I'd like to thank Malady for his help editing this.

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Chapter 1.2

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I watched as Daddy put out a command wide message saying that I was in charge of the project of reviving Carla. Then, he turned to me. "What are you going to do, Rosie?"

"As soon as I can dive into her crystals, I want to see what's there."

Daddy considered for a bit, then said, "I'm sorry, Rosie. I can't let you do that."

"Why not?" I asked. "You just gave me this project, and my first decision, you tell me no. Which is it, Daddy? Am I in charge of this or not?"

"You're questioning my authority. Am I in command or not?"

"I'm not asking as someone under your command. I'm asking as your daughter."

"And as your father, I can't lose two of my girls."

I shook my head. "What I'm going to find in those crystals is Carla's memories, but I've been in Amos' memories. Possibly in his mind."

"Think about it, Rose. For a long time -- over two millennia, Carla was under Amos' thumb. Don't you think that is in her memories? Don't you think there are memories from Amos in there?"

"Maybe there is, Dad, but to me, it's worth facing to get her back." I saw the look of shock when I deliberately called him Dad instead of Daddy. I think it showed him what this meant to me. I didn't want to lose what I had with him, but right now, even though I loved him to bits, I was madder than hell that he wasn't treating me with the respect I deserved if I was leading this project.

John was still present, as was Mom, but she was studiously ignoring us. John was looking on, but letting me fight my own fight.

"Bernie?" Daddy called, I suppose to get her to back him up.

"You got yourself into this, Vernon. You get yourself out."

He looked at John.

"I'm not saying a word, Dad. I couldn't agree with you if I wanted to. I know what her temper is like."

"But you don't agree."

"I will never disagree with you publicly, but since it's understood that we're family right now, I will say this. If she goes in there, I will be worried shitless. But, I know that she has already dealt with Amos in his head. I think she's stronger now than she was then. I believe she can handle it."

"Vern," Mom said. "I don't want to risk losing Rose either. I'll go in with her."

Daddy's face went white. "You want me to risk both of you?"

"No, Vernon, I want you to realize that your daughter and your wife are stronger than you're giving us credit for, and if we find any inkling of that bastard's mind in there, we'll back out immediately."

"Think of it as insurance, Daddy. I don't want Mom to go through that, and she doesn't want me to. We'll back out for each other."

He sat down and stared across the lab for a long time. He was looking at my little sister, and I saw his eyes getting misty. "Alright," he finally said, so quietly that I could barely hear him.

I hurried over and gave him a big hug. "Thank you, Daddy. You won't regret this."

"I already do, Rosie. But there are six thousand people over there, and I was willing to let every one of them die. That one girl there means more to me than all of them combined. I know she shouldn't, but she does. You and your mom do too. Don't you dare leave me!"

I nodded, feeling my own eyes misting over as well.

-=#=-

Rather than fall in, mom and I seemed to materialize in the bottom of a deep gorge. Rather than the blackness that I saw in Amos' memories, I saw turquoise all around me.

"So different," I murmured.

"You said Amos' crystals were black inside."

"They were." I tried to walk to a wall, but I couldn't tell if I was getting closer or not. There was no frame of reference at all. I sensed Mom beside me, and I took her hand. "We don't want to separate in here," I said.

"No, we don't."

We took another step; then, we were moving at a speed that took my breath away. I wanted to stop, and I was suddenly looking at the inside of Heaven's Rose. I walked up the stairs and into the observation lounge. I sat down and was no longer looking at anything. It seemed like an eternity, or possibly a half a second until I was now Kari. I walked to the security office, and suddenly I started to get cold. Colder and colder. I was freezing! Cold! I couldn't stand it! And colder yet! Suddenly, the sensation went away. I looked around, and I was myself again. Mom still had my hand, and we were both shivering.

"Do you think that was when she was put into stasis?" Mom asked.

"I think it must have been."

"I saw the rest in Amos' crystals," Mom told me.

“What do you mean?”

“His crystals continue beyond what we just experienced. All the way to the present.”

“I want to get to the past,” I told her. “I want to find her.”

“You’ve found her,” Mom said. “This is all her. It’s what makes her Carla.”

“If you know that, then why did you come in here with me?”

“I knew you wouldn’t give up until you had your father’s approval to come here, because there’s one thing you want to know.”

“And what’s that?”

“You want to know if her body is hers or Amos’.”

I stared at her for a few minutes. Finally, I asked her, “What makes you say that?”

“Because, Rosie, I wanted to know also.”

“You didn’t have to come here to know. You could have looked at Amos’ memories.”

“I did.”

“And?”

“Rose, that is Carla out there. Her DNA says she’s Carla.”

“But it’s Amos.”

“Not anymore. It’s Carla.”

“So Paul had Carla killed without knowing it.”

“Don’t you dare tell Paula that,” Mom said with force. “She has no need to know that.”

“Carla might tell her.”

“Not if we tell her not to.”

