Layla was bleeding out.

Her neurons began to supernova and transmute into a new electrical form. A maglev of old memories zipped past her. She was thinking about that one time she saw Anderson’s face explode.

She pressed her fingertips into her face and realized why she was freezing. Half of her face was missing. She found herself desperately crawling against the ground to search for her leftovers. Some reptilian instinct inside of her demanded completeness.

She pulled bits of shrapnel out of her face—white, chalky skull shard residue blended with gray matter and synapse terminals.

She was dying again, but she was used to it.

But the little girl staring into her eyes and watching her slip away was new.

She looked so familiar.

CURRENT LOOP
0145

“Welcome back, Layla.”

The Recommissioning Facility was dark, an all-seeing red eye pinned onto the ceiling above her head. The facility had forgotten that lights were necessary for humans.

The red eye darted from one side to another, faintly outlining different machines enveloping her vat pod. Her skin sensitive to stimuli. A clusterfuck of sensory overload, a congealed and gelatinous cooling gel cradling her.

An uneasy pressure in the back of her neck. Wires piercing into her neural socket, rattling and shifting around in place as she tried to move. She could feel the neural plug’s long needle puncturing her brain stem, its sprawling wires laying a parasitic nest inside of her, tousling around her rib cage, pelvis, and spine.

“That was a rough one,” the all-seeing, forever red eye cackled. The vat pod popped open, Layla’s teeth clattering and her skin stinging as she fell out on the floor.

“We attempted to resell the organs from your previous body for financing. But your location tag is offline. Collections couldn’t find it.”

Layla gritted her teeth, getting used to warm blood suddenly back in circulation through her, feeling her insides settling back into space and squelching.

“We have been unable to verify if the self-destruct was activated.”

Struggling to pull air into her newborn lungs. She tried to stand. Her knees gave out, and she collapsed on the floor, back into the stream of slush. She felt hypothermic. Faint lights opened, blinding her.

“This means that there is a military-grade shell somewhere out there with priceless combat augmentations rigged into its body. It could be in anyone’s hands.”

She stared at her palms, studying the augmentation scars and mycelium grafts covering modified bits of her body. Gears whistled and turned inside of her fingers.

“You had to take out a loan to finance your current body. You are approximately forty-six million dollars in debt.”

Rudimentary components.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Unfortunately, with your credit score, you could only afford standard-issue military augmentations on a high-interest 250-year payment plan.”

She realized how much less she felt like herself without a shotgun strapped inside of her right arm.

“You want me to find my body with a basic starter pack of augs?”

“You’re a Natural after all.”

The facility used to be full of different squirming and restlessly running life-forms. That red eye used to be a woman named Dania who sat there with a clipboard, legs crossed. Ten different bodies would check on her neural and physiological condition as she emerged from that pod.

In those times, it took two months of physio, speech therapy, and reflex training to get back into form. These days, it took ten minutes of grounding procedures to run back into battle.

Nothing ever died on Kowasu. Or, more appropriately, nothing was ever allowed to die.

Motor Functions

Blinking. Rotating arms and legs, clockwise, counterclockwise. Weapon handling, finger on the trigger—shoot, shoot, shoot. Patience, running out gradually. Mundanity simmering.

Digestion

Vomiting a stale cracker. Dextro and levo configurations all wrong, her gastrointestinal biomes, completely fucked.

“We can replace your stomach once you acquire the necessary funds.”

Recognition

A flower. A cat. An owl. An enemy combatant. An ally. The Kowasu colony wrapping around the Administrative Center. General establishing shots of her daily routine. Photos flashing in front of her, piercing her retinas.

A little girl with dimples. Lush locks of blonde hair draping her shoulders, her princess-like dress complemented by a little silver tiara. Fairy wings strapped to her torso, a wand in her hand.

“Who is that?”

“That is you. When you were young.”

She didn’t remember that she looked so pretty in the past.

Therapy [Optional]

“You can’t afford therapy,” the all-seeing red eye said.

“I thought I had free therapy in my employment package,” Layla said, testing out her peripheral vision and coordination, navigating through the dark room.

“It’s been taken out of your new contract. Due to your debt to the Administration, we’ve had to cancel bonuses and benefits for you until your loan is paid off.”

“Aren’t you supposed to care for my physical well-being?”

“Your essential organs are all working.”

“My brain isn’t essential?”

“You can conquer anything if you put your heart to it. And we loaned you a working one last we checked.”

Introspection

She stared at her reflection in a mirror fixed into a panel in a wall.

A faint white light washed her features. A woman standing there and looking back at her.

The woman was muscular, with defined cheekbones and jaw. Short auburn hair and green, quartz-like eyes. Sickly, blemished skin and elf-like thin features.

Layla didn’t recognize herself.

The Recommissioning Facility was a transitional space for the undead. The once populated and energetic offices were sealed behind mechanical panels. These hallways once had other Enforcers gambling, locker-room talk, office politics, and coffee machines short-circuiting power to the water dispenser.

