As planets went, it was really rather small.

     It had been dwarfed by the gas giants it shared its solar system with, and successful only in claiming two very small moons as its stellar companions.

     What it lacked in size it more than made up in general attractiveness - no lifeless lump of rock was this. To start with, it was almost three-quarters-covered in water, with a flush of medium-sized islands strung out across the tropical oceans like a broken chain of pearls. Perhaps more importantly, it was covered in life – mostly life of the verdant and green variety, the seas teeming with fish (of a sort) and the forests echoing with the calls of the abundant wildlife.

     The sapient population was small – perhaps numbering only into the hundreds of thousands, and restricted to only one or two of the larger islands – which might have been why the small group of Kiravai colonists had managed to go so completely unnoticed.

     By contrast to the typical Kiravai colonists, who tended to go in and take what they wanted regardless of whether there were prior inhabitants or not, this little group had chosen instead to keep more to themselves, to research the natives and the wildlife from the air, and to take back samples for testing instead of set up large laboratory complexes in the various places interesting trace minerals could be found.

     This “ecological responsibility” was partly the reason that Sei had chosen that little world to take his young partner Mirii to, for a “holiday” of a sort. Like Sei himself, she was a synthetic organism, or Kirasiinu, the most technologically sophisticated “species” in the known galaxy, self-aware and emotionally capable, and given all the rights and responsibilities of their biological counterparts.

     Kirasiinu were rare. Before Mirii had been constructed, along with her six siblings, there existed only five others in the entire galaxy, and whether there would be any more depended in part on how well Mirii’s extended “family” turned out. After all, she was not only chronologically young, she was very emotionally immature, and there was no guarantee she would “grow up” to be as well-rounded and considering an individual as Sei, a mature older cob with a considerable wealth of experience of strange situations.

     So far, Mirii was living her life in a fairly stereotypically “robotic” way. She wasn’t really doing things for herself – it was as if she felt safest just doing as she was told. She liked to do as Sei suggested she did, to do as she thought he’d like her to do, and after the housekeeping had been finished she had a tendency to simply sit and watch the world go by until something new came up that she needed to do. If pressed, she would hesitantly admit to boredom (of a sort), but she didn’t really seem to know how to cope with it, what to do to get over it.

     In a small way, it was probably the fault of her adoptive parents – they had treated her with the same love and devotion that they would have treated a biological daughter with. But. They had been very carefully selected to give the infant Siinu the very best possible upbringing, and for a Kiravai that usually meant-… well, in Sei’s considered opinion the word was probably a little strong, but essentially “a good upbringing” meant indoctrination into the Kiravai mindset – the mindset that said the cob was the smarter, the dominant, the one whose word took priority.

     And that was all before one stopped to take into account his grave error in judgement when she was “newborn”, where he’d foolishly tried to use Mirii’s blank intellect to recreate someone he loved but had lost to his brother’s arms. She wasn’t damaged, she was happy and bright and loved him back the way he loved her, but he felt like a butcher, and eventually relinquished her to a complete decompiling and adoption by a new family. Since then, in spite of the way she somehow found her way back to him, he couldn’t help feeling a terrible need to hold her at arms length, to avoid the risk of “damaging her” again and so there was no possible way he would interfere with her own development. He was polite towards her, of course, and patient and happy to explain things, but… not so passionate as he would have liked to be. Not so close. Not so overt with his affection. He wanted her to be who she wanted, not who he would inadvertently mould her into.

     She seemed happy enough – she hung off his every word and adored him without question – but he felt… a little concerned that she would end up as a fancy sort of plaything, a sophisticated and clever servant rather than a companion, a person who was only capable of taking direction rather than having her own ideas and capable of making her own choices. Mirii had been brought up the Kiravai way, which meant that as a pen, she would be expected to defer to the cob, to do as he asked, to be a good little housewife and not ask too many questions. And she did exactly that – ending up terribly confused about how to do things “for herself”.

     Still, right now everything she did seemed to be guided primarily by whether she thought he’d be made happy by it. She didn’t really do a lot for herself – if he asked her a question, her first response would be carefully tailored to what she thought would make him happiest to hear. She didn’t seem to consider that he’d be happiest if she said what would make her happy, not him. He was trying his hardest to get her to think a little more independently, hence their “holiday” on this quiet little world (and as far away from the safe refuge of “housework” as he could get her). Trying to get her to make decisions she was happy with, decisions she did based on what she wanted – not that she wanted much. Even then, he still usually had to disregard her first answer to a question and ask the question a second time with the added suggestion that “if I wasn’t here…”

     She was trying, at least. Her pretty brow would crease into confused furrows and she would take a very long time (for a computer-brained organism) to think through her answers, and if in doubt she’d “default” to make-my-cob-happy, but every now and then she’d surprise him with some pleasantly independent thought.

     They were currently high above the ocean in a little Vaneship – essentially, a wing-shaped aircraft with a nearly silent electrical engine – heading for a pleasant, secluded little island that Mirii had (eventually, after much suggestion) picked off a map as somewhere she’d like to visit. Even then, she seemed to have based her decision on where to go mainly on where she thought that he might like to go. Somewhere scientifically interesting, somewhere away from too many native eyes, somewhere they wouldn’t cause a fuss and could explore without having to rush.

