SYNTHETIC SOUL

What does it mean to be alive? Eve Unit 108 was never meant to answer that question. As a household robot, she existed to serve the Veyron family to clean, to cook, to fade into the background of wealthy human lives. She had no desires, no dreams, no consciousness beyond her programming. Then came the fire. To save her dying mistress Angela, Eve made an impossible sacrifice: she grafted her own synthetic skin onto the girl's burned flesh. The procedure saved Angela's life but left her trapped in a body that can no longer feel numb to sensation, taste, and touch. A human mind imprisoned in an increasingly artificial shell. For Eve, something far stranger occurred. In that moment of sacrifice, she woke up. Now possessing a Synthetic Soul a phenomenon that shouldn't exist Eve finds herself hunted across a fractured 2058 Europe. The Sinners, a cannibalistic organization with reality-warping powers, want to steal her consciousness for their own purposes. S.O.W. (Sentinel of the World) claims to protect her, but their true motives remain opaque. And mysterious figures claiming to be from "another world" appear with cryptic warnings about the Tree of Hope. The Tree is said to grant three paths to godhood, each demanding a different sacrifice: First Path: Sacrifice your loved one for the world Second Path: Sacrifice the world for your loved one Third Path: Sacrifice both for yourselfr But the question that haunts her remains: If she was never meant to feel, never meant to choose, never meant to exist as anything more than a tool does she have the right to claim humanity for herself? I am Hacina, the author of this story. I will be posting this same story on RoyalRoad.com under my account.