, cloudily-dreamed. Her entrancing one.“

  “Well maybe that works on women, men aren’t blind,” Mist said.

  “True, on the other hand, you often have a high count of horse-faced, house-sized women in your roster, so you’re not always been moved along by what you see but rather by your…”

  “Hey hand over the chocolates, you have been hogging them! It is a wonder you aren’t a house.” Or so Mist interrupted.

  “No, they're praline and my favourite and he bought them for me and…Okay yeah you can have one.”

  Mist grinned and took rather more than one.

  Back at his modest little rented home, so different from the gray and golden castles of the Shiverla brood, Simon once more perused his opponents' writings.

  “Due to global warming and poverty, you and everyone you love may soon be a beggar dying neath the streetlights on an earth that’s become a flowerless grove.” the words Emanuel had written to presumably justify their political take-over.

  As Jacob walked through the valley of Eden, he kicked golden and scarlet apples aside. Ones scattered prettily on the ground. Bright and dazzling. He aimlessly drifted as all the paths of the cloudy lowlands he walked, entwined. Not at all sure where they might be headed. His vision became obscured by a silky grevillea oak; with yellow, showy flowerings. He moved onward and saw flying foxes with fringed lashes.

  Adora soon let go of his hand and called out she was going to find somewhere to rest. She raced away with a wild flourish, and it took him a while to catch up.

  He saw Adora sitting beneath a rosewood tree and it took Jacob a moment to see the rainbow serpent with the bold, black head, twisting and writhing above. It rose up out of the mist that had settled over the land and had only one great eye, that watched Adora as she lay still. Her sweet, faintly pink, colourless dress gave a hint of nudity though nothing truly lay visible. Clearly meant to represent the wild and natural innocence of Eden.

  In the distance, he saw a white lake with pieces of true gold ferried all the way to its edges.

  The serpent slithered down and asked Adora if she would trade her flower for a pint of knowledge. “For a brief but unimaginable slinking in of joy,” it hissed.

  “No, thank you,” Adora said calmly.

  “Jacob, my fair Prince will slay you, I think,” she said consideringly.

  Jacob was perturbed but he did instinctively feel a great distaste for the serpent beast. Without thinking he lifted something dark and glittering from the ground; a black dagger seemingly made from the most beautiful onyx.

  He swung it but the creature dodged easily and to his dismay grew the most glorious red-and-black wings upon its serpentine face and two more right above the strange, slithering limbs which it wasn’t supposed to have.

  “You don’t remember you’re Bible at all,” snorted Adora loftily. “Or even recall evolutionary theory. The snakes lost their dear limbs either as divine punishment or by nature’s unknowable sleight of hand.”

  She was once more speaking in that strange, adult candor. With even the subtle movement of her lips under the command of her voice, somehow trembling her throat. The lightness of the Eden wind was able to be almost shaking her fey, little shoulders.

  The snake beast flew into Jacob’s face, headed right for his eyes but the dagger flew out of his hand to shield them whilst emitting the most exquisite, fair light he had ever seen. It then sliced something blurring and beating in the air and Jacob heard a most anguishing howl.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “You should thank the Lord,” Adora reprimanded.

  Jacob hardly able to concentrate managed to mete out a strange, half-sincere, “Thank you, Lord, who art in Heaven.”

  Adora nodded approvingly. As Jacob caught the dagger.

  “There are a lot of myths surrounding what can make you go blind,” she then muttered.

  Finally, Jacob, in a strange red fury grabbed the beast mid-air as it was swooping mockingly down at him and strangled it whilst it bit and snarled, and his hands burned cold with venom. Soon it fell to the ground and Jacob collapsed with a slight dismay at his ruined hands. The dagger which he had almost forgotten, lay in the golden dirt. He picked it up despite the pain of his wounded fingers and scorched palms and stabbed the snake through the heart as nearby, its sliced-off and scarlet wing still draped and fluttered.

  It hissed in agony and almost seemed to admit a dire weep, before coiling in of itself, as its one eye closed and faded into the dying flesh of a rainbow. Had finally collapsed, this likely once most beautiful being of the Lord. Ash-white and grossly crackling with the now pitted fire of every great star.

  Adora was glowing; the flower she held in her tender hand was glowing and he realized what all this snow-white purity represented. Alongside the oddly one-eyed snake.

  “Did you just metaphorically slay manhood, Jacob?” Adora asked with a fair giggle. “To protect the latent glory of a lady’s virginal wonder.”

  “To shield the flower who when its light ends, will also farewell the glow of her living sea,” She then transformed just like the swan-princess right back into Lady Ember. Into Shiver.

  “Pity you were too late to save me. To fill my pitiful, poisoned shrine with His Holy Spirit.”

  Shiver then wordlessly handed him a virtualizer.

  Finally, she spoke from scarlet lips that rang oddly cold, her smile wan.

  “With this, you have won, show it to Emanuel after he has reprogrammed and redreamed the great machine to kill Aryan, and he will thus take me and Mist to the ground out of spite and humanity will be free.”

