In one, thumbed cats hunt her through their midnight jungles. The sounds of her flight and their pursuit merge into a single cacophony of the forest breaking. The feathers brushing her cheek are a night bird until she hears the dart stick into a tree beside her. She steps off course and sinks into cover. She hopes they cannot see her, still and hiding in the absolute dark of a tree’s shadow, but the branches and leaves all around her rustle with their searching. A string of silent moments means safety and she runs for the door as the canopy shifts, as a single beam of light targets her from the translucence of the domed ceiling and through the thick mass of leaves. The javelin that finds her thigh leaves her limping as long as she walks.

                In one, she writes letters of her own height, a giant “IS ANYONE OUT THERE?” She visits this marker when circling the wastes returns her to it. The room is plantless, the air thick in her lungs and almost unbreathable without her filter. A few twisted and dead trees dot the contained landscape. The dome’s panels, writhing with the dust storm outside, draw what energy from they can from the sun, but there is some flaw in their making that keeps them from fully powering the habitat. The same malfunction that also doomed the gardener, she guesses. No other words spring up beside hers. She tallies scratches behind the question mark each time she passes through.

In one her mother grew her. It had the means of making a runny solution of lipids, a frothy, baby-safe stuff that ran out of its tentacle and down her fat cheeks. She shivered in the soft mitts through which it wended its manipulators to support her as she slept. It had shown her videos of her infant self, paw clutching at the lens. As a teenager, she could barely watch. Its printers deep in its bowels could do so much, make a plastic elephant for her to gnaw and a soft hammer that she swung against tree trunks, and yet it had never been built with the intention of raising a human life, let alone repairing one. It managed the rice paddies of its dome, let the grasses grow up thick on their banks, counted the bounty of possum and raccoon and red panda, taking their growth as a sign of its own skill, with her always toddling in pursuit. It, for it recognizes no human gender desirable to itself, sifted through the immense database of its forebearers for her. Keywords as its guide, bright and simply colored cartoons to entertain her, Preend stories of pigs going to the dentist. It aged the content with her, insofar as ancient search engine optimization could guide it. It showed her films, television, and all the multitudinous humanity it could export to her. Her name for it progresses from Momma, to Mom, and finally Mother, the last always said through clenched jaw.

                In one she finds an arm that clicks nicely over the place where she’d never had one. The arm had been in the back of a kudzu overrun dome, no gardener, no other signs of life beyond the verdant green carpet of vines.  Its wire tendons and pneumatic joints tighten and extend as she tests it. The door she had kicked open squeaks on its broken hinges. Her new fingers split into multitools, knives, and files of many varieties. She jams a curved pin into a keyhole until it clicks. Opening, the door reveals canisters, small and cold. One hisses only slightly as she pierces it with a sharp finger before she sips, satisfied, and then guzzles the sweet fluid.

                 At one, a door opens and a gardener greets her. She gazes into the red lens that peers out on a long tentacle from behind the door. To the gardener she is a thermal bloom. It tastes the contours of her pulse, redeems the state of her emotions from her biochemistry and anatomy. It self identifies by a serial too long and quickly beeped for her to catch. She calls it Z for the first, and only, piece she understood. In the elevator, riding the dome’s curve, the trees shrink to a diorama’s proportions, the giant spider webs between appearing as only the work of a miniscule interloper. “I boosted the oxygen content to 30%. I wanted to see what I could do with arachnids.” “Weren’t you programmed?” Z turns the long tentacle with the camera it had been favoring toward her. “Weren’t you?” The trees shiver as a gust passes through them. It is the biggest dome she has found, one which, as she nears the top, she estimates she could only cross in two days of walking. At the perimeter, with a dust storm eating up the grey horizon behind her and her scar aching with the shifting weather, she’d felt lucky that her knocking had been answered. The locks on the door had been too well maintained to crack open. “I see your piece,” Z says as they enter a donut of rooms at the crest of the dome’s ceiling. She looks over the rust-brown of her left arm’s interlocking parts. “That’s the multitool edition, isn’t it? I have about thirty Preend commercials for those that I traded other gardeners for. Was quite the, uh, work horse? Am I using that correctly?” She has no idea, but nods. “Eternity is long a time to wait for the weather to calm before we might plant again. We all need to pass the time while we protect our charges. Let me show you something.”

