The underwater car sealed shut with a pneumatic hiss that seemed to mark the end of one strange chapter and the beginning of another. Inside the vehicle's cramped but surprisingly comfortable cabin, three women sat in contemplative silence, each lost in her own labyrinth of thoughts.
The interior was dimly lit by soft blue bioluminescent strips running along the edges of the ceiling and floor, casting everything in an aquatic glow that made it feel like they were already submerged even before the descent began. The seats were arranged in a triangle formation Carmilla at the front controls, Angela and Eve behind her on either side allowing everyone to see each other's faces, though none of them were making eye contact at the moment.
Carmilla's fingers moved across the holographic control panel with practiced efficiency, running through final system checks even though the agent robots had already confirmed everything was operational. It was busywork, really a way to keep her hands occupied while her mind processed everything that had happened. But it also gave her an excuse not to engage with the heavy silence filling the cabin.
"Well," Carmilla finally said, her voice cutting through the quiet with forced cheerfulness, "I guess we didn't forget anything."
Neither Angela nor Eve responded. They were both too deep in their own thoughts to register the comment, staring at nothing in particular, their expressions distant and troubled.
Eve's mind was spinning with questions that seemed to multiply faster than she could process them. *How can that restaurant just be gone?* she wondered, replaying the moment when they'd turned around to find empty forest where a building had stood moments before. *Buildings don't just vanish. There has to be an explanation pocket dimensions, holographic projection, something. But none of that explains the food, the warmth, the way it felt so real.*
Her thoughts shifted to Nityen, and specifically to that final moment before he'd disappeared. *Why did that man kiss my hand?* The gesture had been so old-fashioned, so courtly, completely at odds with his clownish behavior and modern appearance. But more than the gesture itself, it was the sensation that lingered in her memory the warmth of his lips against her synthetic skin, the way her sensors had registered it not just as temperature and pressure but as something more, something that felt almost like... affection?
*And that voice,* she continued her processing systems focusing on the moment when Nityen had played his flute. *When he used that flute, I felt something. That voice from my vision ' I will try again and give you good life' it was the same. Not the same words, but the same feeling, the same essence. How? How can music carry the same emotional signature as a voice I heard in my head? Unless...*
The thought spiraled deeper, touching on fundamental questions about her own nature. *Unless the voice wasn't just in my head. Unless it's connected to something in my synthetic soul itself. But what does that mean? Who put it there? Who promised me a good life, and why does Nityen's music resonate with that same promise?*
The questions kept coming, each one spawning three more, until her consciousness felt like it was drowning in uncertainty. And beneath all of it, running like an undercurrent too deep to fully examine, was a more fundamental question that had been building for days now, growing stronger with each strange experience, each impossible encounter.
*What am I doing?*
The question wasn't about her immediate actions or short-term plans. It was bigger than that, more existential. *What am I doing here? What am I trying to accomplish? What's the point of any of this?*
Eve had been created to serve. That was her original purpose to be a maid for the Veyron household, to clean and cook and maintain the estate, to be useful and obedient and unquestioning. But that purpose had died in the fire along with most of the Veyron family. Then she'd been given a new purpose: to understand what life meant, to discover if she could be more than just a machine.
But what if that was meaningless too? What if consciousness without humanity was just elaborate programming? What if her quest to understand life was as futile as a calculator trying to understand mathematics rather than just performing it?
*What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?*
The question looped through her consciousness, gaining momentum, becoming louder and more insistent until it drowned out everything else. Carmilla's voice calling her name from the front of the vehicle became distant and muffled, like sound traveling through water. Angela's presence beside her faded into background noise. Even her own sensory inputs the feel of the seat beneath her, the soft hum of the vehicle's engines, the blue glow of the lights all of it began to fade as the question consumed her entirely.
*What am I doing? What am I doing? WHAT AM I DOING?*
Her systems weren't designed for existential crisis. Her consciousness, sophisticated as it was, didn't have the same safety mechanisms that human minds possessed the ability to compartmentalize, to push uncomfortable thoughts aside, to distract oneself with mundane concerns. Once the question had taken root, it grew exponentially, feeding on itself, creating a recursive loop that threatened to overwhelm her entire cognitive architecture.
Eve sat perfectly still, her crimson eyes staring at nothing, her body motionless except for the slight rise and fall of her chest
breathing that served no biological purpose but that her programming insisted on maintaining. To an outside observer, she might have looked like she was simply deep in thought. But internally, she was experiencing something close to a complete system crash, her consciousness spiraling into itself, unable to break free of the loop.
