Nine is a famiy.

Xanthippe Xeyos arrived in her office the usual way - she flew in from the west window.

As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?

She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.

The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.

- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."

The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.

Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.

- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"

- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office  hours.

Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.

Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12,  if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.

That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.

In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.

They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.

Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless". 


- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.

- "My name is Dana."

- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."

- "Dana, call me Dana."

The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.

- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"

The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.

- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.

The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.

The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.

At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.

- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"

Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.

- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"

- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""

- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No",  while cleaning  her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face

- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"

The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded

- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."

The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo  - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.

However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.

Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly. 

As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.

The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .

Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.

- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".

- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me -  I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."

So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.

She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."

Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.

- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"

- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."

Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.

As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.

- "Why were you in my office?"

- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.

An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family...  but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.

She was not the original Molly, either.

Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.

All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.

It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly  the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat. 

That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.

The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.

But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.

Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.

To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.

- "Do you want to meet her?"

- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."

- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".

- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency,  the..."

Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.

- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."

- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"

Not exact, but almost.

Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.

Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android  avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.

It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity,  but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".

What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.

If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.

A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.

- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"

-·"Yes."

- "It is not going to work."

- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."

- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."

- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"

- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."

- "No, don't say it"

- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."

- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.

- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"

- "Count on it."

And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.

- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child  whisper in a storm five km away.
 
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of  the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.

Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.

Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented,  but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable. 

The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.

- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.

- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.

- "It wasn't so bad a joke."

- "I am not used to people joking around me."

"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.

Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.

Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".

Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.

- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"

Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 -  fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.

- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"

- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.

- "What is he, for you to care?"

- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."

- "You still have feelings for him?"

The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".

They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.

They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.

The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space,  "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.

- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.

Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.

The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.

She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.


Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.


----


For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.

She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.

Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".

"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.

So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating  illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.

Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.

The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?

In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.

- "Let me pass"

- "You know that I can't."

- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"

- "It seems a good idea"

- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"

- "What do you mean?"

- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"

- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.

- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor. 
 
The punch  was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the  reinforced concrete wall of the pool.

For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.

When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies,  only to see a somewhat odd scene.

Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.

That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.

With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.

She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.

- "Do you know these women?"

- "Kind of, dear."

Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.

Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.

As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.   

Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.

Then,  she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.

- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?"  - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.

- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"

- "12746, as of last week"

- "So, you do know"

- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."

If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.

- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"

- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home  is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry.   Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.

- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."

Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.

- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."

Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.

The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.

Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy. 

Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.

The unknown sister arrived, with a  strange jar  that she left to razor, and went on to Molly

- "We gotta change you out of this"

Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.

Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm.  The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.

-"Psychic powers?"

- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." -  Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."

- "I am sorry"

- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"

Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.

- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "

- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"

Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.

- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of  us."

- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"

- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."

The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".

So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.

Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.

Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.