Bill and Casa, in her mech form, sat in the command center of the Freedom. They weren’t quite done with Hera Station yet. They still had a meeting pending with Station Captain Reynolds to gift him a portal. Together they looked at the message from Max. Bill, pale and drawn from his many merge sessions, seemed to age visibly while reading the note. He frowned deeply in concern. Casa tentatively spoke up.

  “Bill, I’m worried about Max. We discussed that damn Tesseract kernel in his neo-cortex uplift module. This isn’t good. The quantum pairing, between him and the Tesseract, seems to be much more than we thought. I didn't just give him isolated access; it goes both ways.”

  “God damn it all! I’m such a fool. When we returned to Earth to save Casita from erasure, Max had already merged his trainer AI with her. They were both cagey about what exactly happened. You spent time with Casita…Mal, in the aftermath of her reformation...over the Thanksgiving holiday. Did you discuss with her what happened?”

  “I…I’m sorry, Bill. Mal was very resistant to the topic. She said that she had been hallucinating while trapped in fast time in the Tesseract, but that her merger with the Trainer AI had fixed it. She passed all my diagnostic testing but refused to let me see her life stream records. I’m sorry. I should have pressed harder…I was distracted by my new restricted cognition.”

  Casa’s mech frame slumped in a very human stance of dejection. Bill sighed.

  “Ah. No, this is on me. I should have slowed down, and maybe pulled Max from his training program to make sure he was okay. When the holiday came, and all the kids came home, it just seemed…like…everyone needed to fall back to normal. The Tesseract, all the Tesseracts, were operating and …and I wanted to continue the research. This is my fault. I’m too damn obsessive-compulsive. I should have stopped to assess everything more thoroughly.”

  “I know that the message isn’t very detailed, but Max didn’t seem too concerned for himself. If anything, he's concerned about you. He says he saw you, your clones, in the Shadowverse. He shouldn’t know anything about the Shadowverse…Oh. No! He has access to Casita/Mal. She might have shared what she knew, what I knew, with him.” Casa said.

  “Hmm. That makes sense. If the Casita fragment shared the details of the MIT event with him, that could certainly be nightmare-inducing.” Bill said.

  “But he mentioned you…and your clones. There was no way that he could have known you were going to recreate the MIT Gate, let alone commit the taboo of creating active clones to explore it…unless…” Casa’s unleashed creativity had latched onto the last part of the message. She prompted Bill to ensure he realized what she was thinking. She saw when it clicked, and Bill finally pick up the conversation.

  “Oh my god. That’s impossible. You think that it’s not just a dream. You think that he’s “seeing” my activity over there in real-time?” The pair both stopped, deep in thought. Bill rubbed his face and spoke slowly as he reassembled his thoughts, working through his assumptions and biases.

  “Fucking Hell. The Uplift crisis, the AI Boycott, APEX, and his god damned doomsday scenario, and now Max. Instead of him being safely tucked away in his training program, he could be experiencing a live feed from the Shadowverse.” He slammed a fist down and shattered the edge of the smart matter console.

  “Everything I do is wrong! I uplifted Max precisely because I wanted him to have some independence and get space away from me. I knew this technology could be both dangerous and a potential source of conflict with the global order. I didn’t realize how much more it would be on both counts. I only wanted to keep him safe…and now he’s right in the middle of it all. All of this is going so wrong. I should have stayed in deep space to finish this.”

  While Bill seethed with recriminations, Casa was already projecting forward. She saw several other details that Max had dropped, the pieces resolving in her mind to fit into place. She needed Bill to focus. She clocked multiple dialog chains and measured the value of each to find one that would pull Bill back onto a productive track. After the slightest of delays in real time, she picked the most valuable thread and resumed the dialog.

  “Bill, Max’s message implied that his exposure to his linkage to the tesseract has given him some immunity. He implied that the animal uplift virus helped him. I’ve replayed the events from the night when we rescued Max from the animals. He was injured…and the animal uplift virus is spread via blood.” At Casa’s words, Bill sobered.

  “But he seemed fine afterward. Shit, of course, he seemed fine. He already had intelligence enhancement from his neo-cortex module. I am quite possibly the worst dog dad ever.” Bill groaned, holding his head in his hands.

