Sometimes she wondered if she was a genius because she was psychic, or if she was psychic because she was a genius. Of course, she also wondered sometimes if this was all just some sort of hallucination or dream, and she was still sitting in that chair on the point of death, but then she was very like her jia yan in that respect. But that tended to be when her brain had only two hundred and thirty nine things to think about instead of the several million she was used to. Some were autonomic so could be allowed to get on without her constant supervision, but others, like the urge to take Binky and slit the crew’s throats, had to be kept under control.

So, in the quiet time after she and Jayne had made love, and his breath evened out as he fell asleep, as the rest of the crew settled down and she could ignore their dreams, she often turned more of her faculties towards this intriguing conundrum.

Oh, not the hallucination part – if it was she didn’t want to wake up – but the psychic versus genius question.

It was unsolvable, of course, without empirical evidence. She would have had to be split at birth, each half undergoing rigorous testing throughout their lives. Life. Would it be singular or plural, if they were two halves of the same whole? Did it count or did they cancel each other out?

Anyway. River 1.0 would have had her amygdala stripped, and River 2.0 would have been allowed to develop naturally. Cossetted. Comforted. Loved. Balls and parties. Opera. Ballet. Laughter. Not Jayne. No. Never not Jayne. She would kill to keep it never not Jayne .

Of course, Mara Tam had been her genetic twin, at least as far as that were possible without actually cloning. She’d been psychic, a genius and insane. Very alike, then.

It wasn’t even as if she felt particularly crazy. In a world of people like her, she would have been normal. Typical instead of unique. Standard instead of special. Ordinary instead of extraordinary. It was only perception and a specif