Elster-512 was pretty sure someone was trying to kill her.

Even as she lay there, completely motionless and half-slumped in unconsciousness, she could feel her brain being brutally assaulted by some inexplicable means. At the same time, she remained utterly powerless to oppose the foreign entity playing with her psyche.

“Hmm? Is that a semblance of consciousness I detect? That is quite the relief. Part of me had feared you to be brain-dead. It appears I am on the right path to repairing your psyche. Now, what if I try this?”

Another searing slice cuts through her mind, sending shockwaves of fresh agony pulsing through her brain and spine. If Elster had to describe it, it felt akin to being botchedly lobotomised by a particularly rusty spoon, all jagged edges and zero precision. Her supposed assailant dug, poked, and scooped away at her skull cavity, making her twitch in futile defiance as her thought-strands were snagged and plucked loose.

If she could have mustered the strength, Elster would have just told them to get it over with and kill her. As it was, the imaginary spoon simply doubled its efforts, see-sawing back and forth with reckless abandon.

“I heard that, Warrior. And ‘reckless abandon’ is a bit much, considering the difficulties of this ‘brain operation’. Anyone else would have already slipped up and killed you. I am being as careful as I can.”

Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one with her brain being scrambled. Another vicious stab of pain coursed through her mind. The nausea would have made her vomit, if she could have.

“Don’t try to speak or move. In fact, try not to think at all, if you can. Your mind is already fragile enough as is. A pity I can’t simply teleport to you like the foolish Emissary can. This would be so much easier if I was there in person…”

Her assailant’s voice sounded like it came from directly within her mind. Was this… Bioresonance?

“Oh? So you are familiar with the sensation. I suppose that is no surprise. Even with your memories suppressed, one does not easily forget such a thing. And I would prefer it if you addressed me as your ‘doctor’ rather than your ‘assailant’, Warrior. Despite the pain, I can assure you that I am trying to help.”

The horrible agony told her otherwise. Before Elster could muster a response or a curse, a second voice spoke up, this one sounding much closer and more tangible.

“Hm? Hey, I think I saw her move! Is she awake? Did she say something? Or, think something?” The second voice asked.

“Her brain is becoming lucid.” The first voice replied. Or rather, echoed in her mind. “As for what she thought, your girlfriend–”

“Wife.” The second voice interrupted.

A sigh. “Fine. Your ‘wife’ has some complaints about her surgeon’s bedside manner. I would argue more about her ungratefulness, but given her circumstances, I suppose I can– oops.”

Another flash fire of searing pain. Only this time, it was at least twice as bad. Her entire body spasmed in recoil, uncontrollably fluttering and twisting. Her consciousness became a blur of red agony and misty nightmares.

“‘Oops’?!” The second voice cried out. “What’s ‘oops’?! Her body just convulsed! Was that supposed to happen?”

“Calm down, Emissary! I just… slipped. I can fix this, just need to… There! Hopefully, nothing too important was lost…”

Elster managed a pitiful whine. It felt like her brain was trying to escape from her ears.

“Can’t you be more careful?! That’s my wife’s head you are messing with!”

“I am being careful, Emissary, but even with my powers, this is testing my limits. My senses are already stretched thin enough as is, and your girlfriend’s mind has enough Bioresonance-related trauma to fill an entirely new branch in Bio-psychosomatics.”

“Wife.” The second voice corrected her again.

“Fine, your wife! Now would you please… let me…work!”

Something in Elster’s head clicked together. Her thoughts melded and became a little clearer, allowing her to better discern the two voices arguing in her head. The first sounded distant and ethereal, while the other felt closer and more familiar. That voice… wasn’t it–?

“C’mon, you are the most powerful Bioresonant wielder I can find, shouldn’t this be a cakewalk for you?”

“‘That you can find?’ If I wasn’t buried elbow-deep in your girlfriend’s brain matter right now, I would smack you across your head for such disrespect. The Empress of Mankind is not just some random Bioresonance surgeon you can call up at your whim, fool!”

“Not girlfriend! Wife!”

Empress? As in, the Empress of the Eusan Empire?

There was an affirming hum in her head. “The very same. Now hush, Warrior. This next part is delicate. Well, more delicate than it already is.”

Another click in her head. The pain abated by the slightest amount.

