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Kavuush kissed me just after I activated the body I kept at Gualmeeta. I kissed back, but stopped when I noticed her thrumming in sadness. We did tear up, but it didn't stream down our cheeks like humans. A drop or two was all we produced. What was more noticeable was a deep vibration in our twin larynxes vaguely like whale song. You know that sound humans made when their voice caught when they were crying? That deep "o" sound of sadness? Imagine that, but deeper and in regular pulses a couple seconds long.

It drove some humans up the wall. The same could be said about our reaction to human crying. Though, both sides had gotten used to each other's expressions of sorrow over the years.

I hugged Kavuush pressing her naked breasts against mine trying to soothe her by stroking her back. We rarely wore clothing. We'd engineered ourselves to not need it. Laundry wasted resources. Or, that's an excuse we used. It probably had a lot to do with our sexually free culture and semi-aquatic past. The same past that gave us webbed feet and webbing to the first knuckle on our mostly-human-like hands.

Kavuush's hands were holding me a little too tightly. I tried to pull out of her grasp only to be pulled even closer. "What's wrong?"

"Why did you ask me to do it?"

"What?"

"I'm not a hacker. I was so scared!"

"Kavuush, I didn't ask--" Then it hit me. My copy! I pulled her off of me as gently as I could. "Please calm down, what did I ask you to do?"

"You know!" She whacked the bed with her tail.

Her longer snout and orange eyes looked so sorrowful that I nearly started crying with her. "No, I don't. Someone copied me."

"Copied you?"

"Wait a moment." I started sending messages to everyone I knew telling them that they shouldn't do any strange favors for me. I got responses that many people already had. We'd thought that they copied me to find exploits, not to exploit everyone I knew.

"You don't remember?" She seemed more scared than sad now, ears sticking out from the sides of her head, eyes wider.

"No, and you're not the only one I supposedly asked to do odd favors." I staggered in place feeling like I was bobbing in water. Too many thoughts at once, too many possibilities.

She backed away, stocky body shrinking. "No... No."

"What did I--other me--ask you to do?"

"To ask for a personal tour of Zutraas's supercomputer and put a device on one of the cables coming out of it. The device came in the mail two days ago."

Zutraas's computer was a ultra-secure AI processing cluster for a system that handled billions of blockchain contracts. The AIs within wrote contracts for unique cases based on algorithms and legal methodology Zutraas devised. If someone compromised this system, they could gain info about contracts and sensitive details about clients. With this knowledge, manipulating the stock market, or one's competitors, was just the beginning.

"Why didn't you contact m--" I stopped myself. "Oh no, all the messages you were sending were going to the other me."

"You told me not to contact anyone other than you about it, that if I did, I might get arrested. You said that even having that...device...was illegal." Kavuush's arms twitched.

I held her. "I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault?" She sounded as though she was trying out that idea.

"No, none of this would've happened if I didn't have such a dangerous job. It's my fault."

"I knew your employers were secretive, but for someone to copy you and risk a century in jail. That's ridiculous."

"Yes." I agreed not knowing what else to say. I asked for every one of my contacts to report any favors they'd done for me in the last few days. I didn't want to know, but I had to know.

I let the responses get collected and categorized in the background as I returned my focus to Kavuush. "Soon I'll know everything other-me asked people to do."

"I still can't believe you've been copied."

"Neither can I." I let out a frustrated hum. "So, you put a device on one of the cables on Zutraas's supercomputer?"

"Don't remind me."

"We have to tell her."

She thrummed in sadness again.

I nuzzled the side of her face. "I'll tell her you were coerced. She's not the type to hold grudges."

"I know. It's just going to be a very awkward conversation."

"How about you give me a download of all your memories associated with this and I'll handle it."

She started sending the memories.

I looked through the files as she gave them to me. Other-me really did sound and act just like me. Wow, I had never realized how pushy I could be with Kavuush and she'd still do what I asked. I hated myself a bit for that. I'd found someone so loving and so exploitable. For a moment I wished she was more jaded and untrusting, but that moment passed.

She was just the way she needed to be. But she needed stronger cybersecurity AIs so that she could be the way she was and still keep the harshness of the world at bay.

