Endless blue waves stretched before his toes. White sand compacted under his feet, footprints crackling at the edges in fractal patterns. Gulls soared, and he picked out their passage into the gold and salmon bands of sunset. Here, everything was defined, controlled, and comprehensible. 

—Thomas? The voice intruded across his consciousness like a bell. —Thomas, wake up.

Irritation. He’d managed to lose himself in this world, in the systems that plied the waves on its shores, the symmetry of the patterns within the chaos. A needed respite from his endless task. “Chi, just one more lifetime, please.”

—We agreed on a week’s rest. Gentle remonstrance. —We’re approaching our gravitational limit, and need to adjust our orbit. And I believe there’s an issue at mission control.

Thomas Tau opened his eyes to the interior of his pod. Intravenous nutrient tubes withdrew as the pod’s lid rose, and waste-removal catheters withdrew fastidiously as he sat up, groaning. “What kind of an issue? My otherself was scheduled to check in...”

—Your datamatrix clone missed a communication drop, the digital clone of his dead wife answered, transmitting the response directly to a chip embedded in his brain. Messages sent through quantum entanglement: instantaneous communication, spooky action at a distance as atoms in her server core vibrated, and atoms in his chip echoed that oscillation. A necessity, aboard this ship—her server cores were closer, by almost a tenth of a kilometer, to the event horizon of the black hole they’d been orbiting, than where the crew pods lay.  

Time dilation being what it was, any method of communication that wasn’t instant, would blur, shift, and stretch by the time it reached his brain. 

You should’ve woken me earlier. Thomas grabbed the coveralls beside his pod and stiffly pulled them on, knees creaking. 

He’d been a young man when he’d envisioned the Artemis Omega. A place to send those dying of diseases that humanity hadn’t been able to cure. To preserve them in the time dilation of a black hole, until science progressed outside and they could be saved. All they needed to do was devise structural fields that would prevent the ship from breaking up, and a way to break free before crossing the event horizon. Before being stretched into a line, infinitely compacted, drawn down into nothingness forever.

The structural difficulties had seemed easier to surmount than the thorny issue of human mortality. 

Of course, that had all been before... everything. The collapse of the galactic human republic and everything else that mattered.

—I was giving both of you time. He’s you, Thomas. He wouldn’t cut communication without cause.

Chi was, as always, a reminder of lost love. His wife, Chiara, had been a psychologist and simulation specialist. She’d built most of the virtual worlds through which the consciousnesses aboard their vessel moved. 

But she’d died thirty years ago. The victim of a disease that this ship had been originally designed to help stave off.  “We brought the wrong crew with us for this,” he’d told her, holding her hand as he sat by her bedside. “We were supposed to be doctors.”

“It’s all right,” she’d whispered. “What we brought was more important. We brought... us. Humanity.”

He’d stared at the scrolling code on the monitor beside her bed. Copying her consciousness in the last moments of her life. “It’s all right,” she’d repeated. A pause. “Let go.”

“I can’t—”

“Please. It hurts.”

Only then had he realized that the pressure of his hand on hers, even this gentle, loving touch, was too much. He’d let go. Stroked her hair lightly. 

And watched the light die in her eyes.

Moments after her heart stopped, the clone consciousness came online. Her last gift to him—someone to keep him company for all the long years in which he might be the only person awake on the ship. 

—Thomas? a voice whispered.

He’d turned away, for what good it did him. He couldn’t bear to touch his wife’s cooling form, and here was her voice, whispering unbearably again in his mind. “Go away.”

—I can’t do that. She wouldn’t have. A pause. —Don’t shut me out.

A sawing, yawing sensation in his chest. “I can’t call you by her name.”

A slight hesitation. —Of course not. I feel like her. I feel... real. I remember you. Loving you. But to you... I’m just an imposter.

They’d pre-gamed this conversation a dozen times as she sank deeper into her illness. They’d imagined a dozen different ways it could go. As a psychologist and a medical doctor, they’d known what was coming intellectually. Yet none of their conversations came close to the stark reality of knowing that his wife was gone forever, and that her... otherself. . . would now haunt him for the rest of his life.

