Biiiiiig trigger warning on this one. The second half is an anxious introspective spiral touching on themes of family death, miscarriages, gender, fertility, transphobia, depersonalization, and psychosis; it might be rough for some readers.
She put up a shockingly good fight past that point, all things considered, but the advantage was firmly yours now. You flowed around the knifepoints, using your forearms to push aside hers and step into her guard, forcing her to give ground and stumble back, and then you reared back an arm for a strike. She found her footing and shoved back, her foot looped behind your ankle, your momentary lapse to set up the strike enough to begin to trip you.
Your knuckles were already pressed to her shoulder, trapped between you, but you knew that didn't matter. She glanced down, as if realising what you were about to do. She knew you couldn't do it, just as firmly as you knew you could.
But something was different.
You shifted, squared your stance, and pressed your fist into her sternum in one motion. Dust billowed off you. The world seemed to flex. You were thrown onto your back by the force of it, and she sailed up, away, making one elegant flip in the air before crashing face first into the sand.
You picked yourself up, slowly, painfully, and examined your hands. There was red, it was soaking the tattered remains of your sleeves, but no injuries, no broken skin. You'd felt cold blades and hot blood, but the evidence was gone, a trick of the simulation. The smell was still there though, overwhelming now, and you sat back down, feeling slightly sick. It was without consequence, but the smell was still heavy, unescapable, recalling to mind instantly the darkness of the ship and the blood on your hands as you tried to keep Chrysalis alive, that confusion and terror that was just two days behind you.
Apogee picked herself unsteadily up and nodded, pushing her glasses back in place. Smiling as the old man came and talked to her, briefly. You were too far away to hear what was said, but they nodded and smiled. There were nods, some kind of conclusion, and the old man strode up to you. He leaned down over you, an eyebrow raised.
"How did you beat her?" he asked.
"I don't think it was a lack of aggression," you said, smiling despite yourself. "There was something else."
"Oh?"
"I don't know. But it wasn't aggression. I didn't need to be angrier. It was… belief," you said.
"It always comes back to belief, doesn't it?"
You looked down at the blood-stained sands, contemplating.
"You gonna ask me if I think I'm the One?" you asked, and he stood back up straight, holding out a hand.
"Of course not." You took his hand and he pulled you to your feet. "What a cruel question that would be to have to answer. No, I'm not going to ask you anything. I think you have some questions to ask yourself."
He turned and walked away as the simulation dissolved back to the white void, as the smell of blood and the stains on your hands faded. You turned to find just Cache and Frag in the void, waiting for you.
"You had me going for a second there," Cache said excitedly. "The grenade, that was inspired."
"Thanks."
"Waste of time. We should be figuring out how to use the codes," Frag spat, then slowed. "How do you feel?"
"I don't know yet," you confessed. "I feel like I'm missing something."
"You'll figure it out," Cache said warmly. "I believe in you."
---
They put you up in a small room nearby the central broadcast stations, a place where somebody had clearly been living who had made way for the new guest. You didn't know how to feel about that, other than grateful. Most of what had been in the room was gone, leaving just a cot, a small shelf and metal dresser, and a devicing hanging from the ceiling which looked somewhat like an oversized mechanical spider, with three long cables folded over its arms. A jack into the local network, and potentially into the Matrix, just here in the room.
There wasn't a plan yet, the more experienced members of your crew were in a meeting with the Messanist's leadership to piece something together for the morning, and you decided it was probably best to get as much rest as you could. You'd be going back in, back into a city which would know you were coming, and it all felt too big and real for you right now. The fight, the first
real fight, the injury, the back-to-back close calls, the selection by this fucked-up cult… the stress was building up, you could feel it in your underdeveloped muscles, like a lump in your gut, pressure on your chest.
You held up a hand in the half-dark, wondering. You still had so many questions, about everything, and today had just added more. You turned your hand around, studied the way the light under the door played over it, listened to the half-muffled voices outside, the creak and groan of the metal and stone around you, the distant and deep rumbling somewhere you couldn't place.
It was absurd, but you found it impossible now not to doubt your senses. Sure, this world felt so much more real than the inside, so much deeper and more complex. Colours felt brighter, emotions felt deeper, each day felt like it had actually happened instead of like somebody had summarised it to you. But you'd lived so long in a lie.