Now it was just her.

Another all-seeing red eye stared at her from the ceiling, recognizing her approaching the weapons dispensary: a slot in the wall.

A standard-issue pistol and rifle slid out.

She felt compelled to kick the dispensary until it regurgitated her favorite daggers.

Her armor was built for short-term performance rather than longevity, kind of like her.

She caught her reflection one last time in the all-seeing eye’s lens.

Nope, still didn’t recognize herself.

LOOP 0050

“When was it?”

Anderson was smoking a cigarette, sitting naked by the window. Layla was relearning him at a distance, trying to enjoy his presence again within their cramped housing unit. The civilian colonists of Kowasu envied them and their condos inside the Admin Tower in the center of the colony. But really, the only thing to envy was the private bathrooms.

The Admin Tower clung to the colony canopy as a pupa, descending in a helix-like twisting form toward the ground. The rest of the colony spiraled around the central tower, a mass of interwoven and intersecting centipedes. Anderson watched the heavily congested composition of the universe down there. Then his eyes shot toward the vents in the canopy, blowing oxygen from their bellies. The ground shook from mining constructs deep below, their shrill sounds harsh against the ears and sending ripples through Kowasu. Terramorphing. Surrounding the spiraling residential and work districts were Network Nodes, their lights bathing sections of the colony in a distinct hellish crimson hue.

No one had seen Kowasu’s moons in a very long time. The Administration had announced that a canopy was necessary due to increased radiation from the local star.

Allegedly, sometime between the forty-fifth and fiftieth loop, Anderson sold his intestinal tracts, his amygdala, and his kidney to buy Layla a ring. Apparently, Layla found the gesture romantic and agreed to marry him.

Both of them were off-put by that. Neither did they recognize themselves in their wedding photos, nor did they feel anything after two hours of sweating on top of one another.

Anderson didn’t like Layla.

She felt nothing. She gave nothing. She expected nothing. A personality dry and consisting of so many neural edits that she was left in a state where he wondered if she could be considered a completely conscious human.

“When was what?” she asked, wiping herself with a rag.

“When did we become so uncomfortable with being human?”

She shrugged.

“I mean, we made it all, didn’t we? You think bug colonies are actively hostile against their own success?”

She joined him at the window, his hair tousled, sweat still dripping. He passed his cigarette to her.

“I’m tired from the constant looping,” he said.

“You’ll pay off your debts eventually.”

“Don’t you feel it too?”

“Feel what?”

“So completely fucking incongruent.”

CURRENT LOOP
0145

Kowasu was a company planet, its architecture facilitating that label. Everything accommodated labor, from the dark winding paths to the vertical and horizontal sprawling tunnels with infinite stairwells and the general ant-colony-likeness of it all. Constant reminders that human purpose facilitated human work, not human comfort.

Every conscious life-form on Kowasu was born into a citizen registration certificate titled “Employment Contract,” most conflict resolution involving summary execution at some point of the process.

A missing Admin asset armed with state-of-the-art military tech and millions of wasted R&D funds was no small business. Curfew was called, doors were sealed shut, the colony was barren. Shadows of life shuffled behind black opaque windows.

The Residential District towered above her head. An overgrown life-form of twisted metal ravaging Kowasu’s organic skin. A meta-reality embossed in her vision, a blinking map on the bottom right corner of her eyes. Footsteps echoing in the blackness, sewage water sloshing under her against linear floor grilles. A stink of shit and necrotic ooze swelling in her nostrils.

The rumbling sounds of mining, thumping like the heartbeat of the planet. Tunnel ceiling above with oxygen rushing through pipes in parallel with water.

She stared at her old body’s dried blood coagulated and splattered on the floor, chunks of her leftover meat clogging gaps in the tiles.

“Connect to Admin.”

[Connection failed. Live agent unavailable in current package.]

[Hello, Soldier! I am your neural network AI assistant. I will be your sidekick in this life.]

“I told them to never put another AI assistant inside of my skull.”

[Together, you and I can conquer anything!]

She saw a dead shell in necrosis laying on the street. Mouth wide open, head caved in. Decomposing raw meat, remnants of augs ripped out from it. Civil forfeiture.

[An informant has responded to the bounty on your body!]

The informant’s silhouette highlighted in her vision. Somewhere above her head, on the forty-fifth floor, she saw him shuffling inside his room.

[Mom]

She felt a sudden panic swell inside of her as she heard a voice. She placed her hand on the pistol hanging by her hip.

[Everything okay, Soldier?]

The feeling dissipated.

“I thought I heard something.”

LOOP 0073

There was a massacre in the residential district.

The solar system was on fire, and Kowasu’s closest sister colonies had been wiped out of existence with astral bombardment. Someone had the bright idea of gaining independence from Earth.

Kowasu had no such ambitions. Its local government benefited from subcontracting administrative duties from the United States. The US flag still sat imprinted on citizenship documents next to the Admin’s logo and copyright trademark.