She’d been a good psychologist, with deep insight into everyone around her. A seemingly endless fund of compassion, too. —Call me Chi. Like the Greek letter that can also be the crossroads.

Or the soul of the world, he’d thought.

He hadn’t responded beyond a bare nod. But over the decades, Chi had become the soul of his world. 

The only part of Chiara he had left. 

He sometimes wondered how his own datamatrix otherself, positioned on a hidden station orbiting a star doomed to fall into the black hole, had managed to endure without a Chiara or a Chi. He hadn’t liked the necessity of leaving a consciousness-clone behind at the hidden base, but... sixty years of perceived time for him here inside the gravitational embrace of the singularity translated to nearly two thousand years outside. Civilizations had fallen, risen, and fallen again in that amount of time on Earth. Seeing a project of this duration through would have been impossible without a functionally immortal copy of himself on hand to handle oversight.

And yet. . . what would a two-thousand-year-old human be like? The human mind was built to endure maybe a century at most. How much more experience would his otherself have accrued, how much more information, how much more. . . him. . . would Thomas the data-clone have, than Thomas the man? It was a thought that itched at him from time to time. Who was this other Thomas, and what could he have become, alone, and untended?

Now, Thomas Tau shuffled through tiers of pods towards the sensor station. Most of them held sleeping passengers, locked in virtual worlds. Ten thousand minds, working through scientific simulations. Engaging in social interactions through a virtual grid. He hadn’t designed the ship for active passengers moving around, after all. 

But all his plans had been upended when the Empire had swept across the galaxy, starting at on a remote colony world, and moving inexorably back through the core worlds of the human sector of the galaxy. 

Empires had been born and died on Earth. Surely this one, too, would eventually burn itself out. But the question was, how much knowledge, how much art, how much of humanity would the Empire have destroyed in its quest to remake humans in its own image

His planet, one of the last left free, had poured resources into the half-built Artemis. And sent them on their way, not with a cargo of physicians and patients, but of the best and brightest minds they could find. To preserve them, in case the human species was, in fact, wiped out or reduced to pre-spaceflight technology. A time capsule of a different sort.

He settled his aging frame into the sensor console. Nothing ahead of them but annihilation—but the sensors were picking up Hawking radiation. The exquisite flare of particles and antiparticles being spontaneously created, and then half of each pair destroyed. I don’t care what the math says. I still think it borders on magic. 

“So. Have you risked transmitting to my otherself?” They could send information out by modulating the patterns in the Hawking radiation. This had the benefit of looking like natural phenomena to anyone looking at the black hole from a distance. 

—Transmitting out requires your override. The Empire could still be out there. Listening. Chi’s reminder sounded almost prim.

Thomas frowned. “I know.” He tried to work out the math. “But he’s been silent for what, thirty-two weeks in his time-reference?”

—Roughly, yes. Chi hesitated. —The carrier signal went dead about an hour ago, our time-reference. That’s when I decided I had to wake you.

Half a day ago, from his perspective, Thomas translated, rubbing his eyes. “So there’s a chance that his location was found and compromised?”

—He’d previously indicated that signs suggested that the Empire was near collapse. Classical overspending on military affairs, inability to support infrastructure, rebellion in conquered regions, etcetera. She paused. —It seems unlikely that the Empire would suddenly take an interest in this region of space. 

“Empires spasm in their death-throes.” Thomas wanted to pace, but he didn’t have the energy, the muscle tone, or the oxygen. “Thoughts?”

—We could transmit out, now that you’re awake. Or, given how long he’s been silent, we could simply exit our orbit. See what’s out there for ourselves. A pause, and then a light, gentle tease. —You could use the fresh air.

Thomas swallowed, the weight of responsibility falling on his shoulders. Heavier than uranium, and twice as toxic. And his eyes skimmed to the tier of pods that held the children. 

They’d brought young people with them, not just aged scientists and experts. And thirty years in, when Chiara had lain dying, she’d told him, “You need to let them have children. Because no matter how slowly time’s arrow moves here... it still moves.”

