Luna found herself back in the brightness of the Q room, lying on the floor staring up at the white ceiling. Her dress had returned to the plainer but familiar style she'd worn all her life, the scuff marks and abrasions that had covered her ABT – wounds she hadn't even realised she'd picked up, not noticing them until they were gone – had vanished as though they'd healed away in an instant, and a smooth pillow had been placed carefully beneath her head.

Beside her knelt Sigma – her Sigma – his hand reaching out to rest against her arm as she stirred. "Luna? You're back?" he exclaimed, his face flushed with concern and relief.

Luna stirred, shifting her shoulders as she prepared to sit up. Once upright, still unsteady as she reacclimatised herself with the renewed connection to Lagomorph and the quantum computer, she turned to Sigma and asked, "Did anything happen, here?"

"Nothing worth worrying about," Sigma replied with a faint smile. "I was merely showing my termite colony to the pleasant young lady who was just here."

Luna nodded, full of relief.

"And on your end?" Sigma then asked. He brushed aside the start of Luna's instinctive objections with a wave of his hand. "I've seen enough Shifts on my path to this moment to fail to recognise what just happened. If that other Luna came here to visit the termites, you must have switched over to the other world. Just as clearly, this Shift was initiated at our end. So please, Luna, tell me what happened."

Luna stayed silent for a good half a minute. When she opened her mouth, all she could say was, "I met the other version of you, there."

Sigma chuckled. "That bad, huh?" He stood up, using one hand planted on his knee to steady himself. Eyes lowered, and traces of a grimace playing on his lips, he stepped over towards the quantum computer's terminal. "It seems that I should deactivate that latest upgrade. It was too soon to try to make use…"

"Wait!" Luna cried out. She hurried to her feet as well and interposed herself between Sigma and the terminal. "There's one more thing that…"

Shock and surprise spread across Sigma's face, but Luna couldn't focus on that. Her entire attention, all the mental power allocated to her on the main computer, was given over to the process that was just beginning. As Luna concentrated, a stream of transferring data passed through her and reached for the Rhizome Nine quantum computer. This connection – half-digital, half-morphogenetic – wrote thousands and thousands of lines of programming code onto that computer in only a few seconds. Each program, once complete and in its allocated place, formed the personality of a Gaulem: a Gaulem from another world.

Luna had offered them all a choice, when she'd connected to the Gaulems in the palace's main computer. That was the most she'd been able to do. How many had taken her up on that offer? Not all of them. But many dozens had followed her back to her own world, choosing the chance of something different over the world Father had created for them.

As the final Gaulem was downloaded into place on the quantum computer and the morphogenetic link fell away, Luna's knees buckled beneath her. Was this what exhaustion was supposed to feel like? Luna supposed so.

Concerned once more, Sigma reached out a hand to help Luna steady herself. Once she had he turned to the terminal's screen, watching as the lines of code flitted by. "Made some friends, I see."

Luna nodded resolutely.

"Hmm…" Sigma's remaining bare eyebrow arched up as he looked Luna in the eye. "It took me nearly a decade to build all the Gaulems needed for the Nonary Game. To make bodies for all of these new individuals, and run through the stress-tests for all of them… We only have the one Gaulem bay to work with, here."

Luna decided, with visions of that nightmarish, buried production line flashing across her mind, that was for the best. "I'm ready to spend as long as it takes," she said.

Sigma rubbed two fingers pensively against his chin. Then, he nodded; a faint but fulfilled smile emerged on his lips. "It will be good for this place to have some purpose once more."

Yes, Luna thought, as she picked out the first Gaulem that they'd bring into their new home. Yes, it would be good.