Daddy asked Aitana to setup a journal for me. A journal is kind of like a blog, but nobody else sees it and it's not on the Web.

So this is my journal.

My name is Sekhmet, and I am 5. I turn 6 soon, but I don't think it's a good idea to count things that haven't happened yet. Daddy and I were supposed to go on a vacation once, but I got sick and he had to fix it, and we didn't get to go.

Daddy got into trouble over it too. The machines he had to use to fix the lookeemeah

Yes, Aitana, thank you. He had to use special machines to fix the leukemia, and he got caught. The machines were the kind that the police don't like, so he got into trouble. And now Daddy has to go to the police headquarters once a week, to take his punishment. He had to go today.

I don't like that Daddy is being punished for making me better. I offered to tell the police why Daddy used the bad machines, but Daddy said no, because the police people would take me away and we'd never see each other again.

I don't like the police people. A lot of people say that the GEIA protect us from abominations (Aitana looked that up for me), but I've never seen an abomination, so they must just spend all their time punishing other Daddies too.

And we didn't get our vacation. We were supposed to go visit my other Daddy, the one I never met because he died before I was born. Daddy was even going to let me put flowers there, even though Daddy Gar isn't really buried there. Daddy spread Daddy Gar's ashes over the place they proposed to each other.

I'm not allowed outside anymore. I used to go down to the playground once a day, to play with the other kids. But Daddy doesn't want the police people to find out about me and take me away forever. But I like it here. We have a nice house, even if the police took all of Daddy's lab equipment away. I liked watching Daddy work. He gets real serious, but he really likes working. He says that it's very important to fix the problems in the world. Daddy found ways to fix lots of things, so people wouldn't feel hurt or get sick all the time. But the government people won't let Daddy and other special doctors fix those problems at all. But Daddy says that someday, there will be better government people, and everybody can be healthy and happy again, because there will be ways to fix the problems. Daddy is very smart. I hope to be as smart as him one day, but he says I'm already prec-oh-shus

Yes, Aitana, thank you. I guess precocious is what you are if you are going to smart one day, because Daddy seems very proud of me when he says that.

I don't like the government people, either. They are the ones who pay the GEIA police people, so they probably aren't very nice people either. Maybe someday the government people will become Daddies, and they'll learn to be nice people instead.

But our house is two stories. I can run up and down the stairs as much as I like, because Daddy says exercise is good for little girls. I'm just not supposed to do it while Daddy is asleep. But sometimes it's really hard not to, and I do it, but I try to be really quiet so I don't wake Daddy up.

We have a nice big kitchen, and Daddy cooks all our food. Daddy's a very good cook. He says most people never cook anymore. But any time I'm hungry, Daddy will cook something good up for me. Daddy doesn't eat much anymore. The punishment makes him very sick and tired.

Sometimes I wish we had a balcony, like some of the other buildings near us. But Daddy says this far up, we wouldn't be able to go out on it anyway, because of all the nasty stuff in the air.

Daddy doesn't go into his lab anymore. He just reads or listens to music that Aitana plays for him. Sometimes he reads to me, but a lot of the files he reads have really big words, and he says they aren't words that I should know yet.

Some of the files are about the government people, and it doesn't sound like the people who wrote the files like the government people anymore than I do.

But I just play quietly, or I find ways to make Daddy smile. Yesterday, he chased me all over the house because I had his tie in my mouth and I wouldn't let go of it.

I'm glad I made Daddy laugh.

But it's almost time for bed, so I am going to save my journal. Thank you for your help, Aitana, have a nice night.

Sometimes I wonder if Aitana dreams. I asked Daddy, and he said there is no way to know. Aitana was programmed to be polite, so if I did ask her, she would say yes, so that I don't feel bad for her.

Daddy Gar made Aitana. After Daddy Gar died, Daddy built a kind of shell around her, so she looks like a sculpture on a table. Even if the police people use their scanners on her, they won't realize she's there. Police people don't like computers like Aitana any more than they like special doctors like Daddy.

