CHAPTER 02: AMBERLEE – THE OTHER TWIN'S CALLING
"When one voice fades, the echo lingers—searching for the harmony that was lost."
— The Space Detective Twins (Space Ghosts)
"I'm just trying to live my life, but people won't let me."
— Kim Kardashian
When she dreamed, she was back in space with her sister. Amberlee Olavi knew it was a dream—yet inside that dream, it felt like she was reliving the horror all over again. She didn’t choose to revisit that terrible moment, and if she could have dreamed of anything else, she would have paid a fortune for it.
Every night, she experienced the same events, over and over, as if they were happening again in real time. In her mind’s eye, she saw it unfold—the final, haunting image: her sister’s dead face. It lingered there, juxtaposed over everything else, hovering like a ghostly overlay, in that surreal way only dreams can manage.
Her twin, Molly-Cat, appeared in the dream, encased in her pink spacesuit. The face behind the visor had once been identical to Amberlee’s. Now, it was a desiccated, ghastly version of her own. Moments before, they had been indistinguishable; within seconds, every drop of fluid in Molly-Cat’s body crystallized into ice, spreading out like a frozen nebula around her lifeless form.
The dream always began mid-spacewalk. They floated together in the stillness of the void, laughing as deadly motes of orbital debris harmlessly pinged off their suits, deflected by the ablative energy fields. Their spacesuits were the reason they had been out there that day. More specifically, they were proving their suits’ ability to protect against the very situation they found themselves in: high-velocity fragments of matter held in orbit.
Olavi Corp had started as a fashion and entertainment brand, but when it became trendy to own fashionable spacesuits, the twin prodigies expanded their vision. They couldn’t just settle for making them stylish—they had to make them the safest in the industry.
Conventional anti-kinetic energy fields worked by reducing the inertia of impacting objects to zero, using the force of the collision to fuel their expansion. However, these fields could be penetrated at very specific angles and had limits on the amount of force they could absorb before failing entirely. In the debris ring around Terra, known as the Halo, anti-kinetic fields weren’t reliable protection.
The suits Amberlee and Molly-Cat wore projected an ablative energy shell. This innovative technology caused objects to curve and follow a path of least resistance upon contact, instead of smashing directly into the wearer.
During their spacewalk, they had felt secure. The suits had been tested for over eight thousand hours; nothing had ever breached them. But something went wrong. A mote of unknown quantum debris pierced Molly-Cat’s suit—a tiny fragment, too small to see but deadly enough to slip through. Even after all the tests, after all their confidence, Molly-Cat’s suit had failed.
Amberlee Olavi was relieved to wake up. She slipped out of her warm bed, the coolness of her dimly lit dwelling hitting her like a tomb. The drastic difference in temperature was intentional, designed to wake her up faster, and it always worked.
She entered the adjoining bathroom and switched on the overhead light. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she smiled. With a tap on a button inset in the vanity, her reflection froze into a still image of her smile.
“Listen to this, Sis,” she said aloud to the frozen image. “They actually had the nerve to ask me to stand on stage with a holographic projection of you and accept the Haylings-Grace-Ogavi-Sanchez Award on Europa. Imagine that. I should hate them for it, but at least they didn’t try to gaslight me into thinking it wasn’t what it was: cruel. Dastardly, even.”
Amberlee moved her hand, and the image resumed its real-time reflection. She made a pouty face and froze it again, mockingly scolding her sister for giving her such an insincere look. She knew that Molly-Cat would’ve rolled her eyes and glanced to the left next, but Amberlee didn’t mimic the gesture. Instead, she just remembered it.
Molly-Cat always insisted on standing to Amberlee’s left, claiming she was the "left twin." She never called Amberlee the "right twin" though—that wasn’t her style. Molly-Cat’s quirks had always been arbitrary, impulsive habits that grew into full-blown idiosyncrasies over time.
They could never recreate a holographic version of her sister, not with her strange, unpredictable mannerisms. But the thought of them even trying terrified Amberlee, and she would never allow it. No one could make her change her mind.
