I'm glad it was @stardvark who shot me. We ended up being good friends, and it offers me no end to teasing him about it. In his defense, he claims I was being "unreasonable."

  Anyway, now that you know how I got that hole in my chest, let's get back to where we were. I was in the center of the basement of Starlab 41665.1, and I had just pulled the memoryshard out of my dead body. Not the memoryshard and catnip virus I had uploaded into the ship's computer, mind you. That Valkyrie ship was probably long gone by now.

  I know I said it before, but memory gaps suck. They really suck. Don't you wish you knew the starlab was full of zombie experiments before you found yourself in the starlab, surrounded by zombies! I did.

  I saw them moving in the room before the memories struck me.

  We weren't alone.

  "M o t h e r f u c k e r," I whispered, rotating away from my dead body.

  I wondered how I had missed them before.

  I took a moment to curse Ashfield's Law of Authenticity. Developed in the early days of human-to-biotic conversion, Ashfield's Law places a value on human traits, including some that have historically been seen as shortcomings but now are thought to contribute to our evolution. Things like general gut feel, imprecision, misspellings, slang, etc., are highly valued. If you use fewer tech-enabled senses beyond your human body, you are being more authentic. If you tune into all the sensors of a machine's AI-enabled comprehension, you are being inauthentic.

  No one wants to be accused of being a machine.

  Many aiways live in human bodies for those reasons. But even then, there are degrees of awareness, of shutting off the tech. It's customary to "unplug" a little. Not completely. We usually just call it low power mode. To truly "unplug" would make us essentially fully human, or as close as we could get.

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  But shit. My adherence to Ashfield's Law could get me killed. It's not the first time I've thought that. Maybe if I had prioritized my sensors over my body's authenticity, I would have picked up more inputs, seen the disaster before it unfolded. Being in the military, I was allowed to scale up to being more machine than human, to some extent, but we never felt good about it. Or maybe I did, but didn't admit it.

  I shook it off. It wouldn't have made any difference, I told myself. My attention had been entirely on my other body, the lifeless one hanging in that mesmerizing blue light. I was utterly captivated by it.

  I didn't need my futurecasting to tell me that this was a trap. I saw dozens and dozens of dark shapes shifting in the background, coming toward me. I had to alert the others.

  kittyboy: "@here, it's a trap! Overtaken! #important"

  shadowhacker: "You've been overtaken? Do you need assistance?"

  Stupid, @kittyboy, I cursed at myself. They don't know what an overtaken is yet.

  kittyboy: "Zombies! Run!"

  I broadcasted a summary of my memory of the log and an image from the video of the redhead being pursued in the locked room.

  shadowhacker: "I'm not picking up anything."

  kittyboy: "You will! Get out of here! Everyone!"

  And then it seemed like every bit of power in the starlab turned itself on simultaneously. It was a flood of the senses, literally. I went from darkness to blazing light, electromagnetic waves, sonar charges. All my sensors were overloaded with inputs and interference.

  I couldn't see, hear, or sense anything. But I knew they were coming for me.

  So I unplugged.

  I felt less alive and more alive at the same time. Suddenly, it was just me. I wasn't backing up my memories anymore. I couldn't sync memories with the others in the hopes that one of us would get out. I couldn't even send any messages to the rest of the Firesquad in this state without typing or saying something to the comms unit.

  But I could somehow feel my breath and my heartbeat even more. Sure, I could still be reanimated, and the Alliance Starmada would put the latest version they had of me in there. But now I felt the true risk of death, the rawness of a human death, and the desire NOT to die.

  I felt more real, more present in the universe. I was not just the center of my world. I was the entirety of my world now. I was everything. Right here.

  More importantly, my tactic worked. I was still slightly blinded by the brightness and deafened by the sounds echoing through the room, but it was more manageable with only human inputs to orient myself and get moving.

  Besides, I shoot better when I'm not paying attention, when it's more gut than science. So, despite my predicament, I laughed as I pulled out the glen10 pistol and started firing.