Unity stood in line waiting for her turn to be recombined with her other half—her clone.
She was told it had to happen quickly, as having two versions of yourself interacting together wasn’t conducive of a good merging—it caused a strange sense of déjà vu.
The remerging of everyone wasn’t taking long. One by one everyone had both their matrices placed in a little device that Angelique had on her ship. And one by one each of them had their memories combined together.
It was Unity’s turn next. She waited as Atlas completed the process.
All the clones who had gone through the stress of meeting the Atua were eager to recombine with their original halves. It was something in the clones’ matrices driving them toward that. It gave them a sense of pleasure. Almost as if it was their destiny.
Unity noticed in herself, when she was a clone, that she didn’t feel the subtle tug when she was inside the alien ship. But as soon as she got near herself, as soon as she was en route toward the real version of her, she was overwhelmed with a desire to combine. It wasn’t a sexual desire; it was more of an anticipation of something. The only similar situation she could think of was when she won her dream house and she couldn’t wait to move in. It was excitement, joy, and pleasure all mixed in.
The desire also carried with it a compulsion to want to take steps toward combining with her original self, like whenever she was waiting for an important email and the wait compelled her to keep refreshing the page until she received that dopamine hit of the email arriving. She found it very hard to give in to that desire.
She stood looking at a copy of herself—the real version of herself. She reached out with one hand as her double did the same. It was almost like standing in front of a mirror—if the mirror wasn’t quite right. If it was slightly out of sync.
The two versions of her touched, and the room went white. Then static sounded, and the room around her went a little cold. Then before goose bumps appeared on her skin, she was warm and comfortable again.
She felt the two versions of her mixing, like a deck of cards being shuffled together. Memories from the last little while intertwined and mixed together. Like mixing milk into coffee, they could never be pulled apart again.
Hallucinations in her mind’s eye of things mixing happened in quick succession. White and black sand. Red and blue paint making purple. Different instruments to make music. The visualizations came thick and fast.
Then nothing.
She felt a little disoriented. She felt like she was in two places at once.
Then the white around her disappeared, and she was sitting in the middle, right between where the two versions of her touched hands.
She was the last to go through the process.
Angelique addressed the group anticipating their questions. “Don’t think of the two versions of you as different. This will be confusing, but it has always been you.”
“I like to think of the two versions of me as simply me on different days,” Atlas added helpfully.
Atlas was right; reframing her two out-of-body experiences as just her but on different days of the week felt a lot more congruent with the reality she was feeling. And with that mindset she started to reconcile the two versions of her.
Now that she had the complete memories of the two versions of her, she learned just how screwed she’d almost been. For whatever reason, simply destroying the aliens’ Starnet saved them. If the flight plan had been preprogrammed or the alien had had an AI on board the spaceship, she would have been utterly screwed. She was a little shaken by that thought but also grateful for how it had all turned out.
Angelique addressed the whole team once more. “We need to get going. I have a planet called Everest. It’s not too far from here; we should go there next.”
Unity wasn’t too sure what she wanted to do next. But she had been running nonstop since they encountered technical issues coming to this star system. She wanted to take a break. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. She was safe, but she still had an urge to run and hide.
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She didn’t have to voice her concern, as Peter spoke first, saying exactly what she was thinking: “Let’s talk through what just happened.” Peter paused and looked at everyone in the room. “We were all just kidnapped by a hostile alien. It’s okay if we’re all feeling a bit freaked out right now.”
Unity started to cry. Peter had just given her permission to feel what she was really feeling, and it all came out. She was a scientist—a researcher. She wasn’t some sort of intergalactic warrior. The last time someone had threatened her was high school.
Fighting was not in her skill set. This was not what she signed up for. She could debate someone. If an alien arrived today and wanted to debate the reasons why it was the superior species, she would happily argue until the end of time. But to be kidnapped. To be threatened! The emotions came like a flood, overwhelming her.
She found her emotions becoming too much. She found herself shifting into anger. She hated the Atua.
She had heard how soldiers that came back from war were changed by what they’d experienced. Most people that left a battlefield left hating the enemy. She was feeling a similar type of way.
