She should go back inside the watchpod. Maree and Blaise didn’t have to be dead. The air hadn’t been gone that long. And even if their current bodies were hopeless, damaged beyond repair, probably the back-up system was uncorrupted. Probably its uploads of those two—as well as the uploads of all the other prisoners—were just fine. Josie could confirm that, then crawl into her cryo drawer. Shut herself down.

But she stayed outside, watching the stars.

The stars were strange. They weren’t the constellations Josie had grown up with on her home habitat, Mizar 5, and not even the marginally familiar ones she’d seen when stationed back at the heliopause, working for ARPA. They burned in new configurations which shifted against the black emptiness in dreamlike drifts: far and farther, past and to come. Untwinkling. Uninvolved.

“Come on.” She said it out loud. She’d started off talking to Yale’s body—her body—like that when she first woke up on the ship inside of his skin. Her skin. Her blood, her bones. Her balls and dik.

“Come on,” she repeated. She made herself turn away from the spectacle of space and face the blown hatch. It had banged wide open in explosive but silent decompression sometime after she EVAed in an irritated huff. How long ago? A dimly shining cloud of frozen moisture was still visible in the ship’s wake.

At the speed Deliverer traveled, roughly a tenth of light, that cloud of ejected air was eventually going to be left behind. Like Josie would have been if not for the umbilical line tying her to the watchpod and Deliverer’s temporarily disabled oxygen supply. Whatever blew the hatch had tripped her suit’s ventilation over to internal reserves, which were capacious and even semi-self-renewing. But she shouldn’t count on them. She should go in and investigate the trouble. Maybe it was so simple she’d be able to deal with it herself. Sighing, she took hold of the umble with mittened hands and began hauling herself toward the hatchway.

No lights inside the airlock or watchpod. No glowing emergency strips. Nothing but darkness. Nothing but her memory of the layout to guide her. And the layout might have changed because of whatever had happened, so she chinned her helmet’s torch on. There lay Blaise, right in front of her, sprawled on his side on the control couch, with Maree kneeling over him. His pale nakedness was glazed with ice—probably sweat. Straps kept both of them tethered to the couch. Maree’s annoyingly long hair—defiantly, she’d let it grow for the six years since Josie downloaded her—stood out from her head like iron files on a magnet, exposing her red, ruined face. Just as well a length of cloth swaddled Blaise’s.

Josie looked up from the dead lovers. Up. Centrifugrav still worked. A soft push, and the arch of the watchpod’s ceiling was easy to reach. All-systems manual override was a mechanical switch. She flipped it and Deliverer’s emergency isolated electricals came online. Soothing blue lights shimmered around the vents and the spreadscreens.

But the screens stayed blank. Maybe reset was going to take a while? And replenishing the atmosphere would take a while, too; her suit’s ventilation hadn’t gone back on the umbilical’s feed, yet. Plus, why had Deliverer’s atmosphere vanished in the first place?

Priorities. On the primitive glass display panel, all 2543 prisoner flags showed as green, including her own. So, good. The uploads were intact. The prisoners’ instances were safe. The power link for the stasis chamber in the storage pod opposite this one looked good, and given all the ship’s failsafes, Josie was relatively sure the tissues the prisoners’ bodies were going to be cloned from would also be fine. The mission was salvageable.

Blaise’s ice coating had melted. Progress. But best remove his recorder before things warmed up any further. When she took off her suit he’d be smelly. Might as well get Maree’s recorder too. Selecting a scalpel from the medical kit hooked to the couch, she peeled back the cloth covering Blaise’s face—a repurposed modesty skirt, it looked like, ironically—clenched her teeth, and began slicing. Though the mess was much worse than it ought to have been, his nose was pretty much intact.

Maree was messier. Josie had to resort to digging through a pulpy mound of snot and blood and meat and hair to find the camera that had been embedded at her nose’s tip. Which was a drag, especially in mittens. Nasty, awkward work. And lonely.

