Thousand bodies

"I understand that," he said. "But that whole thing about there being a thousand of you…"

"I'm trying to upgrade," I said.

I finished making the grilled cheese sandwiches, and I slid them onto plates along with the tomato soup. There were a lot of people on the East Coast who were eating a lot worse than this, but I refused to feel guilty about it, eve3n if I could have digested practically anything.

"How does that work?" he asked. "Like isn't it confusing doing a thousand things at once?"

"Is it confusing for you to walk while talking with somebody?" I asked. "Letting yourself fall and then catching yourself at the last second while you're trying to have a complicated conversation?"

"Yeah, but a thousand bodies?"

"It's different…" I admitted. "I'm helping with the reconstruction in Brockton Bay at this very moment. I'm healing people in a dozen different cities in a dozen different hospitals at speeds that mean that people won't even know what has happened. I'm helping to move bodies in Brockton Bay; categorizing them is harder than I would have thought. There's different levels of decomposition; the ones that were killed by Shatterbird are the oldest, while the recent battle casualties are the most recently dead. I'm using smell to ferret out the bodies, PRT provided cameras to identify them, and I'm moving the dead Fae soldiers to the Docks area for disposition."

***

"Each one of me can give at least as much attention as an average person to things. I'm paying full attention to you here and now. It's just that I'm also giving full attention to a conversation with Amy Dallon at the moment as she'd having a mild emotional breakdown, I'm talking to the Wards in Chicago, and I'm discussing Tinkertech in a room a hundred feet from here with Dragon and Armsmaster."

I was also giving orders to the CUI in the form of thirty court officials as to how to dispose of a hundred million dead. The last thing the world needed was for a pandemic to spread because the Chinese couldn't deal with their dead problem. I was also quietly purging the worst officials in the government and creating the illusion that they'd been killed during the battles. I'd have them replaced with more progressive people, and we'd see how that went.

***

Time