Something I like exploring in my stories is themes of identity. How we see ourselves, how others see us, what changes as we grow, and what stays the same. My favorite character to write across all three books of Starship & Sorcery has been Nimbus.
Nimbus starts as an AI medical nanobot collective, gains sentience, and learns to assume any shape their two kilograms of mass allows. Nimbus develops a personality, and while the nanobot collective emulates human speech and interaction, its motives and internal musings are wholly alien to a human mind.
Unfortunately for Nimbus, a brute of a pirate takes out our nanobot collective during The Magus Gene: Awakening, where they remain dormant until a third of the way through The Magus Gene: Dominion, when Nimbus bonds with a badly damaged female replicant body.
Nimbus now looks human, but certainly is not. She takes on a gender identity that aligns with her new body, and her world opens up. She dreams for the first time! Nimbus still senses the nanobots flowing within her, but over time, the nanobots become quieter and quieter as she shifts to using her organic resources more often than her digital ones. Before long, she feels like she’s lost a part of who she was, and in Magic of the Third Moon, Nimbus compares herself to a living Ship of Theseus.
For those who aren’t yet aware, the Ship of Theseus thought experiment posits the question of, if once a year, a ship is overhauled, and pieces of it are replaced and set aside, if after all its pieces have been replaced, can it still be considered the same ship?
Nimbus’s journey let me explore questions I’ve wrestled with myself: how much of who we are is memory, body, or choice? By the end of book 3, Nimbus experiences a wholeness only she could have wished for, and her identity is entirely unique. Like each of ours.