Twenty percent. One in five. On face that number did not sound so bad. It was better than the chance of winning the first roll in standard craps. But she knew that spread was not a good one. Four of the five people who accepted the conversion therapy offered by the Keepers died. Possibly more than twice that if Thalleus’s ten percent figure represented the truth better than the first estimate he provided.

  Alethia flew through the computer system’s databank of previous experiments related to conversion. She double-checked the original estimates Thalleus gave her on Zoe’s condition. More women died from hysterectomies in the twentieth century than from the base therapy Zoe was receiving. The more Alethia reviewed the stats, if you excluded the fifty-year-plus development time, the Keeper’s therapeutic process had better survivability than any medical procedure she could find.

  The plan Thalleus offered Alethia required a slow application of their therapy so as to avoid the rejection problems that the Enforcer nanites produced. Alethia drowned in new scientific information. It started to make her feel like she could not breathe.

  Alethia directed the second body she held out unconsciously to stand. Upon waking, her perception split again. She could see herself across her crystal walled room. The Enforcer nanites did a good job of making her beautiful. Alethia knew women from high school who would have still hated their bodies, even in a brand new one. But she felt none of those emotions. Even the original Alethia, un-showered, wearing clothes from a week ago, looked beautiful to Alethia.

  A knock on the door broke her concentration and rather than potentially alarm a stranger, she allowed her double to fade away. When she told Natalie and Thalleus that she could hold her doubles indefinitely, she spoke the truth.

  “Come in.”

  Alethia’a crystal table held an assortment of papers she used to take notes. When the door opened, that was the first place Natalie’s gaze fell.

  “Hello Alethia,” she nodded to the pages on the table, “is that paper? Reid, our materials expert said he had trouble finding a recipe for that the crystals could understand. Does it work?”

  Alethia blushed. When she asked for paper to take notes, she did not expect to generate such a fuss. Three different senior scientists had visited her room every day for three days with samples of paper they had produced. The last day resulted in something workable that Alethia could use to take notes.

  “This works fine, great even! I wish I had known how much of a stir I was going to cause before I requested it.”

  Natalie blinked and said,

  “Because of the time you wasted or the materials?”

  “I feel bad taking them from more important work.”

  “Did you notice how there were three of them, ‘helping you’?”

  She made the quotes in the air, Natalie did that often since Alethia had told her about the gesture.

  “I did think that was weird.”

  “That was because every scientist in the arcology and even some hobbyists wanted to visit you and try offering your their version of paper. We had to hold several contests to stop people’s complaints about being excluded from the process. Let me assure you that no one thought this was a waste of time.”

  “Thanks! Why is paper… oh right.”

  Natalie smiled and said,

  “We do actually grow some plant material on base. The crystals allow ideal light frequencies and intensities to pass. But we have not made paper in a mil… long time. Even the historians were interested.”

  “And going back to the source would not be ideal, would it?”

  Natalie said,

  “If we were willing to do that, we would be the same as the Enforcers. I admit, having a sample to practice on would be very nice.”

  “Right, you could test just a bit of the page and see how inks stained the surface, how dense it should be, all of that. You could use that sample to test inks too, right? Oh my god, this was so obvious!”

  Alethia ran back to the desk and the sheath of papers on it. She pulled several pages aside and found the notes she was looking for. Natalie followed her in silence, but held her eyes on Alethia, she clearly wanted to know what provoked this reaction. Alethia found what she sought. She held it up and checked it while speaking,

  “The conversion process, part of the problem is that is impossible to predict how violent the reaction is. Like making beer, you have to adjust the amounts on the fly without knowing the details and without any feedback. What if you had live feedback?”

  Natalie turned her head and her eyes widened,

  “Of course! We could use your duplicate to tweak the conversion therapy to avoid killing you, I thought that was the original plan?”

  “Yes, but I can give you direct feedback. Using the senses of the Enforcer nanites, right?”

  “Oh, you don’t just mean leaving your double in the tank and seeing what happens. You mean administering the process directly with live feedback.”

  Natalie’s face looked dejected as she spoke,

  “All extant nano-systems cause a good deal of pain during administration. That is why both the Enforcers and the Keepers leave subjects unconscious. Of course, we do it because to do otherwise would be cruel. They do it because if they do not, their subjects go mad in much larger numbers.”

  “So you’re saying I won’t want to remain conscious while this is happening?”

  Natalie shrugged,

  “I doubt it, but if you think you can do it, we should still configure one of the labs for the experiment. When do you want to try it?”

  “What, wait? Aren’t there safety protocols and further discussion we should have?”

  “Certainly, but you weren’t planning on doing this now, were you? Besides, the computer has already produced a safety process based on the loose discussion we just had.”

  Natalie tapped on the wall and a screen appeared. On screen, Alethia could see a long list of precautions she would have to make before the administration would green light her experiment. At the same time as the list tried to daunt her, Natalie smiled and said,

  “That looks very doable. I will set events into motion.”

  “That will take like…”

  The image showing her a room turned out to be a live camera shot of the proposed laboratory. Crystals rearranged themselves into multiple panels as she watched. The process was slower than she would have thought, but Natalie said,

  “They will be done prepping the room in about half an hour. Does that work?”

  Alethia nodded. This was something she needed to do sooner rather than later.

  The second time Alethia felt herself die, she sat on a flat table out of sight of her second body. Dying felt painful, like a whole body electric shock passing through her starting with her feet. The second death had a wall of morphine or whatever passed for it in the future’s OR.

  The second time she died, Alethia learned a good deal more about the process she had been subjected to. The nanites in her blood, dyed blue to the screen she used to observe her body, aggressively attacked the silver fluid the Keepers injected her with. Death followed only a few minutes later as her blue saturated cells committed chemical suicide. As if her body could not distinguish between them and cancerous tissues.

  She made sure to record her observations and report them back to the Natalie. Machines watched her body, providing more feedback than she was capable of otherwise.

  All of this was a significant improvement on her first death. For that, Alethia had not received any analgesia or sedatives. On top of that, Alethia had been seated upright and the initial injection contained three hundred times more individual nanobodies than the second injection.

  Alethia’s heart stopped in her second body less than thirty seconds after the injection. That part had felt like someone shoved angry bees into her veins. At first, her arm just felt thick, almost pregnant. Then the fluid began to “sting” her. Fires erupted under her arms. Alethia had checked the monitors on her second body to be sure that the fires burned only in a sensory manner.

  That had been a mistake because she immediately vomited over herself and Natalie. The pain was so intense that Alethia’s main body seized and she had to be sedated and taken to an emergency treatment room. While there, they watched her for lingering side effects and performed some non-invasive tests to confirm that her main body did not experience some kind of sympathetic injury. Aside from elevated blood pressure and heart rate, Alethia was fine. By the time she woke in the emergency facility, her second body was already dead.

  After her second body flatlined, Alethia watched Natalie from her bed. The green-haired scientist watched Alethia’s second body fade away while she made notes into a tablet.

  “Did that work all right?”

  Natalie practically jumped when Alethia spoke. Surprise must have registered on Alethia’s face, because Natalie explained herself,

  “Sorry. I was very engaged in the experiment. I was not expecting you to say anything.”

  Alethia smiled, Natalie had laid a hand on Alethia’s shoulder. The doctor was overly familiar, but Alethia had the sense that their entire society was touchy-feely like this.