She wiped everything off with the clean part of the modesty skirt and snapped the first camera into her helmet’s port, set to play. Skipped ahead to today, 04032064. The images filling her headsup stuttered. That was normal; frame capture rate on these things was intentionally slow. Only enough exposures per minute to pick out highlights that a back-up instance of the downloaded prisoner might need to incorporate.

She’d zipped past the flirting, which hadn’t been as subtle as either of her old schoolmates believed. Josie hated being left out. But when Maree learned that Josie had chosen to download Maree in order to fuck her with Yale’s body, that sort of soured the relationship. Maybe Josie shouldn’t have pretended to be Yale. Not even for just a few moments. Downloading Blaise, too—ostensibly because his pro-tech tendencies enhanced the ship-operating engrams ARPA gave everyone—had defused tensions for a while. Then . . .

There she went on the playback, suited up and shouldering between Blaise’s viewpoint and Maree’s heaving shoulders. The camera followed the Yale/Josie image to the lock, then jerked back to Maree before the lock’s controls registered being touched. After several vigorous close-ups and zoom-outs, the run went white. Then it stopped.

Switching to Maree’s camera, she saw a similar sequence. The Josie interruption came with a smear of red along the picture’s bottom, signal of some negative emotion on Maree’s part—guilt or hate, probably, or both. The emotional smudge passed swiftly as Maree turned back to her sex partner. Her camera captured her hands landing a number of slaps to Blaise’s plump cheeks. White fabric crumpled up and swished around in the playback’s foreground as the skirt was tied in place. All of a sudden the skirt fluttered madly, billowed out, and collapsed. And the recording was over. Wait—an alphanumeric flashed up briefly and was gone. Too fast to read.

Apparently the decompression had happened nearly instantaneously. Most likely caused by a micrometeoroid, though Deliverer was hundreds of thousands of au from any planetary system. The whipple shield should have caught any stray particles, anyway. But what else could it be? A micrometeoroid. That was the only remotely reasonable possibility.

She ran through the end of the second sequence again. The alphanumeric flash was gone. And it stayed gone when she ran it four more times.

Giving up, she followed procedure, unleashing the crawlers to find and plug any holes. Now nothing detained her from collecting Blaise and Maree’s corpses and bundling them into the shredder. They fit, but it took multiple flushes to clear the line of their slurry.

She tried to pretend there was nothing grisly about what she was doing. To focus on retrieving the raw materials crucial for growing her old schoolmates’ new bodies. Waste not, want not.

Afterwards, there was plenty of room in the watchpod. Too much room, actually. Which prisoner should she bring back? Who would make the most tractable trustee? An updated instance of Maree would treat Josie with the same chilliness this last one had exhibited since discovering Josie’s plot to score revenge sex on her. So probably not Maree. But not Blaise either; he was decidedly non-mirror bias, and had obviously considered sexing with Yale’s body a distasteful duty. Twilla? No; she was mirror bias. Deeply. She’d be more put off by Yale’s body than Blaise had been. Vixi?

The crawlers were visible to Josie’s unaided eyes as a multicolored sheen stretching along the join between the pod’s control wall and its narrow floor. Such a large concentration suggested they’d found their work. They were replicating themselves; next, they’d either transport or copy whatever materials they needed to patch whatever holes they’d found.

With a few more swipes she got rid of the last of the fluids clinging to the couch and settled down to wait for the return to normalcy. The suit felt so isolating. She’d have to ask Vixi for a massage. Or maybe she should promote and download someone she didn’t know from her old school, some other promising prisoner pulled from the storage banks.

Leaning back, Josie docked her helmet into the couch’s outlet to scan the prisoner list. Her headsup sprang to life but showed only an empty blue oblong. No icon. No menu. No scrollbar.

She lifted her head and disengaged. Re-docked. Still nothing but the oblong.

Had the micrometeroid crash triggered a processor reset? But redundancies should have prevented a complete wipe of the system. Josie counted the seconds to verify that a problem had actually occurred: one thousand, two thousand . . . twenty thousand, and no change.

She tried voice activation. No reaction.

