That time, Clemente put on his surgical mask in the operating room.

“You know…?” the doctor had said then, “I still have my doubts about what we’re gonna do. I know you know, and I know you don’t care, but I wanted to tell you, anyway.”

“You’re right. I know it and I don’t care,” Broga had replied.

They were about to start with the intervention, and Broga was sterilizing his cybernetic hands in the steam chamber. A nurse offered him a medical cap and a mask, but he declined them. Pressed the device in his neck and the silver helmet covered his head; the mask would not only maintain asepsis, but its technology would be helpful at the time of the operation.

“I trust the peaks of the Primary Plasma in your brother’s lymphatic system will stay at bay,” Clemente said. He covered his bulging white hair with a medical cap and washed his hands. “You’ve conducted the studies yourself, and your calculations have always been accurate. And of course, in front of you is the best neurosurgeon in Pannotia. But beyond that, you should know there’s a risk that he—”

“—Would fall into a permanent vegetative state. I know,” finished Broga.

“I was gonna say that he wouldn’t make it. But I think leaving him as a vegetable could be worse than killing him.”

Broga stared at him; his eyes hidden behind his helmet’s huge red visor. Clemente knew him so well, though; he knew exactly the kind of expression that was under that cold Cyclops mask now.

“Nothing will go wrong if we do everything within the time frame I stipulated,” Broga said. “Now, show me you’re a better neurosurgeon than Templeton was and faster than he was, and I promise not to blow your head off for being such an insolent brat.”

Clemente held up his hands for the nurse to put on his gloves.

“Well, before you leave me headless, invite me to dinner,” he said and winked at him.

That would be the last friendly gesture Clemente would offer in his life.

Together, they entered the operating room.

Brun was lying on the surgery table, asleep. A male nurse had just shaved his head, and a female doctor had outlined two sectors with a marker where the laser saw should cut, one on his forehead and the other above his temple, near the crown.

Mounted on tripods, one on each side of the patient, were two panels with a grid of dark glass that looked like sophisticated solar panels. Checking on the data returned by the display on their dorsal faces, Broga made sure that both were calibrated to the right frequency.

“Make sure they don’t go below one hundred and seven points,” he told the young man in the mask and scrubs who was operating the equipment.

Steven, the scientist from the cryogenic chamber, entered the room. The old man trudged along, hunching forward as if his waist were about to give way and snap. Manson, his young assistant, was with him, dragging a utilitarian table with some cylindrical containers recently removed from their icy stay.

“Here,” Steven presented them; his quavering voice followed the brittle rhythm of his walk. “The last cloned stem cells we have in good condition; three of a Binary-C and two of a Binary-R.”

The old man heaved a sigh and looked at Broga as if debating whether to speak his mind or not. Finally, he didn’t and walked away; his assistant followed him, taking some notes out of his lab coat’s pocket. Broga could hear the young Manson complaining to Steven about some important thing the old man had promised to say or something. It didn’t matter anymore; Broga could get an idea of what the discussion was about. He turned his gaze to Clemente, who responded with serious eyes, and then he addressed the rest of the doctors and nurses present.

“All right,” he told them. “First, we’ll work on the frontal lobe, then on the motor cortex.”

In silence, Clemente began working on Brun.

The laser cut the parts of the skull that it was supposed to cut; Clemente exposed the parts of the brain that had to be exposed. From one of the steam-shrouded containers, Broga withdrew the small test tube that was to be withdrawn and handed it over to whom it was to be handed over. Clemente took the frozen stem cells from the test tube, and with a thin needle, guided by an electronic image magnifier, injected them into the parts of the brain where they had to be injected.

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Thanks to his mask’s visor, Broga witnessed the entry of the cloned cells into his twin’s brain as if he were injecting them himself and watched with joy that—as he had seen in the simulations that he’d run hundreds of times while planning the operation—Brun’s original cells received them with the same urge the dry ground receives in the long-awaited rain. Small electrical storms, wrapped in transparent bubbles, moving from one side to the other, blue sparks pulsing like tiny stars in a dark firmament. A microscopic-scale Big Bang from which new galaxies originated.

It had actually turned out to be a process as fast as it was supernatural. Soon there would be new neurons where the tissue was damaged. His brother’s brain would return to normal. His brother would regain his mind, perhaps much earlier than his calculations had predicted.

And while two of the doctors sealed the open holes in Brun’s skull, Clemente prepared the probe to begin the second part of the treatment.

“Now all that remains is for the spark to work its magic,” he said.

