Bonnie told us to go to the wooden door, and that’s where we went, all the while Gaëlle commented on the horrible interior design of the corridor. It was pretty obvious that we needed to go through the door, as it was the only way we hadn’t tried, but Bonnie could have used a G**gle Maps update because she only told us to go to the door, and nothing else.

Though it was true that the wooden exit felt weirdly intimidating.

Now don’t get me wrong. It looked like a wooden door. It had a wooden handle, little curves on the front panel to make it stylish, a nice golden-brown varnish all over. The whole thing was made with the same wood, even the frame. Still, as I moved my right hand towards the handle, my left one being taken by my sister’s and daughter’s, I really felt something bizarre gripping the skin of my reaching palm.

“Wait, it’s not right...” My sister stopped me.

That felt like permission for me to pull back my hand, and that was the only excuse I needed.

“Yeah, I’ve got…” I began trying to explain.

My sister wasn’t used to letting me speak when she wanted to say something though: “…What’s a wooden door doing in a spaceship?”

“A spaceship?” I immediately countered. “We’re not floating around, we’re not in a spaceship. We’re on another planet!” I responded with annoyance.

“What? How dumb is that! Look at the walls, look at the vents everywhere! I’ve seen enough sci-fi to recognize a damn spaceship interior!”

“What and we’ve got magical artificial gravity too?”

“The things Benedict used on us are close enough to that already!”

“Sure, body modification and regeneration are crazy as hell, but it’s not even close to faking a whole planet!”

“Since when are you the science expert?!”

“Since you’ve started talking crap.”

“Fuck you.”

“Two-legged cunt.”

She smiled. “Let’s ask Bonnie, she can’t lie to you right?”

That was a good question.

“Bonnie, can you lie to me?” I asked.

“No.” The computer responded after a pause.

“…Well, that was a dumb question.” My sister noted.

I didn’t want to approve, but I had to admit, that had given me no reassurance whatsoever.

“Where are we?” I tried.

No answer.

“You didn’t use her name.” L pointed out.

“Oh. Bonnie, where are we?”

“We are currently in the section three of the Andromeda Quescient Dyson Space Station.”

“Hah!” Exclaimed my sister victoriously.

“It’s not a spaceship if it’s a space station.”

“Don’t be a fucking sore loser, Daniel.”

“Bonnie? Why are we not floating around then?”

“Text-to-speech is unable to process this question, please consult libraries to answer your query.”

“There is a library?” Me and my sister asked at the same time.

I looked at the door again.

“Well, now we have to try.”

My sister stopped me again.

“But that still doesn’t tell us why there is a wooden door on a space station!”

“Oh, right. Bonnie, what is that door?”

“This is a Door…text-to-speech is unable to process this question, please consult libraries to answer your query.”

“…Well shit, that isn’t scary at all.” I said out loud.

“I think it’s fine. Benedict had to use it and he wasn’t dying.”

“He was mad though.”

“You think we aren’t?”

At those words, I turned around to look at her, worried. I gazed into her eyes. The violet was uncanny, unnatural and didn’t feel like my sister’s at all, but there was something of a familiarity there. That was reassuring. But the glaze of madness inside her pupils, that I was certain resided in my own as well, that wasn’t. She hadn’t gone through phase three, which was a blessing, but her own body testified of the horrors she had still experienced. So did mine.

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She didn’t have Lila’s hand to hold on.

“Yeah, can’t do much worse that hasn’t been done already.” I approved. “Let’s open this bad boy.”

“Daniel just a…” My sister started second-guessing herself, but that was too late.

I put my hand on the wooden handle with no more hesitation.

And as I felt the wood on my hand, it immediately switched to me just grabbing thin air.

I hadn’t opened the door, but we had changed locations. Lights turned on automatically, showing another room clearly inside the spaceship considering the style and the metal walls, but at least this one was decorated. Not with any kind of good taste, most paintings on the walls were like horrible retakes of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the bed and furniture would have seemed at place in an IKEA, and there was nothing separating the kitchen from what seemed to be a bathroom area. Which was just a shower head above a grate and a sink in a corner. There was a full-body mirror just next to it though.

The room was huge, the ceiling was low but the whole place would have needed two of my previous apartments to fill entirely. Albeit the lack of partitions made it feel like a studio and not really a home.

“Daniel.” My sister said in a weird voice. She pulled my arm. “Daniel!”

I had spotted two other wooden doors at the back, behind the bedroom area, and finally turned around at Gaëlle’s heavy-handed insistence.

The first thing I noticed was that the door we had apparently gone through was just standing in the middle of the room. There was nowhere this door was going, it was a door in a frame standing on the floor. But that wasn’t what had warranted my sister’s violence.

Because when I was saying that there was emptiness behind the door, I couldn’t have been more right.

The back of the door was also the back of the studio, and the only thing that stood there was a large window. It was a highly thick glass panel, with giant metal flaps above ready to crash down in case of a fracture. The view it gave was truly absurd.

Immense lights shaped like Saturn, lights of so many different colours, of so gigantic proportions they squashed the concept of gigantism down to nothing larger than a grain of sand. I had nothing that I could use to scale it with. Maybe it was so close it looked bigger than it should have been, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew this wasn’t something the human mind had ever been made to understand. But the impossible size of the lights was nothing. Nothing compared to its centre. In there was a black spot, of such pitch blackness it tried to grab you into it.