I'd seen enough to know that Zutraas's supercomputer was definitely compromised. Every second was counting down toward ruin.

I gave a compassionate, but hurried, farewell to Kavuush. Then I walked out of the bedroom and past the hexagonal honeycomb of light teal shelves on the salmon-colored wall that hid the staircase to the upper level. As I pulled open the front door of my home, I called Zutraas.

After no answer, I got a text. In a meeting.

It was her autoresponder. I sent Emergency. Your network has been breached. and called again. I had to make her assistant AI see just how urgent this was.

After that call didn't go through, I called one more time while leaning on the wooden railing outside our five-story brick and KREEPcrete apartment building.

This time I got a response.

"Hello?" Zutraas's voice was breathy with exasperation.

"Shut down your network, take all your computers offline. I'm on my way."

"What? Why?" She turned on video so I could see that there were six people in her conference room. Four humans and two Paitishek. Three of the humans were telepresent, everyone else was actually there.

I paced toward the door that led up to the apartments above our two-story one. "You've been compromised and I don't know the full nature of the breach yet."

She left me on the call and shared her interface so I could see her message her tech department reporting a breach and that everything needed to come offline. After that, she walked into the conference room. "That was my tech department, they have to take our network down. Sorry for the inconvenience."

The call ended.

Sunlight from the mirror in the center of Gualmeeta spilled down over the garden-topped four-to-eight story KREEPcrete buildings that made up the dwellings of everyone in the habitat. Gualmeeta was a giant spinning ring with several large spokes that came from a central hub. Some people called it a wheel. But when I looked at it from space, the spokes were hard to see because they weren't as well lit as the inside surface of the ring. It was a band of light in a sea of dark.

Two cities made stripes of civilization that ran the full three hundred and forty kilometer circumference of the ring. Both cities were ten kilometers wide and were on either side of the two-kilometer-wide Circumference Park which evenly divided Gualmeeta's thirty thousand square kilometers of land area.

The rest of the land area of the ring, save for two kilometers near the rim on each side, was a preserve for southeast Asian species. One could fit the entire nation of Albania on this station if it was rearranged to fit.

A clear elliptical tube about five stories high was to the right of my front door. Inside were e-vellos, stacked one above the other. As I approached the tube, I requested one. It was already touching the sidewalk, so it simply rolled toward me and opened its transparent upper half.

I sat between the two front wheels and placed my feet on the floor below the pedals. I needed to get there fast and wasn't going to be pedaling no matter how calming and meditative that motion could be.

As the transparent upper half of the e-vello closed, I sent it my destination and told it to rush. Having pre-loaded my preferences, it knew "rush" meant I wanted it to operate just under its safety limits. It forwarded my itinerary to the transit system. I buckled in and braced myself.

Unkind acceleration and cornering followed as it turned onto the tree-lined boulevard near my house exceeding sixty kilometers per hour. Though I'd set my auditory system to filter them out, I knew that the safety awareness beeps were making a mockery out of the race-car-like driving.

This boulevard arced up and out of view as it traveled the full circumference and back to where I was standing. It meandered here and there to break up the monotony of the grid and make navigation less boring.

Beauty was the way a loose school of other e-vellos parted for mine. Networked self-driving vehicles reproducing the awe of nature.

My e-vello made a skillful right turn putting the entryway to the subsurface train or s-tran station in sight. The word "subway" would've been used, but space habitats loved to rename things to remind people they were indeed in space. Common sense was no match for marketing.

As I dipped underground, I was giddy with energy. If I couldn't enjoy the thrill of staving off impending doom, why was I alive?

The train station was packed with over two hundred other people. Half were Paitishek: this was considered a Paitishek ward of the city. Nineteen out of twenty them were clothed.

I admired a fellow nude Paitishek with short ears and snout for a brief moment before remembering that I was in a hurry. She checked me out and raised her crest as I walked past her. I made sure not to meet her gaze. That would lead to introductions and possibly hands-on appreciation of each other.

My navigation showed that my train car would be arriving in fifty seconds and I jogged to where it would line up: behind four other cars that were currently being boarded.

