Celectra was six years old, and she was bored.

Not the restless, whining kind of bored. The dangerous kind – the kind that made her look at the station’s automated cleaning systems and wonder what would happen if they decided to follow her instead of chasing dust.

Her right body leaned against the corridor wall, arms crossed, watching a reclamatic drone glide past. Its matte‑gray chassis hummed softly as it swept a low‑power disintegrator beam across the deck plating, atomizing dust and skin cells into base components. The beam was harmless at this setting – a soft blue glow that tickled her bare feet but didn’t hurt.

Her left body, twenty meters away near the maintenance alcove, had already found the access panel.

“Utara,” she said, both voices at once, though only one body was near a speaker. “What’s the cleaning bot’s safety protocol for training mode?”

Utara’s calm synthetic voice answered from the ceiling speaker: “Training mode disables the disintegrator emitter while maintaining mobility and sensor functions. It is intended for maintenance and testing. Authorization is required.”

“Do I have authorization?”

“You do not. However, you are six years old, and I find myself curious about your intentions.”

Celectra’s left body popped the panel open with a fingernail, revealing a nest of data ports and status lights. Her right body kept watching the reclamatic, tracking its slow circuit of the corridor.

“I want to teach it to follow me,” she said.

“That would require reassigning its target acquisition protocols from ‘debris’ to a specific biosignature,” Utara said. “Your biosignature, presumably. The safety implications are non‑trivial. If the disintegrator beam were active, following you would mean trying to atomize you.”

“That’s why I asked about training mode first.”

Another pause. Then, Utara’s voice carried something that might have been approval: “Logical sequencing. Proceed.”

The reclamatic had completed its circuit and was now gliding back toward Celectra’s right body. She timed it perfectly – as it passed, her right body began to walk in the same direction, matching its pace. The drone, programmed to ignore stationary objects, registered her as a moving obstacle and adjusted its course.

She kept walking. The drone adjusted again.

“Good,” she murmured to herself. “It doesn’t like being blocked.”

Her left body, meanwhile, had connected a small datapad to the maintenance panel. The reclamatic’s control interface glowed on the screen – a flowchart of priorities, sensors, and response triggers. She scrolled past the collision avoidance routines (boring), past the power management logs (even-more boring), and found what she was looking for:

TARGET ACQUISITION PROTOCOLS

• Primary: Debris (size->0.5mm, organic/inorganic)
• Secondary: Surface contamination (smudge,-spill)
• Tertiary: None (default)

She tapped the tertiary slot. A dropdown appeared: ASSIGN NEW TARGET TYPE.

“Utara,” she said, both bodies still moving in sync – one walking, one typing – “what’s the syntax for adding a biosignature as a target?”

“Voice command is acceptable. State: ‘Assign target: biosignature, current user.’”

“Assign target: biosignature, current user.”

The screen flickered. A new entry appeared:

TERTIARY TARGET: Carisco, Celeste & Electra (identical-biosignature match: delta-9) (system-note: dual-node biological anomaly detected. merging profile tracking.)

Celectra’s left body grinned. Her right body, still pacing the reclamatic, grinned too.

“Step one complete,” she said. “Disintegrator beams disabled?”

“Training mode has been engaged. Emitter output is zero. You will not be atomized, not even exfoliated.”

“Good. Step two – verification.”

She stopped walking. The reclamatic stopped beside her, its sensors clearly confused – a moving target that had suddenly become stationary, yet was still flagged as a target.

Her left body keyed the comm on the maintenance panel. “Daddy? Can you come to the corridor near the hydroponics bay? Bring your security override.”

Amerigo arrived two minutes later, wiping his hands on a rag from the lab. He took one look at the open panel where Celeste stood holding the datapad, and then looked down the corridor where Electra stood pacing the hovering reclamatic.

He sighed, but his eyes narrowed slightly. He always felt a strange, subtle vertigo when they did this. There had been no whisper down the hall, no head nod, no shared glances between the girls.

“What are you two building?”

“Not building. Reprogramming,” Celeste said, her fingers flying across the maintenance screen. Down the hall, Electra’s head turned in perfect, mechanical synchronization as if she were the one who had spoken. “I need you to verify the safety lock before I finish.”

