Cephalopeds. Males and females; adults, adolescents, and suckling young. Some were held in oval traps, and others were stacked in blood-strewn piles, the captives rendered helpless by the ship’s gravity well.

Guarding their catches were the hunters—an assortment of Andria clones ranging from the long-haired, camouflaged beauty I had met in the woods of Virginia to the frightening genetically engineered Nosferatu freaks.

A familiar woman’s bare foot stepped in front of my face, obscuring my vision. I strained to look up beyond her orange pant leg. The figure filling out the jumpsuit belonged to the short-haired version of my fiancée, the one who had taken me to the farm.

She playfully nudged my chin with her big toe. “Ike, if you promise to behave, I’ll ease the gravitational field. But I’m warning you, the Creator sees everything and she’s not happy with you.”

The invisible weight pinning me to the porous surface dissipated. Andria helped me up, and I held on to the clone’s hand. “The Creator told me you’re an exact replica of my Andria, that you even share her memories.”

“I’m not a replica. I am Andria Saxon.”

I looked into her eyes. For all intents and purposes she really was the woman I loved, with two important distinctions: This Andria wanted to raise a family together, and, unlike my fiancée, she had never cheated on me. She was an unblemished beauty, representing a clean start in a new world, and as she leaned forward and kissed me, I realized how much I needed her.

That’s right—needed! So what if she had been cloned by the warped mind of my own creation, she was still a woman—still human. And so there’s no misunderstanding coming out of this internal journal, let me be perfectly clear—my interest was not based on my own sexual desire, nor was it to star in some Jason Sloan–concocted “Omega wet dream”; that ship had sailed the moment GOLEM “the Creator” had appeared. Having heard the computer’s explanation of things that had come to pass, my mind had finally awakened to the fact that I was no longer asleep. But with each passing moment in which I had come to accept this waking reality, I found myself experiencing a gnawing emptiness inside—a feeling I think must be shared by all castaways … the emptiness of finding oneself alone in a new world, having lost everything you have known.

In retrospect, I could not have predicted this reaction; after all I had spent my entire adult life, to paraphrase the real Andria Saxon, “… as a recluse, living inside my own head.”

The clone … this Andria was an offer of reconciliation, GOLEM’s olive branch. If I could accept the machine as the Creator of this new world, then Andria would become the Eve to my Adam—the choice was mine.