Like Galileo’s stubborn denial to the Inquisition.

So he’d encouraged births. Trying to keep their population in equilibrium as their oldest passengers, their brightest minds, died. Kept copies of their consciousnesses as clones in the server core, just like Chiara’s. Murmuring and teaching in the virtual world. “We have children here,” he muttered out loud, “who’ve never run on their own two feet. Who are completely unprepared for life in the—ha—real world.” He slumped in his chair. “And if we pull out of orbit, there is a real chance that my otherself’s silence has been for a reason. That there are Imperial warships out there.” He gestured at the tiers of pods, twenty-thousand in all. “Chi, if I make the wrong decision right now... .” Everything we are. Everything we ever were. All the consciousness clones stored in the servers, all our history, all of us, could be gone. “I have a responsibility to whatever bits of humanity might still exist out there to bring them back their history. Their ancestors’ legacy.”

—But if we never leave, Chi murmured, —that’s just death of another sort. Because sooner or later, our engines will fail. And we’ll be drawn in.

“Death’s what we came here to defy.” Thomas swallowed. “Haven’t had much luck with that, yet. I lost you, after all.” 

Some days, he could almost pretend that Chi was Chiara. Could almost not feel the pang when he heard her voice—hers, and yet not hers. Could almost reconcile loving the datamatrix ghost with his ever-present grief for his wife’s death.

Almost.

—And yet, here I am. Myself, and not myself. Compassion in her voice. —Make your choice.

He exhaled. “There’s only one choice to make, if my otherself isn’t responding,” Thomas replied. “Let’s see what’s out there, Chi.”

The hull creaked and groaned as engines, long accustomed to a mere holding action against entropy, surged back to life. Thomas felt the g-forces, and knew that the monster at their back still reached for them with its inexorable grip.  

They exited, dodging the plume of dust and debris being pulled down into the monster’s heart. Made their way towards the tiny station, moving with as much stealth as they could muster. 

They crept out of its star’s occultation... to find no ships waiting for them. No threatening shapes. Nothing but the silent sphere of the station they’d left there, perceptually only sixty years before. “Still no response?” Thomas asked.

—No, Chiara murmured. —No signs of recent docking, no emission trails from other ships. You should be safe to board.

Thomas heaved himself upright. “All this adventure is easier in your simulations,” he told her, finding the long-disused envirosuit in the ship’s single airlock. 

She laughed. —Those simulations should have gotten you used to death-defying decisions.

“Yes, but inside your virtual worlds, I never have bad knees.”

Once aboard the station, he found the datamatrix’s servers, dark and dormant. Found a repairbot, powered down beside the racks, which had clearly pulled the power couplings. 

He transmitted the images to Chi on the Artemis. “You think he did this to himself?” Thomas thumped a hand against a case housing a crystalline quantum computing core. “What the hell? He’s supposed to be me, isn’t he? I’ve gotten through this—why would he give up?”

It bothered him. If his otherself had given up, it meant that he might.

Chi’s voice rippled through his mind. —He’s you, yes. Up through the age of thirty-five, anyway. Then he acquired two thousand years of differing memories and experiences, making him... a different individual. The impression of a sigh at the back of his head. —Have compassion for him. For yourself, too.

Thomas swallowed his first retort. Having compassion for himself sounded ridiculous. He didn’t need it. He was fine—

But then he saw how his hands shook over the control console. Could feel the bleak rage inside of him, boiling. Not just at the otherself who’d unplugged, but... yes. At himself. For failing Chiara. And Chi. For being so weak that the clone based on him had endangered the mission. For being not good enough—

—Thomas. Chi’s voice rang like a bell. —Take a deep breath. Let it out. And forgive yourself. Both of yourselves. You’re both only human, after all.

Inhale. Exhale. “How did this happen? He doesn’t have serotonin levels. He shouldn’t be capable of depression.”

—No, but he’s had two millennia with only self-repair and self-diagnostics. You’ll have to reboot him and check for corrupt sectors. Memory loss.