  “I just wanted to make sure that you were not surprised I still lived.”

  Natalie bobbled her head back and forth,

  “Not so much that, but I assumed you would have passed out again. You are surprisingly resilient, Ms Thompson.”

  Alethia laughed,

  “You need to work on your come-ons, doctor. At least you did not call me ‘sturdy’.”

  Natalie blinked and said,

  “I don’t get that, but okay! Do you want to see the results of the tests?”

  “Yes, and use small words.”

  Natalie explained the outcome, this test sounded more promising than the first one. But Alethia knew that their best projections required her repeated death. That fact lingered in the back of her mind. So far, she had not been able to answer any major existential questions. Though she did notice the total absence of religious paraphernalia anywhere in the arcology. None of the residents ever spoke the Lord’s name or offered oaths to God. Alethia wondered what that meant for the future of her faith.

  Natalie finished and asked Alethia if she wanted to be done for the day.

  “No, I think we should keep going. I have at least four more deaths in me.”

  This was like a roleplaying game, well a really boring one without adventure. Alethia died three more times that evening, twenty times after that over the next week. Natalie expressed more concern for Alethia’s welfare than Alethia did, which explained why she was the head of medicine and research for the arcology, at least in part.

  By the end of the week, they still had no survivor cases for Alethia to study. The chances did not look so good for her. Then the second week kicked in, by the end of that week, Alethia started to worry. She shared her concerns with Natalie,

  “We have what, over one hundred confirmed tests and no survivals in the whole time? How long until the window closes for me to spend four weeks in a tank?”

  Natalie sighed,

  “You have another month, at least. By that time, your friend Zoe should be free of her tank. Consider that over half of our tests should not count toward the survival odds. We were not trying to keep your double alive for the first half of the tests.”

  “Yes, but now that we are trying, I don’t get morphine or any pain relief.”

  That was the clincher. Alethia would have been fine continuing the tests if she had ever survived one or if she could have continued to be numb through the process. But every night now she dreamed of a silver blob slowly eating her, starting at the bottom.

  Sympathy shone from Natalie’s eyes.

  “I wish I could distract you with something entertaining, but you have thoroughly rebuffed my advances. To continue would bring you discomfort.”

  Alethia rolled her eyes,

  “That is because you always seem to want sex. Maybe instead of sleeping together we could watch a movie or television show?”

  “I know what those are, but I am not sure I have ever tried it.”

  She paused for a moment and said,

  “Oh, two dimensional entertainment. Narrative style. That sounds fascinating. What should we do? I mean watch. What should we watch?”

  This question presented Alethia with a fantastic dilemma: if a time traveler asked to see a sample of Earth television from her time, what would she show them?

  Alethia giggled and said,

  “How much time do we have?”

  “A month, there is no reason not to watch entertainment while we wait, is there?”

  Alethia laughed this time and said,

  “That still won’t be enough time. So we should get started right now.”

  Seventeen hours into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Natalie asked through tears streaked cheeks,

  “Ms Calendar comes back, right? What does the gang do to Angel now?”

  Alethia patted Natalie’s hand while clone number 317 died in screaming agony. That particular death was as hard to handle as the first time Alethia watched Season two of Buffy.

  “We should keep watching. Don’t look it up, you’ll enjoy it more.”

  Natalie squealed at the end of the second season when Buffy sent the love of her life to Hell.

  “How does this show continue? How can Xander ever look Buffy or Willow in the eyes again?”

  Alethia shrugged this time and said,

  “To the first question, let’s keep watching. As to the second question, who knows? Maybe the comics answer that, but I never finished those. Richard did.”

  Thinking about her friend made Alethia homesick. Natalie assured her that she would be able to return to Earth after a variable amount of local time, but after only two or three days passed in twentieth century Earth time.

  They watched the rest of Buffy. Alethia knew that she found a friend in Natalie when the woman declared the series the best story she had ever encountered.

  “You say that, but now we’re gonna watch Doctor Who. Are you ready for that?”

  “Does the first season suffer from the same problems that Buffy did?”

  Alethia nodded,

  “This is a bit ‘worse’ in a sense. We’re gonna start with the original series and then move onto the unquestionably epic series nine and continuing.”

  They spent the next two weeks watching television shows until they exhausted series Alethia could personally vouch for. If Richard had been here, or Rachel for that matter, they could have occupied the entire month just with television. Alethia had to move onto film next and had no idea where to start with that, so she made the computer pick a random title from a list she prepared.

  The choice ended up as an ironic one too, Back to the Future.

  Alethia prepared Natalie for this one,

  “I took a film class in school. This is a good starting movie because it is so good. Basically every note in this film has a payoff…”

  Alethia tried to explain exactly what that meant, but found herself stymied and flustered.

  “Let’s just try it.”

  Natalie issued the command to the computer for Alethia. Right on time, her second body experienced a wave of agony and Alethia needed a moment to let it pass before she could concentrate.

  They watched their way through six more films before Alethia’s first clone survived the procedure. Natalie paused Die Hard minutes before the “Yippee Ka Yay” scene and said,

  “The preliminaries have finished. How do you feel?”

  Alethia blinked, reaching out to her primary body instinctively and finding nothing wrong, she had to redirect her attention to her secondary body to answer Natalie’s actual question.

  “Oh my God. I am just sleeping peacefully now. I didn’t even notice when the pain stopped.”

  She had to review her memory of the last hour or so. Her second body had experienced only minor discomfort during the last session. This was the longest she had survived so far and was the first high water mark for the procedure. Most of the fatalities for the procedure perished during this time.

  Alethia and Natalie conferred about these results. The older, green haired woman still possessed far more relevant information than Alethia did, but she was starting to catch up with Natalie, at least in the domain of this conversion process. They had accidentally turned Alethia into a cutting edge expert in this topic over the last few weeks.

  They decided to proceed with this experiment. The next high water mark would arrive in two days. Natalie decided to continue the same therapeutic regimen throughout the cycle.

  Two days and a dozen films later, Alethia’s double passed away painlessly in the night. Alethia woke without the double’s body sitting on the edge of her awareness.

  “Crap!”

  Natalie shot up from the short cot in Alethia’s room,

  “What? What’s happening?”

  They had been sharing a room for the duration of the experiment. Despite the tension of constant deaths, perhaps because of that pressure, Alethia felt a magnetic draw to Natalie that seemed to grow the longer they spent time together. That still meant Natalie slept in a different bed from Alethia.

  “My double just died. We should review the data.”

  That afternoon, their television viewing held a sour note. The nanite infected systems coursing through Alethia’s blood did not stand rejection well. Even with the silver Keeper nanites attempting to supplant the blue cell’s control, the Enforcer nanites committed cellular suicide again.

  Natalie stared at the screen and tugged on a long strand of hair,

  “That should not be happening. With other subjects, the resident nanites allow the invaders to take over their previous roles. It is like your second body needs an infusion of the original nano systems to keep from suiciding.”

  “And there is no way to do that, right?”

  “We cannot manufacture the Enforcer nanites. They are highly dependent on the process and we have never cracked it. The same is true for the Enforcers and our own nanites. In fact both groups designed these therapies to be impossible to reverse engineer.”

  Natalie tapped the terminal and sighed,

  “If only we had twelve billion years to wait for the testing to be concluded.”