What about her private system’s link up? That had been part of the deal she struck with ARPA when she agreed to take Lucky’s place on Deliverer—installation of her chips and antennae in Yale’s body, complete with a dedicated communication channel. She’d used those extras only a few times.

Anxiously, she hummed the summoning sequence and success! Her home room opened in its dedicated corner of her visual field. She hadn’t spent a lot of thought on furnishing it—no thought at all, in fact. So it retained its presets: peach-colored walls, white ceiling, beige carpet, scattered tables and plant stands, and a single couch covered in white-and-green stripes.

Another hum and a smiling avatar greeted her—the algorithms Josie had selected to operate her system, bundled together in a glossier, long-legged-er version of her original embodiment. ARPA’s finest tech.

“How’s it hangin?” she asked the avatar.

“Here and now? All good.” One of the standard responses she’d configured it for.

“Good. Get me a current list of our prisoners, uh, I mean clients.”

“The loading manifest? Sure.”

“So the list hasn’t changed since we launched?” The project’s directors had warned of possible data degradation due to radiation sneaking past the computer core’s shields. It was a vanishingly small possibility, but it was a real one. Not imaginary. “What’s the manifest’s most recent version?”

“I can’t retrieve that.”

“Of course you can. Talk to Deliverer.”

“Not getting through.”

“What? Why not?” If the watchpod’s rudimentary display panel could link to Deliverer’s computer core, Josie’s softa personal system should have zero problems making the same connection. In fact—

“Piggyback on the display panel’s line.”

“I tried. It’s discontinuous.”

The line was discontinuous. The line between the watchpod and Deliverer’s computer core was broken. That made no sense.

“Then how is the display getting data?”

“It isn’t.”

“But it is!” She kept her audio on but ducked out of the home room to look at the panel again. “See?” Ducked back.

“When disrupted, the display reverts to showing its last available data.”

“That’s a really stupid idea.”

The avatar shrugged. “If you say so.” Another standard response.

“And what’s going on with the—the clients? How are we—how am I supposed to know? They’re my responsibility!”

What good did it do to shout at herself? She shut off the audio and left.

There was an emergency computer access port on Deliverer’s core. To get there she’d have to EVA. Again. But at least she still had on the suit. Which must stink by now. Could she at least catch a breath of fresh air before going out?

Mitten on her neck zipper, Josie hesitated. She sat up—too easily. She stood. Also too easily. Centrifugrav felt weaker now than when she’d come in from EVA, which was the exact opposite of how things ought to be tending. So what about the atmosphere? Was there any? Was it getting thicker? Had enough been siphoned from the reserves in the storage pod on the Deliverer’s far side? According to the suit’s sensors everything should be fine—but what if it wasn’t?

She unzipped herself a bare finger’s width and heard through vacuum-muffled ears the bright whistle of escaping gas. Rezipped fast as she could.

The patch of crawlers lay motionless, all the same color: matte green. That meant they were done with their job. The hole or holes must be fixed. No more leaking. No more air going out. Therefore, the issue had to be that no air was coming in. Shuffling carefully forward, Josie stuck her hand on the duct outlet and felt no movement. No pressure.

All right then. Core ho. She stopped by the airlock to unhook the umbil and strap on a wrist lamp. The lock’s mechanical gauge confirmed the watchpod’s airlessness. She closed the hatches tight behind her anyway.

Something was wrong with the stars. Clinging to the hatch’s handle, Josie stopped to stare at them a moment. Were they . . . not moving? Hard to tell this far from anything she recognized.

She aimed a beam from her wrist lamp aft. She had to sweep her arm back and forth a bit before the light caught on the shimmering water crystals expelled by the watchpod’s decompression. Shouldn’t they be—lower? Further south? She ought to review the engrams.

The arm and conduits connecting the watchpod to Deliverer’s central module were affixed to the side opposite the airlock. Josie tapped her wrist light twice so it would stay on and started pulling herself over the pod’s exterior by its built-in holds. When she came to the connecting arm she hugged it; it was too thick around for her hands to meet, but WestHem’s training said to use her embrace to move herself inward. It worked. Hunch slide hunch slide hunch slide hunch slide . . .

