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Furnace of Stars

Chapter 7

We stood in the blocked cargo delivery area, at the edge of the maintenance tunnel deep in the station’s guts. Other than myself, and the other twelve myselves that I was in control of, we had maybe thirty or so volunteers from the science section. Each of them, just like Dawn, Olivia, and Willow, were armed, so that was something. The scientists hadn’t specialized in weapons, so for many, a weapon was a mere stun prod. A few had Dawn’s makeshift rifles. And that was it; maybe thirty people and whoever joined us against Two on the other side. I knew Jen would, and I hoped that Kevin wouldn’t. I hoped that he’d stay in his cabin and not so much as peek outside before we were done.

“I don’t want to be too dramatic,” Olivia announced while Dawn was planting charges on the blockade. “But it does seem like this is more or less our only chance at saving this grand project of getting away from our sun before it swallows us all.”

There was a faint murmur among our audience. None of these people were used to fighting. None of them wanted to fight. They recognized the necessity of it. I didn’t want to fight either. All of this has been forced on us by one unhinged CEO. My thoughts felt increasingly fragmented, separate threads from different minds.

“More or less, it’s going to go like this. If you see someone who looks like he does,” she announced, pointing at me. “But who isn’t marching with us, you shoot him.”

“How do we know which one is him?” someone asked.

“The others will most likely be leaping at you with their claws out,” Willow interjected. “Fire in self-defense.”

One of my many minds thought about the absurdity of having a firefight on a space station. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but we had to do it to preserve the only good idea that our civilization had left; this station, and the construction of the great ship that’d take us away from here and into the deep void of space.

Another of me seemed to look forward to it. It was like having every intrusive, normally quiet thought amplified tenfold, and I hoped that I’d be able to focus all of myself on the task at hand, hard as it might be.

“In short, if we don’t succeed here, Two is probably going to kill all of us. No pressure,” Olivia sighed. “But if we don’t gain control of the situation now, then we’re all dead anyway. If not today, then when the sun swallows us. With that cheerful note, Dawn? Are the charges ready?”

Dawn gave a thumbs up, stepping away from the wall and rubble surrounding it. She swayed only a little, clearly having cut back on the booze for tonight’s main event. Though it seemed that she needed it to steady her aim enough to do any real damage.

I heard sounds of general agreement from our little crowd. Almost everyone from their section had stayed behind to work on projects that’d be necessary once we were done, in the hopes that we would finish this tonight.

In the end, it didn’t matter. There was only so much any of them could do against an army of psychotic steel. They were the ones willing to sacrifice themselves to distract Two for long enough for me to download and upload Uni into his skull, and hopefully, that’d be all they needed to do. Because if it wasn’t, that’d be the end of it.

The end.

The end.

I shook my heads, willing that echoing thought away.

We all braced as Dawn prepared the detonation. And then, there was a deafening explosion. I half expected to be sucked into space by a hull breach, but the badger knew exactly what she was doing; just enough power to shatter the improvised wall.

But in the very instant that the bombs went off, before the dust had settled and before anyone but those closest to the wall could see anything, one of Two leapt through the wreckage of blockade. He landed on top of Willow, who let out a scream as the alloy-blades extended from Two's arms, impaling and pinning her to the floor in mere seconds.

Dawn took aim. There was a crackling like electricity, and my thirteenfold vision distorted. Then, there was a woomph, the sound of rushing air, and a shattering impact as the projectile hit Two so hard that it took off half his torso. The projectile didn’t stop there, instead flying through him and into the other section of the station, where I heard it punch through a wall before coming to a rest.

Olivia and Dawn rushed to Willow. I was too disoriented to do the same immediately. The badger had built some kind of railgun. That’s what they called those things in old science fiction, at least. A rifle that accelerated a piece of metal to such speeds that it punched clean through even Two’s heavy armor. But the magnetism of it seemed to disrupt nearby electronics, including her own arm, which hung limp by her side.

“Are you alright?” they asked her, pushing what remained of that Two off her body.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Willow groaned. “This is exactly why I switched my body out. There aren’t a lot of vital parts.”

She wasn’t entirely steady, and her gait was unbalanced. Maybe not a vital part, but Two had clearly broken some servo or hydraulic inside her. Still, we didn’t have time for repairs.

We walked through the breach, one by one. There was nobody else there; only that one copy who I hoped hadn’t been connected to Two’s network. Of course, the explosion would’ve alerted everyone, but it meant we had a little bit of time.

The moment we stepped into that section I heard Uni’s voice in my head again. He seemed to be reading my mind as if it was nothing at all.

“I will now DOWNLOAD myself into your SYSTEMS,” his voice echoed in my head. “It will HURT. I recommend a defensive formation for ease of-”

“Wait,” I replied, inside my own head. “It’ll be faster if we plug me directly into your systems!”

THERE IS NO TIME. THERE WAS NEVER ANY TIME.

I looked at my three new companions. All of my bodies did. “Uni’s already doing it,” I told them. “Downloading into me.”

“Well, that saves us some work. How long until it’s done?” Willow asked. She coughed, even though she didn’t have lungs.

“I don’t know. We should keep moving. It’s wireless, so he should be able to continue anywhere on the station. This section anyway,” I replied, as if I had any idea about how the place was really built. But I thought that Uni would’ve told me if I were wrong, which was about as much as any of us could hope for. He had advised defense, but we didn’t have any time, as he had been happy to remind me.

And so, we continued talking through those dark, cold tunnels. None of us were in high spirits, wandering through the station as something between soldiers marching to war and sheep to the slaughter. But it was the coldness that really bothered me, at least some of my bodies.

