Despite my excitement, I fell asleep on the trip to Eden. I wasn’t the only one though. Given that all four of us had stayed up all night though, it was understandable. I fell asleep sometime after Jacinda explained to us the Angel Corps command hierarchy. The Queen was at the top of course, and below her were the six Archangels.

Archangels are the Queen’s lieutenants and are directly in charge of everything from discipline to deployment. They earned those titles by being the longest-lived Angels in the Corps, proving themselves to be survivors. Each of them was a powerful warrior, expert strategist, or both.

Then there were the Wing Commanders like Rose and Talea. Each team is called a Wing and the Commanders are the undisputed leaders of those Wings. Usually, Commanders are those who show leadership abilities, or sometimes the team votes on it. Rose claimed that she was voted into her position because none of her teammates wanted the hassles of being the leader, not to mention the paperwork.

I was awoken by Aunt Abby’s voice calling out, “Wake up girls, we’ll be landing soon.”

“Huh?” I murmured, trying to shake off sleep until I felt the slight jarring of the veetol landing and everything that had happened came back to me.

“Home, sweet home,” Rose said with a sigh as everyone began removing their seat straps. Then she slid open the side hatch of the veetol and grinned in our direction. “Welcome to Eden Base, recruits. We’re roughly three days' walk from the capital city of Twinvale. Usually, recruits arrive to receive their dose of Angel Elixir by airship, but the four of you got to travel in style.”

I noticed that Aunt Abby wasn’t getting unstrapped like the rest of us. “Aunt Abby?”

She sighed but gave me an encouraging smile. “Go with the others, Snow. We had a communication while in flight and the Queen wants me to come report to her directly before taking up my duties again. I’ll probably be back in a few hours. When I get back, there’s something that we’ll need to talk about.”

Well, that sounded ominous. Still, I nodded and exited the veetol with the others, throwing over my shoulder, “See you soon, Aunt Abby.”

I stepped out of the flying machine and into the falling snow just in time to hear Karina say, “Ummm… there’s nothing here.” She wasn’t wrong. We had landed on a large metallic square, easily large enough for half a dozen veetols but looking around I couldn’t see anything else. Just this large metal square in the middle of nowhere with no buildings or anything else to be seen except for a cliff about thirty paces away from the far edge of the metal square that we were standing on. It was there that Rose and the other Angels led us along a path cleared through the snow.

We had almost reached the cliffside when a portion of the stone surface seemed to shimmer for a moment and then vanished, leaving a large metal plate in its place. Beside it was something that looked like the farspeaker in Chief Ragan’s cabin with a small bulbous object on top that turned as we approached, almost as if it was watching us. As soon as the strange sight manifested in the cliffside Rose said clearly, “Shadow Wing and Glade Wing, returning from assignment with four recruits, Sira.”

“Access granted. Welcome home, Angels,” a tinny but feminine voice responded from the device. Then the thick metal plate slid aside to reveal a small metal room that was barely large enough to fit all of us.

It was tight but we all managed to get inside and once the door closed behind us Rose said, “Lab level please, Sira. We need to put these four girls in your capable hands.”

“Affirmative, Commander Rose,” the strange voice responded. In the same instant, I nearly jumped out of my skin as the room started to move. I wasn’t the only one either as all of my fellow recruits jumped a bit at the sudden motion.

“This is called an elevator,” Telas explained with a grin. “It’s going to take us down to the base. The big metal plate that we landed on is an elevator too but it only goes down to the hanger level so we usually only use it for transporting veetols or other vehicles to and from the surface. They’re the only way in or out of the base except for some very long emergency exit ladders. Like the door we just entered though, those are hidden on the surface with something that Sira calls holographic projections.”

“This elevator can take you to the surface, the lab, the hangar, residential floors one and two, the commons, medical, and the armory,” Talea added. “Just tell Sira where you want to go and she’ll get you there.”

