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Furnace of Stars

Chapter 6

I leaned over to kiss Kevin’s nose before stepping into the airlock. It wasn’t really a kiss, and I didn’t have a mouth, but at least his lips touched my new, metallic muzzle. That was enough; the gesture was real even if the act wasn’t, and it carried all the same intimacy. I felt his warmth on me like that, and it was a pleasant, if bitter reminder of what I’d now lost. At least mostly. There might, one day, be a chance to be with him in either a less warlike, lethal vessel, or even in a virtual space.

But I couldn’t let myself get distracted.

“I don’t think these will open if there’s nothing docked,” Jen remarked. “I mean, they are meant for ships, aren’t they?”

We stared at the airlock for a moment. It was too large to be for maintenance. She was probably right. There was no real reason for them to open if there was nothing but the fathomless void of space outside. But then again, I looked at my arms and the composite metal claws extending from my fingers. This body was full of equipment like that. More parts designed purely to rend, tear, and kill.

I wasn’t fully familiar with the frame’s capabilities, but this was a body Two had made for himself, and he was both violent and paranoid. All hundred or so of him.

“The problem is, assuming their section is built the same as ours, and the airlocks won’t open without a ship… especially from the outside,” Jen mused. Somehow, she looked amused despite the grim situation. “Well, you have two choices. I’d bet fuckin’ anything that your body can hack the door locks. Or it can hack them. So, either make it think a ship has docket, or just tear off the outer gate, yea?”

“If you tear it off, won’t opening the inner gate depressurize the entire section?” Kevin asked, sounding nervous.

“Not if you’re fast enough in closing it. Can’t imagine that body getting sucked anywhere it doesn’t want to go. Just dig your claws into the floor and kick the door shut,” the ferret grinned. Sometimes, I wondered if she was even crazier than Two. Thankfully, she was, at least, on our side.

“Them’s the breaks, I think,” she concluded. “Up to you what we do, because if you don’t, we all probably die.”

“I’ll do it. Just be ready. Because I think if I succeed, we’ll all be fighting for our lives next time.”

That was the long and short of it, really. I touched Kevin’s shoulder, said my goodbyes, and then opened the inner airlock door. It opened effortlessly, and I stepped inside.

“Be safe. Please. I love you,” the fox said mournfully. I didn’t dare look back, becase if I saw him with tears in his eyes, I wouldn’t be able to do this at all.

Instead, I pulled the door closed and secured it with the valve inside. The monitors inside the airlock, digital and disinterested, informed me that it was perfectly sealed.

“If you – BEWARE THE VOID – lose grasp on the station, you will float out there – IN THE VOID – until you crash into a planet and DIE ,” Uni warned me, through the station's generic AI message, in its usual, broken manner. Of course, it wasn’t just an AI. It was what remained of One, Two’s former lover, forever immortalized as a digital servant.

But One wasn’t completely subservient. So, there was that. I couldn't tell if he was helping us all to survive, just helping me out of malice and revenge, or out of some hopeless desire to save Two

“I know,” I replied, inside my own head, which was also where I heard One’s voice.

Okay. I wanted to take a deep breath, but of course, I no longer breathed at all. And so, I set the airlock to cycle. There was a deafening rush of air, but the forming vacuum didn’t really bother me whatsoever. I felt as cold as I had since I was placed into this vessel.

I missed breathing, in some strange way.

The hissing of rushing air eventually slowed down and then stopped. I unsealed the outside door with the valve on it, and then pressed the button labeled open to unlock it. Thankfully, the system obliged me despite there being no ship there, but the fact that the unlock button was on the inside was bad tidings for what I was about to do. Maybe. I knew precious little about space travel.

But I couldn’t hesitate now. Really, I never could’ve. I pushed it open, staring into the emptiness of space. Earth was, thankfully, right in front of me as the door opened, with the dying sun leaving it looking almost black rather than the blue and green it had once been.

Still, it served as a point of reference. I thought about it briefly, how every single moment of my life until the last few months had been down there. Up there. Over there. There was no real direction here. Then, I leaned outside and firmly grasped the handles on the outside of the station, placed there so that maintenance workers could, if necessary, repair the hull.

The airlock closed automatically behind me, and I reached to turn the valve to seal it as well, so that there wouldn’t be a risk to the only two friends I still had. Then, I was truly alone, in perfect silence, as I looked at the journey ahead.