  Alethia shared Natalie’s frustration, but she had her double out and sitting in the testing creche within the hour.

  The third week of their testing went far slower than any of the preceding weeks. Alethia’s secondary body survived every first hour milestone, but died during every second day milestone. The fourth week was the real struggle. By the end of the month, Zoe would be awake and Alethia would have only four more weeks of testing available to her.

  It sounded crazy to her when she said the words out loud, but she did not want to die of extreme old age in five years. Nor of a medical accident in as many weeks, but the latter thought lacked the urgency and force of the former. Intellectually, Alethia knew that her chances of survival over five years would be excellent with the assistance of the Keepers and their forces. That thought did not matter; the more she failed, the more desperate she felt.

  Several times, she thought her secondary body was on the edge of living through the two day limit. And several times she had to face the excruciating death offered by her experiment. On week four, just a few days before Zoe was supposed to wake up, Alethia felt herself almost live.

  With the assistance of the Keeper’s instruments, Alethia could visualize what happened within her body. Both nano swarms attempted to integrate with each other and failed. That final time, she could see the merger, how like protein folding the process was only vastly more complex. Within the dance between the two infections in her blood, Alethia thought she saw both nanites change right before they ‘died’ and signaled a corresponding death in the rest of the artificial cells.

  That failure sent Alethia along a new track. The cells infecting her body were not that different from each other and, by necessity, not that different from her own cells. Of course, that was a simplification. In truth, her “blue” cells were jam-packed with data and lines of code. As an idle thought experiment, she determined that just one “blue” blood cell — what she called her own red blood cells post-Enforcer nanite infection — carried sufficient ‘wires’ to cover the surface of the Earth eighty-nine times.

  She needed to find a way to merge those trillion lines into a cohesive whole. One that would not then be murdered by her own cells or the remaining foreign nanites. Alethia’s cognition suffered while her doubles sat in their creches slowly dying. As a result she poured herself into her efforts. Natalie helped, or rather she directed the research by supplying materials and conferring with Alethia every few hours.

  Before she gained superpowers, Alethia would have considered a month or more spent researching in a futuristic laboratory like this a dream come true. Any part of the station allowed access to current research.

  She laid in bed watching her double die for the one hundred and thirteenth time. The pain from the second milestone had finally begun to sink into the back of Alethia’s mind. Even in the future, effective pain management that left the mind limber and clear was non-existent. She watched a real-time view of the various foreign bodies competing and dying her in clone’s body. In their desperate attempts to survive, they were killing her twin.

  Alethia closed her eyes and waited for the body to fade and inspiration struck her. When she told Natalie that she needed an infusion of nanites, Alethia had no idea how to make them. Once her double faded away again, Alethia produced a new one to test her hypothesis. She laid down on the bed next to herself and stared at herself for a second as she touched and reabsorbed her own body.

  The experience twisted her perceptions for an instant, but Alethia was used to splitting her mind now so sealing off errant thoughts and misaligned perceptions was as easy as dissection. The process even resembled the same as Alethia cut off maddened lines of thought and hallucinations while her double reprocessed. Time dragged on, but when the last of herself disappeared, she felt energized and certain. As her own body reintegrated she could feel the tissues merge and cells reorient themselves.

  A flash of insight spurred Alethia to the testing chamber. Before she dropped a double off at the creche she considered telling Natalie what she intended. Alethia had to wait until the second day’s processing changes normally caused death to try what she wanted. The risks to her person were significant. Natalie would probably tell Alethia to wait and continue to observe the crash as the tried to refine the process. It was possible that a third or even fourth reprocessing sequence would emerge and she would die anyway. Alethia knew the risks, with her mind focused as it was, she could view the branching possibilities. Where the future fuzzed — the calculations to determine cellular mutation were too vast for even future computers; her mind refined the possibilities along axes Alethia would never have considered.

  She left the creche with a double behind, resolved to contact Natalie.

  “You could die, Alethia. I thought you shared your people’s high regard for their own existence. Has something happened?”

  Alethia paused, she felt close to Natalie after all of these weeks, but she missed Zoe and Karen. Even Richard. If she wanted to see them again and keep seeing them, this was her only avenue.

  “No, but I am determined to succeed. Based on our observations, this is the best course to take.”

  “I wish you could produce a second clone.”

  “Me too, but wishing gets us nowhere. I only get one shot at this, so I agree with waiting until the last minute. That also gives me a chance to see Zoe after she wakes up. Believe me, I have thought about this.”

  Natalie studied Alethia. The only regret Alethia would have if her plan failed, aside from her own death of course, would be missing the chance to say goodbye to her dad. But this way she could ask Zoe to give a message to Karen and Richard if something happened.

  Natalie was still silent, so Alethia said,

  “Besides all of that, we might find the secret sauce between now and then. That will change the whole equation!”

  Natalie nodded and said,

  “Thalleus was serious when he said people aboard our arcology are free. The only thing I would stop you from doing is hurting someone else. I will continue to assist.”

  Alethia nodded. That was the least she could have hoped for, but not the worst outcome where Natalie withdrew her support.

  “Alright, let’s get back to killing copies of me!”

  The morning Zoe woke, Natalie had entered Alethia’s chambers with her customary knock. The green haired woman giggled as her fingers skimmed across the large blank surface of Alethia’s room they used as a whiteboard. Several official looking forms scrolled by, all bore Alethia’s full name as well as a relative temporal date.

  “What is that and why are you giggling like a girl?”

  Natalie grinned and stepped aside as several forms revealed their contents. Alethia read each one in a blink.

  “Wait, what is this, are you teasing me?”

  Natalie sobered like her jocularity had been an act,

  “Absolutely not. Our computer logs your laboratory time and I reconfigured it not to count your double’s time as that would have raised questions.”

  “I have an MD Phd., in Nanomedicine and Human Biology? How? I didn’t write a dissertation.”

  Natalie returned to smiling,

  “That is technically true. You did not write one dissertation, you wrote two. If you want to split hairs, you wrote three, but two in Nanomedicine and one in H. Bio. Remember the papers I asked you to write, about your observations and tests regarding the serum treatments? Then about how the cellular integration worked?”

  “You asked me to absorb my clone and wait twenty-four hours. It felt like a waste.”

  “So you do remember?”

  Natalie’s eyes glimmered as she smirked,

  “Yeah, I split the first paper into two and wrote all three in a night.”

  “Each one was over one hundred and twenty thousand words long. Altogether you wrote four hundred and fifty thousand words. Our dissertation committee had to call in consultants to review some of your work. You should be proud.”

  “Well, thank you then!”

  Natalie said,

  “Now that we know how to make paper, would you like a copy?”

  Alethia nodded, speechless now that what Natalie said had finally sunk in. She had her doctorate. Legitimately. She trembled as she thought about it. She could return to her own time with what she knew and could build a career releasing just enough of what she had learned to advance Earth science a thousand or more years. That would be insane, but the point stood. Even if she had to receive a life-threatening future nano infection before she could do it.

  Natalie said,

  “It will take a day or two. Let’s wake your friend. By the way, this clears the last few obstacles you might encounter working with the researchers here. Both degrees give you unlimited access to the facilities. You could observe and even direct your friend’s rousing.”

