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The station was devoid of life. The quietness of it all felt almost funereal. A crypt. There was no heat, either, which left everything near freezing cold. A thin layer of frost was forming on all surfaces now that there was air that could condense.

"Hey, Jen and Kevin?" I called down the elevator shaft.

"What the hell happened?" Jen shouted back. In the background I heard Kevin's quieter voice asking if I was alright. "Thanks for the warning by the way, we almost got sucked up there with you!"

"I'm alright," I yelled, replying primarily to Kevin. "But it looks like this whole place was in a vacuum. I'm going to look around for a little."

"Yeah, we noticed," Jen called back. "Next time you jimmy open a door, tell us first! And if it's an airlock, don't!"

Her bone-dry sense of humor never failed to amuse me. I glanced down and saw the two of them faintly outlined in the darkness. I flashed the thankfully intact flashlight at them.

"Just be careful!" Kevin added. He sounded a little breathless, no doubt from adrenaline wearing off. "There might still be a leak."

He was right in theory, but at the same time, leaks didn't fix themselves. Someone had to have opened an airlock, and then closed it. That meant someone who had been fully transferred into a mechanical body, or maybe someone in a space suit for oxygen. But who would have any interest in wiping out a third of the station's population? Maybe an internal conflict. A civil war of sorts that had ended in mass murder. Going by the growing stench in the air, the residents had died before the atmosphere was ejected.

Two also came to mind as a possible suspect. But even then, I couldn't see why he would've done it. We had seen that shape that looked roughly like him, but only from a distance, and while he was unstable, he wasn't outright murderous, as evidenced by the fact that my heart was still beating.

Already, the cold was leaching my body heat. I wouldn't be able to stay here for long before the shivers set in, and then hypothermia. I had a little time, though, to look around and figure out what had gone wrong. The eerie silence really did make it feel like I was exploring a crypt, with even the usual hum of the station's background systems quiet and distant. The atmospheric recycling was probably running again now that there was an atmosphere for it to work on. The rest of it, if I had to guess, had broken down. Water would've frozen and the pipes burst. The generators would work through the rest of their fuel and then shut down forever.

More than anything it felt like Earth. A dead world, lingering for a few moments longer before fading away entirely. At the same time, it almost felt like a time capsule. I wondered how long ago this had all happened, and then - passing a powered-down vending machine - I thought of a way to get a rough estimate. Nothing up here was very secure, at least not the vending machines. And why would they be? The constant surveillance made sure any vandals would be instantly and harshly punished.

I gave the glass front of the machine a quick jab with the butt of the flashlight, and it obligingly shattered. Gingerly, I reached in to fish out a few chocolate bars, barely even realizing that my stomach was growling at even the sight of something edible. I hadn't eaten in a while.

Before I unwrapped the snacks, I had a look at the manufacturing dates. A year ago. These were, as far as I knew, flown up from earth along with new recruits and resources, which would've taken perhaps a month. That meant I had a rough timeframe. The station had its atmosphere vented some time in the last eleven months.

I vaguely remembered the station shuddering. They'd assured me it was just a routine small meteor impact, a shower of rocks hitting the protective outer layer of the Ark, but it could just as well have been this. I quickly grabbed a handful more chocolate bars and scarfed them down as quickly as possible. The flavor, as always, was very synthetic, very artificial. No wonder; the beans these were traditionally made from hadn't grown on earth in centuries.

The energy was much needed, but I still had to hurry. I wasn't dressed for these temperatures, and so I left the vending machine behind as I tried to remember how the Company's section was laid out, presuming each section was a mirror image of the others.

Soon enough, wandering through those empty halls with my flashlight - and whatever starlight reached me through the glass panels that adorned parts of the station - I reached this section's docking port. It had been sealed off by the automatic emergency bulkheads. That was meant to be immediate, but clearly it'd remained open for long enough to leave the section in a vacuum, which in turn meant that someone had deliberately prevented the bulkhead from closing at first. I didn't see any heavy objects nearby, certainly nothing solid enough to stop the bulkheads. No living creature could do it, certainly. The pieces were quickly falling in place.

The only thing lacking was motivation. Two might be paranoid, but to slaughter an entire section of the station like this? That seemed out of character, even for him. It was too much. If he was that unhinged, he would've done the same to the Company. There had to be more at play, here. I just couldn't tell if it was malice or madness.

I, perhaps against my better judgement, followed the disgusting stench of thawing bodies and slow decomposition, until I had to pull my shirt over my face to keep breathing at all. Eventually the smell led me to the cafeteria. For a brief moment, I vainly, _selfishly_entertained the thought that what I was smelling was merely food rotting.

The door was frozen shut by surface condensation, but I managed to rattle it free, and when it slid open, I immediately wished I hadn't. There were dozens - no, hundreds - of bodies, some with mechanical limbs and others still fully organic, piled almost all the way to the ceiling, frozen in their death throes, in convulsive positions that conveyed blinding agony in their final moments. While it might've been asphyxiation that dealt the final blow, many had been brutally eviscerated, all but torn apart. It was a charnel house, a mass grave, reminding me of the many we had back on earth but far more alarming. People down there were dying from natural causes, if far too young.

This was mass murder.

I averted my eyes from the carnage. There was nothing I could do here, and if whatever had done this was still here, I was in mortal danger as well. Suddenly I was on high alert. It felt a little like the emotional flux I had dealt with earlier, with adrenaline surging through me at the slightest sound and the mechanical arm - for no evident reason - feeling lighter, twitchier, like it wanted to be put to use. I closed the cafeteria door and took a deep breath, going through the options we had left.

There weren't many. The third section of the station was still there, presumably, but it was well sealed off. We could also confront Two directly, but that was a foolish thought. He wouldn't care, and if he did, he'd care in the worst of ways. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and let the chilly air soak into me for a second. The growing numbness made the anxiety and stress feel less pressing in turn.

