There was no point in tapping the acceleration stud again. I had the jitney maxed, or close to it, and speed was not what the designers had in mind. We were explorers, supposed to be calmly, casually examining the surroundings wherever we went. Not two guys rushing back to base from an accident.

I silently swore and cursed at everything. Damn the execs who wouldn’t give us the flyer for a trip this far out. Damn the mediocre precautions against known dangers. Damn this planet. Damn the distance. Damn, damn, damn.

I glanced again over at Roy, sitting impassively strapped in the other seat and watching the view ahead. He hates my constantly looking over at him, but I was scared and frustrated and angry, and I justified myself that I was just keeping an eye on his condition.

“I hope there’s no traffic cops around,” said Roy, his words coming out low, soft, and slow. “And I know you’re checking on me again, Peter. I’m okay — just focus on your driving. No use piling up this fancy buggy and spilling us both.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, and tried to force a joke. “The paperwork alone would be murder. Who wants to die twice?” The corner of Roy’s mouth edged up slightly.

We’d been working together for the company a few years when we got the assignment offer for Carter’s Planet. A routine assay to be made of the planet’s useful minerals and plant life, nothing unusual. Out about a year, three months on-planet, sign the releases, kiss the wife and kids goodbye, then come home to a fat paycheck and retire easy. Simple plan.

Two weeks before we came out of transition stasis, the advance team on the planet discovered the critters. More specifically, the critters discovered the team.

The planet already hosted a variety of flora and fauna, all of which seemed fairly bucolic, according to the reports. Interestingly, anything over about 55 kilos just sort of ambled around, ignoring the newcomers. Maybe one or two showed teeth, but then they’d get over what they were trying to express and slowly wander off. No human counterparts. Quiet little world.

One of the team, Simkins, had been outside, working a small research square of soil so they could see how Earth plants did in that environment. There was no concern about contaminating the planet — the soil was in containers, and the shields were still operating at the base, committed to the task of keeping CO2 low and our breathables comfortable. Nothing else was supposed to pass through.

We still aren’t sure how they got in, but we surmise Simkins had a tear in his encounter suit. As they say, that’s all it takes. Beatty, who was watching Simkins the entire time from inside the lab (standard precaution), said later that a dark translucent fog settled around Simkins for a minute, then dissipated. Simkins didn’t say anything, didn’t shout, just slumped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

All hell broke loose in the lab, however. Everyone dived into their suits and readied the iso lab which, fortunately, had a door to the outside. Several went out to pick up Simkins who, to everyone’s surprise, got his feet under him as they stood him up, thanked everyone, and slowly made his way to the iso lab door. Under escort, of course.

The iso lab gear was good, as good as you can get set up on a remote planet, but it still took a week to find them in Simkins. They were miniscule — you needed magnification to see them well. They probably started as a few, but they reproduced quickly, and they were apparently organized. They had started at Simkins’ extremities and were working their way to his core, slowly, inexorably. And they were feeding, not on the meat, not on the blood components. They were consuming axons and dendrites, particularly along those nerves that twitched the muscles, the same pathways that Galvani’s electricity made the legs of dead frogs move. They were like gourmets at a fete, slowly gobbling up everything on the buffet. Simkins grew steadily more paralyzed, conscious the entire time, until they found the non-muscled inner organs and took a liking to the nerve cells there. The critters were chewing up all the energy, taking it for their own needs, and didn’t stop or leave until they were done — they were pretty dedicated to their grisly task. The swarm exited the host only after the host died from the massive organ failure. Apparently they lost interest in a food supply gone stale. Not unlike parasitic wasps, I was told.

They named the damned things for Simkins. Obscene way to be memorialized. “That which does kill us, makes us immortal.” Something like that. Simkins, himself, tried to make light of the situation and called them ZomBees. Stupid joke. The name stuck.

It also explained the behavior of the larger native animals beyond the shields, the ones that just wandered around seemingly aimlessly. Brain was firing, but the body was just carrying it around and not feeling much else. Run? No. Feel pain? Maybe. Feed? Oh, sure, why not? This looks okay. And, repeat, until your insides stopped getting instructions, the connections vacuumed away by the Bees, and you laid down and stopped living. Except it was different for us Earthers, as Simkins demonstrated. They liked us — we didn’t malinger so long.

So, yeah. Roy got Bee’d. I’d heard a soft hum as we worked opposite corners of a target spot, no more than a couple meters apart. I turned, saw the cloud around him, watched him drop and the cloud clear. Without thinking about much else, even my own safety, I scooped up Roy, carried him to the jitney, strapped him in and punched the controls to life, screaming to the base over the radio every ten minutes the entire way out of the zone.

