“Hey. Morgan. Wake up. You’re burning daylight.”

 

“Alex, that wasn’t funny the first time.” Morgan Yu rubbed his face as he sat upright on the edge of his bed. He felt the slightest twinge of dizziness. Wonderful. He hated the simulated gravity of smaller satellites. 

 

“Sorry. Force of habit,” Alex, his brother, said on the line. He didn’t sound very sorry. Morgan got up and looked out of the small porthole down at earth. Big blue ball, once upon a time. Now mostly yellow. Still beautiful. Still looked like home, in a way. Morgan had a lot of complicated feelings about the yellow miasma that had overtaken what was once home to billions of people, their memories conglomerated in the yellow coral. “I need you to come to the research wing when you can.” There was a slight pause on the line. “Don’t forget to wear your suit.”

 

Morgan resisted the urge to fling the transcribe across the room. It hovered half a second above his hand before he thought better of it, and went to the bathroom. The almost-but-not-quite gravity of Talos IV -- because naming it Titanic 2 would have been too on-the-nose -- was annoying, but it was better than not being able to take showers. The hot water ran down his body. It had always been useful to him. 

 

“Learn to respect it,” his father had once told him, one of the few lessons that hadn’t been needlessly harsh, or cruel for that matter. “It is the greatest tool you will ever own. If you maintain it well, it will not fail you.” He hadn’t been wrong. Morgan had always taken care of his body, treating it with respect. He wondered if that perspective, one that had been imprinted in him at an early age, had been what had caused the disconnect. It was a tool, and he’d maintained it meticulously. But he had little affinity for it. Things hadn’t improved with the Talos I incident. Now, with all the Typhon material coursing through his skull -- and probably most of the rest of him -- it felt more alien than ever. 

 

He walked up to the sink as he toweled himself off and grabbed his brush, glad that the mirror was fogged up. He wasn’t in the mood for a face-to-face with someone he’d learned to distrust on board the Talos I. Past-him wasn’t present-him. He detested the person from before, before the experiments and the amnesia. That person was responsible for too much human suffering. He shook his head as he brushed his teeth.

 

Hoisting himself into the suit, he felt a chill run up his spine. He almost never wore the suit around the station, usually sticking with slacks and a shirt. It fit too snugly, reminded him of too many things. It wasn’t the same suit, of course. Not that that mattered. It smelled the same and it felt the same. But the old one had saved his life and if Alex, damn him, told Morgan to put it on, he was going to be a fool to refuse. Alex seemed innocent enough at a glance, but he never said or did anything without reason. Alex always had a backup plan. 

 

Morgan gently nudged the cup on his small counter. It was a force of habit. He hadn’t seen a mimic in a long time but he still couldn’t bring himself to trust cups. The ceramic mug refused to turn into a Typhon, so he filled it with coffee and made his way across the station. He didn’t go to the research wing very often. Alex had obviously stopped developing neuromods -- Morgan had made it clear in no uncertain terms he’d happily jettison him out of an airlock if he tried it -- but he was still doing research on the Typhon. Morgan couldn’t fault him. They were trying to figure out a way to preserve what was left of humanity. Being an endangered species was a trip. He walked up to the giant door. 

 

“Typhon material detected,” the little camera by the door said. He rolled his eyes.

 

“Blow me,” Morgan said.

 

“Override detected. Welcome, M. Yu.” Morgan was going to have to have a word with Alex about those scanners. Morgan was the only one with alien material in his system on the small station, so there was no need for scanners. 

 

There were no Typhon on Talos IV, after all. 

 

The doors opened and he followed the red line down the corridor. It wasn’t Talos I, but the station was nonetheless a little labyrinthine. Without the colour-coding, you could easily get turned around. And the crew was minimal. Another door, another scan, and Morgan walked into Alex’s research wing.

 

“Hey, Alex,” Morgan said as he turned the corner.

 

“Morgan, good t--”

 

“That’s a phantom, Alex,” Morgan said. He’d frozen in place, the cup halfway up to his lips. 

 

“I can explain,” Alex began. There was a purple haze around Morgan that had begun to shimmer. Alex knew what his brother could do and did something Morgan had never thought him capable of. Alex stepped between Morgan and the Typhon.