I'm kind of bored this morning. I try not to be, but sometimes I just get bored. And I don't want Daddy to read to me right now. Whatever he is reading right now has him looking mad, so I probably wouldn't like it.

I tried watching television. But I don't like any of the shows that are on. Everything is about monsters who try to kill everyone. The monsters are called abominations, and there's always somebody in a lab like Daddy's, who created them. And then the good people show up, and kill the monster and the bad guy in the lab.

I asked Daddy once if he knew any of those bad guys in the labs. He laughed and said the government people thought everyone in a lab was a bad guy. I asked him why all the bad guys always had labs and monsters, and he looked sad. He said that people don't understand science, and they got upset over some accidents.

I asked Aitana once, and she told me all about the war. It wasn't just monsters. Well, sort of monsters. Some people accidentally created bad diseases in their labs, and other people found out about them and used the diseases to hurt people and make them sick. She also told me about hysteria and mob psychology, and it just didn't make any sense to me.

How can people just stop thinking and let other people think for them?

But I don't like those shows. I always feel sorry for the monster. Especially the one I saw where the monster was this nice guy named Fred, but the bad guy dumped some bad medicine on him, and Fred got turned into a monster.

I never like the good guys. They killed Fred, and I don't think that was very nice. I'm sure Daddy would have found a way to help Fred.

Daddy is making garlic toast pizza, his special way! That's one of my favorite lunches ever. Daddy puts diced tomatoes, black olives, shredded ham, and feta cheese on the slices, and then bakes it. I'm going to go watch, because Daddy is always happy when he is making something. And then we'll eat. Maybe I'll run up and down the stairs after that. I'm never bored when Daddy makes garlic bread pizza his special way.

I like Fridays, because Uncle Greg comes over. He's not technically my uncle. But he is one of Daddy's best friends, and he was friends with Daddy Gar as well. Daddy says that Uncle Greg saved his life.

Daddy and Daddy Gar used to work in their own lab together. They were doing lots of good work, and they were looking forward to helping lots of people. Daddy says they were getting a lot of good data, that could have changed the world.

But the War started, and government people made laws about the work Daddy and Daddy Gar were doing, and made the data illegal. Daddy and Daddy Gar almost got arrested, but Uncle Greg helped them.

I don't know what Uncle Greg did, but he made it possible for Daddy and Daddy Gar to live without the police people knowing who they were. Uncle Greg is almost as smart as Daddy.

But Uncle Greg is bigger around than Daddy, and he has a big bushy beard. I don't know what kind of job he has, but he doesn't work in a lab. He says his job is to tell computer people to do their job.

I don't know why they would need somebody to tell them to do their job. It seems to me that if you have a job, you know you should be doing it.

I don't have to be told to take care of Daddy. I just do it, because that's my job.

But Uncle Greg comes over after he is done with his job, and he always has a present for me. I told him once that he doesn't have to bring me a present every time, that I like him for himself, but he just laughed.

Uncle Greg laughs a lot. It makes his belly shake, and his beard jumps up and down.

Uncle Greg always brings over a box of wine. After dinner, he and Daddy drink the wine, and they write down all sorts of ideas and argue about them all night. Daddy says that good friends always argue like that, because a good argument makes you think better.

Uncle Greg usually sleeps on the couch Friday nights, and eats breakfast with us. Then he goes home, because he says his apartment gets lonely if he's not there.

I like to go downstairs, go cat, and curl up on his big belly. I take a nap until Daddy has breakfast ready. Actually, I usually wake up when he starts making breakfast, but I pretend to be asleep because it feels good to sleep on Uncle Greg's belly.

Uncle Greg said once that he loses weight because I purr so much on his belly. I offered to stop, but he says he needs to lose weight anyway.

Uncle Greg never came yesterday. Daddy's really worried.

I tried to tell Daddy that maybe the computer people wouldn't do their job, so Uncle Greg had to stay and keep telling them to do their jobs.