  A tear escaped Alethia’s crowded eyeballs,

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much Natalie. This means a lot to me.”

  “You are welcome, Doctor Thompson. A few people might stop by to congratulate you today. Feel free to send them away or set the station system to Do Not Disturb.”

  Zoe’s waking was uneventful, if Alethia ignored the wonder of seeing the mercurial liquid recede from the tank to reveal a bare Zoe. Alethia forced scientific and medical detachment on her mind as she assisted Natalie with lifting Zoe out of her creche and administering a mild stimulant. Zoe opened her eyes and blinked at Alethia as she covered the other woman with a warm blanket made of soft white fabric. Alethia reminded herself to look that fabric up later and studiously ignored the skin at the leading edge of the blanket.

  Zoe said,

  “Hello gorgeous. I am glad to see you.”

  Her voice sounded so happy and wonderful to Alethia that she stood speechless and open-mouthed for long enough for Zoe to nod her head and smirk. Then she darted forward in a flash and planted a kiss right next to Alethia’s mouth. Alethia blinked at that motion and smiled back at Zoe. This time, Zoe kissed her on the lips, full and earnest.

  Alethia grabbed Zoe’s back and pressed herself into the woman as they embraced. Zoe tasted like honey and spices to Alethia. Even better than the strawberry of Natalie’s lips. Why am I thinking about her now? She chided herself and nibbled at Zoe’s lip as they parted.

  Alethia said,

  “I am glad to see you too. How do you feel?”

  Zoe looked at Alethia’s mouth and said,

  “Better and better. Better than when I went sleep, that is for certain. Could I have some clothes?”

  Alethia handed Zoe the simple robe Natalie had set out for Zoe. Alethia turned as Zoe put the robe on.

  Zoe said,

  “You’ve seen this all before, right?”

  Alethia coughed,

  “Well, yes. I guess so. Yes.”

  She coughed again.

  Zoe laughed,

  “Even if you had not, you don’t need to turn around. If you feel better, you could always make it even by stripping.”

  Alethia had already turned around so Zoe did not get to see her face turn cherry red at the suggestion. Natalie laughed into the back of her hand at the far side of the room. Zoe turned her head at Alethia’s shift in attention. Natalie looked up, her laughter gone again and approached Zoe.

  “I am Natalie Goshen, chief scientist aboard this arcology.”

  Zoe looked at Natalie’s hand and said,

  “Nice to meet you. I think I am supposed to head out for some training or something now?”

  Natalie sighed and said,

  “Yes, that is true. You do not know how to move the silver beast yet. You must learn before you hurt yourself or others.”

  Zoe ignored Alethia and Natalie now. Alethia had known this would happen, the Keeper upgrades did not fill the bearer’s heads with computers and mind altering neurotransmitters, but they did implant a single overriding suggestion: seek training upon waking. The instinct kicked in as soon as Zoe’s attention diverted from Alethia.

  Natalie and Alethia followed Zoe through the complex. The few people who crossed their paths bowed their head and clasped their hands in front of them. Zoe walked with a relaxed step, neither fast nor slow. Her robes marked her as a pre-trainee. Alethia understood that the seeking process was required. It held sacred import for the Keeper and the walk through the arcology helped solidify and set the mental pathways needed for training.

  Two figures wearing silver hooded robes waited in a pair on either side of a doorway, like silent golems watching their master’s lair. Zoe bowed to both of them and the door opened. Natalie and Alethia were not welcome through this doorway. Natalie had never elected to partake of the soldier modifications, which were required in Alethia’s case where Zoe had chosen them.

  Alethia was destined to pass through that doorway herself, assuming she survived the conversion process.

  Natalie and Alethia spoke about the solder modifications as they walked back to the research are to drop off a clone and start the experiment again. They still hoped that the second milestone would pass with a living clone and they could move onto the final phase.

  “Why do Enforcer conversions have to take the soldier modification course? Why can’t we use the civilian nanites?”

  “I forget how much history is redacted from your education. In this case I think I am fine to tell you the provenance of the various nano systems.

  Much was lost when the Enforcers first turned on the Keepers. Our religious convictions, long since set aside but for a few ceremonies and mysteries, forbade violence from anyone not initiated into battle by the priesthood. Therefore our defensive force was small and its growth was subject to the whims of religious authorities.

  We were decimated in the literal sense. The figures some historians insist on put our original populations in the low billions. Only five small colony vessels, each rated to hold a mere hundred million bodies in stasis, escaped into deep space.

  Temporal assault left us stumbling along. Only a small cadre of families possessed the knowledge necessary to repair or even drive our vessels. Computer networks had enormous holes in their databanks. We refer to this as our dark age.”

  Alethia hung on every word. This was the most anyone had ever allowed her to learn about the Keeper’s origins.

  “The Keepers survived the diaspora by the grace of a turncoat from the Enforcers. You have experienced their pattern of kidnapping and forced conscription. Someone like yourself, captured and made to serve them found us during a raid and managed to kill his sergeant as well as the rest of his squad. Then he allowed our scientists to study him.

  For almost three years, he advanced our understanding of temporal manipulation and nanotechnology thousands of years. Our own science had been directed at the celestial, by necessity. By that time, we had converted our ships over to a primitive version of the crystal structures that surround us now. Sorry, I digress.

  William helped our society develop our own version of the nano systems we now use on our soldiers. This helped William avoid the life shortening effects of his own serum. It had other combat-enhancement properties as well. Those who received the treatment who did not possess the Enforcer nanites still received a broad assortment of improvements as well as antigeria.

  He helped us protect our ships from further attacks, we owe him a great deal. We did not manage to successfully produce the civilian nano modifications until long after William’s death, Thalleus told you about the Outer Guests? The “Aliens” who helped us?

  They expanded on the original protocol, which lacked many of the advantages aside from life extension and general efficiency gains in things like cognition and physical performance. These are still well below what the soldier modifications provide.”

  Alethia knew the last part, Natalie seemed uncomfortable with her exposition. She left many of he details out of her story, which did not necessarily make it false. Lies held more weight in details than the truth ever did.

  She wondered if this arcology had once been one of the five colony ships. Based on its size, this vessel could probably hold at least a billion people, probably far more than that. And that estimate was based on comfortable housing, not stasis. In that case, people would be stacked like cordwood. She did not know what the stasis technology was like when the original diaspora occurred, but her figures suggested this ship was around a thousand times bigger than the original ships had been.

  Maybe they grew them?

  Alethia had irrepressible energy for the next forty-eight hours. She wasn’t even bothered when her double died at the end, because Zoe would return a few hours later.

  When she did, she wore the silver robes that marked her as a soldier. She looked exactly like she had before, maybe with a bit more muscle mass.

  Her smile split her face when Alethia ran up to her,

  “Hey Allie! It is so good to see you!”

  They hugged and Alethia said,

  “It’s good to see you too! How was training and everything?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “Weird. I can’t say much. But I don’t remember everything that happened between starting training and deciding to accept the military modifications. I remember you were there, right?”

  Alethia blushed, they met in Zoe’s assigned room. It was the same size as Alethia’s room, but slightly colder.

  “I was there, yup.”

  “Why do you say that weird.”

  “You really don’t remember?”

  Zoe blinked and pressed her lips together along with her eyelids. She shock her head,

  “Nope. I remember seeing you. And then I was in training being trained. Like a train. Train train.”

