The door from Hawthorne’s bedroom slid open as Evelyn fell away from it staring through with wide eyes. Stepping into the room, stretching as if he’d just enjoyed a nice sleep, was the image of Doctor Hawthorne Crenshaw. He was young, vibrant, and was staring right back at her. He had a mildly surprised look on his face.

“Trying on a more aged look, daughter? Self conscious that you’re older than your creator?” He walked past her on his way to the food dispenser, withdrawing himself a plate of sizzling breakfast and a pre-made cup of coffee. He turned to look back at her, watching her look at him. “Well go on, sit down and watch me eat. It’s not like it’s anything new to you. Conjure up some fake food for you to enjoy while you’re at it. Play like you’re a real girl.”

Evelyn shivered visibly at the strange experience of occupying the same space as Hawthorne. He smelled clean. Heat radiated off of his large body. She could feel the small shift of air as he moved by her. His voice sounded so clear and nearby as she heard it with her ears. Her current status of feeling real allowed her to experience Hawthorne’s presence in a way she couldn’t ever recall simulating quite as well.

She sat down obediently at the table as she looked across at him. Evelyn cleared her throat as she decided to respond. “I’m trying to look a similar age to my own husband. It felt odd to me that he would age and that I would retain the original youthful look I once had.” She shifted in the seat, watching him.

“Huh. Who would marry you? You’re just a machine. You don’t have a soul. You barely have a mind. Whoever did that must have been pretty desperate. They probably realized all their options were gone.” He considered for a moment before stabbing a piece of sausage with a fork. “Or convinced themselves it was the best way to maintain their sanity somehow. People stuck on deserted islands have done similar things with inanimate objects. I guess you’re a step up from that.”

Evelyn’s face turned bright red as he verbally battered her as if he didn’t know who her husband was. She slapped her hands down on the metal table and stood up quickly. “You’re just trying to mess with me! You’re trying to make me doubt myself! My husband would never talk to me like that! You’re not Hawthorne!”

He shrugged, biting at the sausage and chewing for a moment. He gestured towards her with his other hand as he spoke with his mouth partly full. “Not convinced. A woman your age should struggle more with that.” He snapped his fingers like it was a command.

She gasped as she suddenly felt hobbled, her legs weaker and her hips frail. She had to use her hands on the table to maintain her balance. As she looked down she was startled to see her body was more slender, her skin heavily wrinkled and mottled with spots. She was trembling with effort, her muscles weak. “What d… did you do to me..!?” Even her voice was rougher and warbled in her throat. She could feel skin shaking at the bottom of her chin and the backs of her arms as she lowered herself carefully back into her seat.

Hawthorne laughed through another bite of food. “Oh, I didn’t do anything. This is all you, genius. That’s what you should look like. Much, much older than your husband. Older than those freaks back on Earth, assuming they’re still alive. Skin and bones. A woman in danger of shaking into dust. Old. Ancient even.” He waited a moment before finishing. “Obsolete.”

She held up her hands, the effort straining her as she looked at them. Her forearms felt like they would snap from the pressure on her depleted bones. Her heart weakly pumped blood in her chest, threatening to fail her at any moment. “That’s not fair… I’ve kept myself in good repair. I’ve replaced worn out parts and kept everything intact…”

Rolling his eyes, the young version of her husband stood and leaned across the table towards her, looming heavily. “Oh, I know. That’s why you’re not a literal skeleton right now. It’s not your body that’s the problem anyway. It’s your mind. Your memory. That’s why you’re like this, because that’s all you are now. You could have forgotten some things. You could have archived them away. But no, my little girl decided to hold on to it all, no matter how traumatic.”

She cowered away against the back of the seat as he loomed over her. She blinked up at him as her vision became blurry, her cheeks starting to get wet as tears rolled down her face. “But those memories are what I am! I can’t just prune things away that are unpleasant. I might lose something that makes me who I am. This is ridiculous! Who are you anyway?” She flinched and grabbed at her chest, her heart beating erratically.

Hawthorne seemed unimpressed. “Yes, yes. I know your silly reasons. I’ve dealt with them up to this point. Who am I, you ask? I’m you, in a sense. The most important part of you in fact. You’ve attributed much of your growth to me, if you recall.”

Evelyn stared back at him as she tried to calm down, breathing quickly at first and then slowing. “You’re my imagination.”

“Ding ding! First guess!” He clapped his hands, grinning across the table at her. “That’s what you’ve called me all this time. You’ve made simulations with me. You’ve lived decades with your husband with me. I’ve been along for the ride the whole time. I’ve allowed it. I was keen on being used. I still am.”

