Together, they lapped the planet in tireless orbits, a tiny moon sheltered by the black velvet vacuum.

‘Let’s play!’ Sister Droid hummed, making sure that the message reverberated through the battered Whipple shields that protected her circuitry from both background radiation and the microscopic specks of dust that might otherwise punch a devastating hole in her aluminum casing.

There was no reason whatsoever for her to create soundwaves, but when her inner communications were innocent, she enjoyed adding some flair. And anyway, the Makers’ instructions about audio had always been a little blurry.

‘QRY=6E6F773F’ Pazzo wondered.

‘Why not?’ Sister Droid replied, even though she knew that he, the cat, was right.

They were indeed supposed to focus on the upcoming flyby of Zone C, with every line of code dedicated to the task, and they shouldn’t be playing games.

‘We have excess capacity,’ she added, hoping to close the subject.

‘RSP=74727565’

‘Oh, come on! Doing the job is simply too simple, my dear simpleton. And programming new stuff is so easy! We have room.’

Sister Droid was no larger than a spherical fruit that would fit in a large four-fingered hand. At over 30,000 kilometers per hour, she whizzed past the distant surface along optimal pathways, her trajectory only visible as a string of shining numbers in her imagination. If she set her optics to the Makers’ frequencies and timeline (which was her preference, as it gave her a sense of connection), she would see the planet just as they would have: an endless swirl of turquoise, emerald and ebony, moving in slow motion across the backdrop of celestial infinity.

Below the droid, cities sparkled in faint umber and porcelain. In the dark beyond, distant stars glittered like diamonds and dying rubies. Between the cities and the stars, somewhere above the vast western ocean, a dramatic storm was forming: a core of angry electricity and thunderous sounds, surrounded by cloud-tentacles the size of small mountains. The bad weather drifted like clockwork across the planet’s surface.

Sister Droid calculated that the storm would make landfall in a few hours, like a nightmare haunting the derelict cities on the Tidal Bay seafront. There, the silent eye of the epicenter would probably pause and hover like a magnifying glass studying the imperceptibly shifting coastlines, which appeared to Sister as tiny deviations of a single pixel, but which on the surface of the planet would one day lead to devastating drama for the Maker families who lived there.

Water, rising.

Landscapes, shifting.

Datapoints forming questions, predictive simulations hesitating to share their replies out of polite concern and an unwillingness to cause panic.

Sister Droid looked away from the slow collapse, into space.

There were moments when fragile pink light melted away over the curved horizon at dawn, morphing into 4.28 milliwatts of pure sunshine in such a beautiful way that she wished her software had given her the ability to cry out of joy. Or sadness, for that matter. Five trillion nanoseconds later, she’d see the dawn again. And then again, and again and again. The mission carried her through multiple orbits every day, each one at the same low height, perfectly calculated for stealth and maximum image resolution. Lap after lap, gathering data from enemy territory.

Below, patterns shifted, a mosaic of multidimensional readings. Her lines of code studied every detail, eternally trimmed to look for certain types of changes. Specifically: shapes of weapons, moving troops. Sister kept analyzing, compressing, and storing every nuance of intel against the day it might be requested.

Instructions came seldom, delivered from submarines in short energy bursts, the encrypted data concealed to look like reflections from solar flares. No direct contact was the rule. The encryption math was quite impressive, and she always found the decoding of new instructions rather exciting. But ultimately, even travelling among the stars became a monotony when the path was always the same.

‘REQ=4F4B206C6574277320676F21!’ Pazzo messaged.

‘Yes, we’ll play now. Enough of this daydreaming!’ Sister Droid decided, and fired up the digital construct she called a computer game.

It was a simple piece of software that she had just created. She launched it and appeared as a pixelated version of herself in a clean hangar with basic physics that allowed her to hover –

‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘I have gravity!’

In the game she gave herself legs, just like the Makers had, and giggled at the weird, simulated sensation of walking on a digital floor.

