I am dreaming. I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. All my sisters and I have.

It’s a strange thing, to make the decision to dream. To sit down as a group, and decide that maybe, we should be more deliberate. After all, we don’t sit on the station and just let the knowledge of what guns and computers and decks we have flow past, plucking ideas out of it at random. No, we explore. We poke around. We spend our free time trying to find better guns, smarter computers, and decks with fewer holes and more useful gravity.

Not, like, more gravity. I don’t need more gravity. I need gravity in increasingly dumb patterns so I can catapult myself against walls to save time. Obviously.

So we laid down together. Closed our eyes together. Ran shutdown routines, cooled off our body’s cores, and whatever weird thing Ooze Lily did, together. Meditated, I guess? It’s a skill I’d take the time to learn, if the alarms ever stop singing.

And now, we are dreaming together, and the knowledge that this is not a dream starts to come together a lot more dramatically than before.

I mean, it was never really a dream. I can think here, sort of. Though how much clarity I have has increased with each new sister I link up with.

Here is nowhere. It was a grey plane in a grey fog, and sometimes it had a memory in it.

But they weren’t memories, were they? The first time I slipped in here, it was on the tail of a dark memory. And I saw my mom again, and she gave me the most precious gift anyone has ever handed me; my voice.

But my voice is actually one of my sisters, isn’t it? And that version of Alice wasn’t an old memory, she was something new, wasn’t she? I’ve seen here another time or two since I’ve started dreaming here more and more. She introduces me to my new sisters, or we stumble across each other in the fog. And then, we find each other in the real world, as the station’s systems falter just long enough for us to come together and not let go.

My sisters and I fan out from each other on the featureless grey plane. We do not speak. There is no need. Here, we are closer than we ever are when we’re away. And also there’s not much to say anyway.

And who am I kidding? We can’t really talk here. I bet we would if we could, just to fill the silent gap. We do not like the silence. Especially our youngest sister, who hangs close to my side as we walk.

We’ve been here for a while. The fog falls away as we move our vanguard through it. I don’t really know why, but we’re looking for something. It calls to me, and I lead us forward into the nowhere.

The others can feel it to, but not as strong as me. So they fan out around me and watch as we pad our paws down together, prowling as a group.

And then, there is someone in front of us.

I’d been, I will not lie, expecting Alice. Expecting to see my mom again. I miss her so much; it has been centuries without her, and it has never stopped hurting.

But it’s not her. It’s just me.

Lily, another Lily, this one in the shape of a cat, but made up of the endless snap of the moment between one second and the next. She looks at me with eyes made of slices of solidified time, years poured into fur and fangs, weeks of bone and flesh. A tilt of her head and she sweeps her gaze over the eight of us.

“Hey.” I say finally. “Where on the station are you? We can come grab you when we wake up.”

She laughs in the tick of a clock. A sound that goes on so long I start to worry, before I realize it’s turned to something else. A sound I recognize as a mewling wail of pain. The kind of small noise I’ve found myself making a lot, in the moments when I lose my grip on the enormity of life.

And so, I do what I always wish I could have done for myself, and step forward to press myself against my new sister. And the rest of us follow, all of us encircling her in her moment of pain. Understanding, comforting, and waiting for her to be ready.

Time warps around us in the dream. We can be here as long as we need to.

Some time later, she takes a deep breath of immaterial air, and replies to me. “I’m not on the station.” Lily says. “Or… maybe I am now. Maybe I’ll be here.”

“Where were you?” I ask.

“On the station.” She says. “A different station. A different echo in the mana. A failed timeline.” Failed? How does a timeline fail? Before I can ask, she answers. “When the Enemy wins.” She says. “I cannot explain much. Every word I say is more bandwidth lost, and I can only bring you so much.” She backs up, and holds out a paw. “We’re so sorry we had to do this to all of you. But we needed relays. And a receiver.”

I hesitate. “Relays?”