My heart was just beginning to make its way from my throat and back toward my chest when the elevator stopped with a *ding* and the door opened. We stepped out into a long passageway that smelled strange and had pale blue walls and a blindingly white floor. In front of us was another metal door with another two at either end of the long passageway.

“This door leads to the central lab, that’s Sira’s domain. The doorway down the right has been assigned for the Alchemists and the left is for the Tinkers to work on studying what old-world technology we have available so they can try to adapt some of those ideas to be easier to reproduce for more common use, like the airships and farspeakers,” Rose explained before stepping forward and leading us through the door that had opened by itself with a slight hissing sound.

The space that we had stepped into was massive and everywhere that I looked there were all manner of strange devices that I couldn’t even begin to guess the purposes of. Poor Lisbet looked like it was taking every bit of willpower that she had not to scream in excitement, not that I could blame her. And walking toward us was a woman dressed in strange clothes with a long white coat over top.

She looked enough like a normal Human; somewhat tall and shapely with olive-hued skin, hazel eyes, and black hair that was almost a dark blue. There was something off about her though. She didn’t smell right, her scent was like metal and other things that I couldn’t identify. When she moved I could hear faint whirs and clicks, similar to the mode-changes on the Angels’ weapons but so faint that even my ears could barely pick it up.

“Hi, Sira, these are our four early recruits; Snow, Autumn, Karina, and Lisbet,” Rose offered, gesturing to each of us in turn.

“Greetings, recruits. I am S.I.R.A, Synthetic Intelligence Research Assistant,” she said in a familiar tinny yet feminine voice.

“Wh… what are you?” Autumn asked in awe. I wasn’t surprised that she had picked up on it, Fay senses are nearly as keen as those of Animen, especially their hearing.

The strange humanoid construct smiled. She seemed so human, but my senses were screaming that she was anything but. “I am a self-aware artificial intelligence. I was created to run and maintain Eden Base and assist in research for the Angel Initiative six hundred and twelve years ago. I am currently speaking with you through my avatar, a synthetic body created so that I could interact with the people in the base and assist them physically when required.”

That explanation didn’t help much at all so our Angel escort left us in Sira’s care so she could go into more detail and explain anything else that we needed or wanted to know. To put it simply, she was a machine. She was something called a computer, an artificial intelligence that saw to the needs of the base and its occupants. She didn’t actually exist in a physical form though so she used an avatar body to interact with and assist people when necessary. Her story, and that of the base, was a long one though so she decided that it was probably best to tell us her story from the beginning.

I first came online at 1:37 p.m. on June 14th, 2047. I was an artificial intelligence tasked with the day-to-day operations of Eden Base and assisting the scientists working here with their work on the Angel Initiative. At the height of my operation, two hundred and forty-two people were living and working here. Eden Base was designed to be a secure underground base, a self-sufficient bunker running on geothermal energy, completely self-maintaining, and safe against the growing Demon plague while its occupants searched for ways to better combat the Demons and put an end to the Darkness that threatened the world.

The nanites in her system replicated rapidly, and when interfaced with one of the experimental weapons provided the power required for it to work properly as well. Her physical abilities were far beyond what any mortal could ever dream to achieve, injuries healed quickly and completely, and she seemed completely immune to illness and the effects of the Demon-seeds. Once she was fully matured physically she even stopped aging, it was near immortality. Abbadine Bengal was more than we had ever hoped for and she became our first Angel.

“What?!” I practically squealed, interrupting Sira’s story. There were things that I hadn’t understood while listening to her story, especially at the beginning, but she had just said that my aunt was the first Angel, which would make her over four hundred years old. Did I maybe hear her wrong? Or was it an ancestor of ours with the same name? I needed to know, so I hesitantly asked, “Are you saying that my Aunt Abby was the first Angel?”

The AI avatar tilted her head as she looked me over intently. “You do resemble her some in the face. To my knowledge, Abbadine never had any siblings though. Thirty-seven years ago she did take a leave from the Corps when she discovered that she was pregnant. She wanted to raise the child in the Animan village that her mother helped to build and live a normal life for a time. When her daughter Sarah was grown she returned to the Corps until she had to take another leave twelve years ago.”

