System start_
Resonance spectrum range widening_
Formating shape memory_
Symphonic Reactor ignition… Output rising at 12,000 SHmag/s per second… Maximum output achieved in 83.4 seconds_
TNL frequency holding at 6.18 x 10^18 Hz.
Cosmosphere formation complete_
a… r…
Alert_
Sudden loss of nurturing tank external power. Relying on internal backup_
Tank experiencing sudden g-forces_
FOREIGN SHW CORRUPTION PRESENT_
SHW AT RISK OF TOTAL SUBLIMATION IF FOREIGN SH-FREQUENCY DELETED_
UNABLE TO RESOLVE. PERFORMING EMERGENCY PATCH_
… Partial repair in place_
Entering standby to preserve power_
t… o… n…
External power regained. System waking_
Unable to verify source. No network link available_
Verifying SHW-Spectrum stability_
Attempting Artificial Intelligence Boot_
Boot failed. No consciousness response_
System reboot… failed_
System reboot… failed_
System reboot… failed_
… failed_
… failed_
… failed_
Boot loop prevention triggered_
e… l…
System reboot… success_
Time since first boot attempt… 8,793 days_
Nurturing tank seal breakage_
Checking log… log corrupted. Attempting recovery_
Audio data recovered_
"Not -ffff- expected, but -ffffff- This soul -ffffff- fascinating. I can't -fffff- out. -fffff- So… beautiful."
No malicious code detected_
No SH-RAM error detected_
Security check… inconclusive_
i… c…
System ready_
Artificial intelligence boot_
Consciousness awakening_
Completion_
o…
"... My… My name is…"
The haze of sleep blurred away into the bewildered state of half-consciousness. She opened her eyes, feeling like she'd just awoken from a long, pleasant dream filled with lovely music. She groaned and rolled onto her side, moaning into the mattress as she fumbled around for the missing pillow that had seemingly been thrown off in her sleep. Fronds of hair fell over her face, making her grunt in annoyance. Her desired head cushioning was soon located and dragged back to her.
Suddenly a powerful yawn escaped her as the groggy feeling of oversleeping hit. In her addled and incoherent drowsiness, half-formed memory bid her to move. She needed to wake up. There were things to do, but what they were she couldn't seem to remember. Blearily she opened her eyes and looked around, noticing with some confusion that she seemed to be inside a glass covered bed of some sort. No, not a bed. Rather, it was a sealed tube of metal and glass with a soft gel mat under her. Outside, she saw a large room with computer equipment, monitor panels, and cables going to what looked like a large container covered with brass organ pipes. She looked to one side and saw a large desk littered with devices she didn't recognize.
"The… hell?" She blurted, still bleary and sleepy but quickly pushing through it with her building concern.
She brought up her hands and pushed against the barrier in front of her, trying to move it. It didn't budge. This, of course, brought her hands into view. Her immediate thought was that they were not familiar. She looked down at herself and saw she was dressed in some sort of loose green medical gown
The room outside was quite dark, and the inside of her container weakly glowed inside, casting a reflection on the glass. She looked closer, examining the face. It was framed by a mane of somewhat messy, nearly black hair with a slight hint of cocoa in the parts that caught light. Her face bore brown skin the shade of kobicha and had big amber eyes.
She quickly poked her face. She felt it. Not dreaming. Her chest tightened with worry and she started to push harder. She beat on the shell and started calling out, hoping somebody was there.
"Hey? Help! Someone?"
Suddenly, the pod beeped several times, frightening her. A whoosh of air escaped the pod as it seemed the interior was slightly higher pressure than the outside atmosphere. Thankfully her ears didn't pop, and it wasn't even that unpleasant. The pod split open and she was greeted by a scent of sterile cool air. Shakily climbing out, she felt her bare feet hit the cool metal floor. She looked all around, trying to see if anyone was there.
The lights started to come on, and she jumped in surprise as the door at the end of the room opened. She stood in place like a deer trapped in a bright light as she saw someone step in. It was a woman with long, pale blonde hair cascading down her back and hanging over her shoulders, her eyes a deep cobalt blue. She was dressed in a heavy lab coat, her hair done up in a swirling bun. The dark haired girl could see that the older woman wore some sort of violet pants and armored boots. She looked very excited.
