Please read this

Who: Cassandra
Where: Safely isolated in her quarters
When: Six days ago

Ceasing her pacing of the room, Cass snatched her tablet up from the table and then, after a moment’s hesitation, put it back down again almost immediately
She knew she should send what she had written, but some part of her insular and secretive nature couldn’t quite let her do so – She was unused to opening up about herself, and the letter more or less laid her bare
“Shit” she sighed and after a moment of indecision, picked the tablet up again and carried it across the room to flop on her bed, where she opened the document editor to review what she had written

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Dear Jay
I know it’s a little nineteenth century, but I hope you don’t mind me writing to you, since there are a few things that I’d like to explain and I don’t want to antagonise you and have us wind up screaming at each other again (or worse)

I think I should start by explaining who and what I actually am
In the first instance, I’m not actually a clone – they’re grown in vats with old fashioned biotech, whereas I was constructed with nanites, meaning that I'm theoretically an exact duplicate of the original Cassandra, rather than a facsimile cultured via inaccurate and purely organic mechanisms
I say theoretically there because to be honest: I don’t know whether I’m a completely faithful copy or not – I look like her, but it’s been something of a worry that she may have done something physiological or even neurological to me that I'm not aware of
I haven’t found anything, but maybe I'm not looking for the right things?
Anyway, regardless of what may or may not be there, included in amongst the more obvious gifts I received from the original Cassandra, such as my looks and intellect, are what I assume are all her memories – something of a double edged sword insomuch as they at once define who and what I am and yet, in your eyes, irrevocably damn me
Am I so vile a person?
I'm not even a year old yet and I have barely more than eight months of my own experience to draw on, so the original Cassandra's outlook constantly taints my view of the world; but as raw and real as her memories are to me, I am at least able to take some solace in knowing that the experiences that shape me aren't truly mine, and that I can try to live beyond them

My life (my real life) began around two weeks before you destroyed the Hymenoptera, with me, rather inauspiciously, being forced into stasis almost immediately after my inception - Cassandra having created me as her backup in case the process to reengineer herself didn't work out
I guess it must take some nerve to face the possibility of your own death and entrust your continued existence to someone who isn't you in the way that she did with me; but then, I saw what she went through when the process smegged up, and it was I who had to deal with bringing her back from the dead after Mister Butler retrieved me from stasis, so I'm not sure if I’d have the guts to go through what she did
As for why she did it: That's a complicated one – Brittany (or Cassandra as she was then) was very much a product of her environment, and as you’re aware: her upbringing wasn’t the greatest; so having had to fight tooth and nail to make what she did of her life, had left her, and therefore I, with something of a legacy of moral turpitude
Against this wide canvas of ethical flexibility, when the real Brittany apparently died on Little Cheftonia, my original found herself in the right place, at the right time and with all the right skills to take advantage of the situation, and so conceived a plan to recompile her DNA and transform herself into the monarch – Even now, it’s something of a medical breakthrough that I’m pretty proud of, especially given the basic facilities I had access to!

The one thing Brittany didn't do, was figure out what to do with me once the reengineering process was complete - It was essential that I was created in the event of the process going wrong, but she remained undecided on whether to kill me or just keep me in stasis forever; so me saving her life and proving myself useful in other ways just complicated things

My first few weeks of life were pretty weird – I was worth nothing, and lived with the knowledge that if I died, I could easily be recreated and, other than the handful of experiences garnered from my few days of life, almost nothing would be lost
Ultimately I think I got lucky – I’m under no illusion that I’d have probably been liquidated once Brittany had consolidated her powerbase (which was why I was working so hard to make myself indispensable to her in the months that followed your ‘death’), so the Dwarf getting lost in space and flooded with cadmium radiation was extremely fortunate for me – In one stroke it meant an escape from Brittany, Interpol and a variety criminal organisations; so to say that I was thrilled would be an understatement!

Cut forward three million years and I'm blissfully free for the first time in my life since I was about eight (figuratively speaking of course – I'm not that old, but that’s how my memories are); okay, it wasn't perfect - the Dwarf was, and still is, a bloody dangerous place, and we didn't have much to eat, but the possibilities were endless – We had an entire galaxy to explore and experience!

And then all of a sudden, you come crashing back into our lives!

You might not want to hear this Jay, but I've always liked you; okay you came into that sleazy club I used to dance in far too often for my liking, but I flatter myself to think that you were there, at least occasionally, on my account; so even though I'm not certain you'd have considered a relationship with me had we not been amongst the last humans left alive, I jumped at the opportunity
Now, I know I have something of a mercurial nature and that I'm quick to tire of my partners, but six hundred years of adventure only seems to have added to your cachet, and I was completely hooked on you from the outset – So when you bought news with you of the dubious things Brittany had been doing during my three million years in stasis, I'm sure you can understand some of my reluctance to confess my part in her story, with the end result being that my lack of candidness was eventually compounded into a unforgivable lie when I discovered her involvement with the STCP
I meant what I said when I told you that I loved you and I was absolutely crushed when you didn't reciprocate; and yet from that awful moment onwards, things only seem to have gone from bad to worse for me, what with Katrina turning up and Brittany’s recent revelations about my pedigree
Please don’t misunderstand me there: I’m happy that Katrina’s alive – nobody deserved to die in that attack; but I was even happier before she turned back up; so if you think this has all been part of some plot of Brittany's to get under your skin, look at it from my point of view – I've gone from the first heady flush of love to the horror of having you, whose eyes I had looked up into while we were making love, trying to choke the life out of me
I can’t even express how hurt and miserable I feel about that
It’s as if this has all been specifically arranged to split us up and have me driven from the Dwarf

...Maybe I'm just being a little too paranoid?
From what I understand about Brittany, her schemes are so multifarious that I'm sure it can't be quite as simple as that, and in the same way: I'm sure your assertion that the Hymenoptera attack was just to recruit you is similarly false - You may have been goaded into killing the hive, but as I understand it: You destroyed only the first of a total of eight hives that Humanity encountered as it spread across the galaxy
Maybe we needed to encounter that first hive to spur our technological development and better arm ourselves for these other hives or some other hostile species that we’re unaware of?

I don't know and, more's the point, I can't say because I'm not Brittany - I’m only human and I only want the same things everyone else does, whereas she’s something else!
She’s... I don’t know... She was combined with the real Brittany shortly before we had to enter stasis, so I don’t know what effect this had on her, or how long the woman we met at the STCP headquarters has been alive - for all I know, she could be thousands of years old and as unlike me as you no doubt are to the man you were when the STCP recruited you

I don’t know why Brittany's doing what she is to you, or me, or any of us, but I promise you: I am not her
Please, please don’t hate me
Cass

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Taking a deep breath, Cass pulled up the messaging options and selected Jay’s name from the list of potential recipients, her finger hovering over the send option for a moment before she finally sent what she had written
Unless she decided to tell Holly to delete the message beforehand, he’d get it when he returned from Belhaphasar