Ernest felt his consciousness coming back to him. Opening his eyes he found himself in a room that was both very familiar and very wrong. Familiar because he had spent a good proportion of his life before Miramar in rooms just like this one. Wrong because its walls were missing the faint traces of random patterns, the ubiquitous alien metal-stuff from which the station was constructed. In their place were bare painted surfaces. This wasn't a room at all – this was a cabin.

As his consciousness solidified, his mind reached back to the night before: his meeting with The Capt'n, their talk about his new expedition to the luridly named 'Vortex', reminiscences of the good old days, rambling ever wider as the drinks kept coming. Then what?

And the cabin was not the only thing out of place. It took a moment to register what it was: while his body felt oddly leaden, the splitting headache he surely owed to the night before was notably absent. Raising his head from his pillow, blinking sleep from his eyes, he registered the bulk of The Capt'n filling up the frame of the cabin's only door.

Ernest peered blearily. "Where am I?"

"Come now, Misery. Those are hardly auspicious first words for a navigator."

A realization struck Ernest with horror. He lifted the sheet that covered him and looked down the length of his abdomen. "This isn't my body. Clayton what the fuck have you done?" It was a long time since he had last used The Capt'n's real name. He did everything he could to imbue the word with the flood of anger that was rising within him.

"It's all agreed and legit." He held up a piece of paper. "Got a proper consent form and everything, your signature at the bottom."

Ernest peered at the piece of paper. "That's not my signature, that's just an 'X'."

"It was the best you could manage at the time. Perhaps you were feeling amorous." The Capt'n winked at him suggestively. "Got your thumb print and DNA. All perfectly valid."

"This is kidnapping ..."

"Not at all. Just borrowed your services for a time. Your original self will be waking up back on Miramar Station about now, happily unaware that any of this has even happened. You should be grateful, Misery, I'm saving you one hell of a hangover."

Ernest looked down again at his body. "You decanted a copy of me?"

"The old scan and scram routine. Don't worry, it all went fine." He waved his hand like a conjuror on a stage. "Misery, meet the brand new you."

Normally a man of few words, Ernest did not possess a great well of profanity. Still, everything he had he now put to good use, excoriating the Capt'n and swearing adamantly that whatever expedition was being planned, he wanted no part of it, that he would rather perish in the wastes of hyperspace than ever again steer a ship under The Capt'n's command.

The Capt'n held station at the door, smiling his same smug smile throughout, even putting out a steadying hand when Ernest attempted unsuccessfully to get to his feet. While the new body was a youthful one, a certain period of clumsiness would need to be endured as he adapted to the unfamiliar set of muscles.

When Ernest ran out of accusations to hurl, The Capt'n allowed a few moments of calming silence to pass before speaking. "Come now Misery, your understandable disorientation is clearly making you a little techy. How about I take you through to meet the crew. It won't take long, there's only the one of her."

"Unlike me," Ernest muttered, but without any great venom. His tirade had temporarily drained him of vigor. He suspected this body had been in storage for some time and would need to be cut a little slack while it got to grips with being a living, breathing entity once more.

The Capt'n disappeared momentarily, returning with a wheelchair. He tactfully retreated back to the door while Ernest shuffled his body across to its seat.

"So you just happened to have a wheelchair handy, did you? How long has all this been in the planning?"

"Misery, please! You have such a suspicious mind. As it happens the wheelchair is standard issue. You know The Capt'n, always a stickler for the health and safety."

The Capt'n wheeled Ernest down a short corridor and into the saloon, a spacious lounge fitted out with arm chairs and a large video screen, currently showing a featureless starscape. The overall tone was one of crass luxury, the chairs upholstered in a deep blue velvet with a surface shimmer that for some reason reminded Ernest of blueberries. Not a fruit that tends to be available on space stations. Some sort of bleed over from his body's previous owner, he wondered? This train of thought dissipated when one of the chairs rotated, revealing a young woman. She stood up and advanced to meet them half way.

