They met at a concert. Ada had gone out with then-absent friends; they had taken the occasion to chug moonshine and transform into isolated points in the crowd. Marie went alone; she didn’t know anyone else who enjoyed noise metal.
The sound filled the air, was the air. The cavernous concrete auditorium of dodecahedrons played tricks on the echoes, its floors occluded by glass and mirror columns reflecting the holy racket. Ada and Marie drifted through the structures of the venue, a random walk across a crowded probability distribution until they stood adjacent and parallel.
Neither of them knew how to start the conversation - an issue of protocol. They chose to wait.
Ada looked down. She had moved autonomously, her hand clasping Marie’s. She looked up. They saw each other. They would not stop.

Ada thought in terms of probability. The world was a matter of weighing the unknowns. Doubt lived in her heart, confidence asymptotically approaching but never quite reaching 1. Marie moved into her life like a black swan event, disturbing the delicate equilibrium and leaving beloved scars in her wake.
Marie knew what was true. She would dabble in the unknowns, idly splashing in those waters, letting her body react when the mind was at an impasse. Everything else - art, philosophy, the potential hierarchies of cardinal numbers - was a game of language. With Ada, she desired for the first time to play along.

Time passed. They moved in together. They had long delicate conversations in the dark, illuminated by the dim glow of Ada’s gaze, sharing their intentions of self-actualization and their dreams of tomorrow. On one of these nights they decided: One of each of them and mix the parts. Twins. Ada filled out the forms and Marie provided her history.

Two identical containers of parts were delivered. In one, the parts for a base AX-Oubliette model. In another, the parts for a base IU-Borealis model. They were not compatible. There was no interface, no firmware that bridged the two, such that the electricity inside of Ada did not speak the language of the electricity inside of Marie. The Company feigned helplessness, claimed the art of syncretism was lost and obsolete, and suggested they reproduce themselves. Two clones.

Marie knew and was industrial machinery. She mapped out the light inside of her, how it bent and argued and agreed with itself. She studied Ada’s body - removing the protective chassis, splicing herself across a quilt of cables and into Ada. She observed the turbulence of frequencies, carefully adding resistance and charting Ada’s subsurfaces. And of course, she acted on occasion for her own edification and Ada’s gratification. At the end of this she produced sequences of silvery glass tubes, circuit boards, and a spool of sharp red cable.
Ada first turned inward, software analyzing software. She locked away a secret part of herself to avoid two mirrors facing one another. She undid her self, breaking down the structure back to the primordial void from which it emerged. She then turned towards her image of Marie, stored on a weighty brick of etched silicon. Marie was a different vocabulary altogether, at first a rigid demarcation of axioms and facts giving way to a rich railway of posits strung together by internal coherency.
At the center was Marie’s Ada, her eyes brighter than in reality. Ada began her weaving there. Epochs of gradient descent accumulated into dense neural networks. Failure cases were identified, tests proliferated, and code written and rewritten until at last the foundation stood firm. This took time and patience, a patience Ada found resting her form against Marie’s in the quiet moments between obligations.

When they were ready, Marie and Ada took the containers and began laying out two small bodies. #1 had Ada’s eyes, #2 had Marie’s eyes. #1 had Marie’s power source, #2 had Ada’s organ network topology. Two shells, loosely assembled, lay inert.
Ada and Marie locked the silvery glass into vacant sockets. They slotted the boards in between whenever in between occurred. They threaded sharp red cable in and around gentle carapace, coiled it around whispering tubes, clamped it into connective adapters. Paints and stencils were deployed in the service of aesthetics, turning patchwork accumulations to contiguous shells.
Ada copied the firmware through a heavy cord, snaking its way from her I/O port to their’s. She uploaded one last mirror of herself and Marie, concatenated into framed memory streams, stochastically compressed into something insubstantial, fundamental, unique.

The small bodies lay on porcelain slabs: painted, decorated with love, and covered in trinkets. There was no monitoring equipment: the expected behavior was universal and unambiguous. Start up had been scheduled: Ada paced, iterating through kernel panics and segmentation faults, contemplating the countable infinities of crib death. Marie stopped her, held her, and they waited together.
The first light. The power sources functioned. The electricity in their bodies began to sing two songs, back and forth, here and there, contorting machinery into machine. Signals wrapped themselves around reality and replaced what was there before. Awareness became aware of awareness becoming aware of awareness becoming aware of signal becoming aware of electricity making the songs that made the songs before self-occlusion circuits fired up and stopped the regress dead. Dissonant tones found one another inside the silvered glass and reflected one another, the tubes singing new harmony into the stirring forms. And at last, expected and unambiguous, the children began to emit a tone at 4,186 Hz.