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In 1903, Blanche Beatrice Cantrell was five years old. For this auspicious birthday, she received her very first china doll; it was shaped to look like a lady, teenaged perhaps, with pale gray eyes and long dark hair, in a black and red dress. It wasn't the most current fashion, of course, but for a little girl like Blanche Beatrice, it was perfect. As she grew, her collection of dolls grew; the little girl doll became a little boy, and ten-year-old Blanche Beatrice authoritatively declared his name was Carlisle. But by the age of fifteen, in 1918, Blanche Beatrice cared not for dolls and Carlisle was forgotten with the other remnants of her childhood.



The dolls passed to the daughter of a maid. The girl was ill, a sickness of the mind no one could quite diagnose. She quickly became attached to the collection, but especially to the doll named Carlisle--he became the center of her stories, and from her eighth birthday, to her incarceration at Danvers State Lunatic Asylum in Massachusetts, to her death at age 18 the two were scarcely, if ever, separated.

From there, the doll vanished. It was searched for among the girl's earthly possessions, but it was never found. The man looking for it assumed it had been buried with her, in an unmarked grave...



...but, of course, in the ways of all ghost stories, that wasn't true.

The doll was rediscovered at some unknown point, falling into the hands of a young lady named Thetis Vasilyev. Thetis, an aspiring musician, was charmed by the doll; she called him her 'muse' and, strangely, named him Carlisle. Carlisle accompanied her on her trips across the nation, and for a time, her career flourished.

Then, strangely, she began to descend into insanity. Thetis became convinced that her bandmates were going to kill her, she began to exhibit traits of paranoid schizophrenia. One night, the whispers in her mind became too much, and she slaughtered the bassist. She was imprisoned, tried, convicted and put to death.

Again, the doll vanished. Though it was taken as evidence, after Thetis was buried, it disappeared.



Elixabete dul de Verdelet was the adopted child of the Grand Master of Ceremonies in Hell; once, long before coming into Verdelet's care, she was a demigoddess of air. Brought to Earth as a sacrifice, she kept away from the world at large. Though she occasionally left the manor where she lived--meeting others most every time--by and large she was confined with a small collection of items her adoptive father had given her.

Among them was the doll named Carlisle.

For a good long time, she grew up, growing vivacious and happy. The doll, she exclaimed, was her lucky talisman--and, in fact, it seemed to be. Lixxie turned her attention to painting, to writing, and excelled at all of it. She was called the Thetis Vasilyev of the art world; people remarked on her genius, on the similarity of the doll... And then people started to watch her, waiting for her to snap as Thetis had.

She never did. Instead, she found a man she adored; she married him, and soon enough, she was pregnant with her first and only child. Lixxie died of natural childbirth complications; the baby died with her.

Heartbroken, her husband sought for any way to preserve her or the child. But the gift of Lixxie's divine birthright, which had previously preserved her in situations beyond human comprehension, prevented the preservation of any of her genetic material; and the material she'd contributed to their child, too, made it unusable. Instead, he turned to the doll... the doll that had meant so much to his wife.

At the same time this was happening, a man named Marian Wirkkala was entering a passcode into a very, very old door. He was of average height, with blonde hair in a sharp bowl-cut; his glasses, which were of the brand which darkened in direct sunlight, had a disturbing tendency to slip down his nose at inopportune times. This had caused him quite a bit of trouble during the exploration of these particular ruins, as a man couldn't fumble a code for even a moment before some monstrosity or another would fall upon him. Marian was an average man in the respect that he wasn't fond of being devoured by monstrosities, no matter how novel they were. Especially not when he was finally so close to a lifelong goal.

Some fifty years beforehand, Marian had been lead on a very particular project--they wanted androids. Not just androids, but androids that believably mimicked their human counterparts, which was a demand that had already been met by one Judith Ames, working in tandem with her husband Stephen Brennan. Both of them were doctors in their field--Judith was an engineer, Stephen a psychologist of some sort. Ordinarily, others would have gone straight to the source. The problem was that Judith Ames--or rather, her husband--had tied up the matter of Judith's programming method in so many legal knots any corporation wishing to compete had no choice but to go to other programmers to get what they wanted.

It wasn't exactly Marian's cup of tea. He didn't see why a robot for space exploration would have to appear human or act it; he only reluctantly took the job, because he was fresh out of college, brilliant, and married to the love of his life, with a child on the way. Still, it was programming. It was what he loved. Even if he had to spend time programming romantic rejection routines instead of paying actual attention to things that mattered, he was doing what he'd always wanted to do with his life. Between him and the lead fabricator--a man named Riven Toukatly--they created a series of androids. The first and greatest of them was feminine; her name was Laika, and both of them, to their chagrin, became attached.

Too attached.

But it didn't matter. They were given the option of a substantial bonus or keeping one of the models; after discussion, Riven chose to keep Laika, and Marian took the money. It seemed that everything was going well.

Shortly after finally achieving what he'd been assigned to do, there'd been an accident. What kind of accident, he wasn't quite sure--he knew only that he had awoken, no older than he'd been when he'd been knocked unconscious, in a hospital. His wife was dead. His children did not remember him. Fifty years had passed. Riven and Laika had disappeared; they were all he had left, so he sought them out.

Riven, too, was in similar circumstances. Marian found him on the Eastern Seaboard, living in the same house where he'd built Laika, with a prototype whose hard drive had been entirely wiped clean. Riven's daughter was dead, driven mad by an experiment she'd engineered; Riven's partner, too, had ended in a bad way. Suicide. The two of them decided to turn to the one thing they'd shared--those seven androids.

