Somehow I knew that one more step would make things even worse. Glancing left, I saw that I was almost lined up with the gray and red golems — spreadeagled across from each other while the pendulum crisscrossed slowly between them. The nearest ditto — dark gray — turned its head quarter-profile toward me, looking almost familiar to my bleary eyes.

Then, unexpected and unbeckoned, quavering words entered my head.

realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.

What was that? Another symptom?

No distractions, I vowed. Got to keep my rendezvous with a folding chair, just meters away.

Taking another step dropped me down those final inches to the floor -

— completing the alignment.

And suddenly the sky seemed to crash on me! The intruding voice went basso profundo, filling my head with urgent-compulsive commentary in present tense:

Is realAlbert Dying?

Will He Perish Soon? What If My Organic “Anchor” Suddenly Lets Go During These Final Moments Before the Glazier Peaks?

Estimating …

It Seems the Death Whiplash Could Give My Waveform a Boost Against Yosil. It Might Even Hurl His Obnoxious Specter out of Here!

What the hell? Stabbing pain shot through my parietal lobes. I swayed from the bizarre thoughts pouring through me. It felt like ditto-inloading, only far more intense and alien.

My Foe’s Attacks Grow More Desperate with Each Pendulum Swing. No Compromise. If He Can’t Have the Prize No One Will!

Yosil and I May Annihilate Each Other, Spewing the Glazier Forth Unguided, Rampaging on a Plane of Reality That Society’s Defenses Aren’t Even Equipped to Detect. All Those Doomed People in the City, About to Suffer Writhing Deaths … I Can’t Let Them Be Sacrificed in Vain.

Daunted by the sheer size of this entity, by its booming thoughts, I wondered, How could it have anything to do with me?

Then again, how could it not? You don’t read the minds of other people. Only different versions of yourself.

realAlbert Begins to Understand! I’ll Help Him, Before the Pendulum Swings Back.

He’s Dying Anyway. When He Sees What’s at Stake, He’ll Do the Right Thing.

How Fitting If My Creator Joins Me the Very Moment When It Will Do the Most Good!

That thundering narration, like foam on a tidal wave, was only the surface layer of a mammoth inloading. I cried out, clutching my head as events of several days flooded my battered brain across a link that was unbuffered, unprotected. Coalescing from the raucous clamor were key data -

— what became of my graydit that went missing at Kaolin Manor, back on Tuesday. Enhanced and multiplied a million-fold, it now stood as part of a great machine whose terrifying purpose was starting to dawn on me -

— and who torched my house and garden, a rogue ditto who murdered its own rig. The very one now riding that pendulum, screaming its head off. In a fraction of a second, I grasped why … and what it means to be an “anchor” -

— and what I was being offered …

— and the cost.

Our Patterns Mesh. Despite a Befuddled Brain, realAl Partakes of My New Vision. With Growing Awe, He Perceives the Soulscape in Its Fallow Beauty, Barely Touched by Some Algae Flecks Along the Shore.

Look Deeper, Albert. See How the Soulscape Emerged from the Limitless Inherent Potentialities of the Dirac Sea. Dormant for Ten Billion Years, It Awaits an Entity Who Can Observe. Someone Able to Collapse All the Quantum Probabilities with a Finesse Never Imagined by Theorists …

Stop!

All That Technobabble Comes from ditYosil! While His Specter Slices Through the Standing Wave, He Keeps Trying to Impose His Viewpoint on the Divine.

How Many More Cycles Before Our Conflict Shatters Everything?

Resolution Depends on realAlbert.

Decide! I Tell the Small Organic Man That I Once Was. Decide Now!

Our thoughts weren’t in synch. Time operated differently for that altered and amplified version of “me,” its voice surging and then muting in waves. I needed several intense seconds of instruction before my slower organic mind grasped the outlines — the elegant discovery made by Ritu’s genius father. And his plan to fulfill the life arc of a species.

How many times have I scorned those fringe mystics who took the word “soulistics” literally? Beyond our banal power to live parallel lives, they saw implicit hope — or tacit dread — that humanity had crossed a line, embarking on a new destiny. And here I was, being offered a key role in the greatest thing since the Big Bang!

To earn it, all I must do was die.

Isn’t That Happening Anyway? Just Hasten It by a Few Minutes, I felt urged.

Grab Any Tool. A Bludgeon Will Do.

Wavering on my feet, I spotted a sharp pencil on a nearby console.

Before even willing it — and maybe I didn’t — the slender thing was in my hand, the tip approaching my right eye.

One hard shove and a new age would be born.

“Oh God,” I groaned.

And my own voice came right back, emerging from my mouth with a reply.

“Yes. I Am Here. And Be Assured, This Will Serve Me Well.”

Lying on a cold stone floor as chilly dawn broke through an open window, I hefted my sole weapon — the bent and baked leg that I wrenched from my own body.

I’d have one chance to hurl it right.

Clickety went the missile launcher while a screen glowed READY.

The meddlesome voice that had guided me here was gone. I kind of missed having an audience for my effort.

Here goes, I thought. My one functioning limb — a hand and arm — throbbed with all its might as I threw …

The pencil tip approached my eye. Groaning an oath, I felt quick encouragement from the nearby god-machine. One good shove and a new age would be born, fulfilling a myriad forlorn dreams.

Anyway, I’ve slain myself many times, ever since I turned sixteen, right?

But those were dittos.

My org-body protested against the plan. It bawled to survive!

The same clash with instinct repelled realMaharal from his own project a week ago, fleeing recklessly across the desert night.

“But You’re Made of Sterner Stuff,” my own mouth answered. “Unite with Me. It Will Be Just Like Inloading.”

A day is enough for a ditto, when it knows it will rejoin a larger self. Wasn’t this the same sort of thing? Saints walked into ovens with less assurance than I was being offered.

Okay, I thought, as determination flowed into my arm.

The pencil tip trembled -

Suddenly a flare of amber warning lights erupted nearby, drawing my reflex gaze.

Holo diagnostics zoomed toward an awkward-looking foreign object, obstructing a tilted ramp. News of this sabotage provoked sharp resonance between the gray, the red, and all their virtual copies.