Lights in the Deep by Brad R. Torgersen Page B

one of the women, who looked about forty.
    “I’m not sure yet,” I said. “How did you…put me back?”
    “It’s a long explanation,” said one of the men, a Chinese-ish fellow in his thirties who identified himself as Surgeon Chow. “Here, I’ll make it simple for you.”
    He never moved, but there was a sudden mind jolt, like the ones I’d gotten from Howard’s memory array. In the space of a single second, I suddenly understood everything about the Outbounder procedure. They’d cloned me, using tissue from the frozen corpse they’d found in the observatory’s recording room. Inside my clone brain they’d installed a new organ: a direct-connect interface. They’d used it to slowly trickle my cerebral matrix into the clone brain while the clone body grew.
    Now that I was awake, the direct-connect would allow me to access their public network—once they deemed it safe for me to do so. I still had a lot to learn before I could get out of the hospital.
    All of this knowledge arrived in my consciousness with a cool surety, as if I’d always known such things. But I felt a tight thrill run down my spine while I looked down at my legs.
    “Fully functional?” I asked.
    “Yes,” Hastel said, with a small smile. “Were they not before?”
    “No,” I said. “Paraplegic.”
    “We’ve gotten a few of those,” she said. “Easily fixed.”
    I dared to try to move my legs, which had been useless my entire life, and discovered I didn’t really know how. Though if I concentrated, I could feel the sensation of the air cycler’s gentle current across my thighs, such that it created tiny goose bumps.
    I felt delirious with sudden joy, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes while I smiled broadly.
    My mind began to burst with questions.
    “All in good time, Mister Jaworski,” said Chow. “We’re sorry we had to keep you off-line for so long. Even with advanced gen, it takes years to grow a clone body to the decanting stage. You were put into the queue as soon as possible.”
    One of the other women, a younger and freckly red-head, asked the next question.
    “I’m Surgeon’s Assistant Keilor. What would you like to know first?”
    “Can I…” I stopped to really think about it. Then I said, “Can I get something to eat, please?”
    The entire group smiled widely.
    I looked around. “Is that the right question?”
    “You bet,” Keilor said, taking my hand.
    Another mind jolt, directly from her.
    I slid off the table, and discovered I knew how to walk.
    • • •
    The Outbound were far more numerous and sophisticated than I’d expected them to be. While the solar system had gone about its myopic, self-centered business, the Outbound had secured great whacks of the Kuiper Belt, both for mining and colonization. Eventually they’d erected a monitoring network that had, at first, been designed to keep an eye on the rest of humanity that lived “down in the hole”, as I’d learned they called everyone who lived inside the orbit of Neptune.
    It was this grid which had first detected the Others, who had apparently erected a monitoring network of their own, dating back to the twentieth century.
    Things sort of snowballed from there.
    Exchanging information and technology with the other sentient species of nearby star systems, the Outbound rapidly outpaced those of us “down in the hole”, so that the Outbound were able to easily mask their gradual takeover of the Kuiper.
    None of the Outbound had been surprised by the outbreak of war. They’d seen it coming for many years. The wedge-shaped ship that had intercepted the observatory had been one of numerous, automated picket craft designed to intercept anything sent from the solar system, and determine if it was friendly or hostile. Had I been one of the killsats, or any other hostile entity, I’d have been destroyed. But once they found my memory arrays and determined that I was benign, they pulled the arrays, sampled tissue for cloning, returned