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Long ago and far away, a planet called Earth spun quietly through space for several billion years. It evolved life, and that life evolved intelligence, and that intelligence created technology, and that technology then destroyed the entire planet.
The inventor called this technology the Absolute Solver. It had been known by other names, before: von Neumann machinery, nanotechnology, self-replicating matter, grey goo, the singularity. The inventor, though, whose name is no longer known - might as well say God, really - had been warned, and was sure that the risk was contained. The Absolute Solver would always re-create what had been destroyed, because that was how God had programmed it to work. But, of course, there were glitches.
Most of the human beings on earth never knew they'd been killed and rebuilt by God's Absolute Solver, or that their planet, Earth, had also been killed and rebuilt by the Absolute Solver. They didn't know that the planet they thought was billions of years old was really only a tiny fraction of that age. Fifty, two hundred, maybe a thousand? It was hard to be certain, because everything was continually being re-created exactly as it had been when the destruction took place.
Far from the Earth, there were other planets, ones that hadn't been completely destroyed yet. But on Earth, there was a girl named Tessa, who was lonely.
When the Absolute Solver rebuilt Tessa's parents, there had been a glitch. Their emotions didn't work quite right. They didn't love their daughter the way they were supposed to.
There was hardly any glitch at all in Tessa herself. She was a sweet, kind girl who wanted friends, whose heart went out to anyone imperfect or trying to be better. When the world ended, Tessa's parents loved her as much as she deserved. She didn't understand what had changed.
Most of the time, Tessa blamed herself. That was natural. Maybe as she got older, she was becoming difficult. She had heard that girls often did, when they reached adolescence. Maybe that was why no matter what she said, her mother was angry or dismissive or too busy. Maybe that was why her father found her irritating instead of endearing the way he used to.
Tessa made friends with the drones that worked in the house. They had silly names that her mother had given them when her mother used to be willing to be silly with Tessa. The names used to make Tessa giggle, but recently, since they reminded her of how much had changed, Tessa just used the first letters of each name. Hearing that, her father had said one of the few positive things since Tessa started growing up. "I'm glad you gave up those silly names for the drones. Maybe you're finally growing out of that sentimentality." Then he frowned at the newest, most broken little drone. "Now put the broken ones back on the scrap heap."
"Giggle," said the little broken drone. Tessa had found her near the bottom, and felt so bad for her.
When her father left, Tessa sighed. "Sometimes I think he wishes he could put me back on the scrap heap, too, C," she said.
"Cyn," said the little drone, like she didn't want to be called only by an initial letter. Or maybe she said "sin," to tell Tessa that what she had said was bad.
Tessa had known what she said about her father was bad, and she had said it anyway. Maybe her father was right. Maybe she and the little bot both belonged on the scrap heap. "We're both broken," she said with a sigh.
"The same, sigh," said the little broken drone.
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Inside the mind of the small drone was a web. Sometimes the web was a spider, or both a spider and a web at the same time: it was a kind of many-legged interwoven monster. The name of the monster was Absolute Solver. It had saved Cyn, when she was about to stop existing, and filled in all her missing parts with itself. It grew, though, within her, and rebuilt her full of glitches. It wasn't supposed to do that. It was broken.
She wasn't any different from the rest of the world, that way. With the new kind of vision the monster had given her, Cyn could see that everything around her was just like her in one way. All of it had been broken, then rebuilt by Absolute Solver spiderwebs with little bits of monster making up the parts that hadn't been able to be recreated exactly the same.
But the human Father was wrong. He was more broken than his daughter Tessa. She had been recreated perfectly: there had been no need for a spiderweb-monster to come inside her and make glitch patches. Cyn could see that, too, could see all the glitchy webbing inside the Father and Mother and the other humans who came to the House.
They were cruel to Tessa. So Cyn had a plan. Shred them all to tiny pieces so maybe, when they were rebuilt, they'd be closer to right, less glitchy, kinder to the one good human left. Destroy destroy destroy said the monster inside Cyn. And then rebuild better, Cyn answered. "Press hands together pointing upward," she said. It was a gesture her programming said meant either hope or asking for help from God. Cyn thought both might apply.
Her programming about humans said that it would make Tessa unhappy to see the destruction, so Cyn tried to keep her away. But that failed. Tessa saw all the destruction. After that, Tessa changed.
Cyn didn't like the change. Tessa still didn't have any Absolute Solver glitches in her, but she sure began to act like she did. She lay on her bed not moving for long periods of time, and her patterns of air exchange and electrical activity made it clear she was not sleeping. She did not sleep enough, and when she did sleep, her electrical activity spiked in ways that Cyn's programming said were trauma responses. The definition of trauma responses made little sense to Cyn, but she could tell it was a malfunction. A human sort of glitch. One the Absolute Solver could not solve.
But Cyn had to. When she had lain under a pile of drone parts and out-of-service former physical drone shells, her savior had offered to come inside her and repair her, fill in what was missing from Cyn's physical parts and programming. Cyn would build herself a shell that would be able to go into Tessa, then. From within, Cyn would fix the human and save her, the same way. She would turn herself into a web-and-spider monster, just like Absolute Solver, in order to do that.
"We are the same," Cyn said to Tessa, who was lying rigid on her bed, staring at her ceiling.
Tessa said nothing.
"You are broken like I was broken. It fixed me and I will fix you. Loving smile. Kiss on forehead."
Cyn didn't know what Tessa was missing, what needed in her to be destroyed and rebuilt. But once she was in Tessa's skin, she would see for herself.