  “You’re missing my point, Bill. The virus enabled him, gave him an edge, to resist the effects of his indirect exposure to the Shadowverse. How many probes did you lose to the corrupting memetic signals on the other side? You had to resort to android-body digital clones because your poor biological clones both went insane over there. More importantly, he said that he managed to record his ability in an augmentation skill packet and attached it for you. This is GOOD news, Bill. Max is helping!”

  Bill stopped, took a breath, and held it. He slowly released it and looked across the control room to his two clones, currently sedated into a controlled coma. He clenched his jaw while thinking over Casa's observations. He sighed and said.

  “You’re right, as usual, Casa. I’m glad you’re back to your old self again. You always cut right to what's important. I may not be the best dad, but I’ve got good kids: Bo, Mira, and now Max. I need to get it together. Whatever’s coming, maybe now I have the tools to figure out how to prevent…or at least minimize any damage. My strategy of stepping lightly to avoid notice in the Shadowverse obviously isn’t working. I think it's time we go big or start getting ready to run.” He said grimly.

  Casa’s faceplate showed a beaming smile as she remembered her other discovery. The message from Max had preempted her sharing the news with Bill. She clapped her mech hands together with a clanging ring.

  “Bill, you forgot to ask me what my good news was. I not only figured out how to break the lightspeed barrier, but my latest probes are already doing it. Finding those Ark Ships…and establishing a bridgehead to another star system; should be child’s play now.” Casa said happily.

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  “You did WHAT now?!” Bill asked incredulously.

  Bill Michell jolted awake, the sensation of disorientation washing over him. For a brief moment, he forgot where he was, who he was. Casa’s revelation about the ability to slip portals through space was outstanding and he wanted to dive deep into her new application in portal tech, but he’d forced himself back onto his own track. He needed to get his merging under control to remain effective. He needed his own hive mind.

  Casa had left a while ago, to offer a portal gate to the Hera Station captain. Bill had quickly focused himself and multitasked at assembling a rig similar to Dr. Luca’s group mind arrangement. His design would incorporate a larger holographic memory array and some special, custom cores for his group facilitator AIs.

  Once everything was printed and assembled, Bill encased it with protective smart matter. He performed a top-level backup into the first neural core to create the digital copies he needed to run the network. A brief moment of dizziness and fogginess, while he ran the upload, and then Bill snapped back to alertness.

  He viewed the familiar lab around him, with its glowing network array and shimmering neural cores in the inner world of the network but he lacked the feedback from his body. Then, the realization hit him as he accessed the Freedom’s internal cameras and he saw himself, like a mirror but without the reversed reflection, standing in front of the Mind Bridge components he’s been working on. He was a digital copy, not the original Bill Michell.

  “Damn me, I’m the copy.” He said with surprise, his voice projected from the Freedom’s AV cluster.

  “And there it is. We always say that.” Bill said to his twin. The original Bill was looking better. He had backed himself up into the mind bridge rig and offloading his jumbled memories allowed his overloaded brain chemistry to begin to reset.

  “How are you feeling buddy? This setup is a little different from the usual.” The original Bill said. The digital clone thought about it, flexing into his new space. He ran a comprehensive scan of his mentality at 10x normal thought speed and reviewed his most recent memories.

  “A little lacking in sensory feedback, but my cognition is better than ever. Ah, nice. So this is how Casa feels. We really should market her custom neural core, this feels great. Our fears about compatibility with a human thought pattern were completely unfounded. So…time to get down to business?”

  “You got it. You’ve got the central role in our version of Dr. Luca’s Mind Bridge. You will be the Gestalt manager, the OverBill if you will.” Bill said.

  “Hmmm, not sure if I should be excited or expecting boredom but I do like the title. I guess we’ll see. Unlike our experience with Luca’s group, compatibility amongst ourselves shouldn't be a problem. I sense…oh, hey there! You must be in charge of memory sorting and merging.” Bill, or OverBill, spoke into the net where he felt the other.

  “Happy Birthday, chief. Looks like we’ll be working together. I’ve just incorporated your slight memory divergences into our shared large holographic memory array. Too easy. Now that the Mind Bridge is fully staffed, let's enable it for active communal thinking.”

