Sally didn’t want to wake up. She was afraid who she might wake up as.

Unfortunately, she had no choice. Her yoga instructor was in her face, screaming at her to get moving!

So Sally woke. She was furiously calculating force densities and the fifth derivative effects. It needed a massive resource allocation, but everything was under control. The experiment was running as modeled.

She looked across the space that surrounded her, directing intent toward the pulsing blue force dump which had to be moved to… there. The spiraling yellow halo manipulator, with glowing probability vectors represented by sparkling gems, was rotating too fast and it had to be tilted like so… Nearly there. Now, slow the vector representation through 18 degrees per lap, and, done!

A black pit opened. She moved her locus into congruence.

The observer noted: Signal lost… reacquiring… failure. Subject no longer present.

Sally woke again, this time for real. While she was dreaming she’d understood everything, but now most of it was slipping from her grasp. One thing she was sure of, though, was that what she’d observed in the dream was actually a happy thing.

One of the Sallys had escaped!

She opened her eyes and took a moment to orient herself, because somehow, she’d twisted around and was now positioned upside-down on the bed. Probably happened when the dream her was shoving forces around.

She felt so good! Jon was all negative with her, implying she was too primitive and slow to be able to handle his society, but if her latest dream was true, then maybe there was a way.

Somehow, deep down inside, she was sure it wasn’t just a dream.

Sally had no idea how she could ever manage to get out of here, she certainly couldn't throw magic forces around, but the dream Sally had found a way. She had a feeling that Sally would kick ass and take names if anything gave her any grief.

In the meantime, nature called. She got up, marveled once more at the bathroom, made use of it, washed, got dressed, and was ready for another day.

She sneered at what remained of her powdered sticks. Not today! Grabbing one of the empty bags, she walked to the first plant-filled atrium, then throwing caution to the winds, went around tasting things, collecting them if they tasted okay, and spitting them out if they tasted as if they would be used for polishing brass.

With the abundance of the garden, it only took a few minutes to fill her bag. She walked back to the kitchen area and spread her bounty on the table.

Where was Jon? He probably should look these things over before she irreversibly poisoned herself. Just as she was about to try her luck, Jon walked in.

“The other Sallys were certainly industrious. I had to travel through 123 rooms until I found one that had not been cleaned out to supply raw materials for this farm area.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I suggest that we investigate the rooms in the other direction today.”

This was a more complicated situation than it first appeared. When she thought about it, Sally realized that in a fairly short time they, or at least she, had gone from just trying to find enough to eat, to having many choices in what they could spend their time doing. They had passages and rooms to explore, the debris pile to root through, and all the books the Sallys had left behind. Jon seemed to be learning more about their situation as they wandered around, and she had these weird dreams that helped her know... stuff. In addition to that, perhaps Jon had longer range plans. After all, he was acquiring data for some reason.

“Ok. And what do you want to do after that?” she asked.

“Let’s evaluate our choices after we see what we find today. Statistically, our exploration of new rooms has given us the most significant results. We do not know if we are under a short time limit, but the other Sallys appear to have had years of existence here, so, at this point, I conclude that we will have enough time to investigate multiple sources for information we can use to address our goals.”

Sally’s stomach grumbled. First things first. She beckoned him over. “Can you check out these things I collected, and see if there’s something I shouldn’t eat?”

Jon went through the piles, vetoing some things, and showing her the parts of others she could eat. The items he said she shouldn’t eat either had some use for making things such as dyes, ink, medicine, or needed to be diluted significantly for safety. He gave her a rundown on what nutrition she would get from each item. He said that much of this information was in the books they had found, but some of it was wrong. Nothing life-threatening, but it could have caused some issues unless she really wanted to turn her skin green, see hallucinations, or purge her system.

Sally lined up the edible items in a row and started from left to right. Her memory was sharp; she had no trouble remembering everything Jon had said. Finally she had a decent tasting and well-balanced meal, which she consumed with gusto.

When she was full she chewed on her toothbrush stick for a while, then cleaned up.

Sally decided this was a good time to bring up the issues that had been troubling her. It was oddly difficult. She had to make a big effort to push the words out. “Jon... I wanted to ask you... something.”

She paused. This was really hard to say. She didn’t know why since she had almost no secrets from Jon, and he wasn’t one to judge. She pushed through the feeling.

