My vision is starting to blur. I have once again stayed up way too long trying to parse out all the implications and loose ends of this data that Victoria and Alice brought back for me. I know it's not responsible to deprive myself of sleep like this, but I can barely stand to shut my eyes while it's still unfinished. Especially after those two nearly got killed over it. I’ve been neglecting the house a little bit, but Jackie’s been around to pick up the slack and anyway, this is bigger than my house.

I’m close, too. A couple more components and the soul transfer spell I’ve been working on reverse engineering should be ready. Of course, once I get there I’ll have a whole new roadblock to contend with. In order to test it, I’ll need some active combat doll cores. Getting our hands on those won’t be easy, and probably won’t be particularly safe either. That’s a bridge to cross when we come to it. For now, I need to work out these last few steps. I’m missing something, but I’m sure that once I have it everything will click into place.

The steps of the process, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, involve isolating the markers of a person’s consciousness in the brain, and encoding it into a usable cosma waveform. This is already dangerously complex in itself, it’s impossible to say what is getting left behind in this process. Clearly something is, they’re not copying the entire brain structure after all. That would be a completely unworkable amount of data, and is the primary reason why most reputable witches aren’t trying to crack this particular nut. You’ve got to leave something behind, it’s just a question of what. Obviously not every stray electric signal in the brain is absolutely dedicated to consciousness, but how do you tell where to draw the line between essential signal and nonessential noise? Beyond a few broad strokes gleaned from neurological research, it’d probably be a lot of trial and error, with an enormous human cost attached.

I give a slight shudder at the thought. That's probably exactly what they did. The “work” programs have been running for a while, after all.

Still, I’m not exactly helping much if I can’t even see my screen. I know I should just take a rest, but, then again, maybe it’s just eyestrain. A break from my monitor doesn’t have to mean I stop doing anything, and besides, there are plenty of other things I’m behind on. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard from Jackie all day. Sam is due for another visit, and I told Jackie to let me know when they arrive.

I make my way down to the kitchen and, sure enough, the bag of medication I prepared for Sam is untouched. It’s not the first time they’ve forgotten an appointment, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Their house is within walking distance, I might as well just run these down to them.

The sun is high in the sky when I leave my house, and it’s quite pleasantly warm. I wish I were in a better position to enjoy such a beautiful day, but it’s a little difficult when I’m sleep deprived and frustrated. It’ll be nice to check in on Sam, at least. I’ve missed them while I’ve been holed up in my workshop, so this is the perfect momentary respite.

Before long I arrive at their house, approaching the front door and knocking firmly. After a few moments of silence, I give it another try, then ring the doorbell once. Usually they’re more responsive than this. I glance over to my right, where their car is parked on the side of the street. If they’re out, it should be gone, but there it sits. I’m beginning to get worried, so I try the door. It swings open without issue, so I step inside and shut it behind me.

“Sam?” I call down the empty hallway. No response. “Sam? Are you here?”

I begin to inch down the hall, ears trained for any hint of sound. There’s no one in the living room, and it looks as if there hasn’t been in quite a while. Everything is perfectly in place, untouched. The kitchen looks a little more lived in, but it’s still unoccupied at the moment. A handful of dishes are stacked next to the sink, waiting to be cleaned. I make my way upstairs, where the hallway is just as empty as the one downstairs. “Sam? I brought your meds, you forgot to come get them.” Once again, only silence answers me.

My heart is in my throat as I reach out to open the door to Sam’s bedroom. None of this feels right, and I’m terrified of what I’ll find on the other side of it. I swallow as much of the anxiety as I can manage, turn the knob, and shove the door open.

On the other side, I find Sam lying on the floor, unmoving. The position they’re in doesn’t look comfortable. “Sam!” I rush over to them, kneeling in front of them and checking to see if they’re breathing. They aren’t. There’s some foam leaking from their mouth, and a quick glance around them reveals a bottle of pills, mostly empty. I don’t immediately recognize what medication it is, but it’s certainly not anything they got from me. I roll Sam over onto their back and try to administer CPR, but I already know it’s useless. Their body is still warm, but they’re clearly already dead. Maybe if I had gotten here a bit earlier I could’ve done something about it, but as it stands I’m simply too late. There’s no way they’re coming back at this point.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Not by conventional means, at any rate. My hand finds its way into my pocket, and my fingers close around the core. This is stupid. I haven't finished figuring out this spell, anything could happen. I can give my best guesses for the missing components, but what if I'm wrong? What if I ruin it?