I shook my head. “She’s never listened to me, Mom. Why would she start now?”

“Because you have never given up on bringing her back. She is so important to you.”

“She’s my little sister. Of course, she’s important. I love her!”

“Yes. We all do, Rosie. But she understands the way you show it more than the way we do, or Paula.”

“Oh, come on, Mom.”

“It’s true, Sweetie. Do you remember the argument on her fifteenth birthday?”

“Of course, Mom. None of us can forget.”

Mom still had my hand, and she stepped into the turquoise again. Almost instantly, I was sitting at the dinner table in my parent’s house, looking across the table at my two brothers – well, brother and sister. I felt another presence in my mind. Amos was there.

Paul was running Amos down, and wouldn’t stop. I knew that Rose felt the same way, but she refused to give voice to her feelings like Paul did.

I was shouting at Paul just as much as he was shouting at me. I knew Rose was getting upset, and finally, she turned to our brother and told him, “You’re despicable, Paul. You know how she feels, and you just keep it up. Even if you could change her mind, you’ll never do it this way.”

As suddenly as that, Paul took his focus off of me and started on Rose. I was shocked. Rose agreed with Paul entirely on Amos, yet here she was, defending me! I watched in wonder, while Amos, in the back of my head scoffed it. He called it just acting, yet I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t say anything, as Amos wouldn’t let me, but I swore I would always remember that.

Mom and I stepped out of that memory. I turned to her, astonished at it. “So is she a passenger of Amos all the way to now?”

“Yes and no, Rose.” She seemed to think for a moment. “Well, yes. She was.”

“I don’t believe you, Mom.”

She sighed and said, “Amos designed the computers and crystals so that a person’s essence could be recorded.”

“Okay. I remember that from my dive.”

“He changed both of their bodies into each other, and programmed Carla to respond as him”

“So he knew what was going to happen.”

“He didn’t want to be incarcerated, so he sent Carla to be. When ‘he’ was tortured, it was Carla, yes.”

“So she’s really dead.” I felt like weeping.

“No, honey. When her body died, her essence, or spirit if you will, was recorded. It’s in here.”

“Then what did I meet in Amos’ memories?”

“I’m guessing it was a… ghost of her, I guess, created by her memories and his computer.”

I looked around at what seemed to me to be a monument to Carla. I started to cry in earnest and hugged my mother. “I want out of here, Mama,” I said. I hadn’t called her that since I was a little girl, but at that moment in time, that’s what I felt like. Just a little girl.

I suppose someone who had been born before the bots would have thought it was strange, me hugging a woman who could be taken for my younger sister, and calling her Mama, but Mom just looked super young.

“I want to show you something, Rosie,” Mom said as she pushed back to look at me from arm’s length. I don’t know how she did it, but suddenly, we were standing in a completely different area. It was the same turquoise color of the crystals, but there were thousands of lines around me. It seemed there were more, but they were so tiny, that they faded off into the distance.

All over, there were what appeared to be flashes of light that were frozen in place. I had one of the flashes just to my right, and I lifted up my hand and was able to move it through the light. The light didn’t waver in the slightest when my hand passed through.

“Where are we,” I asked.

Mama was standing in front of me with a sly smile on her face. “Where do you think we are, Rosie?”

“It’s like looking inside my brain when Sylvia showed us.”

She looked around again. “It is, isn’t it. But this isn’t her brain, sweetie. This is Carla’s essence. Her spirit. Or a representation of it.”

I looked around again. “How do you know?” I asked.

“I’m the ultimate spy, Rose. I remember whatever the enemy thinks. Whatever he has ever thought, I remember. He knew about this, and he knew I would too. He doesn’t think we can put her back where she belongs, but he doesn’t know my husband, and he underestimates my daughter.”

I laughed sardonically. “Daddy, yes, Mama. Me, I don’t think so.”

“You are underestimating yourself too.”

I’m not sure why I kept thinking of her as mama, but it just seemed so natural. It took me back to a time when I was a little girl, and maybe it’s something that Amos simply didn’t have. He knew how to navigate his memory crystals, but he didn’t have any empathy for anyone else. I looked around at the connections. It seemed Carla was frozen in time. She was written here, but how to bring her out. I wondered briefly if we could figure out how to replace her in her body, would we be able to do the same with everyone who had died? Provided we had their crystals? A new form of immortality, if only we could replicate their body. In theory, we could, but wouldn’t it require a donor body to change?

That was a scary thought! Who would donate their body? Presumably, someone who was considered less important. Dear Lord, we didn’t need a society where the rich were more privileged again!

“How would you rescue your sister, Rose?”

“I… Mama, this is a mistake. We shouldn’t do this!”

Mama sat down on… nothing. “Why do you say that, Rose?”

I looked around and realized we weren’t even standing on a floor, so to sit down… I imagined that I was sitting on a couch, and drew my legs under me as if I was, and suddenly I was sitting where I could huddle in, away from my fears.