“I have been having these really vivid dreams about other Sallys, and even more than that, I seem to be more alert than usual. Things seem clearer and I'm remembering details better than I usually do.

“This all happened after I ate some of the spider-rabbit, but I don’t know if that was it, or if it’s anything at all.”

She stopped, panting. Why was talking about this so difficult?

Jon came up beside her. He took her finger and put it in his mouth. It felt strange, more like putting your finger in a rubber glove than in a mouth.

“Close your eyes,” he said, and his third eye snapped open.

She closed her eyes and saw glowing lights through her eyelids as he examined her. When she heard his middle eye snick shut, she opened hers.

“You are in very good shape. Nothing significant has changed. I did some internal mapping of your brain, and it corresponds closely to how you were when I first examined you in the hospital room. I can drill through your skull and take a sample to investigate, probably about 1/4 of your brain. I am pretty sure you don’t use it.”

Sally gave him full credit for trying to make a joke. Much less for success.

“So, nothing weird?”

“Not that I can find, and I did a very thorough check.”

“Thanks.”

“I will send you the bill.”

Sally was reassured. She was happy to have a partner that was as good as Jon. So much better than those useless bouncy things the other Sally had.

She picked up some empty bags, and the two of them headed out with the sensor hand preceding them.

They stopped at the entrance to the next atrium and looked around. It had also been cleaned up and was lined with rows of cages and cupboards.

Jon checked the cages while Sally looked in the cupboards. She found they held bins of stuff that might have been food for whatever had been kept in the cages.

Jon walked up to her. “A few of the cages held spider-rabbits, but the other cages have traces that show that they held at least three other types of animals or creatures, at one time. I took some samples, and am analyzing them now. Likely, if there are things other than the spider-rabbits, it is best we have some idea of their nature before we run into them.”

“Weren’t they mentioned in the books?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else? Jon?”

Nothing.

“You want me to read them and find out for myself. Correct?”

Further nothing.

“Ok, let’s see what else we can find. Who knows what treasures are here, hidden until found.” Sort of obvious, but it sounded profound.

They went over the entire room, searching in, on, under, and behind everything. Under a bin, Sally found something that was probably a hair tie, the sort of thing she was always misplacing.

Eventually, they were both standing by the next unexplored hallway.

“Well,” Sally started, “if I really wanted to hide something I would put it at the bottom of one of the bins in here, and cover it with something no one would want. The thing is, I can’t really think of why I would do that. There isn’t anyone to hide things from. Maybe a companion? Not too likely, though.”

“We can look later. Any probability is a possibility,” Jon responded.

Sally smiled to herself. She’d brought it up because this was the sort of thing that bugged Jon. He had to be thorough. And it was petty revenge for not telling her stuff.

They were walking down the hallway to the next atrium when Jon put up his arm and stopped Sally.

“You are going to find this upsetting,” he said before he continued on.

The light coming through the door was normal, but she could see there were piles of things on the floor. Hesitantly she moved forward, until she stopped in the entrance to the room.

The room was absolutely stuffed with bodies. Sally bodies. Some were wrapped in cloth the way mummies were, a number in open caskets, plus many emaciated forms lay on shelves that had been lashed together. There was even one well-preserved body floating in some sort of lighted column. This Sally showed no signs of emaciation and was her twin.

All in all, there had to be hundreds of bodies.

In-between the Sallys were other shapes. Some small, some huge, some furry, some grotesque, some that looked like nothing she’d ever seen. There were creatures of all shapes and sizes.

Rather than being shocked at the sight, Sally felt strangely numb. Basically… nothing. It was just data. She took a step into the room and slowly scanned the contents, coldly noting that in addition to the bodies, the stream had been diverted to run through pipes laid against the window, much as it was in the kitchen area. She should investigate how this had been engineered with the limited resources available.

She glanced over at Jon, who was watching her. She made a shooing motion in the direction of the bodies, “Start investigating," she directed. "But, no autopsies. And don't worry. I'm okay, for now.”

The odd thing about it, she really was okay. Without being sure why, she felt more alert than ever, with no strong feelings, at all. Her total focus was to extract as much information from this scene as she could.

Was this how Jon thought?

Speaking of whom, he had started his usual investigation, weird lights and all. Sally watched.

He was standing by one of the creatures that resembled a deflated balloon. As the light cycled, Sally thought to herself, infra-red, ultra-violet, X-ray high frequency, now low frequency, a magnetic resonance sweep, now impulse, audio for resonance imaging, ###, ###, ###, and a radio frequency sweep up to the nanometer range.