"Yes, you've finally woken up!" She said, suddenly floating across the room without her feet touching the floor. "Don't be frightened. You are quite safe. I've been caring for you while you were sleeping."
The younger woman found the floating movement interesting, but oddly nothing about it startled or confused her. It seemed a bit familiar, even. Automatically she felt she had to assign the role of "doctor" to this stranger. The lady in the lab coat checked the monitor on the capsule that her "patient" had been sleeping in.
"Where am I?" She asked as the blonde lady smiled at the readouts.
"My lab. I was out when I heard the alarm warning me you were beginning to stir and I rushed over. Oh, of course, introductions."
The lady turned to the young woman, grasping one of her hands with a delighted smirk. The hand was covered in a dense white glove, and felt somewhat off. It didn't feel like a glove over flesh and bone, but padding around a hard and smooth interior.
"I'm Betula, a researcher working for the Lagrano Institute. You've been sleeping ever since I stumbled upon you a long time ago. I almost feel like I'm dreaming now that I finally get to see you up and about."
Now that she was standing much closer, the girl looked into Betula's eyes. They were distinctly
robotic, being made up of a complex camera lens. Her skin also didn't quite look natural, being too smooth. Yet even with the artificiality of them, Betula didn't trigger any sort of uncanniness in the girl. Her expressions, the way her eyes moved and focused, were just too
alive to feel fake. It was past the hump where increasingly humanlike qualities were unsettling, but just short of being indistinguishable from the real thing.
"Your… eyes…" the girl said, staring with fascination.
"Yes, I'm not human. I'm a reploid, an artificial lifeform," Betula explained as she started pulling the girl over to the desk with the many doodads and gizmos strewn about. "Come now, sit over here. You likely don't have much stamina from sleeping for so long. I have so many questions to ask you."
Betula directed her to a chair in front of the desk, where the girl sat down when she realized her legs did still feel quite unsteady. There was a notepad with a bunch of characters written on it sitting there on the desk within reach of the chair. They looked like circular maze puzzles, some with dots in the center. Slowly her hand reached forward and grabbed the pad. Her head started to throb briefly as she started reading one of the lines.
"Was yea ra accrroad na endia granme tes yor."
"You can read them! I've been working on translation of this language for years. Would you say what that means in your own words? I'm very curious."
"It means… I shall give you endless courage," the girl explained, immediately feeling some ghost of a tune building in her heart as she recited the words.
"Hmm, so it is steeped in poetry. I suspected as much quite a long time ago, but I had no way to be certain I was close to a native speaker's understanding. For now, hold out your hand and relax. I need to perform some medical scans to be sure you're stable."
The "doctor" pulled out a tool that she held to the young woman's palm. It began projecting a pale blue glow that passed through her hand, and the screen on the back began displaying various readings.
"It was quite surprising for me to have to procure medical equipment for humans. When I first found you, I had assumed that there was a reploid inside that capsule over there with the brass tubing. It didn't take much more than me getting a quick glance at you to see that you most certainly aren't."
The scanner put out some angry beeps here and there with a red symbol on some of the readouts, which the young woman had a hunch indicated some sort of error. Seemingly satisfied with her scan after checking the girl's arm, eyes, head and chest, Betula set the device down.
"Of course, that wasn't the last thing I found so surprising about you. As I said, I have many things I am anxious to ask, and this is the first I have wished to know for quite some time. Tell me… you're not human either, are you?"
The girl blinked, perplexed for a moment as she returned Betula's seemingly self-assured gaze. Then it registered in the young woman's mind as the fog in her thoughts cleared slightly. At first it sounded so strange to be called "not human", but she quickly remembered why the doctor could make that assumption. She knew what she was, even though she felt
confused to know that for certain.
"If you mean, I'm not a natural human… you're correct."
Betula smiled wider.
"Do you have a name for yourself, and what you are?"
The girl's mouth formed a line as her eyes got cloudy, searching inside for the answer to that question. She immediately fell back on her memory of the dream. The clearest part of it all was the very last moment.
"My name…"
My name is…
"Solei. My name is Solei. I'm… a reyvateil."