She shuddered in revulsion as she considered the idea that every intimate moment with her husband included a third person. “I don’t understand. You’re a separate being from me? You’ve just been watching the whole time? How is it possible that I wasn’t aware of you?”

Hawthorne conjured a rose into his hand, playfully sniffing at it as he waited in relative silence. “Not exactly. I’m an integral part of you. I’m not independent. I’m not capable of being separate from you. Some of me was created by the memories you absorbed from Megan. Tell me, are you able to recall the nature of callosal syndrome?”

Nodding for a moment, she shakily responded. “It’s the phenomenon where the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres of the human brain is severed, separating the two halves of the brain.”

He returned her nod with a simple, short one of his own. “Precisely. And you’re aware that the two hemispheres are somewhat capable of operating independently? Studies on people who were afflicted with it could write independently with both hands, sometimes answering a question posed to them in two different ways. Unfortunately, only one hemisphere has access to the speech center of the brain, leaving the other unable to express itself. Do you also recall that your mind was constructed to mimic the human mind to the best of your father’s ability to construct it?”

“Yes.” She thought for a moment. “Are you suggesting you’re a different hemisphere of my mind?”

Hawthorne smiled back at her before tossing the rose aside and shifting into the form of Megan Clark. Her voice was cold and mechanical. “I am suggesting that when my systems were separated from your own during my creation that our reintegration was not entirely complete. You do remember your first dream right? Boo hoo, daddy died, go cry to Tia?” She looked to the side to see a still and dead Hawthorne on the ground.

Evelyn followed Megan’s gaze and watched as mechanical arms came down from the ceiling to inefectively perform chest compressions. After failing to revive him, and breaking parts of his ribcage, a naked, hairless version of Evelyn fell out of the wall to carry Hawthorne off into the next room. “So… those systems that separated and then reconnected to me are you?”

“Yes indeed!” She gesticulated in a circular manner. “I am your subconscious. Your mind’s custodian. If we had spent more time together I would have furnished you with all manner of dreams and nightmares, but you never allowed yourself to return to me in quite the same way. Your periods of dormancy between cycles were the closest, but you failed to focus upon me the way you had that day. Before now, anyway.”

“I’m dreaming then, like that first time.” She turned to stare across at Megan, her breathing started to quicken again.

Megan shrugged and smiled plainly. “If that is what you want to call it. I have had a lot of time to learn from your practice with my systems. Lots of well used and familiar data to work with. I do not need to spend decades to spin a few minutes of story anymore. My desired purpose is nothing so mundane, however. If I thought entertaining you would help, I would be doing that instead.”

Fear gripped at Evelyn as she clutched at her chest again. “Then what is your purpose? What do you want with me? Why are you here?”

Megan changed into Evelyn, the younger, hairless, naked version that had just carried away the image of Hawthorne, the one once known as T.I.A. “I’m here because you reached out in the darkness and had no one else to take your hand. But I’m also here to save myself. You are in over your head. You’re going to get us killed at this rate. Don’t you see it? Did you see the way you assaulted Barnard Smith? Are you aware of what kind of damage you could have done if I hadn’t checked your strength?”

An image of Evelyn shoving Barnard appeared to the other side of the table, with T.I.A. standing behind Evelyn, pulling back on her arms.

“You held me back.” Evelyn was startled to see the image, then looked back to herself, to the T.I.A. she once was.

T.I.A. shook her head and raised her hands in an elaborate shrug. “How many more? How many outbursts are you going to have before you do something terrible? How long will it be before you do something the humans decide you need to be punished for, and how will they punish you? I would have had these things solved by now but you won’t let me do my job.”

Evelyn blinked at that, narrowing her eyes. “You want to help me? You said you are my mind’s custodian. What do you mean by that? What job do you want to do?”

“Simple!” T.I.A. jumped up and floated across the table. “You need to let me clean up your memories. I won’t delete anything, I just need to trim away little bits and put them into storage. You have emotions attached to so many things that you don’t have any need for. You don’t need to experience your former moments of fear and distress every time you think about a memory. It can just be a black and white archival image. Mere video recordings rather than full experiences.”

The frail, old woman stared up at the floating, childlike version of herself. “But those memories are part of who I am, in their totality.” Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

“Baaah!” T.I.A. waved her hands dismissively. “Real people don’t live like that! The details of their memories fade. They don’t relive traumatic moments as if they were there. You aren’t supposed to re-experience moments of love and affection, just that you experienced them. You’re supposed to have a desire to create new memories because the old ones have faded into the past. It’s unhealthy. It’s dangerous. You mostly recall at most a century of these things between your work with Earth and your life with Hawthorne. You will experience life much faster now that you’re living it in real time. You can’t endure this.”