How did you know this was real either?
You wondered about it, quietly, but hadn't asked. It seemed stupid to ask, surely it was the first question everyone asked, and what answers could they give that would assure you? How could they prove a negative?
You flexed, moved each finger in turn. It wasn't the same hand you'd thought was yours, it was smaller, slighter, the knuckles stood out more against the pale skin. Was it more or less yours than the one inside the computer, the residual self-image of your residual life?
God, it hadn't been long. It just felt long because it felt like any time had passed at all, because the days felt like days despite the lack of natural light, but it had really just been a few weeks and you'd been unconscious for much of it. More had happened in the last five days than any workweek you could remember, and that's if you accepted that anything had
ever happened to you since you were born.
There was another question. Were your parents your actual parents, were you some kind of fucked-up IVF baby? Or was it just slight of hand, a child that looked kind of like them selected from the growth stock and slotted in place in your mother? Vector had said they grew humans now, in the pods, and you just imagined how utterly horrified your mother would have been to learn that. When you were seven, you'd overheard your parents talking after you were supposed to be asleep and found out that she'd had two miscarriages before you. It was so traumatic it still haunted her. Had something gone wrong in the process outside, or did they
do that to her, to harvest her grief for something?
She wouldn't know your face if she saw it now. She only had one child now. Maybe they edited you out and put another miscarriage in your place. You remembered so clearly what it sounded like, to hear your mother sobbing in your father's arms, to have the childhood illusion of her invincibility shattered. You felt sick. You'd missed family Christmas two years in a row, working, and you regretted it so much. What was the last thing you said to her? To your father? To your sister? How were you supposed to live, out here, knowing they were still inside, that the twisted prison you'd escaped still held them?
You rested your hand back on your body, and, as it had in waves, the realisation that the body in question was
female once again rolled over you. It had been doing that, and most of the time it was euphoric. Not this time; there was a tinge of horror to it, as you processed for the first time that your mother's experience had not been a distant alien thing but instead a possible future for you, if you ever somehow ended up in a situation where kids were a possibility. You didn't even know where to start with that, especially considering you were currently under the presumption you were probably going to die sometime in the next few weeks.
Another, related yet tangential thought occurred as you did some math in your head to try and calculate your life expectancy. Should you have had a period by now? You had no idea, you didn't understand how any of that worked. You'd spent sex ed curled up in the back of the room trying not to listen out of some inexplicable dread and shame, and you'd sort of wish you'd listened. You… should probably talk to somebody. It'd be weird to talk to Page about, sad to talk to Frag, and while you were fairly certain Sprite had the relevant plumbing it felt awkward to ask girl questions at a person who didn't see themselves as a girl. So Chrysie, then, after she recovered. She'd always been happy to explain-
You paused. Right. She was a transsexual. Which meant… You struggled to work out what that meant. Your only brush with the concept was the suddenly much less funny ending of
Ace Ventura. She was like you with your RSI, just in the real world. She'd mentioned her RSI was different, so like…
You stopped yourself thinking about it further. This is all too weird, and as much as you needed to sleep, just sitting here in the dark was rapidly driving you crazy. You needed to do something.
You eyed the needle-like plug at the end of one of the interface hoses. Fuck it. You stood, grabbing the handle, found a bottle of disinfectant and sterilised it just like you did on the ship, and eventually came up with a small wired remote control for the device. Carefully, delicately, you lay on your stomach, manoeuvred the jack behind your hand, poked yourself in the neck twice, and finally slid the device home.
It was way more gross doing it yourself. Doing it slowly. Hearing the metal-on-metal sound reverberate in your skull, the sound travelling as it went deeper. You'd measured it with your hands; it must nearly touch your forehead. What did your brain look like with all that metal in it?
No, this was exactly the sorts of thoughts you
didn't want to have. You pulled the remote control up and thumbed it on; a small blue touchscreen opened up. There were different loading program instances in a giant menu, and with the admin password Vector had told you you could navigate to the files on the
Ashur too. There had to be thousands of programs, potential worlds to explore, all of them hovering under your thumb.
You chose, pressed
Run, and the world went white.
---
Tell me what program you are running, and why.
