But nothing useful lay in sight — just tons of freeze-dried gourmet foods, stacked here against some doomsday scenario, meant to feed a governmental elite whose tax-paid job it is to stave off all varieties of doomsday.

There didn’t seem to be any good hiding places, either. Not as a platoon of counterfeit warriors began entering the storage room after us, grunting and shuffling as they came. Quick-imprinted, I diagnosed. Beta doesn’t need quality, but speed and large numbers.

A nagging sense of doubt yammered at me, screaming that none of it made sense. The golem that rescued me. Beta’s sudden appearance here. The two waves of war-dittos that he created for some unexplained reason. The grabbing and force-imprinting of Ritu. It all had to mean something!

But there wasn’t time to sort it out, only a series of rapid decisions. Like where to flee. Inexorably, we had but one choice.

Ritu balked at the tunnel entrance. “Where does it go?” she demanded.

“I think it leads under Urraca Mesa, to your father’s cabin.”

Her eyes widened and her feet planted hard, refusing to budge. I glanced beyond her shoulder to see those shuffling pseudosoldiers approach, still fifty meters away but closing.

“Ritu—” Despite rising anxiety, I restrained myself from tugging at her arm. She had already been subjected to more force today than anyone should endure.

At last her eyes cleared, coming around to focus on mine. With a grim tightening of the jaw, she nodded.

“All right, Albert. I’m ready.”

Ritu took my offered hand. Together we plunged into the tunnel’s stony-cold womb.

Like a capacious, ever-expanding jar — this soul contains many.

It feels bottomless, able to absorb a gathering, a plenitude, a forum of standing waves, uniting in a resonant chorus of superposed frequencies, combining toward some culmination of ultimate power.

It isn’t just the two of us anymore — the Albert Morris gray who was ditnapped from Kaolin Manor, plus the little red copy-of-a-copy who visited the Maharal’s private museum for a memory test. Gray and red are linked, serving as mirrors in a mad scientist’s wondrously terrifying “glazier” machine. And now there is more, much more.

No longer confined to a single skull — or even a pair of them — we/i expand into the vacant space between, filling its sterile void with a compellingly intricate melody … an ever-growing song of me

A song heading for its crescendo.

Oh, some kind of amplification is happening, all right, as Yosil’s demented ghost predicted. A multiplication of soul-rhythms on a scale I never imagined, though cults and mystics have chattered about such a possibility ever since the Golem Age began. It could be an egomaniac’s sublime nirvana state — the self, exponentiated by countless virtual duplicates that reflect and resonate in perfect harmony, preparing to burst through, en masse, to a splendid new level of spiritual reification.

I always dismissed the notion as metaphysical nonsense, just another version of the age-old romantic-transcendentalist fantasy — like stone circles, UFO hallucinations, and “singularity” mirages were to other generations who kept yearning for a way to rise above this gritty plain. For a doorway to some realm beyond.

Only now it seems that one of the founders of this era, the legendary Professor Maharal, found a way … though something about his method drove him mad with fear.

Is that why ditYosil needs the soul of Albert Morris, to use as raw material? Because nothing about golemtech frightens me? Self-duplication always felt natural to Albert, like picking something comfortable to wear from the closet. Hell, I’m not even bothered much anymore by all the pain inflicted by this brutal machinery — some clever modification of the standard tetragramatron. Creative machinery that will soon nudge a zillion overlapping copies of my Standing Wave to unite in perfect unison, as light rays do in a laser, joining as collusive bosons rather than independent/bickering fermions …

Whatever that means. I can already feel the process working. In fact, there’s a strong temptation to stop thinking and just let go … wallow in the simplicity … in the glorious me-ness of it all. Memory and reason feel like impediments, sullying the purity of a Standing Wave that multiplies on and on, filling an ever-expanding vessel.

I, amphorum …

Fortunately, there come respites when fierce, machine-driven energies aren’t pummeling and stretching me/us according to plan, when cogent thought remains possible … even enhanced with a peculiar kind of focus. For example, right now I can perceive ditYosil bustling about nearby, sensing his presence in ways that go beyond mere sound or vision. The intensity of his desire. His growing excitement and confidence as a lifelong goal draws near.

Above all, I feel ditYosil’s burning concentration, enhanced by the genius that so often accompanies Smersh-Foxleitner syndrome … a concentration so fixed, he can ignore a rain of dust that falls from the cave’s ceiling each time the stone walls shudder from some distant, booming explosion, as war-golems claw their way closer, ever closer to this buried lair.

They’re still too far away for me to decipher much about their soul-harmonies. Could they even be me? It’s tempting to imagine realAlbert, accompanied by an army of himselves … and maybe a whole bunch of Pal’s wonderful/nasty specialty dittos … fighting their way up that tunnel, coming to the rescue.

But no. I forgot. I’m dead. ditYosil says he killed me. The real, organic Albert Morris had to die, so he wouldn’t “anchor” my quantum-soul observer state to the material world — whatever that means.

Still puttering and preparing, Maharal’s ghost fine-tunes a large pendulum that sways slowly back and forth between my red and gray cranium-mirrors, raising soul-ripples with each passage. Ripples that thrum to the lowest sound you ever heard — like the voice heard by Moses on Sinai …

I lack the proper technical vocabulary, but it’s easy to imagine what’ll happen when ditYosil steps aboard that rocking platform. Those ripples will take over. He plans to use my purified-amplified presence as a carrier wave, to boost his own essence higher. I’m to be spent, the same way that an expendable rocket is splurged, drained, and discarded in order to hurl an expensive probe toward the black abyss of space. Only the cargo I’m assigned to carry will be Maharal’s soul-pattern … launching it toward something like godhood.

Everything makes sense, in a perverse way, except for one puzzling thing.

Wasn’t I supposed to be losing my sense of identity by now? ditYosil predicted that my ego would be overwhelmed by the sheer ecstasy of amplification, removing all of Albert Morris’s personal hang-ups and desires, leaving just Albert’s talent for duplication, distilled, expanded, exponentiated. The purest of all booster rockets.

Is that happening? Ego Reduction? It … doesn’t feel that way. Yes, I can sense the glazier machinery trying to achieve that. But my footing isn’t loose. Albert’s memories feel intact!

Moreover, what about all these echoes that i/we keep picking up? Musically resonant echoes that feel like they come from outside? Yosil never mentioned anything about that … and I don’t plan on bringing it up.

For one thing, he’s dismissed me as a cipher, a beast of burden, talented at copying but unworthy of respect.

But there’s another reason.

I … we … are … am starting to enjoy this.