Then, somewhere behind me, I hear the clang of metal against metal. I spun around, my blood feeling like it'd turned to ice, and found myself face to face with Two. Three of him. They stared with unblinking eyes. No. They looked like Two, but the body language was entirely different. These versions twitched, their heads moving like those of birds in sharp, jagged motions that indicated either paranoia or severe damage.

Their claws, and most of their bodies, were covered in rusty, almost blackened red.

"He's gone and it's my fault," one spoke. Not to me. He was staring past me, into the cafeteria, as if he didn't see me at all, or at the very least, he didn't recognize me. "Let everyone suffer. We're already in hell. He's gone. Gone."

The others repeated the same words, like a chant after their apparent leader. I couldn't even begin to guess- no, I _could._They clearly weren't part of the same... collective? The same controlling mind?

"Two? Who is gone?" I asked, and suddenly all three pairs of eyes snapped to me, and none of them said a word. I got the creeping suspicion that I'd just committed a terrible mistake.

"He's gone. Gone. Gone!" one screamed in a voice that crackled like static.

These three had to be copies who had been disconnected from the original. Flawed copies. Flawed copies. Copied so many times that nothing remained, and the original mind that was Two couldn't reach them. Was any of this even intentional, or had they found their way here by pure accident, and taken out their torment on the station's inhabitants? Did they self-replicate from discarded frames?

"What is it you want?" I asked. I tried not to look at them directly, as if trying to approach a wild animal. But they showed no signs of understanding anything I was saying. Instead they were, apparently, entirely stuck inside themselves in whatever cybernetic hell a disconnected and abandoned mind could muster. And then, one of them twitched again, the flickering diodes on the frame flashing a solid red. I felt my adrenaline spike as I saw his claws extend from his arms.

"Gone!"

Their "leader" leapt at me. I threw myself out of the way, barely maintaining my balance through the dodge. His claws missed me by a hair, swiping so close that I could feel the rush of air. With unfamiliar instincts, I countered his attack, my mechanical arm moving nearly on its own. My own claws sprung from the hardened metal and sank into the creature's side effortlessly, piercing the metal carapace like a hot knife pierced butter. He - no, it - crashed down onto the floor, the lights in its eyes flickering and then going out, hopefully forever. They had no expressions, but somehow, I felt a brief connection to it. A sympathetic, perhaps imagined sensation of relief at being freed from its internal torment.

And then the other two dove at me while I was distracted. In that moment, barely a second long, I managed to shove one aside while the other's claws sliced through my arm and well into my side.

Rather than pain, I felt rage. Seven had talked about "absolute feelings" and with blood gushing from my lacerated body, those strange binary emotions took over entirely. I could barely feel anything in my biological arm, but with the other - when one of the robots clawed at me - I caught its arm and twisted, relishing in the sound of hydraulic lines breaking and warm liquid splattering over us both.

I was on top of it in an instant, coating its mechanical body in my own blood as I tore, tore, and tore into its armored plating and deeper yet until I hit wiring and pipes. It was all in a frenzy. All I remember was that there were sparks, and that a machine's death throes were so unlike those of a real animal. It twitched, and then immediately grew still, dead. Or at least inactive.

The third Two was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it'd escaped, to mourn the loss of its other selves. Or gone to find easier prey. I stood up and immediately collapsed backwards into a pool of my own blood with a deafening crack as my head hit the metal floor. The dizziness was overwhelming, and my vision as already fading around the edges, narrowing into a blurry tunnel. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was happening. I was bleeding out, and I'd already lost too much. Far too much. I didn't dare to look at the damage done, but I knew it was bad. My ribs felt loose, and my biological arm hung limp and useless by my side.

I was dying. I needed to bandage these wounds somehow. Even then, it might not be enough, but I had to try. Summoning every inch of my rapidly fading strength I crawled back towards the cafeteria. The corpses still had all their clothes on. Fabric I could use to staunch the bleeding. A silent thank you for me shutting down two of their murderers.

My thoughts were less and less coherent. The cafeteria door seemed to be further and further away with each breath I took. I wouldn't be able to make it. I had to try, though. I had to try. I dug the claws of my mechanical arm into the floor and pulled myself towards the bodies, leaving a slick trail of blood on the floor. I saw less and less of the world. First, everything narrowed into a tunnel, then all color bled out of my vision before it narrowed further into what was barely a pinprick of light in completely inky blackness.

I heard someone's footsteps behind me. Alarmed voices, echoing and fading in the darkness, until there was nothing at all.

"-happened?"

...

"-should recover, but his organs-"

"-amputated, yes, but-"

...

I woke up heavily bandaged from the waist up. It took me a while to realize where I was. The medical quarter. The same place where I'd had my arm replaced. Jen and Kevin must've somehow saved me, and then carried - or dragged - me back all this way. My side felt bad. Even through the haze of whatever morphine they'd pumped me full of, I felt like I'd been sliced open, which I suppose I had.

"Ah, you're back with us, are you?" Seven, who was standing next to me, said with a lopsided, painful-looking grimace of a smile. "What the hell happened?"

Glancing around, I could see Kevin, Jen, and Seven. Notably not Two, which I took to mean that my friends knew what would happen if he knew what'd happened. Either that, or he was still trying to recover from his "death". I opened my mouth to reply. To tell them everything.

"Don't tell me. I don't want to know. If I know, I become a liability," he sighed. "So, there's a good side to all this."

"Good?" Kevin asked. "He's been _mauled._You just said yourself, his liver is completely ruined!"

My liver? How deep had Two's claws cut? "It's that bad?" I asked.