The train car arrived with its sleek sloping sides. Just enough to be aerodynamic, but not so much that cars had to be spaced too far apart. There were no windows because there was nothing to see but the train tunnel. I stepped in and positioned myself amongst a small grouping of Paitishek.

It was considered impolite to force the humans to stand in close quarters with us when we were nude. So, when we used the trains, we usually dressed. Though, many would question whether it did much good since we loved form-fitting attire. We hated wrinkles and rough seams. An artifact of our nude past.

We were packed in not too badly: I had a half meter of space around me. The car could hold around fifty people if they were sandwiched inside. A human or Paitishek that had modified themself to look like an anthropomorphic furred squid stood near the back. Pink fur, purple suckers, and green spots. I think the statement being made was "Look at me! My color choices are so avant-garde!"

The train accelerated and my back pressed against a tall Paitishek that I couldn't get a good look at because I was too close and facing away. Our car accelerated and joined a circ-train at the back.

Then the car divided from our train and joined a different train. I switched cars five minutes later. And finally I got out at a station near Zutraas's building. I'd've stared at the menagerie of multicolored parasols that decorated the ceiling, but I had to keep going.

The city on this side of Circumference Park, Haavhos, was nearly a mirror image of my city, Gaavhos. But, the buildings had a more modern feel. Buildings here had a polished look instead of natural textures. Some people said that Haavhos was like New York and Gaavhos was like Boston.

I thought that was a bit inaccurate and America-centric. Gaavhos was like Paris and Haavhos was somewhere between Shanghai and Macau. Both of our cities differed from these terrestrial comparisons in having more angular buildings, more streets in a grid pattern, and more greenery. Atriums and rooftop gardens were a staple of Paitishek design.

Zutraas's building was a flat-topped stepped pyramid that had been cut in half poorly. The cut wasn't quite straight down and not quite straight across. It gave the building a very dynamic look.

The garden-topped steps were all on the side facing the direction of the nature preserve. We called this direction "east." North was in the direction of the spin. As a result, there was no southest south or northest north. It was just a direction you could go in and people used landmarks to say what was north or south of what.

There was technically latitude and longitude that divided the cylinders up into coordinates. Most people didn't use this system when talking about where things were, however. There was no need to be especially specific when everyone had navigation software.

The entryway to the building was a sloped glass outcropping. Sunlight poured in providing illumination for the numerous moss-covered surfaces. Inside were four evenly-spaced pillars shaped like tear drops that held security robots. Shades of different mosses were used to make the logo, even. A diamond with a hypercube inside it.

The humidity was rather high in this greenhouse and it was twenty-five degrees Celsius, a degree warmer than outside. Temperatures dropped off toward the cities. This temperature difference fueled the weather.

A sign near the elevators said, "No Air Conditioning. Dress For The Weather. Take the Elevator to The Second Floor And Change Into Something More Comfortable. Compliments Tsaabaji, Nutaaveiduk, and Schmidt."

In this habitat, business people knew to dress in nice shirts and slacks or form-fitting breathable Paitishek wear with a formal trim and pattern. Providing AC when the temperatures were ideal for appropriately clothed individuals just didn't make sense to us.

Beyond the elevators were restrooms, showers, and changing rooms. And at the end of the hall there was a door to a moderately-sized versatile convention space.

As I approached the elevators, I was informed, "Zutraas is expecting you. Do you need directions to her office?"

I said, "No thank you," as I got into the elevator.

"Would you like to stop on the second floor for a change of clothes?"

"No thank you." I grinned at the fact that the AI was likely complaining in its own way about my nakedness. No clothing was considered quite casual, after all. Not for us, but the business environment on Gualmeeta was supposed to be somewhere between Paitishek and human norms.

The elevator automatically took me to the sixth floor. Zutraas, having been informed I was on my way up, was waiting for me in semi-formal attire. A form-fitting grey bodysuit with sleeves that went almost up to her wrists had lines that intersected in hexagonal patterns on it. The hexagonal cutaway showed just enough cleavage to garner interest.

Her ears were longer than some Paitishek, and her breasts were so wonderfully round! Her accent color was a handsome crimson.

My sheer elation at seeing her again mixed poorly with the seriousness of what we had to discuss.