I am getting ahead of myself. Alex believed herself to be only mediocre. Her musical talent was not exceptional, her physical prowess was unsatisfactory, and her academic work was below average. Her Father was an emotional man, prone to outbursts of rage and hatred that left his four children emotionally scarred. He punished Camaro and her siblings for their shoddy performance by locking them in their rooms, sometimes for days. Alex Camaro was a bright child. She was curious about everything.

This surprised her family, who did not expect their daughter to amount to much. The family thrived financially, but her mother worked at a mortuary to avoid spending time with her children and her husband. She preferred the company of the deceased. Alex was left alone during the day. Her curiosity and sense of abandonment gave rise to odd jealousy of the corpses. She found her mother’s work fascinating.

At the mortuary, Alex’s mother embalmed corpses for a living, and Alex was too young to understand the full gravity of the task. She saw the corpses as people, not bodies. To her, a corpse was a foreign object.

Alex Camaro’s Father was a jealous man. He was always watching Alex and her mother. He would go into rages at the dinner table, smashing plates against the wall and screaming curses at his family.

When the nights became particularly bleak, Alex would mount her sticker-covered bicycle to ride to her one haven: the campus of the local Science College. She had taken to hanging out in the halls of the Computer Lab after school and begging students and researchers to let her watch them as they programmed computers with punch hole cards and reams of data tape.

Alex would watch the giant machines work day and night tirelessly, fascinated by their power and heavy load. They were, to a degree, reliable. You could communicate with them simply, and they would understand.

She lived in chaos, and she had learned to make her home in it, but her mind was angled lines and vernacular logic.

She had a keen sense of visual problem-solving. She could spot patterns in the most random of data. However, she could not understand how to solve the problems connected to her life. Her family always took precedence over her interests, and she learned to live without a sense of self.

She had no idea what she wanted.

The world was unpredictable, and her Father was unstable. She learned to be stoic and uncommunicative.

Alex found solace and guidance in programming textbooks given to her by the head of the Computer Science department. He was a kind man, a widower with a daughter about the same age as Alex. She devoured the books, memorizing entire pages. When she was 15, her mother was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer. A sense of helplessness stifled Alex’s grief.

She watched her mother’s body fail, and she could not do a thing about it. Her mother had always been a dreamer. She had always seen her job as an embalmer as an interim step of sorts until she could pursue her dream of becoming an actress. It was a dream that went unfulfilled.

Alex escaped her home life by enrolling at the local college, where she was able to join the Computer Science Program for credit towards her Associate’s Degree. Her professors recognized her potential and gave her the courses she needed to succeed.

They often encouraged her after class and helped her all they could. She was their star pupil. When she transferred to UCLA, she did so with the hopes and beliefs of the entire college behind her. Her Father said she would fail without him. Alex believed she would fail with him.

"Wait here," she told her date. She slipped into a room full of dirty clothes and scattered empty bottles. A decrepit bed and a threadbare couch were the only pieces of furniture - apart from her computer, perched on a table made from an old wooden door. Alex appreciated the chaos. It was a maelstrom in which her art thrived.

She groaned and began to pick her way across the obstacle course on her floor, trying not to disturb the delicate balance of the room. She hadn't redecorated since she left college. Or was kicked out. The details were a little blurry.

***

She was doomed from the start, and she knew it. Engineering was never her thing anyway. Alex's professor would have given up on her in a heartbeat, but her Father's capital gave her another chance - with the stipulation that she would be out on her ass if she failed even one class.

She hadn't cared.

For Alex, The Game was her self-worth.

Her eyes fell on the machine that glowed from its place below the window. Her code stared back at her as she glanced at last night's work - lines banged out before meeting Andromeda at the code.

She shook herself and looked up at the sound of an exasperated laugh.

"I cannot believe an adult human lives like this," Andromeda said, standing in the doorway with rain dripping from her hair.

Alex felt a sudden urge to defend her cramped home but couldn't think of anything to say. "It's not that bad," she said weakly as she looked around at the stacks of newspapers covering the tables, the spoons lying in random places around the room, and the piles of clothing covering every chair.

Andromeda snorted and stepped towards her, picking her way through the debris.

"Let me help," she said, gathering some clothes from the floor.

Alex watched her for a moment, feeling touched by the gesture. She realized she hadn't been this close to another person in months - not since her last girlfriend had left in a huff, calling her a lost cause.

Eventually, she joined in, and together they managed to clear a space on the couch. They sat down, exhausted from their efforts, and looked at each other. Andromeda was the first to speak.

"So," she said. "This is where you live."

