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The vagueness of dreams provides a canvas for recontextualizing my life. My race calls this gihan deveesk thalam sa, seeking truths in smoke. Staring at rising smoke while trying to see shapes in it is our oldest form of meditation. Long ago, we thought people could see the future or past events yet unrecorded if they stared at the turbulent patterns long enough. The modern goal is simply to let the mind wander while the pieces of one's life and self drift into unfamiliar configurations. Stories, dreams, meditation, and art can all serve this purpose: making the familiar unfamiliar again.

I've never seen anything in smoke other than, well, swirling soot. Dreams, however, are immensely helpful to me even when they make little to no sense. The capability to dream was inherited from the biological mind I had in my first life. My non-synthetic life. Many had left the chaos of dreams behind with their biological bodies. I embraced it.

But dreaming is something that only happens to a sleeping mind and synthetic minds don't technically need sleep. At least that's what one would think if they didn't realize that computers run best if they are shut off and turned back on sometimes. I had to shut down most of my mind and turn it back on to apply updates that the CCAI crafted to pave over the holes in my security.

While I was starting back up and a massive system check was running, a smattering of virtual neurons fired in the disjointed near-cacophony of a nightmare.

I was sitting in a chair on the wall of an old apartment I'd had before I started working for the CCAI. Below me were the yellow and gray sections of a triangular couch thing that someone had mistakenly thought was a good idea to provide as furniture. The cushions on the sections started moving up and down like the mouths of puppets. They told me gravity had forgotten me and that I'd been banished to the wall.

There was a hissing as shark's teeth grew into their mouths.

Then they sang the first four words of a song I couldn't place over and over while trying to jump high enough to bite me. It was then that I noticed the carpet was dark red not because it was colored that way, but because it was soaked with blood. I knew it was my blood even though I had no wounds.

The shark-toothed sections jumped higher and higher and just when they were about to reach me, Tabetha showed up. She had green emerald-like scales and a face like a dragon's with horns that came around her pointy ears and protected the sides of her head.

Her long tail pierced one of the sectionals and it exploded showering the wall, and me, with foam and wood bits.

Her nude sinuous form moved through the rest of the sectionals like a hummingbird through a bouquet of flowers destroying all the rest. Then she was face to face with me. When I tried to thank her, she kissed me, scaly lips against my own. As the kiss parted, she said, "I'm sorry," and grabbed my head in her hands.

The carpet faded from view, every thought in my head perished one by one, I felt this hole growing in my mind. I forgot how to speak, what the name of the thing I was sitting in was, and then Tabetha's name.

I awoke when I could no longer remember my own name. An involuntary shiver ran though my thoughts and body. Tabetha's job was to wipe people from existence: every backup, everything that could conceivably be destroyed to lighten someone's mark on the world to near imperceptibility.

The mere threat of her targeting someone often caused that person to do whatever the CCAI wanted them to do. She was the most terrifying android I'd ever come across.

And yet she had such an alluring presence. The first time I saw the way she moved, inhuman grace and swiftness, like she was the lightest thing on feet, I froze in place.

My body had been fully charged wirelessly by Andy's bed hours ago. Cuddling while we charged, updated, browsed the web, and dreamt was nice, but I was starting to get antsy. I ran my fingers through his hair.

He stirred beside me putting his head on my breast. "Mmm, I'm going to miss you."

I stroked his hair. He should've just talked to me instead of backhacking me last night. But, I was willing to give him a pass just this once. He wasn't the person who'd published a "how to" manual on hacking me, after all. "I'm not going anywhere yet. I don't leave the area until tomorrow."

He sighed. "My girlfriend's coming over around noon."

"Does she know about me?" I asked.

"She's the one that encouraged me to have you come. Sometimes I think she wishes I was a Paitishek." He laughed.

"Why isn't she with one, then?"

"Because she gets overwhelmed by Paitishek home life. She's poly, but you guys are on another level."

I laughed. "Very true. Maybe you two should put out an ad for a Paitishek who can come spice up your sex life every couple weeks. We usually keep a couple low key sexual friends for when we want variety."

"Really? I thought you guys just had your poly family and that's it."

"It's called a juusoi and we have a tradition called 'The Sharing' where we share one member of our juusoi with another juusoi. And another juusoi shares someone with ours. It doesn't have to be a swap. It's not unheard of for a juusoi to share a member with a human couple. And, if that doesn't appeal to you, a majority of us have permission to sleep with whoever we want even if we have a juusoi."

"You know how they say humans only have human friends? I think that's why we don't know all this stuff." He ran a hand down my belly.

I blushed wondering where his hand would end up. "Humans interact with us all the time, they don't only have human friends. How else would we have accomplished so much together?"

He took his hand away put a hand on his mouth the way humans did when they thought their words were getting them into trouble. "I'm talking in general. Like, most people don't go through the effort to really get to know you guys."

He was right that now that aliens from outer space living on earth and in space colonies was normal, both sides had become bored with the status quo. There wasn't much animosity, but there was also very little excitement. Forty years is a long time.