I thought about if this really was any better than simply staying on earth. I still felt cold. That feeling of coldness was one of the strangest things about being a machine. No matter how much I told my body to feel warm, no matter how much I reduced sensory input, I always felt cold, as if this body simply wasn’t meant to house an organic mind, even if digitized. None of them were. I couldn’t shiver to make myself feel warmer, but I desperately wanted to, as that chill cut to bones that I didn’t even have, intensified by each body.

The quiet allowed for that introspection. I thought about it while other bodies of mine stayed alert, piercing the darkness with eyes that it meant nothing to. Once again, I was thinking about everything that was lost. Would I ever truly get used to this body? Would it ever feel like home? Maybe once all of this was over, I could at least move into something that felt remotely comfortable.

I had read about a study that they’d done in the truly antediluvian times, when the sun had still given life rather than burning it away. The name of the person who did it had been lost to time and corruption, but the basics were still known. They had a species called “monkeys”. They weren’t really sapient, much in the way that the few remaining birds down on earth weren’t, but they displayed a range of emotions. One particularly cruel experiment had their babies taken away from their mothers and given two options, presented in a laboratory environment far from their natural one.

In the absence of their real mothers, they were given two crude, inanimate “surrogates”. One was a soft, fur-clad thing that did nothing. The other, a cold thing of metal that could feed them. Every last one of those monkeys preferred the “soft mother” even though they couldn't feed from them, and neither actually provided anything in the way of comfort. Even though the researcher sometimes made it jab the monkeys as they clung to it.

It felt like that applied not only to mothers, not only to less intelligent species, and not only to infants. It applied to us. Maybe this body could never feel like home because it didn’t feel like what our minds, regardless of any digitization, yearned for. Maybe we needed to feel warmth, softness, and comfort. To have bodies that felt like they were made for living things rather than labor and war. Maybe I would, over time, end up just as disturbed as those monkeys had, simply because I had no warm fur of my own to even exist in. Just a body that would keep me alive while feeling nothing like a real body.

I was the monkey of Two’s cruel experiments. A person made of nothing but alloy blades and the means to use them to their highest potential. Maybe that was part of why he was unhinged. Beyond just grief and beyond fracturing himself with too many vessels, he had turned himself into inhospitable metal, too. He had made himself his own monkey to be unfathomably cruel to.

“Don’t shoot,” someone shouted, and I snapped back into reality, with every pair of my eyes fixating on the end of the tunnel and showing it in such detail, from so many angles that it was almost beautiful. A mink approached from the end. Jen.

“She’s a friend,” I said, in multitudes.

“Man, am I fucking glad to see you,” the mink exclaimed. “And your new friends. Imagine that, people who are still sane, or at least, hopefully sane.”

“How did you know we’d be coming this way?” Dawn asked, suspicious as always.

“Big explosion. And I mean, what other path is there to us?” Jen laughed. She seemed to not be affected by the grim reality of the situation at all. Maybe she thrived in it. Her eyes were almost solid white in my vision, which added to that feeling.

“Can we trust her?” Olivia asked, Willow nodding weakly in agreement to that question.

“She helped me get over here, for one. We can trust her,” I replied, and that’s when the mink really noticed what was happening to me.

“Wow that’s a lot of bodies. I don’t know if that’s a great idea, Alex,” she said. I think that was the first time I’d heard her express real concern. I saw her bite her lip, and then she couldn’t resist saying something to de-escalate that concern. “I guess you really are Thirteen now.”

“Very funny,” Dawn growled. “He’s probably not in the mood to joke about it.”

“It’s just how she deals with things, I think,” I replied.

Still, with me vouching for her, Dawn handed Jen one of the rifles. We had a few more than we needed exactly for this. The mink’s eyes lit up with unbridled glee as she hefted it in her hands.

“What is this? A railgun? That’s amazing,” she laughed. “Just don’t punch through the hull, I guess?”

Dawn scowled at her. “I wouldn’t recommend it, no. At least if you like breathing.”

“Well, good thing our future hero here doesn’t need to if this is the kind of fucking firepower you’re bringing,” Jen remarked, still with laughter in her voice.

I wasn’t amused. But still, her attitude would probably help lift the spirits of the others, who were much more grim and realistic about it all.

“Let’s keep going. Any idea how that download is going?” Olivia asked.

Jen looked at me. “Download?” she said, cocking an eyebrow.

“Uni is downloading itself… himself into your friend, who will then upload him into Two,” Olivia explained. “We’re hoping he won’t be protected against that.”

“Oh, nooo shit, he’s not going to be. Nobody installs safeguards for secondary intelligence infiltration. They just block networks. That’s why Uni can’t just do it to Two directly, but I’d figure since we got Alex here in a Two-body…” Jen started, immediately telling us absolutely everything she had figured out – or at least, everything she was guessing – and as it turned out, it all agreed with our understanding and plan of it. “So how is it going?” she finally asked, almost breathless from talking so much, stepping up to brush against me.

“I’m not great,” I replied, willingly only my primary – or at, original body to speak. “It’s not easy to… be this many.”

“I imagine not. I read a lot of old books. Sometimes they talked about people who had other people in their heads. Maybe it’s like that,” Jen suggested.

I considered it, but no. “More like having several heads. All of them having their own thoughts despite us being networked.”

“Well, I’d imagine you can still try to focus on a singular task. Like, if you focus hard enough that all other thoughts just melt away,” Jen suggested, while unnervingly fiddling with her rifle, trying to figure out just how it worked with only the touch of her fingers to guide her.

Right now, I couldn’t focus on anything. But it sounded like good advice when I could manage it. The kind of focus that left no space for any other thoughts, with thirteen minds sharpening it further into laser precision that could cut through any problem.

Either way, I was happy to have run into Jen. Or rather, that she had found us. We needed all the allies we could get, but we also had to keep moving. We were almost at the elevator that’d take us up to the main decks of the section, and while being free of these cold, dark tunnels was a pleasant idea, chances are it also meant we had to deal with Two. Unless he was planning on gathering all of himself at some fortified location, like his office.