It took me a minute to remember to breathe.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s a black hole. I think. Well, or a very good rendition on some epic high-definition glass. It’s just like in Interstell*r.” My sister explained.

“Bonnie? What are we looking at?”

“Interpretation of you current positions suggests that you are looking at Andromeda’s centre.” She answered, not helping us in any way. I was increasingly sure she enjoyed playing with us.

“Bonnie, what’s inside Andromeda’s centre?”

“Andromeda centre is hosting a supermassive spatial singularity, otherwise known as black hole, named by Dr Benedict as Quiescent, in reference to its scientific denomination.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I had expected her to refuse to answer again, but I supposed that that answer was short enough for her to go through the pain of telling us.

“Bonnie where is the library?” I asked, trying to capitalize on the computer’s good will.

My sister pulled her eyes away from the real-life definition of the abyss. “No, wait, mirror first.” She reminded me.

Bonnie didn’t care. “Library is in section four. From your current location, take Door 4.”

That same weird direction-giving. As we had just been teleported by grabbing a doorhandle, it did make more sense.

“Daniel, mirror.” L pulled at my hand. She was just as strong as I was and could have easily gotten out of my grasp if she wanted to, but losing the physical contact was clearly something neither of us were ready to face yet. And she didn’t have Lila, so it had to be even worse for her.

“Sorry L, let’s go.”

We went to the mirror.

The two women in it looked speechless.

“Fuck. He made us into actual identical twins.” My sister swore.

Yeah, that made sense. I looked just like my sister. Medium height, fit but still soft and tanned, nice curves but nothing excessive. The only difference was how I stood and the colour of my hair and pubes. Looking at my own breast did nothing but fill me with cold. I felt disconnected, uneasy. Maybe that was why the naked body of my sister, looking nothing like my sister, did nothing to stir my desire. I had gotten used to this body, even without knowing and seeing it, for a long time already.

Still, now seeing it felt wrong.

“I’m…I’m not feeling great.” I admitted.

I buckled over, feeling a retch coming over me.

My sister stopped my fall. She was strong enough to.

“Daniel. Daniel. Look at me. Look at me!” I peered into her eyes. The violet was disconcerting, just like my own eyes. But the familiarity was there, my sister had always failed at taking care of her body, but her mind had always been way stronger than mine. “You’re fine. You’re having a panic attack. It is way better than it could have been right? You remember what he did to us, what we could have been. This is great! I look great. Look at me!”

“You…you look nothing like you, L. You can’t be happy about…”

“NO OF COURSE I FUCKING CAN’T!” She suddenly screamed out of her lungs, tears escaping her immediately. “BUT…but it’s not the worst. I look great, don’t I? DON’T I?”

I gulped. “Yeah L. You look great. You’re only beaten by Beckinsale. Hotter than Scarlet.”

She smiled proudly, her tears stopping. “Fuck yes I am. We’re going to be okay Daniel. We’re together! We’ll get used to being the hot twins everyone wants to fuck, get famous or rich with everything we’re going to find on this ship, then go back and live the best life we can.”

I approved of this plan. That seemed nice. The other hand grasping mine agreed as well.

“Yeah. Lila would like that.”

“Lila?” L seemed taken aback, but only for a few seconds. “Was she…was she with you?”

I smiled. I really smiled, of course Gaëlle would know. She had always been the only one helping, caring about Lila when she was alive.

“Yeah. She held my hand the whole time. Still is, I can feel her.”

“Ha! And she couldn’t come see her aunt a bit? I would have liked to see Lila.” Her eyes glazed over nothing for a minute.

“… I… I can’t see her, just touch her hand.” I explained.

“That would have been good enough. Anyway, if you had Lila, why are you the one having a panic attack and not me? Is that fair?”

“No, sorry L. I’m fine. Really.” I firmly stood back up. “Let’s get everything we can from the fucker, destroy his whole operation just like when I broke his precious Stone. And we still need to help the other guy. He…He was spared. Maybe we can send him back before he wakes up, so he’ll never know what could have happened to him. That would be nice, right?”

Gaëlle nodded. “You’ve always been the kinder of us both. That’s a great idea. But first, we need clothes.”

“Yeah, I see a wardrobe.” I pointed at it.

“Hard to miss, it’s next to a refrigerator, of all things.”

“Talking about food, I’m not exactly hungry yet but I would damn love to feel something enter my stomach right now.” I added.

“I second that.”

“I cook you go fish us some clothing?” I asked.

L started to nod, but then looked at our intertwined hands. “I’m not…”

“Hey L, we’ll be fine, said that to me five seconds ago. Yeah? We’ll just…we’ll just…” Just like a band aid, I removed my hand in one go, not waiting to hesitate.

We both gasped. But then nothing happened, and we resumed our breathing.

“See?” I spoke. “Let’s get moving.”

“Mh. Not too long please. I wouldn’t have done it if it was your usual shithead body, but your hands really feel great now.”

“Don’t go falling in love with me sis, I’m not into your weird hentai shit.”

“I don’t watch incest porn, thank you very much. I like my men, my women, my futas and my shot…”

“Gaëlle! I don’t fucking want to know! How many times do I need to tell you?”

She looked at me, a conniving look in her eyes, and we both started to laugh.