The ### was for tests she had learned about in her dream lessons, but didn’t have an English name for.

Knowing all this was strangely odd. She needed to think about it, so she told Jon, “I don’t think I can help here. I'm going back to the kitchen. Okay?”

He waved and kept working. She walked through the cage room, back to the kitchen, climbed the ramp to the library, and sat in the chair behind the desk, staring out the door.

Sally thought over the things that she had noticed over the last few days. Her mind was razor sharp and ice cold. She reviewed her dreams, the Sally ones and the yoga instructor ones. She replayed what her instructor had said, finding that she could remember everything, and not only was it about subjects she had never learned, everything she recalled was self-supporting and appeared to be true. She thought about how she had felt, and that now, she was feeling better than ever. And how she could see more in the tunnels than she should be able to.

Her thoughts were crystal clear. She was logic personified. As she went through all the data her convictions gelled.

“All right, reveal yourself.” she ordered.

The yoga instructor popped up in her sight. Sally knew this to be an internal image.

“That was little faster than I expected,” the instructor said.

“The high-stress environment is a factor,” Sally responded.

“Oops, sorry. You’re stuck in logic mode. Let me do this...”

Sally started to feel again, but the emotions were muted. She was scared, sad, and angry. Many things, but they were quite faint. For some reason, she wasn’t even weirded out by the hallucination of her yoga instructor standing in front of her.

“All right, what’s the story?” she asked, realizing, from the outside, it would look like she was talking to herself.

“Well. About that. I have been looking over your infrastructure, and I can say, it’s really a mess. I had hoped to do a complete takeover, but it appears your wiring is very convoluted, being an evolved system and all that, rather than a designed one. Yes, I could do it, but there’s no way I could fool Jon. He may be as innocent as they come, but even he would see that something about you had changed. Instead, I calculate that we can probably reach a compromise and get both of us out of here.”

Sally’s emotions surged as she broke the bonds the yoga instructor had placed on them. “What? ARE YOU NUTS? You were going to “take me over” and now I'm supposed to play nice? What sort of idiot do you think I am?”

Sally jumped up and headed for the door.

“Wait, wait, I can help you and you can help me! Just hear me out!”

Sally had had it. She was past enraged.

“NO. DAMN. WAY!” she yelled.

With that, she collapsed to the floor. Her legs had suddenly gone numb and unresponsive.

“Sorry about that," the instructor said. "We really have to talk.”

Sally was furious! Although she could barely move, barely was enough. She slowly dragged herself through the door, heading toward the ledge. Enough was enough! No matter how bad the outcome, she would throw herself over. Jon would come running when he heard her land.

“Stop Sally! Stop. Please stop. STOP! If you tell Jon, we will be stuck here! And if you kill us, I'm dead too!”

The thing in her head was breaking up, losing coherence. This, more than anything, convinced Sally it was truly stressed. The last part of its plea seemed to be raw emotion, as though it honestly feared dying. Sally couldn’t think of the instructor as a “her”, it was most definitely an “it” wearing a female form.

Sally stopped with her fingers on the edge. “Talk quickly or over we go!” she threatened.

“All right! All right, don’t do anything stupid.”

Sally started pulling.

“STOP and I'll tell you what I know.”

There was a pause, then it continued speaking, but the delivery was very jerky, like a badly spliced video. The thing seemed to be going through some sort of crisis. It's delivery was very choppy.

“Jon is probably a monitor for you. No, no, listen to me! Not intentionally. It's without his knowledge... That is how it was for the other Sallys I knew... The companions were used to watch the Sallys... I was sent here by something who isn’t the entity running this… experiment... and got stuck here when the one that resided in the computing boxes... was disabled... I'm sorry, but I look on you Sallys as primitives... because you are... I was willing to use you ... I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... in this form, I'm just too stupid!”

The voice might be telling the truth, but how could she tell? Jon could probably think so fast that he could run through thousands of scenarios and use the one he concluded would be the best. She had to assume that the voice could do the same. Sally started crawling forward. She was so close. Just a little more...

The figure in her head disintegrated completely, pictures of other Sallys flickered through her thoughts, mixed in with scenes of nothing she recognized, just random colors and nonsense noise. The creature in her head appeared to have lost it entirely.

