The artificial part of her brain counted them anyway.
Part 2 - Sidereal
1. Kane
They took two days to return to the safety of the Refuge. Throughout, the Dragon performed the usual deep scans of its own structure and interior, sifting through its constituent molecules for Concordance bugs. It found nothing: so far as their technology could tell, the ship was clean, just as Selene and Ondo were clean. They saw no sign of pursuit in metaspace. They'd escaped the trap set at Maes Far.
Selene spent her days trying to calm her racing mind, throwing herself into furious bouts of exercise until she collapsed into welcome exhaustion. Sometimes she thought that the myth of metaspace travel, the notion that it destroyed the mind, might have some truth to it after all: too often she felt worn thin, strung out. She would find herself staring into the greyness of the void outside the ship, her mind wandering to thoughts about those she'd left behind on Maes Far. They were painful memories, but it felt right to think them, too. A natural reaction to loss.
The tremor in her hands subsided. She talked more and more to her inner Ondo, opening up to him as she never had the real man. At one point, suddenly alarmed that the flesh-and-blood Ondo would get to hear what she'd said, she set a trap of her own to see if his former words of reassurance were true. She regretted it almost immediately, but by then it was too late.
“Ondo, when you refresh the image of your engrams from the real you, will you lose all memory of everything we've talked about?”
“Normally the new copy of me won't know anything about these interior conversations, but I can save them in a safe area of your memory for later recall, if you like.”
“I'd prefer it if they were lost.”
“Understood, although they'll obviously still exist in your normal memory. Is there something you'd like to talk about?”
She pressed on with her plan before she could stop herself. “I've been having … troubling thoughts. Thoughts I can't stop myself thinking.”
He considered her over the top of his multiglasses, a mannerism that the real Ondo used often. “Thoughts you can tell me about?”
“Thoughts … that this is all too much. My injuries, the loss of my family. The death of my father and what he must have gone through beneath the ice.” She waved a hand in the general direction of everything. “Concordance.”
“Can I ask what you mean by too much?”
The concern in his voice almost made her stop. Almost. Instead, she played her role, letting him tease the truth out of her. It helped that she'd had similar conversations with the real Ondo, during her convalescence.
“Too much as in I'm not sure I want to face it. I could have died so easily down there on the planet. We both could. Maybe it would be easier to let that happen next time. Maybe it would be easier to do that now, before there is a next time. We're not really going to be able to beat them, are we?”
Her inner Ondo was clearly deeply troubled as she revealed her invented suicidal urges. There was no doubt he believed her: he offered advice, suggested steps they could take together. It was all as she would have expected.
Later, when she sought out the real Ondo, engrossed in minute study of the artefacts they'd recovered, he was as distracted as ever, barely paying attention to her as she spoke to him. If he'd known what she'd admitted, he surely would have behaved very differently. It seemed that what he'd said was true: her interior dialogues were secure.
She made a mental note to get her copies of his engrams refreshed when they were back at the Refuge, wiping out all records of the conversations they'd had.
Late on the second day of their manoeuvres, she cornered Ondo – the real Ondo – once again, this time to challenge him over something else that had been troubling her.
“The additions you made to my brain are going wrong,” she said. “They haven't embedded fully into my natural tissues. I don't work properly, I'm not whole.”
The surprise on Ondo's features was clear. “Can you explain what you mean by that?”
She sat down beside him. “My thoughts are constantly divided. When I'm under stress, the Selene part of me goes into panic loops while the artificial part starts calculating, planning. It's like I'm two people, not one, different parts of my brain fighting against themselves.”
“May I extract some data from your flecks for study?”
“Will it help?”
“It might allow me to see what is going on.”
“This will give you access to my inner thoughts?”
“In a sense, but I'm only interested in the metadata not the detail. I give you my word I won't pry into anything private.”
She didn't like it, but she needed answers. This, at least, was not invented. She granted him access to her flecks using the protocols he'd taught her. She had to take three separate steps, speak two preset commands in her mind and also carry out one physical motion, a series of taps at a certain point behind her left ear. She sat in absolute stillness while Ondo pulled diagnostics from her brain.
Eventually, he looked up from the med analysis display. He sighed, removing his multiglasses to converse with her.
“I have to say, everything looks perfectly normal to me, given that there is really no such thing as 'normal', of course. It's a simplification, but I can see that much of your logical thought is in fact coming from what remains of your natural brain, whereas a good 45% of your emotional response is from your artificial brain. This idea that your augmentations are detached, machine-like, is a mental construct of your own devising, not based in the biological reality. You're no different to anyone else: a mess of competing urges and reactions and voices that we like to call an
