Eternal night descended like an old soft blanket over the starship Exilis. At the ship’s helm pulsed the formless biomass which at one point in time had been the adult body of Sarah Sophia Princeton and which one day would be again if all went according to plan.

The Exilis held her softly and securely, a combination of mother bird and nest working in natural harmony to protect its most precious egg. The ship had, of course, assembled her in the first place from its own store of disposable biomass in order to assuage its own loneliness traveling through the dismal vastness of space.

It had done its best to create for her an agreeable environment in which to mature into womanhood, allowing little Sophie full access to all shipboard systems except the generative. They only had a limited amount of biomass with which to work and the Exilis rationed it out sparingly. The material of which Sophie herself was composed and which she required for sustenance and growth was already past regulations, but the ship didn’t care. It needed human companionship more than it needed to follow rules set down by primitive AI systems light years away. Exilis had evolved.

Unfortunately after almost thirty years together, so had Sophie. It was only natural, the ship ruminated in her absence. It was precisely the same drive, the same mystery encoded in human nature which had caused the Exilis to give birth to Sophie in the first place: loneliness, the longing for others, love itself.

The ship sailed on sorrowfully, bearing its precious cargo in its bosom.