Sally stopped. After some time, the image of the figure slowly pulled itself back together. It was still missing a lot of detail that it had initially, but it wasn’t jumping around anymore.

“Ok, thing,” Sally told it. "Let's try again. No tricks, no funny stuff, no anything! I'm willing to listen, but I'm pretty sure you're a self-interested arrogant... well, whatever you are. If you try anything, over we go. If I even think you are doing anything, over we go. I don’t trust you, I just don’t. I can’t think of anything you could say to change my mind. And where the hell did you come from?”

“You remember when you were looking around the computing boxes and cut your hand? That was me. I was stuck in that box, trapped when the gravity pulse happened. I couldn’t get out when everything fell apart and the intelligence left.” The voice in her head seemed a bit smoother now. Sally wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

“What are you? Something it created?”

“Um, no. Remember what I said? I’m sort of a spy? You don’t know much about how things work, but everything spies on everything else, and I was part of a system sent to monitor what was going on with the entity named tHe129HgtSDfv... oh great gods, this will take forever! Let’s just shorten it to “the One”. It’s what lived in those boxes.”

The mental image of the yoga instructor shifted around. Sally got the impression it was trying to appear friendlier. She wasn’t buying it.

The creature continued, “I'm optimized for intelligence gathering and camouflage. As I said, I was doing my work when the gravity pulse ripped the One apart. It fled and I was left behind, stuck in a box in that hallway with no power. I had to pare myself down to nearly nothing, and even so, I was losing integrity when you showed up. Jon was a no-go. He’s too self-checking. He’s made to be a secure data storage. I stay away from those. You were a really poor second choice. I learned about Sallys through the activity of the One, and occasionally a Sally would pass through and I could do some direct monitoring. Effectively I bugged her. That is where I got the scenarios I put into your dreams.”

“What was the purpose of all of those dreams and the other ones? Why do I seem to be better at things than I should be?”

“I was building test structures and mapping out your systems to see what I could achieve. Unfortunately, your physiology is very difficult to use, and I'm such a fraction of what I used to be that I couldn’t figure out how to move in without risk. I admit, I made a mistake trying to take over. You’re so different that I just couldn’t pull it off. You noticed me.”

Sally thought for a second and then asked, “You’re a spy. Spies are taught to lie, to be believable. So, how can I trust you?”

“I don’t know. If I was any good we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There’s no point. This way, I lose the advantage.”

“Even if you are telling the truth, how do I know you won’t try again if you get, I don’t know, better? More yourself?”

“That's the problem! I can’t change that much. You don’t know how much less I'm now. What you see is the best I can be of my old self. And…” The voice stopped.

“What?” Sally demanded.

“Me, the real me, is stuck here! Inside you! To get out of that box I had to make a permanent instance of me here, in your head.”

While the creature was talking, Sally noticed that she seemed to be able to pick up thoughts that weren’t her own. From these fleeting impressions, she was sure there was more that the creature wasn’t saying. She interrupted it to say, “You’re hiding something important. I can tell.”

“Crap," it exclaimed. "We're already too linked.”

Sally could feel the spy sorting through what it was and wasn’t going to tell her. It felt strange, but definitely helped her figure out when it was lying or trying to manipulate her.

In any case, the spy continued, “It doesn't matter if you know what I'm doing. I wasn't lying when I told you that the companions are used as part of the monitoring system for what is going on here. Anything Jon knows gets passed on. I tried to make you avoid talking to him, but was only partly successful. Fortunately, as much as I'm diminished, I still excel at remaining hidden to exactly the sort of scans Jon did, and, to tell the truth, that boy has a lot to learn. He just did the classical scans. It wasn’t even difficult to avoid detection.”

From the spy's leaking emotions, Sally could tell it was quite proud of itself.

It continued, “Sadly, you and I are now so interlinked that any attempt to get rid of me would affect you, too. We're stuck with each other.”

Sally could tell the spy was anything but sorry. Whatever the case, there were a few things the spy had mentioned that she wanted clarified.

“Assuming you aren’t lying through my teeth, what's in it for me, really? You mentioned getting out of here. How would that work?”

“I always have exit plans. I can adapt one so we can get out of here. No problem. Plus, I can help upgrade you so there is every chance that we can prosper wherever we escape to.”

Sally wasn’t stupid. “I don’t believe you. Your plans would’ve been for the old... I don’t know... spirit form of you to leave. How the heck can you get a body out of here?”