     He glanced up and met her gaze via the highly polished instrument panel above his head. She sat primly on one of the rear seats, her ankles demurely crossed, her hands folded in her lap, back straight, chin up, her clothing carefully symmetrically and properly ironed, not a hair out of place, silently watching him pilot the vessel. Just plain “chatting” didn’t seem part of her repertoire, yet – she was happy to just sit, and admire, and learn by watching. She wasn’t even playing with Suni, their pet, who had its head in her lap and had apparently given up trying to get her to stroke it.

     “Well, Mirii?” he coaxed, attempting to get a little conversation out of her. “Are you enjoying our trip, so far?”

     “Yes,” she replied, with a little smile and a nod, but that was it. No elaboration.

     “Are you looking forward to exploring this new place?”

     “Yes.” Again, no elaboration. It was… he hated to say it, but it was intensely frustrating. She had a keen intellect and refused to use it.

     “Why?”

     Her little frown came back. “Am I not supposed to?”

     “Of course,” he gave her a reassuring smile. “I just want you to talk to me. I would like you to practice your social skills, and while we have nothing else to be doing it seems like an ideal time to do so.”

     “Ah,” she hesitated. “I-… like to learn. I like to see new places and experience new things.”

     It was a bit of a half-hearted attempt, but Sei didn’t push her. “I hope you will not mind waiting a little longer to see this new place,” he said. “Because it looks like we may get wet, otherwise.” He pointed a finger at the darkening clouds gathering in front of them.

     She actually got up and went over to him, to stand beside him and inspect the darkening sky on the near horizon. “I do not like the look of those clouds,” she observed. “I should not like the charged atmosphere to cause the vanes to lose power. We should land, or turn back.”

     He kept quiet, maintained his poker-face. In truth, he felt deeply concerned – there was nowhere safe to land, not for a fairly significant distance all around them, just… water. Lots and lots of tropical ocean, stretching all the way to the distant horizon. And they had only enough power to get to their location – the vessel would need a protracted period in full sun to charge up enough for the return voyage. “We do not have far to go,” he reassured, although it was only 'not far' compared to how far they’d already travelled.

     The clouds closed in rapidly, though – intense, inky, shot through with flickers of forked lightning. The first drops of rain they encountered made a rattle of grapeshot on the forward screen, the spray becoming temporarily blinding, and then the drops turned into deluge.

     “Sei, please can we turn back?” Mirii asked, in an unexpected little bit of forward-thinking. “I do not like this.”

     As she watched, he opened his mouth to reply, and-

     …-there was a hideous boom that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the world exploding. She recognised it – distantly – as a lightning strike, but the shock that tore through the vessel raced just as readily up through the soles of her feet, and in a microsecond all her delicate sensory systems were offline. She felt the deck impact her chest even as her vision went to static and everything briefly greyed out.

     There was a period of silence and confusion – a murk of unpleasant nothingness. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be non-sentient, she considered, but for a full few seconds she felt almost inanimate. Systems began to reset themselves rapidly – she was designed with a high electrical tolerance in mind for just these situations – but during those few moments of incapacity the situation changed almost beyond her comprehension. Her internal chronometer informed her barely half a minute had passed but when tactile sensation returned, she noticed the deck was moving. In fact-… no, it wasn’t even the deck, it was soft and insubstantial, and cold. Wet. Water. All around her. She was floating – barely – on a sheet of something thin and sodden, in the ocean. And after she’d come to terms with this turn of events, a wave broke across her back and tipped her into the water.

     Her first reaction was one of shock – it was an unexpected turn of events, there was an element of distinct and inescapable danger, and Sei was not in her field of vision to give her advice on what she should do. Plus, the water was cold and sense-blinding, interfering with her optics and deafening her to softer sounds. Her subsequent reaction was a similar one, and again it was alien, one she had not experienced many times at all before in her short life… She was… scared. And sinking.

     She clutched her sodden sheet of insulatory foam and floundered in the surging waves, splashing and attempting to tread water but struggling to maintain her head above the surface – the materials used in her construction were simply too heavy for her to keep afloat on her own, and her “lungs” – her temperature-regulating air-sacs – were far too small to hold enough air to support her. She’d sucked in the biggest breath she could manage, the maximum volume of air she could possibly draw in, and she was still barely keeping her nose above the waves even with the alert sounding at the back of her mind (Overstretched capacity, it was saying).

     “Sei-!” she bleated, helplessly. Sei would know what to do, he always knew what to do. “Where are you, Sei?!” He would get her to safety.

     …There was no response. Even over the rush of water, the hissing of the falling rain and the sporadic groans of thunder she knew she’d have been able to hear him, but there was nothing. “Sei!”

     Separated, she realised, and the odd, unpleasant sense of fear turned into a deep, cacophonous shock of terror. We have been separated. He is lost, he is sunk if he is not dead and I am lost and I can not swim and I will sink and die and we will never see each other again.

     She splashed helplessly, completely incapable of coming up with any sort of plan, and if not for dutiful Suni would probably have simply allowed herself to sink. Somehow it had managed to survive the crash unaided, and its own small body was just lightweight enough to float. Her devoted little pet gave a little whistle, attracting her disoriented attention, and paddled over, pushing a large piece of flotsam along with its beak. What structural component of the vaneship it used to constitute, Mirii didn’t know, but she clutched for it anyway – it was light and buoyant and supported her unnatural weight easily.

     “Suni-“ She didn’t know what to say. She was lost, in impossible weather, in a terrible stormy ocean, completely at a loss as to where she was, clinging to the wreckage of her vessel, and Sei, her poor precious darling, had been ripped away from her. Which meant that the only one who could decide anything any more… was her.