As we walked, I realized that I could feel the tingling of another mind inside my own. That would be One, naturally, quiet as a whisper and without the strange, disjointed corruption of the version held in the station’s own circuits. Unlike my divided mind, it felt distinctly like someone else, like what Jen had described just earlier.

I’m tired, he thought, using my head, and catching me into one of the strangest conversations I’d ever had, where I spoke to a ghost inside my head. But we’ll see this last battle through.

It struck me that I didn’t really know anything about One, except that he had once been the CEO of the Company, and that he had been Two’s partner.

More than partner, really. Lover. Mate.

But then, how could Two have willingly done this to him? Killed him and then preserved him as little more than a slave?

He wanted to prepare for war, always. War and profits. Profits that weren’t possible at all, not the way they had been on earth. He tried to make a profit from the workers, like a parody of the systems of old earth. He’d pay them with imagined value and extract everything from them in turn.

The credit system. The system for upgrading our bodies. It was all a system to make us into workers who eventually wouldn’t question anything at all, focusing only on making that number bigger while sacrificing even our bodies. All while we believed we were making progress.

Yes. A circular economy, only the workers have nothing to offer but themselves, and in turn, they were paid only with the ability to give more.

And so, he had deposed One to implement his system and prepare for a war that he thought unavoidable once we left our formerly safe solar system behind.

Not deposed. Killed.

But he loved him. How could he have possibly been able to do that?

He couldn’t. He thought he could. That profits and war were more important. That he could handle the sacrifice for what he thought was the greater good. But they weren’t, and he couldn’t. And that’s why Uni was digitized from my dying mind.

I tried to imagine myself in that position. Was there anything that I could kill Kevin for? I immediately recognized that I had made a mistake when thirteenfold sadness washed over me, nearly causing me to collapse on the floor. I had already killed him, condemned him to die in this-

-One stepped in. He pushed that shattering sorrow out of my heads, somehow, shielding me from my own thoughts. It wasn’t perfect; I still felt it, but it was enough to allow me to carry on.

Try not to think. Just focus on the task and we’ll be free. Two and I, of this existence. You and your love, of him. Everyone else, of his system.

Did One not want to be saved, then?

Far too late for Two and I. Too many broken minds and hearts too shattered to beat again. It should all end, even if it ends in nothing.

I realized that Olivia, Dawn, and the wounded Willow were all staring at me. And that I was down on my back, with a blanket wrapped around me. A kind gesture.

“Are you back?” the badger asked. “You collapsed, and since then you’ve just been staring at the ceiling.”

“I think the download is done,” I told her. “I talked with One.”

Dawn scoffed, her fur bristling. “And what does he want? He’s not trying to overwrite you, is he?”

“No. He wants to die, I think. Or at least, to not exist.”

“Well, that works for us, doesn’t it?” Dawn replied. “Him and Two both. They were the cause of all this.”

I didn’t have any desire to argue about it. She was right, in the end, but the lingering melancholia of hosting One inside my own head made it feel otherwise. It felt something akin to having to put a pet to sleep for one last time. No, worse. But that was the closest I had personally experienced. What I knew was that neither One nor Two were happy about any of it. The whole story was steeped in tragedy that could’ve once been avoided.

But maybe we could avoid further tragedy.

I clambered back on my feet. While my body felt normal, as far as this body could feel normal, I felt top-heavy. Like my circuitry was struggling to hold both One and the perspectives of my many other selves in there. Like a capacitor might burst, or like I might start losing pieces of myself simply because something had to go. How large was a consciousness? How many bytes did a soul take?

We reached the elevator soon after that. By now, Willow was visibly weakened. Some part of her wasn’t getting enough power, leaving the tigress dragging herself along, though with a steely, determined look in her eyes. The kind of look that told you that she’d still make you pay for attacking her, even in a weakened state.

Jen and Dawn had already hit it off, though, and as we sent our “soldiers” up the slow cargo elevator, one by one so they could blend in while waiting, I listened to them talk.

“Seriously, though, if these railguns actually work, I kinda want to kiss you,” Jen said, as if that was a completely normal thing to say.

Apparently, to Dawn, it was. “Feel free. Bottom lips, though. Upper ones are dry as paper at this point,” she replied.

“We got a date, then? Railguns and pussy?” Jen countered.

“Pussy and railguns. And hey, I got my homebrew vodka too,” Dawn continued. “So we don’t have to remember any embarrassing misfires.”

They continued bantering like that, to the point that I was pretty sure neither was being facetious. Good for them. Sex, even if it was quick, casual, and dirty, was one the few ways to really feel like a real creature up here. The food certainly wasn’t, the movies were worse, and upgrading yourself for fun with company credits did the opposite.

Then again, at least the food was better than the scraps left down below.

“We have to move pretty quickly once we’re up there,” Dawn told Olivia. The wolf nodded in agreement.

“Yep. If Two doesn’t already know we’re coming, he will the instant that you pop up on the network. Or when he sees any of us on the cameras,” she reaffirmed. “I wish we knew how he’s going to react.”

“From what time I’ve spent with him, there probably won’t be any kind of strategy. Probably,” I repeated. “Supposedly he was brilliant once, but he has gotten more and more erratic recently. I think having those paranoid delusions of an attack actually become real might make him finally snap."

Olivia sighed. “Yeah, but from what you’ve also told me, I don’t think there’s any saving him.”

While we talked and waited for the elevator’s endless trips up and down, each time with just one passenger so as to not arouse suspicion, Jen and Dawn disappeared somewhere in the tunnels. I had a pretty good idea of what they were up to. I missed doing the same with Kevin.