I didn’t really know how big the station was, but it looked massive. It was a circular shape, and I’d have to climb all the way to the next section, which I couldn’t even see from here. If, at any point, I lost my grip, that’d be that, just like One had told me. I’d drift for endless days, following the station’s orbit in space. Though hopefully I’d eventually crash back to earth. Better that than… no, I banished the thought entirely. I couldn’t even think of failure. There was only one route, one possibility.

And so, I started to traverse the outer hull. It was eerie how grabbing the handles produced no sound whatsoever, but how would it have? I felt them, ice cold in my metal palms, just like the rest of me. Two point seven Kelvin, my heads-up display informed me. I had no idea how cold that really was, and I didn’t think about it as I kept moving.

Three points of contact, just like when I had climbed back on earth. Hand, foot, hand, foot. I didn’t care to take any risk whatsoever, which made the journey both excruciatingly slow and utterly horrifying, or it would’ve been if I hadn’t turned down the simulation of fear as low as it’d go. I only felt a mild unease, a kind of warning that something could go very wrong here. No disorienting terror the way organic beings felt it, more akin to tilt warning in a stationary machine.

Not that I wasn’t objectively afraid regardless. It wasn’t an easy feeling to quantify.

Hand, foot, hand, foot, with the red sun illuminating the way. It went on for what felt like forever, until eventually even that unease has dissipated into the emptiness surrounding me. I wondered how I’d make my case with the scientists of the third section. It was possible that they didn’t know anything about what was going on. It was equally likely that Two and his many bodies had already been attempting to kill them, or even that he had been successful.

I saw three scenarios, as I grasped handle after handle, creeping across the station’s hull like a flea on a titan.

Number one: They had no idea what was going on. That was the idea scenario, if unlikely. If I explained what was going on, they’d have no real choice but to help me, even if I didn’t know how we could match Two yet.

Number two: They were all dead, in which case we were all dead, with little chance of deposing Two and refocusing the station’s work on a ship that could take us far from the dying furnace of the sun.

Number three: They had been attacked but fended Two off, which was almost as bad as the second scenario, because I looked exactly like Two, and I’d be tearing up one of their airlocks and risking the integrity of their entire section. In which case I’d most likely get shot on sight, and then I’d kill them all.

That thought wasn’t mine. It sounded like Two. Was it? I felt a flash of anger. No, not even anger, but fury. My claws suddenly sliced right through the handle I was holding, and my right foot slipped immediately afterwards, leaving me hanging on the precipice of oblivion by one hand and one foot. In a moment of panic, I dug that hand’s claws into the hull itself like four pitons.

Internally, I was panting, my heart beating so fast that I was afraid it might burst. But of course, my mechanical body reflected none of that panic.

Emotional flux, I told myself. That was what Seven and the other scientists had called it; the scrambled, often flaring emotions that resulted from the mind protesting its digitization. You’re not being possessed by Two. Just because it’s his body doesn’t mean he has magical wireless access to it.

But was I becoming like him? Was it impossible to be fully mechanical and not be driven mad, even without copying and dividing your consciousness?

I regained my grip on the station and continued onwards. It wasn’t long before I found an airlock. Each section of the station had, to my knowledge, two. I had exited through the second of The Company’s entrances, and that meant that this was the section I was looking for. Next to it, there was a cable jack, presumably where a docking ship would let the station know it was securely connected.

I had to hack it, and I knew that Jen knew exactly how to do that, but she wasn’t the one out here in a mechanical body, risking a very slow annihilation with every passing moment. Instead, it was me; an otter from a dying planet who had never seen this kind of technology before. There was the possibility that my vessel had some kind of automated function to connect to interface like that, but I didn’t even know where to start, and so, I pulled my arm as far back as I could and drove it through the airlock’s outer shielding, violently tearing up the cables and circuit boards within it.

The next split second, the door shot off with a blast of escaping air, nearly taking my arm with it. It blasted off into space, just like I would’ve if not for this body’s reflexes. Once all the air had escaped, I climbed inside. The inner door was the problem. I couldn’t rip that one off or – assuming that they had no retrofitted pressure-active blast doors – the station would be lost, which meant I had to override it, open it, and then hope that I could fight the vacuum pull of air from the station for long enough to pull myself inside, which was a feat that’d require incredible strength. Certainly, it’d be impossible for any living creature to do.

Of course, I wasn’t, strictly speaking, a living thing anymore. Just animated, a simulacrum. A copy, effectively, even if it felt like I had perfect continuity from birth to this moment.