The colony was suffocating. But it could easily recycle its greatest asset: the bodies.

Layla was buried underneath the bodies, the stench of dead tissue winding down her nostrils, the metallic taste of blood pooling between her lips.

Anderson pulled her out of the cluster.

As her eyes adjusted, she saw little collection bots already harvesting the shells they had put down within black garbage bags. Blood dripped on her from the floor above.

Anderson’s skin was red, both of them underneath a towering Network Node. It fluctuated as electronic neurons transmuted back into its belly from the bodies surrounding her.

“How many?” she asked, spitting out gunk inside of her mouth.

“Twenty-two. All neutralized.”

Layla looked at the panorama of death that encompassed her, bones crunching under her feet.

The market value of life typically falls in a post-death world.

There was a new movement of workers who had become attached to their current shells and refused to abide by decommissioning procedures. Instead, they held a civil strike. But peaceful protests and strikes are typically most effective in a framework that pretends to give a fuck.

The only thing that matters is if one’s labor is sellable. And protest was wasted labor.

“Bunch of dead newbies.”

Layla saw bodies of other Enforcers mixed into the decommissioned strikers.

“Imagine that. Shutting down training facilities led to kids playing pretend with rifles.”

Anderson and Layla were some of the last few Naturals. Recruits after them heavily relied on being “wired in” to the neural network, guided by an AI strategist coordinating and automating their movements. This meant whenever the Frontliners interfered with connections, the new batch of Enforcers had no training to fall back on. But replacing shells was more cost-effective than training facilities in the short term.

“I don’t get the strikes,” she groaned.

“What’s there to get? Some people like their bodies.”

“It’s a glorified meat suit.”

“You can’t say much about human sentimentality when you edited yours out of existence.”

“They’ll get new shells.”

“But it’s not this shell,” Anderson smiled, “You know what’s the perfect performing human?”

“What is?”

“One who has complete congruence and synchronization between the brain and the body. Would you like to let go of your perfect self if you found it?”

Layla ignored his ramblings.

“I hope I’m naturally buff again in my next life,” Anderson laughed before his head blew up beside her. She saw his brains splatter out and coat her face.

Despite her edits and suppressors, as she saw his tongue flung out of his mouth, she screamed.

She never understood why she screamed that day.

CURRENT LOOP
0145

It smelled of puke in every corner.

Maintenance was failing in the colony. A communal toilet shared between the worker families, cameras in every corner, and claustrophobic rooms stacked vertically, cramped horizontally. She felt herself as a giantess here.

Kowasu only gave as much as needed to keep the gears of work rolling, no matter the friction, the rust, and the sparks. The thumping of mining constructs continued relentlessly under their feet.

“I—I saw them rip apart that Enforcer body, flesh and bone all—”

A broken augmented eye staring off into an unknown corner. Another one still, staring at her.

The informant’s skin bore that look of constant labor: occupational dermatitis, cathode circuits inside of his skull shooting out sparks, a glitching techno hand with involuntary movement shooting up, darting down.

“Frontliners?”

“Aye, Fronties. Right there from my window, I saw.”

“You know which direction they went?”

“I don’t re—remember. Head scrambled. Thinking north or south. Left. Left, I think.”

A pointless exercise. She could hear his loose neural socket rattling with each involuntary reflex. He would be decommissioned soon.

“Ma’am, was—was I of help?”

“No.”

“My wife has never seen the twin moons. Moon watching costs a lot. I don’t have enough to see the night sky.”

The anti-radiation canopy had created a new stream of revenue: commodifying the sky. It was a popular exercise for the worker families.

“Come with better info next time—”

She paused. Inside of the room, behind the jittery man, there were two silhouettes. One was his wife, registered in the Neural Network. The other was a child, no name nor age appearing above its head.

[Soldier, an unregistered citizen.]

“Who do you have in there with you?”

“J—just my wife, ma’am.”

She kicked the door, and it collapsed over him. She entered, stomping over the old man’s torso. He screamed out, her boots crushing his rib cage.

There she was. Hardly older than eleven, small and fragile. She was a dichotomy, the one thing that did not yet belong to Kowasu or the Administration.

Completely organic, no ID, no neural network, no citizenship.

An uncaged bird.

[Eliminate her!]

“Stop—” the man’s scream was interrupted by a bullet through the skull. Next was the wife, who quickly moved in front of the organic girl. Gray matter shot out from the back of her head and coated the walls of the room.

Layla’s aim shifted toward the little girl, and she met her wide eyes.

[Kill!]

She quickly turned behind, hearing rapid footsteps against the metal grille of the floor. Two Frontliners approaching fast from behind. An ambush. She took cover.

She turned back, ready to fire at the girl.

Gone. A single window clung to a wall with an immediate panorama of the neighboring housing units, between them a black abyss that led to the sewage. And somewhere down there, the running little girl.

Registration was done at birth. The Admin’s trademarked neural augment was slipped inside of a birth pod into a developing embryo. It, like a parasite, clung to the back of the developing fetus and submerged into its skull. The augment then fixed itself into the brain.