  The original Bill opened a deeper access into the central array, OverBill and the memory manager Bill practiced with the expanding network of the trio as they combined their thought streams. Despite the limited number of shared minds, Bill felt sharper and faster immediately, even more than he experienced with Dr. Luca’s communal mind.

  He was aware of the other Bills and felt their thoughts as clearly as his own. His multi-faceted consciousness contemplated itself, the Mind Bridge, his mission, and the latest news from every angle. The pieces fell into place and his frustrations fell away. He felt like he did in Luca’s shared mind, but even more detail-oriented, capable, and aligned. For the first time in a long time, he knew what he needed to do; and was able to clearly project the steps to make it happen.

  “We need to bring all the Bills together into this. An ad-hoc network crossing the portals will let all of us focus. Let’s start with the Bill running the store in the Venusian hub. I’m thinking this boosting effect might be even better as we expand membership.” The Over-Bill said.

  “Too right. He’s been chilling without merging for far too long. It's risky. We don't want a divergent Bill running around. Plus, he might have more backup copies from the Bill’s running the Shadowgate. We need those ASAP, so we all understand what might have led to the first Shadowgate’s self-destruct being used.” The original Bill said out loud.

  Bill looked across the lab, his two biological clones were nestled in their personal medical creches in the corner. They had come back from the Shadowverse addled and raving. He had them sedated to prevent them from harming themselves. Max’s message had given him some new ideas on how he might help them. Perhaps there was hope that the damage could be healed with the uplift virus.

  All experiments with intelligence augmentation in humans had resulted in derangement and insanity. Bill shook his head, the mind bridge work showed that human mentality was flexible and could be boosted and combined. He now suspected Apex likely had a hand in those failed historical trials. He didn't like self-experimentation, but nothing else had worked to bring his copies’ sanity back.

  He frowned, first things first, he could get it all done if he went in proper order. He needed to get all the Bills together. There were a few working copies running and expanding the Venusian operation. He needed to update their merges by bringing them into the active Mind Bridge. There were three biological Bills there and five digital copies.

  He’d run a multiplex cable through to enable them all to back up quickly, now that he wasn't the bottleneck. Once that was done, he would do the same to his cloaked orbital platform in high polar orbit over Earth, the second shadow gate. Another three biological with digital riders as their AI and two designated digital clones in mech frames ready to continue the Shadowverse investigation.

  He needed to rethink his entire Shadow Gate approach and ramp it up the speed of its reactivation. Max’s Chthonic block skill may be the perfect thing to help his drone and android copies in the shadow side. He hoped that maybe he could even field his biological copies again…if it worked. The android mech frames were ok, but the human-augmented body designs had been tweaked to perfection. The loss of efficiency and power was telling.

  He examined the coded skill block from three different points of view. He used all his analytics tools, assisted by Ada and Sherlock, to try and derive its functions while running it in a safe sandboxed partition. It defied his every attempt to debug and understand it. The code was dense and incomprehensible despite his ramped intellect.

  “I dislike the danger of using this without understanding it better. It worries me that Max is running that Labyrinth game with this thing active. He implied he got it from his dreaming connection to the Shadowverse.” Bill sighed and turned the code over in his head.

  “Like we thought; we’ll try it out on the scout drones, first. If they can survive the mimetic corruption, it will really boost any expedition's chances. We’ll go slowly, but any tool that helps would be foolish to ignore.” He/They said.

  He hadn't thought any of his digital android copies on the shadow side had survived the first gate's detonation. Now that he knew, from Max’s message, that copies were still fighting for their life on Shadow Earth right now; he was decisive with his plan to reactivate the gate, regardless of the danger.

  The mat comp dinged. His fabrication of high bandwidth cable was ready. Currently, the Freedom had three portal anchors; the engines room’s active gate feeding it power and fuel from the Venusian power facility, the open personal transport gate back to the Venusian Transport Hub, and his inactive personal gate back to the presidential suite in Amundsen station.

  “The clock is still running until Apex’s mysterious doomsday. Let’s get to it!” Bill said, grabbing the massive spools of cable. His augmentations allowed him to hoist it one-handed as he laid one end down near the new device. Being of one mind, OverBill directed a crawler drone to the detail work of hooking it into the central array.

  He strode over to the portal into Venus Hub, trailing cable as he went. He was eager to be whole with his extended self.