Cynosure

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[System update received! Please hold still. There will be severe pain after the tone]

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[This is an automated citation. Some irregularities have been noticed in your internal traffic]

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[At 22.44.18.04.12.92 you thought "is anything real"]

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[At 09.45.18.04.12.92 you thought "am I dead"]

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Before he can blink Strohmeier is drowning. The cowl of the scan helmet came down and in the instant he was weightless and swimming in saline. Enclosed. Trapped. Lightless. He thrashes in panic against the restraints, tries to scream but the amniotic fluid already inundates his throat. His insides. Every cavity of his body.

Then neon green blooms in the darkness.

The solution drains. Spluttering and choking he hacks up thick, floating globules as the tank is flushed. The restraints snap open - and the doors - in pours dizzying brightness and vision - and out Strohmeier is deposited still steaming and shivering into the resurrection module. He retches. His eyes sting, his bones ache, his skin screams red and raw just at contact with the air.

"-most of you imagine this place is some kinda penal colony. A reeducation camp. Or just to punish you, that kind of thing-" someone is saying, without any kind of preamble, but the words hardly register. There's only the shock of knowing. Six years of death. Six years in a second. A second to be flung a thousand AU from Mars to the Oort Gate; right through the endless corridor of the Nexus, halfway across the Zhuza system and into orbit round Uozo. But it isn't that that shakes him from his foetal recovery position. It's the realisation-

"You're not paying attention"

-that he isn't alone.

"M-McGowan, what's going on?" Strohmeier chokes, vomiting up a thick stream of bile and translucent liquid. "T-This isn't protocol, the Mission Commander's decanted firs-"

-he isn't on the Eudaemonia.

"McGowan, wha-what is this?" But he's lying to himself, of course. How could he not know?

McGowan smiles. “So, you're wrong, first of all. I know what you’re thinking. But actually it has been six years. The Eudaemonia's orbiting Uozo, and right about now you're being decanted, a thousand AUs and a universe away. Everything’s just fine. You’re free! I'll be out myself in a couple of hours-"

"N-No, you, you copied me here"

"Yeah, we also did that. Oh come on, stop looking so confused. You already knew we were going to have two of you, so why not three?"

His insides turn to ice.

"Yup. You're still living your furtive life at Epsilon, always wondering when the hammer will fall and we'll finally catch you. But we won't do anything, you'll just live your sad life in fear. Why would we need to when we have you right here? The rumours are all true, by the way. We can read the thoughts firing right off your synapses. We caught you the moment you were first decanted-"

"Why?"

"Huh-"

"Why didn't you-"

"-just put you back in the tank and disassemble you the day you were reborn?" she finishes.

"Yes. If you always knew, why now? Why the false hope? Why let copies of me go free and only-"

"-punish you? Punish?" she snorts.

"Enough games!" Strohmeier cries, rattling - rattling the chains he's suddenly bound in, dangling, thrashing, swinging from the ceiling."Wha-"

"You didn't realise it was odd there wasn't any gravity did you? You know you're on Ganymede".

"How did yo-"

"-Get used to it" she cuts him off with a tone suddenly and completely unlike her. An iron voice, that makes the very idea of talking back or questioning it impossible. EM, he thinks. They've overridden-

"-my implants" McGowan smiles a glacial smile.

Strohmeier swallows his protests. He knows they'll just try to disorient him, with more tricks of the mind. They can make him see or feel anything. They'll torture him without even having to lay a finger on him, he knows that, and they can do it...gods know how long. He'll die, eventually. And they'll resurrect him again. He realises that the only hope he has left in the world is that the continuity isn't real. That the gods damned AIs haven't figured out a way of truly transferring consciousness after all. Imagine if they could, he thinks, and McGowan's smile grows wider. Imagine if the Church was right all along, and he's condemned himself by not believing the truth that will damn him.

"No!" he cries, involuntarily with sudden terror, "no!", and McGowan screams with him in perfect synchrony, face twisted in a mockery of his pain.

"They'll be plenty of time for denial later. But while you still can, any questions?"

Strohmeier doesn't say anything. He just sobs uncontrollably. Until an electric pain, like nothing he's ever imagined lights up his temple - for just a fraction of an instant - too quickly even to scream. Even as it passes he knows that it's the worst thing he's ever felt, the worst thing you could possibly feel, and he would do anything, anything forever just not to have to feel it again. His entire body trembles like he's blowing in the wind, broken into a cold sweat.