I punched the override key and turned the valve. The door wouldn’t budge at first, but I adjusted my frame to maximum hydraulic pressure, dug my feet into the metallic floor and then through it, bracing against the station’s very bones, and pushed. Once again, there was the rush of air as the airlock opened into a narrow gap, then more and more as I forced it open with warnings blaring in my vision, cautioning me against massive overpressure in my hydraulics, but the door did open. And every single moment of forcing it I knew that if the station’s supporting infrastructure gave out, I’d be gone in a heartbeat.

Faster than a heartbeat.

I took a step, and then another, until the airlock was wide open, at which point I began to truly fight against the vacuum, crawling forwards with my claws shredding metal with each heavy movement. I wasn’t thinking; with how much power the systems of my body were consuming, there was nothing left for anything except a basic routine of survival at any cost.

Yet, I made it. The moment I was fully inside the station, the airlock slammed shut so violently that the entire section trembled, and even my warlike body finally lost its footing. I fell down, face-first against the cold, metallic floor.

“W- what just happened?” someone shouted in the distance.

“Airlock breach. It must be one of them,” someone else shouted back. Fuck.

By the time my systems had recovered enough to look up, it was to the sight of three armored women – a wolf, a tigress, and what had to be a badger, each varying degrees of augmented – each pointing a heavy-looking rifle directly at my face.

“Told you,” the heavyset badger scoffed. She had a mechanical arm, but nothing else, just like I once had, and to me, it seemed like she might have been struggling with the same kind of emotional flux, going by how furious grimace. “Told you he’d keep trying.”

Her finger tightened around the trigger. I had no idea how the weapon she was holding worked, but I imagined that it’d tear through me like my body was made of wet tissue paper.

“I’m not Two,” I shouted, as loudly as my body could muster. “I’m not. It’s his body, but I’m not him.”

“Hold,” the wolf growled, raising a hand. She didn’t have any visible augmentations, but that didn’t rule them out. Some were internal.

“He’s lying. It’s lying,” the badger replied.

The wolf looked at her. “How often have any of these things said anything? If it was a copy of Two, it wouldn’t be pleading with us,” she said.

“New strategy, maybe?” the tigress added. She was almost completely mechanical, like me, bar for the head. In a way, that made her look even more uncanny.

“I don’t know if Two is capable of any strategy at this point,” the wolf sighed, and then she turned to look at me again, though without changing her aim. “So, if you’re not Two, who are you, and what do you want? Don’t move a single cog.”

“My name is Alex,” I replied. “I’m in this body because it was the only way to reach you.”

“If that’s even remotely true, things have to be pretty fucking dire at the Company,” the tigress commented. “Fully digitized just to get… help?”

“Two has killed everyone in the Government section,” I continued, and I saw all three women flinch. “I don’t think he’ll stop there. And that will ruin our chances of ever getting away from the sun.”

The wolf sighed, lowering her rifle, leaving only two pointed at me. “So, he has completely lost it, it wasn’t just eliminating the competition. What happened?”

“I think grief over his lover’s death and splitting his consciousness into so many – dozens, at least – of these bodies,” I tried to explain. “We have to stop him, or nobody will survive.”

“Dozens?” the badger exclaimed, incredulous and angry. “We’re completely fucked already; there’s literally no chance-”

“There’s always a chance. If he’s telling us the truth,” the wolf said. “For one, we have an intact copy of his body to study. And we know something about his former lover.”

“His name was One,” I replied. “After his death, Two digitized his mind too and turned him into the station’s AI.”

“Holy- what? He did what? To his lover?” the tigress shouted. Her fingers tightened around her rifle. I could pick up the sound of the precision hydraulics whirring. “I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.”

Suddenly the wolf seemed lost in thought, her brown furrowing as she looked through me rather than at me. Some sort of idea or theory had to have just dawned on her, or so I hoped.

“What are you thinking? And what do we do with him?” the badger asked. “We certainly can’t just leave him.”

I didn’t say anything. Really, I had no right to. I think that for them, it would’ve been the logical decision to simply destroy me. Granted, that decision would also doom our entire civilization, because if we didn’t stop Two now there wouldn’t be enough people or resources to both stop him and get away from our home planet before it was far too late.

“Okay. Guns down, ladies. And you, up,” the wolf finally spoke. “We’re going to see just how much weaponry they pack into those bodies. All the ones that have come for us have been shot to pieces. But I have an idea. Dunno if it’s a good one.”

“You sure about this?” the badger snarled. “Think we won’t be spread all over the floor the moment we turn our backs?”

“Remember how, back in the day, we used to be scientists? Let’s be scientists again, if only for today, and not destroy our one intact sample,” the wolf sighed, and the badger hesitantly lowered her rifle. “I’m Olivia. Badger there is Dawn, and the tigress is Willow.”

