When she was finished considering the essential subjectivity of perception, Jason finished her vegetables and returned to her cell quietly. At last she had a positive idea of the future! It was refreshing, after so long filled up by seemingly arbitrary events, to be aware of some sort of inkling of a “plan” again. Exhilarating almost.
“You’re seeming well-disposed,” said Cass semi-suspiciously. “Nobody looks like that coming back from their first day of work. You’re not in love, are you? Only none of us has quite worked out the ethical implications of that yet.”
Jason shook her head happily and threw herself back into bed, almost enthusiastic to meet another day, despite the dangerous work she was going to have to endure in the meantime.
Her enthusiasm dulled a little bit that morning when she woke to find that she had not been swept away in the night by masked revolutionaries. She was indeed going to have to go back to work.
“You alright, newbie?” said Tina Two when Jason arrived. “No contact from up top yet? Don’t get downbeat, it might take them a while to get to you safely.” There were a few weeks then, every one of which Jason forgot what was coming to her a little more, so that when in the dead of night a guard rattled the bars of her cell with her nightstick and hissed:
“Wake up!”
“Whup?” said Jason. “Cass? Is that you?”
“Not her, another one!” said the guard irately, clicking the key in the lock of the door and pulling it aside with the faint grinding of steel on stone. “We’ve reassigned your cellmate temporarily!”
“Reassigned? We?” whispered Jason. In hushed tones, the guard explained that as much as Jason Prime might exercise her iron-fisted control over her interdimensional duplicates, being as fiercely independent of spirit as she typically was, not many of the guards were actually that committed to her vision or indeed, to their jobs. All this was conveyed over the course of a short walk to what appeared at first to be a broom closet.
“What’s this?” said Jason blearily.
“A broom closet,” said Tina One. “Sorry we can’t do a grander meeting place, but we aren’t supposed to be here, any of us. This is janitorial territory, and our alliance with them is hazy at best.” She was standing just aside from the door, and then she opened it smoothly, like a servant opening the door to a grand ballroom. Even with the bow. Who told her to do that, Jason thought. I’ll fight her.
“So you’re the new model,” said a Jason who she would later find was named Jaycie (not to be confused with J.C. or Jaisee, who were no longer welcome at the meetings for reasons nobody liked to discuss) and she raised her eyebrow skeptically. “We supposed to rally behind this streak of nothing?” She was broad-shouldered, a heavy metalworkers apron thrown over her regulation underclothes.
If this was a broom closet she’d hate to see the brooms. It was easily ten metres square, and as well as the customary janitorial nap area (with magazines and olympic-size hammock) it hosted a dozen or so Jasons looking up at her with their hauntingly familar faces. They were sitting below a sort of lectern/pulpit arrangement that was conspicuously vacant.
“Hi,” she said nervously to the arrayed moon-like faces with their big bright eyes. She was ushered through the group – too small for a crowd, maybe just enough for a throng if they made a lot of noise – to the stage which was made of shipping pallets.
It would be pointless to recount what she said to them. She didn’t really think it mattered anyway. They were desperate for any kind of hope, and she did her best.

Then it was back to soldering duties for another week until the next meeting. She noticed people were a little weirder about her in general after that first speech. Wondered if she had said something wrong. Or worse, something right.

On the saturday she was called in for re-re-orientation.
“What shape is the dimension ship?” said the screen. “Please be as exact as you can.”
“The shape of a stealth fighter and the mass of an airbus, impossibly huge,” said Jason slowly. “I don’t see the point of all this.”
“‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’ To what extent do you agree? Strongly agree moderately agree no opinion moderately disagree strongly disagree?”
“What?”
“‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’ To what extent-”
Jason held up her hands. “What is this game you’re playing?” she said desperately to the screen. “You’re putting us through this insane psychological torment to build an airplane? Is it sadism? Masochism? Some strange blend of both?”
“To what extent to you agree-”
“Strong disagree! Strong disagree if it’ll get you to stop!”
The screen winked green. “Well done, Jason. You are free to go.” The door opened with a sound like a jar being opened for the first time. The corridor outside was unfamiliar, as it always was. The orientation room seemed to wander.

At the meeting that night, she said what she had been thinking all week.
“We’re done waiting,” she pounded her fist on the pulpit. “We’re going to kill the Prime!” The response from the congregation, which had grown to nearly two dozen since last week all pressed in close, was immediate. Since the meetings were secret loud noises like clapping and cheering were strictly forbidden, so assent was marked by a throwing up of hands. The twenty-two Jasons below her looked like a Mexican wave happening all at once.
Jesus Christ, thought Jason, what have I gotten myself into.
Well. At least I’ve got the initials for it. She giggled to herself. She hadn’t seen Cass in a while. Since last week, in fact. She must have been reassigned a long way.