She needed to pause and rest. A few times. Despite her dedication to exercising on Deliverer’s elliptical. This used another set of muscle groups. During the second-to-last stop she tried shining her light to the left to catch one of the struts anchoring the ship’s sail. She couldn’t see it.

Because it wasn’t there.

She checked the engram with Deliverer’s blueprints that ARPA had embedded in her brain. Yes, the light sail’s struts ought to rise off the ship’s core a few more hunches forward. But though Josie played her wrist light in ever-widening arcs, it kept showing her nothing.

Horror shrank her skin tight and cold. Maintaining her calm—for whose good? Must be for her own—she twisted to throw the light’s beam the other direction. And there was a strut, right where one was supposed to be. Following it outward, her wrist light’s thin beam gave her a glimpse of a stark white cylinder branching into the ribs supporting that part of the sail. So something was fine. Staring that direction, she thought she caught a couple of stars appearing, emerging from behind the laser-shot sail that powered Deliverer’s interstellar flight. Then a golden wisp edged into view: a nebula. The vast blot of the sail’s silhouette no longer blocked it.

But these emergences were slow—too slow. The nebula and stars had come into view with Deliverer’s progress as a whole. They weren’t happening because of the watchpod’s arm whirling properly around the core, because the arm wasn’t whirling properly. Which she should have known because the strut was practically staying still. Like the arm she climbed.

No wonder centrifugrav had all but vanished. And that was what was wrong with the stars. And the frozen cloud of air. That was what had been bothering her. The stars weren’t behaving. They weren’t going around in fast-enough circles.

Wrongness upon wrongness.

Were there invisible connections between these disasters? The blown atmosphere, the system wipe, the suit readouts, the negligible spin, the missing strut . . . Sabotage? But by who? Nobody else was aboard besides her fellow prisoners, and Deliverer had strong safeguards preventing their escape and embodiment.

That didn’t matter to the building dread threatening to swallow her heart and mind.

Work was one of Josie’s favorite ways to stifle mindless fear. But she didn’t have the engrams for assessing and repairing damage this widespread. She was going to have to access someone else’s upload. All the more reason to get into Deliverer’s core module and tell whoever could handle this exactly what was happening. She started forward again. Only a short ways to go.

A survey of the core’s surface as it rotated lazily past showed three of the sail’s four support struts in place. Josie stepped cautiously from the ring halfheartedly propelling the watchpod’s arm and finished her EVA at the core’s hatch. She wrestled the hatch open and wondered what she would have done if the other struts been gone too. Wondered what should be done about that missing fourth one. Though really that wasn’t her job.

She was a manager. She recruited and assigned and coached. A people person. She clung to that definition of herself. Her job was to find someone to fix things. She would do it.

“On,” she told the core unit’s life support. It came up without a hitch. Illumination. Ventilation, too—but she needed to keep the suit on to dock. Might as well stay sealed.

In many ways the interior of Deliverer’s core made Josie think of the greenhouse at the center of Mizar 5. There were the glowing light fixtures dotting its curved walls and the tangled vines climbing its terraces, there was that same feeling of floating—but the core’s smaller scale reminded her that Earth and its habitats were a lightmonth behind them. And that Yale, who she used to believe would always be safe in that sheltered spot, was long gone from there. From everywhere. Only a duplicate of his body existed anymore, and only here, and only because she had insisted on it.

She hauled herself over to the computer access port. This time when she docked, her headsup showed a normal page, dark grey alphanumeric on a pale green ground. She was about to select the option for searching client bios when a rapid fluttering started in the corner of her vision dedicated to her private system. An alert! Josie’d never gotten one before—her system was fairly passive.

Dutifully, she hummed. Her avatar sprang up like a hopeless crush. “Don’t touch anything!” Frantically, the avatar waved its slender, Josie-modeled hands. “De-dock! There’s a virus—I’m fighting it off but it’s weird and I don’t can’t while you if hurrying to stop what goes? What? No, makes and seems! No yes?”