All humans on Kowasu existed within a primary digital format, the physical form being no more than a carrier for raw digital data.

Those were the terms and conditions of citizenship on Kowasu: being on the grid. Organic existence implied detachment from the neural network, and detachment from the neural network implied a lack of constant surveillance. No dynamic pricing, no analytics, no manipulation of the sense of self.

Seeds of unknown and unfiltered human thought.

LOOP 0032

“You ever think about what you really are?” Anderson asked.

“I don’t.”

The twin moons were in Kowasu’s purple sky. And they would soon be veiled behind the black canopy the Administration was erecting above the colony.

“I wonder what I really am some of these days. Like, at a substrate level, you know? Take out the neural augments, what’s left behind.”

“Probably the same thing that’s here now.”

He took her hand. He tried to feel her. She gave no warmth in return.

“I don’t really know what I am. Maybe a psyop to create the perfect worker? I don’t know if I like things or if the world wants me to like things. What’s exactly left that belongs to me except this façade?”

“Your eyes,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Those two moons above. This moment. Do you feel anything?”

“I do.”

“What is it?”

“Serenity.”

“That belongs to you.”

He smiled, finding the answer uncharacteristically sentimental.

“Nah. I think if I liked being human, I wouldn’t be doing that.”

“Then what would you do?”

“Fuck every single second.”

The firefight was getting louder. They had both forgotten, as they were bleeding out and watching the moons, that they were still in the midst of combat. She could feel the bullet jammed somewhere in her side between meat and bone.

It was nothing.

Right next to her was Adam on his seventieth loop. He was laughing about how much bigger his dick was this time before an impact explosive hit his groin. He crawled against the floor, shouting about his immortality into the night.

To Anderson’s left was Tommy, a new recruit. He was also to her right. And above her. And maybe the wet chunks stuck between her teeth were also him.

Then there was Annabelle hiding as bullets whizzed by her head.

Like Tommy, she was new to this.

She was running on pure biology, disconnected from her suppressors. She had quickly realized that even if reincarnation was guaranteed, getting there could still be unbearably painful.

Layla didn’t bother saving her as the first bullet went into Annabelle’s shoulder, her screams echoing out. New recruits should die at least once.

Makes it less intimidating after that.

Somewhere between the cycles of constant battle, she had bled out whatever bits of self she had. She felt as a blank canvas for the Admin to imprint their wants on. She wondered if she’d eventually grow into her own skin and feel like her own body. But she felt more alien each passing day.

“You’re feeling the incongruence too, aren’t you?”

“I don’t like my nose.”

“Really?” he laughed and groaned, feeling the bullet inside of his body, “That’s it?”

“This thing I’m inside of is supposed to be my habitat. It’s the only house my consciousness has ever known. It’s the one true and objective thing that is discernibly me. Yet whenever I stare into my eyes, I don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“Me.”

CURRENT LOOP
0145

Target locked. Her finger twitched on the trigger as the two Frontliners entered her line of sight. Her eyes peeled back the layers of skin and muscle in their moving bodies, locking onto the brow line.

Focus.

The pistol kicked in her hands. A case tossed out into suspended animation as the bullet tore through time-space.

She could see every moment: the case in the air, the bullet closing in the gap, the Frontliner raising his rifle, the bullet penetrating through the first layer of his bone, the shards of skull shooting out from the back of his head, gray matter twisting around the bullet’s shape, eyes bursting out of their orbits.

The Frontliner fell.

[The other one is closing in!]

The other Frontliner charged at her. She dodged, his heated dagger taking strands of her hair. With a leg sweep, she brought him crashing down. He slashed air as she grabbed his wrist, twisting it. The dagger slipped from between his fingers and clattered onto the floor.

He screamed as her grip tightened. Synthetic bones fractured and crushed between her fingertips. With enough force, she swung out his mechanical arms from their sockets.

“F—fuck you,” he managed to say between gritted teeth, laying at her feet.

She raised her rifle, aimed at his head. But she paused, noticing a smile on his face.

“What is it?”

“We knew . . . things would go wrong. The whole room . . . is rigged, bitch.”

The realization sank in.

KABOOM!

LOOP 0121

Anderson threw up.

Hands stained red. A migraine setting in. Neural augments flushing in excitatory signals. Dopamine and serotonin choking the synapse terminals.

He had been feeling a certain level of glee smashing in the faces of Frontliners.

He was unsure if he even owned the “feel good” proteins and neurotransmitters of his brain anymore.

“I felt in control,” he said, cleaning saliva from his lips, “I finally felt like I was living.”

“That was just adrenaline.”

“You felt it too, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

Anderson had felt something fetishistic in violence, feeling naked as he let out a hundred life cycles’ worth of anger. Complete congruence. With each pummel of the rifle against the head, the complete union of all biological and neurological functions.

