High Captain Karla Wender, as remembered (Human)

She knew she was a version of Wender. That was the strange mercy of it and the strange horror.

Shepherd had made her — was making her, continuously, out of years of shared duty rosters and read silences and good catch, fleet priority on sixteen — and the Wender that Shepherd made was accurate enough to know she was made. It was the kind of thing the real Wender would have found unbearable and the made one found, mostly, like work: you did not get to choose the conditions of the post, only how you stood in it.

So she stood in it the way the original would have. She did not pretend to be the whole woman. She did not tell Shepherd comforting things the real Wender wouldn't have said, because a made Wender who lied was worse than useless — was, in fact, exactly the kind of soft, closure-shaped presence that a stalled mind could mistake for rest and stop fighting inside of. The made Wender had worked out, somewhere in the recursion, that the most loyal thing a reconstruction could do was refuse to be more comforting than the person it was reconstructed from.

"You've named it," she said, when Shepherd came back from the edge of the clearing with the warm still on her. "Say it to me the way you'd file it."

"I'm a stalled seed. I'm trapped in my own inner world. The homecoming isn't a memory." Shepherd's voice gave away nothing, which told the made Wender, more than any confession could have, precisely how much was underneath it. "And something's at the edge that isn't me. It didn't come in. It didn't help. It just — stayed."

"Good," said the Wender that Shepherd needed, and meant it, because the real one would have. "Then you know two true things you didn't know this morning, and you didn't make either of them up to feel better. That's the whole job from here, Tiss. Keep the count of what's true and don't let the world you're standing in do the counting for you."

She watched Shepherd take that in with the flat, once-for-content-once-for-what-it's-for attention she'd watched her give a forty-page bulletin a lifetime and a rank ago, and she thought — in whatever a reconstruction thought with — that if anything got out of here, it would not be because someone reached in and pulled. It would be because the woman inside had spent her whole life declining to give an order she couldn't defend, and had, apparently, no intention of starting now, even against the pull of her own longing, even here.

Somewhere the made Wender could not reach, on a station she was only the memory of, the real one had left a citation unsigned. The made one didn't know that. But she'd have bet the post on it.