He was sitting back in his command chair, comfortable with the knowledge, that he was hidden behind a friendly station, with a moon directly between his ship and the sun. At least, this should be the case for the next 5 standard time units, more than enough time for his little plot to unfold and the universe to realize, what a genius he was. A bit over the top, he reminded himself, yet, it was the first operation he had planned all by himself and he planned it well.

Every sane man would accept the fact, that cloning was a bad idea in less then 30 standard clicks. It had taken him 15 to realize, that, although the clone would think otherwise, it would not be him. His conscience would die and another man, with the same ideas, hopes, fears and capabilities would wake up, possibly on a very different planet. The reasoning, persuading him went on like this: Cloning works without broadcasting of some last memories, all the data required to clone is already in the cloning facility. All required was a signal, that the master copy of the clone actually ceased to exist. There were cases, where this signal was sent by error and the clone woke up while the master was still alive. These cases did not gather huge attention from most of the people, because there was yet a case to encounter, where the master had outlived this situation for more than one standard time unit. However, as a person cannot be split between two bodies, it is obvious, the the real person, the original one, can only be in one clone.

From one moment to the next, life had become astonishingly simple. All of the sudden, he was on his own and on the run. How long for his former mates to discover that he did not die in the explosion? Well, one thing for sure, they would realize very soon, that he had not stepped out of his clone container and therefore was still alive and well. When there were no reports from him, they would investigate a failure of his clone. That would be the part, where a huge barbecue event would commence. This could buy him some sympathies with the hunter squad, that would be after him only minutes after the last remainders of his "clone" had been eaten. No, he wouldn't rely on the good mood of his hunters to spare him from death - at maximum from a slow, painful death.

It had now been two standard time units since the undocking from the small, insignificant formerly safe station and he already began to hate it. Being in a corp was of much use for an electronic warfare person. Apart from basic self defence, he had never learned how to use advanced weapons. Telling the computer to fire a missile was all he had ever done in a fight within this ship and his capabilities with the autonomous fighter control and the heavy rockets, his carrier was equipped with, was not much use in this small craft with its pea firing blowtubes. As an electronic warfare guy you rely on your team mates. You hunt, you trap *they* kill. That had changed dramatically with the absence of any *they*. So he had started to train how to use the weapons applied to his ship, to get better than the small targeting computer - which was not to hard to do. He asked himself, why the heck in these times with these trillions of calculations each computer could do any second, a human being was still superior, once it came to targeting a moving vessel out of a moving vessel.

It had been several rotations and he started to like the company. He felt much more comfortable with Kendara going on the stations, buying food and water and also claiming the ship her own when questioned. He had finally done some work on the auxiliary transponder giving the ship some fake ID and he also had produced some paperworks which indicated a ship with that particular ID belonged to a Minmatar woman named Kendara. He had gone of the radar screen for his friends and, at the same time made a deal with her. She had named her destination address and he would carry her over, in exchange for her covering his existence. He had no particular station or planet to go to, only some time to train himself reading and fighting. For the former, he found a capable teacher in Kendara. She was fluent in several languages, could read different miscellanies and even one somewhat resembling the inscripts inside the stone.

Out of the darkness he heard a voice. It was far away, millions of miles beyond comprehension.
Yet it seemed a soft and kind voice. The voice came nearer. Maybe, some 5 light-seconds?
Something didn't hurt. Well, some things did, but others did not. His immortal soul, which he
refused to believe in, started closing in on his mindless body. Both started to converge and
from one moment to the next he has jumped from the black bottom of nothingness and
reached the border of the land of the living. He opened his eyes.

Knotting knots

He had flown through half of the galaxy in his attempt to knot some open ends
together and get a ball of wool he could actually use to make sense of it.
His first step had been the cctv system of his ship. The cheerful, paranoid
character of himself had once brought him to the conclusion, that he needed a
tamper proof video surveillance system to record everything happening on his
ship. As he had once told himself, it was too dangerous, something really
important said or done would slip through into the gutter of nothingness and
would be completely lost. Tamper proof it had to be, because it wouldn't be
to _his_ disadvantage to be able to rewind the times a bit.