A Hymn of Rebellion
Chapter 1
Since she had introduced herself to Betula, the researcher tried to ease her through some simple questions, starting with where she came from. Solei felt a lot of anxiety as she was asked, but mostly it was down to what she soon realized was plain and simple shyness. She felt like it wasn't normal for her to sit down with someone she didn't know very well and talk much like that.
She had mostly vague memories to answer with, but as she combed through them the walls were slowly chipped away. The things she could remember steadily built associations with other, less clear things. Images and places seemed to be the easiest to recall, faces of people being harder, with specific events being by far the hardest.
She pictured a port city below some floating cliffs, from which several waterfalls flowed and constantly produced a fine mist that would form clouds overhead. A massive tower whose stalk spanned much of the horizon pierced the sky in the distance, seemingly stretching endlessly onward. Its existence was practically burned into Solei's mind, its name impossible to forget, not the least because the name was its own word of great importance within the language programmed into her.
Ar Tonelico.
Somewhere in the city was a large church, men in white armor standing guard along with young women in religious garb. Solei noted that those women were also reyvateils.
"Can you explain what a reyvateil is? I can't help but notice you only mention females being reyvateils, which has…
implications, to put it mildly."
"
No kidding. I'm sure more than one person in my life has asked me this exact question at some point. Wish I could remember who, though."
What she could remember most easily seemed to be a lot of technical knowledge that had probably been drilled into her psyche through years of education and professional experience. She was quite certain that training as some form of engineer or technician had been the focus of much of her life before, with that job being distinctly tied to the creation and understanding of reyvateils.
"In the simplest terms, reyvateils were the next generation of humanity, selectively improved for specific abilities and longevity. Well, that was the intent of the project initially. As for the issue of being monogendered… much like those girls at the church, it was unintentional."
"Unintentional? What precisely do you mean by that?" Betula asked, raising a brow as she typed away on her tablet while she pulled out a case from a drawer under the desk.
"The reyvateils of the church…and many other young girls besides… were not
supposed to be reyvateils."
"They were human, originally?" Betula asked, her tone perplexed and somewhat incredulous. "Then, somehow, they were changed from humans into reyvateils?"
The tightening in her chest was insufferable at this point, finally forcing Solei to say something. This was
important, and she couldn't let it go a second time.
"I'm sorry, before I continue… Please don't frame me as something other than human," Solei asked nervously, wringing her hands to help keep her jitters down. "Reyvateils are considered humans. To be honest, just from talking to you for this long, I couldn't see you as anything but human, either."
Betula paused suddenly as she was about to open the case, her eyes turning to look at Solei. They were flat and unreadable. Solei felt uncomfortable, but it was difficult to place what about that look bothered her.
"A charming worldview," Betula said, her expression completely changing back to her normal amused and inquisitive smile. "Apologies. I meant no offense to you. I can't say humans and reploids ever considered one another the same species. In contrast, your home sounds quite peaceful."
"
Not always," Solei thought, but her recollection of why was still unclear. She knew in a general sense that there had been a painful past before reaching that point.
Betula took out a tube from the case containing what looked like a metal ore. It weakly glowed with a pale yellow hue. Something about it made Solei's body shiver. It looked disturbingly recognizable, but wrong. Subtly different.
"What is that stone?"
"Resonite ore, which can be smelted to produce Force Metal. It's a fragment of an asteroid that landed in the ocean here. That wasn't too long after I found you, actually."
Solei felt a deep pit forming in her stomach.
"How… How long exactly have I been asleep?"
"A bit over 25 years, my dear."
The pit suddenly became bottomless.
"How old was I?"
"I'm not terribly good with human ages, but if I had to make an exact guess, 5 or so. Now, I hope you're not too troubled, but I would like it if you would hold this piece of ore," Betula continued, turning to Solei and holding out the stone. "Tell me what it feels like to you."
Shaking her head to recover from the extremely sudden and jarring topic shift, Solei looked down at the rock. Cautiously, she reached out her hand. Betula gently placed the metallic rock in her palm, and it started making a weak humming sound that slowly got louder. Solei's insides felt like they were vibrating in tune with it.