Facing the Totem, Broga rested his right hand on the engraved silhouette that had the button on the board and activated its circuits. On his helmet’s internal display, a point of white light flickered along with a legend that said, ‘Pulse On. Radiation emitted,’ and the biometric reader received the energy channeled by his robot fingers.

The hatch opened, and the small cylinder rose to the surface.

As soon as he removed it, the board’s defense mechanism would start—the trap designed by Sebastian’s father, the console’s original owner—and a barrage of Tau radiation would jump off the screen and try to reach his brain. ‘Inhibitor: Activated. Protection: Ninety-eight percent,’ appeared on the inside of his helmet. He was ready to resist the hypnotic radiation.

“Doctor…?” But then, he heard Robinson, one of the male nurses, and before he could turn, the man announced, “He’s opening his eyes.”

Brun—Brun was opening his eyes? Impossible! He himself had calculated the dose of sedatives to be administered. Besides…

“Radiation inhibitors?” he pivoted.

Behind one of the dark glass panels, the young operator watched the display. “They’re working, sir!” he said, his voice quavering behind his mask. “They are at one hundred and two points!”

Clemente, who was about to inject the probe into Brun’s heart, saw his patient’s eyes open and looked up at Broga. “Has he detected the potion?” he asked and halted.

“You, go on!” Broga ordered. It was now or never; there was no time to waste. And, as he turned toward the Totem, ready to remove the containing syringe from the hatch, there was a blackout, and then there was a deafening crack, like thunder that split reality itself in two, and a shock wave hit him from behind, knocking him against the computer board. Thousands of sparks rained down from the ceiling.

A power-surge! One so big even his artificial limbs short-circuited.

His helmet computer rebooted. Everything ahead of him was vetoed, all painted black. For a few seconds, his hands were useless, his legs didn’t respond, and his feet didn’t move from the ground. Everything froze. He could only hear screeching and the interrupted scream of one of the nurses.

When he regained his vision, he saw that the four-frequency emitter that was mounted on the Totem’s board had activated to defend the computer from the electromagnetic blast, closing the hatch and returning the syringe containing the Primary Plasma to the interior of the machine. He tried to reactivate the biometric reader button but looked back over his shoulder and—Chaos had spread through the operating room, raising a heavy stench of burning wire and…charred flesh.

Clemente and the other doctors and nurses were gone. In the blink of an eye, his staff had been replaced by stains on the walls and pieces of bodies disseminated everywhere. There was only Brun, standing next to the operating table, static; his eyes, ajar, and his lips shaken, soaked in sweat as if he had just come out of a sauna but wrapped in an icy mist; his disposable gown somewhat loose.

Broga took his gaze off of his brother. Next to the utility cart and the cryogenic containers, now burned to a crisp, there was a sneaker covered in blood. He recognized it. That sneaker belonged to Clemente; he had given it to him as a present a few months ago. So that meant that the dark, smoky mass next to that sneaker was…

A sharp pain pierced his chest. Clemente was gone. And in the most horrendous way that he could have ever imagined. Although he didn’t even have time to mourn his loss.

Children’s laughter. There was a lot of laughter. A mocking whisper. An unbearable murmur that pressed against his temple, even with his helmet on.

The entire room was covered by a dark gas, a cloud with violet stains and luminous dots that beat as a heart would; as a star cluster would.

The fantastic image he had seen during the surgery just an instant ago, those cells sizzling in his brother’s brain, that cluster of newborn galaxies, was now out there. The operating room had become a perfect image of outer space.

The pressure on his head increased. The oxygen levels in the room, according to his helmet’s sensors and his lungs, plummeted. Now it didn’t just look like outer space, it was feeling like it. He couldn’t breathe.

And there was Brun, standing in the middle of that nebula, with his eyes moving behind his eyelids and muttering who knows what, suffering a strange case of supernatural sleepwalking.

The Primary Plasma! Broga extended his hand toward the console board; if the biometric energy reader didn’t work, he would break the hatch and force the dose out. It didn’t matter, but that was the last one left, and he couldn’t lose it.

However, the pressure that this strange gas exerted on the environment was so strong that his robotic fingers compacted and disintegrated. His arms creaked. The device he had tied to the back of his neck, from which his helmet unfolded, flared. The visor on his mask cried sparks. If he didn’t get out of there soon, he’d lose his limbs and maybe even his head.

Go away, Broga, we don’t want you here, said the voices of some children, straight into his mind.

“Brun, stop!” he yelled with all his might. “Brun, go back to sleep!”

The same pressure that had begun to destroy him expelled him from the room, throwing him into the corridor, just to witness how his brother wrapped himself up in that cloud of galaxies.