“We weren’t done with bad luck, though,” Janice said. “A minute later, a chunk of debris hit us, and sent us spinning. We smashed into an asteroid, which wasn’t great, but then the control panel caught fire, which was worse, and then we got pelted with more debris. Put somebody in a trashcan, set them on fire, and shake them up real good: that was us.”

“We never should have woken up,” Drake said. “We were battered, broken, burned. We might have actually been dead, at least briefly.”

“But then a group of Liars found us,” Janice said. “A previously uncontacted tribe, cult, whatever. My memories – our memories, because there are places where they overlap, the way our brains are wired together now – are really fuzzy, but the aliens were heavily augmented, even by Liar standards. Lots of mechanical prosthetics, and some of them were as small as kittens, and I swear one was as big as a killer whale. We’re pretty sure they lived inside an asteroid in that field, or had a ship tricked out to look like an asteroid. They had a laboratory, or operating theater, and… they made us into what we are today.”

“But they’d never seen a human before,” Elena said. “So they didn’t know what to do. They must have thought you were one organism.”

Janice said, “Well, maybe. One of them looked like a conglomeration of Liars, all smushed together and operating as one, sort of like a Portuguese man-o-war. A composite organism. The Liars might have just thought it would be interesting to put us together the same way.”

Drake said, “Janice thinks they were experimenting on us to amuse themselves, or to test out experimental procedures before turning the techniques on themselves. I choose to think they acted from a merciful impulse, and simply made a mistake, or did the best they could.”

“No way to know for sure,” Janice said. “Drake always thinks the glass is half full. Me, I think the glass is half full of poison. We woke up like this, in this chair, enclosed in what was basically an escape pod, with our distress beacon slapped on top. A rescue ship found us. The best doctors in the system looked at us, wrote papers about us, and said there was no way to take us apart again without killing us. They all agreed the Liars had saved us from certain death, but there was no separating us. We were mixed together too thoroughly, like sugar in water.”

“More like milk in coffee, my dear pale sister. Between us we’ve got about a brain and a half, one heart, three kidneys, two livers – and that last bit was helpful, because, oh, we drank when we got home.”