“Rosie?”

I sighed. She was having none of it. I told her what I had just imagined, and she nodded. “It’s a scary prospect, isn’t it, Honey?”

I nodded, too frightened to say anything. “You’re forgetting something though, Rosie. There is a body out there that has Carla’s DNA and is just waiting for what we see around us here.

I turned my reticence another way. “It’s moot anyway, Mama. I don’t know how to collect her and transfer her. There’s just no way. This is too big. Too much of an expanse. It’s as if we’re actually inside the crystals, and her spirit is taking up the entire space.”

“Collect her. An interesting way of looking at it. How would you collect her?”

“I just told you. I don’t know!”

She gazed at me, then asked, “How are you sitting down?”

“I just imagined doing it, and I was able to.”

“Then imagine collecting her.”

I was scared. “You do it!”

“No, Honey. I have Amos in here too. I don’t want her lost in his thoughts.”

I sighed. Once again, the fear surfaced. “I can’t, Mama.”

“Rosie, you have been petitioning for saving your sister ever since she went catatonic. Why the hesitation now?”

“I didn’t know I was going to have to play host for her before!”

“Sweetheart, you said you would do anything to save her. That’s what you told your daddy.”

I felt silly, shouting when she was as calm as a midsummer day.

“I’m scared. Amos is in this,” I said as I gestured around us.

“I don’t think so. He’s in the memories. This isn’t them. It’s her essence.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Plenty. The essence, or spirit, doesn’t hold memories. It’s the consciousness of the person.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mama.”

She sighed, then asked me, “If this ‘spirit’ had been retrieved from Amos, would you want to put it in her body?”

I was confused. “Are you saying it doesn’t matter what spirit is in a person?”

She tried again. “Do you know what the term ‘ego’ means?”

“Beyond the fact that Amos has a massive one?”

She laughed a bit. “Okay. That’s part of it. “The ego is your sense of self. It’s responsible for your sense of identity.”

“Like when we dove into Carla’s mind, we had her memories, but we were still us?”

“Yeah. like that.”

“How do you know?”

“Call it a theory that Amos had. He knew that he wouldn’t get a person’s spirit unless he pulled much more at their death. That’s what he programmed the bots to do. It’s what sets off the death bot effect.

“So we could revive Kari!” I said, but then, I realized. “No. What body would she inhabit?”

“Her crystals were aboard N21 anyway. We’ve been traveling for over ten millennia, subjective time, away from N21. It’s in between galaxies, and we’re heading into the middle of ours.”

The momentary hope for my friend, then the dashing of it, plus my worries over Carla were too much for me. I started weeping. Mama came over and ‘sat’ beside me, pulled me to her, and shushed me as if I was still the little girl depressed to be in a boy’s body.

Finally, I felt somewhat better and asked. “How do we collect Carla?”

“I think we do as I said. When we touch the crystals, we are able to directly control ourselves in these memories. It is even easier here because nothing is changing as we go. So if you imagine collecting all of this in your mind, I think you will.”

“How would that collect it?”

“Right now, you have your memory crystals that your bots are connecting you to. Because you are in direct contact with Carla’s, you are able to access them secondarily. Think of them as read-only memory.”

“So I’m going to, in effect, copy this file into my brain?”

“You’re going to make a copy on your crystals.”

“I’ll give it a try, Mama.”

I tried to reach out with my mind and group Carla into my thoughts. I felt like a fool, and as I expected, nothing happened. I sighed, and once more, tried to reach out to my sister. Again, I felt like a fool. “It’s not working,” I said dejectedly. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“I’ll try to help you, okay?” Mama told me. “Try again.”

Once again, I reached out with my mind, almost calling for Carla. I knew she couldn’t hear me, but I knew she was there. I felt more this time, and it was like I heard her voice, almost like she was speaking but not. I focused on that area, and the voice got stronger. Not quite as tenuous as it had been. I opened my eyes and saw Mama. She was glowing with that turquoise color that was all around us. I was shocked, and when I looked down at myself, I was too. Suddenly, Carla was gone from my mind, and the turquoise light surrounding us stopped.

“You got sidetracked,” Mama told me, almost chiding.

I nodded.

“Once more, Rosie.”

I took a deep breath and started again. I focused as hard as I could to hold onto that faint echo of Carla that I had felt before. I could ‘see’ the turquoise glow through my closed eyelids, but I was determined to not be distracted this time. Somehow, I knew we were on the right track, but it wasn’t enough. I was determined, though. I didn’t want to lose the connection, but I needed more. My head was starting to throb like someone had just buried one of those axe things that you could turn over and use as a sledgehammer in it. I kept the hold on her that I had, and just barely got out the word, “More.”

Suddenly, it was like Mama gave me everything she had, and Carla was bathed in a spotlight. She was like a statue, and I grabbed her with all my might, then we were out of the turquoise. I opened my eyes and then collapsed. I was exhausted!

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