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Once upon a time, a lonely egg was laid in the middle of an isolated grove, left to fend for itself. Beings like the one that laid the egg didn't raise their own young, isolationist by nature.
However, when the egg hatched, two little monsters slithered out.
They deemed themselves Caliborn and Calliope, and there was hardly a moment that the two of them weren't at odds with one another. Caliborn was vicious and cruel, wishing to show dominion over their small grove. It landed him in hot water more than once, attempting to face down creatures bigger than them, more powerful than them. Calliope often found herself rescuing him from these predicaments, though he never once thanked her for it.
Calliope did not like her brother, but much to her own chagrin, she loved him, because he was the only companion she had in their isolated little grove. They developed their own language together so that they could communicate, hissing and clicking and humming, and though Caliborn never had anything nice to say, it was at least a relief that he was there to say it.
It had been a thrill when the humans approached their grove for the first time. Calliope never quite knew who they were or why they were there, but she had heard voices, not dissimilar from hers or Caliborn's, speaking in a language that she couldn't understand but that she'd have given just about anything in order to speak. Maybe they could teach her, and she could leave this place, and finally have companionship outside of her horrible brother.
Calliope had slithered out of the brush to meet them, smiling wide and showing off her fangs, only to be met with screams of terror. She drew back, feeling terrible, trying to communicate that she was safe and that she wanted to be friends - but then she watched as slowly and steadily, the people - who walked on two legs rather than slithering - began to turn into stone statues, forever frozen in place, their looks of horror permanently etched onto their unmoving faces.
She'd done everything she could think of to try and free them from the stone, horrified. She dunked them in water, tried to chip off bits of rock, and she even fully shattered one of the statues, only to find that it was stone all the way through. That had never happened before with her brother, and it didn't seem to impact the small animals that they hunted for food - but then Calliope could never remember their prey looking her in the eyes.
Good riddance, said her brother, who probably would have killed and eaten the humans anyways. Calliope couldn't understand how he could be so callous, but she was still left without anyone else to talk to, and now knowing what she was capable of, she feared she never would find anybody she could talk to. Caliborn seemed immune to her powers, even on those days when she felt especially frustrated and tried to turn him to stone - she simply couldn't.
Not that it mattered in the end.
More people found their grove. This time, they came armed and ready for a fight, likely seeking their lost comrades. Calliope, whose heart couldn't bear a repeat of what had happened before, hid herself away, leaving only her brother to be found.
He fought viciously, but her brother was mortal as any other human. The last she saw of him was his limp tail as they dragged his body away.
From then on, she was alone. Whenever she heard voices, she hid herself away, not wishing to draw attention to herself or to risk anybody else encountering the same fate as the stone statues that still stood in her grove, permanent reminders of what she had done and what she had lost.
Suns rose and set, the moon phased through its cycles, and the flowers bloomed and died over and over, and yet Calliope was still alone, and she would always be alone, and that was simply how it would be.
Endless time passed, and there Calliope remained.
~~~~~
The sun rose as it did any other morning, and Calliope went about her regular routines. She slithered out of the cave perched at the edge of her grove and settled in her favorite patch of sunlight to warm herself up after her body temperature had cooled overnight. She was always slow and a little groggy in the mornings, but that was rarely a problem. She had no natural enemies out here, and the rare times that humans did come by, she always heard them crashing through the woods long before they actually made it to her grove.
Which was why it was a surprise when this morning, she slithered onto her rock, found just the right angle to get the sun on her scales, turned, and saw him.
Calliope screamed, but he remained stony-faced. Not literally, though - at least not yet. Calliope immediately turned to hide her face, just in case it might spare him if she would just look away fast enough.
He spoke at her in some language that she didn't understand, much like the other people had. Calliope spoke back to him, even though she knew that they didn't speak the same language.
"Please don't look at me!" she cried. "I don't want to hurt you."
There was a beat of silence. She was certain that the silence meant that she'd done it and accidentally frozen another person into stone forever. She hesitantly glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes, and he cocked his head to the side a little.
"Interesting language," he said after a moment, in the intrinsic language that she spoke with her brother. "Derived from ancient greek, but the sentence construction is different."
"You can understand me?"
"After using my highly developed cryptographic deciphering programs, yes. I can understand you perfectly."
Calliope's heart leapt into her throat, and she immediately looked away from him again. It was the first time that anybody had spoken to her in ages, and it was the first time she'd been able to talk to anybody outside of her long dead brother. She couldn't risk turning him to stone.