I stood up slowly, trying to appear as unthreatening as possible, which wasn’t easy given that my body was explicitly designed to kill some unknown threat that probably only existed in Two’s fragmented mind.

“Do we think the airlock will hold? He kind of did a number on it,” Willow asked, adapting a pragmatic attitude. “Gods, I still can’t believe Two would do that. I talked to One, once…”

“It’ll hold. Just no more redundancy, so if there’s another breach we die,” the badger scoffed. “But I guess we’re taking over all of the station or dying anyway.”

I followed the three through the station. Soon enough we had a whole crowd of people following us. True to their goal of being a kind of scientific commune, there didn’t seem to be any consistent “look” or even uniform, not like my section. Everyone seemed nervous, and for good reason. They had been focusing on developing advanced technology, while the Company, under Two’s leadership, had been focusing on only one thing: weapons. At least, ever since One’s death, it’d been like that.

“So, what’s it like over there?” Willow asked me. I turned to look at her while walking.

“Our leader is waging a war against a threat that only exists in his mind,” I replied. “And he keeps killing his staff. And the staff of the other sections.”

The tigress sighed. “We saw it coming. It’s hard to make progress if your only real motivation is profit.”

“Even then it doesn’t make any sense. Who do we sell to if there’s nobody left alive?” I commented, a rhetorical question that had been plaguing me for a while now.

“I guess that’s the part where he went insane,” Willow replied. “But that system was never going to last anyway.”

We walked the rest of the way to what looked like a medical bay in silence, bar for the murmuring of the crowd assembling to watch the anthropomorphic war machine that was me walking among them. Many tried to whisper, but my sensors picked them up anyway. They were worried about battles, about death and war. I was, too. In the end, I suppose my goal in all of this was selfish. It was Kevin, and it’d always be Kevin. If we made it to a new home in the universe, that’d be good, too, but ultimately all I wanted to do was be with my fox. And right now, Two was standing in the way.

They guided me to lay down on an examination table, and I did so without questioning it. There it was again; that feeling of cold metal that I knew was cold, but only in an abstract sense. Most sensations and emotions felt like that now, bar perhaps for love and anger.

“We’ll just do a quick scan. Do you know if their bodies have any connecting ports?” Olivia asked me, toggling a few switches. Multiple mechanical arms descended from the ceiling, and for a moment, I felt a twinge of panic. “No, don’t worry, they’re just scanners. We don’t really do the whole butchery thing here.”

I chose to trust her, but turned off my vision so I could simply float in the darkness while they examined me. “I don’t know. I’ve not been in this body for long. I only had to so that I could… try to find someone to help us.”

I left out the part where the Two-copies had maimed my original body. We didn’t need more bad news about how lethal they were.

“Mhm. Understandable,” Olivia murmured. “We can’t muster up enough firepower to really stand a chance against Two and whatever other hellmachines you’ve developed. But we could, potentially, create an opening. You say he loved One, and then turned him into an AI?”

“As far as I know,” I replied. I didn’t feel One in my head at the moment. Maybe he could only reach me within our own section of the station. “He either died or was actively murdered by Two so that he could take over, and either way, Two was utterly destroyed by that loss because of how many copies of himself he had already made.”

I paused.

“I don’t know for sure,” I admitted.

“Admitting that is the first part of being a good scientist. I think Dawn would do well to remember that,” Olivia sighed. I heard something snap and had this mental image of the badger angrily breaking a pen in half.

The mechanical arms proceeded to drag over my body while humming and whirring.

“Looks like there’s about three times the hydraulics that you’d need for normal tasks. Mm. Nuclear batteries, I think. Yes, multiple ones, you heard that right,” Olivia murmured. She wasn’t talking to anyone, just taking notes.

“Multiple nuclear batteries? Maybe we could-” I heard the tigress say, but the badger interrupted her.

“No, we categorically can’t turn nuclear batteries into a bomb and if we could it’d still be an absolutely horrible idea,” she growled. I heard a bottle being uncorked. “We’re on a very fragile space station. And even then, the best fucking thing you could engineer him into is a dirty bomb which is even worse for us.”

“Well, sorry for thinking about possible solutions for our problems,” Willow sighed. “Do you have any better ideas?”

“No, don’t better me, that idea wasn’t good to begin with. Ask me if I have any good ideas,” Dawn shot back, and I heard her take a drink from the bottle she’d just opened.

“Do you?” Willow asked.

