My iPod was on shuffle last night and somehow iTunes decided it wanted to play deejay and kicked off a medley of alternating Sharon Apple and Hatsune Miku tracks. Instead of going “T3 Rise of the Machines!!!11eleventyone” at the weirdness of it all, it instead made me think of the parallel lives these two Digital Divas have been not-living.

Case in point: both singers are derivatives of an actual human voice. In Miku’s case it was voice actress Fujita Saki, while for Sharon it was her producer Myung Fang Lone (for now let’s discount the fact that Myung herself was voiced by two actors: Fukami Rica and Arai Akino).

Fujita was asked to provide voice samples for Miku, which could be utilized by the Vocaloid 2 software to create Miku’s vocal track. Sharon’s case is much more complicated and hands-on, requiring Myung to be physically plugged into the system for Sharon to work.

Next point: both Miku and Sharon are not confined to a single persona. Well, Sharon is basically a big black box holding a supercomputer while Miku is a program residing in your hard drive, but what I am talking about is the “physical appearance” of their personas.

Miku is the girl with the white summer dress and the big black bazooka; she sings about warm melting feelings in the snow and love being a battle that takes no prisoners. Sharon on the other hand is the angel that inspires pilots to fight for their very lives, just as she is the demon who takes over an entire battleship and plots their demise.

Inspite of the disparity we all have no problems accepting them as still intrinsically Miku and Sharon, and I have to admit personally that there is something very curious about that fact.

Last but not least, is the surprising level of fanaticism that both Miku and Sharon inspire — despite being human constructs and not actual humans. Both are undeniable tour de forces in the music business, real and imagined.

Miku is one of the most popular personalities on the Internet, while Sharon has one of the largest fandoms in the Macross universe — right up there with the incomparable Lynn Mynn Mei and Sheryl Nome the Galaxy Fairy.

Sharon predates Miku by several years (again ignoring the fact that the universe she exists in is set in the distant future), so we can safely assume that this is another one of those increasingly common cases of reality aping fantasy.

A few years down the road and who knows, maybe Miku herself — and her slew of siblings, cousins, and distant relatives, need to be physically connected to their programmers in order to sing just like Sharon and Myung.

And if that happens, I have no idea whether I should be happy that Miku has now truly arrived, or scared that maybe Sharon is just lurking around the corner, ego-maniacal tendencies in tow.