It all started with a fairly innocuous question I asked Kawathra last night during our Corpse Seeker ride from Shady's date with Commander Sillicia.

  "Could you print a human using the Corpse Seeker's printer?"

  "Technically?" The magpie girl tilted her head at the particular angle birds use when they've spotted something shiny. "Yes. Absolutely. The fabrication matrix can reproduce any organic structure down to the atomic level. Why?"

  “Juuuust figuring out the limits," I said, failing to sound casual.

  Shady wiggled where she lay sprawled across my lap, legs resting on Nexxali's thigh. "Are you thinking about making a backup body in case we break this one?"

  "I mean..." I started.

  "Heh." Nexxali's ears perked up. "Kawthy, explain the technical limitations before our Emperor gets any ideas about creating an army of himself."

  Kawathra clicked her dark beak, black feathers glimmering with iridescence at the edges. Charts bloomed in the air around her head featuring anatomical diagrams, cellular structures, probability matrices cascading like digital waterfalls.

  "Creating a physical duplicate with magitek is trivial!" Her analytical tone kicked into high gear. "The Seeker's bio-printer can absolutely scan and reproduce your exact body structure, accounting for exact skeletal density, neural pathway complexity, 38 trillion bacteria, 30 trillion human cells...."

  "But?" I prompted, cutting her rant short.

  "But the most important thing doesn't transfer," she said simply.

  "Um, so if you fully scanned and then duplicated me with the Corpse Seeker printer what would come out?"

  "You, but wrong," Kawathra said.

  "Wrong how?"

  "Soulless," Kawathra said.

  I stared at her. "So what you're saying is that this highly advanced alien machine cannot duplicate human souls?"

  "Souls are… complicated," Kawathra hedged. "They exist as quantum information structures that interface with physical bodies through Astral resonance, but the exact mechanism of—"

  "Kawthy," Nexxali interrupted. "You're doing that thing where you hide behind rant jargon when you don't want to admit something."

  The magpie's feathers ruffled. "I am not—"

  "You absolutely are," Shady chimed in, poking at Kawathra with a clawed finger. "Just tell Ashy what happens if you print him without a soul. Does he come out as a sexy vegetable or what?"

  "Not... exactly," Kawathra admitted. "A soulless duplicate would have all general functions. Breathing, heartbeat, cellular repair. But it would come out wrong. Like a muddy mirror version of you."

  Her charts shifted to display two human silhouettes side by side. One glowed with intricate patterns of inner light, the other remained dim and hollow.

  "Muddy how? Like, why don't the Omnids just print themselves infinitely?" I asked. "Or print themselves infinite Prads to serve the invasion force?"

  "Because soulless bodies are... problematic," Kawathra continued, her charts displaying eerie shadow-tentacles reaching toward the hollow human silhouette and then filling it with fractal shimmering things. "It's a taboo to duplicate an Omnid for a reason. Souls aren't just skill and consciousness containers. They're the thing that manages the defensive barriers of the physical body. Without one, a body becomes..." She paused, searching for the right term. "Permeable."

  "Permeable to what?"

  "To Everything in the Astral," she said matter-of-factly. "Parasitic entities, wandering consciousness fragments, memetic infections, concept-eaters. Think of a soul as an immune system manager for the metaphysical. Without it, a printed body becomes a vacancy sign for anything looking for meat to wear. The longer a body stays without a soul, the more entropic things get in. The most common thing that gets in is Astral viruses."

  "The Astral has... viruses?" I blinked.

  "Yepp," Kawathra nodded. "The most commonly documented Astral virus is ‘Everything’."

  "Everything?" I stumbled on her verbiage, not sure if it was the actual title of a specific thing or the word ‘everything’.

  "Uh-huh," the Datamancer murmured. "The Everything virus. The Echo of the Wormwood star. Usually it gradually turns the body into a ghoul, infesting it with the 'Astral Phantom' skill. The Frontenachii ran many experiments on humans, removing souls and putting them back in. An infection of Everything starts pretty much as soon as the soul is removed. It begins with limb numbness and escalates into desire to eat other humans to stay warm, to suck out souls."

