Day 65 since contact with Earth was lost.
Inside the Deep Space vessel, the red alert light pulsed silently against the cold metal walls. Tom slumped into the captain's chair, his eyes fixed on the screen displaying the last message he had received from Human Civilization sixty-five days ago.
It wasn't a return trajectory. It wasn't a status update. It was a scream across the void.
"Don't come back! Don't return!"
That was it. Since then, the commands had been dead.
No matter how many messages Tom sent, Earth remained silent. Something catastrophic had happened in that distant homeland—something so urgent that the Earth team had time for only one final warning before the silence took them.
Tom looked out the porthole.
At a distance of 15 billion kilometers, Earth was invisible, lost in the glare of a sun that looked no brighter than a coin toss in a dark room. He couldn't even confirm if human civilization still existed.
"If you don't give me a return trajectory... how am I supposed to go back?" he whispered to the static.
The silence of the ship pressed against his eardrums. Without the Earth team's navigational data, he was stranded in the orbital ring of Loshen Star.
The reserves on the ship could keep him alive for 15 years at most. After that, the lights would go out, the heat would fail, and he would freeze in the vacuum.
But it wasn't the starvation that scared him most. It was the exhaustion.
For two years, he had maintained the massive vessel alone. Now, staring down a death sentence, the fatigue was crushing him.
And with the fatigue came the "sickness."
It started as a twitch in muscles he wasn't using.
Tom rubbed his temples, trying to massage away the sensation. It wasn't just a voice in his head anymore; it was tactile. He felt a phantom limb syndrome for a body that didn't exist.
He would reach for a coffee cup and feel a second arm extending in the opposite direction. He would walk down the corridor and feel the sensation of sitting still.
The medical team back on Earth had called it a hallucination caused by isolation and unknown deep-space radiation. They had prescribed pills. But the pills weren't working anymore.
The sensation of a second consciousness pressing against his skull was growing stronger, demanding a vessel.
"I'm losing my mind," Tom muttered, standing up. "Or I'm just lonely enough to invent a ghost."
He walked through the silent ship, his footsteps echoing on the grating. He needed help. He couldn't repair the life support, monitor the reactor, and maintain the hull integrity by himself for fifteen years. He would die of overwork long before the food ran out.
He stopped in front of the Biological Cultivation Room.
Inside, rows of glass tanks hummed with nutrient fluid. Most were small, designed for tissue samples or small plants. Only one tank in the corner was large enough to hold a human-sized mass. It was originally intended for cultivating large livestock—cattle, horses, and donkeys—for colonization experiments.
It was the only one. If he wanted a companion, a helper, this was his only shot.
Tom walked over to the console and pulled up the ship's inventory. His finger hovered over the "Nutrient Reserves" data.
"Creating a full-sized adult clone..." Tom did the mental math, his stomach tightening. "It will cost six months' worth of rations and biomass."
It was a gamble. Cloning himself would cut his survival window from 15 years down to 7.5 years effectively instantly. He was trading time for labor. If the clone was defective, or if he couldn't feed two mouths, he was accelerating his own death.
He glanced toward the airlock chamber nearby. Through the glass, he saw the three spare Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suits hanging like corpses in the dark. Dusty. Unused.
Just three suits. Plus the one he used meant four total.
"Four suits. One tank. Fifteen years of food," Tom murmured. "Not enough. None of it is enough."
But looking at the vast, terrifying emptiness of Loshen Star below, he knew he had no choice. He was already dead; he might as well die trying to survive.
Tom gritted his teeth. He took a cell sample from his own arm. He reprogrammed the induced pluripotent stem cells, modified the DNA sequences to accelerate growth, and injected the sample into the cattle tank.
"Let's see if you can work," Tom said to the swirling fluid.
The next six months were a blur of anxiety.
Tom didn't just skip through the time; he agonized over it. Every day, he watched the nutrient levels in the ship's reservoir drop, literally watching his life expectancy drain away into the tank.
He ate less, hoarding food for the mouth that hadn't opened yet. He spent hours staring into the cloudy liquid, watching the shape of a man—his shape—knit together from nothing.
The hallucination didn't fade; it intensified. The phantom sensation of floating in fluid became so real that Tom sometimes had to hold his breath, feeling as if he were the one drowning in the tank.
Finally, the day came.
The fluid drained. The glass hissed open.
Lying on the wet metal bed was a man identical to Tom, down to the mole on his neck.
Tom stood over the clone, his heart hammering against his ribs. He held a syringe of adrenaline, ready to wake it, or a scalpel, ready to terminate it if it came out wrong.
"Wake up," Tom whispered.
The clone's chest heaved. It gasped, a wet, ragged sound.
Slowly, the clone opened its eyes.
They were blank. Empty. There was no spark of intelligence, only the dull biological instinct of a newborn in an adult's body.
"No self-awareness," Tom noted, checking the pupil response with a light. His heart sank.
A vegetable? Had he sacrificed six months of food for a biological robot?
But then, the "sickness" surged.
The phantom pressure in Tom's mind spiked, screaming for a connection. Following an instinct he didn't understand, Tom stopped fighting the hallucination. He closed his eyes and pushed his consciousness toward the empty vessel in front of him.
Click.
It wasn't a sound; it was a feeling. Like a dislocated joint suddenly snapping back into its socket.
Tom's eyes snapped open.
He saw himself.
He was looking at his own face, haggard and bearded, standing over the bed. But he was also looking up at the ceiling lights, his vision blurry and wet.
He lifted his hand. The clone lifted its hand.
He wasn't controlling it like a puppet. He was it.
He felt the cold air on the clone's wet skin, and he felt the warmth of the uniform on his original body. He felt the hunger in his original stomach, and the burning lungs of the clone's first breath.
Two brains. Two perspectives. Processing simultaneously.
Tom—the original Tom—stumbled back in shock, but the clone reached out to steady him. The movement was seamless, coordinated not by words, but by a single thought shared across two bodies.
"It's not a hallucination," the original Tom whispered.
Tom looked at the single cattle tank, then at the inventory screen showing the dwindling food supplies. A wild, desperate plan began to form in his dual minds.
He didn't just have a helper. He had a way to cheat death.