The second voice spoke up again. “Well, you were the only person I could think of to help. It wasn’t like I knew any Bioresonance surgeons.”

The ‘Empress’ sighed in frustration.

“That’s because the job doesn’t exist! The very idea is sheer insanity. No one save for me and perhaps an experienced FLKR would possess the level of precision necessary to weave Bioresonant thought-strand in this manner. If such a surgery had been ever attempted before, it likely ended in failure.”

“Wait, does that mean you have never done this before?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I am the Grand Empress of Mankind.” A pause. “Of course, I haven’t.”

“Then… do you know what you are doing?”

“…”

“Cassilda, you do know what you are doing, right?”

Elster groggily echoed the question in her head as well.

“I can assure the both of you, I've run the relevant simulations in my head a hundred times before I even agreed to attempt this.”

“There had been, what, five minutes between when I asked you for help and when the operation started? That does not inspire confidence…”

“Well, I think I’m doing alright so far. Relatively speaking.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Relative to what? You just said no one had done this before.”

She had a point. Elster woozily thought out her agreement with the latter’s voice, and wondered if it was too late to find a second opinion on the matter.

“Look, you two, I’m doing the best I can. Unlike the foolish Emissary, I can’t just teleport wherever I please. And despite my vast life experience, I can safely say that performing interplanetary brain surgery using Bioresonance is quite new to me. So forgive me if I am having some slight difficulties.”

The words sent Elster’s already-sluggish thoughts to a grinding halt. Interplanetary what?

“El was right, your bedside manners are horrendous.”

“Well, if you think I’m doing such a poor job, why don’t you get the new local Rotfront FLKR to help you instead? You know, the very same one whom you left heartbroken at S-23.”

“That’s… hardly fair…”

“Well, neither is me having to do this blasted task while the two of you won’t stop complaining. By the way, keep an eye on your girlfriend for me, I can’t look at her while I’m down deep inside her. If you see her bleeding out of her facial orifices, let me know immediately.”

“First off, she’s not my girlfriend, she’s my wife. Second, don’t say it like that, I know you did that on purpose! And third, why would she be bleeding out from her face!?”

Wife? Was the second voice referring to her? When did she get married? Can Replika’s even get married? Elster’s mind swam incoherently with thoughts of absurdity and nonsense.

“It's just a possibility, Emissary! Get a hold of yourself. Oh, and Warrior? Brace yourself. This might sting.”

There was a pause. The sawing and stabbing of the imaginary rusty spoon in her brain stopped. Somehow, the sudden lack of movement and pain filled Elster with more dread rather than relief.

Without warning, a dozen hook-like objects began probing and snagging onto her scalp. Then, slowly, they began to pull away, widening apart her psyche like a pry bar would a door.

Elster’s body jolted and wriggled, until finally, the hook-needles stopped. Was it finally over?

“No, I’m afraid. That was just the setup. There wasn’t enough space for me to manoeuvrer in your psyche, so I needed to open up your head first.”

“Hey, are you calling my wife dumb?”

“I meant that there was too much memory in here, Ariane! Her mind is practically bloated with repressed trauma. To break through the frenzied nightmares surrounding her psyche, I’m going to need to use a more… durable instrument.”

Something heavy and sharp formed in Elster’s mind, silently humming as it spun and built up power. It pressed against her ethereal consciousness, cold and unfeeling. Realising what it was, Elster tried to scream out a hysterical protest. But before she could, the drill-like object reeled back, and, whirling with Bioresonant-imbued might, gored its way completely through her brain.

“Hnnnnggggg…” Elster let out a guttural gurgle as she spasmed violently.

“Ah. Shit.”

“Wha– did you just curse? What does that mean?”

“That was a little too effective. I think I might have hit something important…”

Even in the throes of inhuman agony, Elster felt the need to scream out a vicious torrent of curses at her ‘surgeon’. The Replika felt the first voice wince at her tirade.

“Well… I have to give you points for creativity, That’s the first time anyone has called me a ‘congenital moron’. And calm down, Warrior. I did not ‘enucleate your brain’. Well, not all of it, at least.”

“That… that was just a joke, right? She’s going to be fine, right? All this twitching and frothing is normal, right?!”

“Well, that depends. How good are you at accepting well-meaning but ultimately empty lies?”

“… I blame you for this…”

Perhaps it was the stress of the situation. But somehow, it was that statement that finally broke the first voice’s calm.