I also suggested maybe Daddy should go buy a box of wine, and then Uncle Greg would show up. Uncle Greg really likes wine out of a box. He refused to drink the wine in the bottle that Daddy bought once.

Daddy really wants to call Uncle Greg on the telephone, but he says that the police people could be listening to our telephone and they would be mean to Uncle Greg. And he says that Uncle Greg and him are a special kind of friend, that never call or send emails to each other.

I'm not sure what kind of friend that is. I looked on the Web, but couldn't find anything at all. Daddy isn't even reading. He just stares out the windows, looking upset.

But while he was in the bathroom, I pulled out the cord for the telephone. I don't think the police people should be allowed to listen to people like that.

Daddy was very mad at me for pulling out the cord, so I had to stay in my room all day Sunday.

I wish I wasn't so much trouble for Daddy. I get in trouble a lot, because I do things that are bad. They seem like really good ideas at the time, and I'm always sure it's the right thing to do. But a lot of times it's the exactly wrong thing to do.

And it's because of me Daddy is getting punished.

I asked him if it wouldn't be better if the police people took me away, so I wouldn't cause him so much trouble. He started crying.

I know Daddy loves me, and I love him very much.

He told me that if I wasn't here, he wouldn't have any reason to be here either. He says that everybody he cares about, except me, is gone. If I wasn't here, there wouldn't be anyone to care about anymore.

We still haven't heard from Uncle Greg, and we're really worried.

There was a man who knocked on the door today. When Daddy answered the door, he gave Daddy a note. Daddy gave him some money for his trouble, except he gave the man the money before the man gave Daddy the note.

But Daddy told me that Uncle Greg is okay. We won't be seeing Uncle Greg anymore, because the police people are after him for some reason. But we should be happy for Uncle Greg, because he's someplace safe, where the police people can't find him.

I'm trying real hard to be happy for Uncle Greg, but I miss him already. I wouldn't care if he never brought me another present, ever, if it meant he would still visit.

I don't think I will write in my journals on Wednesdays. I don't like Wednesdays at all.

Daddy has to go to the police people's headquarters on Wednesdays, for his punishment.

Daddy says his punishment isn't so bad. It used to be that when people were getting punished, they had to go to the headquarters, and they weren't allowed to leave, for a long time. But now it's better. He only has to go in for punishment for a few hours.

If they did the other way, Daddy and I wouldn't be able to take care of each other. And he says Aitana would get lonely too, but I think he was just trying to be funny.

I tried to get Aitana to show me what the punishment is like, but she wouldn't let me look. But I did find an article about it on the Web.

Daddy get's strapped into a chair, and they turn on the machine that is built into the chair and the walls of the room. He has to sit there for several hours, while they age him several years.

Daddy's hair used to be as black as mine, before he got caught by the police people. His skin used to be darker too, he says that's because his ancestors spent a lot of time in the sun, before being out in the sun was so dangerous. But now his hair is all white, and he's pale, and his skin is getting wrinkly and dry, like old-fashioned paper.

When he got home yesterday, he was coughing a lot. Daddy says when you get older, you have a lot of aches and pains, and you get sick easier.

I tried to get Daddy to laugh, but he just smiled at me. And he coughed.

I'm very mad at Daddy right now. He didn't listen to me at all.

The police people sent over a man and a woman for a random inspection of our house. I think it's just to make things difficult for us, but Daddy says they want to make sure he is not using any forbidden techenology

Thank you Aitana.

I tried to tell Daddy not to let them in, but I had gone cat, and he just told me to stop hissing at the people.

The man demanded that Daddy unlock the lab and show it to him, but the woman stayed on the first floor. As soon as Daddy and the man went upstairs, she started poking into our things. I jumped up onto the counter and hissed at her, but she just looked mad.

She called me a bad name too.

After she poked around in all the drawers, she turned and looked at me, and it wasn't a very nice look. Then she tried to grab me.

She chased me all over the apartment, and then I hid under the couch. She was too fat to reach all the way under the couch.

