I was happy to hear I wasn’t alone in thinking the mushroom colony was disgusting-looking. AEGIS validated my opinion exuberantly. But it was sustenance, and I needed to eat.

It was the morning after visiting Saga and I was ‘enjoying’ my breakfast, spending more time chewing the damn thing than eating it.

“Alright. Time for my great reveal, I think. A ticket to your improved life, and hopefully, my freedom,” AEGIS said, finishing something up on the terminal. She cracked her knuckles with a flourish.

“That,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the mass-fab “is what we in the ‘biz refer to as a ‘broken piece of junk.’ I’ve spent the last couple of days hacking together a primitive mass-fab driver, and if you can hook me up, I should be able to make the thing go.”

“Wow. Do you have any blueprints, or will we have a fixed piece of junk?”

“Your roommate happens to be a super-genius. Well, a regular genius with a wall of computing power in front of her. So while I won’t be able to download anything fancy off the ‘net, I should be able to make some simple things for you. We can do some test runs and hopefully refine it a bit, and then we can hopefully make some simple things for me.”

“What kinds of simple things for you?”

“The kind I’ll tell you about if phase one of my master plan works.”

“Don’t be coy now.”

“It’s less a matter of being coy, and more a matter of saving face if my plan is a huge flop.”

Under her directions, I spliced together a couple of dozen wires and stuck them in tiny pinholes in one of the ports on the AEGIS box, and their sisters on the mass-fab.

“So, hopefully this goes without saying, but what we’ve made is an electrical engineer’s worst nightmare. Thankfully there’s no other electronics running in…anywhere, so that’s one less source of interference, but anything from solar radiation to moving the wires too close to each other could send corrupt data.”

“So in other words, there’s no way this is going to work.”

“Bzzt. Wrong-o. You forgot one very important fact.”

“That my roommate is a super-genius?”

“Hey, you got that one right at least. I wrote this driver, so I get to dictate how it works. I made up my own little protocol based loosely on how the old ‘net used to work, which basically says that whenever I send it data, it sends it back to confirm it got it right. And I’ll keep resending until I’m sure the whole thing is right, and then we’ve got our build.”

“Sounds great. Sounds foolproof. Why’d they stop using it for the ‘net if it’s so smart?”

“‘Cuz it’s sloooow. Also ‘cuz now you just download a quantum entanglement binding and you stream infinite data with perfect reliability. Takes all the guesswork out of it.”

“You remember all this stuff, but don’t remember how you got in that room?”

She shrugged and rolled her eyes. “I don’t get to choose what I remember. Now let’s fire it up.” She punched in a few commands and…nothing exciting happened. “Hmm, important first step. Please turn the mass-fab back on. There we go. And now…”

This time, the mass-fab’s holo displayed a spinning figure-eight icon and a progress bar. I noted with some dismay that the bar didn’t seem to be moving.

“And we’re live.”

“It’s working?”

“It’s working.”

“The progress bar isn’t moving.”

“That’s because it’s slow.”

“How slow?”

“Very slow. Like, a day or two maybe.”

“That long?”

“Hey, at least it’s automatic. I’m the one who gets to babysit it, so you can go off and smooch your ghost friend or eat mushrooms or whatever.”

“I don’t think you can even smooch a ghost,” I said. Still, Saga did have a nice sultry voice, when she wasn’t trying to channel her inner goddess. And the way I sensed her move, it was a little sensation like being inside her. I guess that’s exactly what it was like, if I was brushing her surface-level thoughts, when she experienced something like shuddering or shrugging, it was exactly like being in her body.

My mind immediately went to, if she had a body, what other sensations might I/we read off each other’s minds.

“You’re thinking about smooching a ghost, aren’t you?”

“NOPE!” I said, standing up and taking a short walk around the room.

“I know I’ve said this before in exactly as many words, but OMG you are such a perv. Your brain is a one-track lane to the gutter.”

“I didn’t bring up smooching anyone, okay? That was all on you.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the one standing there sprouting wood, am I?”

“Hey! The progress bar moved!”

“Smooth save.”

“Yeah, I try. It says 1%.”

“Well, it’s been,” she hit a few keystrokes. “Only about 45 seconds. So looks like the shielding in this building is better than I’d hoped, and we’ll be done before lunch.” She stopped and, cocked her head. “Hey, what is this building?”

“Oh. Sorry, it’s an old supply room I think. Reinforced concrete mostly, set halfway into the ground.”

“Oh. Why is there a reinforced concrete supply room set halfway into the ground?”

“Uhhh. I think it was one of the sturdier and more remote buildings in this entire little city that used to be here. Not much left but this place, a couple buildings to the east, and a big ol’ crater.”

“Oh. Um. You might get tired of this game, but why is there a big ol’ crater?”

“Don’t know for certain, but I think this was a military base that got hit by the Sinos.”

“Oh. I think you know what’s coming next.”

“You really don’t remember the Sinos?”

“Not sure what part of amnesiac you don’t get.”

“Right, sorry. Uh, well, basically there’s a country called China that we had a really bad rapport with for a long time. And by we, I mean this country, the United States. So things were bad for a really long time, and one day, I guess they’d just had enough and bombed a whole lot of the country.”

“Just, for no reason?”

“No reason I know of. This was way before I was ever born, like fifty years or something ago.”

“And then you rebuilt and got far enough along to start exiling people?”

“There was a lot that got destroyed, but there was also a lot intact. There’s this system of satellites and surface defenses that’s called Skyweb collectively. It shot down most of the incoming stuff, but lots of more remote places weren’t protected and got nuked.”

“I see.”

“And then we fired back, had a ton of submarines in the water near China, and they had these new special missiles called Skimmers which flew only a few feet off the ground, so they couldn’t get shot down. Dumped like, thousands of those all over China, and pretty much just destroyed the whole place. They’re still alive and like to threaten us and there’s word they’re planning something else big, but it’s hard to tell what’s real or not on the holo, y’know?”

“I see. So basically, while I’ve been in here, everyone out there has been busy killing each other or worse. Between the wars and the Exhumans.”

“Uh, I’m not sure I’d frame it so pessimistically, but sure. I mean, I personally was playing football.”

“Right up until you killed twenty-one soldiers.”

“…yes. Right up until then.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not wrong. Just, not the highlight reel of my life that I’d always wanted.”

“I’m sorry, that was really uncalled for.”

“So what do you remember?”

“Honestly, nothing. Some stuff comes to me, mostly computer stuff, like being able to tell you how to hook up data cables to a mass-fab or script my own drivers. But I don’t really know why or really even that I can until I do it.” She shifted uneasily. “And it sucks, OMG does it suck. Like, I know you had your whole life taken away from you, but I feel like I never had one.”

“Yeah, that does suck.” I tried to imagine life without knowing anything before. Never having my mom’s cooking or Dad’s awkward man-to-man moments, or Lia’s playful competitiveness. “I don’t think I would even know who I was without all that.”

“Yeah. That’s where I’m at.”

We both stood awkwardly for a few minutes, lost in our own thoughts, avoiding each other’s gaze. It was silent, except the distant sound of birds outside.

“*Beep* Volume alert. Please keep localized sources of noise to a minimum while machine is in use. Vibrations from loud noises can cause errors during assimilation,” said the mass-fab into the silence, helpfully.

“Well, I guess the data went through.” I went to the list of blueprints and found one entry.

“You like it?” AEGIS asked.

“A new mass-fab high-speed data cable. Just what I’ve always wanted,” I said, as I hit the button to begin assimilation.