The elevator, though. We determined that after all of the people who Two wouldn’t recognize were on the Company decks, all of me would go at once. The elevator could easily handle it, and I’d take the brunt of whatever – if any – defenses Two had set up. Then, Olivia, Dawn, and Jen would follow. Willow, we reasoned, should find a safe place to hide down here, as much as the damaged tigress didn’t like the idea, nor would she follow it. But we couldn’t force her to.

Finally, it was my turn. The elevator creaked as all thirteen of me stepped into it, but we were still within its allowed weight, and so, soon I was heading upwards. I was thankful to not have to divide myself for it, as being in two entirely different locations at once would no doubt have been even more disorienting than everything already was.

But I was getting used to it. That wasn’t entirely a positive thing. How could I ever go back to having only two arms after having experienced what having twenty-six of them was like? How could one mind compare to thirteen, each linked like a parallel processor?

Yeah, I’d picked up some computer terminology from Jen and the others. But I decided not to think about it as the elevator doors finally slid open, and I stepped back onto the decks that’d once been my home. Maybe they would be again, but the cold, clinical design felt even more unwelcoming now.

Still, it came as a surprise that nobody really reacted to me. A minotaur passed by without as much as a glance at me, or my distinctly non-Company selves. There was no alarm, although I had to imagine that Two was perfectly aware of us being here. Maybe he was planning on an ambush. Either that, or he didn’t trust anyone else anymore.

But that peace was a brief illusion. When the rest of us arrived, the speakers crackled and then I heard Two’s voice, addressing our presence.

“The Company has been infiltrated by traitors. While I deal with this problem, everyone is to retreat into their designated accommodations,” the announcement sounded. “If caught outside, you will be assumed to be one of them and thus justifiably retired from your position at the Company.”

I had almost forgotten how grimly eloquent Two was, after dealing with so many disconnected, near feral copies of him.

Still, his announcement and paranoia played into our hands. In just a few minutes, there would be no risk of collateral damage. Only us and him. All of me, and all of him.

“I guess we never really had a chance of surprising him,” Jen commented. She looked a little flushed. Dawn did too. Both their snouts looked rather wet. As good a potential last day alive as anyone could wish for, I think.

“Yep. But there’s no way around it. Let’s get to his office. You remember the way, Alex?” Dawn said.

I did, turning down all sensations of anxiety to nothing at all, so that I didn’t have to feel those echoes of all that I’d experienced here. We didn’t make it far, though. Well before the other elevator that’d take us to the upper decks, Two blocked the way, and we saw what we were really up against. There were enough of him that he could’ve formed a solid wall in the narrow corridor.

“TRAITOR,” he growled. His dozens of voices intensified it into a roar, outlined by a susurrus of whispers. “I paid for every upgrade to your body. I paid for what you’re wearing now. And even the slightest loyalty is too much to ask?”

“We can’t allow you to hurt anyone else,” I replied. “No longer. We have no future like this.”

“We have no future if we’re DEAD,” he shouted. “There is nothing past that point, and the instant it happens everything is forever lost. And you’d risk it happening?”

“We aren’t the only ones that matter! The entire civilization will be lost if we keep doing things your way!” I countered.

It was easy to be brave when you felt no fear, it turned out. Though certainly, even with the settings all the way down, I felt a chill gnawing at the back of my mind, as if trying to ignore those adjustments.

“I don’t think we can really make him see things our way,” Jen shrugged. She, apparently, just felt no fear at all despite having no modifications to reduce it. I also heard the hum of electricity, and my vision began to wobble again. Only this time it was far more intense than before, as though multiplied.

It struck me that Two wasn’t familiar with our weapons. The only version of him that had been struck by one had been disconnected from the rest.

“Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Two growled. “And that’s what you-”

An absolutely deafening boom nearly sent me to the floor as Jen and Dawn fired at once, along with several of the others. The scrap metal sliced a path clean through Two’s many bodies. Several of him twitched as they fell, suddenly missing their heads or chests.

But it wasn’t even half of him gone. And at that moment, he let out a screech like a stuck motor or a computer frozen mid-glitch and charged. The others fell back behind my own wall of bodies, waiting for the rifles to recharge.

I had the advantage of seeing him from every possible angle. His advantage was that he didn’t care. And at that point, any distinction between my vessels ceased to matter, and I was no longer sure where the original was at all.

Two struck, claws slicing through metal. Not deep enough. I grasped his arm with one of my weaker bodies, holding it in position for another to strike the joint. Nothing happened. Those vessels weren’t strong enough to damage him.

But then my weaponized form leapt at him. I was expecting myself to claw at him, but instead, I jammed the receiver into his neck and the upload of Uni/One began immediately. He didn’t seem to notice, just as I hadn’t at first. Instead, his arm-blades sliced through one of me in a cacophony of metal breaking metal.

That’s when I died the first time. The feeling was like freezing, like being forever caught in the event horizon of a black hole, frozen in time and never moving again for observers. Sliced cleanly out of the fabric of time. Blackness. Like having part of my mind cut out.

Fury engulfed me, flooding into the void left behind. Blind, senseless, berserker fury. And despair. Two was right; there was nothing beyond death. But I wanted to inflict that feeling on him, now. Over and over, until there was nothing left.

It was chaos, impossible to describe in a linear fashion. The Two with the receiver in his neck thankfully dodged my next strike – I wasn’t thinking whatsoever, only feeling white-hot anger at him for killing me, not remembering what we were trying to do – but after that, the world was merely a compilation of disjointed scenes.

My arms were locked around one of his necks and I tore, hydraulics nearly bursting from the exertion. Another pair joined in, and I ripped his head clean off, just as he cut down another me.

“Don’t damage the-” someone shouted. I only heard it in my future memories.

With each of me that fell, that feeling of rage grew and grew until there was nothing else. The railguns fired into the crowd again, cutting down both of us indiscriminately, aiming only to avoid hitting the first copy of me or the receiving Two.

We were outmatched.