Six of them were easy to trace. They were all on colonies outside of the Sol System, impossible to get back without substantial time input. But Laika had evidently never left Earth, which meant that the most recent existing version of her was MK 2.00.7b--still beta, but close enough that Marian could reconstruct her for that tiny bit of normalcy.

That was what had brought him to the facility where he'd once programmed her. The place had slowly succumbed to the encroachment of the wildlife around it, but most of the technology still worked. Most importantly, Marian's passcodes still functioned. He could get in.

The door was slow to slide open, but it jerkily receded to its place in the wall. Marian picked his way across the tiles, hoped against hope that whatever powered the electric doors also powered this workstation. He attached cables, detached others, and then depressed an unobtrusive button. The screen that hung from the ceiling flickered green for a moment, and then words appeared:

It has been 1,572,428,513 seconds since this system was last activated.

Awaiting input…

It seemed almost too good to be true. And unfortunately for him, it was.

Laika woke up.

Once he'd secured the code and returned to Riven's place on the shores of a little Massachusetts town, the reconstruction of their lives' work went swiftly. Hardware was replaced, software brought up to date--Marian had genius-level intelligence and Riven wasn't far behind. In fact, it could be said Marian was a bit too smart. That, in creating Laika and her six siblings, he'd overstepped his bounds. Judith Ames and Stephen Brennan had not been so ambitious as he; the robots they'd created did not pass the Turing test, but performed admirably in all other ways. It was possible to mistake them for humans if you didn't look too closely and didn't interact with them often. But the Wirkkala-Toukatly androids were entirely different. They could not be discerned from their human counterparts without looking at them in the nude--which most of them, being as they were programmed to be human, studiously avoided. It was said that hardly anyone knew that Navi, one of the original six, was a robot.

It was not said, but it was apparent, that every version after--every derivative version--decreased in complexity, until the third-generation editions of Navi lacked all of the grace and delicacy of the original. Somewhere in the original team that had created those seven robots, there had been a spark. Something magical and inexplicable, something deep inside them which made them different. It could be called a "soul"; it was a theory on the planet Helheim, which hosted the android Yuri, that it was a blessing from the gods. The ringworld of Amitslaw, where Centauri lived, felt that it was the combined emotions of her parents that gave her the semblance of humanity.

Whatever it was, it didn't come from nowhere. Whoever gave the androids this life didn't give it freely, or lightly. Before, its price had been fifty years of Marian and Riven's lives; now, it wanted something much greater.

This was why, when Laika woke up, there were effects across the worlds. Not just their mirror of Earth, but every other mirror of Earth; the repercussions were far-reaching, even to a world as far away as Gaia. In the shockwave of Laika reaching for a "soul", among many other things, the life of a Gaian family was changed.

In the exchange, Laika acquired her soul; and the little boy, Carlisle Mephisto, lost his entire family--and with it, acquired a second chance.

The baby grew quickly; some would say it grew much too quickly, but Len had learned that this was the way of things on Gaia. Especially for these cabbage-children, of whom he knew few others. There was the beautiful brown-haired dragon-child that his acquaintance Richter was raising, but Carlisle didn't seem much interested in her. Instead, he sat in front of a mirror, pressed a tiny, fat hand to it. It left little smudges, proved the boy did perspire; he was alive, he generated heat, he was a warm body. Within weeks, he looked to be a four-year-old. He was that special childlike thin, the sort that led to a tall and lanky adult. That wasn't something he'd exactly wanted; he was tall, yes, but he held out hope in a corner of his heart that Lixxie and Carlisle's matching gray eyes meant that Carlisle would be on the shorter end of the scale--like Elixabete, more than Len.

Of course, this was ridiculous. Carlisle had no genetic relation to either of them, and no reason to resemble one or the other. The eyes, of course, were a coincidence.

Among things which were coincidences was the way sometimes, Len thought he could see a different reflection in the mirror; rather than a dark-haired little boy, he would see a girl in her teens--a brunette with oddly glassy blue-violet eyes. Android, his mind supplied. The awkward movement of the servos gave her away at times, but Len never saw the strange reflection for long. The instant he made a noise, or Carlisle noticed he was there, she would vanish, leaving just the boy sitting there and staring at him, gray eyes innocent and wide.

Len didn't know what to make of it, but he was fond of the boy, so he didn't remove the mirror. He did try to moderate how much time Carlisle spent in front of it. There was no reflective surface in his small office, nothing that the child could use to… He didn't even know how to describe it, only that it wasn't natural. But then, anyone who saw Carlisle acknowledged it; the strange halo that told the time, but was only correct twice a day, and at different times every day, was only the beginning. He didn't speak, but he smiled often, and could walk only a few days after he was born. He was graceful and intelligent, as far as Len could tell--just silent.

Maybe he couldn't talk. He could move the muscles of his face, as evidenced by smiles and frowns; by the way his nose would wrinkle when his hands were dirtied. Mutism wasn't exclusive to those without the means for vocalization. Still, it seemed… almost ridiculously unfair, that Carlisle shouldn't know how to talk. It seemed, to him, like the boy should know.

He was very gratified, then, when the boy turned to him and smiled one day, on their way to his dance lessons. "Papa," he said, wiggling his fingers into a pair of gloves. He looked to be seven years old by then, had been taught by several different tutors. "We're going to be late."

Banal, yes. But Len was walking on air for the rest of the day anyway.