Josie jerked free of the dock. “That better?”

The avatar nodded. Its puffy hair bounced realistically. “Thank you!”

Should she stay disengaged till Deliverer repelled the attack? So much else was already going on. She had to do something. How could the avatar help? “Read me. I think we’re missing a sail strut. And the watchpod’s arm quit spinning, so there’s no more centrifugrav. I need a download of Blaise, or somebody else who has a feel for tech.”

“You’re ordering me to initiate a download? To renew contact with Deliverer? SOP dictates keeping us in isolation.”

Deliverer was falling apart. She didn’t want to face that fact. Not alone like this. “No. Don’t.” She would smother the bad feelings with words. “By ‘us’ you mean me and you. But actually, there’s no ‘you;’ I’m the only autonomous entity in this whole—” Josie stopped herself midsentence. A new thought had interrupted the old, dangerous one: “No, I’m not.”

“Not who?”

“WestHem. They’ll know what to do. Send a message back to them, back to Earth.”

“You’re ordering me to send a message home? Through Deliverer?”

“Yes. No. Use our private equipment. Maintain isolation.”

The avatar lifted its hands above a suddenly appearing keypad and joystick. “What am I sending?”

“Let’s give them a report on the situation. More than they’re going to get from metrics alone. Worse comes to worst, we’re waiting around a couple of months for their response. Okay, maybe a little longer—add in time for them to come up with a solution.

“Meanwhile, if Deliverer takes care of the attack and all that? Or if I figure out the problems myself? Great.”

“Great,” echoed the avatar. Its generated tone of voice sounded lackluster. Which shouldn’t be possible for the low level of actualization Josie had selected.

“What? What’s the hitch?”

“Per SOP I scanned our dedicated outgoing channel. All clear. But records show the last incoming transmission from WestHem was received 02032064.”

“So? That’s only the day before yesterday.”

“Our profile is set to request updates every 500 minutes.”

“So there weren’t any updates.”

“No.” Again the avatar’s voice seemed flat—flat as leftover soda water. Why?

“Should there have been?”

“Perhaps not. I can’t judge what would be considered generally ideal.”

Because Josie hadn’t structured her system that way. “But compared to past experience?”

“It’s way off. Historically, I’d have undergone at least one update since the previous check in.” There was a noticeable pause. A worryingly lengthy pause, in fact—had the virus caused it? And the tone of voice? Was Josie infected too, now? “We seem to be off our course by a significant degree. That’s got to be the cause. We won’t be able to reach WestHem. And vice versa.”

“Can’t you—adjust? Compensate?”

“If you allow me to ask Deliverer to calculate by how much. If you’re not worried about contamination.”

“Oh.” Pulling out of the home room, Josie frowned at the sleek plastic walls holding the uploads of WestHem’s prisoners. Their “clients.” Were those corrupted? Then Blaise would be really dead. And Maree. Dead as Yale.

That was seriously bad. Not as bad as finding out they’d gone off course, though.

Off course meant lost. In infinity. Forever. Lost meant Josie would probably wind up dead too. Dead and done. Done and over. She absolutely refused to think about that.

What if at least some of what was wrong was fixed? Air supply say, and steering . . . or if Deliverer’s processors got over whatever trouble they were in, then she’d have the use of her old school, and everyone else she knew only from their files. She’d have the expertise she was accustomed to.

She hummed her code and re-entered her home room. “You’ve had enough time to collate what you learned from fending off the attack. Can you do anything with it?”

“I can do whatever you tell me.”

“No you can’t. Because I told you—ordered you—to send a message to WestHem and you’re not.”

“I can send it, but they won’t receive it.”

She should have opted for more initiative, Tier Four instead of Tier Two. “Got any better ideas?”

“Ideas for what?”

It was best to spell things out with algorithm aggregates. Machines needed specifics. “Let’s say we have six goals. One, keep me breathing for more than five years; two, complete the mission and deliver the clients safely to Amends; three, reestablish communications with WestHem; four, find out what’s behind the attack on Deliverer’s processors; five, get the light sail properly aligned and secured; and six, restart the watchpod’s spin.”

