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Morgan is different now, different than before, than the simulation and even when this her woke up she was someone else.
Not as different as he might have thought. His sister is currently carrying a bare splinter of her old memories, 4.5% human DNA and a small fortune in human nueromod abilities. She should have hardly anything in common with herself. Alex wonders sometimes if this is mimicry. If the old habitats he facilitates are followed not out of want or memory but to better hide. He glances at the clock, winces at the hour and leaves to find her just in case. Mikhaila and the others usually recharge around now.
Morgan stares into space with unreadable eyes. These days she’s still quiet, though she is getting better at staying human, Alex has to give her this. (Alex has seldom been able to deny Morgan anything, he doesn’t know why he thought bringing her back from the dead would change that.) The most obvious difference he notes as he approaches, is Morgan used to speak more often, inane things he’d give the world for now. This Morgan has an easier time parroting people than figuring out how to string sentences. He marks a similarly in that she’s still not content to be an echo. Always trying to say new things and failing, and when finally frustrated by failure she stops speaking. He’s not sure how to help, this project was arguably to facilitate understanding and while this Morgan certainly doesn’t see them as prey, usually abstains from acting like a predator there’s still a barrier.
This however isn’t one of those irate silences where she hates her own clumsy tongue and Alex too, for trapping her like this. He’s reasonably certain she won’t snap at him if he approaches. (The mean streak isn’t new, the ways it manifest can be.) She doesn’t bother when the precaution of a space suit on the worse days, the vacuum holds no fear now. It’s encouraging enough that she’s bothered to find one Alex taps her shoulder and doesn’t flinch when she turns.
Morgan really has got much better at staying human. She hardly ever looks like the sleeping phantom in the chair these days. Her failure is in incongruous bits and pieces, most often black tendrils snaking down her wrists. Today she has them under control, today Morgan is missing her face. Sometimes a shoulder slouches in a boneless way before it’s wrangled back into alignment too, fraying at the edges. The face she seems to have just forgotten. Like someone took a scalpel from the peaked edge of her hairline and around, just in front of her ears and down to her chin to peak it off. Revealing the writhing black void beneath. Void isn’t quiet right, the stars and flicking lamps lend enough illumination to pick out glossy shimmers where it moves and a dozen pinprick white glows for eyes.
He squeezes her shoulder, thinks he smiles and that Morgan means to back. She doesn’t appear to be aware of its absence and she definitely won’t be able to talk like this. (Sometimes he misses their arguments so fiercely he considers trying to bridge the gap the other way around.) The isolation is probably getting to them both, this small satellite in quarantine from Talos with only each other and the echoes inside operators for company. That’s why Alex doesn’t break the silence and let her know. Why they stand quietly at the window for a full orbit, moon and earth and sun slowly appearing then vanishing. The only explanation for one of them tugging the other away to get some sleep before collapsing themself.