“No,” Dawn replied.

Meanwhile, Olivia was still analyzing my body, typing away on the computer attached to the arms and the “operating table”. It really felt more like a mechanic’s workshop, which I suppose wasn’t inappropriate, but it did make me feel more and more disconnected from my old self. I missed being warm.

“Entire outer shell appears to be a novel, extremely durable alloy. The frame has claws and wrist blades that appear to function like an extension of the arm itself. Excessively weaponized and armored, though I think our accelerator rifles could punch through. The problem is that they take time to charge,” she continued. “It appears that there is a small port in the neck for system updates. Could potentially be exploited if we can get past the claws. This one also has an inactive network chip, potentially only responding to the digital signature of Two’s own mental imprint.”

She paused.

“What are the chances that we can get close enough to plug something into Two’s neck? Like a chip with a viral payload,” she asked out loud.

“Basically, zero unless ‘Alex’ here does it,” Dawn replied. She sounded a little more relaxed, probably from whatever she was drinking. Probably vodka. “And besides, I’m pretty sure he has some pretty beefy firewalls and heuristic virus detection routines in there.”

“Mh, you’re probably right. Alex, you can get up. We have everything we’re going to get, so now we need to formulate a plan. Somehow,” Olivia told me. “It’s not like we really have a choice, if all we have is a bad plan it’s still better than no plan at all.”

I stood up again. The mood in the room was gloomy, at best. When I turned my vision on, it was to find Dawn – as expected – drinking directly from an unlabeled bottle of clear alcohol, Willow pacing nervously, and Olivia looking halfway between thinking and hopeless.

“Well, let’s consider what we can do,” I suggested.

Nobody replied.

I sat back down, looking around the room for any kind of thing that might spark an inkling of an idea. On the wall, there was a poster of a cat hanging from a ledge, with the text “Hang in there, baby” in bold letters. Somehow, I found it more insulting than inspirational. In the corner, near where Dawn was sitting, I saw a pile of empty bottles, which was probably how she kept some unwanted part of herself under control, or at least, sedated. Other than those two details, there was very little that was personal about the room. It was a cold, clinical area.

Two was rather like that, too. He didn’t show much of himself, beyond the anger. His office had all the accoutrements one might expect from a CEO, but I had seen him break so much of it with no remorse or hesitation. It didn’t mean anything to him. It was probably easier to just exist as a role, especially after One’s death. I still didn’t know if it had been his fault, but regardless of that, he didn’t have any kind of reminder or memento of him. I had never seen him talk to Uni, the digitized replica of his former lover, either.

Maybe that was something we could use, as much as it gave the feeling that I was some kind of terrible monster for even considering it.

I spoke up again, breaking the silence. “What if we tell him how One would’ve disapproved of what he’s doing?”

“You think he’d listen to that after killing him and subjecting him to a hellish fate?” Dawn grumbled.

“Do we have a choice? It’s either that, or we go in there with your rifles and my body, and try to get rid of every copy of him. And hope that none of them decide to scuttle the station out of spite,” I replied. I wasn’t frustrated, I think. But how could I really know? Carefully, I adjusted all of my emotions to a higher intensity.

“He’s right. Though, One is an artificial intelligence now,” Olivia stated. “So… wait, I think…”

And then she rushed off, rifling through drawers right next to the operating table, digging in there until she pulled out what I’d come to recognize as a wireless receiver, placing it on the side, and then digging more.

“Eh, I guess I’ll be a little hopeful,” Dawn slurred. She stood up, wobbling a little, the bottle already half empty. “At least the booze still does what it’s supposed to.”

I wanted to give the badger some advice on how to deal with those floods of emotions that our modifications often caused, but I got the distinct feeling that she preferred to ask the bottle. Certainly, it didn’t seem like she wanted my advice.

“What did you find?” Willow asked. Her voice was genuinely hopeful, enough so to make me wonder, too. The wolf had already practically emptied a drawer onto a desk, and she was quickly assembling something. She also didn’t answer the others.

“Her ideas, when she gets like this, are usually good. Good in the sense of using a bomb to put out a fire, but they do work,” Dawn mumbled, stumbling over to me. “You’ll see, robot clone. Maybe we’ll find a way to remote control you and him like those RC cars they used to have, just slam you into each other until you both break-”

“Dawn, maybe you should like… not get totally wasted just as we’re about to make important plans,” Willow suggested. She also came over to watch Olivia from my perspective.

“No, no, I drink so I don’t kill all of you because you’re so fucking irritating when you question my drinking,” she slurred, sat down, leaned against the wall, and in just a few moments, she was snoring.