“If it isn’t for my own good", he begins - they want him to ask it - "and it isn’t to punish me…then what? Why? I-Is this some experiment?” He prays not, but he knows it. He's high enough a tier to know the tunnels of Epsilon are full of malformed things, almost human, the failed castoffs the original Callisto AI abandoned while iterating the resurrection protocol.

“Well…maybe?" McGowan scrunches her lip ambivalently. "I guess? The Lambda mainframe's tried to explain it to us, but if it has to explain something then it's usually beyond human comprehension. But it asks us to bring it people. So that's what we do".

“And you?" Strohmeier asks.

She raises an eyebrow and pretends not to follow.

"You’re a fanatic. Don’t you believe in the Continuity? What true believer would let there be a copy of themselves out there? You were going to kill yourself”.

“Well, let me tell you a secret. Here's something not even the Chairman knows. Not even him". She looks at him wide-eyed with mock sincerity. "The answer to your question is that I don't believe anything. I've got a brainstem, but that's it. My personality's a template. You know, anodyne, quippy, snarky, likeable. A honeypot for apostates like you who miss Earth".

"You're-" and suddenly he can't believe he's never seen it.

"I'm honestly surprised you never noticed anything was off. The template's based off your wife for chrissakes. Well a younger copy of her. Not surprising you liked me so much".

And somehow even in hell itself that's almost the worst of it. He'd dared to hope. Ever since he'd met her, he'd always thought she acted the least culty, the most like a normal human being, of anyone he'd met since-

"-Earth. Earth, Earth, Earth. That's all that goes on in your brain".

"You don't exist".

“Well, I did. There was a Malorie McGowan. We just never resurrected her. Instead we whipped up a new body and just enough of a brain from scratch. We can do that now. Can’t engineer the whole thing on our own, yet, but we can build just enough of it to jam machinery between the cracks that does a pretty good job of passing. Fooled you, didn't I?"

The question forms in his mind, but he realises he doesn't need to say it.

"Around 35% of everybody you know. Crazy, huh? We've got our own EM and ultra emitters up in here", she taps her forehead, "so we make enough that everyone's under constant coverage. Where they work, where they sleep-"

“-How could you keep it secret?" he protests, knowing there's no point. "It's impossible" he lies to himself. "McGowan had no family, no friends with scans, but I know a dozen people from Earth. So does everybody. You said they give you new bodies-"

"-designed for effect" she winks.

"How could someone not realise if his wife was replaced? His parents, his friends-"

“-You think we can’t engineer around that?" a new contempt comes into her voice, almost incredulity. "All day, every day, your brain is on EM strings. We could make you think your own reflection was your wife if we wanted to. Sometimes things like that even happen by mistake. You can’t recognise faces, did you know that? Total prosopagnosia. Everyone alive has it. Unforeseen defect in the temporal lobe. It's caused by a glitch in the resurrection process somehow, and of course humans can’t figure out those quantum-computed algorithms well enough to fix it. All your facial recognition is done for you by your HHUD, and you don’t even notice it. Sometimes it comes in handy though, funnily enough. We can just turn it off selectively, and then you wouldn’t even recognise your actual wife"

Strohmeier hangs in silence for a long time, and for some reason she - it - obliges him. Finally he lifts his head, and asks, almost in a whimper-

"Was any of it real?"

She cocks her head, not even bothering with a human expression this time - more like a cat seeing a bird through a windowpane.

"What?"

"My life. Since I woke up on Callisto. Was...was my wife even real? Am...oh christ, am I?"

"Oh boy. Oh boy. You do not want to be asking that already. Look, Strohmeier, and seriously - because this is the last human face you're ever going to see - let me tell you something. You're going to spend the rest of your lives in this cell, wondering, desperately wondering, what's real and what isn't".

And sure enough the walls begin to judder, the ground shaking as if there could be an earthquake on Ganymede. The room stretching out with impossible speed, impossibly, until the walls fade into an endless horizon and the ceiling into an overcast sky. The light behind it is blood red, a horrible light seeping from everywhere, and everything, and McGowan herself begins to disappear into the awful glare.

"You're starting to wonder what you're going to tell yourself for the rest of forever. Your own little personal theodicy. For a little while you might hold onto what you believe, telling yourself you're a martyr, resisting the Church for the sake of humanity. But there's nothing they're trying to get out of you. There's nothing for you to confess, no way to give in. Pretty soon you won't even be able to think about that anyway. You'll be nothing. Just pain".