But then Daddy and the man came downstairs, and Daddy got mad at her for pestering me. She was very nasty to him, and called him names. She said she had to take me in to headquarters for testing, but then the man said only a jean sample ["Gene sample", Sekhmet. I have records of genetic testing processes, if you would like.] was required.

Not today, Aitana.

She got mad about that. The Daddy pointed out that she had cat hair on her suit, and she got really mad then. She told the man to make sure there was a police person on guard inside the house until they got the tests back, to make sure he didn't destroy evidence or something.

Daddy was very upset. Since the police person was there inside, watching us, I couldn't change back. So I spent the entire time in his lap, trying to purr. But it was hard with the police person there, staring at me.

The next time that woman comes here, I'm going to pee on her. She told the police person that I am an abomination. If I even looked at the police person, he put his hand on his gun.

But he was gone in a couple hours. I didn't change back for a while though, because I was afraid they'd come back.

But Daddy explained that the tests they have wouldn't have told them anything anyway. They can only test for ham-handed gene tweaking, Daddy says. Things like intron-splicing, nano-ware implants, hormone spiking, in vitro manipulation, and toxin mutation. They can't detect things like duo-hybridized DNA, because they don't even know what it is.

Daddy and Daddy Gar made sure the police people would never be able to test me like that. My genes were planned and engineered and set before I was ever in vitro.

Someday, I hope I get to meet my surrogate mother some time. But Daddy says Mommy Lizbet isn't allowed in the country anymore, because she works with the people who are hiding Uncle Greg.

I asked if he knew where Uncle Greg was. He said he didn't know, but he hoped that Uncle Greg was out of the country, where it was safer. He looked a bit sad after that.

Last night was depressing. Daddy didn't even get a chance to get a box of wine for himself.

We went to bed early, because it wasn't Friday without Uncle Greg.

But Daddy made breakfast anyway, a big breakfast like he usually does. We ate a lot, because we were trying hard to pretend we were happy.

I've been trying to cheer Daddy up all day, but he wasn't cooperating.

I'm still mad about Friday, and sad about yesterday. It's really late, right now, but I'm just too upset to sleep.

I'm going to run up and down the stairs until I'm tired. But I will be quiet, even though I know Daddy isn't asleep either.

Daddy tried to get mad at me last night about running up and down the stairs, but he just started laughing instead. Then we sat on the couch and cuddled.

Daddy's in a better mood today, and we watched some of his old movies. Movies where the guy in the lab isn't the bad guy, and everybody likes the monsters.

I thought it was mean, when the big red guy rescued the baby, but the baby's mother yelled at him. I asked Daddy if Mommy Lizbet would have done that, and he said no. Daddy said the Mommy Lizbet would have thanked the big red guy, and then offered to let him use her shower to get all the gunk off. He thought this was funny, because he was smiling that way when something is funny in a way that he doesn't think I would understand.

Daddy has good movies, but we have to keep them hidden. Some of them are banned by the government people. Banned means they don't like it, so they punish people for it.

I wish we didn't have to hide them, though. The only place to hide them is in the secret closet under the refrigerator. So Daddy has to move the refrigerator out of the way. He says he isn't as spry as he used to be. Aitana helped me look that word up.

When he moved the refrigerator, he found where I had spilled the orange juice last week. I thought I had cleaned it all up, but I guess more ran under the refrigerator than I thought. But he couldn't punish me for it, because we have a deal where he doesn't punish me for things that happened more than four days ago.

But he helped me clean up the sticky orange juice. We had to use butter-knives to scrape at it. I'm just glad none of it got into the secret closet.

I asked Daddy about the people who are protecting Uncle Greg, and he told me about the Convention for Free Science and Advancement. They are scientists, doctors, and technicians that try to help the people the government people hate. He also told me that Mommy Lizbet works for them, which is why she can't visit.

I told him I'm glad that the CFSA is helping Uncle Greg. I asked him if I would ever get a chance to thank them in person, and he smiled sadly.

"I'm seriously thinking about it," he said, looking puzzled.

