Sunlight broke over the rooftop, spilling into the courtyard.

Leigh blinked.

She found a list of old titles and skimmed through two of them, “Homo Evolutis” and Buckley’s “Who’s On First.”

A thinline between fiction and nonfiction disappeared as transparency revealed the true noisiness of the universe.

A birdfeeder made of broken scarlet glass sent dancing, swaying light reflections scurrying across the courtyard floor.

Who had arranged her states of energy?

How was she able to travel from one universe to another with ease?

What was the difference between true joy and joy artificially induced by mass market hypnosis?

If joy was simply a sudden change in a small portion of one’s states of energy, themselves artificially arranged to begin with, then was anything ever genuinelu authentic, having originated from previously active, autonomous states of energy, themselves artificially arranged, too?

Leigh calculated the types of people she would encounter and selected subroutines that would subtly alter her appearance throughout the day.

She was expected to speak to several large groups interested in her plans for establishing family-based colonies on Mars.

Hired by a sorority sister, Satguar, after Leigh left college to build a series of motivational speaker bots, Leigh had studied Satguar’s company goals for Terraform Corp.

Together, they devised a matrix of ten ten-year plans that predicted the outcome of most literary, political and business output for the next three years.

Solidly so.

Leigh’s motivational bots, identical in almost every aspect to Leigh herself, were not consciously aware they were duplicates of Leigh.

Every bot assumed it was the original and the others were duplicates.

Leigh had forgotten which body was supposed to be her original.

She had stopped caring.

New memories gathered by the bots were cross-referenced wirelessly throughout the day.

Leigh had long ago paid off zombie net hackers to let her use the net to update her selves anywhere and anytime across the solar system.

A chimney’s shadow crawled across the birdfeeder, its colour turning a dull maroon.

Leigh finished her dandelion salad, took a bite of croissant and washed it down with the last swallow of chicory coffee.

She blinked again, reviewing the day’s schedule stored in her thoughts.

Two bots were out of service for experimental upgrade testing.

She and a half dozen other bots were meeting with officials and people on the street this morning to promote a new set of family values found only on Mars.

Tonight, they’d speak subliminally through music concerts, online immersive thought nets and adverts hidden in people’s everyday environs, city or country.

They were also slated to appear on various talk shows throughout the day, their external appearances so different that no one realised they were actually the same internally.

Facial recognition was ubiquitously transparent but DNA recognition was still restricted due to to business and political leaders not wanting the general populace to know how many clones existed.

Leigh used every available tool to sell Satguar’s parents’ dream of settling Mars and rebooting society at the same time.