“What?” Samantha responded, equally stunned. She turned to Paine. “This is insane.”
Paine’s eyes darted to Samantha quickly before he looked around at their surroundings, the endless catwalks and pillars of the Constructor’s replicator facility. He bent over, propping himself with his hands on his knees to keep from falling as he shook his head. “This has to be a nightmare. Tell me this is a nightmare.”
“Uh, you guys all swapped wives?” Jules reacted, both perplexed and visibly amused.
“They’re from another universe,” Old-timer responded harshly.
Jules’s eyes widened. “Oh. This is fascinating,” Jules suddenly said, the pieces coming together for her. “The parallel universes we travel to are virtually identical—that’s why they’re so close to each other in the multiverse—but something must’ve happened in the universe you brought these two from that drastically altered their destiny.”
Old-timer cringed as he remembered the drastic event Jules’s didn’t even realize she was referring to.
“You’ve traveled vastly different paths since then,” Jules observed. She shook her head, marveling at the coincidences. “Yet, socially, you must’ve still intermixed with one another. We’re going to have to study this in greater detail at some point. We could write volumes on—”
“We’re not your damned science experiment!” Old-timer shouted, shutting her down. “This is our lives. And speaking of, there’s still one more person from their universe that needs to be awakened.”
“Uh, sorry, Craig,” Jules replied. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Why?” Old-timer demanded as he turned to the android, his tendril still jacked into the back of her skull.
“These two,” Jules replied, pointing to Samantha and Paine, “they’re most likely dead in this universe, but your friend, Adolf—”
“Aldous,” Old-timer corrected her.
“Aldous—much better name—he’s already been replicated. And we’ve got very strict rules about only replicating one individual from one universe at a time.”
“One individual from one universe?” Daniella reacted, astonished. “Craig, what is she talking about?”
“The androids aren’t replicating humans they find on different planets across the universe,” he explained, his eyes still locked impatiently on Jules’s as he answered Daniella’s question, “they’re hopping from universe to universe, assimilating Earths. That’s why they’re all human in appearance.”
“And why we can’t have multiple copies of the same person replicated from the same universe. We rescue one version per universe, that’s it,” Jules elaborated. “There are hundreds of versions of me from other universes, but there’s only one from each. You understand? We can’t let someone be replicated more than once in a universe, or they could build an army of themselves—”
“Make an exception,” Old-timer ordered through gritted teeth. “We’re running out of time here, Jules. We need to grab Aldous and get the hell—”
“I can’t,” Jules replied. “There are only two people who could overrule something like that. 1 herself, and—”
“Neirbo,” Old-timer growled, his eyes suddenly darting away from Jules, confusing her for a moment.
“Yeah, how did you—”
“Because he’s right behind you,” Old-timer replied.
Neirbo had, indeed, landed on the catwalk just a few short meters behind the group, a fully rebuilt Anisim at his side.
“Finally,” Neirbo said directly to Old-timer, with a gruesome smile, his face contorted by an ugly, twisted lust for revenge, “I get to end you.”
Jules moved away from Old-timer, though he didn’t release his tendril’s grip on her artificial brainstem.
“How’d you find us?”
Neirbo tilted his head toward Anisim. “Whenever a member of the collective is killed, a report is sent and we immediately review the last moments of their life in their mind file.”
“That’s why you didn’t resist,” Old-timer realized, turning to Anisim.
“I needed to stay alive long enough for us to know your plan,” Anisim confirmed. “I knew you weren’t going to succeed. You’re outnumbered, more than a trillion to the handful of you here. There was never any danger to the collective.”
Old-timer turned to Jules. “You knew this?”
She looked up at him and shrugged. “Everything I said before is true. I don’t want to die. But yes, I did know it was futile. I told you, resisting them is pointless.”