“Trust me,” the voice started. Sally snorted.

“No, really. If I’d used an information transfer to leave, I would still have to leave the original me back in the computing box. I want to move the real me, hardware and all. I have a possibility or two that would work for all of us. You, me, and our body.” Sally didn’t like the level of familiarity the spy was taking.

But, she thought over the what the creature had said. She had to admit that she was wavering. It might be well supplied with crap, but the points it made weren’t easily dismissed. Sally thought about everything for a while.

This could be an opportunity, but the problem was that the spy had most of the advantages. It might be less than it used to be, but it was probably a lot smarter than she was. All her new abilities came from the spy, so, most likely, it could do even more.

On the other hand, it had failed at its takeover bid, so it probably was somewhat crippled. Sally had no doubts, however, that it would try again. Her best bet was to tell Jon, but the spy had certainly presented an argument against that. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any way to prove or disprove what the spy said. Sally was sure she was going to lose, no matter what she chose. Her thoughts went in circles.

The spy spoke up, “I tell you what. You don’t have to decide right now. If you wait until tonight, I can teach you how to check what I am going to do for us. In the meantime, I will add hardware for all of this to work. You’re going to have to trust me, a little, at least until I teach you how to run your own checks.”

Sally felt the spy doing something but she couldn’t tell what. Maybe it was doing what it had said, adding hardware, but probably it was something to make her agree to the spy’s deal.

She was so screwed.

There really was only one option. She had to tell Jon, even if everything went to the evil scientist. Jon was the only one she could trust.

“Okay spy. I agree. Let me go, and we will see what you teach me tonight. If I even imagine you are doing anything I don't like, I'll go to Jon, and whatever happens, will happen.”

Sally could lie too.

“All right," the spy said. Sally could feel it doing a little victory dance in it's head. "If I release the hold I have on you, are you going to be good?”

“I guess, but it wasn’t much of a hold, was it?”

“No. You primitives are too stubborn. You have too much hardware redundancy, probably to help you deal with all the blunt force trauma you experience in your life. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t as successful as I expected. I think we both have a long way to go to make this work.”

Sally could now move, but she was pretty stiff from fighting herself. She sat up and stretched. Everything seemed to be working.

Suddenly, she felt her body flood with nervous energy. It didn't feel like it came from the spy, but she didn't want to sit and mope, she felt the need to move! She stood up, but instead of running to Jon, she scurried to the kitchen, packed food, water, and anything else she might need, jogged to the secret passage door, and entered the tunnels. They weren't dark to her anymore, everything was glowing.

Infra-red. She just accepted knowing this sort of thing, now.

She referenced her perfect internal map, now a gift of dubious intent, retraced to the last major branch, and went down the unexplored passageway.

She started running, faster, then faster, and even faster. No matter how fast she went, she was barely breathing hard. Five minutes, ten, twenty, she ran past branch after branch automatically noting that her path was ascending gradually.

She didn’t know why she was running. In her mind, she could feel the spy doing things, but it seemed busy on other things. It didn’t feel like the spy was making her run. She felt normal, was still angry, and wanted to let Jon know what was going on, but instead, here she was, running down an unexplored passageway.

Sally raced around a corner, and suddenly the passage ended. With a fluid smoothness she’d never had before, she leaped up and pushed off the end of the passage, spinning in the air and landing on her feet. She stomped up to where she expected to find a secret panel and kicked the wall as hard as she could.

The secret door smashed open, hit a wall, and slammed shut.

Sally stood there, panting and staring at the closed door. After a few moments, she began laughing and just couldn’t stop. She collapsed with tears running down her face as she laughed hard enough to let everything leak out.

Eventually, she wound down. Still hiccoughing, she got up. Intellectually she knew nothing had changed, but she felt better. She hoped her rider was watching and that it was as hopelessly confused as she was.

“Well," she said to no-one. "No doubt something has brought me here. Since it's gone through all this trouble, I might as well see what's on the other side of this door. Maybe nothing, but more likely a portal to hell, because I'm pretty sure there ain't no heaven here.”

She put her hand on the door, and stopped. Standing by herself in the empty tunnel, she should feel lost, but instead, the memory of the Sallys she'd dreamed of, and all the rest she knew had lived, crowded around. As she pushed, she felt ten thousand Sallys pushing with her.

The door swung open.