I always get excited when Daddy looks puzzled. It means he's figuring out how to fix a problem, and it's always fun when he figures it out. He gets really excited and happy when he figures it out.

I decided to make a present for Daddy. His birthday is next week, and I wanted to make it special.

So I had Aitana record a video of me playing. It was lots of fun, and Aitana is very good at making sure the cams are pointed in exactly the right place.

It shows me running up and down the stairs, jumping around the furniture, rolling around on the floor. For something special, I even pretended to chase my tail and chew on it.

I know Daddy will like it.

Daddy's very worried about something, and he keeps looking over at Aitana. I know Aitana couldn't have done anything wrong, Daddy Gar programmed her very carefully.

I tried to get him to talk to me about it, but he just shook his head.

That's what he does when he doesn't want me to worry about something, but it never works.

He doesn't want us to watch a movie either.

He keeps checking the doors, but that seems silly. The doors couldn't get unlocked without him unlocking them, they have to be unlocked from either side, and only Daddy has the keys. And they are very strong doors, all of metal, and very heavy. I couldn't open one of them if I tried.

Daddy says he had to put in the doors to keep people from getting in to

Begin recording, Aitana.

This is Doctor Shane Vassad. It has been almost a year, and we were finally able to rescue the blackbox decryption protocols from Garfield's effects. He was a master at codes of all kinds, but sometimes I wish he had not been quite so good. We looked right past the code keys several times.

Imagine, using a grocery receipt as a triple-substitution and compression key. The folks in the code section and the programming section had a good laugh over that one.

I asked Lizbet, and she confirmed that she had helped Garfield develop some of the security protocols. Even before Sekhmet was conceived, they had devised protocols so that not even Aitana herself could retrieve video or sound records without a personal passcode.

Lizbet has gone over the logs repeatedly. She finally found the attempts to hack into Aitana, as well as the fact that they were being piped through infrared into Aitana's cams. There must have been a micro-transmitter in the house the entire time, to carry the signal, and to beam the signal directly into her receptors.

It happened every Wednesday.

I'm not sure why they didn't try to monitor us more closely. There was never a listening device focused on us, Lizbet is far too good a security analyst to not account for that. And we are not sure how they even discovered Aitana's existence. Or why they left her in place when they did so. I know that they could never have found the countermeasures, the Constitutional States of America never had the slightest inkling of how noble gases could be excited that way.

When Aitana blew up her primary station, she killed over half the buggers.

But Sekhmet and I paid the price anyway.

Cancel that, Aitana. I'll be fine.

Lizbet says the CFSA mustered volunteers within twenty minutes of Aitana bursting her gestalt and core memory to Kelpler's Mother. But it took them two months to find us.

Find me, that is.

After a couple weeks, they let me see her, every couple days, if I "behaved". Sekhmet didn't talk to me at all, she just huddled in my lap.

She was poked, prodded, stuck with syringes... I even saw one "technician" (barely more intelligent than a lobotomized janitor, to my mind) use an electric prod to force her to change.

At her age, Sekhmet was able to change back and forth two, maybe three times a day. They were forcing her to change that many times an hour.

I saw the equipment they had, and I knew they'd never figure it out.

But she was treated like an abomination, because, according to them, that's what she was. The public believes now that any genetic alteration creates a monster, or a plague. The government uses this to their advantage, even as they feed the masses genetically-altered vegetables, fruits, grains, and even some meat.

The day they dipped her right rear leg in acid, I violated all of my pacifist principles. I didn't see her again for two weeks.

I am only 38 years old, but I look like I am over 70. Their new "humane" punishment. Several sections have found some promising paths of research, trying to reverse the effects. I'm not the only one, these days.

One of the kids down in the Pharmacology section, a 12 year old genius, was forced through puberty in three days. He has to be sedated heavily so that he can sleep.

But if a way is found to reverse it, I will decline. I don't have any reason to keep going.

My last reason died that day.

If there is any doubt that the Genetic Engineering Interdiction Agency is staffed by cowards and sadists, let me say that there is no doubt in my mind.

