Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

set of rank-signifying jaw rings steps out of her tent. She must have the information I need. I look over my shoulder and give a broad hand signal to the darkness beyond the reach of the lights. The rest of my copies and I keep walking forward.

One of the Medusas shouts, “Wait. Stop them. Something’s wrong—”

At that moment, the cargo truck my delta copy is driving roars out of the night and smashes into one of the Medusan armored rovers on the far side of their camp at one hundred kilometers per hour. The force of the collision explosively ruptures the fuel cells of both vehicles and sends gouts of white-hot flame mushrooming up into the night. I shield my eyes. Screams echo out over the fire-lit sand.

My copies raise their weapons. We do what we must. We press forward.

It is not in my nature to kill, but nothing can be allowed to stop me now. I must survive. I must reach Sybil before they do.

Through the smoke and the screaming and the strife, I think, I will find you, Sybil. No matter what it takes, I will find my way back to you.

I will put everything right, as it should have been.

I will make us one.

Part IV: Redhill

I

ALEXEI AND DANAE'S now-separate awarenesses returned by degrees: first the pain, then the weight of the steel clamped around their wrists and ankles. Their eyes were swollen, their ears ringing from the rocket blast, the shrapnel still in their skins—but I had ceased to exist. They were themselves again.

“Naoto,” Danae gasped, with her first moment of clarity. She searched the darkness. “Naoto?”

“Behind you,” Alexei said.

Wincing through the pain, she managed to roll over onto her other side. She could just make out his silhouette in the glimmers of daylight through the cracks in the walls. She called his name again and pulled her chains taut to reach for him with shackled wrists. She was terrified her fingertips would find his flesh cold, but it wasn’t. She leaned her head against his. “Naoto. Wake up.”

She held his face and kissed him, but tasted blood on her lips. She felt his pulse, but it was faint and uneven.

Alexei tried to speak, but his voice caught in his throat. “He’s— I think he was—”

Danae grabbed Naoto’s shoulders and shook, but his body was limp. “I love you. You have to wake up. You have to stay with me.”

“He was the one Doc said was—”

“Don’t go. You can’t.” Her hands were shaking as she reached for Naoto’s head. She hesitated. She forced them steady. “I’m so sorry. I wanted so much more for you than to be part of me, to be part of you, but if it’s the only way to save you . . . if it’s what you want, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

“Wait,” Alexei said. He kept finding saltwater on his face.

She put her palm on Naoto’s forehead and willed.

Traces of his sensorium flickered unevenly through hers. Distorted flickers of searing pain burst through the link, so intense she almost screamed aloud. Her body writhed electrically, but she refused to let go. She only clutched him tighter and focused harder, searching behind his eyes for any trace of awareness. A thought. A memory. Him. But nothing came.

He wasn’t there.

“Danae?” Alexei whispered. “Is he . . . ?”

Her will collapsed, and she fell back into her own body, feeling Naoto’s skin only from the outside. She felt as hollow in herself now as she had in him.

It was Alexei who wept. He quivered and choked and bit his hands, his tears mixing with the blood and dirt and oil to pool on the floor. It was as visceral as it was bewildering: he thought of all the people he’d dispassionately watched die, many of them more horribly, many he’d known far better than Kusanagi Naoto.

“How do I know him?” he asked. “How can I be feeling this?”

“Unity,” she said.

“How . . . ? How do I know what that means?”

Danae stared brokenly away into the darkness. “I’m so sorry.”

“Tell me,” he said. “I need to understand what happened.”

There was nothing left to say, she thought. Without Naoto there was nothing left to do, or feel, or think. But she’d touched Alexei’s mind without his consent, and the least he deserved was an explanation.

“I . . . borrowed your tactical skills,” she said. “I needed to know how to operate the minigun, and there wasn’t time for you to explain it verbally. So I took the knowledge directly from your mind. It was unforgivable to do that without your permission, but I thought . . . I could save us.”

“But how did we—”

“There must have been unifier nanobots left in your cerebrum that hadn’t self-terminated yet. The shock of the rocket strike must have reactivated them. Reconnected them to mine.”

“Nanobots,” he echoed. “Self-replicating swarm nanomachines, like Gray weapons, except—” He struggled to form words fast enough to keep up with the information racing through his mind. “Except the nanobots in your body are infinitely more advanced than Gray, aren’t they? You’re talking about molecular machines capable of seamlessly integrating with a human brain—”

“—and reading or writing its synaptic configuration from within,” she finished.

Alexei blinked in awe. “But how is that possible? No power on Earth has that kind of tech. But I can remember you creating it, decades ago. I can remember . . . your memories.”

“And I yours,” she murmured.

He shuddered to ask, “How much did we share?”

“Only fragments. A small subset we keep close to the surface, to maintain the continuity of identity, to remind us of who we are. They form an index to the self. We didn’t truly unify. However much of me is in you now will all disappear within hours, and vice versa. We’ll forget it like a dream.”

“If we had fully—”

“If we had fully unified, we would