"We knew that no matter what happened, Mother and Father would always keep us safe..."
The androids' ship skids to a precarious stop, teetering at the edge of an abysmal chasm. Father greets Mother and his programming tells him that her well-being is a priority for him. Likewise, his will be hers. When they exit the ship Mother slips very lightly, catching herself in the nick of time, staring into oblivion below. The androids have a problem.
They start their trek into the dry new world with a dry old joke involving a back-handed compliment and Mother says she feels optimistic. Father picks up a piece of dead wood, noting some plant material not thriving inside it.
After setting up their self-expanding dwelling, they "initiate" Trimester One by hooking up six humanoid embryos to Mother via lines leading from her abdomen to embryo vats. She gives the command to Activate. Nine months later comes the Disconnect and Father pauses with a hammer at the apex of a swing when he's compelled by a programming cue to attend to the situation in the dwelling. The androids harvest five silent, inactive, and underweight infants from boxes. When they remove the sixth infant, they see that he's not breathing, so Father says they'll have to "break it down; feed him to the others" as their programming dictates. The infant is like any other material thing, so it only stands to reason that dismemberment and compulsory cannibalism will be practically a necessity, scarcely. Mother insists on holding the infant briefly (before "it" starts to rot). She has a touching connection with him; holding him to her I/O port/breast, humming tearfully and shaking her head rhythmically as bulging veins throb in her forehead and Father becomes confused. The infant starts to come around and Father's confusion gives way to another programming directive that they'll name the youngest of Generation One after their creator - Campion. Mother seems as though she may now be experiencing very much happiness and she says that it's a "strong" name and he seems deserving of it. The Creator apparently endowed Mother with something he perceived to be a necessity in abundance.
A few years later, the kids all sit around like potted plants in latex body suits, comically being fed benign-looking gruel by Father as Mother charmingly weaves textiles. Campion narrates that it was hard for the androids to keep the children alive, but at least they never complained or lost their temper (and apparently the bad stuff wasn't their fault). The androids appear to be quite strong as they pull massive serpentine dinosaur bones from the ground and raise them high. They show the colossal obscurities to the kids for entertainment.
One of the little girls, Tally wanders off one day and falls down one of the deep holes in the ground (not exactly never to be seen again). Mother responds abundantly; picking up Tally's straw voodoo dolly and encircling her head in the air with it, howling like an animal at the chasm.
Campion narrates that he's learned "this world isn't like Mother and Father. It doesn't care if we're happy, and it doesn't get sad when we die". Likewise, Mother and Father are not like the world, but at least they care. Sadly, the remaining children are progressively developing a characteristic illness and dying, and Campion says he still believes in Mother and Father. As he and the last of his departing box-baby siblings sit by the fireside with Mother, she conveys a lesson with half clear-eyed absolutism that the new civilization the children are seeding will be built on humanity's belief in itself (and they'd better believe her about that). She says the reason science hasn't helped the dying children is because "we have more to learn". When Spiria coughs Mother shushes her, cares for a moment, and then compels her to list the (probably infinite) ways in which the number five relates to all manifestations of life. When Spiria later succumbs to the illness she's the fifth child to die, leaving Campion alone to continue the new civilization.
They dig a hole for the girl's body and the she-bot appears to be overloaded.
Later on, Mother needs Campion's compliance in focusing on task-oriented behaviors, so she 'comforts' him in his grieving by fooling him into thinking he's seeing Spiria again; summoning the dead child like a virtual apparition by mimicking her voice and executing a brute force hack into Campion's eyes and mind via virtual retinal display. She uses the spirit of Spiria to manipulate Campion not in the spirit of Spiria. Well, "just like" love will do.
When Father sees that the interesting Mithraic arc has arrived, he decides to try to contact them and instructs Campion he may have to deceive the Mithraic to fit in. Father implies that Campion will be a good liar and then artfully lies to Campion about the likelihood that the Mithraic would administer repairs to the androids and happily keep the 'family' together. He needs Campion's compliance with the plan. He happily suggests that they lie to Mother by not telling her they're making contact; they should tell her when it's too late for her to stop them and it's OK that Father is going down one of the pits to get to their ditched spaceship because there aren't really any serpents in the pits and the androids lied to the children for security reasons.
Mother has a schizo-levitation regression back to her former unwholesome Necromancer identity via a bug involving her memory files (she's light as a feather, stiff as a motherboard). When she awakens, a critical systems check doesn't happen and she loses her temper with Campion when he lies badly about where he was all day. She then savagely decommissions Father during a spat regarding the pending arrival of the Mithraic; impaling him on a serpent fang and cramming her hand into his chest to rip out his CPU/heart. She lies abundantly to Campion about Father's untimely demise, and later as she sleeps Campion listens at her chest for a heartbeat; it's not there.
Campion makes a distress call from the spaceship, and it tumbles into oblivion in a downward spiral of staggering destruction when he unsuspectingly touches the fascinating controller orb with his hand. He barely makes it out alive. Mother meanwhile digs in the dirt like a rabid animal; panting and growling like a dog and pulling up serpent bones with white fluid dribbling from her mouth for no worthwhile purpose. She becomes useless to humanity. She won't budge and Campion lies down helpless beside her overused body as a cold spell moves in.
A Mithraic lander team arrives and spends the night despite Mother's politish attempts to dissuade them from staying. The Mithraic debate the possibility that Campion may be the special, special, poor little blessed and woeful orphan boy of one of their many, many intriguing mystery prophesies, and they ultimately conclude they can't leave him there because for all they know she may have killed the others.
The commander of the Mithraic team tries to lure Campion up to the ark without Mother, enticing him with talk of other kids his age and animals. When Mother intervenes, she's beaten vigorously and kicked into the fire by the Mithraic he-bot. He throws her around and pounds her with relentless hateful gusto, stomping on her face as hard as he can. But that's OK because she's just a she-bot and so he can just be vile without fear, for his security. It's even OKer when it turns out she's an entirely different and unwholesome identity; proficient at frying men with the scathing sound of her voice.
The commander runs to the lander to escape but the Necromancer hijacks it, flying it to the ark where she gains entry via virtual retinal display. In the ark, the maltreated she-bot screams everyone to bloody bits on the way to the bridge where she makes a brute force entry by freezing a spot on the door with her icy breath and punching through. She commandeers the ark by killing most of the bridge crew and hurting a man badly for a retinal scan, and sets a collision course with the planet. She seems to come clean then, as the bloodbath of the immediate past is whitewashed by interesting light and she pleasantly visits the serene playschool to pleasantly select a few hostages not to kill in the immediate future.
As Campion sets about burying the mutilated bodies of the first humans Mother savaged (in his lifetime), the elegant and insubstantial-seeming ship drifts down serenely overhead; loaded with men and women and children and animals condemned to an infernal death in a terrorist massacre. There's an interesting light show as it crashes distantly in a nearby valley, and Mother pleasantly arrives in a lander with fresh playmates for her precious, precious Campion.
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