It was traumatic. She’d always assumed that intelligent species would progress toward a more peaceful way of living. But now she was questioning that. She didn’t believe PBD when it said it was taking them back to Earth. She was confident they were being taken back to be studied. That thought sent shivers up her spine.
Peter put a hand on Unity’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’re safe now. We’ll get them back.”
Peter looked at Angelique. “I know you’re desperate to get back to your planet and make sure they’re safe. But I feel like we’ve been reacting to this threat for so long we haven’t stepped back and agreed on what we should do.” Peter looked around the room. “Is everyone okay?”
Unity wiped a tear away from her eye and nodded. “I’m feeling a little bit better now, thank you.”
“Are we all happy to go somewhere a little bit safer?” Peter continued. “Go to Angelique’s planet Everest and come up with a plan then?”
“I don’t want to go there,” Atlas said. “I need to get back in contact with Trillion and Icarus. It will be faster to check on them if I go to the Tac star system and see if I can get the Starnet going again.”
“Atlas, where and what is the Tac system?” Peter asked.
“It was the first star system that Trillion colonized. It’s literally the closest star to us. It’s basically a resource mine. We could build a ship for all of us there if we wanted to.”
Surprising everyone, Ariana said something unexpected: “I want to stay here. I want to research that alien vessel.”
Unity did not understand her logic. She blurted out the words, “But what if they come back?!”
“I’ll send a backup with Angelique. But I’m not missing an opportunity to study alien technology.”
“Okay, does anyone else want to stay here with Ariana?” Peter asked.
No one else in the room said they wanted to stay. Unity assumed Ariana was crazy or extremely brave. Unity thought long and hard about why Ariana would do something so crazy. She decided it was because of all the changes Ariana had made to her matrix had also turned off her fear response.
“Does anyone else want to go with Atlas?” Angelique asked. “I have an escape rocket that could take you back to the Tac system if you wanted.”
Unity considered it for a moment. Atlas said whoever went with him would get their own spaceship. She liked the idea of having a ship all for herself. She would go wherever she wanted. But then she wasn’t much of a lone ranger. She would have never become a beta explorer.
She looked around the room. No one else said they would stay with Atlas. Unity decided she would stay with Peter. She felt safe with him.
“Angelique, if we go with you back to Everest,” Peter said, “can we get our own ships?”
“I’m sure I can arrange that.”
“Okay, looks like most of us are coming with you then. I’m keen to see what your world looks like.”
The team moved quickly to prepare themselves for the next mission. Atlas’s and his Ship’s matrices were both moved into an escape rocket. It was basically a small engine and enough processing power to house a simulated reality. It didn’t have any cargo space for a fabricator or even ANTs. But Atlas assured them he could get whatever resources he needed from the Tac system.
Ariana was given a fabricator and as many ANTs and eleph-ANTs as Angelique could spare. She was given the device that was currently projecting a field around the alien spacecraft, disrupting all signals in and out of that area in space. The team left it with her, under the assumption it would stop the Atua from potentially regaining control of their ship through some kind of signal.
When all was completed, Atlas said something to the group. He had been quiet most of the time, biting his lower lip and thinking. “I think we might have started a war.”
“They definitely started a war with us,” Peter said.
“So can I make a proposal?” Atlas asked. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. We don’t know how powerful this alien really is. So can we figure this all out before we meet them again? Ariana, can you see what information you can gather from studying their ship? I’ll get in contact with Trillion and Icarus to warn them. And hopefully between all of us, we can figure out which star systems the Atua have colonized already. We might be able to locate one of their colonies and investigate them more.”
Unity got the feeling that humanity had finally become aware of the war they had been a pawn in. She thought things were about to get interesting. She knew humanity hadn’t been out exploring the galaxy for that long and already had thirty-five star systems. So, if this alien empire had been exploring for longer than humanity, they must be bigger. Unity wasn’t sure how they could fight against a civilization much older and bigger. But she knew that if human history was anything to go by, they would fight until the bitter end.