“She’s been like that since she got the arm,” Willow sighed. “We figured it out pretty early in the process. It’s sort of like a thing with the neural processors…”

“We call it ‘emotional flux’,” I informed her. “Same problem everywhere.”

“But not everyone gets it,” she replied. “I don’t. How about you? I mean, you don’t have any biological parts of it to screw up anymore, so…”

The reminder was painful. Not that I wasn’t extremely aware of what I’d lost, what I’d sacrificed. It still hurt more when someone pointed it out like that. Like a scar that I’d already grown accustomed to, but that people couldn’t stop staring at and commenting on.

“I still get it. But it’s more manageable,” I answered.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to… remind you, I guess,” Willow sighed. She sat down next to me, and we watched Olivia work. Neither of us seemed to really know what she was doing as she connected that little receiver to a computer and booted up another device that I didn’t even recognize. It was strange to think that only months ago I’d never even used a computer at all. I guess learning was easy when you were constantly threatened by something.

Finally, Olivia returned to us, nearly stumbling over her own feet in evident excitement. She held up the receiver, now somewhat modified. “I think we can jam some data into Two’s personal network with this,” she beamed, sounding out of breath.

“But that’s assuming that he has no firewall and no antivirus?” Willow countered, her ears slowly folding against her skull. “I can’t imagine he’d forget to install those. And we’d still have to get close enough.”

“No, that’s not what I mean, I’m sure he does, but that’d only protect him against viruses, not an artificial intelligence, and also, Alex has the same body he does so they’ll probably use the same protocols, and I’m not sure if they could tell the difference,” Olivia continued, talking so fast that my language processors could barely keep up. “We’ll put their station AI into Alex and then use him to connect it to Two’s network!”

Willow pinched the bridge of her muzzle with a pained expression. “Okay, now repeat all that but slower, because even I didn’t-”

“I think she means to upload Uni into Two using me,” I said.

“Exactly! We’ll see how well he deals with having to confront his dead partner directly in his head! It sounds like they don’t get along, and that AI has to have orders of magnitude more processing power than Two, even if they’re all sharing the computational load!”

I thought about it. Uni did seem to be on our side. It felt incredibly cruel to force him into Two’s head like that, but then again, then there was the same question that kept echoing through my mind every minute of this journey: what other choice did we have?

A bigger concern was that I’d have to fit an entire second intelligence in my head and hope that it didn’t fry every inch of circuitry inside me. And then, I’d have to somehow get close enough to Two to make the upload happen, which would still take some time. It didn’t seem likely that he wouldn’t crush my body the instant he felt the transfer.

Granted, I had Dawn, Willow, and Olivia on my side, along with whatever fighters volunteered from this section. And there was one more potential reinforcement that we could tap into, as much as I didn’t like thinking about it.

I was, effectively, Two. He was controlling a legion of himself, and that meant that I could do the same, but there was a very real risk that it’d be the last thing I ever did. Still, I realized very quickly that I’d rather be insane or dead than take any risk of them hurting Kevin.

And so, I suggested it to them. Well, to the two who weren’t in near-comatose state of alcohol intoxication.

“That’s not safe, you saw what it did to Two,” Willow replied with heavy concern.

Olivia thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. It’s a risk. But we could probably duplicate these bodies here. But if it is like you said, you’re going to end up like Two.”

“Then again, wasn’t Two’s fracturing caused more by sorrow than sensory input?” Willow suggested, after a moment of thought of her own.

“Part of it must have been overloading his mind with input. But… you might have a point. That alone couldn’t be enough. Do you have anything you regret? Anything that would destroy you if echoed by a hundred or more pieces of yourself?” Olivia asked.

I leaned over, looking at my metallic hands. Probably just this body, I guess. I didn’t regret it, because it had to be done, but at the same time, I desperately missed the feeling of my original body, now discarded like any organic matter that was past its prime. I tried to imagine that feeling intensified a hundredfold. Maybe the fact that I had only done it to protect my love and help save our civilization would be the difference. Or maybe it wouldn’t, and I’d end up completely psychotic, just like Two, chasing shadows and ruled entirely by violent paranoia.

“How quickly can you do it?” I asked.

“Well, a few months…” Olivia started, interrupting herself when she realized it’d be far too long. “Okay, no. But we do have a stock of uninhabited bodies. They’re not weaponized like yours, but they could serve to distract him for at least long enough for you to do your thing.”

