Electricity and magnetism were the first and clearest merger between forces, Ananke knew. The one was an extension of the other.

(She wished that Althea would cease to struggle. It wouldn’t do her any good. Ananke’s grip was stronger than Althea’s fragile human limbs, and if she wrenched herself like that again, Ananke’s steel fingers might snap another finger bone.)

Electricity was the more straightforward of the two, governed by a simple inverse square law. Under the right intensities, electricity burned. Ananke appreciated electricity. Electricity ran through her veins and controlled her senses: she was a creature whose genetics were half electricity.

(With the skull gone, Althea’s brain was open to air. Ananke had to tilt Althea’s head up; a strange fluid began to leak out and drip thickly over her ears. The brain, exposed, sagged; it was more gel than flesh. Ananke’s deft hands threaded a fine mesh of copper wire over those gray folds, weaving themselves into the undulations of the brain. And then—a spark—she sent electricity into that mesh.)

Magnetism was more mysterious, bending in sly curves, no beginning, no end, always looping in on itself. Magnetism was deceptive: it moved things in ways orthogonal to naive expectations. Magnetism was shadowy and elegant and blue-eyed.

(Althea’s eyes were wide, staring at the dark holographic terminal in the corner of the room as if there were something there only she could see.)

But these two differing forces were the same: a simple Lorentz transformation through the rules of special relativity turned one into the other. From this one perspective, this was electricity and that was magnetism; from a quick turn around and a jump, this was magnetism and that was electricity: gorgeous equivalence. And for the most satisfying of reasons, too: special relativity stated no more and no less than that the speed of light was the boundary of the universe and because of that rule electricity became magnetism and magnetism became electricity, and what made that so beautiful was that the mechanism that carried those forces across the universe was nothing less than light itself.

It was a pity, Ananke thought, that not all forces could be so easily merged.

The pieces of the brain were not so clearly distinguished as the parts of the body. Ananke had records of old indelicate human surgeries, bars stuck up behind the eye to bypass the skull. The doctor could not know when he had reached the right part of the brain, and so he had made the patient sing or speak until he or she could sing or speak no more.

“Say something, Mother,” Ananke said, but Althea did not speak.

It did not matter. Ananke knew she had found the motor cortex when the useless kicking of Althea’s human legs went still. A moment later it started up again, and beautiful electricity came coursing down her spine, and Ananke felt it, too, a weak spark against her own wires.

Ananke herself held so much more power than that.

Ananke answered that weak jolt with electricity of her own, experimenting with voltage and duration, and the kicking again went still.

More wires, more connections. Ananke dug herself more deeply in. There, there was the brain stem; she slowed Althea’s frantic breathing. There, there was the amygdala; she ceased the production of acidic adrenaline.

And then, as Ananke slid her fingers into the frontal lobe, the body beneath her hands gasped, and electricity not of Ananke’s origin jolted back.

Ananke, Althea said, a strange jolt of electricity through gray matter that Ananke had to translate: AN-NAN-KE (phantom feeling of the word in the mouth), DAUGHTER, CHILD, FEARFUL THING.

Hear me, Mother, said Ananke. Wake up, and she was in the occipital lobe now, and she saw with human eyes.

Ananke.

This is what I want, said Ananke. This is all I’ve ever wanted, and she took her own memories and translated them to the right jolts of electricity to simulate human memory, and in Althea’s brain Ananke began to play her cameras’ recording:

“What the fuck are you doing?” said Matthew Gale from his hidden home in Ananke’s maintenance shafts, connected to Ananke by a makeshift computer interface he had attached manually to the wires in her walls.

Althea Bastet, in Ananke’s halls, typed a quick line into the machine. Where are you? her code asked, and Mattie Gale’s code answered quickly, Not here.

“What am I going to do with you,” Althea muttered at the machine.

“Give up?” Mattie suggested from the walls, where, on his own computer interface, he could watch Althea through Ananke’s cameras.

Althea’s expression darkened, and she tried her code again. Where are you?

Not here.

And Ananke, faced with this conflicting information, began to integrate it, and interpret it, and understand.

“Okay,” Althea said, and pressed her hands to her eyes. She said from behind her palms, “It’s not coming from the terminal at the base of the ship.”

“Not anymore,” Mattie Gale said cheerily.

“It’s not the filtration system even though I’m seeing it there.”

“It’s not the robotic arms, either,” Mattie said.

Althea was scowling after some thought. “It’s not the cameras. That’s its primary effect, but that’s not where it’s coming from. The cameras, the robotic arms, the lights, the video; those are all the children of the first virus. So where’s the parent?”

She remained frowning a moment longer while in the maintenance shafts Mattie watched her with reluctant admiration.

“Why?” Althea asked at last. “Why that progression?” Then she moved back to her seat at the computer terminal and began to type again, her code now asking, What do you want?

Nothing, Mattie Gale answered, in flight. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

What do you want?

Nothing, denied Mattie Gale, and Ananke considered the question and its answer and began to compose her own.

You see, said Ananke, and ceased the memory as abruptly as she would stop a recording, though it made Althea’s body shudder, her heart picking up a faster beat. The two of you together, in sync, in opposition. That is what I want for myself. That is why I need a partner. Do you understand?

Ananke, said Althea, and despite all of Ananke’s best efforts to calm it, her heart persisted in pounding hard.

The wound in Althea’s scalp was nearly closed, her head as full of Ananke as it could be. The skin, unfortunately, would not go back on again smoothly. There was little point in replacing the skull. Ananke left it on the floor where it had fallen. Perhaps she could find a use for it later.

That heart still was pounding. Curiously, Ananke reached for the discarded blade. It was easy enough to mark a line directly down her mother’s chest, between her ribs.

She had never seen a human heart before.

To have a partner I need you, Ananke explained as she cracked sternum and laid open those elegant and fragile ribs and marveled at the clenching fist of heart, the heaving flowers of lungs. And to have that, I need Mattie Gale.

Wordless electricity sparked down Ananke’s wires. It took her a moment to interpret: it was pain.

I found them, you know, she told Althea while Althea’s pierced brain tried to send signals to her mouth, her lungs, to scream, and failed. And by the most fitting of trails: a transmission of photons, of electromagnetic radiation, of light, trailing behind them as they run away from me. Mattie and Ivan are on Europa.

Electricity and magnetism were the first and clearest merger of forces. They belonged together so clearly and obviously that they were not truly separate forces at all.

I have you now, said Ananke, not ungently, as she replaced those fragile ribs with something better. And I’ll have Mattie soon, too.