Drink two, some minutes later:

“So, is it easy?” Lowen said.

“Is what easy?” Wilson asked.

Lowen waved at Wilson’s body. “Being green.”

“I can’t believe you just went there,” Wilson said.

“I know,” Lowen said. “Jim Henson and several generations of his descendants are now rolling in their graves, many dozens of light-years away.”

“It is a funny joke,” Wilson said. “Or at least was, the first six hundred times I heard it.”

“It’s a serious question, though!” Lowen said. “I’m asking from a place of medical curiosity, you know. I want to know if all those so-called improvements they give you Colonial Defense Forces soldiers are actually all that.”

“Well, start with this,” Wilson said. “How old do I look to you?”

Lowen looked. “I don’t know, maybe twenty-two? Twenty-five, tops? You being green messes with my age sense. A lot younger than me, and I’m thirty-five. But you’re not younger than me, are you?”

“I’m ninety,” Wilson said.

“Get out,” Lowen said.

“More or less,” Wilson said. “You’re out here long enough and you eventually lose track unless you check. It’s because as long as you’re CDF, you don’t actually age.”

“How is that even possible?” Lowen said. “Entropy still works out here, right? Physics hasn’t totally broken down?”

Wilson extended an arm. “You’re engaging in the pathetic fallacy,” he said. “Just because I look like a human being doesn’t mean I am. This body has more genetic material that’s not strictly human than it does material that is human. And it heavily integrates machines as well. My blood is actually a bunch of nanobots in a fluid. I am and every other CDF soldier is a genetically-modified cyborg.”

“But you’re still you, right?” Lowen asked. “You’re still the same person you were when you left Earth. Still the same consciousness.”

“That’s a question of some contention among us soldiers,” Wilson said, setting his arm back down. “When you transfer over to the new body, the machine that does the transfer makes it at least seem like for an instant you’re in two bodies at once. It feels like you as a person make the transfer. But I think it’s equally possible that what happens is that memories are transferred over to a brain specially prepared for them, it wakes up, and there’s just enough cross talk between the two separate brains to give the illusion of a transfer before the old one shuts down.”

“In which case, you’re actually dead,” Lowen said. “The real you. And this you is a fake.”