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Her name is Luna.
She’s eight years old, and she’ll be eight years old for the rest of her life.
A medical miracle, born lightyears from what is now the decimated remains of Earth, not the first of her kind but exemplary nonetheless. She grows up among the artificially grown fields of grain and tomatoes, spends her free time watching the flight pattern of her planet around a nuclear sun through a window on the base.
She learns to write. She learns to draw.
Her parents walk her down to the viewing deck, swinging her between their hands. Her favorite pastime is helping the hatchery technicians with the fish pond, carefully laying eggs ripped out of tinfoil packaging underneath and between algae and plant life. In just a few weeks time they’ll be fully grown and the process will begin again. Some she keeps as friends, some end up as food.
She is chosen for an experiment. Not genetically perfect, but one of the few remaining that are young enough to be viable. They sit her down in a transformed medical inspection room, place diodes along her head and spine, and begin.
Letter by letter her biological coding is inscribed to a thumb-drive, a precious piece of information that they hope they may never need to unfurl. She feels no pain from the procedure. The drive is inscribed with the name everyone had come to know her by, the one her parents called her most often: “Lulu.” They set her free and she continues on her way to her parents’ room for supper.
It is two days before her ninth birthday when the Deathdrives attack. The size of them eclipses the planet, pitches the whole base into utter darkness. There’s a build-up of energy, a great burst of light, and systematically the base is vaporized. The effect is instant. Luna feels no pain.
Somehow, her data survives, it is collected, and it is assessed. Terraforming begins, then the creation of a colony. The Deathdrives lay their roots across the surface of her home, reshaping it into a tool to be used for further destruction.
They create a lab to recreate her. She makes it to a year old before they find her existence untenable. So they start over. The energy readings from this – what was it again? Biological life form?-- are incredible. If they can harness it, it would advance their technology by several millennia. Planet to planet transportation in the blink of an instant, power beyond any countable means, machinery capable of creating machinery at ten times its usual speed. Travel through time and space simplifies to the press of a button.
She is born and born again, over and over until they get it right, the once crystalline code breaking down further and further into gibberish, before they land on the perfect string and she’s stable. The day comes, and finally it works.
The Lulu, an expendable piece of technology, no more human than a touch pad or a stove, is made. It has no purpose other than consumption. It powers wars, it furthers territorial expansion. It assists across multiple planetary harvests, absorbed for fuel and thrown out as waste.
It serves them well – it has no other choice.
Her name is Lulu. This began as her function, but she adopts it as her name. She is created the same as the rest. She is raised as a human. She learns to write. She learns to draw. She eats for the first time. A family forms around her, one that calls her daughter. She will keep them together.
She is growing with every passing day. The danger grows too. She is there, side by side, as her family fights to keep this world together. The threat becomes too much, a decision is made, and she’s left all alone in the aftermath. She collects the heart of her broken family and carries it with her. A bond is formed with a Deathdrive – she comes to call him partner. She sets to work with a human, one she comes to call a friend, and together they try again.
Lulu is twenty-eight, and sixteen, and eight years old. She has just been born, and she has no future. She finds her father – half of the whole, and she swears to make it right again. She meets her partner, now a stranger, and she has to make it work. They press on, trying together, and finally it does. Her family is different now, but they’re together.
She is there at the end of the world. It’s painful and every moment is a struggle for survival. She gives up someone she cares deeply about, promises to go on living without him. She is alive. The world is alive.
She is a daughter, a partner, a child and an adult, a friend and an adversary. She’s never met Luna, and will spend the rest of her life never knowing she once existed. Still, through a long string of duplications and recreations, they are connected. They are wholly the same and entirely different, all at once.
They are loved. They go on living.