The original and the new.
One day, nine months into her recreation, she emerged back into consciousness from the latest procedure. Spiky agonies tore through her chest cavity with each breath, as if the wrong tissues had been sutured together. The familiar quiet of the medsuite that was her permanent room lay around her. The subdued glow from the sensors that Ondo kept her hooked up to gave the room an incongruous feeling of the early evening gloaming, some late-summer day on Maes Far. A bitter, chemical taste filled her mouth.
This time he'd reconstructed her chest cavity, implanting the left lung he'd grown from her stem cells, filling in the lost fragments of her rib cage with carbon-fibre bone analogue, attaching intercostal muscles and the malleable mass of her left breast, connecting the artificial to the natural with his customary microscopic artistry and covering everything with the shimmering black dermal substrate upon which, eventually, her own skin could take root.
Ondo's face entered the frame of her vision. Her brain was still adjusting to the exotic sensory inputs her left eye now gave her, so that his features warped for a moment, multiple-wavelength representations overlaying. But of course, it could only be him. There were only the two of them there.
His voice was quiet, full of regret at what she was going through. “How does it feel?”
She had no secrets from him, no defences. He knew the workings and pumpings of her body better she did, knew her more intimately than any lover ever could, knew her from the inside out. She resented it. The pain was muffled by analgesia, but she could tell it would be huge soon enough. It would have its day, a beast that could not be contained. She wished she could stop breathing altogether and let her racked muscles rest, but she refused to show it.
“It's okay.” Her voice was a whisper, her lips cracked dry. “How long was I out this time?”
He missed a beat before replying. “There were complications that I hadn't foreseen. Integrating the bioelectronics into your nervous system is always difficult, as you know. It is a difficult procedure to carry out while rebuilding muscle tissues and blood flows. Weaving the neurons from your artificial limbs through your spinal column proved to be rather more difficult than I'd anticipated.”
“Tell me how long.”
“Twenty-seven hours. Your heart stopped twice. The second time I thought I'd lost you. You were gone for a full minute.”
She could see the weariness in his lined face. He had saved her life one more time. She couldn't stop herself saying it. She didn't want to stop herself saying it. “How many times now?”
“I don't understand.”
“How many times have I died?”
“Including the lander, twenty-two times.”
“You should have left me. I don't want this. I don't want any of this.”
“I couldn't do that, Selene.”
In her mind she was screaming, although it came out as a rough whisper. “I've had enough! I don't care what you promised my family. Let me go, Ondo. You have no fucking right to do this. It's my choice to make, not yours.”
A part of her could see the effect her words had upon him. She didn't care. She had been through too much.
“I'm not doing this because of my friendship with your father, Selene. Nor for your family, nor for all the dead of Maes Far. I'm doing it for you. When I pulled you from the wreckage of your shuttle, resuscitated you that first time, I vowed I would save you, give you a chance at life as best I could. Too many others have died.”
“This is no fucking life. I don't want it! Let me go, I'm begging you. I'm ordering you. You do not have the right to know what's best for me. You're controlling me just as much as Concordance did.”
That stung him. He hesitated, perhaps debating with himself whether he was doing the right thing. He reached off to one side to touch a control on one of the devices. The fog of anaesthetic filled her brain and she couldn't fight it. He wasn't giving her final oblivion; he was sending her back into unconsciousness from where she couldn't object.
“No, Ondo, don't you fucking dare. Don't you…”
Then the fog rolled through her brain and there was nothing she could do to fight it.
Ondo sat unmoving for an hour, watching over the young woman he'd rescued, his gaze flicking between the monitor readouts and her face. Even deeply sedated, she occasionally winced with pain, her brow furrowing and her mouth half-forming a silent scream. Was he doing the right thing, keeping her alive, putting her through all this?
It was possible he was being selfish. He'd lived a lonely life – a life he'd accepted, sought out – but he'd paid the price. He'd envied Seben, Selene's father, envied the relative normality of his life, the love and family and home he'd enjoyed. Seben was dead now, of course, and he, Ondo, was alive, pursuing Concordance, following his trail. But if it led nowhere, to defeat or a dead-end, he knew he'd regret what he'd done with his time. He sometimes wondered who he might have been if he'd lived in a different age. Occasionally, he dreamt dreams of a life that had never existed: spending his days on research and on building his devices, his family and friends around him, a life peaceful and contented.
He let out a long sigh. Still. He couldn't change the past. The faces of the people in his dreams were always a blur, but now there was this young woman, viscerally real, terribly injured, alone apart from him in the whole universe. He would do what he could for her, despite the rigours of all she would have to go through. If he could, he would