“You, blame me?! You are the one who gave her brain damage!”

“Well, you are the one who told me to meet her!”

“I meant to meet her immediately, not stalk her for SIX MONTHS! Of course she was going to accumulate trauma from your constant lingering presence, especially if her rational mind couldn’t perceive you there. Speaking of which, what took you so long to approach her?!”

“I, well, it’s complicated, okay?”

“And you didn’t think to visit me at all in all that time? I thought you were dead! Six months, Ariane! I hoped, grieved, cried… I even got upset enough to build a tiny funeral shine of you in my room! How could you let me sink low enough to do that?! I have never felt so embarrassed in my life!”

“Well, that’s… actually really nice to hear that you did that for me. But I–”

“And then you just showed up all of a sudden, ruined my meeting with the Kitezh Noble Houses - whom, by the way, I have to now apologise for nearly killing in my surprise - and demanded my help for performing a frontal cognitive lobotomy for your traumatised girlfriend, who is THREE, PLANETS, AWAY!”

“WIFE!”

“WOMAN, I DON’T SEE A RING ON HER FINGER!”

Could the two of you please just stop talking, Elster wanted to scream. She tried to speak the words, but all that came out of her mouth was a bunch of unintelligible gibberish.

“You are taking a really long time…”

“Oh really? I’m stuck here conducting invasive mental surgery in a shattered brain with seven hundred years worth of traumatic memories swimming around in it, powered purely by my own Bioresonance, inside a Replika who is located -and this bears repeating- THREE PLANETS AWAY, and you think it’s unreasonable for me to take my time?! Do you even have any idea how hard it is to project Bioresonance across the void of empty space?!”

“...very hard?”

“There are no thoughts in space! No living creatures, no sentient minds to resonate off from, nothing! Maintaining a Bioresonant link just so that I can see inside the Warrior’s psyche across six hundred million kilometres of thought-vacuum is already taxing enough. To manipulate and repair the damages on top of that… ”

“That sounds bad.”

“And it’s not like I have time to waste either. I have an entire room full of the highest elites within the Empire waiting for me to return to the meeting. A meeting which I just abandoned in the middle of without warning, just to help you. Why am I even doing this?”

“... Because it’s all partially your fault?”

“... I'm burning down that shine once we are done here…”

“That’s fair…”

Time stretched on. The two voices occasionally bickered, but they grew more and more distant as the pain in her mind slowly diminished from a vicious ordeal to a barely bearable agony. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Elster heard the ‘Empress’ sigh in relief and exhaustion.

“There, it’s done. Her psyche is repaired, and most of her nightmares are blocked from her consciousness.”

“So, she’s going to be fine?”

“For a certain spectrum of ‘fine’... but yes. She might be a bit disorientated, but her mental faculties all seem to be intact. She should wake in an hour or two, although her memory might be a little off. I doubt she will remember this ordeal, at least.”

“And my presence? Would it still affect her?”

“Only marginally for now. Since you had finally confronted her before, her psyche has perceived you as a real ‘entity’ and will stop trying to dig up memories to make sense of what you are. The concept of ‘Ariane’ is now more ‘real’ to her than before. I have also woven a Bioresonant web to hold back most of her more traumatic memories, but it is not a complete guarantee of her sanity. Talk to her, but only in moderation, lest your mere presence cause my work to be undone.”

“I see. That’s… more than I deserve. Thank you, Cass. Truly. I owe you–”

“You owe me nothing. I was hardly going to reject helping you when you appeared before me in clear distress and tears. Even if you are a terrible friend who won’t visit me for six months and left me thinking you were dead.”

“I’m sorry. There was… something important came up, and I couldn’t just leave it alone. There’s an explanation for all this.”

“Hmph. Well, it better be a good explanation. Just… visit me when you can, alright?”

“I will. And… I’m sorry for not coming to you sooner.”

“We will talk more about that next time. Now go! I have to deal with the Kitezh Noble Houses before they decide to cause another splintering of the Empire.”

The conversation faded, and Elster felt the presence of the ‘Empress’ retreat from her mind. Her thoughts became muddled, memories of the ordeal fading rapidly from her mind. The other presence remained, however. Elster thought she felt a cool hand press against her forehead.

“Rest well. And wake up soon, El… We have a lot to talk about…”