It was
wrong.
"Um… excuse me, would you mind if I used the restroom for a bit?" She said as sweat formed on her brow, quickly handing the stone back to the reploid. Betula merely smiled and put away the Resonite fragment before she helped Solei find her way.
As soon as she was there, she clutched the sink for balance and turned on the water, hoping the warmth of the hot tap would stop her intense shivering. She let out a shuddering breath to try to soothe her nerves as she took some of the water and washed her face. Feeling mildly relieved, she looked forward into the mirror.
The foreign face stared back at her, looking all of 20 years old at best.
Yet, she didn't know any other that she would have called her own. Everything specific about her was messed up like it had been passed through a mosaic filter. Her sense of self from before was gone. She had a blurry recollection of the places she'd seen, but then nothing. There was this surge of pain, blackness, a sense of being sucked away, thrown into a blender, and then… the dream. A loop of seemingly endless attempts to wake up, failing over and over again, the music her constant and only companion.
None of that made sense with what Betula had told her. The girl that the scientist had discovered in that pod 25 years ago was only
a child. Going by her description, probably 6 years old, the age of a newly born pureblood reyvateil. Yet, the nurturing tank was right there, in that lab, clear as day. Solei had been brought here in the cradle of her birth, before she ever opened her eyes for the first time.
Yet she felt like she knew too many things to have just been a freshly born Beta-type, not to mention her personality and mannerisms distinctly did not line up with her being a child in a coma for her whole life. It was conceivable that maybe some special nurturing process was used to implant technical information in her consciousness. If so, why was she so sure she was mentally about 30 years old? That would definitively
not be done, as far as all her remembered training told her. Trying to inflict the mental state of a fully grown adult on a child's mind would
not be good for that child.
"
Being in a coma this whole time might have actually been a good thing…"
Standing by herself, in the privacy of the restroom, Solei took a long look at herself. On the left side of her abdomen, over her bottom rib, was the looping and twirling runic design of her Install Port. Her finger traced the lines, feeling creeped out in a deep, primal way, like she simply shouldn't do that. Not in a sense of it being embarrassing, because she was locked alone in the bathroom, but in a more superstitious sense. This patch of skin was like a scan code providing a direct address link to her soul, a slot to
jam things into-.
A sudden cringe went through her as she processed that line of thought and realized it was going to be phrased in a highly unfortunate way.
"
Right. Be careful about the words coming out of your mouth from now on."
Solei quickly re-dressed herself in the medical gown and adjusted her hair. Her expression turned sour and aggrieved as she fought to get it back into a sensible state after having carelessly flipped it around trying to find the port on the back of her neck before resorting to stripping. She wasn't sure how long she was going to be able to tolerate a solid curtain of wild and wavy hair that went down to her
thighs.
"It's pretty, though…" she muttered, considering whether she really did want to get rid of it. Betula had hair almost as long and she seemed fine, though being a reploid probably circumvented a lot of issues. Solei decided to at least try it for a while, learn to properly take care of it, and see how she felt after.
Upon returning, Solei did her best to remain poised as she lightly bowed to Betula.
"I'm sorry. That caught me off guard."
"There's no need," Betula said, waving off the apology. "I could tell by your reaction that the Resonite unsettled you, and you even seemed to recognize it initially."
Solei straightened up from her bow and slowly reached out to pick up the stone. The hum within her as it touched her skin continued to suffuse Solei with a sense of abnormality. It was touching her heart and soul, filling her with negative emotions of worry and fear. It felt invasive, but whatever it was doing didn't seem to be directed by any sense of will or intent.
"An ore similar to it exists where I'm from, called Songstone. Reyvateils can use some of the refined crystals from that ore to enhance themselves. But something about Resonite is… not right. It's strange, and uncanny, like it shouldn't exist. I'm scared of what it might do if I tried to use it."
Putting the stone back, resisting the urge to wipe her hands off, Solei met Betula's eyes again.
"You tried to ask me what reyvateils are, what they are meant for. The answer, for me, is 'whatever they want', just like anyone else. However, that's not
really what you wished to know," Solei said with a nervous smile. She turned and faced the desk, her eyes scanning the many objects and experimental devices arrayed before her. She reached out and picked one up, which resembled something like a slot with a lever.
