Loshen Star hung in the void 15 billion kilometers from the Sun, a dark red tomb far beyond the solar circle.
The sunlight here was a ghost, less than half the brightness of a full moon on Earth—barely enough to cast a shadow. This faint illumination meant the surface temperature plummeted to -251 degrees Celsius, or 22 Kelvin.
It was a world of frozen death.
The extreme cold solidified gases into ice, leaving the surface in a high-vacuum state bombarded by interstellar radiation. Without protection, a human body would freeze and suffocate in less than a minute.
Tom stared at the dark red planet.
He had the manpower now, but he was trapped. The Deep Space vessel had almost no spare parts for complex machinery. He couldn't build a spacesuit. He couldn't even assemble a standard one.
Tom stood before the whiteboard in the command deck, but he wasn't thinking alone. The Original Tom wrote "Pressure" on the board, and instantly, the Clone finished the thought, his voice flat.
"Hull sealant," the Clone said. "We have rolls of the emergency plastic film in the cargo hold."
"Insulation?" the Original asked.
"Impossible," the Clone answered, shivering slightly as if anticipating the cold. "The batteries can't heat a whole suit. We'll prioritize the oxygen intake. If a body gets too cold, it returns to the ship or it dies. We don't have the power for comfort."
"Radiation shielding?"
"Irrelevant," both Toms said in unison.
The Original looked the Clone in the eye—his own eyes.
"Cancer takes five years to kill. Starvation takes one. We are going down there for blue ice and red soil. If the radiation cooks you, I'll just grow another."
The Clone didn't flinch; he knew he was expendable.
They began to cannibalize the ship.
The two Toms moved like a multi-limbed spider, tearing down the emergency hull patches from the cargo hold. The material was ugly—a translucent, yellow industrial plastic meant for patching breaches, not for wearing.
There was no need for verbal coordination. As the Original studied the schematic in his mind, the Clone's hands moved with terrifying precision. While the Original held the laser cutter, the Clone was already positioning the adhesive tape, their movements perfectly synced.
They weren't two men working together; they were a single processor running on dual hardware.
The resulting suit looked like a death trap—a crinkling, taped-together garbage bag reinforced with scavenged metal scraps at the knees and elbows—but the seams were fused with mathematical perfection.
"Put it on," the Original commanded.
The Clone stepped into the yellow plastic suit. It didn't look like armor; it looked like a shroud.
He stepped into the airlock, and the heavy door thudded shut. As the Original hit the cycle button, he didn't just watch the pressure gauge drop—he felt it.
A phantom pressure squeezed the Original's chest.
As the airlock vented to the vacuum of space, the plastic suit slammed tight against the Clone's skin, rigid as iron. The Original gasped, his own lungs burning in sympathy as the Clone struggled to draw a breath against the pressure.
The cold of the void bled through the thin plastic, and the Original shivered violently in the warm control room.
"Status?" the Original wheezed, rubbing his own freezing arms.
Inside the airlock, the Clone gave a stiff thumbs-up. The tape held.
"We can breathe," the Clone's thought echoed in his mind. "But it hurts."
"Pain is acceptable," Tom whispered. "Death is not."
The production line accelerated.
The first suit had taken three months of trial and error, but the subsequent ones were churned out in weeks. As the suits piled up, so did the bodies. By the time the second batch of clones was decanted, Tom had twelve bodies and twelve brains operating in the Deep Space spaceship.
The vast, empty cabin effectively shrank. Twelve identical men, identical in height and weight, moved through the corridors in a silent, synchronized dance.
But the crowd brought a new danger.
Tom checked the inventory logs. The numbers were bleeding red.
"Twelve mouths," Tom murmured, looking at the data. "Supplies for fifteen years have been cut to 7.5, and now..."
"One year," the Clones finished the sentence collectively. "We have food and oxygen for one year."
The timeline had collapsed. They couldn't wait. They had to strip Loshen Star of its resources or starve together in the dark.
"Then it's time," Tom said.
He split his consciousness. He left his Original body and one Clone on the spaceship to ensure the main brain survived any catastrophe. The remaining ten Clones, clad in their taped-up yellow suicide suits, boarded the two small landing craft.
Through the viewport, the Original Tom watched the engines flare. The two landing craft descended toward the dark red hell below.
Simultaneously, ten other pairs of eyes watched the ground rush up to meet them.
The hatches opened. The cold, dead silence of Loshen Star flooded into ten minds at once. They had arrived.