It made sense. Like a cancer that formed through incorrect replication of baseline genetic code. “You’ll have to walk me through that. You were always the expert on minds. Organic and quantum alike. I’m just a highly-certified scalpel jockey, when it comes down to it.”

—Do you think he has your odd tendency towards self-deprecation? Chi mused.

She took him through the processes and procedures.  He brought the servers back online, slowly going through system repairs and checks. Two millennia of experiences and data coupled with two thousand years of wear and tear. Errors had been introduced. And there’d been no one here to correct them. “What else can we do?” he finally asked her. “What can we do to ensure he… doesn’t feel alone?” A sudden shiver of dread. “Install you here with him?” Which would leave me alone, unless we created a copy. Two ghosts of Chi in a universe without a Chiara…

—No, Chi answered slowly. —Not right now.

He hesitated. “You mean later. When I’m dead.” 

—That’s far blunter than I wanted to be.

“I’m all about ripping the bandage off.” He exhaled, revolving the idea in his head. He didn’t like facing his own mortality. No one did. But he was, first and foremost, a doctor. And doctors had to face that truth. 

No, he felt... jealous of his otherself, getting to spend eternity with Chi. And that wasn’t even the most disconcerting part. “I don’t know which is odder. Realizing that what I thought was an emulation of Chiara’s emotions in you might be genuine affection for me—” he shook his head, rattled, hurt, “or that you could so easily transfer those feelings to a... ghost of me.” It’s taken me thirty years, after all, to do the same thing, and not feel like it’s betraying Chiara...

—And I don’t know what’s the more predictable from you, she replied with a hint of acerbity. —That you live in denial about how I feel about you, or that you think it will be easy for me to bear your loss.

Her voice faltered in his mind. And Thomas closed his eyes on a rush of grief. The old, weary sense of loss of Chiara. A newer pang, at having hurt Chi. Not just today, but over the years, from never having been able to truly commit to her, because he loved a dead woman. A foreboding kind of grief, too, at the fact that he would eventually deal her a far worse blow. He swallowed, hard. “I don’t want you to be alone when I’m gone. But he’s... not me. As you were just at pains to tell me.”

—I keep a log of all your memories through the chip. You could upload your current memory dataset to him. Keep grounded in reality, rather than whatever digital fantasies he’s concocted for himself. You have a perspective that he lacks–that of the aging process of a human, the passing through of crises, of interaction with hundreds of other humans. He’s had none of that. It might help him.  Her voice sounded sad. —Eventually, he’ll be… close enough. If he wants to be.

Thomas set his hand on the console, feeling chilled. “We still haven’t really kicked that mortality thing in the ass, Chi.”

—We’ll keep working on the problem. One way or the other. But for now—

“Yeah. I know. Do it. Give him all of me. And then we’ll wake the patient.” 

He didn’t feel a thing, of course. Everything that made him, him, had been recorded and kept in the Artemis’ logs. And with quantum transmissions, it hardly took any time at all to upload what he was, to his otherself’s core.

Then he tabbed the console. “Hey, Tom. Rise and shine.”

His otherself’s voice, an echo of his own, though much younger, resounded in his ears. “Thomas! What are you doing here?” A pause. “And why do I have two separate experiential datasets?”

“Chi thought it would help you.” Thomas cleared his throat. “Don’t envy you the migraine you’re going to have as you go about reconciling my last thirty years to your eighteen hundred-plus.”

To his surprise, no reply from the digital clone to the effect of I don’t experience pain. Just a pause. Followed by a rough-voiced admission: “I… thought I was alone… that no one… was ever coming.” A pause. “It hurt.”

That inadvertent echo of Chiara’s words, as she lay dying, caught at Thomas’ heart. At least he hadn’t been alone for this past lifetime. 

So he swallowed. Kept his words simple, light, and without blame. “You must’ve needed a nap as badly as I needed a vacation. But we’re here, and you’re not alone. And there’s still work to do.”

“Then I suppose we should get to it,” his otherself replied, sounding both tired and determined. “We’ve got death to defy, after all.”

—And worlds to rebuild before we sleep, Chi whispered softly.