With her quantum transponder replaced and her clout cashed in, Noviko had no obligations to anyone whatsoever. She’d spent weeks in a neural transduction tank spreading her understanding of biospeak into broader Syndicate. After that, she visited Vox and congratulated her on the new bionic legs. When Noviko confessed that she did not defect as a master plan, but in a moment of genuine weakness and panic, Vox forgave her for “being a stupid baby.” Vox would go on to retire from Ghost duties and pursue a career in NorMurican diplomacy with a focus on the Pacific Northwest. They would not keep in touch.

Dunk and Noviko remained pen pals and exchanged memes occasionally.

Wenyue argued with Noviko regarding the feasibility of getting her old life back. “No, you cannot just bodysnatch your way back into your family. Your replacement has feelings and motivations of her own,” she would say.

Tokiko, who chose to end her infiltration ops in MetaFold after training her replacement, came up with the solution of sponsoring Noviko’s replacement clone and making everyone happy. With some gentle, maternal persuasion, Tokiko and her new ‘daughter’ renamed themselves to REDACTED and founded a Temple in a stable ice formation in the Arctic circle, wherein defectors from MetaFold could sue for residency and be escorted safely to Syndicate territory.

And so that is how it came to be that one day, Trip and Banh answered the door of the hab, and found to their surprise that Noviko had come back after a week’s vacation with a katana at her hip. Trip wanted to play with the katana immediately and was told he could not. He would eventually play with it in secret and accidentally slice his hand open. He would recover with a palm scar. With their lives paid for, Banh was grateful he could spend his days drinking beer, hiking, diving, and playing games with his friends. Sometimes Noviko joined him and genuinely enjoyed herself. It was a simple, stupid life, and she was grateful for it, and she was sure to forgive herself whenever she got overwhelmed and wanted to be alone for a while.

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Noviko went on to be an advocate for ‘the empathically impaired’ and gained a large following throughout Syndicate. She pushed back against cultural nosiness and biomon snooping and fought for the right of every human to be judged not by the contents of their mind or the implied hormonal motivations of their body, but the results of their actions, and the decisions they made. Sociopathy meant selective empathy, after all, and what better way to show true, engaged empathy than by choosing to experience it?

Former CTO of GYOTA corporation, Jace Windmill, spent ten years in the psychological torments of the SyncBox. They experienced everything their victim, Dr. Humboldt, had experienced. Once their sentence was served, Jace was given the option to liquidate their assets and leave Syndicate or stick around and go into empathy stimulation therapy. Jace chose the latter and returned to GYOTA to serve in an advisory role, where he often gave seminars on the importance of forgiveness and humanity in a corporate setting. These seminars were never looked forward to and considered by most employees to be a waste of time.

Once the squid war was won, the naichi infesting the Aleutian facility were fumigated by a ZON pest control team. Research resumed after restaffing and repairs.

PRISMA remained PRISMA. Its expansive superintelligence remained the expression of all Syndicate’s citizens, be they human or otherwise. She still sometimes amused herself by revealing her true form to people and then erasing the memory. Beyond these small expressions of mischief and rascality, she remained dedicated to maintaining harmonious collaboration and nurturing empathy. She also remained dedicated to her long-term, ten-thousand-year plan of spreading printed human beings (and MetaNet access) across the cosmos utilizing Von Neuman probes and quantum-entanglement buoys.

But that’s another story for another time.

THE END