Elena feels it when her brother dies. She knows it in her bones before the phone rings. She sits for an unknown time, staring at her hands. At the floor beyond. At nothing. Max is dead and there is nothing she can do to change it. Nothing she could have done. She is powerless and pointless and empty and torn in half.

It is the first time she’s experienced loss. Even in the depths of her grief, even as her every thought drowns in the ocean of her pain, she understands that it won’t be the last.

Everything dies, after all.

She says pretty words at Max’s funeral. About how he was her twin, her other half. About how he still chased after butterflies and never bothered to tie his shoes and insisted that puns were clever. People laugh and cry, and her voice quavers but doesn’t break.

But when it’s her turn to pour dirt into the hole, onto his coffin, to cover him and say goodbye forever, she crumples. She falls onto her knees and clutches the dirt to her chest and weeps.

She doesn’t remember how she gets home, after. She comes back to herself curled on her bedspread, still in her muddy black dress, one shoe on, one in the doorway, wedging the door open.

She wonders if this is what going crazy feels like.

Then Max sits next to her on the bed.

“It’s not so bad,” he says. His voice sounds just like it always has. “Being dead, that is.”

Elena just blinks at him, rubs her eyes, blinks again. He’s a little translucent, a little fuzzy at the edges.

“You need to pull yourself together,” Max says. “Mom and Dad are taking it pretty hard too, you know? You can’t just break down. They need a functioning kid.”

“You’re dead.”

“I know.”

“No. I felt Max die. I felt him… go. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not my brother.”

Max’s form shimmers, then settles, like wind ruffling the surface of a pond. “Well, that’s disappointing,” he says. He still looks like Max, but everything else about him is different. His posture, his expression, the way he sits in her room like he’s never been there before. “I thought that I’d be able to fool you. I suppose I should have known better.”

“What are you?”

Not-Max shrugs. “You’ll see me as your enemy, I suppose. I killed your brother. Ate him from the inside out. Consumed his memories and shape. His mind. His attachments.” He sighed. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you all of this, but I have all of Max’s memories. It’s like I’m used to telling you everything.” He sighs again, this time rubbing his forehead in an achingly familiar gesture. “They told us that the attachments are the worst part, but I wasn’t prepared. Loving someone is quite painful, you know. Especially if you’ve never done it before.” He pats her hand. His skin is dry and cold. “I’m going to go talk to our parents. I hope I can fool them.”

“I’ll tell them you’re a fake.”

He smiles Max’s crooked smile, but his eyes are smug and condescending. “You’re a little unstable at the moment. Having a rough time. They won’t believe you.”

“Of course they will. You’re impossible.”

“How can I be impossible? I’m standing right here. They’ll want to believe me. So they will. It’s the only feasible way forward.”

Her mother makes pancakes for dinner, since they were Max’s favorite. There are four places set at the table. Elena can’t believe that they’re just accepting this. “That’s not Max. It’s some kind of replicant or something. It told me so itself.”

“You’re right,” Not-Max says, his voice pitched low. “She does seem overwrought.”

“Don’t be absurd, Elena,” her father says. “I’d know my son anywhere. It’s a miracle. And Max isn’t the only one who’s back! It’s all over the news. They’re calling them shadows.”

“That isn’t Max! It’s the thing that killed Max!”

“Honey, stop it. I thought you’d be happy to have your brother back. Now, sit down and eat.”

Not-Max sits in Max’s chair. Elena storms back to her room and slams the door.

No one comes after her.

More and more people fall sick. But it’s not a problem anymore, because their shadows will just take their places. And of course their shadows are still them–they have all of their original’s memories, know things that only the original person would know. People test them, and they perform perfectly.

And if only people who die of this specific illness get shadows, well, that’s part of the miracle. Accidents still happen, after all. It’s not like death is over.

There are others who see the truth, of course. But they are dismissed as deluded, as fearmongers, as selfish girls who want to wallow in the misery of losing a twin instead of accepting that he’s still right here.

Not-Max is more and more solid every day. Less translucent. He doesn’t need to look like a ghost, so he doesn’t bother. Elena’s parents seem happy to just forget the months of sickness, the funeral, the fear and pain. Elena ignores him. Ignores her parents’ disappointment at her attitude, ignores his sad, pleading eyes.

“I miss you,” he says, over and over, increasingly frantic. “Please, tell me what I can do.”

She ignores him and walks away.