Their battle is over. It’s out of their control now.

To Yosil, the news is calamitous. The germ missiles may not launch at all! No viral rain of death virus to mow down millions and feed the glazier beam when it arrives. Hovering above the city, it will harvest only a trickle. The few thousand who normally die each day will discover an afterlife unlike anything they were taught about in church! But Yosil despairs that such meager reinforcement will never give the glazier the boost it needs to become a spiritual behemoth, capable of bending the soulscape to its mighty will.

The other personality — once rooted in Albert Morris — had succumbed to Yosil’s dream, adopting it as his own. Can he now accept it’s over and choose a more modest goal?

Others plunge into this fray.

While the glazier builds toward ignition, the organic body of realAlbert sways along the axis of the beam, like an anchor dragged by a rising storm -

— as Ritu and Beta arrive with arms outstretched, united in purpose at last, bent on pushing him aside, or worse.

I know you’re curious to probe Ritu’s complex, tormented soul. By all means, use the new powers of perception. Soon you’ll see the crime that set her tragic tale in motion …

… the reason why her syndrome so resembles and exaggerates the very same one suffered by Yosil.

Not genes alone, but also a trauma they both suffered long ago, when a doting father tried using clever new technology to encourage and spur his infant daughter’s developing brain, by imprinting talents from one loving soul to another.

Like playing music for a fetus in the womb — that is how poor Yosil imagined it — a harmless gift from one generation to the next, alas, before anyone understood about subjective uniqueness and soul-orthogonality. Before the dreadful harm was widely known. Before such things were out-lawed.

Tragedy can have its own triste beauty, evoking tears or laughter. This one rippled on with gorgeously transfixing horror worthy of Sophocles, across years wracked with silent remorse, obsession, and pain.

Yes, you’ll pity them. From this new perspective, you will commiserate, dwell upon, and share their agony.

Later.

Others plunge into this fray.

A spiral-patterned golem charges through the opposite door, shouting about betrayal in terms that only a multibillionaire would use. And you have to hand it to Aeneas Kaolin. (You will hand it to him, I predict.) It took ingenuity that no one imagined him capable of, to penetrate the many-layered disguises and defenses erected by a family of brilliant paranoiacs. Yosil and Ritu and Beta underestimated him. So did Albert Morris.

With a little more time … or if he trusted Morris enough to confide and ally with him from the beginning … Kaolin might have made a difference. But now? Even as he raises a weapon, shouting threats and demands to desist, Aeneas clearly knows that it’s too late.

Same with the warriors now arriving from the military base, bursting through that dark tunnel under Urraca Mesa. Armed, armored, and representing the wrath of abused taxpayers, it is the cavalry at last — pulverizing Beta’s rear guard to reach the high parapet and gaze down on all of this. Among their weapons are cameras, beaming images around the world.

Light cleanses. The World Eye was supposed to prevent all big nasty conspiracies and mad scientist labs.

It very nearly did.

Maybe next time it will.

If there is a next time.

Has anyone noticed the alignment yet?

Like a superheated, pressurized mix of air and explosive, the amplified Standing Wave has grown beyond containment or forbearance. Nor can you retard the advancing ortho-moment any longer. The time for meddling is about to end -

— as Kaolin charges toward the red mirror

— as Ritu and Beta plunge toward the gray

— as soldiers throw themselves courageously over the balcony on ropes made of living clay

— as realAlbert lifts his eyes … the only one who seems, quite suddenly, to know what’s happening.

A tester once told Albert he was “born for this era,” with the right combination of ego, focus, and emotional distance to make perfect duplicates. Well, except for me, his first and only frankie. Still, I was willing to gamble on that talent -

— providing I could somehow reach the scanning plate of a simple copier.

This time there was a chair nearby. Fumes wafted from my poor arm as it dragged me over there, one slither at a time. Worming around to grip a chair leg with my chin, I hauled it back, positioning the chair next to the big white duplicating machine. Only about a kilo of my body mass melted along the way.

It doesn’t go high enough, I quickly realized. Glancing around for something else, I spied a wire-mesh waste receptacle three meters away. With a groan that escaped through several cracks other than my mouth, I set out to fetch it — a journey that felt like crossing the North Pole while being pelted by asteroids.

Half of my remaining ceramic teeth fell out while gripping the metal basket on my way back. Then, the first time I tried tossing it on top of the chair, I missed and had to repeat the whole damned thing.

This had better be enough, I thought, when the basket was finally in place, upside down on the cushioned seat. Any minute, someone might restore contact with that missile launcher upstairs and resume the countdown. And those vibrations of running feet grew closer by the second. Whatever was going on, I wanted the power to act! Even as the shambling replica of a frankie.

Well, here goes.

From the floor I reached up, grabbed the edge of the chair, and pulled hard. My head and torso weighed much less now — and grew lighter with each passing moment — still the strain was enormous. Fresh pock-fissures erupted all along my quivering arm, each one venting noxious steam … till at last my chin broached over the ledge, taking some of the pressure. That made things a bit easier, though no less painful. Commanding my elbow to twist up and around, I managed to push down now, dragging my attenuated body to perch at the edge of the seat.

So much for the simple part.

Halfway to the copier platform now, I could see a glowing green START button within easy reach, but useless till my head reached the perceptron tendrils. Still, I took a moment to smack the button, telling the machine to start readying a blank. If I did manage to make it, there’d be few seconds to spare. Machinery rumbled and rumbled.

Now things get tricky.

Fortunately, the chair had arms … twice as many as I did, actually. That helped as I leveraged myself alongside the upended wastebasket, flopping and wedging my body against the metal mesh while my sole decaying limb pushed. Then I had to reach higher, onto the copier itself, searching for fingerholds — and as I strained again, a couple of digits broke off, liquefying horribly as they fell past my good eye to splat on the floor.

This time, the fissures along my arm resembled chasms, sweating fluid the color of magma. It was a race to see whether dissolution would win, or hard baking from heat, like happened to that leg I threw at the missile launcher. Suppose I self-cooked in place! What a sculpture I’d make. Call it A Study in Obstinacy, reaching and grimacing while struggling to haul a useless body …

That’s it, I realized, grateful for any inspiration, drop the deadweight!

Barely thinking, I applied lessons that I learned upstairs, pulling my self inward and away from remote parts. The whole bottom half of my torso was useless to me now — so ditch it! Scavenge the remaining enzymes. Send them up for the arm’s final tug.