The quest to kill Jason Prime began with a bang. Specifically, an electrical explosion under the North Wing fire alarm. Jaycie triggered that, having been finally converted to the following of Jason the previous Saturday. While the alarm was blaring and the red lights began to flash all through the base, Jason and a few of the other revolutionaries gathered in the tunnel, where they could be sure they were unobserved.
“You people work here?” said Tina One, handing out guard uniforms. “It’s like a hairdryer!” She threw off a mock-salute to Jason and scampered out of there to her hiding place in the gymnasium. The four of them struggled into their uniforms – they were sized perfectly for the four of them, but which one fitted which took some figuring out.
“I think I’ve got yours,” said Asta to Tina Two, struggling to close her jumpsuit at the front to zip it up. There was a messy process of swapping suits back and forth but eventually they got it more or less right.
They’d lost a lot of time to the uniform mess. Jason knew that they would have to move fast. She took the stairs two at a time down from the tunnel and sprinted for the nearest exit – as far as the blueprints she’d seen told her, this would be the easiest way to get to Prime’s office.
Right, left, centre fork, left, right, right. It should have been as easy as that. That was the blueprint. The words she’d been repeating to herself. But either she’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, or those blueprints weren’t as good as she had been led to believe.
“Come on,” said a voice from a speaker. “Would I give you blueprints you could use to kill me? You’re smarter than that. So I am as well, naturally.”
“God, I really hate her,” said Tina Two. “She’s so damned smug about it.”
Suddenly Jason felt a compulsion, as if a voice were instructing her from inside her own head. She closed her eyes and started walking confidently. If we’re so alike, try this on for size, she thought.
She came to a few minutes later, the large ceramic planter she had walked into smashed and scattering its load of earth over the pristine floor. The alarm was still going.
“Jaycie may have gone too far,” said Asta. “She seemed excited to be on the demolitions team.”
Jason sat despondently. Trusting her subconscious had been a one-way ticket to head injury station. So be conscious. Where would I put my secret sanctum?
“Tina, tell me I’m an idiot,” said Jason.
“You’re an… why?” Tina Two said, furrowing her brow.
“Why are the electronics in the dimension ship running constantly? Why does every part need replacing and re-soldering three times a week?”
“I don’t know… research purposes?”
Jason rolled her eyes and sprang to her feet. “It’s the ship!” she said. “Back the way we came!” And she took off that way at a jog, swaying slightly from side to side as she went.

Leaving the others outside to guard the door, Jason entered the ship, feeling sweat bead on her brow almost instantly. It had to be here somewhere… This wasn’t going to be pretty. She wrapped her hand around a metal lever and gritted her teeth as her skin seared with pain. There was a faintly bacony smell, which she tried not to think about as a narrow passageway opened. It was metal on all sides. She was going to have to go through bent double, or on her hands and knees.
Quickly, she slipped her arms out of the jumpsuit and tied it around her waist so that she had as many layers on her knees as possible. Slipping her boots onto her hands, she began to crawl through the tunnel.
It was getting narrower. She howled as the burning metal pressed into her skin, but turning back was no longer an option. The air was catching in her throat. She had to keep going. Her eyeballs felt like they were boiling in her skull. She had to keep going. The soles of her boots were bubbling. She had to keep going.
The wave of freezing cold air that hit her when she opened the hatch felt like being burned all over again. She screamed and shielded her eyes with her blistered, bleeding arms.
“Oh, not this again,” said a voice. It was hers. The Jason on the surgical table wheezed. Eventually Jason realised she was laughing. Lying on the floor, Jason realised that her vision had deteriorated to a smear of red: light when her eyes were open, dark when they weren’t.
“Take this,” said the other Jason, and pressed something into her hand. Attached to the ceiling by a cable, it was a set of goggles with a rubber seal around the eyepieces. Putting them on, they adhered easily to her sore, reddened flesh and the pain began to deaden, then fade. Through the haze of painkillers, she was aware of needles piercing her skin, punching through bone into her optic centres.
Suddenly, she was looking down on the two of them: herself and the other one.
“I suppose it’s my turn now,” said one of the Jasons. She saw herself shove the vile mass off the surgical table where it lay, struggling to move. A probe entered the back of her neck, which hardly felt like hers any more when she looked at it like this. Her deadened nerves finally gave in, and she ceased to be aware of her body at all.
“Why am I here?” she asked the computer system.
/BUILD THE SHIP/ said the computer. /COMPLETE THE JOURNEY/
“Build the ship, complete the journey.”
The compound was just that; a compound eye that she took in in its entirety. Tina One, Jaycie, her band of renegades outside the ship… They were too dangerous. She would have to deal with them, if she was going to complete the journey.
“I should be respectful, let them go back to their own worlds,” she said to the computer.
/NEGATIVE/ said the computer. /INEFFICIENT/
In a very small portion of the panopticon of her experience, Jason watched as a complex network of mechanical tendrils began to operate on the broken body that had once been hers, drilling into her tissue like silver maggots. She would be the one. She would complete the journey.