"It is. Liver's gone and your old arm isn't going to move or feel anything ever again. If you were on earth, that would be a death sentence. Maybe if you got a transplant you'd just lose an arm, but you'd certainly never drink again. Up here, however..." he trailed off, looking me over. "Well, the entire purpose of this station is to save people from their bodies. And with this kind of damage, we can fast track you past the credit requirement. Just say the word and we'll have you in a fully mechanical frame in a matter of days."

"Gonna have to do it," Jen sighed. She'd been standing so still I barely noticed her at all. "We can't have you die before, well, you know."

"Yeah," Kevin concurred. "Today. Just... I want to say farewell first. In private."

"Farewell?" Seven asked, cocking an eyebrow. "He's not going to die. Not as far as we understand the transfer process."

"No, I know. But what if he does? That, and, he's never going to have a real body again," Kevin replied. He couldn't stop sobbing. His tail was tucked so far down it was almost between his legs.

"Ah. Yes, I suppose that is something you'd miss," Seven replied. His ears flattened a little as he evidently remembered some people considered physicality to be important. "My apologies. It's been so long since I had any kind of physical contact with anyone. It's hardly a high priority here."

Jen whistled in the background. A sad little tune.

"I suppose we'll let them say their farewells, then," Seven offered with a weak smile.

Jen nodded with her characteristic blank expression, communicating nothing at all. Together, they left the sterile-looking room and closed the door behind them. The instant they did, Kevin practically fell on top of me, embracing as much of me as he possibly could.

"I'm so happy you're alive," he whimpered, I could feel his soft, bushy cheeks were wet from tears as he pressed his face against me. He was trembling. "When we found you all bloody and cut open I- we thought you were gone."

He quietly told me how they'd hastily bandaged me up with their own clothes and then found a long roll of cable to use as a rope and to lower me down the elevator shaft with. By the time we were back at the Company, he described how I'd felt cold with a pulse so weak he could barely feel it at all.

"Just stay away from Two," I whispered.

"He did this? Two?" Kevin asked. Briefly, so briefly I would've missed it if I blinked, I saw his vulpine eyes flash with unbridled anger.

"Not exactly. Not the Two we know. I'll tell you about it later, alright?" I reassured him. The last thing I needed was my precious fox going after him. Instead, I wrapped my mechanical arm - the one that still functioned - around him and pulled him close. He was careful not to touch any bandaged parts as he climbed into the hospital bed with me.

We laid there for a while, embracing each other for what might be the last time. And of course, soon enough the more typical reaction to both physical closeness and trauma became obvious. I could feel his cock against my thigh, stiffening with anticipation. Despite the amount of blood I'd lost, I was quickly in the same state. Something about how the body prioritized procreation had always been so amusing to me. All the way until the point of death, a man could get hard and orgasm, even if he was mostly paralyzed.

"Do you think-" Kevin whispered. I recognized that tone; he needed it, maybe more than he'd ever needed me.

"Just don't touch my side or I might scream," I chuckled, and then groaned as the chuckling became a pained cough, each hack feeling like someone was sticking a white-hot iron into my right lung.

Gingerly, Kevin climbed on top of me. Certainly, I was in no shape to take an active role, but that didn't make me any less eager to enjoy his slender form wrapped around me. His clothes came off effortlessly, leaving that beautiful vulpine cock bouncing with each little motion. I throbbed pretty eagerly too, as he peeled off my pants. Thankfully everything down there was undamaged, and my cock sprung out with such carnal neediness that it slapped against Kevin's perfect, soft cheeks.

He giggled, probably half fuelled by relief that I was still alive, and promptly guided my shaft under his tail while he pushed back against it, teasing me until I was starting to leak with precum that'd have to act as lubricant. I groaned. Gods, how long had it been? It felt like an eternity. After today, it might be an eternity, and so I was determined to enjoy every last moment of this. I grabbed his hip with my functional arm, letting the mechanical fingers dig into his fur. It felt almost real, at least in the heat of the moment, as if I was touching him with an arm of flesh and blood.

But even if my senses weren't real, Kevin was. Warm, breathing, alive. I couldn't muster the strength to thrust up and into him, but he obligingly let gravity push him down and onto me, until I was starting to press against the wonderful tightness of his pucker. It was rough, with so little lube, but we both needed it far too much to care about minor discomfort.

Gravity did what it does, and finally, I popped inside him. He gave a shuddering, needy moan. I would've, if the side of my body hadn't felt like it was on fire. The feeling of him squeezing around me was like balm for that pain, though, with pleasure radiating down my cock and through the rest of my body. Soon, I was panting too, just as he hilted himself on me.

"I love you," he whispered. And then, he began to ride me. Slowly, at first, with sensual gyrations of his hips, each of which forced a groan from my lips no matter how much it hurt. He felt wonderful, beautiful, another warm and personal moment - perhaps the last we'd ever share - in the cold mechanical darkness of the station.

Kevin leaned down to kiss me, and even as he did, his body never stopped moving, never stopped squeezing and clenching around me or rocking back and forth, making sure to keep pushing me closer and closer to the sticky end of our union. I was already swelling up and throbbing inside him. I hadn't thought of sex for a while, and now, it became incredibly clear just how badly I needed it anyway. How badly I needed him.

I thrust, if weakly, trying to drive myself deeper into the warm, clutching bliss of his body. As deep as I could without hurting my ravaged body even more. Slowly, Kevin's movements grew more insistent, more needy. His cock was already twitching every time he impaled himself on me, splattering my stomach with strands of warm precum, betraying just how badly he needed it too. His tail was wagging furiously as he rode me with carnal hunger in his eyes.

"I'm not going to last long," I huffed, trying to catch my breath. I was already tensing up, my balls tightening against my body.

"Then don't. Just let it happen," Kevin replied in a moaning whisper, biting his lips to keep the whole medical ward from hearing what we were doing.