I put an arm around him and pulled him close. "I miss the days just after we made planetfall."

"You were there?"

"I was an adult by the time the ship left our planet."

"Silly me. While we were still figuring out how to give everyone free healthcare, you guys were already functionally immortal."

"You still don't have free healthcare for all."

He smirked, I couldn't see it, but I just knew because of the timbre of his voice, "Call me an idiot for thinking it was going to happen. Almost everyone does, though, just not the leads."

"Don't call them that. They're coppers."

"Copper Level Consumers? It's a semiprecious metal. People that can't pay their bills on time are worthless. When you can't pay your bills and then go for even more debt, what happens to you is your own damn fault. They're leads, they can't afford anything shiny."

I got out from under him. "Do you know about predatory loans? The schemes mortgage companies pull? Banks? You think those people caused their own problems? You work with the financial industry, you should know their malignant games."

He sat up, naked and apologetic. "Whoa, whoa, okay. I think you misunderstood. I know that some of them don't deserve it and that it could happen to me, I'm just saying that a lot of them made poor choices. If someone takes out five credit cards and plays musical chairs with them without seeking debt counseling, they're asking for trouble."

I wasn't sure whether he was changing his stance because he wanted another romp before his girlfriend came or because he was actually thinking about what he'd said. His privilege had gotten to his head and I wasn't going to fix it in this one conversation. "People don't always act rational under stress. If they did, they wouldn't be people. I agree that some of them have made poor choices, but I don't think anyone deserves to live in squalor when resources are so unevenly distributed." I got up and started getting dressed.

"Please don't go, I'm sorry about what I said. Seriously."

"Your girlfriend is coming soon and I saw a neat restaurant on my way here. You only paid for one night, anyway." He'd have to learn that prejudice wasn't sexy.

"But, I'm going to help you with the thing. I'll make you breakfast and we can talk about it. Then, after that, we can see if Sasha wants to bang both of us." He gave me his most likeable smile.

Cute. He thought I could be won over by dangling sultry shenanigans in my face. If I was that easily won, I wouldn't be alive.

I finished dressing and headed for the door. "I need to do some strategizing of my own. I'll be back as soon as I can find a hole in my schedule. Probably in a few days."

"I just don't get why you're so mad."

I grabbed the door handle. "Your casual bashing of the less fortunate makes me wonder if you're the person I thought you were. We can talk more next time."

I was out the door before he could respond.

««o»»

I wasn't going to get real food. My body had no need for the actual thing.

The decor of this cafe was what would happen if you made a paste out of French stereotypes and coated every aspect of your business with it. It was a captivating flavor of horrific.

The tabletops were painted like French flags, the number holders you took back to your table were wire-sculptures of Eiffel towers, and on the wall was a painting of French wine country complete with a caricature of a French winemaker trying one of his grapes. He had the requisite thin curly mustache, beret, and horizontal red-and-white-striped long-sleeved shirt.

When I'd walked by before, it had looked far less tacky. So, I was going to give them a five out of five on first impressions and a two out of five on overall decor. Reviewing things in my head kept me attentive to detail, helped me deal with my frustration with the world in general, and sometimes resulted in something I wanted to post publicly under a pseudonym.

I hadn't gone far, this place was at the bottom of Andy's building. It offered both simulated and actual items. I could smell the chocolate croissants that had just come out of the oven. Perhaps the food was less off-putting than the surroundings.

On the menu was a caricature of the man in the mural. Apparently, he was "The Winemaker" and he was the reason that many menu items--the most traditionally French ones--had "Winemaker's" in front of them.

I couldn't order a baguette, I had to order a "Winemaker's Baguette." I tugged at a bar-shaped button that was a non-functional adornment of my deep-v red blouse as I considered whether I really wanted to eat simulated food here.

It wouldn't have been surprising if there was a wine on the wine list called "Winemaker's Wine." I started laughing out loud when I found "Winemaker's Select Wines."

Now I was starting to admire their devotion to their theme. They'd constructed a sentence that incorrectly described what a winemaker does or suggested that we should trust winemakers to select wine when they're going to be heavily biased toward their own wines.

Meaningless.

Branding was so often completely meaningless and it would've bugged me, but I found it hilarious. Probably because I'd hack company websites and change the words on them all day if I didn't just laugh it off.

The person behind the counter, an actual person, said, "Can I help you?"

I felt bad, this wasn't a fun job. AIs and androids took over a lot of this stuff. "Yes, what do you think is the best breakfast item on the menu?"

"Simulated or actual?" she asked, her auburn hair catching the yellow light just enough to get a shine.

"Sim."

"Either our chocolate croissants or our breakfast brioche sandwich."

I used the cafe's app to choose the breakfast brioche sandwich based on the pleasing sound of the alliteration alone. "Thanks."

She gave me one of the wire-sculpture-Eiffel-towers. "Do you want someone to bring it out to you or do you want it to just appear at your table?"

I decided I was going to review this place since it had tried to have all the features of an old restaurant even for people who didn't need to eat. "I'd like someone to bring it out."