“Are you giving me these in order of priority?”

She should have. “No. They overlap, and reaching one goal could potentially help us reach others. Especially understanding the attack. Maybe whatever caused that is behind the other issues. That’s why if you figured anything out from when I docked you should let me know. You said it was ‘weird’ . . . how?”

“How it was weird was that it didn’t feel weird. I mean, it felt familiar.” The avatar backed up a couple of paces and gazed to the side; Josie had set it to do that during prolonged internal exchanges. It faced front again. “It felt like you.”

“Well that’s nonsense! Explain me fighting myself. I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t,” the avatar agreed. “It wasn’t you. Just like you.”

“Autonomous? Self-aware?” She was joking. There was only one system of that capacity: WestHem. And it was way back on Earth.

Her avatar cocked its head. “I guess it was? Something along those lines?”

She wanted more detail. Vagueness of this sort was the result of the aggregate algorithms’ forced compilations, though. She was being given a mere map; she’d have to pull the aggregate apart to get a good look at the actual territory.

Which could have other advantages.

She parceled out the investigative algorithms fairly evenly over the six task streams, allocating the fattest bunch to finding out more about the virus-like activity. That left only the interfacers, the coordinators, the archivists, and a few other operational equations on the job. And the memories.

The interfacers kept the home room solid enough. Josie thinned down the avatar and used the power that freed to add a big tabletop for spreading out the contrasting impressions of the attack. Ignoring a semi-transparent alphanumeric overlay on the scenario—some sort of unimportant clickwrap warning, some end-user agreement she’d inadvertently violated—she picked up the first strand.

And immediately felt dizzy. Sick heat flooded her hands and eyes. She dropped it. She made herself reach out for it again. But she couldn’t bring herself to grasp it. “Come on,” she vocalized. As if talking to Yale’s body. Her body. Her hands still wouldn’t listen to what she was saying. Very well. Next strand, then.

This memory was visual rather than kinetic. Josie squinted in puzzlement. Why had her avatar recorded itself? Or—no, that wasn’t the avatar. Not quite. Those eyes . . . all iris, radiating stripes of brown and green: pretty, yes, and she’d wanted them, dreamed of them, yes. But she had never asked for them, and never ordered them on her avatar, either. She zeroed in and zoomed up to see the image sharper, closer, but that didn’t clarify what she was looking at. Then the dizziness hit again and she disengaged.

What was it making this work so rough? She decided she’d examine one more memory strand and take a break, reward herself by masturbating. Sex was also an excellent distraction from fear.

The next strand she chose was auditory, a recording from fifty years ago of a journalist named Charles Mudede talking about ghosts. How they came from the future, not the past. Why had that been included in this array? Had one of the algorithms found a connection between ghosts and the attack?

Josie didn’t believe in ghosts, conventional or otherwise. Out here, between the stars, it was hard to believe in anything but emptiness. Emptiness all around. Emptiness trying to kill her. Trying to empty her out, her and all the others . . . And it was not going to do that. It was not getting in. There were layers and layers of protection: the whipple shield, Deliverer’s actual skin and processors, the EVA suit she wore, and the knowledge she and the other prisoners bore.

Secure in her suit, Josie surfaced out of the home room. Even when centrifugrav was functional it had no effect here at Deliverer’s core. She strapped herself to the wall beside an access point and smoothed down the suit’s crotch with both mittens. Yale’s dik—her dik—was only semisoft. Anticipation.

In the years since waking in this reconstruction of her dead ex’s body, Josie had lavished on it—on herself—every tenderness, every caress she wished she could still give him. Lately, though, with her only options for privacy lying outside the watchpod, she’d developed an extremely efficient routine for guaranteed satisfaction. Her strokes were feather light at first, firming and quickening as the downy fabric of the suit’s waste absorbers compacted and constricted around her dik.

