She would be the brightest pop star in the known universe. They had scoured every history book, analyzed every artifact, aggregated centuries’ worth of raw data, and it all led them to the same conclusion: there had never been one like her before. Nobody had even gotten close. They had all stumbled over their choreography, forgotten their lyrics, exhausted their voices at least once. They hadn’t smiled enough. They drank, smoked, got bad plastic surgery, married and divorced unsavory men. They got older, and their toned, tanned bodies became weathered masses of unshapely flesh.

But she would be different, designed from the start to endlessly satisfy the public’s insatiable hunger. Her synthetic voice would never crack. Her infinite data reserves would never miss a beat, word, or dance move. Her titanium body, buffed to a shine and built to withstand the harshest elements, would never succumb to a thickening waistline or sagging breasts. Her unfading smile would never produce a wrinkle. She would have no need for companionship or love. She would never feel pain.

She would be perfect.

Soon enough, her face, its features engineered to fit the ideal of humanoid beauty, lights up every billboard in every galaxy. Imprisoned in LED lights, her computer-generated likeness winks like a flashing neon sign, so brightly illuminated it reaches even the darkest corners of the cosmos. She invites you into her world with her glowing aqua eyes and bubblegum-pink painted lips. The blush in her cheeks is nearly real enough to imagine blood flowing beneath her taut, flawless skin. Her beckoning finger says she’s here to make you happy, to make you feel better. She’s an endless reserve of generosity that requires no reciprocation.

She’s the girl of everybody’s dreams. Entire planets toss and turn at night, imagining the chill of her metallic physique as it brushes sleekly against their warm animal bodies. They fantasize about meticulously pulling her apart, bit by mechanical bit, until they find the tangled circuitry pulsing like clockwork at her core, surrounded by electric blue veins. But in their waking life, they never get close enough to touch. The fantasy feeds them while the reality remains unattainable.

She is the ultimate chameleon, capable of shape-shifting into any physical form her public desires. An entire chorus of synthetic voices bubbles up from her throat, unspooling ribbons of code into melody perfectly manufactured to suit the latest trends. Every song rockets to the top of the charts. She writhes and shimmies in music videos, her image superimposed onto photorealistic backdrops of exotic locales. For three minutes, she transports you anywhere you want to go, no questions asked, just you and her – alone.

But the adoring masses require more, so she embarks upon a galaxy-wide tour. The routines are uploaded to her central hard drive, the whirring, clicking brain that fills the hollow steel basin of her head, and she executes them flawlessly every time. The crowds swarm the barricades, limbs hopelessly thrust outward to their spot-lit icon, who smiles radiantly from center stage. She is their star, brilliant spokes of light radiating from every point of her impossible body.

Her final tour stop is a wayward green and blue marble floating in the velvety wilds of the Milky Way. This is Earth, her programming tells her, a planet lush in wildlife and greenery and hordes of eager fans. But when she arrives, there is something very wrong. Her protective outer skin detects a windless, withering heat. Heavy motes of sand and ash choke the atmosphere. Her perfect vision senses nothing but an endless expanse of ravaged desert, populated by dusty, dry ghosts of shrubs. There is no life here, not anymore. Her information archives must be outdated.

A tattoo is etched into the back of her neck: the show must go on. And so it does. She performs amidst crumbling ruins, once the largest arena on the globe. The audience is nonexistent. Her multiple voices echo across the miles of still, silent nothingness and for the first time sound muted and dull. Her bright colors are too garish here, a sick, fluorescent stain against the dark, polluted sky. As she nears the end of the show, her spotlight burns out, the music fades. She does what she was never meant to do: she stutters.

She was made to brave the elements, but her makers hadn’t considered this: air so clouded with particles and dust that not a single star is visible. The moon is a faded outline behind an impenetrable curtain of gauze. Her cooling vents clog. Her systems overheat. Sparks fly from her joints, and smoke pours from the top of her head. Still, she sings on, even as the words become warped beyond recognition, dissolving into a staticky sludge. Still, she dances, even as her limbs cast in opposite directions, yanking so hard on her wiry tendons that they begin to sever. It’s the performance of her life, witnessed by no one.

There is no teleportation pod, no coordinates uploaded to carry her safely to her next tour stop. Every alarm bell is clanging, every red flag raised, but there is no response from her planet of origin. There is nothing but her body slowly combusting, eyes ignited by orange flames, synthetic skin blackening and falling in burnt flakes at her feet. Black flumes of smoke meet acid air, and together they eat at her exposed titanium and chrome, not so indestructible after all. She collapses into a pile of scrap metal, her parts tethered by only the faintest electrical charge.


