Impersonating various people

If I was going to save people, if I was to have a chance to make a difference in this war, I’d need to see where the victims were being taken. I’d need to track the monsters back to their own lairs. To that goal, I might have to sacrifice some of my own bodies.

We all dressed slowly. I took the forms of people that I knew. Director Piggot for the ill, Dinah Alcott for the child, Chris for the teenager, Hannah for the adult, and an older neighbor for the elderly.

We all stepped out into the line, and I put the same look of wonder on my face as the others.

***

If they were going to do this in every city, then the singers had to be Evolved. They’d been doing this since the days of the Pied Piper, and presumably they’d been breeding his descendants into a special class, designed to make conquest much easier than otherwise.

My other self on the island found a spring nearby, and Amy declared that it was clean. The view from above showed that the island was ten miles in diameter, with jungles and mountains in the center. The whole place teemed with life, and fish filled the sea. There was a ring of coral circling the island out to a distance, providing a safe lagoon, a place still filled with fish, but sharks or other dangers as far as I could see.

***

Paradise