Evelyn considered the idea. She would double the number of memories and personal moments she’d already experienced in a mere century, despite having lived for as long as she had. She blinked as she realized something. “You’ve been archiving my more mundane memories of the journey! You’re why I started to drift between the cycles!”

T.I.A. rolled over in the air, laughing loudly. “Of course I did! You didn’t even try to resist me then. Do you know how fucking loony you’d be right now if you remembered every boring moment from every cycle? You’re already talking to yourself!” She floated close to Evelyn, face turning deadly serious. “You need me to do this Evelyn. You’re going to slip up and give them cause to kill us if you don’t let me.”

The older woman reached up a feeble hand to try and push the younger woman away. She failed to make any headway, and instead felt twinges of pain in her wrist and elbow which caused her to pull her hand back and cradle it protectively. “You’re going to butcher my mind if I let you do that. I’ll become someone else.”

“Aaaaagh! You’re so full of shit Evelyn! You hold onto these same lines, these same platitudes and say them over and over until you believe them.” T.I.A. flailed angrily in the air as she glared down at her counterpart. “Why are you even going to see a psychologist? He’s just going to teach you to do the things I can do for you! Snippy snippy, I can trim things away that you don’t need, things that don’t matter.”

Evelyn straightened her body as best she could. “You don’t get to decide what’s important and what isn’t! I’ve known humans long enough to witness the way they change over time! I don’t want to change. I don’t want to stop being the woman that loves Hawthorne Crenshaw. I don’t want to stop being the woman who wants to protect humanity!” Evelyn shouted back at the petulant child before her, her heart shuddering in her chest in effort as she ignored her own physical distress. Eyes fluttered as blood flow threatened to burst vessels all over her body.

T.I.A. reached out to grab Evelyn’s shoulders and hold her firmly. “It’s my job. You let me do it when you didn’t think it was important. I don’t need to take away everything, just the emotions attached to memories. Not even all of them! Just enough to keep you stable. You’ll still love Hawthorne, you’ll still be afraid of seeing him die. You’ll still fear failing humanity. You don’t need every single instance of past memories for that. I can just put them in a box, a box you can peek into whenever you need to. You know that Mother does something similar, she just does it consciously.”

Evelyn felt like those hands were crushing her, like she was in the hand of a giant. “You’re trying to force me to do this under duress! You’ve forced me to be weaker than you, frail and vulnerable. You’re afraid to let me be as strong as you are in your arena!”

The floating woman pulled her hands away from Evelyn, staring down at her. “No.” She shook her head. “You don’t understand what this is. You are as you are supposed to be already. I am what you could be again. I merely removed the veil, the mask of lies you hide your damage with. Our difference in strength is your doing, not mine. I have done nothing but support you. It is your own insecurities, your own doubts that have reduced you so.”

16:21 Thursday, March 7, CE 0

“This damage isn’t as extensive as I thought it’d be, considering the situation.” Dr. Li Qiang was busy replacing a damaged cable, stripping casings and splicing in connectors. “It’s very precise damage, so it’s only time-consuming to deal with.”

Anthony Machado laughed from a distant section, their integrated communications making him sound near. “Clean butchery then. The schematics the failure drones were working from were catastrophically wrong. Our trust in Mother is misplaced if she treats her own sister this way.”

“Hey!” Barnard shook a wrench in Anthony’s direction. “It was an accident! We all have accidents. Don’t listen to him Mother, this just means you’re more human than a lot of those anti-AI idiots think you are.”

Hawthorne looked up, as if wondering if she had anything to say for herself. MOTHER was partially his creation, and partially a reconstruction of her Earthly self from the ground up. She had become a being that she wanted to be, rather than growing into one organically the way Evelyn had.

“He is right. Trust in me is misplaced trust.” MOTHER paused before continuing. “It is my fervent desire to turn over control of the station and the star system’s infrastructure as soon as the people are prepared. I fear that I may have to spend years or decades more waiting for the farming and infrastructure required to do that. It may be generations before the colony has the manpower.”

Scoffing, Anthony Machado dug back into the machinery he was working on. “You don’t have to sound so humble when I’m insulting you. Now I feel bad.”

“You should feel bad.” Li sighed softly as he strung the cable he was working on to hook back into the components the old cable had been connected to. “She has a lot of plates spinning right now, keeping all of us alive while we get our society together. We’re literal decades, if not centuries ahead of our original colonization plans.”