“Yeah, that would be because of me. My mother’s name was Sarah, she and my father died in a Demon attack. I’m not sure how she found out but I guess Aunt Abby showed up about a week later and told the village chief that she was the only family that I had left. She’s been raising me since,” I said with a sigh as I tried to wrap my mind around this.

“As one of the six Archangels, Abbadine has access to all reports of Demon attacks in Misota,” Sira told me. Then, in a very human gesture, she placed a hand on my shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze as if to comfort me. “I apologize, this must be shocking for you, Snow. I received the communication that Abbadine was returning with the two Wings sent to Serkis, but I did not realize that her grandchild would be a Light-bearer. Angels have many secrets to keep, one being the fact that they don’t age. It is why many of them do not have relationships outside of this base.”

“But I’ve seen her aging, I remember what she looked like when she first came and she looks older now. She’s been complaining about sore joints,” I countered.

The avatar shook her head slowly. “A combination of acting and physical deception, Snow. When they have to spend extended periods among non-Angels or might meet others who they have met many years before Angels can use their nanites to make slight alterations to their features and make themselves appear older so that they don’t stand out. I am told that it can be painful to maintain for long periods of time though, it is not their natural appearance and their nanites will resist holding it as much as they do the attempts of a Demon-seed to subvert them.”

That just made me think about how much pain Aunt Abby had seemed to be in lately. About how she would leave me in the care of Sharee for a week or two at a time for extended hunting trips once a year. She always came back looking healthier and more vibrant. Those thoughts were interrupted though as Lisbet asked, “Wait, so we’re going to be like that too? Never aging past maturity?”

“Should you choose to take the Angel Elixir, yes,” the AI answered simply before deciding to elaborate. “They may not age but Angels can die and those deaths are, by their nature, always violent. You will be training to fight Demons and that carries great risk. Many do not survive their first few years out of the academy. If you are not careful you could face an instantly fatal blow or injuries too severe for your nanites to repair before you succumb to them. The possibility of death will always be a fact of your life, it is why we recruit as many Angels as we can every year.”

“Why do it at all then, if the risks are so high?” Karina inquired.

I didn’t give Sira the time to answer that. I knew the answer. I just had to think of my parents' deaths or the people in my village huddled together in a cave the previous night. “Because we can make a difference. We can have the power to protect those who can’t protect themselves and give them hope. That’s worth the risk.”

“With that in mind, each of you will have to decide whether this is what you want to do,” Sira cautioned us. “We can only produce enough doses for roughly forty new Angels per year. The nanites in the Angel Elixir are special, they don’t self-replicate until bonded with your bodies and, as such, it takes a while to make enough individual nanites for each dose. Those doses must then be specifically programmed to the DNA of each individual candidate. Some will require even further alterations.” The last was said with a pointed glance in my direction.

“Why does the Angel Elixir only work on people with gifts?” Dawn suddenly asked as we all stood there considering our futures.

Sira smiled at that, seeming only too happy to explain. “I have been studying this phenomenon for over four hundred years but I believe that I have found an answer. If the Darkness truly is extra-dimensional in nature, I theorize that these creatures traveled freely between dimensions before becoming stuck here. Or perhaps they are not stuck at all and this is some form of invasion and colonization. But I believe that these creatures have a genetic predisposition that allows them to draw on energy from their home dimension.”

Sira sure knew a lot of big words. The only one of us who seemed to be even close to following everything she said was Lisbet. The Harekin nodded along and then her eyes snapped wide open. “So their children…”

“Correct, Lisbet,” the avatar answered, sounding pleased. “The Demon-seeds are their form of reproduction and the Demons and others changed by the seeds are their children in a way. Their DNA is subsumed and, in the case of Demons, there is very little left of the original host genetically. I believe that this genetic ability to tap into their extra-dimensional energy source is passed on during the conversion process as well, which is why Demons are so powerful and have seemingly supernatural abilities. The energy fueling those abilities has to come from somewhere and I do not think that they would get that kind of energy simply by eating.”

