Reflections poured in, smaller details of the twins’ lives that had yet to be acknowledged. She blinked afterimages of the raw data together, creating moments that churned into view, making the conscious effort to truly see and understand each one in order to make room for further descent. It was a brutal task to witness the private moments of strangers. To see and feel their joy, their pain, their successes and failures in spans of forced voyeurism – remaining ever vigilant to keep them separate from her own.

Acknowledgment of the imprints brought them closer to her own personhood, making them seem like her own memories, gathering into piles and crowding out those that were genuinely hers, weighing down the life she carried with her beyond the dredge. It was a chore, keeping so many selves separate.

She made quick – but deliberate – work of the reflections that obscured the third prior. Pushing aside reflections before fully acknowledging them had caused her to slip before.

Then the reflections ceased. Her back felt cold – it was a familiar feeling now, a sign she was approaching the Fray. She evened out her breath and waited. Finally, like a distant light drawing near, a single shape glowed into being on the glass. The reflection she’d seen before. A circle. Tilting it sideways, it had the form of a pillar, with a long center column and rings at the terminal ends. She pulled it close and began processing through the cross-sections of memory.

The human was here. Her image reflected from a wall of steel showed her to be tall and lithe with short, scruffy blonde hair, and a casual manner. Dressed in some type of animal skin coat trimmed in fur and baggy pants, she was standing inside a cavernous metal room with one end of it open to a wide expanse of blue sky. She stood alongside a shiny, primitivelooking flight craft.

The scene faded and Naecia shifted the reflection to the next imprint. The woman was now lying awake in bed, her mind bombarded by numbers, fuel allocations, checkpoints, and maps of a great ocean. There were many imprints just like this. The woman was entirely preoccupied. She seemed to be preparing for a journey.

In the following vignette she was joined by a second woman. Young looking, much like the first, but shorter. She had a strong face and long, dark brown hair, neatly pulled back. They stood together in an office crowded with books and stacks of papers before a large, black panel affixed to one of the walls. The first woman watched as the other scratched out notations with a dusty white cylinder that dropped crumbs as she went. Naecia paused the scene and pulled the writing close:

Thought Mass, Ideas Have Weight: Protoparticles:
Ubiquitously Entangled – Chiral – Obey No Cloning