🌘

“I have a younger sibling, but, well…I used to have a younger sibling, I mean,” you say. “I don’t actually know for sure.”

“Oh no,” Zeta says. “I’m sorry.”

“It was years ago. He just vanished one day. Got separated from us and that was that…”

“That’s terrible!”

“We don’t even have any idea if he’s alive or not,” you say.

“Do they have any idea what happened?” Zeta says.

“Even the private detectives my family hired couldn’t find him. Most disappearances in Lunar cities, I think as much as 80% of them, are abductions by cults, like the Lunar Traditionalist Foundation. People like that would have the resources to elude even technopaths. The Traddies especially target so-called “male” children, who they see as an endangered species that needs saving or something. Then they use some intense technopathy to make them the perfect Traddy cultists. So they’re probably the most likely ones, but we found nothing, and it could have been anyone.”

“I didn’t know the Moon was such a harsh place…”

“I guess the colonies are more stable,” you say.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked…”

“It’s okay, you didn’t know. It was years ago, and a long way from here… We have cults of our own to worry about here, so let’s focus on training,” you say.

“Okay,” the Zeta copies all say in unison. Just the one currently in front of you continues, “Obfuscation lesson: find the real Zeta!”

Simple, you think. But is it? You observe them all as you rotate around. By now you’ve completely lost track of what positioning the original Zeta was in when you closed your eyes. They’re all completely identical--the way the light and shadow interacts with them, the way the circulating air blows the short half-black-half-white hairs on their heads. Their voices are identical in every way when they speak. They’re just out of reach for you to touch, that would be one sense it would be hard to get around with sensory echoes.