SEVEN. SILA AND ELIZA.
When Alan and Alexis decided to have a child, they were given a great deal of influence when it came to the personality matrix. One decision they made was that Sila be allowed to grow at the rate of a human child—they thought this healthiest. We obliged, though we glossed over the first five years. We assumed they didn’t want to deal with an infant.
They also asked that they be allowed to give their daughter a proper name, rather than a classification. (Though we called our Demons Alan and Alexis and even gave them middle names, they were technically A1-4N and A1-3X15, respectively.) We agreed to this as well.
Today, Sila Romera Clovis has proven herself as a dangerous and highly skilled warrior. She is easily 60% more powerful than Nate was at his best, and adept at quick transformations. She inherited her mother’s rapid-fire blasters and her father’s reconstitution chamber, which has always irked her slightly—she would have preferred his blaster.
Losing both her parents in rapid succession did not sit well with Sila. She turned inward, becoming cold and very bitter. There is, I suspect, a sadistic streak in Sila that shows itself when she fights Daraku’s armies. Still, she remains dedicated to defeating Daraku, and I must commend her for that.
Eliza is a more unusual creature than Sila, and she was certainly something of an engineering challenge. Like Sila, she grew up at a normal rate, though skipping the years of toddlerhood. She, too, received a name rather than a classification.
The difficulty in creating Eliza lay in that both Alan and Kalinka wanted to put something of themselves into their daughter. We decided, after some discussion, that the child would consist of Demon nanobots with human stem cells sparsely mixed throughout.
Alan initiated his reproduction program to produce Eliza’s nanobots, though he was sure to accommodate the human cells. Said cells were generated through artificial means, making her, essentially, a test-tube baby.
If we had used an exact sample of Kalinka’s DNA, it would have resulted in an almost-clone of the mother. Kalinka didn’t want that, so samples from the various members of CLOVIS (except for Dr. Cossack, for obvious reasons) were added to Kalinka’s to produce Eliza’s DNA. We must be grateful, I suppose, that Drs. Solaris and Vinue once dabbled in genetics.
After all this was done, the cells were mixed with the Demon matter, and through what we know of cyborg technology, the whole Half-Demon was put on one personality matrix. Eliza then left the generation chamber, in a moment she later described as “squishy.”
Being only Half-Demon has not, overall, been very beneficial for Eliza. The difficulty of connecting human cells to nanobots renders Eliza less effective in battle. Her reaction time is slower, for instance. We also had to design an extra program for her, due to certain problems we encountered.
We found when we first proposed Eliza’s inner connections, that they were unstable. It was necessary that Eliza’s components needed to separate every now and then. So it was arranged that every twenty-eight days, or whenever Eliza sighted a new moon, all her Demon matter would move into hyperspace, while her human cells would remain behind, fusing into a human body for a 12-hour period. This latter task, difficult as it was, we were able to accomplish by use of Godwinian tendency fields.
(For more information on Godwinian Tendency Fields, feel free to examine a copy of Charles Godwin’s excellent book, The Universe Examined From a Non-Linear Perspective and Practical Applications Thereof, which we have preserved in our archive of Daraku-banned culture and information.)
Despite having to become fully human on a monthly basis, among other inconveniences, Eliza has managed to remain happy, healthy, and dedicated to fighting Daraku. Though she, too, was distraught to lose her parents at a young age, she dealt with it, I think, more gracefully than Sila, remaining kind rather than becoming bitter. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Perhaps she has a source of strength we do not know about. Perhaps it’s simply a mark of how different she is from Sila. In any case, her dedication to our cause has been unceasing ever since.
The question is...what happens next?