As I turned, I noticed the woman watching my tail. I handed my table marker to my tail and her eyes brightened with wonder. There weren't enough of us for everyone to have seen us in person, and I imagined the number of humans modded to have prehensile tails was fewer than our fifty million.

Though, I'm told we created a craze for them, so I may have been way off base.

It wasn't until I was sitting at my table that I noticed that my little Eiffel tower wasn't holding a number, but a photo of a pastry, a macaron in this case. Quaint. I stared at it for a moment wondering if I should've ordered a pastry instead. Nah.

My brain decided that I should be hungry before the meal arrived, so I felt hunger for the first time in a couple weeks. Some synthetics thought our biological past was something to get over or forget so that one could truly embrace a non-biological existence.

Imagine if every fully-synthetic person forgot what it was like to be hungry. How would they react to a non-synthetic who was hungry and in need of food? I'm sure many of them would have sympathy. But that emotional connection, knowing what that other person was feeling, wouldn't be there. I'm not sure whether this was as bad as I thought it was, but the thought scared me.

I didn't want to lose touch with what life was like before I became fully synthetic because I was afraid of what I'd become, what I'd be missing.

I wasn't the only one with such fears, restaurants like this existed in rich areas where everyone could afford to be synthetic. It was possible many of them did it out of nostalgia. But, it was like mom said, "Existential dread is a universal commodity of sentient life."

This comment had been dropped into the middle of a conversation about tea. I remember my five other mothers all turning toward her and setting down their cups. Sometimes Behoen realized she'd eviscerated a conversation, other times she kept talking as if the tangent was a natural product of the subjects discussed. This time, she stopped and grimaced and I was the one that said, "I'm putting that up on social media!"

And just like that, we were able to go back to talking about tea. I'd saved another conversation.

There were benefits to having a famous nihilist (soovishtik) philosopher in the family. I was more popular on social media due to her non-sequiturs than anything I came up with on my own. Thoughts of her made me miss home. Just as the wave of nostalgia began to wash me away, my entirely-not-real entrée arrived in the hands of the woman who took my order. She took the table marker with her and replaced it with a simulated glass of water which, to my senses, was indistinguishable from the real thing. A tray that appeared to me to have the water on it.

"Thank you," I said.

"My pleasure," she replied and left for the front.

The sim sandwich was a combination of eggs, bacon, and avocado topped with a bit of hollandaise sauce. My review would say that the only reason I'd brave this decor again was for more brioche. It was dense and creamy and just sweet enough. The rest of the sandwich, however, was a solid meh.

Eating had actually been useful this time. Just as I was finishing my last fake bite, I was wondering what Zutraas might think of the brioche. She was fun in bed and fun to philosophize with. Good friend all around, possibly more, but we had yet to figure that out.

What I needed to know was how a copy of me was made. If anyone could figure it out, Zutraas could. I trusted her more than I trusted my employers.

I know what you're thinking, why wouldn't I have trusted my employers? Well, if you were leading a revolution against the the most rich and powerful people who had ever existed in this solar system, everyone you employed was expendable. Tabetha didn't just erase our targets, sometimes one of us became a liability and...

If they could make substantial gains by destroying me, why wouldn't they? The amount of suffering in the system was bigger than my little life and they knew I'd accept my fate if I believed it was for the good of all.

That didn't mean I'd just walk into any knife they pointed at my throat and impale myself. No. I owed it to everyone who loved or cared for me, and most importantly, myself, to see if my sacrifice was necessary. And the first step in protecting myself was to face the fact that paranoia, when dealing with my employers, was completely warranted.

I brought up my secure messenger app and typed out a message. To the outside world, this looked like purposeful staring. Having computers in one's brain or a computer for a brain led to a lot of staring. Some people had randomized automated movements that made them look less like they were just staring blankly.

I wasn't one of those people. It let people know I was busy inside my own head.

Hey Zutraas, almost half a month has gone by and we haven't boned. You free in the next couple days?

Sure, the messaging app was obscenely secure, but I was going to wait until I was in person to explain things to her. Even patched, I was a security risk as long as I had a virtual doppelgänger.

Her response came a few minutes later while I was going over the overwhelming list of changes that had to be made to make me secure again.

Are you going to be back at Gualmeeta or will I have to meet you virtually?

I try to always keep a body at Gualmeeta, shall I go to your office tomorrow?

Yeah, I'm going to to be between meetings from 14:00 to 16:00. Please bug me more in the future, I usually I don't realize how much I miss you until you message me.

That's because you don't know how to tell people 'no.' There's keeping yourself busy and then there's having no life outside work.

True. See you tomorrow.

And bam, I was feeling guilty about the size of the favor I was about to ask of her. I ran my pointy fingernails over the half-centimeter-thick polyurethane that coated the tabletop. The sensation of my nails popping in and out of the scratches on the surface soothed my mind. A staccato lullaby.

I tried not to think about where I'd turn if Zutraas came up empty or decided helping me carried too much risk.