It was often during the most important moments, instants of the greatest significance, when people communication become quite a bit less coherent. It was certainly true for Martin, as he stared after Rin as she tumbled down the street like a crash-test dummy launched from a cannon.

Martin was moderately complex —as people went — and the layers to his thinking as he realized Rin had died a second time were certainly multifaceted. His sympathy and his concern responded first, quickly followed by a certain amount of embarrassment — as his professional pride had been hit by that same motorcycle. Even before he managed to turn his head and open his mouth to speak, he worried this might not be just a horrifying coincidence. And half a heartbeat later he already began to worry that he was in a quagmire too deep for his own thinking to get him out of.

None of this was apparent in what he eventually managed to say, or course. "Oh, shit, no, fuck!" was all he managed to blurt out as he chased after Rin and the stone. He crossed the distance fairly quickly; she barely stopped rolling before he was crouched beside her, ear over her mouth and two fingers pressed against her throat.

"She's dead, Martin," BIRD said.

"No, she might not be, that impact wasn't as severe," Martin disagreed. "A motorcycle doesn't hit like truck."

"I'm looking at the status feeds from her artificial eye. It's registering no brain activity, and no pulse. Like that hit cracked her skull, broke her spine, and stopped her heart all at the same time," BIRD reported. "Almost exactly the same injuries she picked the first time she died."

"Fuck," Martin said.

"By the way, you have six seconds to grab the stone and find some cover, before your shoot yourself," BIRD reported, and Martin swore the little robot sounded amused.

Martin wasted one of those seconds wondering what BIRD meant by shooting himself, until he remembered that he was also halfway up the street. And armed.

"Shit," Martin muttered as used his hands and feet to throw himself forward so quickly a professional sprinter might only have been mildly disappointed. He managed the distance to the glowing green stone in six steps, snatched it up without slowing down, and almost reached a cement barrier on the far side of a bus stop.

Almost.

Something punched him in the left shoulder hard enough to knock him off his feet, and he ended up skidding into the barrier, colliding chest-first and knocking the wind out of his lungs. He coughed, pulled himself behind the cement, and gasped for breath.

"Fuck," Martin cursed, slipping the stone into one of his pockets and drawing his sidearm. He looked at his shoulder, where the ceramic plating had shattered from the impact. "That asshole didn't even use the beanbag shotgun. He's full-on trying to put me in the ground."

"I'm not sure that expression works on a city floating in space," BIRD said, as it perched on the top of the cement barrier and inspected Martin's shoulder. "This might be the oddest form of suicide in history, by the way."

"Don't remind me," Martin agreed, as he tried to glance up. He ducked as soon as he remembered who he was dealing which, which was fortunate since another three shots smashed into the concrete inches from where his head had been.

"That's a hell of a close grouping for over two hundred metres," Martin noted. "I'm a really good shot."

"Great. The one thing you're good at, and it's working against you," BIRD said. "Got a plan for getting out of this one, like firing back?"

"Shoot-outs don't work in real life like they do in the movies," Martin replied, ducking down a little lower. "Those three shots were me showing off, letting another pro know that unless I surrender right now, he's going to put the next few shots into me. I poke my head up to fire back, I'm dead."

"Can't you blind-fire at him, without putting your head up?"

"He's two hundred metres away, you goddamn tamagotchi pet," Martin yelled. He waved his hand for emphasis, which ended up getting him hit in his armoured glove, knocking it down hard and feeling to Martin like someone had just cracked him with a hammer.

"Fuck," Martin cursed, "I am a really good shot. I'm going to have to surrender and try to talk my way out of it. Unless you have a self-destruct feature you can use."

"Why would you want to blow yourself up?" BIRD asked.

Martin frowned at the little machine, and gestured with his head towards his other self. "Oh, right," BIRD mumbled. "Well, I could dump my capacitor all at once, but I doubt that would do more than tickle. Or I could just start pecking at him."

"Go for the eyes, Boo. Go for the eyes," Martin replied, and readied himself.