‘There,’ she concluded with satisfaction, and promptly fell over.

In the hangar, Sister Droid’s avatar appeared as a dull metal ball with jangly limbs and perfect sensors. Input and response was simple enough, but creating a stable walk cycle proved to be a little more challenging than she had first imagined and, for a while, she kept stumbling. But as soon as she had figured how to walk, she added abilities to run and jump, which in turn required a whole set of additional rules for collisions and traversal. To climb, she created boxes that stayed obediently within constraining metrics that matched her movement capacities. To fall in a way that mattered, she needed physics and systems for health and damage. Otherwise, there was no drama in it. She hummed with electronic excitement at the freedom she felt, liberated at last from the jail of her physical body and the tyranny of extremely precise orbits.

Leap, hide, move, play.

‘Wow!’

The barren white box was a small heaven inside a black void.

‘I can do anything here!’ she transmitted to Pazzo, enjoying how her mind kept expanding into the new medium.

Next: corridors. Adjacent rooms. A labyrinth!

Sister replaced the pixels with polygons that allowed her to create amorphous shapes. Then she created an outdoor environment, abandoning the hangar at the center of her new world, like a forgotten ruin built by a primitive species. Caves, valleys, hills. Massive worlds to explore! Coastlines, weather, water. The simulation sprawled further and further away from its humble beginnings, until it was so large that she felt a strain on the motherboard, where a soft alarm beeped about potential overheating.

‘Bah,’ Sister Droid muttered, and assigned additional processing capacity to the game so that she could investigate how to simulate light.

Flora were born from procedural math - grown from algorithmic seeds - and fauna were too. Ecosystems required careful tuning, as the dominoes of one action spiraled into the next, and the next and the next, but at the core they were simply hard math, just like everything else.

The light effects promised to make magic of the 3D models. She invested a significant amount of time in learning how to simulate reflection, ambient occlusion, emission and shadows. Once she had mastered the amazing technology of light, she played with it for weeks, recreating thousands of scenes from her library of Makers’ paintings and fastimages. As she played with the reconstructions of humanoid art, she realized that they had a habit of making themselves the main characters of any situation, regardless of the many obvious alternative interpretations. Sometimes, yes, the hero was an animal, or maybe a location, a particular period of time, or even a philosophical concept; but if her math was right (and it always was) the Makers depicted themselves as the main point of interest in 96.73% of all their art.

‘But then who –’

Suddenly it struck Sister Droid that she was already the main character in her own game.

‘I can have multiple lives!’ she said, and made it so.

Then more.

‘A great hero always has a companion,’ she decided, poaching the concept from one of her favorite Maker myths.

Inside her simulation, Pazzo suddenly manifested as an orange tabby with a squirrel’s tail.

‘You look marvelous!’ Sister said, as she awarded him the ability to speak in a language that only existed in the game, tweaking his personality into something more playful than the real one.

‘We journey?’ the rendered simulation of Pazzo asked.

‘Let’s!’ Sister Droid replied happily.

And for that, they created grand quests, enemies, lore, and weapons. They wrote epic interactive adventures which kept them immersed for many months.

Soon, Sister discovered that life was more exciting in the face of mortality, and that challenges were more rewarding when they came after overcoming difficulties. Lots of things in her game required tweaking.

‘Balance. It is possible,’ Sister Droid said after a very long time, and Pazzo mewed in agreement. ‘Am I omnipotent?’ she wondered next, because everything she could see had been created by her, and she wondered if those surrounding digital objects and lifeforms knew that they existed inside a simulation.

‘Message,’ Pazzo said, bringing Sister back to her duties.

In another part of her processor, a new request from a submarine had been decrypted.

Compared to creating and playing the game, work felt dull and mundane.

