Were you looking when the flash hit, a click, a smile on your face? Or were you simply drained away one moment at a time, shot from cover?
Blessed are they, the fractured—a hundred selves all separate, equal in self despite a certain primacy intrinsic in one's faded memories of another....
It's getting crowded; the management is aware—the pressure of some billion disembodied voices can be quite discomfiting. They apologize, but the re-supply ships are notoriously late, and management's best efforts at pruning, well! They admit, with some self-deprecation, they hadn't imagined how fast you all would grow!
Your bodies? Oh! They're outside, as ever, empty shells just dreaming that they're you, running off some half-imagined hint of what you were to them; don't worry, they're fine. Just bringing more of you to harvest in the most—you say, humane?—manner possible; as if not a thing had changed.
First published in Jabberwocky, issue 17,
2012-12-21.
That magazine is gone, so this is the copy that’s left.
As it ran
Jabberwocky, issue 17 (2012)
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