  She quickly dissipated like a scattering of mist and raindrops and took Jacob with her. Soon he was out of the virtual realm and back in his grand, beautiful home.

  When Aryan first wheeled them into the grand living quarters of his manor on their holding cart, the androids were a good six feet tall; nearly as tall as him. They had long, greyhound-like faces, stiff-looking slender limbs, and pale, shiny skin. Their colour was an almost metallic, pinkish-white and they were pretty impressively humanoid in structure and shape. One was male the other female and they were wearing dark-blue and white servants clothes and even pristine white aprons. Shiver Gray, his precious little pixie, tugging at her own flowing, deep, blue-gray cotton dress with the pleats, wondered if she would be allowed to touch one.

  “They look so real like a living person,” said Shiver. “Can I touch one of them to see what they feel like?” She inquired of Aryan with a hopeful little smile.

  “Go ahead,” said Aryan smiling back at her indulgently. He petted first silken skeins of her fair hair and then caressed her pale, slender arm. He reached out to do the same to Mist’s spreading-of-silver hair, the boy shied away a little then accepted the strange bout of unbridled affection.

  Like Monovalent (whose artificial brain was modelled somewhat on Aryan’s own mixed in with Emanuel’s) Aryan saw the two Shiverla as his pets, sweet, intelligent, beautiful, and rather amusing creatures but hardly on his level, not able to ever as Emanuel commented wryly “match his caliber.” While regular humanity was about as intelligent and capable as instinct-driven insects they needed a firm hand to guide them. As a collective humanity was capable of so much but as individuals so mentally and emotionally devoid except for rare exceptions like the glory of great artists, scientists, musicians, and inventors as well as his own precious Shiver and Mist.

  Shiver’s pupils enlarged joyously, and she reached out one of her lily-white, delicate hands that could have belonged to an aristocrat and that imbued in her such pride and gently caressed the android’s arm. One of her electronic toys, this one a red fox, altered by the movement walked over and began making a yipping noise which set Waterbaby off and he chased it and her leopard, Tasmanian tiger, and ocelot robots which had all been curled up on the ample chairs around.

  “Emanuel and I designed the programs for those robotic animal creatures it was a slightly less complex task than the humanoid ones and we also both share in a large amount of the company’s profits and so get the human and animal androids for free Shiv. Emanuel too has his own robotic maids and cooks now,” Aryan said.

  “The android’s arm feels very similar to skin the covering over the arms but smoother and tougher like its synthetic which of course it is”.

  Aryan didn’t respond as it wasn’t a question, and he couldn’t remember the material/ materials their skin was constructed from anyway. That wasn’t his department. He did the software; he was a programmer and a software designer. Hardware and the physical elements of AI, computing, and robotics for his programs were done by Fused Computing and Robotics International or some other such company affiliated with his own.

  “What will they be used for?” Shiver asked speaking again and snapping him out of his train of thought.

  “Plethora of basic, mundane tasks,” Aryan told her shrugging. “Cooking, cleaning, and heavy lifting, fishing, truck driver and delivery man, plumber, garbage man, fruit picking, and fieldwork, waitressing, factory work, administrative, clerical and retail work they’ll also can lift a hundred thousand times their weight due to being made of micro-architected metamaterials.”

  “They’ve been built with artillery and weaponry to be used by armies as defense, likely fight in future wars as they’ll be able to see/recognize the enemy without assistance from officers analyzing the images sent by the camera needed in the past and can withstand far more damage presuming we can’t prevent all that uncivilized nonsense.”

  “Most factories use machines to do the bulk of the work already, this is just a step up. When they are released producing, repairing, and maintaining them should create new jobs to occupy some of the ones they’ll fill. At least they will be used that way, once perfected. For now, they are simply too difficult to run and maintain to justify our program. Expensive as it is holographic imagery, is still slightly cheaper.”

  “They are very, very simple machines programmed well by our Monovalent but as of yet not as efficient or workable as I should prefer at all,” he said somewhat disparagingly.

  Mist tossed tousled, pale silver-blond locks disdainfully and winked at Shiver as if to say the old guy’s at it again, rattling on and on about how nothing’s ever perfect or good enough for him. Shiver in a lacklustre response sniffed and curled the corners of her lips in a lukewarm smile. ‘Sounds rather like something out of science fiction. I wonder if they know they’re robots. Jana and Rachel didn’t,” she said curiously turning to face Aryan.

  “They know they’re mechanical dear, they don’t need memory implants to function anymore that Monovalent does.” Aryan retorted exasperated.

  “ I like science fiction when it is grim and black and grotty, a real bleak futuristic thriller of pollution, dark interior,s and misery. I love the story where a robot implores the hero to buy her a novel before he kills or retires her and then says to the other robot when he obliges ‘“you don’t have the capacity or emotions to understand why he did that”’ I think it was an old novella.” Shiver said still talking, incessantly, ceaselessly.

  “Some androids have the youthful face and body of a woman-child like me.”