  Alethia laughed at that,

  “Did you get stuck on a track?”

  Zoe grinned and said,

  “So I had to keep steaming ahead.”

  “We went off the rails here. I was trying to see what you remembered?”

  “Besides trains.”

  Zoe nodded, still grinning.

  Alethia said,

  “So you really don’t remember kissing me. Me kissing you back?”

  Zoe’s hand went to her mouth and she turned red. Alethia knew the answer before Zoe spoke.

  “I did that? Oh my gosh, I am so sorry!”

  Alethia nodded back and forth.

  “I was not so much reminding you because I was bothered. More like I wanted to see if kissing you would be okay. Would it?”

  Zoe blinked again and nodded,

  “Yes it would, Ms Thompson.”

  Alethia kissed her with a brief peck on the lips and said,

  “You mean Doctor Thompson. That doesn’t matter. I can explain later.”

  Zoe was almost laughing when Alethia kissed her more sincerely this time. She had definitely been kissed before, even recently by people she was happy to kiss. But she was finally kissing instead of being the one kissed.

  The mirth melted out of Zoe as she stepped into Alethia’s embrace and they explored each other’s mouths with tender affection and seasoned longing.

  Two days later, Alethia’s double failed to die. It complicated things more than Alethia expected. They had a choice to make. On the one hand they could repeat the process again and make sure that it was reproducible. Or they could let the process continue, hoping for a successful conclusion.

  Alethia opted or the former. She wanted to maximize her chances and this would give her one more opportunity to study the correct phase one to two transition while also allowing them to see her clone die once, if there was a phase three.

  They would still have just over two days to spare. Even Zoe agreed that it was as good a course as any other.

  The second time she survived day two, Zoe and Natalie were both with her. She had been worried all forty-eight hours that something would go wrong. The next three weeks flew by with some heavy tension. The day before her clone should have woken up, everything went wrong.

  The pain warned her that something was wrong before the machines monitoring her clone detected a problem. Alethia had time to ask for Natalie’s help when she passed out in shock from the pain.

  She later reviewed a recording of the failed process. Her double had literally melted in the creche. All that was left was a mass of green and silver fluid that failed to disappear when Alethia woke and stopped concentrating on it. They had finally changed the body enough that she did not have control over it. With some trepidation, Alethia called forth a new clone.

  It worked and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  When she passed out, they lost forty nine hours. That set them behind their time table. They only had one more chance to complete the process now and Alethia would have to go into it basically blind. She spent almost every waking moment during the last three weeks reading and watching her last clone expire. Her memory held only emptiness when she reviewed it and the machines, despite the intense resolution of the advanced technology barely helped. Every cell in her body had reached near total maturation and integration. Everything should have been fine, but two days before the process ended, all of them spontaneously… the only word that fit was exploded. They filled with self-produced antigen and viral loads and burst from within. The green hue was from a sulfur reaction in the blood.

  The night before she was set to try her reabsorption trick, Zoe visited her alone.

  “Hey, do you mind chatting for a while, I wanted to ask you something. Something that’s been bugging me.”

  “Sure, what’s up Zoe?”

  “Why do you have to go on this OP? I mean I am going because I am already ready. And I guess I am not asking the right question. I mean why are you insisting on accepting the conversion before you go? Couldn’t you rescue Karen and the rest without the Keeper transition?”

  Alethia shook her head,

  “No, something could go wrong. Based on what I already know, I think the Enforcers can control their agents somehow. Maybe not without an officer or whatever. But I am not taking any chances. I would rather be dead than someone’s slave, Zoe.”

  “People say that all the time, right? But even if you’re a slave, you are still alive. You still have a chance to do something, turn things around or whatever. Death just ends all of that.”

  “I don’t believe that death is really an end. It is an entrance to eternal life with the Father.”

  Zoe smiled,

  “I love that. It’s cuter because you absolutely mean it and you are not arrogant about it. I love that.”

  Alethia decided that was a compliment,

  “Thank you.”

  “But you’re still going through with this tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “I am. I have no choice Zoe.”

  Natalie insisted that she start at least an hour before the models theorized. Her logic was sound, but Alethia was resistant. She was afraid that if she tried the integration before whatever went wrong did, she would be too early and dead no matter what.

  She laid down in the creche next to her body, the silver fluid was temporarily lowered for this part. Alethia could breathe the liquid, but it still felt disconcerting to breath fluids. She lay shoulder to shoulder with her clone, focusing on sensing her tissues and their relative health. Despite what Natalie had suggested, Alethia waited, listening to her body for a change. It arrived twenty-nine minutes later which made Alethia grateful that she had listened to Natalie.

  She started the integration when her clone’s tissues started exhibiting an anomaly. For a moment, her perceptions went crazy again as her clone woke and they shared senses. The press of the liquid was the first thing Alethia cut away. Urgency tried to force her to act in haste, but she resisted the pressure. This would require proper timing or she might die anyway.

  Before her cells started to die, she forced the transition. Energy surged through her bodies and her mental efforts to segregate her various ideas and thought shattered. Pieces of thought floated down like leaves from a tree.

  Alethia’s father smiled as she showed him her grades at UW. Summa Cum Laude was something to be proud of, even if her mother muttered a slight directed toward ‘state school’s’ in response.

  Her mother arguing with her father in front of her about Alethia’s involvement in he SCA and with Role Playing games. Her mother insisted that they were the “tools of Satan” while her father held the skills she gained in high regard.

  She remembered the first time Tony kissed her. Alone in his car after watching Spiderman on the big screen. He awkwardly fumbled for her chest and she had to tell him that she was not ready to move that far that fast. The truth of that situation flashed at her: even then, I wasn’t really attracted to him.

  Her fight with Tiny Tim scanned by her vision now. Here she felt even worse because it of how badly she had treated Karen, Zoe and even stupid Tim.

  Alethia snapped back into her body and felt the whole cells forming her original body start to fall under the toxic assault from the modified cells. Her nanites could not adapt fast enough for her to live and for a moment, Alethia felt like surrendering to her end. With the right mental control, it would be painless.

  But her conversation with Zoe goaded her on. She did not want to die and more importantly, she wanted to explore every new thing she had found here. Her doctorate was just the representation of the first step. Like an emblem.

  With that her resolve hardened and she turned her mind away from integration to replication. She could double her cells before they died. Over and over again she repeated the process, observing that the cells and tissues she replicated changed as she did so. Alethia lost all sense of time and for a moment hung in a perpetual state of rebuilding her body as it consumed itself.

  There she felt a mark upon her heart, like a seal or a brand. She felt a place of perfect balance and could see that all of the splits and tensions of her life lead to this one moment. And all she needed to do was hang on until the next.

  Silver light burst into her vision with that realization. She attained equilibrium between the disparate cells in her body and with a thought, pushed that tension over the brink. With a leap forward like that of a evolutionary mutation, in fact that exactly, her cells changed to absorb the previous, modified tissue and something new emerged, a stable combination of the twain.

  Her muscles seized as the biological processes crashed through her body, changing her and saving her.

  She opened her eyes as fluid drained out of her creche. The digital alerts that troubled her were gone now, erased from the system in her head. But their absence left a void begging to be filled with data. White vistas of possibility occurred to Alethia as she probed the nascent, pristine digital encoding system resident in every cell in her body like a spare set of DNA or like ten thousand blank Internets waiting for data to fill them.