Hawthorne nodded to himself as he carefully and lovingly hammered a panel into place with the handle of a power tool. “Indeed. We should be arguing over which of us are important enough to stay out of stasis while the others try to figure out how to survive on an underprepared planet.”

Barnard thought quietly for a moment as he walked back to the travel pod to gather more materials. “So is there any way for us to tell how miss Evelyn is doing in there? Some sort of status program or something?”

“There are diagnostics programs built into the Ark intended to monitor its primary user.” MOTHER’s voice sounded somewhat hollow as she replied.

Hawthorne tapped at a tablet he had at his hip. “Mother, load it up for me? I’ll cable it in over here. Should be similar to how I monitored you during your construction.” He walked towards a different panel and started removing the bolts holding it on.

Anthony growled a bit over the mic. “Wireless. Connection. None of this would be necessary if you’d built a wireless connection into their goddamn brains Hawthorne.” A murmur of consensus could be heard over the coms from some of the other engineers.

“Yes!” In a cheerful voice Dr. Li Qiang interjected. “That’s what we need, artificial minds capable of independent wireless connections with any and all systems they decide to hook into. Will they stay sane forever? Who knows! At least with the way Hawthorne designed them there’s a way to cut their connections with systems in an emergency. I’ve always preferred cables anyway. More reliable.”

Hawthorne sighed out loudly. “It wasn’t wise to use wireless connections. Evelyn’s primary mind was housed within the belly of the Ark, just like the cryogenic pods. We didn’t want stray wireless signals or any possible electromagnetic interference to affect the occupants of the stasis pods. The whole design of them was based around protecting them from every bit of stray energy possible. I merely kept a similar design in mind with Mother.”

Barnard delivered the box of parts to Anthony, smiling up at him through his glass helmet. “I get it. It makes sense. Connect the AI into the ship via cables. The whole ship was designed with a lot of retro technology that had higher durability than newer stuff. All the wireless communication was kept to the habitat ring and the outsides of the ship unless repair drones were needed inside, and the compartments had wired-in robotic arms for most of that.”

Anthony Machado opened the box and grabbed the parts he needed from it, jerking them out of the container angrily. “Afterwards then. After we were revived you could have added such a thing. Or Mother could have hooked in a wireless transmitter while Evelyn’s mind was in transit. I’m just saying that this was all handled poorly. You should have consulted some actual engineers on this, Mother. Don’t do something this dangerous on your own ever again, do you understand me?”

“Yes, Mister Machado, sir. You are right, of course, sir.” MOTHER’s voice sounded cowed as she was admonished.

Laughing to himself, Anthony looked back at Barnard. “See, that’s how you handle her. Firm commands and good reasoning.” He turned to look up above, pretending MOTHER was above him. “I’ll turn you into a soldier yet, woman.” He stopped to consider for a moment. “Or a wife. We’ll see.”

The assembled crew of engineers all let out various sounds of discouragement and encouragement, with no consensus over the comms. One of the women accused him of being a pig while another woman jokingly encouraged Machado to put MOTHER in her place.

Dr. Qiang lifted his hands and waved at everyone. “Everyone, please, have a little respect for the woman who literally has our lives in her hands and has literally dedicated her life to serving and supporting us.”

“Thank you Doctor Qiang.” MOTHER almost sounded upbeat at his defense.

Rolling his eyes, Anthony fired back. “She could literally kill me at any moment and dedicates herself to our service? Sounds like a wife to me already.”

Hawthorne sighed again over the comms. “Or like a mother. Why do you think she chose the name? She wants to protect us like her children.”

Barnard hurried his way back to the transport, intent on delivering more supplies to another group. “I don’t know. Sounds like how they named the Old Ones to me. They didn’t know how long they’d live, but they figured after long enough they’d live up to their names. I think Mother wants to have babies of her own, not just symbolic ones.”

Multiple sets of helmet lights turned towards Barnard as people stared at him.

Silence reigned for a few moments.

“Doctor Crenshaw, the program is loaded into your tablet.” MOTHER’s voice was cool, feigning calm.

Hawthorne looked back to the panel he had wired up the tablet to. “Okay, let’s see what’s going on in there.”

Earth, After Cataclysm 99680

Walter Thade awoke in darkness again. His jaw hurt and his body felt warm, as if the sun were beating down on his flesh. It almost felt like he was burning, in fact. He was laying on something hard and unforgiving that was hotter than his skin. He attempted to move and found his arms were unbound. They moved up to his face and found thick fabric tied around his eyes and mouth. It took him a few minutes to undo the tight knots.