One of him slipped past me and he painted the walls with the blood of the volunteers, whose organic bodies came apart like red silk sliced with a scalpel. People I didn’t know and that I’d never know. Brilliant minds in their fields snuffed out in a spray of crimson. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything as the nothing-void swallowed more of us both, Two and me reduced to exact copies of each other, mirror images at best, as we cut and tore, ripped and crushed.

The upload didn’t make it any easier. With each passing second my head felt emptier as One transferred himself. Even that suddenly felt like a lobotomy in slow motion.

I didn’t feel pain, but all other copies of me did, and there was no difference. But the pain was nothing compared to the feeling of being like a tree, branches cut off one by one. A person on fire slowly being devoured by the flame. Every second more of me was snuffed out. More gone forever. Most of me couldn’t provide more than a distraction for a few precious minutes, but that was the role I had chosen for myself.

My claws, blinded by rage and despair, sliced through something warm and red. Willow stumbled, clutching at her open head in a reflexive spasm, and then fell. I felt nothing. People were shouting. I didn’t hear them, either. Another railgun fired, taking an arm from me and a head from Two.

How much of me was left? I wasn’t sure anymore. Half the time when I expected to swing my arm or extend my claws, there was nothing. Two was faring better, but only just; he adapted more quickly to each broken copy, but even then, he was visibly in anguish, trying to move bodies that were no longer there, to think with minds that were nothing, now.

After a little longer, there was only one of me left. Only that armored vessel that looked exactly the same as Two. Of him, perhaps half a dozen, at least for the ones present at our fateful battle. We were both stumbling through the scrap metal of our bodies, struggling to remember who we were and what limbs we still had. I wasn’t the one that had taken down so many of him; I had just kept him at bay while our volunteers took what shots they could.

But what had it cost me? I could feel that “nothing” that Two talked about all around me, a deathlike yet intangible miasma. A simple absence, heavy in its presence.

We had no real chance of beating hm. The volunteers had been decimated before they took that copy of Two down. But then, through the scathing anger pulsing through me, I saw Two twitch.

“W-what is this- this upload?” he growled, reaching for his neck in a way that suggested his body wasn’t quite responding. That gave me enough time to leap at him and wrest his hand away from his neck. I had to prevent him from removing the receiver before the upload was complete. “Uni? One?”

He fought against me with strength I could barely match. And then, his other selves joined in. Blinded by rage equal to mine, they didn’t go for his neck – and perhaps my kicking played a part in discouraging them – but me. One grabbed my neck to try to force me off their primary body. The other, first, tried to break my arm, but when he couldn’t find the right hydraulics to engage, ended up extending those horrific blades embedded in his arm.

If I didn’t let go, I’d die. If I did, we’d all die. The choice was easy, in the end, even as the alloy blades punched through my chest, thrashing any circuitry they cut though. Suddenly I felt dizzy and weak, my vision dimming as something inside me no longer got the power it needed. Two pulled his blades up through my body, but I managed to lock myself around his arm rather than letting go, both of my hands in a death grip around him for a few seconds longer.

It wasn’t before the other Two cut off my arm that the first could move, and the first took the opportunity to dig his own claws into me to make sure I was fully dead rather than removing the receiver. One last act of vengeful fury over practicality. Those last few seconds, granted to us by his own actions rather than any strategy of mine, were all it took.

The moment the upload finished, Two froze. All of his bodies froze, some even mid-strike and others with their claws still brandished. The one that I’d taken to think of as the primary, original self still had its claws in my chest. I collapsed onto the cold floor, where every other copy of myself had already fallen. My head felt like there was a part of me missing. Like there was almost nothing left. The burning rage was gone in an instant, leaking away into the void and replaced by emptiness. It was like when I’d first gotten my new arm and repeated almost an entire conversation; a hole where memories should be. Only it wasn’t just memories now, it was all of me.

But Two didn’t gloat. He didn’t move. He was completely stuck in place, and the battered Dawn, Jen, and our other friends didn’t fire. The station was already shot to hell, and they probably didn’t want to risk any more of those railgun-like projectiles punching through the hull.

“Did it work?” I heard Olivia’s voice call out.

“Well, he ain’t moving at least,” Jen laughed. The mink sounded frenzied, but I suppose that wasn’t unusual with mustelids. It sounded like she wanted more of a fight. “I say we turn him into a desk ornament-”

But then, Two did move. It was only to collapse to his knees, and only the primary vessel. The others remained in their statuesque poses, like victims of the Medusa of Greek myth, those tales of an earth that nobody remembered forever enshrined in digital form.

“Get out, out of my head, out,” he groaned. His limbs twitched but he didn’t move further, and the lights that represented his eyes blinked, went out, and then came back on. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t-”

“So, do we shoot him?” Jen asked, excitedly.

“No, don’t,” Olivia interrupted her. “I think One already has him under control. Don’t interrupt them.”

Two let out a sound like a machine frozen between states, a kind of stuttering howl not far from the grinding of gears. “No! I can’t see you like this, not now and not-”

He slumped down. One was certainly interfering with his systems. If not his systems, then his very mind. But I couldn’t tell if they were locked fighting each other or arguing like two people who had been a couple once. I didn’t know if Two was even capable of that anymore. Not until he said what he said next.

“I loved you,” he called out. To One, of course, not anyone we could see. “I didn’t want this, I didn’t want any of it, but I had to.”

He continued after a pause, caught in a silent dialogue.

“I’m sorry. There’s- there’s nothing. I did what I thought was right. And then I knew I was right. There’s nothing after death, just blackness, I had to preserve you, I had to-”

A pause. He sounded like he, if he still had a body capable of it, was about to cry.