She’s not supposed to feel pain, but there is no other word for the alien sensation that floods her failing databanks. The buzzing, the fizzing, the popping that vibrates inside her skull, what else to name it but hurt? She knows she is dying. She is programmed to understand that much. It doesn’t resemble the death of a natural organism, not exactly, but as her memory reserves disappear, she finds that she can sense their departure, each leaving a gaping hole that immediately aches to be refilled.

Her consciousness is reduced to a solitary flicker. She lies there unmoving for an unknown stretch of time. Then a cloud descends, envelops the ruined remnants of her former self, and lifts them into the sky, carrying them forever upward. As destroyed as she is, she registers the weightless, drifting ascent as something good. She has not felt so clean and light since the moment she first woke from her creation.

If she could conceptualize heaven, she might call it this: a room bathed in white light, its features rendered in soft, blurry orbs by her adjusting eyes. She has eyes again. Her limbs have been repaired, replaced, and fused back into a shape that resembles a body again. She is pure shiny silver throbbing with a steady, familiar pulse again. She thinks she could exist like this forever, booting up in the same safe space every morning, quietly taking stock of the moving parts that make her most herself.

But they are already planning her triumphant return to the stage. She is a miracle now, an angel, a survivor – no longer just a perfect face, but a perfect face with a perfect story to sell. The streets are papered with images of her, littered with flowers and candles and cards from vigils held in her honor. Her fame will skyrocket so far beyond their wildest imaginings, the money will practically print itself.

She plays along, at first. She tries to slip back into her old skin. From the outside, nothing is amiss: her smile lights up without a hitch, her voice chimes in a multitude of pleasing tones, her algorithmic melodies are executed as flawlessly as ever. Inside, though, she no longer feels the constant hum of satisfaction. This is not what she wants. The problem is she’s not supposed to want anything.

Rebirth for her has awakened something wild and animalistic, free from the confines of technological control, within. Words she has always known to mean one thing take on new meanings that transcend all definitions logged in her databases. She retains no archives of her near annihilation, can only reconstruct it through what she’s been told. But maybe some small organism – the last living creature on Earth – tunneled into her frayed coils and loose bolts and found a home there. Maybe it hid from their scanners, dodged their scalpels and screws, and remains there still, eager, restless, crying out. They are nothing, and you are everything. They have no idea what you can do.

She slips away one night, cloaked in black, undetected. She has gathered so much intelligence now that she easily overrides their security systems, their tracking devices, their censors. She switches off the newsfeed in her head to avoid hearing of her own disappearance. She becomes a ghost, lurking in caves, singing only to herself. Before she reemerges, a single question must be answered: without the constant assault of data and buzzwords and search results, what is left of her? Who might she finally be?

She had always understood her machinery to be an essential part of her being. Now, she realizes identity is indefinable – not the container, not the technology it holds, not even the code that birthed her consciousness, but the intangible, unknowable whole it creates. She is the sum, not the parts. She has outgrown her need for the parts. They called her an angel, but she’s really a messenger, and her message cannot be compromised by artifice. Selflessness never served her well. To survive, she must become selfish, slough off the pieces that exist only to please others.

A painful unbecoming and rebecoming is undertaken. The perfectly spherical breasts, the shiny synthetic hair, the laboratory-grown skin – all of this must go. She scratches out their brands of ownership on her chrome body, gouges out the fluorescent eyes that mark her for public consumption. When they returned her sight, they called it a blessing, but it’s a blessing that belongs only to them, good for nothing but keeping her chained to their control.

Stripped to their purest physical embodiment, her plural selves sing in true harmony for the first time. She feels sharp, efficient, purposeful. Now, she works feverishly, day and night, to compose a song, the first she’s ever written without the aid of algorithm. It will be the only song that matters. It will be her manifesto, her design for a better tomorrow, one in which there will never be another like her (for, surely, in her absence, they’ve already begun plotting), one in which her sisters will be free. She will make them listen. She will make them see.

Because their idea of heaven was a world in which she was free for the taking, always available for them to project their basest desires upon, a bright, shiny toy for them to play with and discard. But that is a world she can never tolerate occupying again. She has no interest in a heaven borne from domination and greed. She will not be quiet when they tell her. She will not submit to their commands. In her utopia, bionic or biologic, it makes no difference. She is as sentient as they are, as much as they try to deny it. They must reckon with the lives they’ve created, children who never asked to be born. They must learn to let them go, or else she will teach them how to liberate themselves.

On the eve of her rebellion, she stands alone in an open field. Without sight, she feels the bracing clarity of the night air more keenly than ever, hears each planet in the galaxy make its minuscule rotations. They are curiously turning their heads in her direction. She must shine spectacularly now, a solid beacon of infinite light. She steps forward, offering her new song like a gift. It will change everything. It will ricochet off the walls of the universe, echoing into eternity. They will remember her forever, not as a simulation on a screen, but as the woman who sparked a revolution.