  "So soulless bodies turn into... zombies?" I asked.

  "Not quite," Kawathra said. "Ghouls. There's a technical distinction. Zombies are reanimated corpses controlled by necromantic magic. Ghouls are living bodies infected with Everything, driven by an insatiable hunger for warmth and life force. They retain a varying degree of cognitive function, which makes them significantly more dangerous."

  "Great," I muttered. "That's so much better."

  "Don't worry, Ashy," Shady commented from my lap. "If you turn into a ghoul, I'll put you down humanely. Quick snap of the neck, very merciful."

  "So romantic," I deadpanned.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  She grinned, showing far too many teeth and then licked my hand with her oversized, red tongue.

  "Kawthy, what about this Earth specifically? Does the Astral virus infection occur at the same rate here?" Nexxali asked.

  "Excellent question!" Kawathra sprouted new charts. "Earth's Astral plane is significantly denser than most colony or dead worlds. The thickness assuredly creates a natural barrier that slows metaphysical infection rates. Let me calculate..."

  More charts. Probability matrices. Infection progression curves overlaid with temporal data.

  "Based on Astral density measurements from multiple planetary locations, accounting for local variance in magical saturation, cross-referencing with documented ghoul transformation rates from forty-seven different colonies the Third Fleet founded..." She paused, pupils dilating as she processed. "A soulless human body on Earth would take approximately... thirteen to eighteen days before the Everything infection reaches critical threshold and ghoul transformation becomes total."

  "Longer than I expected," I admitted.

  "Oh yes!" Kawathra bobbed her head enthusiastically. "Most colony worlds see infection and transformation pretty quickly. Earth's thick Astral acts like... mmm... like trying to push through honey versus water. The Astral parasites have to work harder to penetrate."

  "Still ends with the same hungry corpse situation though," Shady pointed out.

  "Yes, yes," Kawathra conceded. "Eventually. But the extended timeline creates interesting experimental opportunities! We could monitor the degradation process, document the stages of infection, establish baseline data for—"

  Nexxali chortled. "Someone's excited about ghoul experiments."

  "What, no! I'm simply observing that—"

  "That you want to print soulless bodies and watch them rot from the inside out," Shady finished. "Very ethical science."

  "Ethics are a social construct designed to limit experimental progress!" Kawathra stated without a hint of irony.

  “Why don't our dead bodies rise from the graves then? Those are soulless, no?” I asked.

  “Your dead bodies are linear, magic free. They are not magitek-forged constructs created via duplication magic!” The Datamancer explained. “Anything created by a Corpse Seeker fabricator is essentially soaked in magrad and is fertile ground for Astral infections.”

  "Hrm. Does the crystalloid infection prevent ghoulification?" I asked.

  "Crystalloid infection suspends organic decay processes and opposes entropy. ‘Everything’ is a conceptual infection aligned to Entropy and Infinity. The nature of the fungal network actively repairs and maintains the host body, gradually crystallizing things. It prevents the degradation cascade that Everything requires to fully manifest."

  "What about gun units? Do they have souls?" I asked.

  "Gun units..." Kawathra clicked her beak. "Are a network of soul bits, comprising an approximation of a soul-like patchwork for each gun unit. Most importantly, they lack organic components that would decay. No organic decay, no ghoulification.”

  “How do guns get power?”

  “Each gun unit has a miniature dragonheart beastcore reactor inside it. If a gun doesn't have enough energy due to fighting all day, it simply goes to sit inside the nearest available Corpse Seeker close to its dragonheart reactor. Sorta like little dragons stay close to their mama to power up their hearts."

  “Dragon lore is the cutest lore,” Nexxali commented.

  "Imagine being born as a gun." Shady yawned from my lap. "Your entire existence is 'pew pew' and occasionally getting warm snuggles from Corpse Seeker mom."

