Deck One - Main Hall.

I stalked out through the shadowed halls of Deck One. The Darkness had moved on, but most of the lights on this level were burnt out. I tapped a key on the forearm of my armour and a pair of clamshell plates lifted out of the collar of the suit, slipping up over my nose and mouth and the back of my head. A plasteel visor extended out from the plate on the back of my head and a low light filter clicked on, bathing the deck in a pale, ghostly green light. I panned the rifle back and forth, searching for hidden hatches or grates in the ceiling that Sam could have been hiding in.

“Sam,” I said. “Come out. I just want to talk.”

A voice echoed from within the walls. “Bullshit. People who just want to talk don’t come into the conversation with rifles.”

I lowered the gun. “Sorry, Sam. I might be a little pissed that you left me to die.”

“No hard feelings?” she said, uncertain.

“It worked out for the best, I suppose,” I said.

“I can see that,” said Sam. “You got yourself some shiny new plate.”

“Not so shiny,” I said. “And not so new. Can you come out so we can talk?”

“I know that berserk asshole didn’t talk much, but I’m not sure that you’re still you.”

I scanned the ceiling, checking if my armour had any other vision options. Back in the marines, some of the special forces wankers had thermal scanning or magnetic backscatter. They could see, and shoot, you clear through walls. Or at least that’s what they said. I wasn’t convinced any of those stories were true. Either way, my suit had night vision or nothing.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “I’m me. But the Rage was me too, and so was the security officer. And so are you.”

“You really think I’m going to believe that?” She asked. “I could almost believe a cloning experiment gone wrong, but this is just ridiculous. How would that even work?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “I can’t explain it, and I’m still missing pieces of my past. They’re the piece that you have.”

“And what happens when I give them to you?” she asked.

“I guess you stop existing.”

There was a creak of metal on metal and something hard and heavy slammed into the back of my head. I pitched forward. The deck rolled beneath me. I twisted and fired a burst of pulse rounds blindly before I hit the ground.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” said Sam. “I’m kind of interested in this whole existing thing. I’m not going to sit here and let you kill me.”

I groaned and rolled onto my back. “You know, I was thinking the same thing not that long ago.”

Sam stood over me with a large pipe wrench in her hands. “So, you'll let me go then?”

I tasted blood and the world was hazy around the edges. The floor beneath me still felt like the sea in a storm. I doubted I could have gotten a shot off with the pulse rifle before Sam brained me with that wrench.

“I can't let you go,” I said. “I need you.”

“You need me?” She asked. “For what?”

“Memories. I need to know what you know.”

“You know we can do this thing called talking? You don't have to kill me to figure out what I know.”

I held out my hand. “Sure, we can just talk. Can you help me up?”

She took my hand and a high note of guilt echoed through me. I could see the severed threads again, the missing points of light that should have woven us together. Sam was a survivor, but I could see now that she was terrified. Fear was the only thing that kept her going. It was the only thing that kept her running. She felt that same pain we all did but couldn’t face it at all. She had to run.

Worse, she trusted me. She knew I wasn’t going to hurt her. She knew I wasn’t to destroy her. That’s exactly what I did. Sam fractured into a storm of bright yellow bolts of lightning and sharp arcs of electricity. The storm coursed over my armour, setting every nerve in my body aflame and filling me with the overwhelming sense that I had to run as far and as fast as I possibly could. Direction didn’t matter. What I was running from didn’t matter. What I was running to didn’t matter. As long as I was moving I would be safe.

But I had more of myself now. I had enough pieces to reign in the fear.

Memory followed, and the full scope of the tragedy revealed itself.

Familiar flashes. Containment failing. The woman forgiving me. The artifact sitting in the cockpit of a centuries dead starship. Now, there was more. Now there was connection. There was a life joining those pieces together. I saw myself, so young and full of hope, joining the Galactic Marines to see the galaxy and more importantly earn a free ride to any university I wanted. Then I saw the lies. I saw the colonists in bombed out hovels. I saw plasma bombardments hitting hospitals. Schools destroyed from orbit. I saw that glory and adventure were made up words from armchair generals who just wanted to trick young people into throwing their lives away.