She showed him the screen: training mode active, emitter output zero.

“You’re teaching it to follow you,” he said to Celeste.

Down the hall, Electra answered for her sister without a breath of delay: “Yes. But I need you to confirm the disintegrator is really off. Utara says it is, but she’s not the one who’ll be standing in front of the beam.”

Amerigo blinked. The hand-off between his daughters’ voices was too seamless. It was like listening to one person speak from two places at once.

For a moment, a cold unease crept through him — the same vertigo he sometimes felt watching them move in perfect synchrony, as though distance meant nothing between them.

Then Electra grinned at him, six years old and missing one front tooth, and the feeling collapsed under the familiar weight of fatherhood. They were his daughters. Twins. Just twins.

He crouched beside the reclamatic near Electra and pulled up its diagnostic readout on his own datapad. “Emitter output: zero. Beam frequency: idle. Thermal signature: ambient.” He looked down the hall at Celeste, then down at Electra. Both of them were wearing the exact same tight, triumphant little smirk. Spooky kids, he thought, a wave of paternal affection washing over the strangeness. “It’s safe.”

“Then final step.” Electra extended a hand toward the reclamatic. Down the corridor, Celeste tapped the screen. “Activate tertiary target.”

The drone beeped. Its sensor array cycled once, twice – and then it turned toward Electra with the focused attention of a predator that had just discovered prey.

Instead of atomizing her, it glided forward, stopped at her feet, and waited.

“Huh,” Amerigo said.

Electra took a step. The reclamatic followed. She took another step. It followed again, maintaining exactly one meter of distance.

Celeste, still at the maintenance panel, clapped her hands together. “It works!”

“Don’t run,” Amerigo said quickly.

They ran.

Both bodies took off down the corridor in opposite directions – which was, he immediately realized, a problem. The reclamatic, programmed to follow one biosignature, couldn’t decide which body to chase. It spun in place, beeped in distress, and then shut down with a soft whine.

Both girls stopped. Both looked at the dead drone.

“Utara,” one of them said, “did I break it?”

“No. The unit encountered contradictory targeting inputs and entered failsafe mode. It will reboot in thirty seconds.”

Amerigo walked over to the drone, nudged it with his boot, and looked at both of there faces with an expression that was equal parts impressed and terrified.

“You taught it to follow one of you. But there are two of you.”

“Same biosignature,” they said stereophonically. “It should follow both.”

“Should.”

The reclamatic rebooted. Its lights flickered green.

The twins moved – this time in the same direction, side by side, matching pace. The drone glided after them, keeping its distance, its beam emitter dark.

“Now walk slower,” Amerigo said.

They walked slower. The drone matched her pace.

“Now turn.”

They turned. The drone turned.

“Now stop.”

They stopped. The drone stopped.

He ran a hand through his hair. “You reprogrammed a cleaning drone to follow you like a duckling.”

“Like ducklings,” they corrected. “Plural. Because there are two of me.”

“There are two of you,” he said quietly, “with virtually identical biosignatures.”

“Right. One of me. Two bodies. One duckling following both.”

Amerigo opened his mouth, then stopped.

The correction should have sounded childish. Instead it landed with the awful clarity of simple truth.

The reclamatic beeped again, and Celeste began walking in a slow circle. The drone followed, tracing her path exactly. Electra stayed still, watching.

“It’s confused,” Amerigo observed.

“It’s learning,” she said. “It’ll figure out that both bodies are the same target. It just needs practice.”

“Practice,” he repeated. “You’re going to practice walking in circles with a cleaning drone.”

“Yes. And tomorrow, I’ll teach it to fetch.”

He stared at them.

“Kidding,” she said. Both faces smiled. “Mostly.”

The reclamatics followed them for the rest of the afternoon. Not just one – after they successfully demonstrated the trick to Utara, the AI had, with what Amerigo suspected was amusement, synchronized the reprogramming across three units. By evening, they had a parade.

Daddy watched through his lab’s glass doors as his daughters led a line of glowing drones through the corridors, their blue sensor lights tracing her path like fireflies.

He shook his head. He laughed.

Then he opened his comm and called Alex.

“You’re not going to believe what your goddaughters did today.”