“Different bodies? That might make it even worse,” Willow pointed out. She was fidgeting with a pen now, flipping it between the fingers of her robotic arm. “We’ll end up with two murderous one-man armies on the station.”

Dawn snored. I was rather jealous of the badger not having to confront any of this, because it was incredibly stressful, even with a synthetic body like mine. It felt like my head was overheating. Nothing like organic stress, but recognizable in context as the same feeling. I didn’t much like it, but the easy escape of alcohol or drugs was no longer one I could take.

What I could do, though, was simply retreat into myself. It wasn’t only as an escape, though, but a plan, or at least, an idea.

“Let me think for a moment,” I told them.

I turned my attention entirely inward, and then I was there again, in that strange internal landscape. The lone tree on the hill, the sun that wasn’t warm, and the endless ocean that stretched into the distance. As I understood it, it was a little like dreaming, only I could exist here for as long as I needed while no time passed in reality.

I hoped that I’d be able to bring Kevin there, one day. Maybe I’d figure out a way to change the landscape, and we could just be together. It’d be as real as anything, even if it wasn’t real at all. Just imagining it, thinking about us together made me feel a little more comfortable again.

But he wasn’t what I focused on.

Instead, I tried to imagine myself in two places at once. Two minds connected and looking at the same object – the singular tree – from different angles. After all, why not? My mind wasn’t bound to any one, particular perspective in a completely fictional space. And the tree existed fully in my mind, so I knew what it looked like from every possible angle.

Sure enough, it happened. It was disorienting. I saw two perspectives overlayed on each other, except at the same time, not exactly. The other perspective wasn’t in my eyes, it was the kind of sight one had in a dream, or when imagining a scene_._ Vivid and accurate, but confusingly different regardless.

A third perspective, willed into existence. A fourth. A fifth. My head was swirling, seeing the tree from so many angles all at once. I tried to take a step, and took five, one of me stumbling and falling due to the disorientation of the little hill being steeper where he was standing, and that sensation of falling had all others fall, too. Staring at the blue sky, I thought about Kevin again, and that was when the true agony of multiple perspectives truly set in. In one mind, I thought of him snuggled up to me, here. In another, I thought of what I’d do if he died. In a third… no, it was too much, like having every possible thought at the same time. How many perspectives had I created, each running in parallel but not exactly the same due to some inherent entropy?

I could easily imagine it breaking me, and as I did, I also had to fight back the urge to think about what I’d lost, because I was suddenly perfectly aware of what’d happen if I let that thought spiral out of control. Instead, I focused on making all five imagined versions of me slowly get back on their feet, not focusing on any single one but letting their perspectives blur into mine. The next manifold step, I didn’t stumble. Maybe it could be done.

I don’t really know how long I spent there in my inner landscape, doing nothing but willing myself to move in coordination with my other selves. The longer I stayed, though, the more I could feel each perspective drift. And this was with merely different processes in the same mind. A physically separate mind, even if connected, would drift more. I could be angry, sorrowful, and happy all at once, and I knew it’d be overwhelming.

But as before, what choice did I really have? I hated that phrase by now. I had repeated it dozens, if not hundreds of times in my head. What choice did I have?

After what felt like an eternity inside myself, I finally left that mental landscape and returned to the real world, where Olivia and Willow were still looking at me as if no time had passed at all. Maybe it was a function of how much faster the processors in my head were than an organic brain ever could be, but it felt incredibly disorienting, like waking up from one of those dreams where you live an entire life over the course of a single night.

“I think I can do it. I hope I can,” I told them. I wasn’t so sure, but that one question kept echoing in my mind.

“Okay. It’s your choice. We’ll try to help as much as we can,” Olivia stated. “I’ll try to wake Dawn up so she can prepare the bodies. And weapons. Still not sure how we’ll get everything over to the company section after we sealed the transport tunnels, though.”

“Controlled demolition should work,” Willow mused. She suddenly sounded hopeful. “I think I could do it in a way that doesn’t punch through the outer hull.”

We had a plan, then. I wished there was a way to inform Kevin and Jen of it, but there wasn’t. I’d take control of every empty robotic body from this section. We’d tear through the sealed tunnel with Willow. Whoever volunteered would distract Two and any other security, led by Dawn, while Olivia and I would attempt to download Uni into my head. Then, I’d upload him into Two. It was a long shot, barely more than a roll of the die. We didn’t know if Uni would do what we hoped he would, but the AI had always seemed to be on our side. And it was he who had told me to come here for help.