  “Aww, you make Corpse Seekers sound cute.” Nexxali kneaded Shady's legs.

  "Could you make me into a partially organic gun unit?" I asked.

  The question hung in the air as everyone stared at me.

  "What," Shady said flatly.

  "Could you create me a suit that would make me stronger and faster, plus connect me to another gun unit with a ‘printed human body’ inside it. So that I could control two bodies at the same time, be in two places at once?"

  Kawathra's pupils dilated. Charts exploded around her head like a supernova of data. Probability matrices cascaded in overlapping layers, neural pathway diagrams intersected with magitek schematics, energy consumption calculations spiraled into recursive patterns.

  "Oh," she breathed. "Oh. Oh!"

  "That's a lot of 'oh's," Nexxali observed.

  "This is—" Kawathra's mane fluttered, feathers rustling with barely contained excitement. "The architecture is already there! Gun units already interface with their operators through neural-sympathetic resonance produced by miniature neural interfaces we implant into prads and commanders. We'd just be... reversing the polarity. Making you the operator and the printed body the weapon!"

  "Is that a… Yes?" I asked.

  "Yes! Absolutely yes!" Kawathra bobbed on the couch. More charts bloomed. "We'd need to establish a bidirectional consciousness link. Create a neural bridge that maintains coherent identity across two simultaneous instances. Split your processing between bodies while preserving unified subjective experience... Ah! There's just one problem. According to the Frontenachii human-research files… a human mind cannot process two completely distinctive streams of observation…”

  "My mind is fully split in two," I said. "Feel free to scan me for such. Shady did it.”

  Shady nodded. Kawathra tapped something on her holographic controls and a robot arm descended from the ceiling scanning my head with a red beam.

  "You're not magic at all are you?" Kawathra's exuberance dimmed suddenly as she looked over a thousand charts that detonated in front of her and then slowly faded away. “The only thing I can see is that your mind is sheared in half by… Wendigo hooks.”

  "Took you long enough," Nexxali chortled.

  "But, the... but," the Datamancer stammered out. "But... you're... not... the local god at all?"

  I stared at the distraught Datamancer, wondering whether she would turn against us if I confirmed this fact.

  "But the—" She gestured vaguely at me, then at the air around me, then back at me. "The reality manipulation! The impossible coincidences! The way you appeared exactly when and where you needed to! The—" Her voice cracked. "The statistical impossibility of your entire existence, of your successes!"

  We stared at the fretting bird.

  "I ran the numbers!" The magpie's voice pitched higher, charts flickering back to life around her in chaotic bursts. "I calculated probability matrices across seventeen different dimensional frameworks! I cross-referenced your behavioral patterns with documented Divine-tier entity manifestations! I analyzed your Astral signature against forty-three known reality-bending artifacts! Every single calculation pointed to you being—" She stopped, hexasuit-covered chest heaving. "Being… something."

  "I'm just a guy," I shrugged.

  "JUST A GUY?!" Kawathra's feathers puffed out, making her head look a quarter as large. "Just a guy who convinced a Frontenachii Heiress to betray her entire family! Just a guy who subverted a Marshal Commandant's blood contract! Just a guy who turned our most devoted, top Commander into a willing traitor! Just a guy who convinced me to... No, no, no. You cannot be 'just a guy'. You! Princess! You must know something! I see you grinning there! Tell me what you know!"

  "He's a liminal tree," Shady commented.

  “What?” Kawathra sputtered.

  "A liminal tree," Shady repeated, sounding extra-cryptic. "You know. Not quite here, not quite there. Roots in multiple realities. Branches reaching through probability. Very tree-like. Very liminal. Very him. Not sure what it all means. My Fractal Engine heart likes how it tastes."

  Nexxali clicked her tongue looking contemplative, gold eyes flashing from me to the Wendigo.

  "How can he be 'just a guy' AND a 'liminal tree' AND… and—" Kawathra stopped, pupils contracting.