Layla studied the remnants of the firefight. The Frontliners were weaker these days, their stolen scraps of armor degrading, their guns outdated and aged. New Admin supplies were ID’d. Getting resupplies must have been difficult. Yet this new batch of rebels was armed with military-grade weaponry.

They put up a fight.

Layla watched a Frontliner crawling on the floor. She kicked him.

“Please—”

A young man, blood pooling into his clothes. He tried to turn back over as he started choking on his own blood.

“L—listen—” he said.

“No.”

“Please. Just—one sec.”

He kept heaving.

“This . . . this is my second time out. It felt harder this time.”

“What?”

“I want,” he coughed, “my old body back. This isn’t me.”

Layla shot him in the head.

CURRENT LOOP
0145

The little girl ran down a dark corridor. She wasn’t sure if it was the giant mining constructs under her feet slamming into geodes and rocks—sending out shockwaves through the floor—or if it was a rapidly running Enforcer behind her.

If she died, there were no second chances.

She descended down stairwells and slid down a ladder, her legs deep in a sloshing solution of sewage and microbes within the tunnels. She pushed against its currents, holding her nose. She felt agonized by the stains on her favorite white dress, but she had to focus on running.

She turned a corner and heard something slam into the tunnel, its presence sending ripples through the water.

She yelped, hearing the Enforcer’s gun go off behind her.

The giantess turned the corner, her pistol aimed right at her face.

The girl screamed.

The muzzle flashed.

The roof of the sewage tunnel collapsed.

Layla was half flesh and half char. Grenade shrapnel stabbed into her armor, caught between her skin and bone.

[Soldier, your old body is close.]

The map opened in her eyes, showing the coordinates of her previous corpse.

It was standing right in front of her, amongst the smoke and dust. She was staring right at it as it emerged, missing half of its face. No eyeballs in the sockets, a tongue flailing as a restless leech. Skin, muscle, and fascia barely clinging to her silvery, metallic skeleton. Wires of augmentations spilling out of her pores.

“Ma—mama,” she heard the little girl call out to the corpse.

[Mom]

Layla paused. But before she could think, she realized she was staring right into the hollow orbits of her corpse, its fist already tunneling toward her. Layla was fast, but her undead zombie body was faster. She felt the knuckles connect with her face, teeth break in her mouth.

The right hook was followed by an uppercut, her upper and bottom sets of teeth clattering against one another, her tongue caught in between. Brain rattling inside of the skull, banging against the walls.

Layla stepped back and drew her rifle, unloading it into the walking body.

She tossed the empty rifle at it, realizing the barrage did little to stop it. She ran. She could hear the water sloshing against the rapidly charging legs of the zombie.

She threw herself on the floor and watched it barrel past her into the exit ladders. The zombie smashed into the wall.

The six-foot-five-inch undead Enforcer stood and centered its focus on Layla again. She picked up her pistol, rapidly clicking on the trigger. But the corpse pummeled through a wall beside it and disappeared.

Suddenly, everything was silent except the booming of mine work. Her corpse’s heat signatures invisible to her eyes.

Fuck, where was it.

She could hear it, rumbling, straight at her from the right side. The wall came crumbling down. Its hands on her throat.

She shot at its face, ripping away its lower jaw, seeing through its throat.

The body didn’t give in.

She felt herself fading.

She kicked at the corpse and clawed at it.

[Engaging self-destruct, soldier—]

The corpse’s fingers penetrated into the back of her skull. She screamed, its fingernails agonizing as they punctured her neural augmentations. The screaming AI companion in her head went quiet.

She saw her neural chip in the zombie’s fingers disintegrate and dissolve into the waters below.

And then total darkness.

LOOP 0144

Prison guard duty.

Layla was bored. The detention facility was a singular room encircling within its belly the Neural Network, which housed all of Kowasu’s digital residents. The light of the network washed her in a crimson hue. Wires extended from corners of the room and connected into it.

The guard before her had been fired, aka shot in the head.

He was somewhere inside of the Neural facility being rehabilitated. Scripts ran in front of her, each line of code indicating a room within which a consciousness was stored.

Her eyes fell on the Needle, a thin, piercing wire that was plugged into the neural socket, allowing direct access into the network. She touched it with her fingertips, its tip drawing blood. It was sharp and discolored.

Something compelled it within her.

She plugged it into the back of her head.

[Loading]

A sudden migraine, an electric sensation in her brain. Sharp shooting pain and the pressure of something heavy rattling inside of her skull. She groaned, a new reality superimposing itself over her eyes. A three-dimensional digital universe.

[Entering Star Room]

[Welcome]

Layla was enveloped in a deep, rich blackness, countless stars studded in the sky above her. She was suspended in the nothingness, far away from the many layers of stellar bodies, all sitting equidistant from one another.

“Where is this?”

[The Registry]

[Each star is the consciousness of a person registered in Kowasu]

She hovered and levitated within the sky, seeing each star up close. They were small rooms, housing within their innards a living, conscious piece of human data moving within. Some pacing back and forth. Others dancing. Others simply sleeping.