She and Molly-Cat had co-founded Olavi Corp when they were just children, with the help of their entertainment agent lawyer. Together, they built a media empire that generated franchises and wealth. But there was still the Board. And the Board had barely contained their ghoulish delight when Molly-Cat’s death caused a 25% spike in profits.
The world didn’t feel right anymore. Nothing made sense. Amberlee remembered a time when her mind worked differently, but now... she was lost. The vision of herself that had once existed—both in her memory and in the eyes of her fans—was gone. It wasn’t just melancholy, and it was more than survivor’s guilt. It was anger, deep and profound. She was more furious than she could even express.
Amberlee had never said it out loud, never even truly allowed herself to think it clearly, but she hated everyone. She hated space for killing her sister. She hated the Board for selling Molly-Cat’s death. But most of all, she hated the fans who bought into it.
Her rising anger sharpened her focus. She realized she was shivering in the cold. Pulling on some clothes from her wardrobe, she returned to the bathroom to empty her bowels, glancing once more at her reflection before leaving.
“I’m calling Bensel at R&D again,” she muttered. “It’s been weeks.”
As usual, her reflection offered no reply.
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Amberlee activated a communication panel on the wall, using voice commands to connect to Olavi Corp’s R&D division on Luna. She hated the way people on the Moon spoke—too fast, too few words, and always pronouncing “moon” like “mun.”
When Bensel answered, Amberlee noticed he was walking through one of the corridors between buildings, holding his handheld flexipad. No pleasantries were exchanged.
"...got five-nine wicks o' data from the Halo with a 9986. Zed pops."
Amberlee cursed under her breath. "Pops" referred to incidents where the suit had been perforated by debris. What Bensel was saying meant that despite running suits through the same conditions Molly-Cat had faced, nothing had repeated her fatal accident. Three years of trying, and still no explanation.
“About that,” Bensel began, and Amberlee already knew what was coming next.
“Zed funds.”
“I’ll handle it,” she replied coldly.
The call ended, and her fury intensified. Technically, she owned the company, but the Board still held power over major decisions. She had convinced them to manufacture spacesuits with the idea of blending fashion and safety, but it was the only product not tied to Molly-Cat’s death. And the fans didn’t care.
Amberlee thought back to the first time she had brought up spacesuits to Molly-Cat. Her sister had laughed and said, “What do I even need a spacesuit for?”
“Space,” Amberlee had replied.
Tears welled in her eyes, though she denied them, internally insisting that it didn’t count. Because she didn’t cry. Amberlee hated lying, even to herself, but at this moment, she didn’t care. She hated the world too much. Hated the hypocrisy. People said one thing and did another, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. It was a layered, endless abyss of disinformation and deceit.
But this didn’t count. Nothing counted. Amberlee’s entire existence had unraveled after Molly-Cat’s death. To say Amberlee felt hatred would be an understatement. The rage inside her was a shapeless, incomprehensible force, burning like white-hot ice behind her eyes. It was an existential dilemma of identity, one that left her with no way forward.
Amberlee briefly reflected on the authoritarian conservative society she herself benefited from, despite its opposition to her emotional and mental well-being. Psychology, declared illegal like religion, was now contraband. And yet, she had managed to amass the largest collection of illegal psychological texts she had ever seen. She prided herself on outsmarting others, always staying ahead.
Her IQ was so far beyond average that the gap between her and ordinary people was greater than the gap between ordinary people and the cognitively disabled. The discomfort average people felt around the mentally challenged mirrored how she felt around anyone else.
Molly-Cat had been her only companion. Her sister had engaged in fleeting trysts, using men to generate publicity for their brand, but ultimately, it had always been just the two of them.
Amberlee lived by the principles of the secret psychology she had learned from those outlawed texts. She knew what she was, deep down, but she refused to acknowledge it—even to herself.
When she looked at her reflection, she didn’t see herself anymore. She saw Molly-Cat. The same event that had taken her sister’s life had taken Amberlee’s identity. Her time had stopped three years ago. She could either move forward herself or wait for a miracle.
