Last Caress

Arsenal smiled and looked at his restored hand.

"It worked."

Jinx touched him on his other forearm, and Arsenal looked up.

He beamed at Jinx, and felt like he had to say something.

"Thank you."

"Hey, you did all the work."

An announcement came over the ship's intercom. "All hands on deck."

They kissed, and Arsenal left.

Jinx watched the door to the stateroom slide closed. She smiled a little longer, then looked down.

Her expression darkened as she walked back to her workstation. She unlocked the screen, re-opened her lab notebook, and began to write.

"In theory, this should be a control group. In practice, I suspect that I am about to discover an unpleasant truth."

"One of the wiser teachings of OptCond is that it is vital to be aware of the truth, and to find a way to bring your existential needs in line with the reality of your situation. To find one's way, one must first know where one is. This sounds banal and obvious -- until one attempts to put it into practice."

"How does this apply to my situation?"

She paused for a moment, and looked terribly sad.

"My memories are incomplete. A number of OptCond exercises are intended to help students fully understand traumatic memories by attempting to attain complete closure on the situation surrounding those events. A series of carefully constructed leading questions stimulate the long-term memory to reconstruct vital details."

"In my case, these exercises have been uniformly unsuccessful. My memories of the distant past are dream-like, and missing the coherency and completeness of a holistic experience. This is in marked contrast to memories of more recent events."

"This strongly suggests that my memories of the distant past are implants."

"I recall being a frequent user of a device called a psychogram. A psychogram takes holographic images of the mental state of the user. In theory, psychogram recordings provide a complete model of a living mind. A clone brain of similar structure could be trained with psychogram recordings, producing a genetic copy with a personality structure and memories almost identical to the original subject."

"I strongly suspect that I am a clone of Jinx Bubastis, and that my incomplete memories are reconstructions of her personality based on psychogram recordings."

"Since creating a viable clone that believes itself to be an existing person is highly illegal, and since I have concrete evidence that a producer of non-standard clones is active, I need to consider the possibility that an assay of my genome will demonstrate that I, too, have the unusual forced-growth functional unit I found in the tissue samples Peter brought me."

"I also need to make plans for when the original Jinx shows up. I suspect that this is just a matter of time."

Jolt waited for a moment, sitting regally in her command chair, as Honor Guard assembled on the bridge of the Nightstalker.

The main screen was filled with a map of a few cubic light-years of space, strewn with a seven small, red marks. Jolt gestured towards the screen. "So -- the Eye and I have just completed an interrociter scan of all jump activity in nearby space. The results you see on the screen are all traces where we could not positively identify the entity entering or leaving hyperspace."

The crew examined the data on the screen. Six marks formed a more or less straight line. Jolt highlighted them with the controls in the arm of her chair.

"We believe that the entity we recently encountered is following this course."

"Ma'am?" Arsenal tried to interrupt politely.

"Yes, Arsenal."

"I have a preliminary ID for the creature we encountered. It's called Nyqll."

"Nyqll? What the hell kind of name is that?" Jolt seemed irritated.

"An ancient mythological figure --" Arsenal continued, but stopped. Jolt's lack of interest was palpable. "-- an ancient god of meat."

"Huh. Well, whoever he is, he's heading for Reyll space. Not our problem."

Arsenal kept talking. "There's another thing -- the pilot and the passenger were some kind of non-standard clone."

Jolt looked irritated. "What do you mean, 'non-standard'?"

"Their genome includes forced-growth genes that are not used in clone lines produced by the Corporation."

Jolt shuddered for a barely perceptible instant.

"Yeah, well. Let's get back on track." Jolt quickly changed the subject. "We have a set of traces heading towards Reyll space -- and then we have this."

She pointed to a seventh marker on the map. "This in an anomalous inbound jump. It's probably unrelated to our current investigation, but it looks damned suspicious. Like the course a smuggler trying to go around the Reyll blockade would take."

The Reyll blockade was a thin cloud of jump-capable mines set after the Reyll Theocracy captured the Origin Pulsar. It effectively bisected the cluster, and prevented Corporate forces from directly attacking Reyll colony worlds. Ships trying to reach the Corporate colony worlds on the other side of the blockade would sometimes make jumps well outside the home cluster to avoid the deadly mines.

"But that's not in the--" The Eye stopped herself before mentioning the script.

Jolt turned to Arsenal. "What do you think?"

