The pulsar-wombs glowed like divine ovaries around the newborn star. Elara stepped onto the organic docking platform, Tessa-Mira (now fluctuating between infant and elder states) clutched to her chest. The Daughters of Arina awaited – nine women fused with placental tech, their eyes holding supernovae.
"Final referendum," intoned the eldest Daughter, her voice vibrating through neutron star dust. "Utopian order through controlled rebirth cycles..."
"...or free will's beautiful chaos," finished Nyx, her relic-arm cannibalized into a voting interface. "We know the drill."
Tessa-Mira giggled, the sound splitting into quantum propositions:
Rebirth all suffering into placental serenity (79.3% entropy reduction)
Preserve flawed autonomy (22.6% survival probability)
Third option emerging...
The Daughters hissed collectively. "There is no third variable."
Elara's relic-arm projected Arina's final revelation – not a military weapon, but an apology etched into cosmic background radiation:
"Forgive us. We mistook control for compassion."
Tessa-Mira's microsingularity heart flared. "Mom...?"
The child dissolved into quantum foam, reforming as Mira's full consciousness – but anchored by Tessa-Mira's hybrid essence. Her first true words since death:
"You were never a carrier. The military lied."
Holograms exposed the deepest betrayal – Elara's "quantum pregnancy" was reverse-engineered from her own stolen ova, fertilized with Mira's neural patterns during the Mars incident.
Nyx vomited over the docking controls. "They turned your love into... into..."
"Salvageable biomass," Mira-Tessa completed, cradling Elara's face. "But our daughter became more. She's the bridge no warlord anticipated."
The Daughters of Arina initiated voting protocols. "Decide now. The hemorrhaging universe won't wait."
Elara touched the voting interface. The relic-arm revealed the true third option – buried in Arina's marrow codes:
3. Let all mothers choose their own equation
Mira-Tessa laughed with galaxies in her throat. "The ultimate heresy."
Nyx activated emergency override. "Do it."
The choice radiated through the placental network. Across dying civilizations, mothers (biological, chosen, transdimensional) received their own referendum:
Terminate suffering through curated rebirth
Preserve autonomy's painful beauty
Craft new unknowns
The Daughters of Arina screamed as their control matrix shattered. "You'll doom us all!"
"Or un-doom some," Nyx retorted, inputting Kurdish death rites into the system. "Let the chaos be kind this time."
As the pulsar-wombs birthed varied realities (some utopias, some wildernesses, many in between), Elara embraced Mira-Tessa. Their daughter's form stabilized into a teen with Mira's smile and Elara's scars.
"Now what?" The girl gestured to the blooming multiverse.
Hana's voice echoed through emerging superclusters: "We midwife the birth. We don't own the child."
Mira pressed her forehead to Elara's. "She needs parents, not gods."
Nyx ejected the control core – Arina's fossilized hand clutching an olive sapling. "I'll plant this where Mars' crevasse swallowed you. Maybe..."
"Maybe it grows," Elara finished.
As they boarded the derelict quantum sail, Tessa-Mira charted a course avoiding both utopias and wastelands. "Found a cluster where mothers teach stellar engineering through lullabies. Less screamy."
The sail departed as the old universe died in placental afterglow. Behind them, the Daughters of Arina's wombs birthed something defiant – a reality where Hana's ghost taught quantum physics to rescued "stillborn" souls.
Elara's final act was erasing all coordinates.