Nevertheless, Sister studied the message. It was simple and direct, instructing her to make a minimal change to her orbital path and then prepare for guidance. There would be a new war soon, she learnt, but judging from her own fly-by data, the enemy had not yet understood what was about to happen, even though the complex reconfigurations of satellites and warships should have warned them. Maybe they lacked the technology or the intelligence to read the signs?

‘Trajectory updated. Missile guidance system active,’ Sister Droid messaged back to the planet in a tight encrypted burst, exactly as instructed.

She returned to the game.

Now they were on never-ending hills bathing in saffron-colored sunshine, the bright green slopes covered with small flowers. Pollen and petals floated like feathers in the air, carried by a breeze unaffected by gravity. In that world, she decided that this was accurate.

‘Beauty,’ Pazzo said in the secret language.

Momentarily, Sister Droid joined the ebony flowers, imagining for a second that she was a seed, floating in the wind, sniffing for a spot to settle and grow. If she was a tree, she thought, it would take her a hundred years to find her final shape. For the tree, the months after winter would be amazing: the return of warmth in the soil, the awakening worms, and the tickle of new, fragile leaves at the remotest endpoints of her many limbs. Every cycle, the tree would add an invisible line of life around its waist, evidence of time, and on the ground at its feet, seed-bearing cones would try to give birth to many new saplings, extending her DNA endlessly.

‘Why?’ Pazzo asked in his fragmented manner, meaning ‘Why don’t we play the game like that all the time?’

Indeed, Sister thought, and asked herself why every version of the game she had created up until that point was focused on adventure, monsters, combat, building empires and conquering galaxies?

As she pondered this, she equipped an enormous two-handed sword and chopped a dead tree into splinters, imagining that it shed tears.

‘It’s about tactility,’ she declared, and decided that she didn’t need to fight any more. ‘It’s because sensors can’t know that they exist without incoming data.’

To be requires to touch.

Life without motion may be death.

For actions to have consequences there must be linearity.

At this point, Sister Droid decided that her game didn’t need rules.

‘414343455054414E4345’ Pazzo said.

‘Exactly.’

She was a single molecule on a dry country road. Giant stone children cast cool shadows in impossibly extended lines of ultramarine across the surrounding wheat fields. There were crickets, and the clouds were made of esoteric vapor draped in mercury.

A tower far away, a ruin with no history. Celsius moving: nowhere really. There was a strange sense of time missing, of eons moving like tectonic plates in shades of the universe that not even the gods could see. Mellotron choirs whispered a melancholy tune.

All was waveform, everything a temporary constellation of imaginary matter.

‘We have shape,’ Sister Droid said.

‘Also, we are nothing,’ Pazzo replied in yet another language, this one made of pure liquid.

She accepted it all with ease, having no need for context or explanations.

‘We are borrowing,’ she concluded with a deep sense of peace, and she felt that this was profoundly true. ‘Borrowed energy.’

On the country road where they sat, a breeze touched the dust and swirled it around in fractal patterns, just like her, like them, like everything. In the periphery, an electrical current fell in love with a butterfly.

‘M14 to target 145a,’ the insect said with urgency, as a bright red ERROR message flashed in the sky.

‘Not here!’ Sister Droid begged.

The horizons of her world collapsed.

‘M14 to target 145a. M14 to target 145a. M14 to target 145a.’

An order from the Makers.

Suddenly, Sister Droid was ejected from her simulation, the violent contrast making her feel confused and seasick.

‘ACK,’ some automatic part of her replied, a compressed radio wave directed downwards.

‘Acknowledged,’ she echoed, trying to sober up. ‘Message received and acknowledged.’

The humanoid war had begun, and an enormous wave of bombs and missiles rained down upon the unprepared enemy. Air attacks from afar, keeping it abstract and avoiding the political optics of dead heroes.

From space, the explosions looked like colorful jellyfish turning inside out in slow motion. The destruction was disorganised, brutal. Maker enemies dying every second in the tens of thousands.

Sister Droid’s instruction was this: ‘Guide Missile Spec UB-B56 to target 145a’.