The problem was that the instant we breached into the Company’s section, they’d probably know. And then it’d be open war. I didn’t know how many of them would be willing to fight, which was the same problem we faced. But even if nobody except us and Two fought, there were more of him than there were of us.

But at this point there was no point in worrying about it. They managed to wake Dawn up quickly enough, and though the badger complained about a headache, she still seemed happy to be doing something, rather than waiting for the next attack while unable to concentrate on research because of the anticipation.

She left, and soon enough, she returned with some ten robotic frames obediently following her. They seemed practical and simple, not styled after any particular species and lacking the kind of heavy armor or weaponry that I was built for.

“Yeah, see, that’s the thing. We didn’t fucking anticipate having to fight anyone, up here, not until recently. So, we made bodies that are practical for work and simply existing in once we make our long jump to the stars,” Dawn explained. “I mean, aliens don’t exist, or at least there’s no record of them anywhere in our history, and the station was meant to collaborate, approaching the same problem through three different perspectives.”

I nodded. “And instead, Two produced frames like mine, and then everyone had to fight.”

“Right. We wanted to be peaceful. Even these rifles,” she said, tapping the weapon that she’d placed on a desk. It looked a lot more primitive up close. “I had to improvise them with basic science. They’re kind of like a miniature prototype of how our colony ship’s engines would work once it’s done. Pretty destructive, but not intentionally so.”

“It’s probably this kind of thing that always led to us failing to leave earth,” I said. We’d never really know for sure, of course, but it seemed likely that there’d always be someone who refused to collaborate. Or one who simply broke when we reached this stage. If I wasn’t careful, I’d be next.

But I decided to be brave. For Kevin, if nobody else. I stepped closer to the first of the bodies, and waited for Dawn to connect me to it.

That sensation was the strangest that I’ve ever felt, I think. Like I was being stretched into infinity, falling into a black hole, except I was also still outside of it. An impossibly miniscule pinprick of light exploding into endless radiance. Reduplication, as if my entire mind grew from a single seed that produced the same tree I already was. Not an identical one, but the same. The birth of a twin, without a unique personality, just more of myself.

It felt just like it had in my improvised simulation, almost in describable. I raised an arm and saw two arms lift. Yet, with real gravity and touch, I managed to take a few steps without staggering.

“You’re in there now?” two of Dawn’s voices asked.

“Yes,” two of mine replied. “Let’s continue.”

Through some miracle of will, one of me stood still as the more weaponized one approached the second frame. Then the third. And so on. With each new body that I inhabited, the world grew more fractured and fragmented. I couldn’t keep track of where I was, where the original me was – the first copy, anyway – but it didn’t matter, because somehow, it was strangely intuitive at the same time.

“…feeling?” a cacophony of voices asked.

“…can do this – I think I’m okay,” some of mine replied.

Maybe not for long, though. I wondered how long it had taken Two to get used to it, and twelve parallel minds all answered the question with different nuance. One thing was certain, and I told Dawn as much. The instant Two had been taken out, she had to delete all these copies of me before anything bad could happen. Was that murder? Maybe. She’d kill a full-fledged me each time she pushed a button. But it’d be impossible for me to continue existing like this, like a legion of unfeeling metal, just as it had been for Two.

But once we had gathered everyone we could and armed them, heading towards the cargo tunnels, I realized that I could barely comprehend what my three companions said. Each copy of me heard them, yes, but each misheard, or simply didn’t hear, a different part of what they said. And each time I asked them to clarify, the result was the same. It wasn’t until I felt a warm hand against my chest that I suddenly regained some level of focus. Through one set of eyes, I saw Olivia, the wolf’s soft yet aged face showing significant concern.

“…for a moment. Are you still with us?” she asked.

Trying to answer with only one voice was like trying to breathe with only one lung. “It’s disorienting – confusing – strange,” I said, hearing myself echo through the other bodies. By now, I wasn’t sure if there was an original me. We were all copies of the original, or even copies of copies. “But I can- I think I can handle it – I can manage – I’ll be fine.”

“I hope you can. Remember, once we breach the section, we find the nearest terminal and download Uni into your head. Then, you only focus on Two. We’ll find Kevin and Jen and anyone else who needs help. Don’t think about anything other than getting close to that asshole and connecting to his network.”

“I understand – I know – I hear you – I’m aware – Acknowledged,” I heard myself reply. Oh, this would end poorly, wouldn’t it?

I couldn’t tell any of my thoughts apart from the next. There was no original; he had died the moment I was first digitized. Worse yet, twelve of these copies of me would never leave this station, win or lose.

We only had one shot.