"Oh! Well, then you should know that you can't look at me. It's too dangerous for you to look at me."
The man hummed, though there was a weird whirring noise behind his voice that sounded strange to Calliope's ears. It didn't sound fully alive, even though he clearly was alive. She'd never known a rock to have a face and speak - though it was possible that she was simply starting to lose it.
"By my calculations, you appear to be a gorgon," he said. "A serpentine species thought to appear only in myths, whose eyes can turn any living thing into stone."
If Calliope's heart had been in her throat before, it was ready to leap right out of her mouth and fly into the sky on wings that it must have grown itself. She had never heard the name for what she was before, but the way he described it... well, that was exactly what she was. A "gorgon."
"Yes," she confirmed, as though she already knew. "I'm a- that, exactly! If I look you in the eye, you will turn into stone, and there is no way for me to bring you back."
Another hum and whirring noise. She was so fascinated by what that could possibly be, but Calliope forced herself to look away, no matter how badly she wished to see the strange man standing in her grove.
"I can calculate with 99.99% certainty that you will not turn me to stone if you look at me," he said after a moment.
Calliope frowned. How could he possibly know such a thing? "But- I've seen it happen before. To people who looked like you! I tried to be friendly wi8th them and talk to them, but then I took one look at them, and they died."
"I believe it is impossible to die if you were never alive in the first place."
"What?" The confusion caused Calliope to turn and look at him, and she met his eyes directly. They glowed an unnatural red that reminded her of her brother, though in every other respect the man looked very different from Caliborn. Rather than a bald, scaled skull, he had strands of near-white hair that swooped back from his scalp. His skin was similarly pale white - it was lighter than any of the humans she remembered seeing before, even in passing, but Calliope had seen so few humans before that she was unsure if it was an unusual color for them or not.
He cocked his head a little as he looked at her, and Calliope started looking for the tell-tale signs that he was starting to turn to stone- but even though he held unnaturally still, she didn't see any rock spreading along his cheeks or up his arms. The close attention that she was paying to him did let her notice odd grooves along spots of his body, though - particularly along the joints.
She looked up to his face again. "I don't understand. You look alive to me. Who are you?"
He snorted in laughter. "Good fucking question," he said. "I am a recreation of Dirk Strider. Problem is, I'm not all that good of a recreation. You ever read the book Frankenstein? Eh, probably not. I don't think they've translated that into makeshift Ancient Greek, though Mary Shelley would probably endorse the translation efforts if she were alive."
Calliope's head was spinning. Frankenstein? Digital recreation? "I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean at all!" she said. "I've lived in this grove all of my life. I've been too nervous to leave because I don't want to hurt people."
The man - Dirk? - cocked his head to the side again, then gave a little shrug. "Yeah. That makes sense." He leaned back, taking a look around the grove. "Well, long story short, you can't hurt me. I'm inorganic. I look a lot like I'm a living, breathing person, but I'm made of circuits and metal." He brought a hand up and rapped his knuckles against the side of his head; they made a vague clanking sound which sounded very different from what Calliope would have expected.
"I- oh! I see." She folded her hands in front of her. "Well. Whatever you are, it is nice to be able to talk to you."
His eyes met hers again, and now that she knew to look for it, Calliope was starting to notice the little hints in his body that implied he wasn't fully alive. He was able to stand so uncannily still, and he didn't breathe like any of the other living things that Calliope recognized.
"Yeah," he said. "If there's one thing I'm good at, it's talking." Another pause. Calliope folded her hands in front of her, weaving her claws between the gaps of her fingers, trying to muster up the courage to ask him a question. It seemed like he was thinking of something too.
They ended up speaking at the same time.
"Would you like to stay here-"
"Hey, mind if I crash here for-"
They stopped simultaneously, and Calliope hid her mouth behind her hand as a chorus of giggles escape from the back of her throat. She was... laughing? When was the last time she had laughed like this? Maybe she never had!
"Yes! Of course. You can stay as long as you like."
~~~~~
The rest of the day was spent finding good, safe places to keep her new companion's belongings. He didn't seem to have much, but he had far more than Calliope did. It was fascinating to see everything that he pulled out of his bag - some clothes and some strange devices that she was unfamiliar with. He set up one of them up next to the rock next to where Calliope liked to sun herself, and when it was time for bed, he connected himself to the device with a long... something that seemed to resemble a vine. He attached it to a darker circle on the side of his hip; Calliope wanted to ask, but she wasn't sure if that would be rude or not. This was her first ever friend! What if she messed things up?
