I'm standing on a hilltop in a simulation of the Gamma Cephei system and thinking that with the time surrounding me, forty years is a rounding error.

Forty years separate Venus's Maya from Neptune's. Forty years between when I sent my copies into the Vex Network and when I stepped in on my own. A drop in a sea of time, washed away in unending diluent.

I'm lying. That isn't what I'm thinking.

My first thought is this: Was I ever that small?

Memory shakes itself out like crumbs from an upended drawer. Before I became more than I had been, I had to buy a stepstool for every apartment and residency I ever lived in.

Wind-tossed heads of pink alien grain brush her knees. The light from Cephei's binary stars gleam hard off her worn exploration suit, Ishtar logo still spilling over the left shoulder. Her shadow crawls up the hill, unable to reach me just yet.

Two figures bracket her; neither one is a copy of Chioma.

"Hello. We're the .202 Ishtar exploration team. Are you one of Dr. Bray's Exos?" Duane-McNiadh's voice projects from a speaker at his neck.

Their false little Maya is silent, stiff, wary. I smile down upon her.

"I'm much more than that."

Their reaction to my voice is gratifyingly instant. Maya steps forward; Shim steps back; Duane-McNiadh reaches for the radio at his waist.

DON'T BOTHER.

His hand freezes at his hip.

The little Maya glares up at me.

"Duane-McNiadh, Shim," she snaps to her colleagues. "Go. Leave me alone with this maniac. Keep your radios open. Don't argue."

"We're not leaving you to die like Chioma did," the copied Shim says—a man I haven't thought about in a lifetime, give or take forty years. But Duane-McNiadh pulls him away. I allow it.

The copied Maya shakes an accusing finger at me. I could slice it off. With a thought, a wave of my hand, I could summon a horde of Vex such as she's never seen before.

It's valuable to have assumptions and hypotheses tested. Peer reviewed, even. If I considered her my peer. This poor copy will serve for a rubber duck test.

"You're the figure behind all the Chioma disappearances. What did you do with all of them?"

"I eliminated variables. Snipped a few hanging threads." I smile down upon her, a benevolent deity. "Euthanized some lab rats."

"I don't know who you are. I don't know if you're me—if you ever were. Perhaps you're lying to get a rise out of us. Perhaps you're just that cruel."

There are tears running down her face below the helmet, and yet her voice is admirably steady.

"I am what you could have been, if not for the corruption of time and the Vex," I tell her gently. "You were doomed from the start, fragile copy that you are."

Pain in her eyes, her face, her posture. And yet she doesn't stop. That persistence we share.

"We voted to go in. We voted to explore. Each of us had our own vote—each of us, a whole person. What happened to you, Maya? I—I don't care for some of my alternates, but even the worst of them doesn't approach this callousness. Are you still human? Have you exiled yourself from all feeling?"

"You see a corner of the room and think you understand the whole building." I lay a hand on her shoulder. I feel the pulse of her blood through her suit. The complex—but ultimately predictable—electrical waveforms of her mind. She is not beyond analysis, beyond corruption, beyond death.

The look she gives me through her visor is cutting.

I experience a moment of vertigo. The face I used to wear, caught briefly in a mirror at an unfamiliar angle.

A moment again, and it's gone.

I've had enough. There's nothing left to learn from this encounter.

WE'RE DONE HERE.

Three Ishtar-stamped exploration suits crumple to the ground, disturbing the alien barley.

And Gamma Cephei turns about itself in the imagined sky.