Good to know some benefits come with being a hero.
You wouldn’t be here even now if I hadn’t pulled strings. Hell, we wanted you to meet her, to come to the wedding, even if you didn’t want to opt into it, but it all took place during a security blackout. We make do, though unlike me, my wife doesn’t serve in the same units as herself. “Things get complex enough when you’re sharing multiple bodies, so all of us married all of her. She nodded and lowered her hand from the glass. She smiled at me, and it was a sad smile. I backed away from the glass and sat down hard on the bench that was the only furniture on my side. I’d been grimly determined to face my future solitude without giving into despair, but to see then how much I’d missed of the past, a past we could no longer share… The sudden force of that knowledge hit me harder than the news of my alts’ deaths, a whole unit of my alts dying, and the one survivor hours away from her own extermination. I followed her gaze back to our twinned hands, noticed the plain gold ring on hers. “We need to talk,” she said and glanced to her left. People used to say that before they could sync souls directly.
UTOPIA SYNONYM WINDOWS
My boyfriend Dave calls them soulful, and he’s right, insofar as they’re windows to the soul. The glass could have been a magic mirror, opening onto some other world where the person staring back was a stranger. I wanted to embrace her, to comfort her, but I settled for what I could get.
I stepped up to the glass and put my hand against hers, right against left. “Nope.” She shook her head, then grinned. “All in all, I’m glad you didn’t stop to run errands on the way over. Still, she looked better than she would an hour or two from now.
UTOPIA SYNONYM SKIN
Her skin was ashen, and the circles under her eyes were dark, as if she hadn’t slept in days. Though she’d pulled her hair back in the same ponytail I wore at the dojang, loose strands clung to her face and neck. Repair nanobots can only work so fast, and hers had double duty helping their brethren fight against the Hive. Her short hospital gown revealed dozens of half-healed scars on her arms, legs, and face. This made her smile, as I’d hoped it would. I made a show of taking her in, head to toe: a sick and dying soldierly version of myself. The one who’d stayed safe at home, teaching military history and tae kwon do at the University of Chicago, unwilling to drop tenure for a chance to help save the human race. The only Teri Kang who hadn’t enlisted when the Hive invaded. My alt rose to her feet and put her hand against the glass. That left us alone, save for the hidden cameras we both knew were watching. The MPs stationed themselves outside the door, and the nurse made his exit. She moved as if her joints didn’t ache, as if she weren’t already running a fever, but I could tell. Hearing me enter, she raised her head and swiveled to face me.
UTOPIA SYNONYM FULL
Right then, the anti-Hive nanobots they’d pumped her full of were fighting a battle every bit as pitched as the one she’d fought on Charon, one that would end for her the same way it had ended for the moon.
I sometimes read like that, but only when sick or exhausted. She’d propped her head in her hands, elbows on the gray metal surface. I found her sitting at a desk, reading a newsfeed it projected in the air. A smartglass wall separated me from the sterile chamber where the other Teri Kang would live out her last few hours. Well, the room next to it, since she was quarantined. Not for the first time, I wondered if I had such courage lying latent within me.įlanked by MPs, I followed a nurse down hallway after hallway till we arrived at my alt’s room. A lot of G.I.s who got bitten went AWOL rather than face the certain death of returning to base. Under the circumstances, even coming home had been an act of courage. Soon the only other Teri Kang in the universe would lose her fight with that infection, and the army docs would euthanize her. Like it was a zombie plague or something. That’s what the G.I.s called it when Hive nanobots infected you: being bitten. Before she’d escaped the doomed moon - the moon she’d given the order to destroy - she’d been bitten. More than that, one who’d become a hero, the only Teri Kang to survive the Battle of Charon. Today for the first time I’d be meeting one who’d seen combat. Two years before, I’d synced with a bunch of my alts home on leave after basic training. I’d never even been off-world, but I remembered those claustrophobic beige corridors. The army hospital’s underground floors reminded me of Pluto Base, a place I’d never actually been.
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