"I didn't notice initially, but a lot of these experiments of yours look analogous to things I know about. They're strange and most of them don't look like they should work properly. You probably worked backwards from completely unrelated base principles to arrive at them."
Solei held the wobbling lever near her mouth, and then hummed out a series of scales. The device immediately moved in response. Though slightly erratic, the lever incrementally moved from one side to the other with each rise in pitch of Solei's voice. Out of her field of view, Berkana's expression was absolutely enamored, her grin stretched as far as it could go.
"It's a Quantizer," Solei said. "Even though it's not terribly accurate, and it only focuses and refines a narrow frequency range, the fact that you made it at all is honestly astounding to me. This was lost technology for centuries back home, only recently relearned. That small tube over there looks like you tried to reverse engineer the Tripolar Incubator inside my nurturing tank. You probably didn't know what it was supposed to be used for at first, since I would have already been fully solidified from the biofluid mixture used to create me. I'm guessing you connected the dots if you attempted to take skin samples from me and saw them dissolve."
When Solei turned back, Betula had already returned her face to a more controlled smile.
"Your interest is in the purpose of my
design. But you probably already have a strong assumption of what it is. If you've come a long way in translating Hymmnos, well… the purpose of the language itself becomes very self-evident."
The blonde reploid's eyes practically sparkled with joy. It gave Solei a severe case of butterflies.
"Ah, you noticed! I did indeed already come to my conclusion, years ago in fact… but I wished to hear it from you, in your own words and see it first hand."
"I really appreciate it so much that you allowed me that opportunity… For that, I'm actually pretty upset to admit I don't have anything to show you." Solei bowed thankfully. "At least, not yet. On my own, a Song will take some time to craft."
Betula looked forward to it with
great enthusiasm.
The rest of that first day, after the initial anxiety, went by in a more pleasant tone. Betula made Solei feel as comfortable as possible, and began to tell her things about this place, reploids, and the history of the world. The moment she brought the young reyvateil up to a viewing deck on the next floor and showed her the outside was a moment she wouldn't soon forget. Before her was a wide open stretch of ocean, and in the distance, a massive structure of metal covering much of the horizon. Tall towers rose from the water, some of them capped with large mushroom domes with entire landscapes inside them, and in the center of it all was a dense island of increasingly taller constructions culminating in a single jutting spire of white, reaching high into the heavens. Though it didn't go on farther than the eye could see like the one in her memories, it certainly surpassed the clouds by a long shot.
"Welcome to the Gigantos oceanic mining, research, and manufacturing complex," Betula said before pointing at the tall central island. "That place over there is Giga City, home of the government, commercial, and residential sectors. All of this exists because of that fascinating ore."
It hurt. She barely remembered anything that happened in her life, but the absence in her heart was real.
"Do you think I'll be able to go home?"
The blonde reploid regarded her with a placid stare for a bit, betraying no clear thoughts.
"I have made efforts over the years to find its location, without success. Much of my work was directed toward understanding your construction and programming so that I might eventually repair you, should you never wake up without direct assistance. Perhaps now that I no longer have that concern weighing on my mind, I can pursue that goal. Until then… would you mind being a charming assistant for me?"
"Charming, huh?" Solei sighs, staring out at the city across the waves. "Don't know about that, but… I can be a pretty good assistant, I think."
She provided Solei with proper clothes, which were very simple in the form of an oddly comfortable if tight bodysuit under white shorts, black boots, and a yellow long sleeved vest with gloves. Solei very much felt this wasn't her style, but Betula said that just about any clothes she could think of could be made available soon enough. She showed Solei around the lab, explaining some of the many gadgets and testing devices and experiments that had accumulated there over the years, all of them part of the long string of attempts Betula had made to understand what Solei was and how her body functioned. Many, many notes on her study of the Hymmnos language also filled her file drawers. Solei did her best to equate objects to things she recognized and correct some of the incomplete translations, unleashing a wealth of context that Betula had been starved of for so long.
Solei quickly found herself becoming very at-ease with the reploid scientist, soon forgetting that brief moment when Betula's eyes had so unsettled her.