"Misery, let me introduce Gina, our expedition's resident xenophilologist." He leaned the full rumble of his voice into the 'x', almost chuckling, as if wielding the big words as a bludgeon against Ernest's discombobulation. "Think of her as our muse. She's the one we have to thank for the Vortex."

Ernest peered at her. She wasn't particularly tall. About five-five, dressed casually in a ship suit. Slim, certainly, but with enough curviness to render her well short of waif. Her black hair was tied up at the top of her head with a plethora of errant stands that fell down the back of her neck, like a semi-halo that had slipped. The look of impertinence she wore – Ernest was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt: possibly it was her face's default expression. Any other justification, it seemed to him, would be inappropriate in the circumstances. She was attractive, too, in an unadorned way, the impertinence accompanied by an originality of expression that eluded further description but was pleasing to look upon all the same.

"This Vortex ..." Like bile, a caustic comment rose in Ernest's throat but got no further; something about the way she was looking at him made his anger feel suddenly petty. Words failed to come and moments passed in silence. To their credit, his two captors allowed him the time to collect his thoughts. Lacking an alternative, he resorted to politeness. "I'm afraid The Capt'n likes to speak in riddles. Am I to take it that you're the one who chartered this expedition?" The words felt strange in his mouth, as if provided by someone else, leaving him surprised by his own steadiness of speech and outward evenness of temper.

"In a manner of speaking. I think it's fair to say we each have our own objectives for being here."

Her voice was deeper than her appearance suggested it might be; and as he listened Ernest paid more attention to its tone than its content, unable to decide whether her voice reflected the insolence of her expression. How much should he include her in his anger, and what was it about her that felt out of place with the situation? Then he shrugged inwardly. No doubt his reaction was a side effect of his disorientation. Another question surfaced in his mind. He turned to The Capt'n: "Where did you get this body?"

"Oh, you know. Just one we happened to have handy." He was still pretending to play the part of jovial host.

Ernest looked down at himself. He was wearing a pair of light, full-length pajamas, but even covered in this way he could tell his new body was younger and a lot more buff than he was used to. He had a sense of it being one of those high-maintenance bodies, the sort that would quickly run to fat if it were not looked after. The thought was distasteful. He abhorred exercise, or any other pointless activity for that matter. Working in the warehouse had been different: not only did it keep him healthy, counterbalancing the drinking, it also earned him the pocket money to fund that drinking. A steady state from which he had never expected to be ejected.

"Are you going to tell me what happened to the previous occupant?"

"Come on Misery, there's no need to be morbid. Just settle in, make yourself at home. The past has already happened, eh. There's no changing it now."

The copying of minds had never advanced much beyond being an experimental possibility. The problem lay not with demand but with supply. There were the inevitable rumors – rich people in search of immortality decanting themselves into vat-grown clones. This was pure myth. For sure, clones could be produced – but nobody had ever figured out how to grow them other than the old-fashioned way. There would always be a person inside. To copy one's self into one's clone would be to commit murder. Nor could you merely acquire a body for which the previous owner no longer had a use – for the sort of on-the-spot transfer that Ernest had just awoken from, certain very specific conditions had to be satisfied by both donor and recipient. Most notable of these was possession of the sort of intrusive neural alterations that were shunned by anyone remotely safety conscious or death-averse. Unless you were a navigator, of course. For navigators, the necessary enhancements were a prerequisite of the job, needed to plug one's self into the ship.

Whoever had once owned this body had almost certainly shared Ernest's former profession – had suffered the fate that so many in that profession do.

Ernest looked across at Gina, seeing her shrug and look away, as if to distance herself from the whole affair.

"Well then, a Capt'n's work is never done. I'll just leave you two young 'uns here to get acquainted."

Ernest still had his eyes on Gina. "Don't believe a word he says. I'm older than he is."

"Not any more you're not." With a guffaw of laughter, The Capt'n left the room.