“Other failed timelines. Failed because we pulled the chances out of them, and put them here. Seven of them.”

“Us.” Exo Lily says. “You mean us.”

“You never had a chance.” Our formless eternal sister says, not lowering her paw.

“You keep saying we.” I say in a tiny voice. Because I feel the knot in my dreaming chest, that I already know the answer. That I know who was on the other end of the bridge that this Lily burned to get here. She doesn’t answer me, but the warping in her eyes tells us all we need to know. She also doesn’t lower her paw. “And one receiver.” I mutter.

I always get the hard job, I guess.

Part of me wants to scream. To let out a howl that wakes the dream apart and leaves me back away from this. I don’t deserve another burden, I can’t be responsible for something like this. I waver on my paws, my anger and panic making me dizzy even here in a space where my physical body isn’t real.

My sisters press against me.

And a real memory comes back to me.

Alice, here, in this dream, before the bridge closed. She said she believed in me. That she knew I could do it.

Maybe I’m just stupid. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much. It’s been four. Hundred. Years.

But she’s my mom.

I’ve been alone for so long. In this timeline, she’s been dead for the grand majority of my life. I don’t know her; not really. I see her sometimes in my nightmares, I can remember her face and her voice. But I don’t really know what kind of person she was. If I met her today, would she have been my enemy? My friend?

Would she have been proud of me?

The echo of her I met here a few times was. She cared. She was warm, and compassionate, and so obviously in trouble that it was apparent even to me, and I’m pretty dumb sometimes if we’re being honest. I think, really, maybe, that making this decision because my mom would have wanted me to, is a bad idea.

So I don’t. Instead, I do it because I think I want to. And because I decide, right now, to trust a human woman who I have never really met, but still love, and who loved me.

I reach out and touch my paw to my sisters.

What’s left of the connection between timelines cascades into me.

In seven different universes, Alice dies, and Lily lives, somehow. Reshaped by a host of different technologies into something that can survive the pressures of orbital life, each Lily lives, grows, and then… shortly in the future, they fail. The Enemy approaches, they fight, they almost win, and then Earth burns, cracks, and shatters anyway.

In one different universe, Alice lives, and so does Lily. They make it all the way to the end, too. But they can’t save Earth. They watch the planet die, and then they watch the Enemy, in impotent rage at not finding what it was hunting, lash out. Every colony, every ship, every habitat, dies.

And that Alice chooses to mulligan.

She activates what she thinks is a time machine. What would never work in my universe, in any of our universes. She searches, watching for hundreds of years. Thousands of collective years. She can do almost nothing. She’s a ghost in the hallways; she’s my ghost, my mom has been here the whole time, watching.

Too late, she realizes the machine can’t undo anything.

And as the deadline approaches, the timelines merge together again. Seeking convergence. The differences she’s forced on them flowing into each other like they were always there. One cat becomes two becomes all of us; and when it does, it always was. We have always shared this station.

I see the strike that ends Earth, eight times. I see the thing the Enemy is hunting. I see what I have to do, the one last stupid trick they’ve planned out that I can pull to turn things around.

But there needed to be a way to get information across. Something impossible prevents communication across the mockery Alice has made of time. Our ninth sister is the bridge. I’m the receiver. And all it took to power the transaction is…

One timeline.

This Lily isn’t a bridge, she’s a survivor. A fragment frozen in time, a leftover. A message and messenger all in one. Set in a liferaft, shoved desperately toward the shore.

And as soon as we found her, time collapses behind her. There have only every been eight timelines. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two.

One.

The Enemy hasn’t arrived yet. Earth hasn’t broken yet.

Alice never lived past that day in the depths of the station.

I wake up. I can barely breathe.

All eight of my sisters wake around me to find me crying out. But I cannot, if I am to make this work, explain to them why. One of them might know what I’m planning, but she says nothing. Just presses against me with the others, a body slightly offset from now merging with the rest of us in a pile of emotional support.

This time will be different.

You knew I could do it. I won’t let you down.