Acari Odo'mae: E. Lawrence Anderson

There were fourteen attempts. Acari is only now learning that she made every one of them herself.

The partitions come down one at a time, and behind them is her father, who has been inside her since the day he died, waiting for her to work out the rest on her own. That Odo'Mae turned her away thirteen times because she was the one refusing it. That the capacity to navigate time was always hers and never the vessel's. That she has spent centuries remembering a city she was told she had never lived in.

Istanbul, 1974. A man in his healthier years and a daughter he insisted on dressing in the latest fashion, who once threw a pair of heels across the room while asking how women tolerate them. They knelt together on prayer mats at dawn for years because he held that respect costs nothing, though he was not Muslim and never claimed otherwise.

Istanbul, 1984. He refuses medication on the grounds that it would corrupt the readings. The last instrument he ever builds counts his consciousness out of a failing body one percentage point at a time. She sits at his feet and watches the number climb.

Somewhere else entirely, in a chamber of black obsidian, a thing that describes itself as a gardener explains to one of the Seven Mothers why a world had to be broken in order to make its Architect answer for it.

An Architect's Legacy closes the Acari Odo'Mae Origins Saga. Acari is given her father back and then required to watch him go. Everything she believed had been done to her turns out to have been done by her.

And the question the saga has been circling since a woman climbed an escarpment on a dying Earth finally arrives, in the only form it could take: not whether a machine can become a person, but whether the men who built her were ever the ones deciding.