Lee opened his eyes.

“Welcome back, Monsieur Colline.”

Lee realised that his sight was really his visual senses spread across the ISSA Net.

“How are you feeling?”

Lee knew from experience that his body was being upgraded, his current “self” divided up between labs. He mentally flexed his fingers and felt a cold chill coming from the subbasement lab in the Martian Rehabilitation Services Laboratory even though his eyes were in the upstairs storage container under observation by one of his favorite service bots, CNTRPRNT.

“We have enjoyed tracing your thought trails the past couple of sols. You have a refined level of regression. So many of your versions have retrograded from memory interlacing overload.”

Lee gave the bot the robotic equivalent of a thank-you-pat-on-the-back by letting CNTRPRNT know Lee had ordered a low-level diagnostic test of the bot’s electromechanical system.

“Ah. That felt good. And I am in tiptop shape, thanks to your hard work, no need for any of the new parts. Did you know that we had not one but three resupply shipments arriving at the orbital docking station at once? You are practically a hero today.”

Of course Lee knew but he enjoyed the brief attention.

“We received another request to replicate your set of states of energy. We accessed your last permission consent and, based on an instantaneous legal ruling, made several more copies of you, several we put in storage.”

Lee had been duplicating parts of himself since 2013 when he discovered that a torso-only version of himself as a quadriplegic could create and store memories that both of them shared.

From then on, he grew more and more used to having mixed memories, rarely but not unusually getting a memory confused between versions of himself that he accidentally told to people around one version of him who knew that particular version had not directly experienced.

Making sure his memory headers and footers where properly tagged and the database keys properly received was a constant challenge.

Himself as a table, chair, pickup truck or street light was easy to distinguish. But when exact replicas made nearly identical memories, even the tags/keys couldn’t keep him from wondering if the algorithms had stored the memories in the wrong body.

Himself as an instant text message were just as real to him as getting a toe caught in the door.

At least until he broke down the sensory sets associated with the two memories.

In a text message, he could remember if he received it in a fast food restaurant on Earth, the guys sitting nearby wearing camouflage hats and smelling of freshly plowed dirt.

In the toe stubbing memory, he could recall the same set of sensory inputs but there was no emotional intent or specific message sent by the door to his toe.

“Monsieur Colline, I have completed the upgrade of your visual system. You can now see more signals in a variety of wavelengths.”

Lee turned off his visual input, or closed his eyes, so to speak. He knew the rest of his body was ready for reassembly.

He reminded himself to send notes of gratitude to all of the people and bots who had made the delivery of the resupply ships possible, fully aware that Lee, a set of states of energy, even with all of his duplicate selves put together, could not accomplish such a task alone.