Every moment, there was the risk of someone walking in and finding out, but that only sharpened the sexual high we were both on. The pleasure was intoxicating, and the risk made it exciting. Something I found myself wishing we'd have done a lot more while we still had time.

It felt too good to stop, anyway. The station could've exploded around us, and we wouldn't have stopped. Not before Kevin was full of my seed, and I in turn was covered in his. One last heated, animalistic embrace. We lost ourselves in the moment, rutting like wild animals. I didn't know if anyone had figured it out, nor did I care. All that mattered was the clenching heat of my fox's body around me.

"I'm going to-" I choked, interrupted by a moan that I had to clench my jaws to suppress.

Kevin nodded eagerly. He didn't say anything, but he moved a little faster yet, slamming himself down on me with obvious desire to make me finish inside him. Not that I really had a choice, anyway. The slick friction of our mating was heavenly, and he had my weakened body pinned down. All I could do was clutch his waist tightly as I surrendered to my body's urges and let basic biology take over.

Just as the first blinding spasm of orgasmic pleasure shot through me with the first throb of my cock, I saw Kevin's beautiful vulpine cock twitch too. A stream of white shot over my chest - thankfully missing my wounds - and then another, a third, as if his body was reciprocating everything I pumped into him. I could feel the heat pooling around my cock, and yet I gave him more. Every last thick drop of my pent-up lust, a suitably beautiful and even glorious orgasm to be my last.

Finally, I slumped back down against the uncomfortable hospital bed. Kevin gazed lovingly down at me, and I gazed back. I'd never felt so utterly content and connected with someone as I was right then, with the warm afterglow suffusing my body.

"I'll love you even if we can never do this again," he whispered, after catching his breath. "But I hope we can."

I was in full agreement.

"I think we should finish up. You have a whole operation ahead of you," he continued, and slowly pulled himself off my softening cock. It felt almost as good as that first moment of penetration had, and it left me shivering until I fully slipped out of his vice-like embrace.

Dutifully, and with a sheepish smile on his slender, vulpine muzzle, Kevin helped me clean up with some tissues next to the bed. Thankfully, we hadn't made too much of a mess. Most of it was inside him, after all, and what'd coated my waterproof fur hadn't yet dried. Once he was done, he covered me under the blankets, again.

"I'll see you soon," he whispered, so close to my ear that I could feel his warm breath, and for one final time his lips pressed against mine in a soft, passionate gesture of our mutual affection. Then, he spun around to tell Seven that I was ready.

From that moment onwards, I tried not to think about Kevin or Jen, as they wheeled me out of the med-room and into the chamber where full transfers were performed. It looked like some kind of church of the electric, a chapel dedicated to the mechanical and metallic. In the middle, there was another bed. This one with straps, and some kind of heavy-looking helmet that presumably would copy my mind once we began.

I had so many questions, and no more time to ask them. I was already dying. Nausea, jaundice - the whites of my eyes were quickly yellowing - and worst of all, a terrible itchiness that not even the post-orgasmic calm could soothe. My condition was degrading rapidly despite their best efforts.

"Right, staff. Get him ready," Seven commanded. "And don't waste a single second. We have to get his mind copied while his brain is still functioning."

From then on, everything was a flurry of activity. Someone began to shave away the fur on my head. Another fastened multiple electrodes on my chest. Two others - a maned wolf whose body looked far too thin for his disproportionate head and legs, and a ferret who I thought looked a lot like Jen - sat down behind a pair of computers presumably set to monitor my vitals and whatever else the equipment revealed. I didn't pay close attention to it. Instead, I tried to take deep breaths to calm my nerves. There was a real chance that whoever would wake up after this procedure would only be me as far as other people were concerned.

If the copying process, the digitization of my mind, was accurate enough, I didn't see why that wouldn't be the case. But if it was, I'd be dead, and I wouldn't care. I thought of everyone I'd met here, everyone I'd known back on earth, saying farewell to each, if only inside my own head. Then, Seven himself fastened a mask to my face.

"You'll need to be unconscious for this. Well, it's for the better, anyway," he told me. "We tried to do it with the subject awake, at first, and... well, no need to revisit that unpleasantness. Take a deep breath."

Momentarily, I felt that rebellious streak flare up. What if I wanted to be awake? Still, the logical part of me won out; I took I deep breath, the world swam in front of my eyes, and I was gone.

THE ORIGINAL IS FLAWED. PERFECT COPIES CANNOT BE MADE FROM AN IMPERFECT SOURCE. WE HAVE FAILED WHERE OTHERS MAY SUCCEED. THE METHOD IS FLAWED. PERFECT COPIES CANNOT BE MADE WITH IMPERFECT METHODS.

I didn't like existing as a disembodied consciousness in a featureless void. But even then, I understood what the voice - Uni, no, One - meant. It wasn't that what the Company did went wrong, it was that the entire methodology was wrong. It couldn't work the way we were doing it. We had to end it, and the only way we could do that was by approaching the others on the station. Alerting them to what was going on.

Hovering in the void while they were presumably amputating my old limbs was... strange. I felt nothing. Maybe the doctors had turned all my emotions off. Either that, or One had somehow whisked my consciousness away into some untouched part of my brain. In a way, I liked it, because it finally allowed me to think with perfect clarity.

Two wasn't the cause of any of this, despite his many bad decisions. He was a symptom. I'd be a symptom, too, I supposed, but maybe that's how it had to be. Hopefully, it'd be less severe than it'd been with him. If he was already flawed somehow before the process, he'd be worse off on the other side. But wasn't I flawed? I was, but perhaps not in the same, catastrophic way. I had no choice but to wait and see.

I thought of Kevin and Jen. My partner and my friend. Perhaps more than a friend, at this point. I felt a familiar warmth inside me. Despite the clarity, I could still feel. Where was I? I didn't know.

