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Being forced to address this here, where anyone could hear, made Alina heat with embarrassment. “No… I just think they’re not the monsters they were back then.”

“Right. Picked the right one to shack up with too, didn’t ya?” The woman glared. “Bet your preciouscommanderwon’t be slitting your throat any time soon like he did my daughter’s.”

The blood drained from Alina’s face so fast that her vision went a bit hazy for a few ticks.

“I’m… I’m terribly sorry,” she stumbled over her words, her tongue dry and heavy in her mouth.

“Sorry won’t bring her back, will it?”

“That will never happen again, I swear to you,” Alina tried to placate. She hadn’t discussed this with Threxin yet, but surely now that they had a vaccine and even planned to equip the uhyre with limiters, uhyre-human relations wouldbe permitted? Anything else would make him a hypocrite, and Alina was pretty sure he wasn’t one… She hoped.

Alina tried again. “Part of the reason I did this at first… I wanted to work with him, for our people’s benefit. So what happened to your daughter would not happen again.”

The nutriwrap packet crinkled in the woman’s clenching fist, and Alina could tell nothing would get through.

“Whoring yourself out for the common good? Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

She had seen so many people leave over the prior days.

Alina watched the scene through the one-way mirror. Technically anyone could come and see the process of Upload. It was a way of normalization—a celebration. People were ecstatic about being given the choice to Upload. Some even thought this was the best possible outcome. Many would never have been able to afford Heaven.

They weren’t told when exactly that final jump to their final destination would be, only that the plan involved settling on a habitable planet with the uhyreeventually. On Threxin’s orders, Orion Halen could only give his people a rough idea of what was happening. They were going to make a jump to a habitable Earthlike planet. If itwasindeed habitable and Earthlike, they would land. They would share this planet with the uhyre who invaded them. If not… Well, if not their future was entirely unclear.

That was enough for a steady stream of volunteers to manifest.

Alina refused to call it dying, because that wasn’t what it was. But the way the life drained from their bodies and the flash of realization in that critical moment sure looked like death of a certain form.

But she could see the rapid flash of the rig’s helm and theserver unit as her shipmates’ minds were transferred to the holding database of the ship.

Kaia had been there too, watching and pretending Alina didn’t exist. Alina didn’t bother trying to talk to her. At some point their silence began to feel almost companionable, except Alina knew better.

Kaia hated her guts. She hoped it was some consolation that this was what she had asked for in the first place—for Threxin to give people the choice to Upload should the prospect of living with the uhyre, or even just alongside them, be so unbearable to them.

But children were always hard to witness. The face of the girl in the rig, her eyes nearly completely shrouded by the helmet over her head, relaxed into perpetual stillness. She looked almost exactly the same. With the older people, their wrinkles would smooth out and freeze on their faces into a vision of ultimate peace.

But the children had no lines or wear to show in the first place. They’d had an entire life ahead of them to earn those.

The family of the girl smiled and cried at the same time as the blinking Upload indicator solidified into a constant green glow. It was done.

As the small body was unstrapped from the rig and taken away, there wasn’t much time for goodbyes. The mother at the rigside squeezed her husband’s hand, letting the nurse guide her into the rig. Alina couldn’t hear them as their lips moved, but it was enough to see the man lean in to kiss his wife’s lips. They would be reunited in minutes, and yet his brow was furrowed and his hands shaking even as he comforted his wife.

When the woman had passed, it was the husband’s turn, and by this point he was visibly impatient. Alina couldn’t blame him—he’d just watched his wife and daughter pass on to another plane of existence. It must feel devastating, being suddenly so alone. It had to Alina when her parents both left.She’d spent so many years caring for her mom, been so happy when she overcame the physical side of her illness. But her mind never recovered, and her parents decided their only option was to Upload, together. After everything Alina had done to try to get them all back to normal, it had all been for nothing.

At first Alina looked forward to joining them in Heaven one day, if she could afford it. Now she had bigger things to look forward to.

CHAPTER 55

THREXIN

Threxin stood in the Upload observation space, hands clasping elbows across his chest as he watched. The Uploads had been going relatively smoothly. After the initial commotion subdued by Orion Halen, a total of nine hundred humans opted to take the offer to Upload before their time. Orion and his female had arranged some silly human system in which those who were already registered did not get a free pass, prioritizing those who otherwise had no means to Upload. Not a ship week later, a steady stream of additional volunteers kept trickling in.

It was not enough to meet Threxin’s quota of depleting the human population by half, but a certain female was beginning to wear him down in her demands for him to find a solution to avoid disposing of the extras. Threxin glanced sideways, Alina Argoud standing beside him. On the other side of the one-way view, Kaia Halena loomed in what had become her customary corner.

Threxin had been observing some of the procedure along with some of his cohort for the sake of curiosity. Humans were placed into a large rig, an oversized helm with a multitude of electrodes and scanners atop their heads. More electrodes were placed alongside their body, concentrated at theirabdomen to capture gut scans. Those were allegedly important to compile a holistic human personality matrix and neural function mapping.

The process was efficient, taking about five ship minutes once the rig was activated. What was not efficient is the ceremony prolonging the entire experience. The Uploaded human usually demanded time to mentally prepare their faculties. Worse, family members and friends in various states would gather around each human to say their goodbyes. Thus a five-minute affair could drag on for an entire hour or more.

That was precisely what was happening now, as they looked on at a younger male surrounded by a gaggle of kin. He had been holding up the rig for too many ticks. They did not have enough time to waste on such things.

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