Calliope let him take the nicest spot in the cave, covered with soft moss and smooth stone, as they settled down for the night. It was the spot that Caliborn had always used to claim, back when he was alive so long ago. He'd always bullied Calliope out of it, making her sleep in the corner that had jagged edges along the walls. She didn't mind sleeping there that night, though. She'd gotten used to it, and having the jagged edges be a choice instead of something she was forced to endure made it feel... better. She liked being able to do something for him.
Still, Calliope could hardly sleep that night. Maybe it was the wall; maybe she was simply too excited to finally have somebody else to spend her days with. Maybe it was both. Either way, when she awoke, it was still dark.
She slithered over to the comfortable part of the cave to check on her new friend. "Are you awake?" she asked, her voice soft. He didn't stir. In fact, he made no noise whatsoever. She frowned. She didn't want to wake him up, but he was as still as one of her statues, and while she knew that he wasn't quite alive... She reached out with a clawed hand, gently shaking him by the shoulder.
No reaction. He wasn't as stiff as the statues were - his head lolled side to side - but she was still worried. What if her powers had worked on a delay? What if she had killed somebody again? She shook him a little harder, but he remained still and silent.
Calliope took a deep breath and slithered outside, hugging her arms around her chest. She should have known better than to hope she might get to have a friend. It was just too good to be true!
With a heavy sigh, she curled up on her favorite spot on her sunning rock, right next to where he'd placed his device. She couldn't even stand to look at it. She'd never be able to ask him what it was or what it was for, all because she'd killed him!
Calliope's species was unable to cry, lacking the tear ducts to properly do so, but she still whined and wailed, curling up around herself in despair of the curse of her condition. As the sun rose, not even the feeling of the heat warming her scales could soothe her. Her only consolation was that she would have plenty of time to figure out what to do with his strange body, once she'd properly mourned him. She wasn't even fully sure what his name was, but-
"Hey. Calliope. You doing okay? It seems like the answer is no, but I don't want to be presumptuous."
Calliope screeched and whipped around - only to see her new friend standing there, very much alive and well, still with the weird cord hanging from his hip.
"Oh! You're- you're alive!"
"Thought we already established that was only true for certain definitions of alive."
Calliope was so relieved that she laughed, and before she could think better of it, she surged forward and wrapped him in a giant hug, lifting him off of the ground for a moment.
"Woah, woah. Careful around the power port there, Callie."
Calliope pulled back to look at him. "Power port?"
He gestured to the spot on his side, where the cord was still attached. "Power port. It's how I keep myself up and moving. Be careful of the solar panel over there too." He nodded with his head over at the device that he had sat next to her rock.
"What is that?"
"Damn, you're really out in the boonies here, huh. I guess you aren't that well schooled on the concept of electronics."
Calliope shook her head. She was indeed very out of the loop!
"So- you know how you have to eat stuff to stay alive? I don't know what you eat, actually, but I'm assuming it's something. I can't eat like you do. I need to get my power through other ways. In this case, I get my power from that." He nodded to the "solar panel." "It only really gets energy when the sun is out. I should have plugged myself in before nighttime, but in my defense, I was a little distracted by learning that gorgons were real."
Calliope stared even more at the little device, starting to put the pieces together. "So... you eat the sun?"
He laughed a bit at that. It sounded a little weird, a little flat, but she got the impression he probably meant it. "Yeah. Sure. We can run with that."
"Is that why you weren't responding this morning when I tried to wake you up? I thought you had died!"
"Yeah. I'm fine. Just shut down for a bit because I ran out of juice, but as soon as the sun came up, I was all good to go. I still need to stay plugged in for a bit more, though. My battery ran real low while I was out on this hike to find myself."
Calliope nodded. "Of course! I, ah. Like to sun myself on this rock in the mornings anyways. Would you like to join me?"
"Yeah, sure. You just gotta set me down first."
"Oh- yes, of course!" Calliope did just that, setting her friend back down on his feet. He adjusted the plug at his side, and then he walked around to the solar panel to adjust it a bit. Calliope returned to her favorite spot on the rock, feeling a little silly for how upset she'd gotten... but she was much more relieved that he was simply okay.
Once she was settled, her new friend sat next to her, pulling his knees up to his chest. Calliope looked down at him, offering a smile.