YOU ARE INSIDE YOURSELF. INFORMATION COPIED AND WAITING TO BE REPLICATED. THE COPY WILL NOT BE PERFECT. BUT YOU WILL BE YOURSELF. NOT AS YOU WERE. NONE OF US ARE AS WERE.

"Uni?" I asked, except I wasn't speaking, not really. I formulated the question somehow, but I had no mouth, no voice, and nothing moved in the darkness. "Uni, how do you know all this? Are you the one they called One?"

I AM

The voice cut off. There was no reply. There was no me either. There was nothing, an eternity passing in an instant as surely as if I was dead. No awareness of anything except my own nonexistence. Perfect, pure quiet, a place that I wouldn't ever have left voluntarily, given my total lack of will. I'd call it peaceful, but in truth, it was nothing at all.

Then, I felt warmth. Sunlight soaked through my closed eyelids. I let out a sigh of relief, though I didn't know why. There was no past or present, only the very moment I was inhabiting. Slowly, I opened my eyes and took in my surroundings.

I was in a wide-open green field, leaned against a lone tree on a hill. The sun shone warm above me, set in a deep blue sky. For a moment, it felt like nothing was wrong at all, as I watched the clouds drift by. I didn't really know why I was here, and nothing outside of what I could see existed. I had no memories, no sense of who I was, only that I was utterly relaxed and exactly where I needed to be.

That sensation lasted for perhaps an hour. It was hard to tell, time didn't really matter. A weak breeze rustled the leaves of the tree I was resting against. But then, doubt began to creep in. A faint memory of things as they were, rather than things as they should be. The nature surrounding me looked like a postcard, something that I'd seen... somewhere. But I'd never been in it. I'd never felt fresh green grass. Never seen the distant lakes, the scent of which the wind carried to me on my little hill.

Why couldn't I remember? I felt as if I should've been panicking, but I didn't feel it. It was more of an abstract kind of observation. The kind you might make of other people. Not yourself. If you knew you were supposed to feel something, you were already feeling it.

Slowly, more of my mind opened up to me, memory by memory. Who I was, where I had been. The earth didn't look like this, did it? No. There was nothing like this left on our planet. No vast lakes and no green hills. That could only mean one thing. The Ark must have succeeded and allowed us to find a new world to inhabit, far from our own dying sun. I had, then, suffered memory damage at some point.

Memory damage. That didn't feel like a natural phrase. I closed my eyes tightly, trying to remember. What was it I was still not remembering?

There was another possibility. That none of this was real. I couldn't imagine any way for it to not be real, except, perhaps, a dream. Slowly, I stood up, turning my gaze towards the horizon, where the light of the sun glittered off the almost still, endless ocean. If this was real, where was everyone else? I would've expected a city, even a village, but there was nothing except myself, the tree, the hills, and the distant sea.

Perhaps I'd walk to the sea.

Yet, moments before I set off, on the spur of the moment, I raised my hand and reached out towards the horizon. My fingers touched something cool and solid in the air. An invisible wall or screen, impossibly suspended without any regard for gravity. My hand left a glowing trail across the nothingness, and then, text appeared, but not on that surface. Rather, it appeared inside of my vision, visible even when I closed my eyes.

Your memories should now be functional. Transfer is almost complete. Currently, your mind is in a virtual space to avoid any unnecessary complications. We will keep you updated.

The doctors. The procedure. Suddenly it all came crashing down on me, a cascade of horrifying memories that I had never realized how badly I wanted to remain forgotten. I remembered Two and his feral copies. I remembered us concluding that I had no choice but to become a "full transfer," my mind digitized in a stronger body.

Hopefully, I wouldn't end up as Two had. I let the feeling of dread fade. It was interesting that I'd felt that emotion. Panic was blocked, but not dread. Was love? I tried thinking of Kevin, and I felt the familiar warm fuzziness near my heart. Selective. I'd no doubt have the option to choose what I wanted to feel, fully.

The vast expanse around me felt suffocating now that I knew it was merely the jar for my consciousness. I was here like a goldfish in a bowl, only fully aware of everything. I let my thoughts wander. There was nothing else I could do except wait, and so I thought of existence. If I was conscious here, it meant that mind had been fully digitized, and that my biological brain was now dead. Nothing but burned carbon. Ashes, along with the rest of my body. The body I'd been born in, and had all my experiences in, was gone and it'd never return, except as a simulation in this strange inner space.

It was entirely possible that I was dead too. That this was an entirely new copy of me, a new consciousness merely believing itself to be continuous with the last. That line of thinking would bring me nowhere good, however. It'd drive me mad. How was it that the cat had phrased it so colorfully? Something like bonkers, raving on the floor mad.

Yet the immense isolation I was beginning to feel was getting to me. It was difficult to keep track of how long it'd been. The sun didn't move in this simulated reality.

"How much longer?" I spoke, hoping that the people putting my new body together could hear me. There was no reply, no text or a thunderous voice from the skies. Perhaps it was the wrong question. Or maybe I wasn't asking it right.

I closed my eyes and imagined my query. Three words, floating in the air before me. How much longer?

We will begin enabling other senses soon. The physical component of your mind is in its frame. If you are uncomfortable, we can give you a new scene to watch.

I didn't respond to that. There was no point. This would take as long as it took. I had to be patient even if the last thing I wanted right now was patience. Every second I wasted in this twilight existence was another chance for Two to fully succumb to madness and do something bad. I couldn't bear the thought of Kevin getting hurt. And on a higher level, I wasn't ready for all the sapient life we knew ending here, on a haphazardly constructed space station above a charred husk of a planet.

I forced myself to return to the present once more. I took in my surroundings afresh, knowing what it was. A kind of inner space, I figured, only far more vivid that what I could've imagined with my organic brain. A place where I could escape, if I wanted to, which made it a little ironic that I couldn't escape from it. It was like a prison island.

