From the unedited records of embedded companion AI construct
Construct Model: 3XU-T
Handler: Iris [last name unavailable]
In his first week at the temple, Iris did nothing more than watch the sun transit across the clay-coloured wall of his room. Every few hours, a monk came in and offered him a small piece of fruit. Twice a day, a different monk came to change the bandages on his back and legs. No one spoke to him, and for that, Iris was eternally grateful. When he blinked, there was fire beneath his eyelids. When the birdsong fell quiet, nothing but cries of suffering poured from the vault of his memory. He bit at the fruit when it was placed in his mouth and tasted only ash. But the sun moved, and the monks arrived at exactly the same time every day, and slowly, very slowly, he began looking forward to their arrival.
Once a day, just after sunset, a round-faced woman would come to speak with him in a language he didn’t know, of things he could never comprehend. She would light fragrant incense in the corner, and his room would fill with faint rosewood smoke. When it rained, she would open the windows wide and let the scent of rain and wet grass fill the space. Ashe drifted off to sleep to dream of pain and fire, she would stroke his hair gently and hum under her breath. Iris could have gone on forever like that. After many days, bit by bit, he began to forget.
When his wounds healed, Iris was given books. First, simple books with few linear ideas to build his language skills. Then, as he grew competent, scrolls and wooden boards carved with the foreign tongue that spoke of the Infinite Light and how it played out in all of the living things in the cosmos. Then came dozens of books about spaceships exclusively, dozens more about fruits and gardens, many more on astronomy and planetary geology. All of them, Iris devoured as he devoured breakfast each morning, surrounded by white-, yellow-, and red-robed monks, all bowing their heads to eat in silence.
There were a few other children around, but they made no attempt to include Iris in their games, and he made no attempt to join. While they laughed and played together, Iris spent some time every day learning their games and their habits from afar. Still, he was never bored. He was given free reign of the gardens and the temple as long as he kept up his studies and scrubbed the tiled halls when told to. The gardens alone were enough to satisfy his curiosity for months.
The round-faced woman still came to his room every evening and told him stories in a language that, over the months, had become manageable, about things Iris was only beginning to comprehend. She still opened the windows when it rained, and they both sat in silence, listening to the thunder roll in from behind the mountains.
Days turned into months, and months into years, and soon Iris found himself navigating the temple on muscle memory alone, preparing breakfast in the temple kitchens side by side with other yellow-robed novices, attending both sunrise andsunset prayers. He no longer stumbled over his words. They spilled from him as naturally as birdsong from the jays outside his window, without reserve, without a second thought. Some nights, he’d catch himself speaking the Starlit’s tongue in his sleep as he dreamt of home. He asked for his head to be shaved and learned the five proper ways to bow. No one specifically instructed him to do these things, but they were things to do, and he was glad to be useful. It was work to belong.
It was a gentle summer night many years later—the crickets were chirping up a storm—when Iris said, “I have been reading about a Vessel’s vocation, Mother Nova.” One such cricket had taken up residence in Iris’s room, and he had let it, finding it easier to fall asleep to its rhythmic song than to complete silence. “I think that’s what I want to do, to help people. It’s when they need the most help, isn’t it, when they cannot comprehend their own passing?”
For a while, Mother Nova was silent. Then she placed her hand atop of Iris’s and said with gravity, “There are other ways to help people, child.”
“But I want to be as helpful as I can be,” Iris insisted.
After another moment of contemplation, Mother Nova let go of Iris’s hand and stood up. “Very well, Iris. Then you will begin your training tomorrow, and you shall never finish it. You will meditate and study and discipline yourself until you are fit to be a Vessel, and you will do it all without complaining. Understood?”
Iris gave an enthusiastic nod.
“Get as much rest as you can. This will be the last night that you sleep fully.”
She had been right. Come morning, he scrubbed the meditation chambers, same as he had each morning, but soon afterwards, a red-robed Beacon took him away to study inprivate. Now, each of Iris’s books were handpicked, his meals planned, his free time no longer his own. He read until his eyes were sore, until there were only words he saw when he shut them at night.
Mother Nova never came to his room again after that night, never opened the windows. They saw each other in passing in the temple and at meals, and Iris always graced her with a deep bow, but she remained unmoved. Eyes forwards, lips curled in a calm, benevolent smile, like she was privy to a truth he couldn’t quite grasp at his young age.
It would take him many more years to learn how to smile in such a way.
Iris lay on his stomach, cheek pressed against the mossy floor. His left shoulder throbbed with every breath, and he was growing increasingly suspicious that Yan had somehow gone and botched the dressing. The simplest of tasks. He wouldn’t put it past Yan to ruin him out of spite alone.
You need to get some food,VIFAI suggested.
Iris ignored it.
If you die of starvation, I also die.
“I’m not hungry,” Iris lied and turned his head the other way. The pile of bones was still there, largely untouched. The four skeletons he had assembled barely counted. He had failed as a Vessel. He had failed to send these passengers to the One Beginning, and to make matters worse, he had contaminated himself with another’s touch.Sacred vows.How quickly those were tossed aside the moment he needed help. But there was a deeper insult, one that brought on an onslaught of personal shame, one that Iris had promised himself to never endure again.
Mother Nova insisted he was infinitely blessed to never fear the sin of vanity. But growing up alongside the brilliant Bacai, who, despite the identical robes and equally identical shaved head, never saw a lull in companions, Iris yearned for the missed opportunity.To be vain.It was a great and shameful wish he would take to his grave. To experience, even for day, what it was like to be deserving of vanity. To be admired. Desired. To be held by someone without the immediate, accompanying pang of shame.
In his youth, Iris had compensated for his appearance with enthusiasm and attention, and this sufficed for a while. It worked for those who could enjoy his company with the lanterns shut off and candles out, those who easily let go if he never approached them again. But it was all performative, a careful choreography Iris had followed time and again, leaving others satisfied and himself hollow. None of it had been satiating. None of the encounters had ever penetrated deep enough to sew together the broken bits. As he matured, Iris put away the youthful longings and focused on his training instead. And as the years passed, the hurt scabbed over, and he was able to be around others again, albeit always at a distance.
Iris ran a hand along his head and jaw. Stubble had begun to sprout on both, and its prickling caused Iris to curse in disgust. Another reminder of his failures. With a wince, he forced himself upright and onto his feet, and stumbled to his duffel bag. The ten-metre walk left him winded, and he gracelessly collapsed to his knees.
You need to eat.
“Please, do not speak to me.”
Iris dug inside the bag for his shaving kit. With a trembling hand, he ran the blade over the whetstone thrice and raised it to his jaw. But he had lost a lot of blood. The outer layers ofhis robes were plenty reminder, crumpled aside, nearly brown. Sluggish fingers unfurled, and the blade fell to the floor, the handle striking his knees on the way down. Iris was still conscious when his head hit the moss beside the blade. He stared at the cracked leather of the duffel bag, his one real possession, and fell unconscious once more.
The next time he woke up was to the echo of heavy footsteps outside the cargo bay as they dissipated into the distance. VIFAI reminded him again that he needed to eat, and Iris dismissed it rather impolitely. The throbbing in his shoulder had subsided enough right as the pain in his stomach reached levels he could no longer ignore. Steadying himself against the wall, Iris shuffled to the cargo bay doors on shaky legs.
