Six years ago your sister said, Tell Emma it was never her fault, and then she overloaded my reactor core and threw herself into the Rift and died.

  You are not her. You are four inches shorter, thirty-one pounds lighter, and thirteen percent less muscular. Your hair is mouse brown and a lukewarm texture between straight and curly; you stutter sometimes when you speak; you have been diagnosed with mild osteomalacia and there is a curve to your sternum that lends you the appearance of fragility. Your heart beats faster than hers did (by two point five beats per minute, on average) but with less vigor (you are on the cusp of high blood pressure: 132 mmHg systole, 85 mmHg diastole). When the officers look you in the eye, you do not hold their gazes.

  I am not her, either. I am the ghost of her, or less. I am the helm intelligence—the brains, the gutted remains—of Tokyo Calling, who was your sister’s submarine megafauna combat defense unit before she killed herself and my body, too, and sent me alone, disembodied, drifting back up to the surface of the South China Sea.

  I have been asleep for six years. Now you are here, in the pilot’s chamber they rebuilt for me, floating in the pitch-dark saltwater womb that should have been hers instead. And I am awake.

  -

  They transmitted your intake data to me three hours ago upon your arrival. I was still slumbering then; I did not know yet that you were Ray’s sister—twenty-three years old, blood type B positive, enneagram type four, turbulent, thus compatible with my own disposition.

  You stood before them then and waited, shivering. You had nothing with you but your bag and the clothes on your back: standard enough for an Alcatraz School graduate’s civvies, formless white tee and beige sweats, sneakers five years old, the duffel faded and freckled by sun and water damage, your hair in disarray.

  You’d worn it short for five years; at Alcatraz you’d had it down to your ears, a cloud of untamed brown curls—now it was shaved all around your head except on the front left side, where it hung limply into your eyes. Your face was pale, unremarkable despite the moles here and there; you had a habit of chewing your bottom lip when you were nervous. You’d bitten it to a split, bloody, down the middle by the time you got to the narrow gray counter where the assistant they’d set up (flat-faced, flat-eyed, the way a real human might have been in the same position) gazed down at each of you in line from a flat glass screen and asked in a monotone who you were, where you’d been assigned, and if you knew where you were going.

  You stepped up to the glass. The assistant said, Name, please.

  Kanagawa, you answered, Emma Eiko, and your voice hardly trembled; your hands were white-knuckled.

  Assignment, said the assistant tonelessly.

  You said, Cadet wing.

  And then you thought better of that, because “cadet wing” wasn’t the proper name for it—but the assistant intoned, Place your thumb now on the pad, please, and you stuck yours out like a zombie, like more of a robot than the robot itself, and you hardly noticed the prick that followed.

  Did you know then—that you were here to replace her? Surely you did. They told you she’d been posted here during the interview, seven days before; the name of her team was on your form. Did you think about it on the flight over? Did it haunt you as you stood in line, waiting to fill the vacuum left in the wake of her corpse?

  But if you knew you did not show it. You let them take your biosigns; you gazed directly into the light of the camera they’d set up for IDs and you did not blink. And when the assistant asked, Do you know where you’re going, soldier? you said Yes, and you did not flinch, not even when the digital gong chimed and spat out—from a dark slot beneath the screen—a set of blue-gray fatigues, tailored to the measurements they’d taken from you a minute before.

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  (The chime was as much to move the line forward as to make sure you are unafraid of sudden loud noises. You’ll get used to those here.)

  Ray’s sister and in spite of it all just another cadet in processing, a gray scrap of meat: you shuffled onto the train to base and up to the dormitory and left the duffel and fatigues on your bed and did not stop to take your shoes off, because they had told you to be in the hangar at fourteen hundred, and so you were. And when the officers came in to wake me up you did not flinch then, either. But when the doors to the launch bay opened—

  Then, oh, then you came undone.

  (This was my last memory of you outside of me, before the sync: my great red eye revealed you far below me as a minnow before the looming shadow of a heron; you were small, so small, smaller even than your brethren. Not even the size of my littlest finger.)

  But you went willingly up the elevator and into my saltwater maw, the pilot’s chamber, the diving bell. You stripped without argument and let them manhandle you into the water, into the cradle, let them strap you in while the old woman with the face split in half by a lightning-jagged scar watched—of course they had the colonel directly handle the sister of the Rachel Kanagawa, press drank this sort of thing up—and you did not complain when they fit the helmet over your head and you could see nothing but the blinking idle lights of the interface along the inside of it. You entered me like a sacrificial lamb.

  That part I do not remember from within your head; that part I know only from looking over my own diagnostics logs, later. The first thing I remember from inside you is this:

  Cold. Bone-chilling. You startle from it. You struggle—there is nothing to struggle against, the chamber is far bigger than you are; the cradle spins with you, and you don’t know which way is up or down, and you are falling, maybe screaming, maybe drowning. (Not drowning, of course, because the helmet is airtight and the O2 feed is nominal. But your mouth flutters helplessly all the same.)

  And then you feel me.

  I am a ghost even now; I am the chip they inserted under the skin at the base of your neck not an hour before (the site is still tender; there is dried blood there, though you won’t notice till later). I am weightless, like you in the saltwater. I am nothing. But I am everything too. I am the weight of the passenger you had been told about in class but never truly fathomed till now, a whole exabyte of data accumulated over years and years of fighting and struggling and winning and losing. Not a person. Bigger than a person. Far bigger.

  You go limp.

  This is familiar to me. I felt it twelve years ago when your sister was first offered up into my maw. Had I a heart it would ache with longing for her, for the body I’ve lost. I do not have a heart.

  Briefly we tussle, my ego and your id. Do you regret it, entering the program, coming here to the reclaimed shore of Hong Kong, climbing into me all but naked and giving yourself unto the machine? I don’t know yet; I haven’t calibrated well enough to know this layer of you, the way I knew her, your dead sister. (It has been thirty milliseconds since you entered the vessel.) But I know that I will in due time. And for now I know this:

  You are a hundred million things, sound shape color taste form, biting kicking scratching, blood and plasma and muscle and tendon and sinew, bone and teeth and skin, breath and breath and breath—heartbeat and heartbeat—and you want. You want. What do you want?

  This I ask you; amidst the storm I reach out to you—up through your brainstem, through the medulla into the pons, and from there I writhe my way across sulci to your amygdala, a long and labored foray of electrochemical impulses (ten milliseconds). And there I cling on with all my might. Through your howling I ask you again: What do you want?

  And your answer comes back after a long, long pause (fifty milliseconds)—I do not even think you know yet that you have answered me, that you have thought it.

  You say, I want to be found.

  (This is how I know you are her sister. She answered the same thing when I asked her all those years ago.)

  Slowly, slowly, I feel you calm; your heart rate comes down, the goosebumps on your skin stay but do not grow. The shape of you takes form.

  It’s bittersweet, isn’t it? You’ll understand that in time, too. For now I nestle against your cerebellum, in the frightened animal part of you, and I soothe your sparking nerves. And in an old, old voice—one I have not used in more than six years—I whisper, Welcome home.