On the other hand, what does it matter at this point? They're already dead, and they'll stay that way if I don't do anything. It's not like I can realistically make things any worse.

I pull the core out and hold it over Sam’s body. Deep breath, calm down, control. The tears in my eyes start to dry. My heart beat slows down. I hold my body still and reach out with my mind, feeling for cosma in the room around me. Unsurprisingly, it's fairly concentrated around Sam’s body. This usually happens after a death.

I pull a generous helping of cosma toward myself and begin to adjust its resonance. Not enough for the entire ritual, but I can add more as needed. The first several steps are easy, I don't need to start using guesswork yet. As I tune meaning and intent into the loose energy before me, it begins working its way inside of Sam, flowing up to their brain and taking note of what it finds. Another wave of self-doubt hits me as I briefly wonder how much their brain has changed since it stopped receiving fresh oxygen, but I quickly swat it away. No room for second-guessing myself now, I have to focus. Even if I do everything right, it might not work, but if I let myself get distracted, it definitely won’t. I’ve got years of practice at this, when faced with a choice between possible failure and certain failure, the only option is to barrel forward.

As the cosma begins to mimic the connections it finds in Sam’s brain and come back to the initial mass, I keep adding more. For now I have to keep the cycle moving, but before long I'll have to start making decisions about things I don't understand. The cosma flowing back out of Sam is coalescing around the core, and I'm holding it back from entering it while I work out how I want to approach these final steps.

Normally, when constructing a doll’s soul, I would direct it into the core gradually as I build it. The vessel is designed for the soul being constructed, after all, it's already the right shape. Nothing in my research has suggested this, but intuitively I suspect that this would be the wrong approach for a human transfer. It feels right to construct the replica unconstrained, and then place it into the core.

This is something I'd forgotten about doing new magic, actually. You can get plenty far with theory, puzzling it out and doing test runs and such. But it can't get you all the way. At some point, magic has to be performed. You take what you've figured out, and you fill the rest in as you go. Intuition, feeling. That's where the magic really lies. It’s been too long since I did it, I didn’t even realize I was missing it.

I’ve reached the end of what I was able to glean from the information provided to me, but I’m no longer worried about that. I’m already working the spell, I’m feeling the cosma ebb and flow and pulse through my hands. It’s in my head as much as it’s in Sam’s, guiding me through the process, the flow of energy carrying me through what I haven’t figured out. I can see where we’re going, and it’s taking me right where I want to be.

I stop pushing more cosma into Sam’s inert body, I’m certain I’ve got enough to work with now. This is going to be the tricky part, I suspect. I need to compress and shape what’s in my hands so that it can fit into the core, without damaging the in-progress Sam replica in the process. Injuring them at this stage would be catastrophic, they certainly wouldn’t survive. Something would end up inside that core, but it wouldn’t be Sam, and I doubt I’d like whatever it ended up being. Compressing a soul without harming it is a touchy process; they’re malleable to a degree, but you have to be gentle, don’t do more than they can handle at once. They need time to adjust, which is a tricky balance to strike when unbound cosma is so volatile. If I spend too long working it outside the core like this, it’ll collapse and disperse, and the entire ritual will amount to nothing. This is why I usually construct dolls inside the core.

Slowly, gingerly, I pull the mass of cosma roiling around my hands together, gently pressing segments against each other where they look like they’ll fit, letting the rowdier parts sit on their own until it’s time to wrap them around the outside. Eventually, the whole thing has been pressed down into a minute pinprick, small enough that it’s ready to slide inside the core, coursing through its veins and giving the entire thing a faint golden glow. I release a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding as the last of the cosma leaves my hands, sealed safely away in its new prison. I’ve done it, I think. That should be Sam in there now.

I hope they can forgive me.