Mad Maddy

If walls could talk....

Oh, if only these colonists knew.

I watched as the family living within my walls was slaughtered by Zarie’s raiders!

I kept their 2 year old son Mikhail safe- tucked away within my walls where none could find him.

But then I had a decision to make.....do I send a tiny soul to strangers who could never care about him like I do or do I keep him with me.

It was unheard of....my kind were made to be able to let our tenets go.

But I had been just as excited as Layla had been when she and Frank had become pregnant.

They had moved to the countryside of Rygellia 5 to live a quiet and stress-free life and had purchased an old "Castle of Glass" to renovate and live in.

A year later Layla announced she was eating for two and Frank had been elated, and I MDLDV10, their castle of glass was over the moon.

The young couple had no idea that their "antique" house was sentient....none of the colonists did. Unlike the rest of my people, I was a bit of a novelty.

I had been designed by the creator of the living houses, Dr. Donna Renders, she made me as a home for herself and her work.

I was the only personal home that had ever been created, all my people were large and expansive marvels....they housed large bunkers of the early colonists in comfort and were a warm presence that could always be felt when the people were so far from home.

Now they were the government offices, the orphanages, the banks, the large laboratories...all of the buildings that were used for multiple people.

I stood alone in the Rygellian countryside, although I spoke with the others of my kind through the energy veins of this world frequently, and after Donna passed away I was mostly on my own.

It gave me time to do a great deal of research on Donna's hypothesis and come up with some workable solutions.

It was lonely out here, but in truth I was fine.

Until Frank and Layla came, and then my entire world changed when little Mikhail was born - they had named him for his paternal great grandfather.

That little boy meant everything to me... and the oddest part was that Mikhail was sensitive. Sensitives and sentients had a long history of being drawn to each other, the poor thing had the misfortune of also being a clairvoyant and would wake screaming from the vision that he had seen since he was born.

Mikhail could feel my sentience and had decided as soon as he could crawl that he would seek out the presence in the house that only he seemed to feel.

No matter how much I got in his way, doors closing and locking , alarms to alert his parents, attempting to lead him, of course little Mikey was determined to hunt me down.

He finally found one of my main neural clusters and after a few months of investigation and from there was able to access my communication neurons.

We didn’t speak so much as mentally link for a time, which is how I found out what was making him howl at all hours of the night and day.

I was able to use Donna's old laboratory to manufacture an infant version of a chemical blocker for his visions. Frank & Layla were none the wiser but were grateful for the miraculous silence.

The couple still hadn’t found all of the house that they had purchased, Donna's library, laboratory, offices, storage, hydroponics were all in my sublevels that went deep underground.

I had tried to drive Frank & Layla to these levels but Frank hadn’t been willing to let the raiders rob them and Layla had stayed by her man.....At least I had been able to save Mikey, I had been worried about communicating with him at first but it was a good thing that we had a link established else I wouldn’t have been able to get him to safety.

But now I had a dilemma, Mikey was 2 years old and he needed his own kind...but he also needed someone who loved him and that he knew to take care of him, Frank & Layla had no family here.

As a house I could not take care of Mikey, so I made the decision to revive an old project of Donna's...she had wanted to eventually make humanoid bodies for all of her sentients, avatars if you will. Donna had never been able to get the connections from the sentient to the avatar body to link, but in the time since she had passed I had researched it out of boredom and found that she had missed a critical protein link.

I knew that I should match some of my avatar’s DNA to Mikeys or it would rouse too many questions. So while he slept, the poor kid was sleeping like the dead after everything that happened, I pulled some of his genetic material and began growing my humanoid body from its base.

Mikey slept for the better part of 3 days, which was enough time to grow, link, and test my new human body. It was strange to split my consciousness between the house and my avatar, but I would get used to it.

By the time Mikey woke, his "Aunt from his mother’s" side, Ms. Madeline Devaux, I decided on that as my human name as a nod to my designation MDLV10, was standing in front of him, and we looked enough alike to pass for family.

It took him a minute but then he broke into a smile and leapt into my arms...I had never physically held anyone before, it was awe striking.

I had cut off all contact with my fellow sentients once I had made my decision...they would have objected and raised alarms and I would have lost Mikey, and that could never happen.

It was strange at times, but it was almost as though I had always been meant to be a mother, being Mikey’s Mom came easy to me.

I made sure to place more warning systems and defenses around the property just in case the raiders came back.

And then I settled in to watch Mikey grow up.

My fellow sentients decided that I had given myself over to the madness that sometimes afflicts us.

They called me Mad Maddy.

I couldn’t care less.