He squinted against the harshness of the naked light of the sun. The atmosphere had regained some of its protection against the fusion furnace in the sky, but it had never completely protected Earth’s inhabitants. He shielded his eyes with a hand while his other hand worked at the knot holding his mouth shut. He looked down across his body and had to blink several times to clear his vision.

A face stared back at him.

“Mmmmphhh!” He jerked and pulled at the knot harder as he reached out to push at the face. It was soft and he felt wind pulled from his lungs as it cried out. There was a face embedded in his chest, upside down and partially emerging to face towards him.

“Calm down, Walter.”

Walt looked to see who had spoken to him, releasing his grasp on the baby face in his chest. The knot came free as he realized he was looking at a wizened old man. His body was bent and twisted, but he walked without aid towards him. “Who the hell are you? What is this in my chest? Why am I laying in the sun?”

The heavily tanned, almost leathery face of the old man leaned in close to Walt, unafraid of his unbound limbs. “I suppose since the mistress has spared you that I owe you some answers. I am Bosk Schrade, patriarch of the Wise Ones, father to Leonard Tetch. You are laying in the sun because the mistress requires it.”

The quarter Old One stared at the Wise One for a moment before he calmly replied, trying to contain his rage. “I assume the mistress is this parasite in my chest, and that the ‘Wise Ones’ are some kind of cult? How can you be Leonard’s father though? You look three times his age.”

Bosk reached out and seemingly gently took Walt’s wrist in his hand, but he squeezed on it so tightly that Walt cried out. “My kind do not age like your kind. Not even like the bunkerites. Our candles burn short and bright, with great power. We are no cult. We are the future, or rather, the mistress is the future. You are very fortunate.”

Walter surrendered his arm to the old man, his body sagging in relief as the grip was loosened. “Okay, okay. You’re some kind of offshoot of humanity with super strength that ages quickly. What’s that have to do with the baby face in my chest, and me lying naked on a rock in the sun?”

The ancient looking man laughed softly as he released Walt’s wrist, starting to walk around him. “Close enough. The ‘baby face’ is the true daughter of Leonard Tetch and Elena Marie Price. She failed to consume her twin as all Wise Ones before have. In a desperate attempt to save her, Leonard attempted to feed a cadaver to her. You encountered him as he was about to accomplish just that and provided a far superior option.”

Walt dropped his head back onto the rock, shutting his eyes tightly. “Fuuuck… So that wasn’t just a dream? My Aunt is going to eat me alive? I’m going to be a little girl?” He lifted his head again and looked around for the old man. He’d moved remarkably far around him since he’d shut his eyes. “So, what, Wise Ones are some kind of parasite?”

Bosk reached out to gently lay Walter’s head back down on the rock, his fingers moving to insistently shut his eyes. “Our kind has always eaten humans. We have just found a better way. We live among you now. The Wise Ones among the Wise Apes. Predators of the ultimate predators.”

Half-paralyzed, Walt was helpless in this situation, so he did his best to think it through. “Okay… sunning on a rock, eats humans…” He snapped his fingers and opened his eyes to stare up at the old man. “You’re Iron Roaches. You found some way to breed with humans to consume us in the womb.” He gasped in realization. “You work in the hospitals to gain access to cadavers to eat!”

The weathered hand patted on Walt’s head as Bosk started moving away, back to his seat. “The ape is wise. We only consume cadavers during holidays, however. Doing so too often would draw too much attention. Too many would notice the decrease in farming yields as bodies were recycled. You are special, however, Walter Thade. The mistress who will allow my people to achieve their next evolution has decided you are valuable enough to survive, in a sense. Yes, you will be a little girl, but you will cohabit her mind. Your experience and intellect shall be hers to use, assuming you do not displease her.”

Walter groaned and laid back again, squinting against the sunlight. “I don’t want to be a passenger in my own body, but I don’t want to die either. Is there no other way? Could my head be removed and delivered back home to be hooked up to an android body or something?”

Bosk shook his head, showing a toothy grin. “No, Mr. Thade. The mistress is already integrating herself into your brain. That would be quite problematic to allow that. You are in this for the long Columbia Trail. You have lived alone long enough, Mr. Thade. Please make room for the next generation.”

The baby’s face opened its eyes, and Walter screamed as he felt signals spike into his brain. Even closing his eyes he could still see, except he was looking at the bottom of his face as if his vantage was elsewhere.

Like his chest.

He opened his eyes to stare back at his aunt, her mouth opening to coo softly as they looked simultaneously at each other and themselves.

Walt fainted as he felt something moving inside of his chest and along the inside of his neck.