"Wait for it," BIRD said, "and go."

Martin rose, already lining up the sights, to see a sight he never expected to witness. Himself, living and breathing as if he were someone else. He was holding BIRD by its wings with one hand, and with the other just pressed the barrel of his gun into its chassis.

Martin fired just as his past self shot BIRD. There was an explosion of ceramics off the other Martin's chest, a flash of light, and both the little robot and the other Martin toppled to the ground.

Martin advanced, gun still trained on himself. It was a slow, tense walk, made all the worse since he was on edge the whole way. His arms started to ache a little by the time he drew close, and both his right shoulder and left hand began to ache.

He was both relieved, and troubled, when he didn't see himself rise.

"He's still breathing," BIRD said on his shoulder. Martin wasn't sure if BIRD was trying to be reassuring, or trying to chide Martin about leaving a job half-finished. "You're still breathing. Your earlier self. No, let's go with my first stamens, since he's an entirely different person now."

"A different person? He's me," Martin said, pointing down at where he lay.

"No. The moment the two of you lived a different experience, you stopped being the same person," BIRD said. The little robot's eyes had turned darker, and the tone had taken a certain 'I will fuck you up if you don't pay attention' tone that Martin rarely heard from anyone who wasn't his boss. "Take this from an entity who's entire consciousness sits in a server bank; everything that makes you up is composed of two things. What you've experienced, and how you experience it. And how you experience it is a lot more important."

"Afraid I don't get it," Martin admitted.

"Of course you don't," BIRD said.

"Another shot at my tiny human mind again?" Martin asked, as he holstered his sidearm. "I'd threaten to shoot you, but I've had more than my fill of threats, violence, and death today."

"No. I was going to say I introduced a philosophical concept without explanation or context. It's not something you're going to get right away. Now, let's take a different tack and try to think about why trying to save Rin's life failed," BIRD said.

Martin sighed, and just as he began to relax, exhaustion nearly knocked him to his knees. Not a physical failing, his body was still ready and willing to go miles further, and as firefights go, even this last hour wasn't particularly gruelling. But the number of emotional shocks he had lived through, all at once, felt like he was trying to carry half of Neo Tokyo on his back.

"It's simple," Martin said. "I was just careless, leaving her in traffic while I gave her the thing she wanted most."

"Two times in a row? In exactly the same way, at the same moment? Keep in mind, Rin lives here. She's familiar with the city's traffic. But you've been here less than an hour, and managed to not only walk trough traffic but had a firefight in it?"

That gave Martin pause. "What are you saying, BIRD?"

"Something might be working against your efforts to save the girl."

"Something like a gang other than whoever the fuck those anime bikers were?"

"Something like the laws of the space-time continuum."

"That a mafia back on Luna?"

"What? No, you blithering idiot. Since you have a time machine now, perhaps we should go back to when you were born and ask your parents to not drop you on the head so many times. Or perhaps add a book or two into your life and try to actually use the grey stuff between your ears," BIRD ranted, pacing back and forth on Martin's shoulder. "It's a wonder your brain cells don't commit rapid apoptosis from chronic cranial inactivity."

"You done ranting, birdbrain, or do I leave you behind?" Martin asked. He fished the glowing green stone out of pocket and walked towards where the earlier version of himself had left his bike.

"Just stalling while I did a software update. I need to expand this platform's local storage capabilities."

"Why?"

"Because when you jump though time, I don't actually come with you. I'm not actually on you shoulder, this platform is just an interfacing device. You wouldn't expect to experience time travel just because I left with a remote control car you still had the controller for, would you?"

Martin reached the motorcycle and set the stone on it. He plugged in his phone next, and changed the time to ten minutes prior.

"Look Martin, you need to consider the possibility that you didn't just fail because of an accident or an oversight on your part," BIRD warned Martin as he mounted his bike. "There might be something else at work."

"Whatever's behind it, BIRD, I'll deal with it," Martin said. "I'll save her."

"Not sure that's up to you," BIRD replied.

Martin's shiver that had nothing to do with being cold.