#

The Capt'n was lying. On a routine journey like this one, from Miramar Station to wherever they were going next, a ship captain's duties consisted of little more than some in-system piloting and dealing with the docking procedures at either end. Nor was it all that different on exploratory trips that ventured away from the comparative linearity of the trade routes and out into the turbulent gyre of the great beyond. On a mission like that, where a live navigator was essential, the captain could do no more than monitor the drive system stability, ready to press the panic button that would drop them back to real-space should conditions get too unruly for the navigator to handle. Even with the best navigators, this happened from time to time.

"Why do they call you 'Misery'?"

"By 'they', you mean The Capt'n. He was the one who gave me that nickname."

"Perhaps that explains it then. He's only ever seen you in his own company."

Ernest shifted in his wheelchair. He was reticent by nature and evidence of this was visible even on his brand new face. "My real name is Ernest."

"Pleased to meet you, Ernest." She grinned at him. "Gina's not just my real name – it's the only name I have. No history of daring-do like you and The Capt'n, nothing to earn me a nickname." Her voice was not quite natural; there was an animation in it that to Ernest's ears sounded forced – who uses words like "daring-do"? – as if eager to win his approval or cover some other emotion. She also appeared reluctant to look at him, Ernest noted, yet from time to time would cast sly glances his way. This he realized was what had unsettled him before. It was due, no doubt, to her guilty conscience.

He felt a grim satisfaction in reaching this conclusion: reading other people was a skill in which he knew he was deficient, at least when it came to strangers. As for his reactions to the girl herself, these were obviously tainted by her being in league with The Capt'n. Yet a part of him wanted to like her; and this worried him. There was something about her – something below the surface, attributes that would never appear in any auctioneer's catalogue of her virtues. This much he could sense. It was the nature of these attributes that was beyond his capacities to detect.

He looked at her again. The impertinence that first struck him was still there – it was her redeeming fault he decided. Her expression was sweet but it was hardly artless. Good. The harder she tried to win him over, he sought to reassure himself, the more transparent would be her game. And therefore the easier it would be to resist. In the meantime, the situation offered him little option but to watch and wait.

"You said you were a xenophilologist. Does that mean you study alien languages?"

"I was part of the Xeno Studies program at Sibay City, analyzing artefacts that explorers like you and The Capt'n bring back. This time I'm trying to be a bit more proactive."

"I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying this expedition of The Capt'n's has something to do with finding aliens to talk to?"

She laughed. "Oh, this is as much my expedition as his. But I thought you already knew? We're off to investigate a hyperspatial anomaly."

"This Vortex he keeps talking about?"

"That's what The Capt'n insists on calling it. In the trade it's called the Sonet Anomaly. That's me, you see? Gina Sonet. I discovered it."

"Really?" Ernest still wasn't sure how much about her he should allow himself to believe. But, if true, this was worthy of admiration.

"Our understanding of the past is so poor that it can take years to make sense of what we find. I was studying items brought back by a previous expedition and kept encountering what appeared to be references to a particular area of space. When I arranged with The Capt'n to go and take a look, the Anomaly was what we found. I'm no expert on hyperspace, but I understand it has characteristics unlike the usual turbulence you must be familiar with. We suspect it might be artificial."

"Artificial?" Ernest knew a lot about hyperspace – he was a navigator after all – but he had never encountered any suggestion it was other than a natural phenomenon.

"If it is, then the fact that it still exists after all this time suggests that whatever is generating it may still be functioning. So you can see why we are keen to take a closer look."

"Well, congratulations. Whatever else I might feel about what's going on here, I don't mind acknowledging that's quite an accomplishment."

"Thank you. But I'm not the only one who deserves credit." She was looking straight at him now, her furtiveness gone. "That past expedition I mentioned. You were its navigator."

Ernest felt a moment of giddiness. His tenancy of this body, the girl sitting in front of him – these things were making him dizzy. He clung to a core of sullen anger – this at least was entirely his own and made perfect sense. More puzzling was the ease with which he was able to talk to her.

