Cherry Blossom Snow

Seraphim

Upset by Aurelia's disappearance, Nathan decided to try building himself a new companion. In 1983, he completed the creation of a tall, slender, female humanoid cybernetic organism with light brown skin, long, flowing, black hair, highly reflective bright yellow eyes, and black feathered wings. She was to be his emotional and sexual companion as well as his loyal personal servant, although he had mixed feelings about this project from the start.

While creating them, it was certainly easy to think of them as just machines, but they were so much more, as was only really apparent once they were activated. They were sentient beings, deserving love and respect as such. He paused and thought back for quite some time. One million, two hundred and six thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight failures and only five successes. Tens of thousands had deliberately killed themselves, hundreds of thousands accidentally, and there were still hundreds of thousands more who were so defective that Nathan had personally killed them out of mercy. Nathan did not feel like calculating his success rate, as he secretly was not particularly good at mathematics, which as he thought about it could probably account for a large portion of his failures, but he knew that his success rate was very low. How many more sentient beings would he bring into a miserable existence to satisfy his own selfish desires? He couldn't keep doing this. No more, he decided. This was it. Regardless of the outcome, this next one would be the last.

Nathan considered removing the self-destruct feature from this creation, but he decided not to, because he thought that would be too selfish. After his first failure, he had realized that it was a possibility that his creations may wish to end their own lives, so he always built a self-destruct system into his creations, designed so that only they could activate it and only they could cancel it. He always hoped, though, that it would not be needed. Nathan checked this one repeatedly to make sure that she was flawless. Nothing could go wrong this time. He would not be able to accept that. Everything had to go perfectly. Even if it did not, he promised himself that he would not try again.

Nathan calmed down and did his best to maintain his composure. It was too hard, though. He needed a break from his work. He needed to cheer up. He secured his laboratory and left for a bit to spend time with his children. Upon his return, he did another quick system check on his creation. Then, he activated her.

"I am Nathan, your creator," said Nathan. "I name you Seraphim."

"Seraphim," she said. "I like it. It's a beautiful name. I accept it. I am Seraphim."

"It's a beautiful name for a beautiful person," Nathan said as he held up a mirror to Seraphim.

"Fascinating," Seraphim said as she looked at herself in the mirror.

"I created you for a very special purpose," said Nathan. "After billions of years of living in this universe, I discovered sexual intercourse. Unfortunately, that was after I had already been rejected by the one person I was truly in love with. I searched for ways to appeal to her, but they never worked. That is why I created you."

"How did it take you so long to discover such a simple thing?"

"I'll admit I was a bit clueless. I mean no disrespect to you, but I would rather be with that special someone I was talking about, and you were created merely as a substitute for her. She wanted children, but I didn't fully understand, so I built children for her all by myself. Although she eventually came to accept the children as her own, she grew increasing disdain for me."

"How did you create your children? Did you make them the way you made me?"

"More or less."

"So, does that make me your child?"

"No."

"Why? They are your children. Why am I not?"

"Damn it," said Nathan. "I think you may be right."