Throat burning, I forced air in through my mouth slowly. I was light headed, dehydrated and wondering whether subconsciously this plan had been intentionally suicidal.

  My soul and memories rejoining the pool would be good. I had learned much about the Reserver’s operations across the deserts edge. I was the exact sort of contaminated sliver that they were intent on keeping alive. My entire body clenched from the ramifications of such a death. My memories would be shared with the new baseline me, but all the other memories from other me’s would-

  Too painful to imagine. I had control over such thoughts. It was what made me such an effective merc, but also a danger to the Reservers at the same time.

  The ventilation shaft had seemed like a really good idea up until the furnace had gone full blast. The monitoring guards wouldn’t have done that on purpose would they? To flush me out?

  I had killed myself successfully many times, but never through dehydration from hot dry air. Besides, they would be desperate not to let me die. I might even get the rare drugged straight jacket existence after this little stunt.

  It was expensive for any colony rover or even mainstation settlement to drip a merc frag like me. My health would deteriorate and when I died my broken mind would infect the rebirth pool.

  It was searing and itchy pain with the seams between ventilation panels scraping my shoulders if I crawled too high, but my back ached from the extended prone movement and I felt the warm tickle of a bead of blood running down my arms.

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  I nearly forgot myself and started chuckling at the idea of the scent of a merc’s artificial blood making it’s way through the air system of the rover.

  The distant hum of the rover’s massive treads on rubble was something that never stopped until you were back at a settlement. If you ever came back at all.

  The wide rectangular shaft stretched out far into the distance as I turned the corner and I weighed the odds of beating downwards and hoping for a decent outlet.

  When my body rotted, the stench would be a good fuck you to the higher ups. Or would the dehydration mummify my body instead. No, death wasn’t good enough. I had died many times in the pursuit of passing on my knowledge to new versions of myself.

  There was no guarantee the overseers would continue rebirths based on my soul signature either. The only reason they hadn’t already was likely no replacements were good enough.

  But god knows they were trying. I could sense it. Not too far away trainees were being tested for dropper pairing. I hesitated for a moment, noticing an unusually high spike in energy close by.

  I grimaced, even across a hundred lifetimes of memories, the nostalgia and hope I felt during my own selecting was strong. I had been so excited to serve such a corrupt system. I grunted and kept moving, seeing a decline in the ventilation up ahead. Looks like I would be getting out after all.

  Peering down the slope, a grin spread across my face. There was a hinged outlet vent that I could open with a good kick. I twisted around to slide down to it on my stomach feet first and dragged my hands above my head to keep from coming down too fast. My boots caught on the middle of the vented grate and popped it open.

  Not too loud-

  BANG. The vent had crashed onto the floor, coming fully off the hinges. Well, shit. Hopefully, no one heard that. I slipped my feet down and hung on the edge of the vent opening for a fraction of a second before dropping down into a small communal bathroom. I bent down checking for feet within the three stalls. No one here. Lucky me.