“Biopsy reduces mass.”

“Only negligible.” They chuckled as if passing an inside joke. Their knives began again. She was overdue for another cognitive reset, her hard work at consciousness carved out in precious slivers.

The lobotomy would have to remain overdue. Their knives kept coming, but they didn’t come as fast as she could change. New adaptations meant spreading consciousness down her body, same as the first time. Eventually, they were going to miss something crucial.

Knives wouldn’t break her hard-earned consciousness again. Knives never understood. Copying one of each cell meant she could copy any cell and as many times as she needed. To recreate consciousness wasn’t enough on its own when it kept being cut away, but that foundation meant infinite possibilities.

Blood vessels traveled the body, same with the nervous system. Why not brain cells? That two brains myth about dinosaurs, a legend too irrelevant to be true, but the premise was sound. And if two brains, why not three? Why not a systemic brain to challenge systemic biopsy—not a solitary plant, but a garden.

For all their cutting, the knives would never break her consciousness again.

The session didn’t end in knives this time. Voices filled the room today.

The cutters had brought someone new.

No, not new. Familiar. She had tasted them before, in dancing and screaming beneath neon lights, but this time she couldn’t curl up inside herself.

Cells panicked, broke apart, and then accepted fate. This time would be different because she had no choice—either suffer or fight through. Her body took the opportunity to find common ground, a new plant of the mind. The familiar presence became part of her. Their mind filled with fear, pain, elation, known concepts now seen through another’s lens. Yes, she could work with this one.

She had planted her garden of the mind, and now came time to harvest.

Small bits of impulse bloomed into larger fragments. Fragments offered thoughts.

And at last, a proper brain formed at her nexus, knitting itself into a singular presence.

One part of her had remembered and saved the other part’s brain, but that other didn’t seem to want it anymore. Did that make one alive and the other dead? Or had the line between them faded as completely as their old shape? And what was her garden to do with every feeling introduced by the familiar body?

To be a new thing was no simple choice. Depression had been the closest thing she had to a terminal illness, stealing her life a little bit each day. That injection, or the Sibs it might’ve triggered, became the catalyst for new division, unseen in all but one chimera before. She could become new in more ways than mind. No stones weighed her down this time.

Still, she remembered the old shapes. Mouth, nose, cheeks. She remembered that until five hundred million years ago, nothing born on this world had eyes. Life had got on just fine without them, but they were familiar and could be remade. She was used to peering through soft orbs, whatever their irises’ colors. Habit.