  Zoe looked into the creche and said,

  “Hello there beautiful, I am happy to see you alive.”

  Alethia looked at her and felt her heart swell. She stood up from the creche on her own and embraced Zoe.

  “I am so happy to see you. You are lovely too.”

  Zoe gave her a brief peck on the lips and said,

  “I am sorry to rush you, but I think you need training, right?”

  As soon as Zoe mentioned it, Alethia felt the urge fall on her like the need to use the restroom. The floor of the station glowed in a way she knew only soldiers could see. She followed the glow, waiting only for Zoe to pull the rainbow robe over her head. That part was import too for some reason.

  As soon as it covered her, Alethia made for the room. The place where she would be trained. She needed to get there now. Shadows passed by her, a part of her sensed a vague threat as she walked by them. But their eyes were averted and she could plainly see their hands. Nothing needed to be done to these people.

  Two people, one man and one woman marked her destination. She felt a relief akin to the first sip of tea in the morning when she saw them. It was enough to whet her appetite for a proper gulp, something to coat her stomach in its emptiness.

  They made no motion as she passed between them.

  Beyond the door was a short hallway. Alethia was alone now and the urge to proceed moved her beyond thought. She passed through a second door and came face to face with a mirror. In it she saw a powerful enemy, herself. Despite the knowledge that she was herself born of seeing her own duplicates obey her whims, she struck.

  Alethia flung her hand forward, but the mirror was too far away to strike like this. No matter, something long and serpentine writhed out of her hands and struck the mirror, shattering the image and breaking the unnatural urges in her mind like throwing a switch. Behind the mirror, Zoe and three other silver robed men and women clapped for Alethia.

  She could feel something hot in her blood, like she had a fever that did not touch her head.

  Zoe said,

  “I welcome you to the Argent, sister Alethia.”

  The first day of training involved learning to control the heat in her veins. The source of the heat proved to be a collection of her own cells that filled her skin and blood. With concentration and practice, she could control the cells like they were clay.

  There were other lessons that day too of course. While Alethia tried to draw forth the sinuous mercury in her body, information was streamed high speed into her mind. The breadth of the training projected into her this way astonished Alethia. Like the Matrix, she could suddenly use a several dozen new weapons she only knew the name of but lacked any historical context. With her eyes closed, she could disassemble the Axial Proton Cannon and describe its effective range — limited by gravitational interference — but she could not tell you when it was produced or when she might expect to encounter one. She sincerely hoped she never did.

  Other pieces of training seemed more useful. Alethia already possessed some basic craft and survival skills. She was proud of her ability to camp rugged; a pack, shovel, some food and a tent would keep her fine. This took her skills to a whole new level. Now she knew how to produce shelter not in different biomes, that was too restrictive for her training. She learned how to survive a diverse array of timezones and in their biomes, including ones Alethia only heard of in sci-fi: radiation zones, alien habitats 1-19, and many more.

  Space was the most interesting. The Dreadnought Personal Battle Suit, the silver fractal treaded suits that abducted her friends, was the showcase achievement of the Keeper engineers. Creating it required mastering the silver liquid in her blood, an ongoing process she continued to pursue even while her mind filled.

  Using the Dreadnought, Soldiers could survive for weeks even in deep space. Using the suit would recycle her air and water, the carbon and hydrogen exchange processes were already clear to Alethia from her previous studies.

  Interesting, she thought, they train us for the possibility our suit is destroyed.

  The Keepers interleaved contingencies like that. Despite the rapid run up to readiness — any modern military would kill for a civilian to Special Forces/Mobile Infantry training time of only thirty-one days — the Keepers valued their Soldiers.

  All of this made Alethia suspect that her mandate might extend beyond the Earth and her twentieth century home than Thalleus and Natalie suggested when she arrived.

  The second day, Alethia slept for two hours after which Zoe woke her,

  “Hey, turns out I have some teaching talent. They want me to show you the Argent Way.”

  “What? Is that like philosophy or something?”

  “Not even sort of. It’s combat martial arts, pure and simple. You will like it I think.”

  “Why didn’t they inject that into my brain like the rest of these weird martial arts?”

  “Right? If you think about it, they did. This is like the culmination of the last twenty-two or so hours. Like the rest of this, the Argent Way has echoes of religious significance for them. Come on, we’re burning time, I really do think you will enjoy this.”

  Zoe was right, Alethia loved it. The moves were simple, yet sinuous. They combined movements from all of the hundreds of schools inserted into Alethia’s head over the last day.

  She was curious about something,

  “Why don’t we use the Dreadnoughts? The manual thinks that is the personal combat suit par excellence.”

  “I’ll use it later once you get the hang of things. You won’t use it much, if at all.”

  “Why?”

  Zoe shrugged,

  “Have your Enforcers enhancements faded?”

  Alethia thought about that,

  “No, not even a little.’

  “Right. You’re faster and stronger than the rest of us because of your combined enhancements. Once you know what you’re doing and I start having trouble sparring with you, then I will activate the Dreadnought. I will show you how to use it too, if you need. But I doubt you’ll want it.”

  “Can I try to create my double?”

  Zoe shrugged,

  “Beats me, I’m no scientist. Though I have been thinking about that. It would be really helpful in battle. We should keep training for now. The time we have is important.”

  After only two hours of training in the custom martial art of the Keepers, Zoe activated her Dreadnought. Her movements sped up and Alethia had to focus while she spoke to Zoe using her own voice while Zoe spoke with Dreadnought’s fractal language,

  “This is harder than I thought it would be.”

  Alethia sucked air in and her skin burned. The snakes in her veins wanted to escape to meet the glinting needles and blades that Zoe turned on Alethia.

  “It is hard in particular because I can tell you are resisting the Silver Serpent. Let it out and it will help you on its own. You know how to do this. You don’t want to resist it.”

  Alethia knew that Zoe was right, but when the violence became so real, she struggled with unleashing herself. Even in her own time trying to stop the gunmen who shot Karen, she had never intended to harm any of them. The arts she was practicing now crossed the line of what she studied for a decade. This was a military combat technique: killing reduced to pure efficiency.

  Zoe did not relent. She pressed Alethia, but still she avoided releasing the Serpent and used her own enhancements to counter Zoe. The process worked though Alethia had to tune out the searing pressure in order to focus on defending and counter attacking against Zoe.

  They spoke little for the last few hours of Alethia’s training. More and more her resistance to violence and her discomfort with the ideal of a Soldier willing to kill for their alliances warred against each other. Self defense was one thing, attacking the Enforcers because they captured her friends was different. Even with her impressive intelligence she could not resolve the conflict with a simple aphorism or argument.

  In all likelihood people would die by her hand within a few hours and when they did Alethia would carry with her the knowledge that she sought them in their homes. Even if she knew her cause was righteous — a rescue of her allies from mind control and abuse — that did not absolve her of her guilt.

  As the end of Alethia’s training neared, Zoe pressed her even harder, as if to squeeze as much use out of their remaining time as possible.

  Alethia had no idea where that urgency came from until they finished. She found thinking about anything but her lessons hard until the forty eight hours had expired.

  A second trainer emerged to inform them they were done mid fight. Both stopped like their switches had been flipped. They moved with inhuman precision and skill now and such an abrupt halt was nothing for them.