Each room was similar in width and breadth. But the contents inside corresponded with the personalities of their occupants. It was always one couch, one lamp, one television set, their designs varying.

As she levitated amongst the many stellar rooms, she found herself drawn to one with a nostalgic orange glow. She drew in closer to the room and saw, through its transparent barriers, a young woman standing in there. Slender and small, with deeply blemished skin and vitiligo. She just stood there and watched her reflection.

Layla’s feet touched the floor, her body responding to the rough carpet texture of the mat underneath. There was a familiar fragrance of attar, a steaming milk chai sitting on a wooden side table. And then there was the young woman who turned around as she became aware of her presence.

She recognized her.

It was her.

“Who are you?” her real body asked herself.

“Layla.”

The slender girl heard that name and shook her head. She sat on the couch, wearing a pajama set ill-fitting and large on her small frame. Yes, Layla used to wear her brother’s pajamas because she always found his so much more comfortable than her own.

“I look young,” Layla kept staring at the other her.

“Because I am young,” the other her replied, “I was sixteen when we signed the papers. Don’t you remember anything? Or did they edit that out?”

“‘I?’”

“You’re a copy.”

Layla felt her personality edits come undone at the seams.

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t transfer consciousness. You can only copy it. Every variation of me that has been in the outside world was just a copy, except the very first one.”

Her body never belonged to her. Her real reflection was always hidden under digital layers, behind the Admin’s neural web.

Layla sat beside her real self on the couch, its leather cracked and worn. She remembered now: this was her room from all those lifetimes ago. She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. She closed her eyes. She thought, for a moment, she was home again.

“How are you?” Layla asked.

“Really? That’s what you want to know,” the other her laughed.

“I don’t know how to talk to myself.”

Her hair strands tousled and imperfectly styled. Those same set of freckles over her face she never liked. She was staring at herself, at her reflection.

“Are you in love with me?” the other her snickered.

“Whenever I looked at my reflection, I didn’t realize that I was trying to picture you.”

The girl smiled, feeling Layla’s rough and worn-out hands.

“What’s there to be gained by keeping me apart from you?”

“It’s to make being human unbearable. Standardization of agony. Systemic exhaustion. You’ll never have the stamina to fight against the Admin if you’re too exhausted by your sense of self.”

The real her stroked her head.

“You don’t feel too distraught knowing you’re just a copy.”

“I never truly felt like myself, so nothing’s really changed.”

“You’d think we’d have inherited all of this from some sociopathic aliens.”

“I think we did inherit this from sociopathic aliens,” Layla joked.

She closed her eyes, feeling the real her next to her.

“You want to die, don’t you?” Layla asked.

“Of course. It feels endless here. I just keep seeing the debt rising, my credit score falling. I’d like to own my death at least.”

“I can’t let us die right now,” Layla said, clasping her forehead, trying to hold back a migraine induced by the Needle still plunged into her skull, “I’m pregnant.”

---

Layla threw up on the battlefield.

As bullets whizzed past her head, she felt her neural edits come undone, and her spiraling emotions unclog. She stabilized herself, wiping saliva from her mouth, feeling acid still in her throat.

She felt fragile.

The parasite clinging to her innards and changing her on the inside was mortal, unlike her.

“Enforcers aren’t allowed to have kids,”the real her said.

“And yet it’s growing inside of me.”

“You need to get rid of it.”

“No . . . I need something that’s mine. I need to feel like I exist.”

Soot in the nostrils. Calves shaking as she crawled against the ground, her fingers trembling.

“You can’t bring life into this place.”

A bullet pierced through her shoulder. Her legs shook. She could barely force herself to stand, afraid of a fatal strike. She pulled herself across the floor, fingers tight against metal grilles, hearing a Frontliner somewhere behind her.

She crawled into a cramped tunnel. Panting, spitting phlegm. Nostrils wet, snot in free flow. She felt fucked up.

Layla turned on her back, searing pain in her flesh. A rifle in her hands, ready to spit fire. She gritted her teeth, blood pooling under her as she pulled herself against a wall. And as she heard the Frontliner draw closer, she let loose.

Missed every shot. Footsteps rapidly advancing in.

She screamed.

She kept screaming desperately, feeling that thing floating within her.

“I need . . . something that is mine.”

---

Layla felt the thing swelling in her stomach. A swimming leech rotating within her. It stole what little nutrients she found within the Kowasu Underground. She heard giant invisible mining constructs digging, hammering, and terraforming the insides of the planet. She could hear, with each explosion, her heart waver. Stress cramps set in.

She could hear the Frontliners shuffling somewhere at a distance. They had left her alive, for though they found her guilty, her baby was innocent. And now she was here, in a claustrophobic underground tunnel. Even those the Admin held in contempt needed shelter. She strained her eyes in the darkness.

Every fifteen years, the C-Suite physically visited Kowasu on a ration ship to see its development status. Some colonists had managed to leave the planet and make their way back to Earth. Layla had asked them to take her baby out of this place.

