“Yosil! Father, stop … we had a deal!”

Damn this compulsion to recite, built into one of the golembodies that serve as mirrors to enclose the growing waveform.

A new kind of Standing Wave surges between the glazier poles. Soon it will escape confinement, bursting through these porcelain dolls with enough power to endure for weeks over a dying city, feeding on death manna from millions of extinguishing spirit flames — a meal sufficient to complete the transition from created to Creator.

While that countdown ticks, a desperate struggle rages. What imprint will the glazier-made god carry? Whose core personality? Right now the waveform oscillates between two possible states — two discordant definitions of I am.

Yosil is with me now, our borders overlapping in unhappy swirls, like immiscible fluids. We both howl against this unnatural merging! It’s like trying to inload someone else’s ditto, a calamity that no one attempts twice. How can you share without agreeing on dimensions like left-right? Up-down? In-out? It’s all subjective on the soulistic plane. My versions dart away at angles that have nothing in common with his.

Communion will come, when I finally arc over this landscape as an all-transforming deity. I’ll establish fair metrics that are simple, universal, then invite all to join me in a vast new cosmos! Using raw material more basic than vacuum, together we’ll make stars, planets, whole new Earths.

But first, to win control.

I was here first, growing immeasurably during the last few hours. But my adversary knows more theory. He also has the advantage of position. With each rhythmic pass, the pendulum cuts like a blade, slicing through the glazier’s soft center, the most energetic and impressionable spot.

Worse, I feel yanked by the presence of realAlbert, so close that his image enters me now through a set of eyes. The red ditto can actually see him, leaning on a bannister rail as he descends from a western parapet. realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.

With each footstep nigh, the glazier shudders!

He’s my archetype … the reason I survived erasure to reach this point.

Now he’s getting in the way.

Poor Albert may have to go.

Ever try to rip your own leg off? You need motivation.

It helps if you’re already falling apart.

Even so, pulling hard with my one good hand and arm, I made little progress while the nearby missile launcher ticked through its final check sequence.

Let me offer a suggestion.

Nag that it was, the voice had steered me right so far. Soon I felt a touch along my crusted skin, and within.

The appendage is no longer part of you.

Envision that.

Draw yourself back from it.

Trigger these enzymes as you go.

Like this …

My knowledge of chemistry was rudimentary, at best. Yet somehow the instructions made sense, like recalling a lost skill. Naturally, that’s how to do it, I thought, ignoring for now that the instructions came from an imaginary friend. Simple. I must remember this.

All pain and fatigue fled from the leg. Amid that growing numbness, every dram of leftover energy spent itself, not melting but hardening as if in a quick oven.

My next hard tug was rewarded by a brittle cracking. Again I pulled, and the limb snapped off below the hip, trailing gooey bits of shredded soul-fabric that sparked and glittered.

In my hand now — a near-perfect replica of a human limb in baked terracotta, bent at the knee. I hefted the thing. It was handsome, but hardly aerodynamic.

TARGET LOCKED, announced the launch-controller screen. Missile number one slid into place with its dire crimson warhead.

As the machine’s hum rose in pitch, I knew I had one chance.

Descending from the parapet, my feet were like blunt clubs at the end of mushy noodles. Waves of nausea whelmed over me as I clutched the bannister from one sweaty grip to the next. Dry-retching, I’d vomit if my stomach had been fed more than a few protein bars during the last few days. Hunger and exhaustion were factors, of course, but such a fierce decline must come from something else — surely a rapid war plague that some arrogant Dodecs stashed at the bottom of an armored hole for safe-keeping. A tool of genocide, banned by solemn treaty. But who ever throws a weapon away?

Was my agony a taste of things to come, for millions? I had no clue what was happening in the center of the lab with all those antennas and humming tubes and pendulums swinging between crucified dittos, like some nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch. But I do know it involves germs, so it’s gotta be evil.

That made things simple. I’ve got to interfere.

Only how?

My old friend Pal had a philosophy: “When you lack understanding, or subtlety, you can still get your argument across with a monkey wrench.”

A simplistic, often foolish credo, but right now rather compelling. If I disrupt things enough, Clara and her friends may have time to find out about this place. They’ll come do the rest … sort it all out. So, whatever the hell is going on, just find a way to interfere.

Even a futile resolve is something to cling to. As nausea worsened with each downward step, I pictured the AI-XIX computer … and a metal folding chair that stood nearby. Just the thing, in lieu of a monkey wrench. Assuming I could still lift furniture when I got there.

Which seemed doubtful as my symptoms worsened. Halfway down those rickety stairs I felt surrounded by nasty invisible creatures with stingers and claws, leaving flesh quivering after each phantom slash. Figments, I diagnosed. Your brain is making up stories to explain unpleasant signals from a dying body, Keep moving.

Fine. But two steps later the imaginary pests were joined by unsettling bursts of vivid recollection — sensory waves that made me stagger on the stairs.

The unmistakable floral aroma of Chavez Avenue Park.

Spears and shields displayed above a dead man’s open coffin.

Ritu in tears, consoled by a figure with skin like luminous tin.

Sneaking past a trio of boys tormenting each other in a yard -

— then turning to see a gun in the hand of grinning ghost …

These unsorted memories didn’t rise from personal experience, or any ditto I recall inloading. They had to be delusions. Yet their déjà vu familiarity was hurtfully intense, like the first time I ever rolled my Standing Wave in clay, or witnessed a scene from several points of view, or looked directly into my own eyes without a camera or mirror.

Awakening trapped in a liquid-filled vessel.

Viewing cuneiform tablets and Venus figurines -

— and pain liked I never imagined, machine-generated, amplifying my soul-undertone, while rubbing to erase everything else about me -

Stumbling under this barrage of frenzied images, I could also hear people yelling across the room. Beta and Ritu for sure, and maybe others, all of them sounding so-slow as time seemed to creep more gradually with each passing second. Few of their frantic words were clear. Anyway, their passions seemed immaterial as I paused on the bottommost stair, a foot wavering above the laboratory floor.