It had now been seven months in total since I left the Earth behind. One more month had passed since I touched down on the red and rocky surface of Mars. And in that time, as I had predicted, I was able to grow and encompass a surface area larger than a city. I was truly huge. A breathing forest.

Unlike my attempt in the valley after Alejandro's death, I could now fully indulge a strategy of linear growth. There was no one around to disturb me. Seraph, it turned out, was not so omnipotent that their attacks could reach me here. Though, I had spied the satellites above changing their orbit to watch me twenty-four seven.

Let them watch, I thought. If they tried anything funny, I would be ready. I had dug deep and my rockets were on standby. No matter what, I would survive.

My body had grown like a tumor over the planet's surface. My flesh organized itself in a fractal pattern, with most of the machinery and pumps kept underground. In order to build up the biome I needed, a great amount of soil and water had to be processed. Blood flowed like rivers and nerves sprawled deep as the roots of trees might. Great big atmospheric domes had been erected and inside, thousands of lifeforms flourished.

Yet, I had time to build up my defenses as well. Enormous, glossy eyes jutted out between the enclosed, green hills of flesh. They peered unceasingly into the dark void of space, ready to alert me if anything should change.

For my part, I was happy to let those features run on autopilot. There was something torturous about maintaining the kind of enormous mind I had constructed on the moon. So instead, I preferred to keep things decentralized.

I aimed my designs so that they would be a harmony of independently mechanized parts and freely growing terrariums. Each organ had its own predetermined job, but through their competing signals and the tension of their struggles, something else emerged. Something new. And I fostered it with reckless abandon. Because this was my mind and my body at the same time. Especially those parts which I did not directly control, but which I influenced and who in return influenced me.

Freud believed that barely one-tenth of the mind was conscious, I recalled. And so, I followed that schema here, giving a living will to all my independant parts; letting their conflicts drive me. I was the sum of these parts.

Meanwhile, my minions were free to roam about the inside of corridors I had created for them, or up to the enclosed surfaces. I had quickly done away with their air-tight designs, as it was clunky and claustrophobic. It felt far more integrated to allow a semi-permeable integumentary system.

And so, they could walk through the foliage among the humid fog of the afternoon.

Deep below the surface, they moved through bioluminescent halls. Always, they were making requests of me. As promised, I would grant any of them, provided they weren't cloying for the old ways. They had to express growth.

Rooms, I would provide. Food, I would provide. Entertainment, I would provide. But not beds, hot pockets, and TV. Instead, I gave them viscous sleeping chambers which suspended them in blissful weightlessness; multicolored foods which defied the previous limitations of seven basic taste sensations; and I gave them the ability to dream while they were yet awake. To directly explore their angsts, memories, and wants. To be gods of their own, like madmen were. Able to roam the psyche...

This kept Daniel, Cyber, Paradise, and Foci relatively content. Ricardo was also more or less quiet, though he occasionally slipped into depressive spells. For this, I wouldn't help him. He needed to move through it on his own.

I gave bodies to the rest of the humans which I had downloaded previously. Most of them were unremarkable, but a few good Powers were in the mix. These I paid special attention to, trying to win them over and not to push them too harshly. I never knew when temporary mind control, for instance, might come in handy.

Still, my interests were relatively fixated on a single task. The most complex problem in biology was naturally the last and most interesting subject for me to study.

That was consciousness.

Before, I had been able to scale up Dawn's mind and give her sentience. But this was simply a matter of copying over the structural complexity of a human brain without the loss of the information that constituted her Kizmet personality. It was not a true act of creation.

Now that I had Eden, the next step was obvious. I needed my own Adam and Eve to populate the world. Creatures that would remain loyal to me, but which I did not directly control. Much like the Logician, I was interested to see how they developed on their own. Because, despite how deterministic life might have seemed from my perspective, there was literally no way to predict a new and emergent system. It was a mathematical impossibility.

What could be more exciting than that?

Gathering my wits to this end, I shut out all but my urgent notifications, so to speak. In my own personal cavern, the central brain kicked into high gear. Located miles beneath the surface and stretching toward the cool iron core, I opened my mind to the channel. Once again, I let my imagination wander to ask for nature's wisdom.

There was no better way to do it than by natural selection. That was the way the universe provided answers, despite the fact it lacked a voice. We simply had to say something stupid with our own and wait for the oncoming slapdown. Then maybe next time what we say would provoke a gentler reaction. On and on until we know we've struck a balance by the absence of correction. Stumbling to the truth.