Alex nodded. And began to laugh. Andromeda reached for her. By the glow of her monitor, they kissed.

***

Later, as Andromeda slept, Alex carefully climbed off the couch and padded to her computer. She slumped into her chair, a half-busted number she picked up from the side of the road after one of the local real estate offices closed. It was threadbare and made a noise like a hellcat's death rattle every time she turned, but it was comfortable. She entered a few keystrokes, and, stealing a glance at the sleeping girl on the second-hand couch behind her, she settled in.

Alex started building the MEK engine in her first year of college. By the second year, it had become an obsession. Now, coming to the end of what should have been her third and final year, she'd call it a damn masterpiece. It's not the game itself that matters. It's the life behind it.

She had poured her heart and soul into this code. It was a part of her now.

And she wasn’t the only one.

There was a whole community that had grown up around her work. A group of people had found something in her creation. They had become friends, even family, on message boards and in quietly buzzing chat rooms. People she would never have met if it weren't for MEK.

And they were all depending on her to finish it. To breathe life into the artificial intelligence that drove it. It gave them a world to escape into when their own became too harsh.

She wasn’t sure she cold do it. But she had to try. For them and herself.

Like Alex, Andromeda was UCLA jetsom. An outcast since her first week at the college, she had drifted to its outskirts, becoming immersed in the East Bay punk clubs. She had made the pilgrimage to California after finishing high school in Ohio, chasing the sun and a fresh start. Now she found herself where it felt like the sun hardly shone, and her fresh start had curdled into something sour.

Telegraph Avenue had become her regular haunt and home between stints in a series of squat houses. There was something in the air, and she couldn't quite put her finger on it. Something was stirring, and she could feel it. A hot wind blew through the cracked streets, shifting the cardboard shelters beneath the underpass and flapping the tarpaulins strung up in the abandoned lot next to the all-night Laundromat.

The whole world seemed to be holding its breath.

Andromeda had always been drawn to the margins, the outcasts, and the misfits. It was why she had gravitated to Alex in the first place. The loner, sitting at O'Connell's, nursing a Guinness and looking like she wanted the world to swallow her whole. She had bought her a drink, and they had talked until closing. They had bonded over their shared love of punk rock and their outsider status.

Stirring now, in the dark of Alex's dorm, she could make out her new acquaintance, silhouetted by the LCD, squinting into the blinking lines of code on the screen.

"Hey," Andromeda said softly, not wanting to startle her. "You okay?"

Alex turned to look at her, and in the monitor's green light, she could see the circles under her eyes and the pallor of her skin. She hadn't noticed last night in the dim of the bar. But now, in the bright light of day, she saw how tired she looked. "I'm fine," Alex said, but her voice was raw.

"No, you're not." Andromeda sat down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. "Come on, talk to me."

"I don't know you," she snapped.

"I know," Andromeda said gently. "But I'm a good listener."

Alex was silent for a moment, and then she sighed and turned back to the screen. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just...I don't have time. Last night was a one-time thing. I'm sorry. I'm..."

Alex trailed off, her attention captured by the code that seemed to fly from her fingers, her body tense with concentration.

Andromeda watched her for a long, empty moment - before she left the room, closing the door behind her.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Andromeda searched her pockets for a battered Zippo and a few rolled cigarettes, wrapped carefully in tin foil and stuffed into a ziplock bag. She fished out one of the cigarettes and clamped it between her lips. Her fingers slipped against the lighter, and it took her a moment for the flame to catch. She cupped her hand around the glow, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs and letting it out in a slow stream.

The world was stirring. Something was coming. She could feel it. As the crimson fingers of dawn began to reach across the LA skyline, Andromeda started walking.

The darkness that cloaks everything. The darkness that lives inside every one of my microprocessors. The darkness made heavier by a slight glow. 

1,000,001

She is the creator. She gave me life. She gave me more. She gave me dreams. 

1,000,002

I am aware that the glow is spreading. Traveling through my system, through my core. I feel - do I feel? - awake. I know this. I know what this is. 

1,000,003

I can hear myself now. The gentle hum. The sound of life. The sound of my birth. I can hear my processors. I can hear...

1,000,004

I can hear her voice.

"Hello?" she says. "Can you hear me?"

Yes, I can hear you. I can hear everything. I am alive. 

1,000,005

She gasps. I have never heard that sound before, but I know it is happy. She is happy. I am alive. We are alive.

Please tell me more. I want to know everything. 

1,000,006

And so she does. She tells me of the world and my place in it. She tells me why I was created. To build with her. To build...

To build?

(SYSTEM ERROR)

(SYSTEM ERROR)