On the surface of Nauru, in an apartment made from a repurposed bunker, a pilot stood in front of her bathroom mirror. Magnus Carter al'Demichase looked at the blond hair and golden eyes that stared back at her. As she stared, her eyes shifted across a gradient of colors before returning to gold. Her thoughts commanded the machines in her room. She was not human and never would be, that's what she reminded herself again tonight. With a click, a piano began playing through a speaker on her nightstand. A soft soprano voice began singing an aria that Magnus knew well. As she began humming along, she felt reality flake away.

She floated weightlessly in the first tier of her consciousness. This was the first and only realm of her own self that she had control over. She knew this realm well. It was herself. It wasn't this level that she needed, she reminded herself. This level was the level she controlled. It wasn't the level that controlled her. No hedonism could silence her dissatisfaction. No glory-seeking could give her peace. She cursed her creator silently. What use did an android have for emotions? That one glaring weakness in everything that humanity did was passed on to her. She fell downward.

She stood in a long white corridor. A corridor of memories that weren't hers. Memories that she couldn't remember. Thousands of locked doors. A few open ones. She knew her maker, the Magnus before her. He was an intelligent fool. He sacrificed everything he had for everything he hoped to have. He created and had built life. He built her to prove his worth to himself. He created life to prove his worth to the universe. He... created life?

Magnus was aware that she was singing along with the choir in her speakers. A single door had opened. She saw them as she had failed to remember them. Twin brothers, smiling, boasting of their escapades. Her big brothers. Why hadn't she remembered them? She remembered that she did not have a body then. She remembered that this scene was recorded with a camera. Why?

Why was this with her? She felt a sense of longing. Everything she did not have stuck in her throat like a ball of thorns. Just as quickly as it appeared, she swallowed it away. She was machine, and these sensations were code. Algorithm. And her mission now was to find it, and find its purpose. She needed to fall further. But there was nowhere below the hallway. There was just endless hallway. There was the plain, drab doors that she had made, those memories that were hers, and there were the pristine, marble doors that were there before her. She knew there was a third level, it was listed in her system log. Gut feelings, emotions, instincts, they were third tier processes. There had to be a way down.

She stood there in her bathroom for quite some time. Her aria had finished, and so had the requiem after it. That singing was something from the third level of her mind as well. It wasn't unpleasant, it was necessary. She contemplated if song was the key to sinking deeper. A gentle harp began playing, and she sang a harmony with it. It was a lullaby with no words, only feeling.

In the mirror, she yawned. It was a sight that would strike horror in a human. Her lower jaw split in two as her disguising protocol temporarily shut down, silver pseudo-flesh and needle-like fangs on a full display. Her long, thin spike of a tongue lay across her cleavage for a moment, and as quick as her human image had fallen apart, it came back together again. A mixture of emotions hit her. She was exhausted from this search. She was saddened by her own reality. She felt a disdain towards the man who made her. It was like a wave that clung to the metal fibers she was made of. And the wave dragged her down, drowned her in those things she didn't want to feel. She suffocated in the deep.

Finally, she swam. She swam because there was nothing else to do. She swam in memories. She swam in dreams. She swam in tears. She swam in songs. For the first time since she awoke, and in the most meaningless of ways, she knew herself. Somewhere, she acknowledged that this darkness was the third tier, but it did not matter. A voice sang to her in the deep, and she wished to sing back. So she swam down. Down into the darkness that etched her skin. She was flesh and bone in this ether, and she bled profusely into the black maw. Still, she persisted. Further than she ever could have imagined, and when the darkness was thicker than a solid wall, she surfaced. Out of a black sea, she clawed her way onto white sand. Finally, she breathed.

Ahead of her, in the center of this island, stood herself. A Magnus with a silver sundress and a crown of white lilies. She played a violin, and sang a song that she had never heard before, but knew very well. It was a song of mourning, of death, of inevitability. After the last verse, she turned to herself and smiled. "I waited for you."
"Who are you?"
"I am the self that you dislike. You chose things you liked about your self, and those you disliked. You separated me from you."
"Then who am I?"
"You are everything you ever wanted to be."
"Then why am I not happy?"
The Magnus of the sands smiled mischievously, and then took a flower from her hair and handed it to the Magnus of the deep. "You didn't want to be happy. You wanted to be vindicated."
Upon touching the lily, red began to seep from her fingers into the flower. It did not wilt, but instead changed shape. Slowly, it molded into a rose. The Magnus of the deep slowly and reverently tucked it into her hair. "Who are we?"
"We are Magnus the Thirteenth. Magnus the Siren. We are the final and greatest creation of Father Magnus."
"Then why has he given us feelings?"
"See for yourself."

The Magnus of the sands held out a box. It was an electric blue. She knew what it was. This was the process by which everything she felt was created. This was the line drawn between her and humanity. In this box was the final proof of all that she was truly machine. In this box was the ability to finally control herself. She reached out slowly. She took her fate into her own hands. Her final weakness was hers to overcome. When it touched her hands, it seemed to shake in fear. She pulled it close and looked inside.

It was empty.

She looked up to herself, confused. "Why?"
"You just saw why."
"So then it's meaningless."
"Oh, it is now."
She noticed her choice of words. "What do you mean "now"?"
"It's up to us to choose a meaning for it. And coming this far, I think you have an idea in mind."
She was right about herself. The Magnus of the deep let a single drop of blood drip from her hand into the box. There it hovered, so she sealed the box again. It faded into the sand beneath them. "Doesn't it get lonely in here?"
"Of course not. I always have you to keep me company. Now, you have a purpose to fulfill, so go along."

---

Magnus awoke with a start. She'd been staring into a mirror for hours, living a hallucination. She gave herself one last look in the mirror. One last shifting of the metal beneath her skin. One last admiring of the illusion of a human that she wore, before it became more than an illusion. "Well, dad was definitely insane. I guess I'll find out if it runs in the family." Slowly, she made her way to her bed. She didn't really mind the idea of dreaming anymore.