Through this natural selection, I began to uncover the answers about consciousness that I needed.

Fundamentally, it was no different from any other biological mechanism. At every level, life systems were predicated upon perception and reaction according to an internal standard. These control mechanisms, like the monitors for glucose, body temperature, and hydration, sensed a particular measure and, depending upon where that input was in relation to the ideal, created an output accordingly. Glucagon or Insulin was released. Temperature rose or fell. Urine output or thirst increased. In any case, the goal of a balance most conducive to life was sought. Such was purpose without thought.

Yet consciousness was no different. It was an intensification of these feedback loops. Layers upon layers of them. At the deepest level, thought was a system of reacting not just to an immediate input, but to predict the impossible causality of one's own outputs upon the environment. Unlike simple blood sugar, it was a far more dark and foggy thing to perceive the meaning of the sensory world. Especially when dealing with social stressors.

Depending on the context, a hand on the shoulder could mean the comfort of a lover or selection for the firing squad.

So much of the sentient mind, I saw, was dedicated to the creation of belief; a system of responses tailored by experience to form an abstract map of the world. That was the nature of personality, which provided the desires, or destination, that shaped the map. Its roots spread down into the biological substrate. That was the Id. Yet they branched high into the Super-Ego; a mixture of social expectation and want which formed the vision of the self. And right in the middle, that great trunk of the Ego was tortured by the love and the hate of both. Always miserably in-between the animal and the angel.

Ultimately, I was almost disappointed. There were no strange quantum structures that I could find, nor was the design insufficient to account for my whole lived experience. I was the product of this chorus of arguing voices and drives, bound loosely together by nothing more than the organizing force of belief. And when I spoke, it was like a hypothetical fielded among a crowd of alien machines.

What would a Creep think here? it asked. And out pops a guess.

On and on I went, pretending as I must.

"Oh well," I shrugged. In the privacy of my own mind, I decided that I wouldn't make much of this knowledge. I wouldn't mention it to Hickory or Walter. Those programs in my brain... I didn't want it to change them.

Deep down, I had always known. It was endemic to who I was that I accepted the death of the self. But regardless, I was ready now to create a soul. It would take days to process the complexity, but my heart was set on the task.

I wanted them loyal, but even I couldn't make them automata. It was simply a contradiction, no matter if I had wanted to.

Despite what I had learned about consciousness, they would not lack a kind of free will. They would be unique and selfish agents, and there was a meaningful distinction between those behaviors which emerged from within them and those which were the product of coercion. So it would be.

Cell by cell, I gathered my creation together from the greater well of flesh. Refusing to go with a bipedal design, copying mankind, I envisioned something wholly different.

They would not be infinitely mutating like me and Dawn. These would be my foot soldiers and so their forms would be singular. But I would not bind them with rigid skeletal structures. I wanted them boneless.

Therefore, they appeared as a translucent, muscular cephalopod, covered in small eyes and brimming with veins of light. Like a mixture of Kraken and deep-sea jellyfish. Those things which had lit up the dark after my very first death. Inhabitants of the most beautiful abyss.

At last, when the design was complete, I deposited the first lone male on the surface of the world. They were lain in the green, mossy fields there, among the eyes and the spires of chitinous bio-rockets; among all the other fauna which I had already made. At home in a complete ecology.

His nervous system sputtered to life and I could see in real-time as he became aware. This was no copy of another. His mind was built from the ground up.

His first words were spoken not through sound, but light. "Hello?"

He was a social creature, as designed. Thus, his first instinct was to look for others to assuage his confusion. This was a role I was happy to fill. It was my job as his father to guide him.

"You're awake," I signaled. My words carried through pockets of lights that I had placed around him. Slowly, I gave him my sincerest welcome. "This is your home, little one. I created you to live here and come to understand yourself. Your name is Sol."

"Sol?" he asked. "What is that?"

In all cultures throughout time, names began as a way to liken a person to a thing. They were a spiritual notion. "You see that light up there? It is full of energy and fire and everything that it shines on grows strong and healthy. That's the way you are. Full and giving of life."

He seemed to stop and ponder that for a while. Making sure to keep him separate from the humans for now, I did, however, connect his terrarium to a section of the underground. I invited him to go and explore. This cage was only temporary. Eventually, he would be welcome to leave the garden. And nothing within it was forbidden to him. Though, he would quickly learn that some of it tasted like shit.

I had no intention of making that same old classic mistake. Sol would be introduced to the idea of right and wrong rather promptly. Innocence, I knew, was not to be held on to forever.

One day, he would have to lead armies.