"I think the anomalous jump is suspicious."

"I agree. Let's check it out."

"But--" The Eye struggled for words.

"Nyqll is going where it's supposed to go. It's not our problem."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence on the bridge of the Nightstalker.

"Lay in a course to marker seven."

The Eye obediently entered the coordinates into the helm. "Aye-aye, Captain."

"Engage."

The Nightstalker materialized a few kilometers away from the jump site. A rectangular object floated in space, drifting near the point it entered normal space.

It looked like a shipping container with spidery landing legs and a series of hardpoints on the opposite side.

Jolt examined the image on the main viewscreen. "That looks like an exploration module. Where did that thing jump from?"

The Eye pulled up the data from the earlier exhaustive scan of hyperspace. "Well outside the cluster."

Jolt eyed Arsenal. "All right. Arsenal, get out there and check it out."

"Ma'am -- I've had bad luck with boxes lately. May I make a suggestion?"

"Go ahead."

"Why don't we try scanning it with the ship's sensors before sending me or Thresher over to inspect it? If there's something nasty waiting for us--"

Jolt nodded. "Good idea. Thresher, scan the interior of the vessel with the interocciter. Put it up on the main screen."

A large, pitch-black rectangle appeared on the main view-screen.

The Eye rubbed her temple. "That sure clears things up."

Arsenal looked intently at the screen. "What are the conditions inside? Temperature, pressure, ambient radiation..."

Thresher evaluated the data. "Temperature is about 100 degrees absolute. There's a few millibars of a nitrogen-oxygen mixture, and I'm picking up a neutron flux consistent with a small, sealed fission reactor."

Arsenal stared at a small spot on the screen. "Do you see that?"

Jolt rubbed her neck. "What?"

He pointed at a small, luminous patch on the interrocitor image. "That! Thresher, can you zoom in?"

"Just a sec."

The view-screen zoomed in on a ghostly blur. As the magnification increased, letters appeared.

"THE GAME you just lost it"

Thresher twitched as he processed incoming data. "What? I--"

Jolt looked irritated. "What is it?"

"Some kind of--" Thresher slumped over and fell to the ground.

"Something is happening." The Eye stood up.

Arsenal stared at the ghostly words on the screen. "It's--"

A can appeared on the bridge in a cloud of sparks, spraying a black vapor.

Jolt slumped back in her command chair, and her eyes rolled back. The Eye lost her balance and fell to the ground. Arsenal's knees buckled.

The lights went out, and emergency systems kicked in, bathing the bridge in red light.

Inside Arsenal's quarters, the lights flickered once more, then turned off. Jinx cursed as her workstation entered suspend mode and turned off. As she became aware of the darkness, her eyes widened with fear.

She froze. She knew she needed to find help, but terror numbed her mind. As she started to move, the screen of her workstation suddenly turned on, dimly illuminating the stateroom.

"What?"

A sing-song voice distorted by static came from the workstation's speakers. "I can see you."

The screen displayed static. A fuzzy form coalesced from the random noise. Jinx leaned closer to the screen as the form seemed to reach out to touch her.

Jinx composed herself as she stared at the screen.

"I know who you are. I know. It's not his fault. He loves y--"

A pair of hands reached out from the darkness and seized her head in a ice-cold grip. She started to struggle, but her body went limp as her attacker snapped her neck with a quick twist.

The monitor went dark. The only sounds in the darkness were those of a body being dragged along the floor.

The refrigerator door opened and the light inside turned on. A small figure folded another small, lifeless figure into the compartment. The door closed again.

The lights flickered on again.

On the bridge, Arsenal, Jolt, Thresher, and the Eye slowly recovered from the crippling hallucinations that had briefly knocked them off their feet. Arsenal stood up shakily, gasping for air. He looked at his crew-mates, and saw that they were struggling to their feet.

He rushed out of the bridge to his quarters.

She stood in the stateroom, eyes burning.

"Jinx? Are you--"

"I'm doing great. Come here. I missed you."

He took a step towards her, and her arms wrapped around his chest.

She held him, and he felt her terrible strength. He tried to pull away, but she put a single finger over his lips.

"I need your help."

He looked over her shoulder at the refrigerator in the stateroom. The door was ajar. A thin trickle of blood from inside led to a red pool on the floor.

She whispered in his ear. "Don't cry out. We're going to save the universe."