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  Danna was going to need to be careful of them. But that was a problem for later.

  She turned back to the terminal, and typed out the last instructions. She hesitated before confirming. She looked over her shoulder at Iris. Powerless to act, her control stripped from her. False eyes wide with real fear—fear of having all her dreams and all her chances stolen from her again.

  Iris died two hundred and twenty years ago, Danna reminded herself.

  Still, Danna would mourn her.

  She confirmed her instructions.

  Iris didn’t scream. She simply blinked out of existence. The lights changed their pattern, then winked out, the stars going dark one by one.

  Danna closed her eyes. And not only out of grief, or respect for a life lost. As hard as that had been, the next part was what she had been dreading the most.

  She had wanted Iris to agree, because it was the right decision, and because she had hoped she was wrong when she had imagined Iris trapped in her own kind of stasis for the past two hundred years, unable to move beyond the person she used to be. But she had also, selfishly, hoped for Iris to say yes because she wanted this to be Iris’s job and not hers. Iris was the one who had chosen to launch the Rainbow’s End in the first place. Danna, as she was now, would never have made that choice. And just like Iris wouldn’t have enjoyed the reality of the firefighter career her five-year-old self had been set on, Danna didn’t want her choices determined by a long-dead version of herself.

  But she had a mission. And she would see it through to the end, like she had always intended.

  She typed in a new set of commands, and a door opened in the far wall. She walked up to the doorway of the hidden room, but hesitated before crossing the threshold. The room was small, the size of her room down below, with most of the space taken up by the human-shaped indentation in the floor. A bed of metal, with room for legs and arms and head. She could still remember the chill of the metal on her skin, and the squirming feeling of it molding itself to fit her body when she had tested the design. She had built this room herself, for the absolute worst-case scenario, and then scripted for memory.

  She had understood that even the immortality she had chosen wouldn’t make her invulnerable. And she had known that if something ever happened to her that she couldn’t come back from, someone would need to run the ship.

  She activated the computer in the corner of the hidden room. Quickly—because she didn’t know how long it would take the hidden watchers to register that something was wrong—she went through the steps to tell the room what she wanted. She confirmed, and double-confirmed, and triple-confirmed.

  Then she stripped off her uniform like an old skin and lay down in the metal bed.

  As the metal crawled and shifted under her, she closed her eyes, and silently counted down the ten-second delay. On ten, she gasped as the needles pierced her skin in a dozen places. The numbness spread through her almost immediately. She had wanted to make sure whoever found themselves lying in this bed wouldn’t feel it when the machines she had set in motion sawed off the top of her skull to pick apart what lay underneath, layer by layer.

  This wouldn’t be like the last time. She didn’t have any human technicians watching over her, to check over all the work by hand and make sure nothing got skipped or altered. This copy—this new self—would be imperfect. But enough of what mattered would come through. Enough to turn the ship around.

  And the other Danna, the one lying encased in metal, already feeling her thoughts grow fuzzy around the edges? Maybe she would be on earth when the Rainbow’s End came home.

  Want more?

  For more stories about how our tech makes us who we are, try these stories:

  The New Me

  The Happiness Algorithm

  Lost in Translation

  Hearth Fires

  Exactly Like She Was

  Or get them all in Digital Soul, available on all major ebook retailers.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this book, please take a few minutes to leave a quick review at the retailer where you bought it. Reviews help other readers find my books, which lets me keep writing and keeps my dog in treats. Ever had a 130-pound dog try to climb into your lap because he hasn’t had his nightly treat? Save my lap, leave a review.

  Want more? Sign up for my newsletter to find out the second I release a new book, get sneak peeks and opportunities to read my new books early, and find out what I’m working on now. Plus, dog pictures! When you sign up, you’ll get a free copy of No Regrets, an introduction to the Iron Bound urban fantasy series. This story is available exclusively to subscribers.

  About the Author

  Zoe Cannon may or may not be a supervillain out to conquer the world through writing. When not writing, she can be found perfecting her schemes for world domination, plotting against her archenemies, and staying up too late reading a book. Her secret lair is rumored to be located somewhere in southern New Hampshire. She also writes as her mild-mannered alter ego, Z.J. Cannon.