Zach tells me, "Of course we took the money."

"Ok, so you work for Doktor Urmind. Got it. Um, that's a lot to take in. Kithera, what's with all the papers?"

"These list activity for the interface device. We've been able to pick out the times when you are in RWO. We can also see the times that you mentioned seeing into our world in your dreams."

"Huh. You've talked about the interface a number of times. Is that the black thingie on my head when I'm logged into RWO? The one Doktor Urmind has been paying you to develop?"

Zach says, "Yes, that's it. I've been wearing the interface pretty much non-stop since I was able to make one that doesn't have all the cables attached."

"So what about the other Hashi's? Numbers one to five. Are those me? Or are they someone else? I'm pretty freaked out about them. Were there other me's that didn't survive?"

Kithera says, "Both Zach and I have looked at the logs. There's some activity similar to your dream episodes and also to the beginning of your first RWO session."

"The beginning of my first RWO session? How many?" I already know the answer to this one.

"Five." they both say at once.

"So what's different between those sessions and mine?"

Kithera says, "They pretty much look the same until a certain point where there is a rapid increase in network activity. For your session, the network activity hits a certain level and then goes down. For the other sessions, the network activity continues to rise. All of them had an increased heart rate at the same time."

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Kithera pauses for a bit and then continues, "For your session, Zach's heart rate went up for a little while and then settled back down. The other five times it continued to rise along with the network activity until the network activity dropped abruptly. We also saw in all six cases a huge upswing in server activity. A lot of the interface is based on artificial neural nets running on a cloud server. The previous times we had to reset the interface neural nets as they had trained themselves into a nonfunctional state."

Am I just bits in the cloud? I look at the papers on the table. This is way too much to take in. My head's full.

Zach takes over, "Let me fill in a few more gaps here. I've been making to-do lists for my away character the whole time. Like what happened with you, I saw evidence that my away character was going off and doing other things than what was on the to-do list. After each one of these interface resets, the away character went back to doing the things on the list. I asked Doktor Urmind about it once. He said that he thought that would be normal given that I'm using a hacked game client. I don't remember his exact explanation but that having an away character get weird with the nonstandard interface made sense to him. Something about the away characters being adaptive based on how their players act in-game. I don't remember doing anything all that strange in-game other than running into things a lot since I wasn't using a visual interface."

Mind blown. I don't understand most of what Zach is talking about. I sit down on the couch.

"That is a lot of stuff all at once. What did you think at the time these things were going on?"

Kithera tells me, "Well naturally I was worried when Zach's interface went weird those 5 times. After the first two times, Zach set up a safety mechanism to put the interface into a standby mode if his heart rate started racing. That got triggered during sessions 3 to 5. When the interface came out of standby, it kept retriggering until he reset the interface neural net."

I can't process this. Did they kill other me's?

"Hashi, those interface neural nets haven't been active since you disconnected from RWO, the interface device was damaged during the fall. Zach's repairing it."

"You aren't the interface."

What am I?