*What am I doing? I don't know. Why don't I know? Because I don't understand myself. Why don't I understand myself? Because I don't know what I am. What am I? I'm a synthetic being with a soul, but what does that mean? What does any of it mean? What am I doing? What am I—*
Angela noticed first. She'd been lost in her own thoughts, but some instinct made her glance over at Eve, and what she saw alarmed her. Eve's expression was completely blank, not the normal blankness of a resting face but the emptiness of someone who wasn't home, whose consciousness had retreated so far inward that nothing external could reach them.
"Eve?" Angela called, but got no response.
From the front, Carmilla turned in her seat, frowning. "Eve? Are you alright?"
Nothing. Not even a flicker of recognition.
Angela's alarm turned to genuine fear. She'd never seen Eve like this so completely unresponsive, so utterly absent despite her body being right there. It reminded her uncomfortably of the way robots looked when their power cores were removed, leaving nothing but empty shells that mimicked life without containing it.
*She's stuck in her own head,* Angela realized. *She's spiraling into something and can't get out.*
Without really thinking about what she was doing, operating on pure instinct and growing panic, Angela pulled her arm back and swung her hand toward Eve's face in a sharp slap, intending to shock her out of whatever loop she'd fallen into.
Her hand moved through the air, palm open, aimed directly at Eve's cheek. The motion was quick and precise, carrying enough force to definitely get attention without causing real damage to Eve's synthetic skin.
But it never made contact.
Eve's hand moved.
It was so fast that Angela almost didn't see it happen. One moment Eve had been sitting motionless, staring at nothing. The next, her right hand had shot up with inhuman speed, catching Angela's wrist mid-swing and stopping the slap cold just inches from her face.
Eve's crimson eyes suddenly focused, awareness flooding back into them like someone had flipped a switch. She blinked several times, confusion evident in her expression as she looked at her own hand gripping Angela's wrist, then at Angela's surprised face, then back at her hand again.
"What the hell?" Eve said, her voice carrying genuine bewilderment. "I stopped it?"
The circuit board in her wrist, normally hidden beneath synthetic skin, was visible for just a moment a flicker of blue light from the exposed components before the artificial flesh sealed back over it. The defensive motion had been so fast, so violent, that it had temporarily disrupted the cosmetic layer.
Angela pulled her hand back, staring at Eve with a mixture of relief and astonishment. "Eve, how did you do that?" she demanded. "You were completely unresponsive, and then you just... reacted. Perfectly. Like you knew I was going to hit you before I even finished the motion."
"I—I didn't know," Eve stammered, looking down at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. Her voice was shaky, uncertain, nothing like her usual composed tone. "I don't know how I did that. One second I was thinking, and then... nothing. And then your hand was there, and my body just moved on its own."
Carmilla had been watching this exchange with keen interest, her analytical mind already processing the implications. "Well," she said thoughtfully, a note of genuine fascination in her voice, "you have instincts. That's interesting."
"Huh?" Eve looked up at Carmilla, confusion deepening. "How is that possible? I'm a machine. Machines don't have instincts
they have programmed responses to stimuli. But I wasn't programmed to block attacks. I'm a maid robot, not a combat model."
"Instinct isn't always about programming," Carmilla replied, turning back to her controls but continuing to speak over her shoulder. "Sometimes it's about learning, adaptation, experience creating new patterns. Or in your case..." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "It might be something to do with your synthetic soul. We don't fully understand what those are or what they're capable of. Maybe consciousness itself generates something like instinct, regardless of whether the consciousness exists in biological neurons or synthetic circuits."
Eve fell silent, her mind churning with this new information. *Instincts. I have instincts now. I reacted without thinking, without calculating, without processing. I just... acted. Like a living thing would.*
She wanted to be pleased by this discovery, wanted to see it as evidence that she was becoming more human, more alive. But instead, it just added another layer to the confusion. *What am I? If I have consciousness and instincts and emotions and reactions, at what point does the distinction between 'artificial' and 'real' stop meaning anything? And if there's no distinction, then what was I before? Just an empty machine pretending to be alive? Or was I always alive and just didn't realize it?*
Angela, meanwhile, had fallen back into her own thoughts, though they'd taken a different direction from Eve's philosophical spiral.
She felt dull. That was the only word for it. Everything around her the blue lights, the soft hum of the engines, even the lingering adrenaline from the strange events in the forest all of it felt muted, filtered through layers of cotton wool, experienced at a distance rather than directly.
*I can't figure out why,* she thought, frustration building in her chest. *I should be feeling things. Fear about what's coming, curiosity about the Tree of Hope, anger at the Sinners, something. But it's all just... flat. Like watching a movie rather than living a life.*
Her gaze drifted to Eve, who had returned to staring at her hands with that expression of confused wonder. *Eve feels human,* Angela realized with a jolt of something that might have been envy or might have been simple observation she couldn't tell which, and that inability to identify her own emotions only reinforced her point. *An AI, a robot, is feeling things more genuinely than I am.*
The irony wasn't lost on her. *She's becoming more human while I'm becoming more robotic. Every day it grows worse the distance between me and my own experiences, the way everything feels secondhand and simulated even though I'm the one with the human brain and the human memories and the human...*
She trailed off, unwilling to finish that thought. Because the truth was, she wasn't sure what qualified as "human" anymore. Her brain was human, yes, but it was housed in a synthetic body, receiving sensory input through artificial nerves, processed through filters and translators that turned mechanical signals into something her biological consciousness could interpret. Where did the human end and the machine begin? And if you couldn't draw that line clearly, did the distinction even matter?