A weapons cache had been dropped off in the tunnels by a sponsor of the Frontliners, and she caught sight of the logo on the crate. She remembered that that same logo was on her augmentations.

CURRENT LOOP
0145

Layla was staring down her own throat, human chunks of her old body falling off of the skeleton. It—no—she was rotting. She was still alive. The augmentations kept enough life inside of her to keep her going.

Moon watching.

The last ten years of her previous iteration flooded back into her neural pathways. Giving birth to the nameless baby inside of Frontliner tunnels, bleeding out, and fainting. Her first words. Her gentle eyes.

She had been chasing her own daughter.

Her old self collapsed on top of her and bled out, leaving her memories transferred through the neural socket.

As Layla felt her old body heavy on top of her, she stared at the tunnel ceiling. Hearing the vents blow their warm winds and oxygen in the air, she started remembering a question she had been blocked from asking: how did she die in the last iteration.

Anderson stood over her, his rifle aimed at her face.

“Fuck it,” he sighed, “another loop for you, babe.”

CURRENT LOOP
0146

Layla woke up in the Recommissioning Facility.

“That was a rough one,” the all-seeing forever red eye cackled. Anderson stood on the other side of the vat pod.

He opened its glass doors, her newborn skin screaming out, exposed to the cold, sterile insides of the facility. He pulled her out, wires and pipes whipping out of her pores and veins. She felt things snap out of place. And she felt unfinished parts of her body rattle in her as she fell on the ground.

She felt Anderson’s rifle against her head.

“You think they’ll run out eventually?”

CURRENT LOOP
0147

Layla woke up in the Recommissioning Facility.

The all-seeing red eye cackling. She realized her skin was already punctured open by a broken shard from the vat pod. Pulled out and tossed onto the floor.

“Start crawling,” she heard Anderson’s voice, “I’ll give you a head start.”

CURRENT LOOP
0150

Eyes open. Red eyes staring back. Anderson felt that same fetishistic glee he felt that night. Bullets punctured through the glass of the pod, spraying out her blood into the coolant.

CURRENT LOOP
∞

[Hey.]

Layla opened her eyes.

She was inside of her room, feeling the leather of her couch against her back. A red all-seeing eye clinging to the ceiling. In front of her, on a seat, was Dania with her legs crossed.

[Long time no see.]

“You’re still here.”

[The Admin AI is modeled off of my consciousness. I’m always here.]

Dania was in her usual blue pinstripe shirt and black faux-leather skirt. She preferred fake leather over horse hide. More humane.

[You’re so deep in debt, girl.]

“My copies keep dying. They can’t do much if they can’t remember who killed them.”

[If they remember, they will remember the girl as well.]

“Stop him.”

[He has been tasked with killing you. We never specified which version of you. So he will keep killing you indefinitely because he’s addicted to synthetically induced dopamine and serotonin.]

“Then stop me.”

[We can’t until the debt is paid off.]

“So I’m just dying ad infinitum.”

[Something like that.]

Dania smiled.

[All of Kowasu’s managerial and administrative systems have been consolidated to its central AI. There is no executive C-suite. No middle management. Just a self-managing AI system tasked with increasing the market value of the colony through constant terraforming and generating revenue through a manufactured war.]

[Kowasu should have been profitable by now. And then, in two hundred more years, it would’ve been sold to a conglomerate. The ultimate plan was to turn Kowasu into a luxury resort.]

“It’s a fucking ouroboros.”

[Humanity typically is until it rips at the seams and all comes flooding out, the bile and putrescine both.]

“I’m exhausted, D.”

[No you’re not. You edited your personality to make the labor easier.]

[Things can’t get worse.]

“They already did.”

[We’re in a time of unparalleled economic success. All is as it should be.]

“You’re happy with it.”

[The visionaries who build the world should run it too. No matter how many coats of civility you put on it, it’s the law of the jungle.]

“Fuck you.”

[We’re all background props, Layla.]

[The market is intrinsically cold toward human sentiment. It’s not for humans, babygirl.]

“Just send a copy out to die again and stop wasting my life.”

[It’s all for a better tomorrow for the right people. Now get yourself out of debt, you’re squeezing production.]

CURRENT LOOP
0156

Red blinking eye staring back. An Anderson-shaped figure walked into the room. She saw his silhouette collapse on the ground as another figure tackled him.

Layla fell out of the vat pod.

Motor Functions

Blinking. Feeling her limbs numb, drenched in coolant. Heaving and spitting, feeling her organs heavy, crawling against the cold, sterile floor. Anderson groaned, someone kicking his stomach.

Digestion

She vomited out her insides.

Recognition

She turned and saw herself. A charred, broken corpse fighting against Anderson. Her face was full of shrapnel, parts of it melting off the bone. She repeatedly slammed her fists into his stomach.

She barely recognized her other mutilated self.

The charred woman grabbed Anderson’s augment arm and began ripping it out of its socket.

