Chapter 31
Physics' Decision
The colorlessness melted away and the music went back into his mind, when Leeondro K'Saavis faded back into reality. He recognized the person standing before him by very manner, though the man had his back to the inventor and his body hidden in a long, white lab coat. The Force, even as Lee started to push it away because of the memories that flooded in, stuttered and told of a convergence he could not understand. The room in which he stood was as Imperial-military as the views from Corran Horn's interuniversal camera and was set up obviously as a makeshift laboratory. It was filled with many instruments that he could identify and others he could not, though they either resonated with the Force or pricked at some memory at the back if his mind. These observations took seconds.
The man in the coat began to move, and Lee saw on the desk behind him one of the spherical universe-machines. He turned and Lee saw his own face, worn and lined and rebuilt. When Horn, Jedi, went into this world he did not encounter his other self, he had become him...
It was not Lee's lacking command of the Force but rather his scientist's mind that made the connection. This other self not of the fringes of the Remnant but of the thriving Empire, knew the possibilities of his machine.
Face to face the inventors looked at each other with calculations and equations of probability rising into their conscious thoughts. Conflicting, battling for existence flashed though their minds, their selves.
Reality spasmed. Physics realized that its earlier decision that one person could not be in two places at once was being decided again.
It was less a physical death than a mental banishment. Existence tore their consciousness, self, sanity and delusion away. Half an hour later, an emissary of the Empire would find the almost identical bodies and congratulate the inventor on the completion of his experiments detailing clone madness.