  Natalie met the two in the hallway outside of the training area.

  “We are ready to deploy, training went well?”

  Alethia nodded. Zoe stayed mounted in her Dreadnought. Alethia gave it little thought because of the tension behind Natalie’s eyes.

  “Something seems wrong.”

  “We need to walk while we talk. Let’s go to the disembarkation hangar.”

  Alethia knew its location from her training. She also knew the key defensive positions as well as the places that could be safely detonated using the arcology’s, named Prime, explosive sequence.

  Neither Alethia nor Zoe spoke. This felt like the lead up to one of the big wars the SCA held. Natalie spoke,

  “After everything, the administrator was able to give us five minutes of time. At our current rate, we threaten to surpass that delicate threshold. The Sphereship will send you to the Terminal as soon as we reach the disembarkation hangar.”

  Natalie repeated herself at the end. She felt the same pressure that had been affecting Zoe.

  “Why is everyone so worried about this?”

  Natalie said,

  “We have not heard from Terminal in two days. Exactly the amount of time we needed to bring your training to conclusion. Right before Terminal went dark, they indicated that the Interdiction had lifted on our assault point. We expected our soldiers to return. Instead something else happened.”

  Zoe said,

  “So in addition to rescuing our friends we are part of the assault on Terminal.”

  Natalie and Zoe used the word casually, Terminal. Alethia’s training informed her that this was the only time travel station the Keepers possessed.

  Terminal allowed the various arcologies to maintain contact with each other. It was also outside of the black hole’s temporal protections. To reach it, she needed to use one of the Sphereships, vessels so old that the secret to their construction was lost during the Keeper Dark Ages.

  Two more Soldiers in Dreadnoughts joined them on the way. Natalie ended her discussion with Zoe and Alethia. As she did, Alethia had the feeling that some message or signal passed between the other two women. She had no idea what that could possibly be.

  They reached the door to the hangar and a man shouted from down the hallway, causing all five people to spin and react defensively. None attacked, of course. Training ensured their professionalism even in untested cases like Alethia and Zoe.

  The man who waved at them from down the hallway wore a dirty artist’s smock with a fanny pack on the front. He had bright red short curly hair. His hands distracted Alethia, they were covered in fresh paint just like his smock.

  “I am coming with you! Wait!”

  The two veteran Soldiers shifted. Alethia caught the imprecation they shared using Zoe as a shield. She wondered why they did not want him with them.

  He was panting when he finished running up.

  “Oh, good. You didn’t leave yet. That would have been unfortunate.”

  No one else said anything. An odd hole in Alethia’s training left the question of chain of command open for the Keepers. The others waited on the newcomer like he was someone important.

  Alethia could not hold her tongue through the tension and absurdity of this guy’s appearance.

  “Who are you?”

  He raised his eyebrow with a minuscule twitch.

  “Oh no one important. I am coming with you or your best friend Rachel will die as well as your friend Karen. That would be unfortunate.”

  “If you come with us, they’ll live?”

  He walked through their group, talking to Alethia over his shoulder.

  “If you come with me, your friends might live. And that will be fortunate.”

  His gaze lingered behind him as he wondered through the doorway and into the hangar.

  Alethia mouthed, “who is this guy?” to Zoe.

  One of the Dreadnought-ed other soldiers answered,

  “He is the Chief of Soldiers. An Ex-Enforcer like you. His enhancement is a little…”

  The other solder interrupted,

  “Fucking annoying. Protects him just fine, the rest of us not so much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Without turning around the chief said,

  “You will see, assuming you survive long enough. Come on, we need to hurry.”

  He was running along with the rest by the time they reached the black ramp that led into the giant black sphere dominating the hangar. Alethia’s awe made her miss a step, stumble and recover in her mad rush to reach the ramp. The black sphere towered in the hangar, as they approached it and the small figures moving around the distant side of the hangar came into focus, she realized the sphere was hundreds of meters in diameter. It’s presence here lowered Alethia’s estimate of the population of the arcology by a few percentage points.

  The ramp was massive and its size made Alethia wonder if these were the seed vessels the Keepers used to flee during their diaspora. Nothing she had learned filled in that gap, which inflamed her curiosity.

  The chief had already reached the command deck of the sphere by the time trailed in last. The ramp started rising before her foot hit the end.

  Panels overhead glowed with soft red light. The chief turned and said,

  “Zoe, Alethia. My name is Edwin. Just call me Ed. This is your first translation, right? We should all put on our Dreadnoughts. That is an order by the way.”

  As he spoke, mercury puddles covered him and obscured his face. Alethia concentrated on her own suit. It flowed out of her skin and covered her with relief. Pressure she had shut out of her awareness finally subsided.

  “Albright, lift off.”

  Ed’s words gave the only notice that the ship had started moving Alethia felt nothing through her Dreadnought. The visual systems in her personal tank let her see the interior of the Sphereship in greater detail. The readouts all showed the Keeper script Alethia had learned at the beginning of her stay with them.

  She read all of them in a glance when Ed’s voice interrupted her musings.

  “Prepare for translation. Lock all Dreadnoughts.”

  All five of the Dreadnoughts’ fractal armatures grabbed various surfaces in the command deck, as well as each other.

  Edwin did not count down. Alethia eventually learned to appreciate that.

  “Go!”

  No other warning prepared her for what happened next, but then nothing could have. Every cell in her body changed shape, warped against the backdrop of the universal medium as it warped itself. She tried to scream but the Dreadnought held her still. The pain shone bright enough in that instant to dwarf the sensation of melting into green and silver goo.

  Alethia woke to hear shouting as though down a long hallway. When she did not respond, the shouting reached her ear in an eye blink,

  “Wake the shit up, we’re in it already! Can you hear me?”

  Ed’s voice roused Alethia from her disorientation and awakened her senses. His silver armor held her own in a vice grip.

  Alethia mumbled,

  “Yes, I can hear you.”

  Before she finished, Ed shouted over her,

  “Good, we’re bailing before something happens to the Sphereship! Out out!”

  Air roared out of the command deck as a large porthole opened in the side of the ship. Alethia’s mind, still trying to recover its balance from the translation noted how she had not seen anything that might shift or become dislodged in any part of the Sphereship.

  Her own Dreadnought disengaged its anchor points with a leap, heading for the opening and clearing it without a bump. The suit had a tracking and telemetry system that showed her the gravity plane several hundred feet below her. It also informed her that she was descending at speed in hard vacuum. Overhead, Ed’s suit displayed a blip showing Alethia that he had let go right after her, making sure he was the last soldier out of the ship. The ship itself changed direction from Alethia’s perspective and flew back along a new trajectory.

  Below her, the suit’s systems displayed a broken series of dense stone and metal pillars. Soldiers, both Keepers and Enforcers fought amidst the ruins. Maps of the area presented themselves and Alethia angled her own descent to take her to the time portal in the ruins. Zoe and the other two soldiers fought in that area. Ed’s intended descent carried him to the same position.

  Her Dreadnought handled entry into the low atmosphere of Terminal. This place was an enigma among enigmas. The Keepers controlled access to it, at least until recently, but they had no idea how to replicate it or even repair the broken pillars of the surrounding architecture. Even the air and its low atmosphere were mysteries.