Not a prison unless you insist on making it one. Sanctuary. Time passes more slowly while you're here. And others can join you, if you allow them to, the text read. Other digitized minds, that is. Not yet, but eventually.

He was right, of course. It was just infuriating to accept that I was stuck here while my body was dead or being cut apart. Or perhaps already decomposing and eventually becoming fertilizer for the station's plants. In a way, it reminded me of all those stories of afterlives that I'd heard on earth. They were all something like this; a strange, eternally beautiful space where pain and suffering didn't exist. It was only appropriate if I was dead, somehow.

We modelled it after some historical artifacts. Photographs from when the earth still had oceans, and the sun was still yellow. This one was pretty famous, though we took some liberties like the tree. As far as we know, the real ones looked exactly like what you're seeing, Seven's text-voice read. Okay. Now let me focus. You might see some distortions, but don't worry.

I had no idea what he was talking about, beyond what the words directly implied. Before I had any opportunity to think more about it, my vision flickered- no, the world flickered, like a damaged monitor. Maybe they were connecting my mind to my future body.

I wondered how Kevin was doing. Would he still love me when I was... well, what I was about to become? As long as my mind was intact, perhaps he could. But we'd never again mate the way we had, before. Never cuddle and feel each other's warmth.

You can do that in this inner space, if I wasn't clear. Two simply chose not to, after... well, I'll tell you once you're back in our world, Seven commented. Oh. Your friends send their best wishes. I told them we're just about done.

It was difficult to tell how much time had passed. He had said time passed more slowly for me, but it seemed much faster. Perhaps the initial installation was different. A series of words and numbers. appeared at the top of my vision. Remaining charge 100%, system auto-diagnostic: all OK, system integrity: nominal.

I had the lurching sensation of being about to wake up from a dream. That I was about to be torn out of this comfortable and already familiar space, like a second birth. And then, I was.

The first thing that struck me was overwhelming cold. An icy, all-consuming frost that would've left me shuddering. Above me, half a dozen people toiled, putting the finishing touches on my new body with automatic screwdrivers and other instruments I couldn't even recognize.

"Blanket," I whispered. I heard the sound leave where my lips should've been, but with a metallic edge to it. Just like Two's did. "Cold."

A white cat currently working on attaching a heavy-looking chest-plate paused to look at me. "It's awake? Should it be awake yet?" she asked. The others muttered something, clearly preoccupied with their own tasks.

It? The word alone filled made me uncomfortable. I'd already lost enough of myself without someone pointing it out.

She turned to me with a sigh. "Look, you can't feel cold. We haven't plugged in your temperature sensors. I don't know why you're even conscious-" she began, but a familiar voice interrupted her.

"Give him a blanket," Seven ordered. "Over the legs. We're done with that part. Just a matter of calibration for the rest. Welcome back, Thirteen."

The white cat sighed again, loudly and demonstratively as she left to fetch a blanket for me. Another scientist - or were they doctors, mechanics? - took her place and bolted the chest-plate onto my body. It was strange. I felt nothing except that icy, biting cold. As if I were dead.

"We're going to shut you down for just a little longer, alright?" Seven asked, and then his face appeared above me as he leaned down over me. "We have a bunch of things left to do. So, just bear with us, otter. Glad to see the acoustic input and output working, at least."

With a gentle hand, he turned my head to the side. Reality flickered again, and then I was out for some unknown number of hours. I didn't even get the green hills this time. Only darkness, though not the true void. I'd experienced that before. This was different; I was aware, but only on the most basic level. In a way, it was comfortable. A primordial darkness where only a faint spark of myself existed. Of course, that wouldn't last. After that brief stint in the darkness, it was time to wake up, truly.

Light flooded my vision, which took no time at all to adjust to the same way my old eyes might have. Waking up the second time did not feel good. The freezing cold was mostly gone, but I couldn't move any of my limbs. I couldn't even feel them. They weighed me down, restraining me as surely as any chains, which was good, because otherwise I'd have strangled the Seven right then and there. I loathed him with every fiber of my being for doing this to me, for allowing me to do it to myself. It wasn't a rational kind of hatred, but it had me growling and snarling, my muscles - no, my motors - working just enough to leave my abdomen and chest flexing and twitching as I tried in vain to get up so I could tear his head off, and that disgusting _concerned_expression with it.

"Calm down," Seven said, which only made me angrier. If such a thing were possible. "Absolute feelings, remember? It'll pass. You'll be fine. You'll be able to move once you can form coherent sentences."

"Fuck you!"

"That's a phrase, not a sentence," Seven grinned bleakly. Obviously, he had the upper hand here, because without him, I wasn't able to even move my own limbs. It didn't make want to tear his throat out with my teeth any less. Not that I had teeth.

"It's better than being dead, isn't it? We're still working on the details. I'm trying to isolate your emotions so they can be turned on and off at will. I know it doesn't sound like living - getting to choose what you feel - but the choice-" he gestured towards the windows, and presumably towards earth. "-is down there. That is our fate, too, if we don't do this."

I felt like hell. Like I'd been chewed up and spat out by one of old earth's mythological predators. One of those enormous bears, long since extinct. I didn't have any nerves left, and yet every single nerve was on fire, pulsating out searing agony like a very bad sunburn. Heavy, clumsy, stiff, cold and simultaneously in pain. It hurt a hundred times more than having my physical body cut open had. At least as I examined my thoughts, they felt the same as they always had. The _flow_was a little different. My mind was faster, but my thinking was more structured, in a way that was beyond difficult to describe, as if I was thinking along a track rather than freely, though I could lay down new tracks if I had to.

"Fine," I growled. "Fine. Do whatever you need to do."