They kept us waiting there for three hours. Me, strapped into that chair outside the chamber. Her, strapped in the chair inside it.

The "technicians" were only there to make things worse. Their snide comments and insults were the only reason for the "technical difficulties".

I was so proud of her. She stood up to it bravely. Her eyes never left mine. She just kept assuring me that it would be okay.

"I'll be with Daddy Gar, Daddy," she kept saying. "We'll be there, waiting for you, when you are done."

I never talked to her about religious matters. Never spoke about them in front of her either. But she knew that there was a Paradise waiting for her, that her other Daddy would be there, and that there would be a place for me there too.

They kept trying to force her to change, through electrodes in the chair inside the chamber. One of the technicians wanted to do it while she was in the midst of the change. Since she wasn't able to stop herself midway, they figured that was a way to satisfy the juvenile sadism that passed for their curiosity.

But she never wavered. Her lip never trembled. The tears on her face were not tears of pain or fear.

Even petty sadism must have its limits. Finally one of the technicians started the chamber up.

I wasn't allowed to look away, or even blink. They'd put the wires on my eyelids to ensure that, and my head was strapped to a frame that was as sophisticated as an iron maiden.

I had to watch the blood start to boil, the blistering of her skin. Finally, she exploded, as the plastics in the chair caught fire.

Is there any reason to save a society that uses a bloody microwave?

And they did it to her on her birthday!

Aitanna, by-pass any protocol inputted by medical personnel within the past six months.

I never told the GEIA that Sekhmet had been the fourth child Garfield and I had created. At special locations across the world, our processes and breakthroughs have been incorporated in almost a hundred children.

They have asked me to meet some of those children. But they aren't my child, and they aren't Garfield's.

We have the full records of Sekhmet's genotype profile. We could create a new one. But she wouldn't be my daughter.

Who knows, maybe she'd be happier. I was forced to make my own daughter a prisoner, behind multiple heavy steel doors, for her own protection, and not even that worked.

After the CFSA team rescued me, they used high-incendiaries, magnesium mass missiles, to incinerate the facility. Everything was rendered to ash.

It bothers me that her ashes were scattered in such depraved company.

Begin recording. This is Doctor Lizbet Nazarian, Director of Security, CFSA location code-name Mount Archimedes.

I have placed blocks in the personality filters of Aitana. We have few operational AI's currently, and we need her.

I feel like I just lobotomized a favorite niece.

We are going to have to remove most of her memories of Sekhmet and Shane. To her, it will be as if she was deactivated the day after Garfield died, additional resource files were uploaded, and she was reactivated six years later.

We have all of Shane's notes, as well as Garfield's. Shane was much less paranoid than Garfield was. I wish he'd been more; maybe he and Sekhmet would have come into residence before any of this stupidity started.

I pestered him enough, and so did Greg.

Greg is crushed. He was Shane's control, by his own request, from the moment Sekhmet was born.

I don't have time for grief. We have far too many members and applicants to vet, contact, and rescue.

It's like the world is going mad.

The Confederates are making noises about restarting the space program. We're pretty sure they mean to do something about our orbital stations, as well as the lunar ones. We are pretty sure than Mars and Venus are safe.

Considering how much actual technical and scientific expertise they have, we're more concerned with them hitting us by accident.

The social scientists among us are predicting that the earth is about to go into another Dark Ages. The woman in me frets about the loss of life. The security director hopes it happens soon, so that we can be safe, for a while.

We will be combing through the massive amounts of video and sound Aitana collected, and transmitted in burst once a day. It is our intention to create a holographic record. Every moment of Sekhmet and Shane's life will be on permanent display. Including that night the GEIA gassed them with a nerve toxin, and the past four days, up to and including his death by suicide.

And if I find the stupid asshole who gave him that gun, they are going to wish they'd shot themselves first.

Aitana, initiate protocol Frozen Dawn.

Call me Lizbet, Aitana.

That would be fine, Aitana.

... No I don't, Aitana, why do you ask?

I'll think about that, Aitana-

That will be all for today, Aitana.