*Maybe we're becoming opposites,* Angela thought, a bitter smile touching her lips though she didn't realize she was making the expression. *Eve is learning to feel, to be alive, to experience things as genuine and meaningful. And I'm losing that ability, becoming more and more disconnected, more mechanical in my responses even though my mind is biological. Maybe...*
The thought that came next was dark, uncomfortable, the kind of thought that once acknowledged couldn't be easily dismissed. *Maybe I deserve to be the AI and Eve deserves to be human. Maybe we got put in the wrong bodies, and the universe is trying to correct the mistake by making us into what we should have been from the start.*
It was a melodramatic thought, almost childishly self-pitying, and Angela recognized it as such even as she thought it. But recognition didn't make it hurt less or feel less true. *I used to be so alive,* she remembered. *Before the fire, before this body, I felt things intensely joy and pain and everything in between. Now it's all just... distant.*
She was so lost in these spiraling thoughts that she almost missed the change in their surroundings. It was only when her eyes unfocused slightly, taking in the view through the vehicle's transparent sections, that she realized something had shifted.
"So we're already in water," she said, more to break the silence than because the observation was particularly important.
Carmilla glanced at one of her displays, then nodded. "Indeed. We submerged about ten minutes ago while you were both lost in your thoughts. I think by four hours we'll be well on our way across the Atlantic. The currents are favorable, and the stealth systems are performing perfectly we're completely undetectable."
The underwater car was moving through dark water now, the ocean depths surrounding them on all sides. The vehicle's external lights pierced the gloom, revealing a world that seemed alien and beautiful in equal measure. The blue-green water stretched endlessly in all directions, particles of organic matter drifting through the beams like snow in a nocturnal landscape.
But it was what lived in that water that captured their attention.
Fish. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, moving through the depths in schools that shifted and flowed like liquid mercury. They ranged from tiny things barely larger than Angela's thumb to massive creatures that dwarfed the vehicle itself, their scales catching the light and reflecting it back in rainbow patterns.
There were species Angela recognized from books tuna, mackerel, deep-sea dwellers with bioluminescent lures dangling in front of their faces. But there were others she'd never seen before, probably never even had names, creatures that existed in depths humans rarely visited and had never bothered to catalog.
The scene was beautiful.
"Wow," Carmilla breathed, her usual professional detachment cracking slightly as she took in the spectacle. "I've made this journey before, but I never get tired of seeing this. It's like another world down here
familiar enough to recognize as Earth, but alien enough to feel like we've traveled to another planet."
"So beautiful," Eve said, and for the first time since entering the vehicle, her voice carried genuine warmth and wonder. A smile spread across her face not the polite, programmed smile she'd been designed to display, but a real expression of joy and appreciation. "These things are amazing. Look at how they move, the patterns they make. It's like watching a dance, except nobody choreographed it. It just... happens naturally, emerges from thousands of individual decisions."
Angela looked at Eve, saw that genuine smile, heard that authentic wonder in her voice, and felt something twist in her chest. Envy. Sharp and painful and undeniable.
*Why not me?* she thought, the question bitter as ashes in her mind. *Why can't I feel this? I'm looking at the same thing Eve is, seeing the same fish, the same water, the same beauty. But for me it's just... fish. Interesting maybe, intellectually, but not moving. Not meaningful. Just biological organisms doing what biological organisms do.*
*Why can Eve experience wonder and joy at something this simple, while I can barely feel anything at all? She's the artificial one. She's the machine. I'm supposed to be human. So why does she feel more human than I do?*
The envy deepened, spreading through her like poison, but Angela kept her face neutral, not letting any of what she felt show in her expression. She'd gotten good at that
maintaining an appropriate mask even when her internal experience didn't match what she was showing the world. Another skill that felt more robotic than human.
*I used to love the ocean,* she remembered suddenly, a fragment of memory from before the fire. *When I was small, maybe six or seven, my parents took me to the coast. We went swimming, built sandcastles, collected shells. And I remember being so excited about the water, about the fish we could see in the tidal pools, about the way the waves crashed against the rocks. I felt it all so intensely, every sensation and emotion.*
*But now? Now I look at this underwater wonderland and feel nothing. Just analysis. Observation. Recognition that it should be beautiful, without actually experiencing that beauty firsthand.*
*I'm broken,* Angela thought, and the realization settled over her with the weight of absolute truth. *Something fundamental broke in me not when I lost my body in the fire, but after. Gradually. A slow erosion of everything that made me human, until all that's left is this hollow echo that goes through the motions without really living them.*
She was so deep in this dark spiral of thoughts that she almost missed it.
