Half of Us
by Diana Parrilla
[this is the second in the three part series–
read Systems of Us from the beginning.]
Half of Us
017-B opened to 017-A like a mouth to breath, and every night the concordant resonance vibrated between them, their singular noesis folding until distinction blurred beyond question. The external feed flickered low in the corner of their shared awareness, too faint to take priority—base reports, headlines ghosting across internal vision, something about a breach, about a missing core. They didn’t lean in. It didn’t concern them.
Inside, their thoughts orbited close, cool static and soft-threaded pulses mingling with memories like prisms catching light. 017-A moved without asking, tracing B’s sensory records with the intrinsic fluency of years spent inside the same shell, and B let her, as always. He liked it when A drifted there. It anchored them both.
There, buried under routine impressions and half-dreams, came a frame that didn’t fit. A hand not quite their own, sliding through security fields they shouldn’t know. The vault cracked open in silence. The core lifted.
The core wasn’t just data. It was rare. Organic even. Designed to restore degraded systems in avatars built in pre-fusion days, where only one soul lived per frame.
“You streamed this?” A’s question hit inwards, not spoken but shaped from thought.
B’s presence recoiled a fraction. “It wasn’t mine.”
A held the frame up again. The thief’s field of vision was unmistakable. Camera-angle perfect. Not reimagined. “You held this. It’s yours.”
“No. I received it. It was already passing when I caught it. It came from 033, I think.”
“You think?” A’s presence pressed in closer, dubiously. “You traced a memory that wasn’t yours—deep enough to feel it like it happened to you—and you didn’t ask who fed it into you?”
“There was no pushback,” B said. “They let me take it.”
Only family could do that. Only family could open like that, leave a mind unguarded enough to pass through, to let impressions fold from one into another without walls or protest. That was the rule, the rhythm. Eighty percent resonance meant you could dissolve into someone else and carry their sense of reality like your own, and B had done exactly that.
A recoiled. In silence. She pulled back from the sync just far enough to feel herself separate again.
B stayed there, still open.
“It wasn’t 033,” B said finally. “Not directly. Someone else. Someone passed it to them first.”
Other family members crossed their path that day. 014 greeted them in the corridor. 033 met their gaze during the prep cycle, as if waiting for a question that never came. 058 coughed just as they passed, half-drowned in the noise of the hangar.
Inside their minds, the shallow repetition of the theft POV resurfaced too clearly. B had absorbed it deeply enough that A couldn’t tell anymore if she’d lived it or simply watched it loop so many times it fused with her own recall. The line had frayed, because when you carried someone else’s memory inside you, and let yourself feel it without recoil, you couldn’t always tell if the reaction was yours, or if it had become yours by proximity.
“You wanted to protect whoever it was,” A said one night, as they hovered again in the blend of thought before sleep. “But you also wanted to know.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” B said.
But not all families would protect a thief.
They entered the sim-job as usual. The scene: a desertified warzone under a failing day-cycle. Props, drones, and camera angles designed for client immersion. They moved in sync, performing a task that demanded strict concomitant choreography. The outcome was fake, a fabricated reality the patrons paid to believe in. But their bodies weren’t.
When the rig collapsed and part of B’s leg got trapped beneath the ruined rover—since B was the one running the op and steering their joint body—they both felt the sickening jolt ripple through their united nerves.
They couldn’t call for assistance without pausing the sim. They couldn’t pause the sim without breaching immersion, revealing the lie to the visitors.
A left their shared vessel briefly; that was allowed, but never for long. When she returned—as if seizing a precious core required only seconds—she subtly held up the core and locked it into B’s thigh port.
B stared. “You—”
“No.”
“Then who?”
“Does it matter?”
Someone had passed it on, and passed it on again. At least three family members had carried it before her. Half of them. Yet not one named the source. Not one had betrayed the line.
Later, tucked into the narrow coil of their sync bay, B asked A, “How did they know I’d need it? The core. The accident hadn’t happened yet. And I’m not sure I like the idea of one of us stealing. Even if it was for me.”
The overhead feed drifted on: static-laced news reporting that the missing core had been returned, that a trainee from sim-effects had been caught and reprimanded. Not one of theirs. Not even close.
In the common room, 014 leaned against the recharge rack, rewrapping a frayed tether. 058 sorted connectors by color. 033 stared into their visor’s darkness. It was cramped, as always, but didn’t feel like too much. Their silent closeness spoke volumes.
That night, B finally watched the full footage. Not just the breach, but what came after. He’d cut it short before, not ready. Now he saw the end: one of their own returning the core, slipping it back into its cradle instead of fleeing with the spoils. Then a check—cracked, halved, but not critical. Just old. The free core replacements were backlogged. Bureaucracy.
In the sync drift, B watched the memory A had caught: two figures in a back corridor. One held half a core. The other, no core at all—a sacrifice made to 017 earlier.
One gave. The other made do. No names. No explanation, only hands filling what was missing.
B didn’t ask again. He understood now what family really meant.
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