  A full platoon of Enforcers countered the Keeper push. Alethia could see that her forces were doomed even before she arrived. Any hope of victory fled as fast as her calculations sped through her mind. Right up until Ed landed in the middle of the heaviest concentration of enemies. He landed with a massive impact. That, combined with the fact that he beat Alethia, suggested he had accelerated to strike his foes like a missile.

  Alethia could not believe he would risk himself with such a cavalier attitude, but when the debris cleared from this landing, she saw that he stood unharmed, Dreadnought armor no longer covering him. He held a small billy club, a piece of wood or metal about a foot and a half long with a slight bulge on the end. At least half of the Enforcers rose and fired at him with a melange of weapons and powers.

  Fire and plasma streamed toward Ed as well as laser fire, but weapon-based and generated, as well as several melee attacks. Once again, Alethia was sure he was dead. But the laser attacks missed Ed by a hair, striking one of the Keeper defenses behind him. All three fire bursts curved impossibly toward Aelthia. Her own Dreadnought engaged a defensive maneuver and dodged the strikes.

  Every melee attacker fell without touching Ed. Several of them hit each other and those who did not, hit themselves. Two people died, having cut each other nearly in half with glowing energy swords.

  Ed was speaking out loud to the people attacking him, but Alethia could not make out the words over the cacophony of the attacks. Her suit dampened the sound, while also managing to convey the difference between that and the rest of the noises in the area.

  She landed and rolled to cover. Alethia had aimed for Zoe’s position, but evasive action had led her off course. Her armor receded from her with a thought, filling her with hot pressure once more. The air left the reek of both gunpowder and ozone in Alethia’s nostrils.

  Alethia huddled behind a pillar who’s top surface had been shorn off with some sort of laser or energy weapon. She could see tiny bubbles that marred the surface of some of the pillars. The edges of this one had them too. Her training offered several possibilities for weapons that might have inflicted that damage on the pillars.

  She wished she could summon forth a double in this situation, something that would be expendable for her. No sooner had Alethia hoped for it than her mirror image sprang out of her body and sprinted toward Ed’s former position. He laid into the Enforcers around him, heedless of the danger to his person. Maybe there was no danger to him.

  Alethia tore her own attention away as Zoe’s Dreadnought joined her run. She would have to be careful here.

  Zoe’s appendages gave quick, clipped messages,

  “Look at the portal.”

  Alethia looked up and saw that a small team of Enforcers had gathered around the pillar. Between the three men sat a small black metal device with runes Alethia could not read written in large font on the side. At least the font seemed large, like a warning or trademark.

  “We need to run up there. Now.”

  They rushed to the portal, lasers and other diverted attacks coming close to both of them. Several shots clipped through the edge of Zoe’s Dreadnought. None of the hits were direct and such glancing blows did nothing to the armor. Alethia had trouble preventing her double from throwing herself between Zoe and the attacks, but the activity near the portal demanded her attention.

  The men watched Zoe and Alethia run and one motioned to the other two with his head. They nodded and blazed toward the two with speed that made Alethia concerned. A stray laser took one of their attackers in the chest, killing him instantly. The other reached Zoe with a thunderous impact. For some reason he did not consider Alethia much of a threat.

  She did not have to try to kill him when she hit him with her double. Her speed was a little diminished, something Alethia had not noticed the first time she split.

  The man’s head and neck hardened as she made contact with his jaw Her blow did not even stagger him. He turned and hit Alethia’s clone with a perfunctory backhand that she failed to avoid by only a finger length. Two of her ribs broke from the blow and Alethia bit her lip to keep from doubling over.

  Back behind cover, Alethia clutched her ribs, unable to filter the pain out without leaving Zoe with a defenseless double. She kicked forward at the man as soon as she could recover. He stepped out of the way and swung at her again. This time Alethia moved out of the way only for the man to step back into her space and reverse his strike. He grabbed Alethia’s collar and shoulder and crushed it with his hand. It suddenly became dense and hard as metal and Alethia’s double coughed up blood, spitting it into her attacker’s face.

  Sheer luck guided her aim, which ended in his eyes. He staggered for the first time and Zoe hit him with all of her fractal needles. He sprouted hundreds of little spikes, like a macabre Christmas tree, he stood there suspended by Zoe’s attack. Then the spike retracted in a blink and the man fell over.

  The final man hunched over the device next to the portal, fingers flying against the surface like he was typing out his manifesto in his last moments.

  If only we could be so lucky.

  Alethia suspected that he was entering the ignition sequence for his bomb. That is how this would work in any game. She thought that as her clone and Zoe raced to him. Her clone arrived first, even with her pierced lung and shattered right shoulder. Back at her bunker, Alethia’s main body had vomited nearby when her clone’s lung was pierced by her own bone.

  Alethia reached the man as he laughed and turned around.

  “Do it traitor. Nothing can harm me more than the upcoming thirty-seven seconds!”

  Alethia ran around his opened arms as Zoe shocked him with her appendages. Alethia examined the device the Enforcer left behind as he toppled over. It was large and the fact that it was made of a metal exotic enough that she could not identify it was not good.

  She hefted the bomb as symbols flashed by on the top. He said thirty-seven seconds before they knocked him out, but why would he tell them the real timer?

  “Zoe! I am a clone! You have to throw me as far and hard as you can! Now!”

  Zoe’s suit halted for a breath, before Alethia could open her mouth to goad Zoe on further, she lifted the clone up. As a gamble, Alethia tried to activate the clone’s Dreadnought suit. It worked. Zoe hurled her into the air as a high arc, Alethia activated her suit’s jets and kept the bomb tight to her chest. She sailed out of the atmosphere and further still. Her suit would not tell her where they were, but that made sense anyway. She aimed for one of the large asteroids near to Terminal’s surface. Though she aimed for the back, her suit’s propulsion system chose that moment to fail.

  Alethia’s double exploded an instant after her bundle. The fighters on the ground felt the concussive shock from the explosion and Alethia watched as pieces of asteroid sprayed away from Terminal in a fountain of dust and water. Somewhere up there, pieces of her floated in space too.

  Alethia should have anticipated what happened next, and later she would say that the shock of exploding distracted her more than expected. Only seconds after her double blew up, the same pieces of rock Alethia had been admiring began rain down on Terminal.

  ‘Rain’ was the wrong word. Devastate fit better. All over the field pillars exploded as if struck by heavy artillery. Alethia spun around her shelter to look for Zoe. Amidst the descending boulders and showers of dust that rose like a morning fog, Alethia saw Zoe standing near the portal with another figure opposite her. Alethia could not tell though the clouds who it was or what they were doing, but after a rather large blast, Zoe disappeared while the figure remained. Alethia sped toward where Zoe had been with fear, almost sheer terror, guiding her footsteps.

  She windmilled her arms to keep from falling over when she reached the top of the stairs leading to the portal. Alethia did not even consider dodging falling debris. Finding out what happened to Zoe stood above every other factor in her mind.

  The only person standing near the portal was Ed. He grabbed her when he saw her and said,

  “Good! You’re here! Zoe’s already through! We will come pick you up once we secure this region. Nice work keeping the whole plateau from being destroyed by the way!”

  Alethia had a chance to say, “thanks…” before Ed pushed her through the portal. Her last view before entering was of him whipping himself around to face the nearest threat.