                In one, an ocean inundates a screen. Her eyes unfocus as her mother drones: “Morus bassanus gorges on varieties of Clupeidae and other small fishes, feeding and often drawing the attention of larger predators, Lagernorhynchus acutus and Thunnus thynnus, themselves prey for Homo sapiens sapiens.” Extinct seabirds dive and reemerge with a shimmering treasure, leaving showers of scales dancing in their wake as fish of many shapes and sizes school in a single whirlpooling current as the thick body of some new creature rides the waves on the near horizon. She leans until her nose touches the crackling screen, her eyes focused on the few dark pixels riding the front of white fish that rides the waves. “I’m not sure how to maintain your attention. Lessons are how you become a person.” She stares into the mechanisms that develop and tighten, complex flowers opening and closing for Mother’s sight. “Can I go to the bathroom?” At the mirror, seeing a face she finds alien, she forces herself to watch as it imitates the actors she has seen on her screen, waiting for the emotion to drip from her gap-toothed smile down her throat and to fill herself.

                In one, an architecture of mechanical legs, steepled back on themselves, sits before her. She recognizes the form of a dead spider in its shape. Z hovers over the tool tips, the long legs, the multitude of possibilities and capabilities these new body parts can offer her. Her fingers clasp the simulacra of tendons, test the gaps in the mechanisms for weatherreadyness. “There is a cost to the surgery.”

                In one she thinks she sees someone. A shadow on the back wall, slipping out of visibility even as she creeps toward it. She peeks down from the top of the doorframe, sneaking down the hallway from the ceiling, ready to fall on top of any vicious enemy that might attempt to spring at her from behind a corner. Nothing. The swamp into which she emerges hums. Here, a frog held with the intimacy of a heron. A web-stuck fly plucks its own serenade. No mind has organized this sepulcher. It grew up in its own weave and tangles, its private rules unmanaged, its network an ouroboros feeding on itself until the last nutrient becomes unusable and the last leaf withers and drops.

In one her Mom explains that she came to it as a baby, carried by two people who had only barely survived, waterless and foodless, in their crossing outside. They did not even have the strength to give it their names, their stories. Her heart races and, panting, she swallows a torrent of uncertain words. Together they watch a film in which people in black clothes watch a wooden box descend into the soil. A few with blank faces, some veiled and sobbing into white cloth. “Where are they buried?”  It did not respond at first. “I added them to the decomposition pile.” They are in the food she has eaten, the water murky with algae, the furred backs of stupid animals that run from her as she kicks and screams for Mother to leave her alone.

                In one Z intones: “You are finished.” She lies on her back, her array of legs folded onto herself, like wings before flight. She tests them, each of her eight long spindles ending in a delicate point that splits, at will, into fine manipulators. “Take your time, new parts need adjusting. Your nerves have to acclimate to communicating differently.” She crawls up to the ceiling. “May I keep the old pieces?” Z directs her to a pedestal with the mechanical arm. Beside it her organic arm and legs float in tubes of formaldehyde. “I have no sentimental attachments.”

                In one, a child in pajamas nestles deeper into parental warmth, softness. A green spike blurred behind them, firelight playing across their faces. Touching them, even a cautious and outstretched fingertip, pauses the ancient commercial.

                 In one it waits. It has charges, raccoons and waddling ducks, little precious things it has an impulse to preserve deep in its code. But they never were its children, never so distant and so close. It moves a possum corpse into the decomposition bin, the unlucky third this week. There must be a leak somewhere, a toxicity sneaking past the filters. But she should be back soon.  She always returns after rounding all the local islands, especially before the season of storms sets in, when passing between each dome risks being impaled on some wind-flung bit of Preend trash. Then it can find the leak. Then she can walk the pond’s edge, laugh like she is a child again, it trailing behind, its longest tentacle descending from the dome’s ceiling. If she hurts too much, it can lift her, support her fragile body as far and as long as she pleases. It scans the environment around itself for up to 50 miles, but sees nothing bigger than a mouse. Not yet.

                In none she crawls across the barren sands, her language finding this new self she has chosen slippery, out of definition. Z packed her rations. “Come back, tell me how they function. There is a manual for cleaning and fixing them embedded in the code, if you find another gardener.” To eat out here would mean a mouth of sand, wave on wave of that irritant inundating her. She’d die coughing up dust for her few last days before choking on phlegm, alone in this desert. A peak of a beast’s white skull uncovers as the dust stirs before her. She hates being alone and yet the two people she has met have made her feel as though she was wholly. Mom has her own needs and Z too.  And she as well, has needs, has always wanted to feel a part of something. She sees the cranial cap of the dome, not far ahead now. At the next dune’s crest, a lone biped stands. Their tattered cloak flutters as though a feathered river. They lift a long tube to their shoulder and square up.