But waiting for miracles was now a crime.
Amberlee knew she was messing up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and she was in denial about it. Given her circumstances, and the fact that money was the one thing standing between her and progress, the person she had to turn to was Halsiform Somdinathoether, Chief Financial Officer of Olavi Corp. Hal was a sin-worn rogue, a figurative vampire who drained the potential of talented people like a parasitic monster. To be fair, he was more like a symbiote—his contributions did benefit his hosts. He didn’t just drink the blood of Amberlee’s success; he made that success easier to capitalize on, enabling idiots to spend more and more.
Still, Hal knew how to protect the company’s assets. He wasn’t someone who lost money easily, and this fact made Amberlee reluctant to call him. She needed to approach with a relative argument, something that couldn’t be reduced to zero-sum logic. She needed a heavy thread to dangle in front of a fat cat, too large to risk pulling down.
Back when the Olavi twins were in their early teens, their entertainment empire had been at its peak, even before they ventured into fashion. The media they produced wasn’t just about marketing—it was propaganda. One of their most popular films from that era had been a comedy-bildungsroman in which the two played identical twins, separated at birth, each raised by opposing military factions. Titled The Stars Are at Fault, the film was a AAA-Diamante-rated hit across the system, with billions of viewers. The moral of the story was simple: war is awesome if you’re rich.
It had been pure pathos, funded by the Old Brigade to bolster recruitment among the aristocratic youth. The Twins’ former attorney-agent had brokered the deal, and the Olavi sisters' teenage fans—scions of the second-aristocracy—followed them into the military. So when the space army called upon Amberlee back then, she had answered.
Amberlee accessed her communication portal using voice commands: “Port 658853. Olavi, Amberlee.”
Three musical notes chimed from the screen’s audiograph, each note resonating through her throat as part of the voice authentication process. She shuddered at the thought of what might happen to someone who tried to bypass the system.
The screen went dark, indicating that she’d been granted access. “Lance Corporal Staffingtonshirehamsmithe,” she said, nearly yawning through his name. She wondered if that slight lapse might have messed with the authentication.
The screen flashed white before resolving into the image of the Lance Corporal. His squinty eyes scrutinized her from behind half-closed lids, as if judging everything at once. Her hesitation in speaking gave him the opening to cut in.
“Wot, kid? I’m a busy man, me, can’t be bothered. But if you want another go at a proper recruitment owt, I’m mad fer it.”
“Good to see you again, Mister Lance Jack,” Amberlee replied, using the nickname he’d once insisted upon years ago.
At hearing her call him that, the Lance Corporal’s mouth stretched into an ear-to-ear grin.
Their conversation had ended with Amberlee feeling confident. The Lance Corporal had promised that the Old Brigade would initiate a contract with Olavi Corp for their new spacesuits, provided they passed standard safety tests. This was the breakthrough she needed. To uncover what had killed Molly-Cat, she had to make the spacesuits profitable. For a military contract, they needed to undergo expensive testing. To fund those tests, she needed the Board's approval. And for that, she needed Somdinathoether.
Amberlee prepared herself for one more call that morning. It would be to Olavi Corp’s CFO. She mentally reviewed her strategy. Her ultimate goal was simple: figure out what had killed her sister. She would start by asking for a large sum—enough to hire alien Sinii Thinkmasters to investigate the mystery. Of course, this would never get approved; alien seers didn’t work for money, and even if they did, Olavi Corp wasn’t about to liquidate assets for something that wouldn't turn a profit.
She could sell her shares, but the idea of doing so was unthinkable.
Her real plan was more realistic: to secure just enough funding to put Bensel and the R&D team back to work on discovering what had breached Molly-Cat’s suit. The Board would know she was feeding her obsession, but once she revealed the military contract, it would be difficult for them to say no. The Old Brigade deal would be too lucrative to pass up.
Amberlee initiated the call. The screen flickered as the image of the other side began to materialize. She was ready. If all else failed, she could always offer to return to entertainment media and make the company a fortune that way.