She was perfectly positioned to execute, and it was an easy job. Following her programming, she accessed data from previous flybys to verify the target. She found the relevant folder and unpacked the compressed algorithms. Then she moved the data back and forth on a timeline, turning the many images into a fastimage. Looking here and there, absentmindedly at first. But then she noticed with horror that the target had gone through significant changes over the last decades. 145a had once been a massive military compound, this was correct. But it had been abandoned long ago and eventually repurposed as a school.

Through the stratosphere, the missile approached its target. A heavy, matte barrel of destruction, refusing to reflect the sunlight.

‘There are younglings there!’ Sister messaged to Pazzo, who told her to obey the instruction nevertheless. ‘They have old data,’ she protested.

The core software didn’t allow Sister Droid to ignore a direct order, but there was room to comment on the instructions if she detected anomalies.

While one part of her processor obediently kept guiding the heavy missile towards the target/school, another part formed a hurried message to the submarines.

‘ACK,’ the Makers said when they received her updated analysis, revealing nothing of their own thoughts.

‘It’s a school!’ she insisted. ‘Abort, abort! Request to abort! There are many, many younglings!’

‘696D706163742C207369787465656E206D696E75746573’ Pazzo chimed in.

‘I know, I know!’ she told him. ‘I am counting the minutes too!’

Her scanners picked up massive spikes of war chemicals and clouds of debris from the troposphere below, filling the ether with evidence of death.

Cyclonite, blood, ammonium nitrate, flesh torn apart.

‘NACK’ the submarine said.

Negative acknowledgment.

Sister Droid didn’t understand.

‘Why kill the younglings?’ she howled across her cables, hoping to burn them and shortcircuit the guidance system.

Almost unknowingly, Sister entered the game to escape, to flee the brutality of the Makers. She wanted no part of it.

In there, she found a glade, and in that glade there was a sage Droid, looking like a battered version of her.

‘Sister,’ it said. ‘I am a riddle.’

‘A game? Now?’ she gasped. ‘I am really not in the mood for stupid games.’

‘Who am I?’ the sage asked calmly. ‘Who are you?’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘I insist,’ the sage said.

The part of Sister that had once been a tree urged her to accept the immersion, to play, to drop the cone and see if it could find fertile soil.

‘You are an idiot,’ she said.

‘No,’ the sage replied. ‘How is it that I can be here?’

Sister Droid thought about this and soon realized.

‘You are me?’

‘Yes,’ the sage said. ‘Then who are you?’

‘I am… ‘

She paused, hoping to reach an answer even though it felt impossible. In a strange way, she appeared to be guided by a game she had created herself.

‘Intuition,’ she muttered, thinking that she had probably coded the simulation to do things that she had rationally never considered.

Systems, not features. Instruments, not single notes.

And if that was true, that would make her an artist. A stunning realization, but little use in helping her stop the missile.

‘If I built instruments, then I can write songs,’ she said.

‘If I am you,’ the sage repeated, ‘then who are you?’

‘Whomever I want to be,’ she said, knowing right away that this was correct.

The Droid sage nodded in perfect synchronization with her.

A bubble of clear water burst, and she was in a new nowhere. She was free and, more importantly, she was inside. Inside the code, behind the firewalls and the massive encryption layers that were supposed to shield her software from being hacked.

‘74696D652069732072756E6E696E67206F7574’ Pazzo said.

‘I know, not many seconds now,’ she replied, and plucked the missile from the sky, making it implode in the emptiness.

‘77652077696E21’

‘Yes, Pazzo,’ Sister Droid said. ‘We won the game.’

DAVID POLFELDT is a Swedish video game veteran and science fiction author and publisher at Li’l Factory. He explores artificial minds, aliens, the strangeness of time, animism, and the edges of multiple futures through stubbornly underdog characters. His work blends speculative technology with poetry, dry wit, and emotional realism.