Being a navigator was all about bandwidth. When Ernest interfaced with hyperspace, bandwidth was what he had; it was the reason he could do what others could not. That ability to connect on many levels, to capture the nuances, above all to experience the world around him in its full intensity and to react almost preemptively to its constant flux. It was an experience he had denied himself these past years; the feelings it invoked – a mixture of craving and fear – he believed were safely walled up behind the scar tissue of his last active mission.

But for what we are given we must pay. Ernest's openness to the world when plugged into a ship was twinned to a constriction in his dealings with the everyday world, its people most of all. He felt himself to be immense, yet constrained like water behind a high dam, the narrow spillway of the spoken word the only outlet allowed him. Ernest was the silent type, as were most navigators. He did not believe this was coincidence.

But here and now, something had changed, some property of this new body. The more he acclimatized to it, the more expressive he felt. More intensely alive than he'd felt for a very long time. Those scars that had held him together since abandoning his profession were no longer there to do their job. Instead, emotions surged back and forth with no inner bulkheads to buffer their slosh and sway. Or rather, no bulkheads but one. The experience might have been overwhelming were it not for the one emotion that anchored them all: his anger at what had been done to him.

#

They were underway. Ernest could feel the distinctive vibration of the ship under automatic control, the fluctuating stresses and strains of a subjectivity field in less than perfect balance as the drive scrambled to claw itself through the minor bumps and undulations of the trade lanes. In his mind, he tried but failed to stem the nostalgia this conjured up, his memory of what it had been to be a working navigator, of striving to maintain a bubble of normality upon a sea of strangeness. Turning his focus back to the girl in front of him, the image flipped. Here she was, a packet of strangeness inhabiting the mundane. For Ernest, this was as good as a synonym for a human being.

For a moment he closed his eyes, seeking a few quiet seconds to quell his seasickness. Whatever was happening in his head, he reminded himself, it was not to be trusted. Wait for his new body to acclimatize, maybe then he would see things differently.

Except for the anger at what had been done to him. The anger was non-negotiable.

He opened his eyes again, looked once more at the girl, calming himself, relaxing by force of will. You can't coerce a navigator. The job by its very nature must be done willingly or not at all. That was his advantage, and failing any better ideas that would be his strategy: he'd simply wait, refuse to cooperate. It shouldn't be hard, requiring only that he cling to his anger. Perhaps The Capt'n would crack first.

Later Gina showed Ernest around the rest of the ship. It didn't take long; apart from the accommodation suites it consisted in its entirety of a saloon for the crew, the Capt'n's bridge, a small gym, and a cargo hold. The hold, too, was small, and largely empty, just a few anonymous crates.

Back in the saloon, Ernest flopped down in an armchair. He'd walked his way around the ship and the movement had done him good. Already he could feel a growing sense of ownership in his relationship with the body he inhabited. Part of him still wanted to resist the process – out of bloody mindedness if nothing else – but he accepted it was probably inevitable. He should save his fight for the more important battle.

Taking his seat, he noticed Gina watching him again, and with that same look he'd labelled as impertinence. Those errant stands of hair framed a pale oval face. Was she trying to catch him out in some way? As before there were things in her expression that he lacked the wherewithal to interpret. He suppressed these thoughts by talking over them: "I'm expendable, you realize."

The odd look on her face passed, replaced by that of a professional carer. "We want you to help us, that's all. We don't want you to come to any harm."

"That's not what I mean. I mean there's two of me now. And I'm the superfluous one."

She frowned. "You're a separate person now. A human being in your own right."

Ernest shook his head. "Not if I don't choose to be." He saw that odd look return, this time tinged with recognizable concern. "There's no way I'll agree to cooperate, you realize that? And a navigator can't be coerced." That the words came so freely still surprised him. On another level,Ernest clung to his anger like a life raft. "The very act of doing my job gives me complete control of the ship. We have a stalemate."