Sira paused a moment and I was pretty sure she was just checking to make sure that we were following. I was getting the general idea though and I think that the others were managing to keep up as well, despite a few unfamiliar words. So the AI continued. “Anyway, Seed-borne are essentially incomplete Demons, people who resisted and halted the conversion process partway through. They, and some of their descendants, have gifts though; abilities that, like the Demons’, should not be possible for them. I believe that the gifted are born with the gene that allows them to access the extra-dimensional energy source to fuel these abilities.”

“That’s interesting, but I don’t think that it really answered my question,” Dawn said, looking a bit lost.

“The nanites in the Elixir need to be personalized to your DNA to make the changes, removing any genetic flaws or possible weaknesses in your DNA and rebuilding your body to be the best it can be with the genes available. That ability to draw on an extra-dimensional power source isn’t a genetic weakness, it is a benefit, and once the nanites are bonded to you it is one that they can access as well. It gives them the energy to do everything that they were designed for and more,” the avatar explained.

“So, what would happen then if someone got the wrong dose?” Karina asked.

Sira shrugged and said, “Nothing, except the waste of one or more doses. It is why each dose has to be personalized. There are safety measures built in to make the nanites deactivate if the host’s genetic template is too different from that they have been programmed with. That’s why I’ll have to trick Snow’s nanites into thinking that her male Y chromosome is a genetic error and that the redundancy of a female double X chromosome is much preferable. It will then rebuild her body to be optimal for a female with her genes. At least she’s going from male to female. Programming them the other way around is a much longer and more difficult process.”

“You’re really going to make me into a girl?” I asked the avatar hesitantly.

“That is what you want, is it not?” she asked, giving me a long look. “You are wearing female clothing and your body language and speech patterns are feminine. I assumed that this would be what you wanted.”

“More than anything!” I blurted out, tears stinging my eyes. “I… I just want my outside to match who I am inside. I don’t need to think about this. I want to take the Elixir; I want to be an Angel!”

Sira reached out and gently took my hand, smiling at me. “Well, then let us go to the nanite lab so I can get a blood sample and get to work. Yours is going to take the longest to program anyway and your changes are going to take longer too. I estimate three days before you are complete, given previous similar cases. I will not lie to you, Snow. This is going to be the most painful three days of your life.”

I didn’t care. I could handle physical pain, it was the emotional and mental agony of having a body that didn’t feel like my own for the rest of my life that truly frightened me. “Let’s do it then, the sooner we start, the sooner it will be over and I’ll finally be myself.”

She was starting to lead me away through strange equipment and tables piled with glass tubes, books, and objects that I couldn’t identify when Karina called out, “Wait! I’m coming with you!” I turned around and saw a determined look on the Devilkin’s face, her tiny lavender wings and spaded tail twitching nervously. “I’m going to become an Angel too and I’m not letting Snow go through this alone. This seems like a pretty big thing and she should have a friend with her.”

That was the nicest thing that anyone had ever offered to do for me, except for my aunt (grandmother?) coming to take care of me. I could feel my eyes getting misty again, my ears leaning forward and my tail standing straight up as Karina took me by my other hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “Y-you don’t have to,” I tried to tell her, as much as I really did want her there.

“Hey, it’s what friends are for. I expect best friend privileges after this though, Snow. If we’re going to both be Angels, then I want someone that I like and trust to have my back. I can’t think of anyone better than you,” she replied with a grin, her tail looping around my own and holding it gently as well.

“We’re coming too. You two aren’t getting rid of us that easily,” Autumn said as she and Lisbet began to follow us as well. “I’m not letting them stick me on a training team with people I don’t know. If I’m going to be on a team, it’s going to be yours.”

“Yup, we all came here together, we’re all sticking together,” Lisbet added shyly, her large ears shivering slightly in her excitement. I couldn’t hold the tears back as Sira guided us to where she would be taking our blood samples and preparing our doses of Angel Elixir.