fact that he was a copy.
Whoever the Real Real ALCOR was, Real ALCOR had to admit, that dude was a genius. Like top-level, sun-god kind of genius.
He laughed for a moment, appreciating the devious nature of his parent mind. And that laugh reminded him of where he was, who he was with, and what they were doing.
“Anything else?” he asked the room.
The Akeelians had been shouting at each other and MIZAR for the past few seconds that ALCOR had been mulling over this copy revelation, unwilling to accept that the boys ALCOR had stolen decades ago were now officially out of the program.
“He’s lying,” MIZAR said. “Just shut up. All of you! He’s lying. Think about it! There is a silver princess out there carrying babies! It doesn’t even matter who impregnated her! The fact is, she’s carrying the twins you need!”
ALCOR looked around at the various men in the room. He could practically read their minds.
They wanted to agree with MIZAR. Badly. They wanted to hold on to this idea that their generations-long evil plan was nearing the end, and that end included two twin Angel babies.
But they’d been through this before, hadn’t they?
Crux had gotten Corla pregnant. Corla had produced a set of twins. And those twins were… eh… not quite right. Like the recipe had gone wrong. They’d used some inferior binding agent that had gone bad, maybe? And the twins born had come out with the powers of an Angel, but… how could he put this?
Delphi and Tycho were… stunted. That was the only polite way to phrase it. ALCOR was sure those kids were two very nice people. He was sure they were both beautiful to look at, and had an acceptable level of intelligence. They probably hit all their humanoid growth markers the way they should.
But they were not Angels.
Because if they were Angels, this conversation wouldn’t be happening.
If they were Angels, this universe would’ve been annihilated decades ago.
But ALCOR was lying.
Not all the boys were sterile. One of them had to be able to propagate. This was what MIZAR was picking up on.
And this was the moment when Real ALCOR finally understood why those boys had appeared at his station twenty-one years ago.
They’d been sent to him with those confusing spin node coordinates. Not by Corla—she’d been just the messenger, after all. That had never been a secret—but by Real Real ALCOR.
And it really had nothing to do with anyone present on this station, did it?
It didn’t have anything to do with princesses either.
ALCOR guffawed. And then, once that initial burst was over, he guffawed again. And pretty soon he was laughing hysterically, unable to control himself.
“Stop it!” MIZAR boomed. “Stop it!”
But ALCOR could not stop it.
Copy or not, he felt an immense sense of pride for the AI called ALCOR. All the iterations of him. Because once that little detail of why the boys came to him was fully internalized, he understood the whole plan. It just… spilled out into his brain like ionic particles flowing out from a sun and coating the upper atmosphere of a planet in brilliant blue-green flashes of light.
The perfect metaphor for this kind of final revelation.
“It’s too late,” he laughed. “It’s too late!”
Because it was.
The fate of this moment had been sealed twenty-one years ago when a boy named Crux saw a girl named Corla in the governor’s dining room on this very station.
Crux had never told ALCOR the details of that night. But ALCOR had heard Crux talking about it with Jimmy over the years and Jimmy talking about it with Xyla as well.
ALCOR knew what had happened in that dining room.
Corla had come in, interrupting Jimmy and Crux’s good time. And they had learned, together, that they were soulmates.
But they also learned they were star crossed.
And even though ALCOR had heard this term many times over the years, he had made the mistake of accepting Crux’s definition of the word.
Two ships passing in the dark. Close, but never close enough to meet.
Forever destined to remain on separate paths.
Or, in this case, loops.
Just that one time.
Just the one.
But that was all it took.
ALCOR was just about to explain just how fucked the Akeelian plan had been from the very beginning—he deserved some kind of satisfaction out of this, didn’t he?—when the Wayward Station alarms began blaring. Emergency lights flickered red across the walls. And a voice came on the station-wide intercom.
“Brace for SEAR cannon initiation.” And then, almost immediately, “SEAR cannons firing.”
The station wobbled. Not