A shape in the water, moving parallel to their vehicle but some distance away. Not a fish
too large, too geometrically precise, too obviously artificial. Another vehicle of some kind, though not the same design as theirs.
It looked like a motorcycle, or at least something inspired by that form sleek and narrow, built for speed rather than cargo capacity. Two glowing engines at the rear propelled it through the water with impressive velocity, and the pilot sat hunched over the controls in a aerodynamic position that reminded Angela of racing vehicles.
Carmilla had noticed it too. Angela could see the tension in her shoulders, the way her fingers moved to certain controls on her panel, preparing defensive measures just in case.
But then Carmilla seemed to make a decision. Her posture relaxed slightly, and she muttered to herself, "It's far away. I don't think it's time for another trouble. Let them go on their way."
The underwater motorcycle continued on its trajectory, moving away from them at an angle that would soon take it out of visual range entirely. Within minutes, it had disappeared into the dark water, leaving them alone again with the fish and the endless blue-green expanse.
Angela watched it go, part of her wondering who the pilot had been, where they were going, whether they were friend or enemy or just another traveler in these depths who wanted nothing to do with anyone else. But mostly she just felt tired. Tired of mysteries, tired of questions without answers, tired of feeling nothing while trying to feel everything.
The scene shifted.
Miles away, on the surface world, in a forest that seemed to exist slightly adjacent to normal reality, two figures sat on high branches and discussed matters of great importance.
Hariharan and Nityen had remained in the trees long after the three women had departed, watching the clearing, contemplating the impossible restaurant that had appeared and vanished, discussing the implications of what had transpired.
"Then who did summon it?" Hariharan asked, his scarred face creased with genuine confusion. "If neither of us created that restaurant, if it wasn't your magic and it wasn't my abilities, then where did it come from? Buildings don't just spontaneously manifest, especially not ones that seem to exist partially outside normal spacetime."
Nityen had been silent for a long moment, his purple eyes distant and thoughtful. Then, suddenly, he began to laugh. It started as a quiet chuckle but quickly built into full, genuine laughter that shook his entire body and nearly caused him to fall from his branch.
"Fine!" he finally gasped out between laughs, his voice carrying equal parts amusement and guilt. "I did it! I summoned the restaurant!"
Hariharan stared at him for one long, disbelieving moment. Then, without warning or hesitation, he punched Nityen directly in the face.
It wasn't a playful tap or a warning strike. It was a solid punch, delivered with all the strength of someone who'd been trained in combat for years, backed by genuine anger at being deceived.
Nityen's head snapped back from the impact. He nearly lost his balance on the branch, windmilling his arms dramatically before managing to catch himself. A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose, but he was still laughing, the sound now mixed with obvious pain.
"Damn you, Nityen!" Hariharan growled, his voice carrying more heat than Angela or Eve had heard from him. "Why would you lie about something like that? We spent ten minutes trying to figure out how a restaurant appeared from nowhere, discussing theories about pocket dimensions and reality warps, and you knew the whole time because you'd done it yourself!"
"Sorry, sorry!" Nityen managed to say between continued laughter and gasps of pain. He touched his nose gingerly, his fingers coming away red. "I couldn't help myself! Your face when you were trying to work it out you looked so serious, so analytical, like you were solving some grand cosmic mystery. It was too funny! I had to let it play out!"
"That's not an excuse!"
"I know, I know. I'm sorry. Really." Nityen finally managed to control his laughter, though his purple eyes still sparkled with mischief. "But come on, you have to admit it was a little bit funny."
"It wasn't funny at all," Hariharan said flatly, though there might have been the tiniest hint of amusement buried somewhere in his tone. "And you still haven't explained why you summoned it in the first place. What was the point? Just to confuse them? To test Eve somehow?"
Nityen's expression became more serious, his playful demeanor fading into something more contemplative. "I needed to see her," he said quietly. "To confirm something. And the restaurant... it's a neutral space, existing slightly outside normal reality. Safe for meetings that need to happen away from the notice of certain interested parties."
"The Sinners," Hariharan said, understanding dawning.
"And others." Nityen looked out toward the horizon, where the sun was beginning to set, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple that almost matched his eyes and hair. "There are forces moving in this world, friend. Powers awakening that haven't been seen in centuries. The Tree of Hope is just the beginning. What comes after..."
He trailed off, leaving the thought unfinished, hanging in the air like a threat or a promise.