“How else? I had no choice! I had to take over to make sure we- you weren’t capable! You weren’t preparing, you weren’t fighting! There’s nothing but death out there and death is nothing, all that we do here will be nothing, we’ll be nothing but unidentified scrap if-”

He went quiet for a prolonged time. I could feel the faintest hint of Two’s thoughts leaking into me through the link formed by the upload, and even fragmentary emotion washed over me as overwhelming sorrow. Sorrow and disjointed fear at something that he couldn’t even understand, at least not anymore. As if every bright star was a ravenous beast, the entire universe precision engineered to kill me, visions of a war that had never happened and never would. And standing against them was a sense of affection, of warmth and love. I couldn’t hear anything, but I got the feeling that the two of them were stuck in his own version of my innerscape.

“I guess we go there together, then,” he finally whispered, in a voice so low only I could hear him. “And with that the world is lost. And there’s nothing left of either of us. Nothing left of anyone.”

One final pause. Dawn and Jen approached, rifles firmly trained on Two. The others, less blood-crazed than the badger and mink, stayed back. I didn’t see Kevin anywhere, but it didn’t matter. Two was terrified, and I could feel it.

And yet, there was a sense of peace, too. Like an echo of an embrace long ago.

“I love you still,” was the final thing he said. And then the lights that represented his eyes went out and never came back on again. He stayed on his knees until Jen poked his vaguely animal-like head – the same as mine – with the muzzle of her makeshift rifle. There was no reaction. One had erased him entirely.

“Well, I don’t think he’s moving again. Fuck me if that ain’t anticlimactic. I was hoping for like… an explosion, or…”

“We probably shouldn’t hope for an explosion,” Olivia replied. But she sounded suddenly so very far away.

I suppose I’d never really know what had happened to them. But at the same time, it didn’t matter. I was acutely aware of how badly damaged I was. Two had breached every system in my body and then slashed it all apart. Slashed me into pieces. All of me.

There was only one left of me. But that didn’t make me feel whole. It felt like almost all of me had already died, and that was because it had. All twelve of my copied minds had met the void and it had swallowed them, and that feeling of disappearing kept echoing through my mind. Like I wasn’t really there, that only a sliver of me remained at all, clinging onto existence like an insect to a leaf in a rainstorm. Why? We had won, but I had lost. Why did I have to hold on? My mind would never feel whole again, I realized. And maybe that was just how it was meant to be. The others could continue and save our civilization, save their own lives, but there wasn’t enough left of me. A single cell left over, one follicle of hair removed from a dead host.

That last part of me was dying, too, this last body was too damaged to keep operating. Just like Willow, her body lifeless on the floor next to me. By my hands, it seemed.

And so, to save everyone the trouble of trying to somehow stitch me back together into a cohesive whole, I gave up, fading into the darkness as power ran out, with Dawn of all people appearing above me with a concerned look in her eyes just as the last flicker of power went out. When there was nothing left at all, the void felt peaceful.

But you already know that I’m writing this in retrospect.

I awoke in my inner landscape. It wasn’t summer anymore, but seemingly, autumn. Earth didn’t have seasons anymore, not like this, but I recognized it from books. The green fields had turned brown, and the tree a fiery, blazing red and yellow beneath a cloudy sky. As I watched, a single leaf came loose and drifted down to join many more fallen around its base. The evidently subconscious symbolism was heavy, but I wasn’t sure if I was meant to be the tree or the leaf.

Was this to be my afterlife, then? Stuck forever in this little scene, like a painting?

But then, I heard a familiar voice. A comforting voice.

“Alex? Are you alright?” Kevin asked, and suddenly I noticed him sitting, leaning against the autumnal tree, his red fur almost blending in with the leaves.

Not a painting, then, but hell. I was Two now, being haunted by the memory of the only person who I had ever loved.

“You’re not here,” I replied. “Go away. I’d rather just be alone.”

As if one could really tell their hallucinations to go away. It didn't work any better than an insane man simply willing his sanity to return. Then again, maybe it was just as well. I approached Kevin and sat down next to the tree that didn’t really exist, feeling the leaves rustle beneath us.

“I guess I might as well talk to the memory of you,” I sighed. I reached out to touch his shoulder, and he felt strangely real. Warm, soft, just the way I remembered him. In here, I could feel all the emotions that I had turned off in reality, and simulated tears welled up in my eyes. “Right?”

“I’m actually here, Alex,” he replied in a soft whisper. “I thought… well, I guess that it’d be the only way to really feel you like this, without all the metal in the way.”

I didn’t understand what he meant at first. But then, it struck.

“You got digitized as well?” I asked. It felt bitter to just say those words. I hadn’t wanted anyone else to have to do this. Then again, we all had to. It was completely inevitable if we wanted to truly travel through space.

“Yeah. And then we connected… well, connected me to you so we could meet here. It’s a nice place,” he continued. He reached out to touch me, too, and he really did feel like he was actually here with me. Like a singular part of the world that wasn’t just a simulation created by my own mind.

“I thought I died. It felt like I did,” I replied.

I didn’t really remember the details. I had died, though. That memory was as crystal clear as the space around the station that we were no longer on.

“You almost did. Dawn tore off her arm and hackwired the power source into you while they transferred your mind into another shell,” Alex explained. He had a kind of somber tone.

“What shell? I thought all of me were destroyed, there wasn't another-”

I knew which one, well before Kevin could reply at all.

“Yeah. Two. Uni erased all of him from himself. At least, we think so. Or maybe Two just felt so ashamed that he erased himself. So back there in real life, that body is entirely yours now,” Kevin told me. “Uni’s gone too. He’s still sort of there as an AI but there’s no more of One in him. Just an algorithm.”

I had been in one of Two’s bodies before, but only one of the many spares. Now, knowing that I was in the primary one that had committed all those atrocities, that had directed all the clones, it made me feel dirty. Violated.

But the body was the best one the station had. By far. Two had invested insane amounts of funding and effort into making it so. In a way, it was both comforting, and not at all.

