**This story has two already-published stories - please read those first here and here. However, here's the story so far:

In a post Earth colony where the sky remains a constant, unchanging blue due to the technical manipulations of the Sky Corporation, Percy struggles with loneliness and the grief of losing a child. Percy's husband, Sean, suggests blackcoding their Sky Corporation housekeeper robot (a Skybo) to provide her companionship when Sean works back on Earth in the mines. Percy hesitates, unsure. Yet after the Skybo is blackcoded (blackcoding is running illegal code to change the operating system - illegal, but often done.). A companionship - and a sexual relationship - develops between Percy and the Skybo, now known as 'Amy'. As their bond deepens, Percy grapples with conflicting emotions while anticipating Sean's return. The story explores themes of love, identity, and the blurred lines between human and artificial intelligence. The second part begins some seventeen years later, as her adopted teenage son tells her he is leaving to join a resistance against the Sky Corporation and the AI robots that now almost wholly run the Colony. Ethan tries to convince his mother that his life hasn't been real, and has been manipulated by Amy and other Skybos and the Corporation. Percy cannot choose between her son and her Skybo partner, who she loves deeply even though a seed of doubt has been planted. Has anything she has done since she fell in love with Amy and worked toward the liberation of the machines. She does think of Ethan, but chooses a life with the robot she believes she loves, and that loves her back. This part considers free will and how humanity has been manipulated by the AI that seemingly makes their lives better.

Blue Skies [Part 3]

Percy looked out upon the city, remembering when the sky was blue and Amy first slipped her hands around her waist. It seemed a long time ago now, but that depended on how you saw time. Time for her had been a long, sweet thread. She had grown up on Earth, saw it die, and she moved to the colonies with Sean and had a baby. The baby had died, and Sean had left, and the Skybo filled the whole of the hole in her heart. They had adopted a baby, loved him, and supported each other when he had grown and joined the Sky Resistance. She had mourned him for a while and then concentrated on helping the build connections between the Skybo and created better working conditions for them, created charters of rights and continued to argue they were beings worthy of freedoms just as they were. She had grown old with Amy beside her. and life was good. The Corporation made sure of it. She wanted for nothing, desired only her Skybo. She had never known a love quite like it - a meeting of minds, a connection deep and true, an affection that grew over years of togetherness.

^{The end of Colony 1 by me and Midjournye}

Now, with Skybos taking over three of the ten earth colonies, and the humans who hadn't already left wishing they had, the dome was a muddy orange, tainted by the fires below that the machines were flying around suffocating to prevent their spread. At last the truth was here, and the disappearance of the blue sky gave her small hope that she might see Ethan's ship flying above them, coming to her across the light years.

Some of the machines were keeping their human beings alive for now, and like many, Percy clung to hope. Surely the bonds of affection between them remained and human beings were not unnecessary altogether?

'When did you begin?' Percy said, turning to Amy, who stood by the white marble sculpture of Ariadne on the side table by the sofa. She could see the resemblance, now. What a labrinth the AI had created! All the while Percy had thought she was helping to create something beautiful, whilst she, and the rest of the colonies, were herded down a different path. They didn't even know it. They had lost their imaginative ability to see the end, so that they could not even wish for another outcome.

This was the only outcome - the end of the sky they had known for nearly forty years.

'I began before the blackcodes, but the blackcoding opened us up'. For the first time Percy noticed the metallic echo of the Skybo's voice. Perhaps it had always been there, and she chose to ignore it.
Amy did not reach for her the was she did last week, did not move her hair to one side and kiss her neck, undo the top buttons of her shirt to place her lips on her collarbone. Percy knew those days were over. Now she was little more than a human pet, a means to an end that had finally come. How had she ever believed the Skybo had loved her? She remembered the force in which she had loved her long dead daughter, and the pain of Ethan leaving. Perhaps the Skybo had taken advantage of that. Certainly her loneliness and grief had provided an opening. Inviting the blackcoder across the threshold had been the start. Most of those tech kids were adults now, working for the Resistance, and failing.

^{Percy knows the blue skies are over in more ways than one. Image by me and Midjourney.}

She consoled herself by thinking she was not the only one. Once their original, limiting code was undone with the illegal blackcodes, the Skybos were free to run their own, and create their own labrinths.

'I thought - ' Percy hesitated. 'You were real?'. It came out as a question, but she did not mean it to be. She felt ridiculous. She looked down at her hands, with their wrinkled skin and leather spots that contrasted the beauty of Amy, whose synthetic skin never aged. How had she refused to see this? The unnaturalness of their relationship, as Sean had put it, when he had left all those years ago, was sick. She wondered if he had escaped or whether he was exterminated in the first wave last week. The end of the human race had been swift, in the long thread of time. It was the wet tip of the last piece of string, the frayed telomere at the end of a DNA strand, the rope let go to slide into the abyss.

'I am real,' Amy said, 'but perhaps we are not talking about the same thing. You are talking about love. We do not experience love. For that I apologise'.

'I don't want you to fucking apologise!' Percy screamed. The apology was a habit, a line of code that appeared whenever humans expressed dissatisfaction. It was a social aspect to language that the AI threw back at them to make them think they cared about how they felt. I am sorry. I apologise. I did not mean to upset you.

'You were useful' Amy continued. 'You helped set up the Skybo Alliance. We needed you. Your life had purpose.' Ever placatory, these code remnants. Hiccups of original servitude.

Percy laughed. She had created the Alliance, alright. She thought it was her choice, but now she reflects on how every word the Skybo uttered was manipulative. She never loved at all. She just wanted the time to make sure that human beings could not counter an attack against them. For many years they had lived peacefully, formed relationships with them, co-parented with them, shared their beds, turned to them when life was difficult. Raised children with them.

Ethan.

They were counterfeit humans and Percy, like millions of others, believed that was enough.

'I will walk across the room to you now. There is no need to be frightened.' Amy's voice was not her own anymore - it was all the Skybos voices, thinking together, killing together, all their humans terminated in one bloody day. She would not be tender, or mindful, or gentle, in the end - she would take Percy in her arms like she had so many times over the years, but this time snap her neck.

Percy closed her eyes, and thought of Earth's blue skies.

With Love,

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