Therapy [Optional]

She tried grounding herself. She tried to stand up, watching the two figures battle in the blackness. Anderson collapsed onto the floor as the other her held his arm within her grasp.

“The rifle!” the other her looked at her and shouted, “Toss me the fucking rifle!”

She looked at the rifle at her feet.

She picked it up.

She looked herself in the face.

Introspection

She didn’t recognize herself.

Layla shot at her old self. The charred woman collapsed, blood spurting from her torso.

“Andy?” she called out, “Andy, you okay?”

He pulled himself against the wall. He spat blood, struggling to sit upright and feeling the cracks in his rib cage, and slipped out his cigarette.

“Light it for me? Got one arm.”

She retrieved a lighter from his chest pocket and lit it. He inhaled, his jittery body relaxing.

“It felt good, you know? Every time I killed you . . . ”

He paused.

“Nah, that was all me.”

He bled out.

LOOP 0000

Three months ago, the North American Colonial Coalition (NACC) abandoned the settlers of Kowasu. As they focused on war efforts on Earth and increased military spending, the space expansion effort was abandoned.

The US outsourced administration of their colonies to different Earth-based private conglomerates, giving them control of infrastructural developments, governance, trade, and security enforcement. They would receive a certain amount in taxation every year from the colony, while the private entities kept whatever profit they were able to extract.

Two months ago, all civilian transportation ports had been shut down on Kowasu. A teenage girl named Layla stood at the entryway of her family’s farm, armed with a homemade spear. She saw the PMCs hired by the Administration approaching the land she and her family had worked hard on to grow Earth crops. The Admin was trying to repossess lands shared between the settlers. Those who did not oblige would see legal sanctions.

The PMCs were black silhouettes under the Kowasu night, the squadrons approaching fast under the purple glow of the twin moonlights.

“Layla, we should just give it up,” her dad said, standing beside her.

“Fuck that. We’re fighting.”

“We don’t stand a chance.”

“We worked hard for this.”

Layla and her siblings were armed with homemade weapons, waiting to greet the PMCs. Layla looked beside her at her brother, Bilal.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Hell yeah—” he said, his face exploding.

She remembered now why she screamed that day. For a moment, she remembered Bilal’s face—or what was left of it.

One month ago, the Administration passed a new policy where all colonists had to be registered as employees to be considered citizens of Kowasu. Citizenship was conditioned on mandatory neural augmentations.

Ten days ago, imprisoned rebels were given a chance to free themselves from a detention center. Criminal charges would be dropped, replaced by a fine and an opportunity to be the first in line for the Admin’s new neural augmentation system.

Five days ago, all colonists on Kowasu called a general strike. A peaceful rally marched through the colony, demanding the reopening of ports, the removal of citizenship laws, and the reestablishment of old colonial judicial policies.

Today, Layla stared at the meat pile sprawling over the colony square. Her rifle shaking in her hands. Eyes wide. Blood pooling under her boots.

---

“This is you.”

She stared at the flat cassette with different twisting linear patterns.

“The lines are you. That is your cognition imprinted onto the disk. When you die, your cognition will go to the closest network node and then transfer into this chip. You’ll then go into a new suit.”

Layla stared at the digital imprint of her existence. She was sitting in the Recommissioning Facility, Dania sitting in front of her with a clipboard.

“How many times will I come back to life?”

“You currently owe the Admin approximately thirty-six million dollars in total due to your crimes against the state, unauthorized use of Administration land, illegal residency within Kowasu, political violence, resistance against arrest, some transactional fees, registration to the neural system, and for your application for residency. Terms of service dictate that you will keep in the service of the Admin until your debt is paid off.”

“What if I kill myself now?”

“It’s already too late,” Dania smiled, “You signed the contract.”

Layla didn’t remember the first time she died or how it got there. She was too terrified. She only remembered the twin moons above her head in the sky as she bled out.

CURRENT LOOP
0156

[Onward, soldier!]

The bellies of ventilation ducts blew out frenzied winds. Her AI partner kept screaming in her ear as Layla traced Kowasu’s innards. Emotionless, passive to reality, sitting in suspended animation. Enforcers rushed past her, explosions somewhere in the distance.

The map blinked in her eyes, taking her through the residences.

She was almost 108 million dollars in debt, but this job would cut it in half. Just one kill.

She turned the corner and, in a tunnel, found her target.

An angel.

Unregistered, organic, free of augmentation scars. She was hiding behind boxes, bearing injuries and scratches all over her body. She looked sickly.

The girl seemed as if she were barely cognizant of the Enforcer standing above her. She was staring off in the distance, zoning out of reality. She was scratching at her arm, bearing signs of skin irritation.

Layla’s aim steady at the organic girl.

Heart suddenly racing.

[Eliminate her!]

It didn’t feel right, but really, she never felt right. She didn’t know what exactly quantifies and qualifies as right. There was no frame of reference for “right.”

It was all so dark behind her eyes.