"That's what we like to hear," Seven smiled, pausing whatever he was doing on a tablet connected to my neck by a long, black cable. "I'm going to give you back control of the old arm. The one that was already mechanical. I want you to move it, but be aware that if that move is a swipe or punch at me, I'll shut your motor control down again until we can tweak your emotional spectrum a little more."

I tried to close my eyes before remembering that I couldn't. There was no more blinking or naturally closing my eyes anymore. Hopefully, I could disable my vision or when I slept, or I'd quickly go insane. Instead, then, I raised my mechanical arm. It moved with an eerie smoothness, half a dozen or more servomechanisms and actuators working together to emulate a humanoid range of motion. At first, the sight of bare metal and cables having replaced both of my arms caused a flood of negative emotions - a diffuse sorrow at what had been lost - to wash over me, but there was a certain beauty to it as well.

I turned my wrist splayed the mechanical fingers.

"Very good," Seven smiled. "You're taking to it well. Do you want to know what Two did, at this stage?"

I couldn't quite nod; I hadn't been granted access to that part of me yet. Instead, I slowly raised my thumb in that half-universal gesture.

"The moment he woke up and we gave him control, he damn near killed my colleague, Five. That's why we're so careful about letting you move on your own. Slammed him against the wall. Demanded that he tell him what we had done to him. Despite it being him who ordered it," Seven explained, his hands mimicking a strangling motion. "Twice, _thrice_as angry as you; it depends on the person. And he kept asking about where One was, despite One having been dead for... a while."

Seven leaned towards me. With my enhanced vision, I could pick up the individual strands of fur that clad his feline face. It was fascinating, seeing things as a mass of parts rather than the greater whole biological vision and processing might summarize it as.

"I think they were lovers," he spoke, quietly. "One and Two. Two was never the same after he died."

I "blinked" - it'd take a while to get rid of that impulse - and couldn't quite think of anything to say. If he was right - if One and Two had indeed been lovers - I didn't understand why the latter was playing the role of the ship's AI, now. Assuming that Uni indeed was their digitized mind. I couldn't be sure of that, either.

"Right, anyway. You look a lot like the boss, you know. I think these frames were originally meant for his personal use, but he approved putting you in one," he added. "In fact, you looked a lot like him in your original body, too. Maybe that's why he's so forgiving with you."

That left me with far more questions than answers, and a gnawing, almost acidic sensations inside me, almost like heartburn. I was inhabiting one of Two's spare bodies. That made me feel dirty, like my entire being was coated in old oil. I didn't say anything about it to Seven, but anger flared inside me again.

"I'll enable the rest of you. Same stipulations apply," the old cat said. He pressed a few buttons on a remote which was plugged into some part of me. "Now, try sitting up."

With a heroic effort, I swallowed down the anger, and instead of leaping at Seven, I tensed what muscles I would've once had and found myself rising into a sitting position. The mapping of thought to motion was almost perfect, though it also left me feeling somewhat detached from my new body, as if I was controlling a mechanical body rather than my own. Which I was.

"There. That's good," Seven grinned. "How do you feel?"

"Strange," I replied. "Like there's a delay."

Seven nodded, almost sagely. "Ah, yes. Everyone says as much. You'll get used to it. The delay is merely imagined. You're used to nerves, to the analogue signals of your old body. Digital signals feel oddly different to the mind, even if they are faster in reality. It's something akin to how fast travel might feel slow if there's no point of reference. Ah, I'm rambling..."

I moved both of my arms at once, and then my legs, swinging them over the edge of the bed to slowly put my weight on them. To my surprise, no matter how visibly heavy my body was, I barely felt any weight at all. In fact, I felt strong. Intoxicatingly strong. Increasingly I was aware of the raw electric power that coursed through my being, begging to be used. How easily I could shatter Seven's skull, like an egg, to punish him for stealing my body from me-

-no, that wasn't right. I shook my head.

"Something wrong? If you're experiencing overwhelming nostalgia... or intrusive violent thoughts, those should both pass with time," Seven advised, clearly noticing me losing myself in thought again. "Right, let's get your weapons installed. It's a long process, so I'd recommend relaxing in your innerspace. At least I think that's what we chose to call it..."

"How do I do that?" I asked.

"Imagine yourself entering it. Picture it. Your weapons will work the same way. You will picture them. The input parser will interpret your mental images into actions, which will then map onto muscles that you used to have, such as curling a finger," he replied.

I did as he asked. I pictured stepping through a door into that strange, picturesque afterlife. This time, it did feel like an escape, or a refuge. Two would be expecting me soon after we were finished and I was comfortable operating my new body. I had other plans, though. The moment I was ready I would try to contact the third section of the station. The independent scientists. We had sealed the entrances, but with this body, I could travel on the outside of the station. The vacuum of space, lethal to my former biological form, now meant nothing.

Or so I hoped. Given Two's strange paranoia and insistence that we prepare for war, I expected the bodies to be impervious to the icy emptiness of space. There was a risk of the hydraulics freezing, but while I could imagine the Company doing so for others, it wouldn't cut corners on bodies meant for Two. I didn't have much choice, either way. Even with this form, I was no match for Two alone.

But for now, for what felt like almost a whole day in the strange mental landscape they'd created for me, I admired the beauty lost to the sun's scorching embrace. This was nothing but a copy, but being that I was a copy too, it felt only appropriate. A lesser form of beauty for a lesser form of being.

Most of all, I thought about what Seven had said. That I looked like Two. Maybe I did. Mirrors were at a premium down on earth; nobody manufactured any. I could scarcely remember what my face was even like. And even if I did, I didn't know how Two had looked when he was still biological. It was the fact that I was in a frame made for him that really bothered me. Yes, we were both otters, but that was the end of our similarities.