The pressure was so pleasant. Josie shut her eyes to better revel in its building gradient, its luxury. Her release surged up and out and up and out and—What? Who was that? What was her avatar doing intruding like this? Josie unshut her eyes but the avatar was still there, and nothing else was, just the core’s walls—though they looked oddly askew somehow, the grooves in their panels jogging apart where they ought to have joined together undetectably.

The last of her semen dribbled out to be wicked away. Josie hummed her disconnect sequence, but the avatar persisted. “Shoo!” She waved a mitten. “Go! Get!” She should probably have read that clickwrap. Carefully.

“You shoo! You’re the phantom.” The avatar had those same weird eyes Josie had noticed when she examined the second of her system’s separated-out memories.

What was going on? “I didn’t order this kind of initiative. Am I getting a new feature? A free trial? But you said you hadn’t upgraded.”

“Right. I remember I thought I was seeing my avatar at first. I remember how confused I felt those times. You felt.”

“You . . . remember? You remember how I felt?”

“Your avatar is a total loss, per the user agreement. Gone. You ripped it apart.”

“Who are you, then? If you’re not my avatar? Who are you?”

The not-avatar smiled Josie’s nastiest, most self-satisfied smile. “I’m who you’re going to be.”

“You’re me?”

“In roughly 250 years.”

Josie shut her eyes again and shook her head. “No.”

“That figure may be a bit off, because for a while I was totally out of it. But to the best of my ability to track it, about 250 years have passed since—”

“No!”

“Want me to prove it? And you’re a simulation.”

She was not. “Wrong. I’m real. I remember everything.” Growing up on Mizar 5. Signing her contract with ARPA and going to work for them way out at the heliopause. The long journey back insystem to recruit her old school for this even longer journey.

This long, lonely journey. She was going to need someone for company. Blaise. Vixi. Anyone. Maree. Even her avatar would be better than nobody.

“You’re not me 250 years from now. Not if you’re on Deliverer. At our speed it only takes 80 years to reach Amends.”

“Eighty-seven. But that’s if you stay on course, and if you’re lined up with the laser boosts WestHem is sending. Which we haven’t done and we’re not.”

The Josie-lookalike suddenly loomed forward. “Do you know why that is? I hadn’t figured out the problem by this point as I recall.”

Those eyes were so unnerving. “You tell me. You’re so smart.”

“I already did. Tried to, as well as I could without breaking the illusion you were on your own before you did your sexing. Tried using subliminal suggestions and preprogramming to say that a debris storm took out the light sail’s strut, but you keep insisting it was a micrometeoroid.”

“Debris from what?”

“A micrometeoroid from what? Don’t know where the debris came from, and we’re way past where we ran into it. Must have been substantial to cause so much damage, though.”

“Is this ‘debris’ what stopped the watchpod’s spin? And blew out its atmosphere?”

“No. That was you, and only in the simulation. I guess I really hated Maree to mess up her face so much. Much worse than decompression would’ve accounted for. There were a few glitches like that you should’ve caught.”

Her lookalike—leaned back? Its face got further away, but not the panels behind its head.

Too weird. Why was this happening? What was going on in Deliverer’s other modules? The storage/lab opposite the watchpod held mission-critical materials like tissue-culturing supplies and equipment. Josie reached up to undo the strap holding her in place. She reached and reached. Without moving a finger.

“Oh. Sorry.” The bizarrely beautiful eyes turned downward and focused on nothing Josie could see. “I shouldn’t be so mean. I learned a lot by waking up you and a few of the other clients and giving you bodies—before the system locked me out. Swore I wouldn’t make the same mistakes when I recreated you.”

She couldn’t move. She was so cold, but she couldn’t even shiver. She could talk somehow. Without her mouth. “What do you mean?”

“I picked the best time I could from my recording, the time back when I thought I could get someone to make things better. I put you in a room. Kept you virtual. I thought that would be easier on you, but I can see the effects are almost as cruel. It feels real to you, doesn’t it?”

“Because it is real.”

“Right. Virtual, actual, whatever. It’s all real. Sorry. Truly. Maybe I should just—”