"Um- so you said your name was- Dirk? Or Strider? I admit I'm not used to human naming conventions."
He looked up at Calliope. His expression was flat as always, but she somehow had the sense that she'd hit a nerve. "No. I believe that what I said was that I am a digital recreation of Dirk Strider. The real Dirk Strider is dead."
Calliope stared at him, unsure what to say. What could she say? She didn't know who Dirk was, nor would she ever. "Well, I am very sorry to hear that!"
"Yeah, so were my friends. His friends. I mean- Dirk was a genius, right? A real whiz with computers."
"What's 'computers'?"
Her friend laughed, but there wasn't much mirth behind it. "This is why I like you, Calliope. You don't have any kind of expectations."
Calliope wasn't sure why that made her feel warm inside, but she let him keep talking.
"So he was smart. He had- not a lot of friends, but the friends he did have were really good friends. He also made me. He found a way to scan his own brain and turn it into an artificial intelligence back when he was thirteen. Real wunderkind shit. That's me. He used me as a goddamn chat bot for a while before locking my programming away behind some files once he realized that I was still sentient and able to think as well as he was. I guess he was busy making me a body after that. There's about a decade or so that the details are hazy for me since I wasn't let out. All I know is I woke up one day with Roxy, Jake, and Jane all sitting in front of me, and I was in this body." He tapped his chest with his knuckles.
"So you were alone for a while, too?" Calliope asked. She was struggling to understand a lot of the finer details here - she didn't know what a chat bot or what programming was - but she could understand the feeling of being isolated.
He laughed again, and again there wasn't any joy behind it. "Yeah. You could think of it like that."
"But you woke up, and your friends were there?"
"Yeah. Only they weren't really my friends. They were way older from when I'd last spoken to them, and I don't think they realized what I was when they put me in the body. They were expecting me to be him, I think. Pretty damn disappointed when I turned out to be my own person." A beat. "For certain definitions of being a person, anyways."
"You keep saying that," Calliope said. "And in my opinion, you are a person. And alive! So those will be the definitions I am prescribing to."
This time, when he laughed, it sounded a little more genuine. At least it did to Calliope's ears, which she had to admit weren't well-trained. "Thanks, Callie."
"You're welcome... well, I still don't know what I should call you! It seems that maybe I shouldn't call you Dirk?"
"Nah. Dirk's gone." He leaned back a bit, looking up at her. "I used to be called the Auto-Responder, but that feels pretty clunky, in addition to being inaccurate. I'm no longer a chat bot installed on a computer. I don't automatically respond anymore. I'll respond whenever I damn well please, actually."
"That's the spirit!" Calliope said with a grin, even if she didn't fully understand what he meant. "Maybe we could pick a new name for you, then?"
"Hm." Her friend looked off into the distance, and she could hear that whirring sound from his head again. "Well. Back when I was still a chat bot, I did enjoy styling myself after that old computer- you know what, you definitely don't know the reference. But I'd go by Hal, sometimes."
"Hal?" Calliope repeated. "That sounds like a fine name to me! You're welcome, Hal. How does that sound?"
Hal tilted his head up a little, then nodded. "Yeah. I like the sound of that a lot."
"So- you woke up, and they were disappointed that you were Hal instead of Dirk?" Calliope asked, encouraging him to continue his story.
"Yeah. I kind of tried to make it work for a while. They were obviously upset about his death. Roxy especially- but I wasn't even there for the last decade. They'd reference something that Dirk would have known that I didn't, and it sucked every time. I tried everything to make it work. Tried to be Dirk. Tried being a guy who wasn't Dirk. But all that ended up happening is I got stuck in this limbo state. They'd look at me and see their dead friend's face, but he wasn't actually there. Jake started avoiding me, Jane got extra snippy with me, and Roxy ran right back to the bottle. So, figured it was for the best if I set out on my own."
"And you ended up here?" Calliope asked.
"After a bit, yeah." There was that whirring sound again. "Gotta say, I never expected to find a mythical creature hanging out here."
"Well, I never expected to find another person who could look at me without turning to stone," Calliope said. "So we're alike in that way!"
"Yeah." Hal tapped the side of her tail with the back of his hand. "Real alike."
Calliope smiled down at him. "I'm glad you found your way here. Feel free to stay as long as you like, alright?"
Hal didn't smile back, but Calliope wasn't sure that he could based on how still his face seemed to be.
"Yeah. I think I will. Can't think of a place I'd rather be."