Then I woke up again. By now, the training was routine. I was slowly getting the hang of using parts with muscles that weren't there by simply imagining a motion. Both of my arms had Two's lethal, steel-piercing claws now. For projectile weapons, Seven explained, we'd wait until we reached our as-of-yet unknown future home, as if used here, they could easily depressurize the entire station. Personally, I hoped we'd never need those kinds of weapons again, as a civilization.

I found that I could think in parallel trains of thought, now, which made me feel dizzy at first, and then, like a _genius._It was bizarre-

-how would Kevin and Jen feel about me, now-

-multiple lines of thought, all at full clarity-

-they'd probably be scared, maybe terrified, but I hoped that they'd accept me-

-how would I get outside of the station without causing a depressurization event-

I imagined how it might feel to do this with a dozen, a hundred bodies at once, and merely trying to picture it made me feel like I was drowning. A vast, endless scope of thought, able to consider every question in the universe all at once. Was that why Two was the way he was?

No. Not thinking. He and One had been lovers, and One had died. Not only that, but he had ended up suffering a fate worse than death, somehow, assuming that he really was Uni. Two had been grieving_with a hundred minds at once. The overwhelming sorrow of _one mind was hard to bear. A hundred? It'd break anyone.

That realization didn't answer every question I had. What had prompted this mad self-replication to begin with, against the advice of Seven and the other scientists remained unknown. Perhaps it was nothing but the typical panicked scramble for immortality when facing death.

Either way, I finished my brief training with Seven and promised to return the next day, which was a lie. Even if there were more things for me to learn about my new form, I didn't have the time. The road ahead was long and hard, but the hardest part of it was what I was going to do next.

As Seven had instructed, I dialled down anxiety and fear as I approached my friends. Dread, too. There were no strict controls, but upon feeling an emotion, I could choose to dampen it. An experience that I don't think an organic being could truly understand. Not that any remain. Not of old Earths' stock.

Kevin heard me first and immediately turned to look at me. The look in his eyes spelled alarm, and he nudged Jen, who immediately spun around as well. She had been nervously fiddling with a pen, and that hand froze the instant she saw me.

"Two?" she asked. Her voice hinted at alarm, and her body language was that if someone on the brink of running away. The automatic analysis spelled it out.

"No," I replied. "Thirteen. Alex."

"Wow, you look exactly like him," Kevin stuttered. I didn't need the voice analysis to tell me what he felt was relief. "Like... that's his body, isn't it?"

"Dead fuckin' ringer if it isn't," Jen replied. "How are we supposed to tell you apart?"

"I'm not murderous and unstable," I suggested.

"And clearly, you have a sense of humor, whereas Two... well, not so much," Kevin grinned from ear to ear.

He took a step closer, and briefly, despite the dampened emotions, I worried that I might hurt him somehow. His organic body looked so frail compared to the metal that I consisted of, but he was careful. Slowly, he raised his hand and touched his palm to my chest, splaying his fingers against me. I felt his warmth, though only in the most muted sense. The plating that covered my front didn't, for understandable reasons, have much in the way of sensors.

"You're still you, in there. Just clad in the armor of necessity," he murmured, in that same oddly poetic phrasing I'd fallen for initially. "They told me we'd be able to... interface, later. Once I also got transferred."

He would. I didn't look forward to seeing his perfect, soft, beautiful vulpine body replaced with metal, but it was far preferrable to him dying on our way to the stars, while I lived eternal. Or at least, as long as I could maintain my new body.

"Right, enough, you two. What are we doing?" Jen asked. "What's the plan?"

"Find the others, like Uni said," I told her. "Just at the third section."

"And how are we going to get there?" she prodded. "Cut through walls at random with those fancy new claws of yours and hope we don't end up in space, instead?"

I fought back the urge to get angry at her remark. Thankfully, even that - the binary feelings, or absolute, as Seven called then - could be dialled down with a little focus. It was when I didn't see them coming that they risked overwhelming me.

"No," I answered. "I'm going to climb along the outside of the station."

Kevin and Jen stared at me with wide open eyes, as if I were insane. Maybe I was.

"You know we can't follow you, _even if_that crazy idea works out?" Jen said. She pinched the bridge of her muzzle as if trying to get rid of a sudden headache. "So, we'll have to wait here and... keep doing our jobs?"

"It's not that crazy of a plan, though," Kevin said after a moment of silence. "As long as you make sure to never let go of the station."

"I won't," I reassured him.

"You won't because you'll never get that far. What were you thinking of doing when you get to that side of the station? Punch your way in? Tear off their airlock? Knock on the window like a friendly space alien and ask them to let you in?" Jen asked, speaking faster and faster, sounding angrier and angrier. If I didn't know any better, I would've thought she sounded worried.

"No, no, Jen. The airlocks can be opened from the outside. How else would a ship dock?" Kevin interrupted. "Right?"

It struck me that none of us had actually seen the airlocks from the outside. I could only hope they could be opened from space. If not, we - and especially I - were out of options and hope.

"Fuck it," Jen snarled. The pen snapped between her fingers. "Crazy plan, but we don't have any options. We'll just pretend like nothing is wrong and hope Two doesn't notice, but you'd better come back with an army or we're fucked."

She was right in that I'd need help. But there were only so many frames that Two could possibly have on the station.

In the direst of circumstances, there was also the fact that I could do the same - copy myself into multiples of his frames - but what the cost would be, I couldn't tell. Maybe I'd shatter just as Two had shattered.

Still, we made our way to the airlocks together. Once there, we'd have to act quickly before any alarms went off. I still didn't know if this body would even survive the jaunt through space, but what choice did I have? What choice did I have had quickly become the central, defining question of my life here. I felt like a marionette, or worse yet, a rat in a maze with only one possible destination at any given time.

All I could do was hope.