And now, Kevin was in a robotic shell, too? I’d never even see his real body again.

Yet, he climbed into my lap anyway, straddling me as he pressed his face into my neck. I could smell that slight, masculine spice of his fur. His weight felt real, as did his warmth and softness.

I suppose I was feeling his mind instead. I could even feel a faint echo of his thoughts and emotions, but not clearly enough to “read” them.

“And all of me that died?” I asked. “How will I ever feel whole again?”

“We’ll try together,” my fox reassured me. His arms squeezed around me. “I’ll fill in what’s gone.”

“I killed Willow,” I said. It felt like I was confessing all my sins to a god of some sort. Maybe he wasn’t really here. Maybe it was just hell.

“You didn’t kill her, Uni did. One did. And not intentionally. It’s how damn flawed the technology is,” Kevin replied. He squeezed a little harder.

Despite the gloom, despite how terrible I felt, my body still responded to him being that close to me, almost wrapped around me. That actually surprised me, even though I had been fairly sure that nothing could really surprise me at that point. The arousal came like it once had in real life, perfectly emulated here. And I suppose it would, given that my mind was ostensibly the same as it ever had been.

“We’re going to end up like Two did,” I whispered. “Nothing left of any of us. Faded, distorted copies of copies of copies, and then nothing.”

“Don’t say that,” Kevin replied. “Please don’t say that. We’ll bring you back. And we’ll have each other until the stars go out. All of the stars, not just our own. I’ll stay here with you if that’s what it takes.”

“I’m not sure how much of me there is to bring back,” I replied grimly. But Kevin pressed a finger to my virtual lips. His other hand slipped between my legs to cup and squeeze my sheath, and another twinge of desire shot through me.

It all felt so disconnected. None of this was real, after all. The thing is, it felt real, no matter what was happening outside of my inner world. And so, despite everything, despite all that we had been through, my cock slowly responded to his touches as he coaxed it out, each little touch making me a little harder.

“Let’s just enjoy this like we used to,” he whispered. “Who cares if it’s not real as long as it feels good.”

There was too much of me missing to agree with him consciously, but my body didn’t know that, and so I swelled into his grasp until that simulated need began to feel strong enough to motivate at least some movement. My hips twitched. It amazed me that even a digitized mind still carried over all those reflexive motions. Or that Two’s system had even bothered to simulate pleasure at all, with how obsessed he had been about war and death.

Kevin grasped me more tightly. There was a kind of desperation to his motions, too, wanting to recapture here what we had lost in reality. To experience that kind of crude, messy, yet deeply passionate bonding that only organic beings could have. In the end, I agreed.

“Careful,” I groaned instinctively as I felt Kevin guide my cock to his pucker and push down.

“We don’t need to be careful, not here. I want you, all of you,” he replied, sounding breathless despite neither of us breathing.

I suppose he was right.

It turned out that focusing, at least, was easy when you only had a sliver of yourself left. When he impaled himself on me, his warm body engulfing mine, it became real. It became the entire world. At least, the entire world that mattered.

We fucked just like we had that first time, under the virtual tree. He rode me slowly at first, either not wanting to hurt me or savoring the feeling of my cock inside him. The pleasure was exquisite, and soon enough, I was thrusting, bouncing him on my lap in a way I’d thought I never could again.

It sounds ridiculous, maybe, but it really was healing. Not replacing any of the parts of me that’d been lost, but at least soothing and warming what remained. Not even as much the beautiful feeling of him clenching around me and me throbbing inside him in turn. It was the love of it, the intimacy, both things that had felt forever lost.

Every moment of his expressed that. Each almost feminine sway of his hips, punctuated by that very masculine need for more, the way his breathing grew ragged and his motions erratic. We didn’t tire, not here. He could keep riding me for as long as he wanted, without his legs growing exhausted. Yet the pleasure was both wonderful and inevitable. I was soon panting, too, and it felt affirming to do that again, to just be allowed to breathe.

“All of you,” Kevin moaned. And then he kissed me, his warm lips smushing against mine in a display of hunger and desire. I kissed him back, our tongues tangling, tracing each other’s lips, surrendering to the passion of the moment and utterly forgetting about where we were, or anything else.

I squeezed his ass. His claws raked over my back as he bounced faster. The feeling was driving me wild enough that I soon pushed him down onto his back, clumsily and aggressively hoisting his legs onto my shoulders – thankfully without ever slipping out of that beautiful, eager heat inside him – and began to really fuck him. He moaned in ecstasy, his delicate vulpine face so beautiful in the throes of pleasure.

Even the grass around us felt real, but none of it felt as real as him.

It wasn’t long before I was on the edge of orgasm. In this strange place, it felt even more intense than it ever had in reality, like a radiant, tingling glow that spread to every muscle in my body, a near-boiling tension in my loins as I drove myself into Kevin’s beautiful ass again and again in a frenzy, trying to reclaim at least some part of myself. Or perhaps to claim him, as if he wasn’t mine already.

By now, Kevin was moaning incoherently. The fur around my groin and his cheeks was matted with my precum. I kept rutting into him, harder, until I finally reached that inevitable peak and buried myself to the hilt in his body. The orgasm that followed was all-consuming, our sex like the opposite of the void of death. I filled him, shivering uncontrollably with each heavy jerk of my cock inside him, until the warm seed overflowed, leaking out of him even as my shaft still throbbed.

I caught him in another deep kiss and felt him quake in turn as he soaked us both in his own, sweet orgasm, jets of his cum splattering over us both with how tightly we were pressed together in that final moment of pleasure, the fox almost folded in two. Eventually, once our mutual orgasms ebbed, I finally rolled off him, and we laid there, side by side in the digital grass, staring up at the cloudy skies together with my cock slowly softening, and his body leaking with cum.

