Joseph had been careful with the gun. He'd pressed it against the bridge of his nose, angled down slightly to point toward the hippocampus. He didn't account for recoil. It was the first time he'd fired a gun. As a result, the bullet had veered to the left, missing its mark but still tearing apart more than enough of the brain to kill him. He collapsed on the cold floor.

He'd been dead for about six hours when Marian walked into the room, sighing heavily and carefully tiptoeing around the blood and brain matter scattered across the floor. She frowned. Joseph always made things difficult, so she'd expected nothing less. She dropped two pods of spiders on the floor and watched them hatch and scatter around the room, so small that their metal bodies almost disappeared against the gray concrete of the walls and floor. Did this count as theft? She was using her vacation time to follow Joseph out here, and the spiders were company property. Oh well. She was sure they'd be happy with her when all was said and done.

She checked her phone again. Still no signal. Any data she needed would take at least six minutes to download — three to beam her request back to a main server, and three for the server to beam it back here — which took most of the fun out of aimless scrolling.

She turned and walked back down the hall, up a small flight of concrete stairs. and out of the bunker. It seemed unlikely that Joseph had built this place himself. This asteroid had a breathable atmosphere. It must have been terraformed and forgotten years ago. She wondered how Joseph found it, and why he'd chosen this, of all places, as the place to die. Wouldn't deep space have done just as well?

Deep space wouldn't have made him that much harder to find, but it would have meant that he died in zero gravity. Marian thought about this as she opened her ship's storage compartment and pulled out the large, heavy, glass bubble that the spiders would need to finish their work. She groaned as she picked it up and struggled back down the stairs into the bunker.

It wasn't really glass, just close enough to share the same name. Real glass wouldn't be this heavy. It also wouldn't be able to reshape itself so the spiders could come and go, and it wouldn't be strong enough to stand up to the pressure of the artificial gravity well they'd need to work. So they could reassemble the pieces of his brain into something that wouldn't really be Joseph, but would — she hoped — be close enough to share the same name.  

She set the bubble down on a wooden table she'd found in one of the bunker's mostly-empty rooms. The table, its accompanying chair, the gun, and Joseph's body were the only things she'd found here. She wondered what this place could have been used for. Had Joseph been here before? Hard to say.

Marian sat down and connected her phone to the bubble, giving it a power source, a keyboard, and a display. She settled in to watch the spiders work.

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The bunker was unventilated. She'd left the front door open, but the slight breeze hadn't helped much. The air was thick with the smell of blood and death. She tried to convince herself that she found the smell annoying instead of naseauting, saddening, or repulsive, and was mostly successful in doing so. 

The spiders were too small to make out individually, but she could see dozens of them, like a small patch of television static, under the bits of tissue they carried up the sides of the table and into the bubble. Marian watched them for most of an hour as they slowly organized the bloody mess into something recognizable, stitching the pieces together and patching broken connections with their bodies. Occasional sparks lit up tiny sections of the patchwork when a spider was torn apart for materials.

She almost didn't notice when her phone buzzed, telling her the reassembly was as complete as it could be. Some irreparable damage, as was to be expected, but most of what she needed was there.

Reading from the brain was, unfortunately, much harder than reassembling it. The odds of successfully retrieving information were much higher with a more direct route. Marian cleared her throat, took a deep breath, and turned on her microphone.

"Hello, Joseph," she said. "Can you hear me?"

She waited a few moments for his response to appear on the screen:

> a riviviviviver threw the brainn

Marian read the words and frowned, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, then frowned more emphatically when the computer confirmed her first guess. Severe damage to the language centers of the brain. The spiders had struggled to repair it. She tried to keep her voice steady. Joseph's perspective would be confusing enough, and she'd been told that keeping an even tone would help prevent a negative response to the situation — panic, denial, a psychotic break, and that sort of thing.

"I'm having a little trouble understanding you. Would you mind repeating that?"

>  a riviver hot and rising ow

Oh, she thought. Yeah, okay, that does sound like a bullet. She clicked over to the next tab, shaking her head at her own carelessness — she should have done this before she started asking questions. She tapped a few keys and the spiders quickly disabled Joseph's ability to feel pain.

"Better?"

> cool cloudm ist

"I know it's hard to speak. It's okay to take as much time as you need. Clarity is much more important than speed, all right?"

> trying two too

"Okay, good. I just need to ask one more question, then I'll let you sleep. Is that okay?"

> gren briht

"Where's the kid, Joseph? Remember that clarity is more important than speed. Take all the time you need."

A few seconds passed. A few minutes. Marian clicked through a few tabs, making sure the machine hadn't malfunctioned. All signs showed that Joseph was still working on a response. Finally, it printed to the screen.

> Dumb question.