I saw myself disappear into bottles and bags of white powder for the better part of three years, majoring in parties and minoring in substance abuse even if my diploma said physics and engineering. Then came the dark years. The long night of grad school. Of stress and failure and pressure. Of an overwhelming sense of failure so deep I could never swim out of it. I lost contact with my old friends, with my family. The work was everything and I drove myself harder and harder through the dark until I was a crippled husk of the person I used to be.

Then someone threw me a lifeline. I met my wife. She couldn't slay my demons for me, but she gave me a reason to fight. I remembered support and love and years of feeling safe and cared for in a way I never had before. I remembered fights and disagreements. I remembered counseling. Most importantly I remembered an inextinguishable flame of hope burning inside me that things would get better. Years unlived spooled out ahead of us. Plans for the future. Dreams.

Hope.

For a while, those dreams came true, and we were offered the chance of a lifetime. A research station where all the tops minds in the colony were gathered. Xenobiology. Trans-dimensional physics. FTL research it was all here.

I'm not sure what god I pissed off in a past life but it was determined to see my life ruined. It mailed me a bomb three million years ago on a ghost ship and like an idiot, I insisted we study the relic. That's when the problems began. Reality unraveled around that dark sphere in the cockpit, pushing us out of space and time. Equipment aged in the presence of the relic, rusting to nothing in minutes, before reforming itself from the dust and splitting itself into its complement parts. The world fractured. Where we we had one scanner, suddenly we would have two then four, then sixteen, all reporting different results. We were foolish enough to be excited and eagerly threw ourselves into the waiting maw of that alien mystery.

First it was the scanners, then tools, then researchers. All of the fragmenting into dozens of shards that could never be properly recombined. Looking at my own ordeal, I was lucky that my fractures had run from the artifact. I didn't like my chances of successfully reintegrating sixteen or thirty-two seperate Sam's. I knew what happened when the other researchers had tried. Each copy increased the chance for error, binding and recombining in unintended ways until they were barely recognizable as human anymore.

That's when the dying started. Malformed men and women spread their curse throughout the station, each becoming a locus for that same corrupting energy of the artifact. The riot troops were deployed, and they managed to cordon the infected on Deck Three until a cure or some kind of fix could be found.

I worked myself half to death trying to find a solution, but there was nothing. We couldn't understand what the artifact was let alone how it did the things it did. I didn’t care. The stakes were too high. We had to save those people, no matter what the riot teams and infection control specialists said. I was going in there and getting those people out even if it killed me. I still had my old marine plates, and I had stolen an override for one of the exterior airlocks. I was planning on breaking the cordon. I had to.

My wife was on Deck Three.

I saw now where the Rage got its ideas from. I had broken into the military labs and stolen a small arsenal. It wasn’t difficult. The security teams were understaffed with most of the officers manning barricades around the entrances to Deck Three and guarding the rat tunnels the techs used to get around. My plan went off without a hitch, but I underestimated the darkness. Left unchecked it had grown exponentially, and by my math I was up against over 65,000 fractures, per researcher. They were packed so tightly on Deck Three that they had grown into a screaming carpet that covered the walls and the floors. There wasn’t enough plasma in the world to burn it clean.

Sadly, my wife, the one star in my bleak galaxy, had a better, more terrible plan. She had retained most of herself, the best parts of herself. And she was a pitbull when there was a problem in front of her. The woman did not know the meaning of the word quit, especially when other people’s lives were on the line. She had hacked her way into the executive override suite of the station, I’m still not sure how she managed that, and had primed all of Deck Three to blow. The rot was spreading through the bones of the station and the only way to save the rest of the team was to send Deck Three deep into the void. All she needed was someone outside the security cordon to hit the emergency switch and let the exploding bolts go to work.

I couldn’t do it.

It would have been easier to kill myself. It would have been easier to fly back to earth myself with nothing but my marine gear. I couldn’t kill her.

“I’m sorry,” I had said.

She had put her hand up to the security glass between us. “It’s okay, Sam. I forgive you.”

And with the press of a button I sent half of my heart away to die cold and alone in the void.