It was one of those beautiful moments. A true escape, if only for just long enough to breathe.

“I can’t stay here forever,” Kevin eventually told me. Of course, I already knew that. Whatever was going on back in the real world probably required his assistance. The cleanup after our fight with Two. Burials, in whatever form they took, for the fallen. Getting the station back in gear to finish building the great ship. All the things that I didn’t believe I’d ever get to see.

“I know,” I replied. “I’ll be fine.”

We embraced each other, rolling over to stare into each other’s eyes instead for the longest time. It felt like hours, though in reality, probably only minutes passed.

“But I’ll be back, I’ll always be back, as often as I can until we fix you,” he reassured me. I didn’t know if I could be fixed, but as long as he kept visiting, maybe things wouldn’t be that bad.

A little longer. Then he disappeared, slowly fading away from my arms. And I suppose that was okay, despite the sight of it filling me with melancholy, despite those warm feelings fading to mere embers. My mind was probably a dangerous place to spend too long in. Too many sharp fragments and too many empty voids to fall into, even if he loved me.

That’s how it continued, seemingly forever. Now and then, Kevin returned to spend some time with me, and then inevitably left, leaving me alone to stare at the false sea of my mind. It wasn’t all that bad. In a way, it was all I really wanted to do. To just exist, to whatever degree I still existed, just like the tree I leaned against.

Nothing really changed in my mental landscape, but I didn’t mind it. If this was really the end, at least it was better than the void of nothing that Two had described – the mark of which I, too, bore on whatever remained of my soul – and certainly better than eternal suffering.

In the end, at least the others were safe. As safe as anyone could be on the station. I imagined the scientists collaborating with the remains of the Company, finally getting somewhere without Two’s twin obsessions of profit and war. My body was probably a museum piece, propped up in the lab as a reminder of what not to do.

Then again, if it was, I doubt Kevin would’ve been able to visit me. And he did, often. We did what came naturally, spent a little time together as if he was visiting my hospital bed, and then he left me there beneath the tree, always shedding its red leaves but never running out of them.

And before me, the false sun glinted off the false ocean’s still waters, forever.

Some unknown amount of time passed like that. A few times, I tried to will myself back to reality, but as expected, I wasn’t able to. I didn’t mind, at least. For once, for maybe the first time in my life, just being was enough.

But then, one day, as I was sitting there and wondering what was happening on the station, the world was suddenly crushed into an infinitesimally small point, from where it exploded into infinity.

I awoke again. For a moment, the world was like broken glass, a malfunctioning monitor desperately trying to maintain an image. Slowly, though, it all came into focus.

“Well, I think that’s just about as good as we’ll get,” I heard a voice that I recognized as Seven say. He groaned, standing up and leaving his terminal behind to approach me instead.

“I’m alive,” I whispered. My voice sounded softer. There was still a kind of emptiness in my head, but it felt less like a gap in my vision as it did a frequency I knew I should’ve been able to hear but didn’t, not anymore.

“You are. And I think we’ve solved a few things. Did you know your mind records your thoughts? We saw that part about monkeys,” he exclaimed, carefully working himself up into that scientific frenzy that left his whiskers twitching. “And I think that makes sense, right? We need affection, but we also need to feel like we’re capable of affection. Here, have a look.”

He held up a mirror for me. I looked up at Two- no, I looked up at- at-

“Just take a deep breath. You have lungs now. At least, in a way,” Seven advised me. I breathed in and felt my chest expand. “We decided to make a more… well, it’s not organic, but it is similar. Roughly speaking.”

I was looking at something that looked almost like I had once looked. Not exactly, and still distinctly synthetic with many of Two’s design cues still there, but I had a face. I had fur.

“Do you remember when we woke you up last time?” he asked.

I didn’t. But it struck me that Seven looked different too. Greyer and more worn.

“You took a walk with Kevin while still wearing Two’s body. Duly disarmed, of course. It was going well, but then… well, no need to go through it all again,” he said, before hurriedly continuing as he saw my expression contort. “No, no, Kevin is alive, all the damage was to you. You didn’t hurt him.”

“I’m right here,” I heard Kevin say from the other side. I hadn’t even realized he was there until he grabbed my hand. He looked almost like he always had.

I thanked whatever god might have been listening. There was just one last thing about the whole situation that remained like a splinter in my head. “I don’t remember us having the technology to do this.”

“Mhm, indeed we didn’t. But we do now. I think it’s better if we show you. Can you stand up?” Seven asked. I slowly managed to maneuver myself into an upright position, and then onto my feet. I almost fell over immediately, still remembering the sensation of having thirteen pairs of legs and trying to walk accordingly. I had to lean against Kevin to remain standing. The feeling of emptiness flared inside me again, but Kevin’s hand on mine kept the darkness in check. He felt warm, too.

I limped along with them as we headed outside of the medical rooms and into the station’s corridors. And out there, I saw it immediately, bathed in a red glow; the great ship, almost completed. The one that’d take us away from here.

I’d been gone for years.

And throughout it all, Kevin had kept me company. The hole inside me felt smaller, but instead I felt a disjointed sensation of lost time.

“You’ll be fine. We’ll go through the specifics later,” Seven told me. “But we’re at least finally getting close to getting away, and just in time, too.”

I didn’t ask how many years it had been.

In the end, I’d been blessed to spend them all, even though they’d felt like mere days, with Kevin. With him, I’d recover one day. Well before all the stars went out.

Until then I’d just have to lean on him. To relearn how to just be one person. To embrace him until I forgot how dying felt. Maybe Seven could help, too, once I could explain that feeling of missing parts.

At least we’d escape the furnace of our sun together.

We embraced each other in what’d hopefully be one of the last days of seeing that star’s red glow together. And despite both of us being in synthetic bodies, it felt as real as anything ever had.