 

“That thing is going to kill you, Alex,” Morgan said, matter-of-factly. “And then it’s going to do something stupid to this station and it’s going to kill me too.” He looked from the Typhon to his brother. “And then I’m going to come back from the dead, I’m going to resurrect you, and then I’m going to beat you to death all over again with this coffee cup.”

 

“Morgan, listen to me,” Alex pleaded. Morgan barely was. His attention was fixed on the Typhon, almost daring it to make a move. The creature’s glowing eyes followed Alex’s every move. 

 

“Listen to him, Morgan,” a voice said. It was a little distorted by the technology, and Morgan squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t what you think it is.” The operator’s boxy shape hovered over to the two of them from wherever it had been hiding. 

 

“Please tell me what I’m thinking, Mikhaila,” Morgan said softly. He was trying his best to stay mad, but Mikhaila made that very difficult. “Because I don’t know myself.”

 

“We were running an experiment,” another voice said. Igwe. Of course he’d be here too. Morgan turned to Alex.

 

“What is this? A reunion?” 

 

“In a sense,” Alex said with a little smile in his voice. If it had been on his face, Morgan might have slapped it right off. His older brother was a stubborn bastard, and had often bullied him as a child. Nowadays, Morgan was probably the most physically capable human being left alive. Not that that was saying much, but Alex had no way of standing up to him. If he wanted to, Morgan could suspend the rest of them and kill the Typhon before they’d even touched the ground. But he wanted to hear this. And, well… Mikhaila was here. Or somewhere. 

 

“Where are you?” he said to the operators. 

 

“Talos II,” Operator-Ilyushin said. 

 

“Your brother thought it was best not to have us all in the same place, Morgan,” Igwe piped in helpfully. Morgan shot Alex a sideways glance. 

 

“Yeah, he’s pragmatic like that. What’s going on here, Mikhaila?”

 

Alex, always the helpful bastard, answered for her. Morgan, through a titanic force of will, resisted telling him to shut up. “The Typhon do not possess mirror neurons,” he began, as if he was teaching Morgan all of this, as if Morgan hadn’t figured that out way back when. 

 

“I know all this, Alex.”

 

“I know you know, Morgan. Please, hear me out.” Without waiting to see if Morgan was actually going to oblige his request -- or perhaps to make sure Morgan didn’t have the time to change his mind -- he continued. “When you were injected with Typhon material, you became part Typhon. You were able to interface with the coral.” Morgan’s eye twitched. Stop telling me what I already know, he wanted to say. But he waited. Just a few more seconds. “We hypothesized it was possible to inject human material into a Typhon,” Alex concluded, as if that was a normal and not totally batshit thing to say. 

 

“You did what.”

 

“We injected it with human memories, to see if Typhon can learn human empathy.” 

 

“You’re insane.”

 

“Perhaps,” Alex said. “But the others agreed. If we are going to survive, as a species, we need to find a way to communicate with them. But they must first want to communicate with us.”

 

“That’s why… all of this.”

 

“That,” Alex nodded, “is why we are doing all of this.”

 

“And the results are truly remarkable,” Igwe said through the operator and hovered over to the phantom who looked at it with… curiosity? “Not only has the memory implant fully taken, but it is actively allowing us to run a simulation to see if we can teach it empathy.”

 

Morgan finally put his cup down. He’d been so close to punching his brother with it so many times, it was probably better for everyone involved that he didn’t have a ceramic melee weapon in his hand. 

 

“And what memories are you implanting? Some hyper-empathetic saint whose connectomes you finagled out from under them? Another sob-story, some idiot who let you rummage around in their brain? Whose?”

 

“Yours,” Mikhaila said. He could tell she was smiling on the other side of the connection. 

 

“I really set myself up there, didn’t I?”

 

“You did.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because, Morgan,” Mikhaila said, “despite your posturing now, you proved to me back then that you are a good man. You risked your own life for everyone aboard the station over and over again. We would not have survived without you.”

 

Morgan just grumbled something. 

 

“What was that?” Alex raised an eyebrow. 

 

“Fine.”

 

“Thank you, Morgan. If you want to be involved in the project--” he began. Morgan was not in the mood. He would talk about this with Mikhaila later. They’d been talking more again, but he was a little hurt she hadn’t told him about this. In his defense, if he’d heard about it via transcribe, it might have been even more uncomfortable. 

 

“I do not,” Morgan said and turned on his heels. “Good luck.”