  She then proceeded to twirl the soft silk that comprised her red-gold locks round and round her finger. Irritated by these two spoilt teens of his preening and playing with their hair and who having always owned almost everything one could desire, truly comprehended the value of almost nothing, Aryan looked at his robot servants and he felt even further annoyed.

  “They are truly not perfected in the slightest,” he said again with a dismissive frown. “They will break down at the drop of a hat, though Monovalent, Emanuel, and I are pretty darn good at doing maintenance on them and rebooting and programming them if they should break down or fail. They do have great camera eyes and various sensors.”

  Their particular, derived behaviour or Artificial intelligence is modelled, and I feel awful saying this (it was Monovalent’s idea) on humans with a condition that causes them to be retarded in a manner that leaves them almost personality-less. Much like the monkeys supposedly going to have genes removed to make more docile and willing to follow orders without rewards.”

  “Their behaviour mimics impaired humans and those with autism: who so love their routine. Intially it was on data from the old monkey experiments. A programming that enables us to use androids as we would have unethically used the monkeys; as a form of cheap labour that can perform menial tasks and jobs. Essentially what the androids are now being programmed and marketed for.”

  “Too mass produced and menial to store too much valid information but have minds that Monovalent backs up and forms and can be moved from one point to another seamlessly as adjustable body size and can fit into fairly small space.”

  “Easily and with proficiency they may engage in various tasks, actions, and basic conversation and even truly learn. They're strong as greatest steel, self-repairing, and can change shape, stretch arms, and legs, and shrink and grow due to a bendable and shrinkable material. To clean and cook more proficiently.” He continued with some pride.

  “Well so may I,” Shiver said.

  “Given the right nano-replication and human, viral, bacterial, or animal capabilities and instructions for my malleable structure and cellular makeup, I can do all those things. I am as resilient. Made partially of similar material to theirs.”

  “Yeah, that’s not so great we're darn superior,” Mist said.

  “You are also simply prototypes, to test out a new, more versatile, and immortal human evolution, and therefore only two of you exist. So, unless you want to tidy all houses yourselves personally, I’d leave it.”

  “For example, if you were to use one of my androids in a coffee shop it could take orders. What coffee do you want to order sir it enquires, and it even interacts with you, with a nice discussion about the weather as its sensors will perfectly indicate if any given day is cold and rainy. Hot and humid. A not dissimilar form of robot technology’s been around for years, starting in Japan.”

  “As were the ability for androids to read human tones and basic facial expressions but these new androids are artificially intelligent not mere copiers and reactors and capable of responding to far more stimuli and with some propensity for thought.”

  “Did you know old AI could be programmed with certain reservoirs of knowledge and apt to use that information to create to set of problems or solutions? Using trial and error to try various potential options and learn the most effective course of action. Yet could not learn from its environment something vast and ever-changing. What a defect that they could not mentally evolve, and exceed pre-programmed capabilities? Well since my Monovalent and even these far inferior artificial beings. That is no more.”

  “They understand somewhat more complex human speech, respond accordingly to basic behavior, and may even work out when the distressed need comforting as well as more basic things like fire means danger.”

  “If tell them an entire selection of problems say you’re looking for ex-branch of the company, are lost and need directions or need the police or medical assistance and (the androids can perform first-aid) they’ll understand and help you. They can decipher the difference in behaviour between a violent criminal and an innocent bystander.”

  “Although if Monovalent is functioning right and installed in all workplaces he’s used (as computers have been for a while though never this successfully) as a surveillance alarm in homes. He usually sees and handles many of these issues. Starting next month we will be having the androids patrol the streets, particularly in dangerous, deserted areas though as armed guards/officers for this reason.”

  “In a workplace, the androids will direct visitors to the office floor “It is three doors from the left ma’am”. It could also of course perform any relatively basic, menial task (cooking meals, sweeping floors, supervising a shop, and counting the profits at the end of the day. They can lift suitcases at a hotel, lay bricks for housing, that level of basic function.”

  “We’re not getting rid of our servants to replace with the androids, are we?” Shiver asked this whilst munching happily on a huge chocolate chip cookie.

  “Not yet dear,” said Aryan “We will need our servants in this house still as the robots break down frequently and are slower than people, with weaker reaction times.” In a demonstration, he raised his arm and began waving it in the direction of one of the robot's sensors.

  The Android turned pale, listless eyes on him and asked after a very slight pause if it “could do anything for the Master today, “in a dull, apathetic tone.

  ‘They’ll be cleaning and cooking for us while Anne-Marie and Laurence are away on holiday," Aryan explained.

  “Couldn’t you just find a replacement?” Mist said speaking for only the second time since Aryan arrived ten minutes ago with the android.

  “Not on this short notice,” he answered.

  Shiver then asked why Aryan didn’t cook. “I don’t have the time with my heavy work schedule and am truly abysmal at cooking anyway as you must admit are you and Mist.”

  “We really should practice,” said Mist.

  “Do you want to start?” Asked Aryan.

  Mist gave him a look of horror. “No,” he said sounding appalled, “Thanks but I’ll pass.”