34 - Psychosomatic Love Story (2) [June 16th, Age 14]

Yoru left not much later to go find Ava; he said he knew beyond much doubt where she went. We all sort of did too, since her secret weed room wasn’t much of a secret anymore, but we all figured it would be better to just let him handle it.

I spent the day wandering around and not doing much of anything. Bell did more or less the same. A few hours went by of me quietly avoiding her before I couldn’t take it any longer.

Maybe she’d tell me things she wouldn’t tell anyone else.

I caught up to her in a hallway somewhere upstairs. To be completely honest, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I was mostly hoping Bell knew, so she could lead me back to an area I recognized.

It was on-and-off thunderstorming all day, so an outside-wander was a difficult proposition; that said, I was starting to get a little cabin fever. I wouldn’t have minded getting rained on a little bit just to see something new.

Not that I had to get rained on, mind you. I was more than capable of walking in a little bubble of dry air, no matter how hard it was pouring.

Bell turned around, spoke to me first. “We keep running into each other, huh.”

“I have nothing to do,” I said. “Just…walking.”

She shrugged. “Same.”

Bell looked away, turned to the far end of the hall. “It’s always weird having nothing to do. Especially after how busy I’ve been. I’m just…I have to keep reminding myself that it’s over, you know?”

I didn’t really know. But I knew all about the repeated self-reminders. That was something I was very familiar with.

So I told her the more-or-less truth, which was, “I know.”

“I’ve been eight different people over the last six months,” she said. “A real diverse cast.”

I was on the edge of it. I knew. If I could just be a bit more encouraging—

“Like who?”

Bell smiled. “You want to know where I’ve been?”

I nodded, fervently. Feverishly. I craved the knowledge.

I mostly just wanted to hear Bell’s voice. To be the sole recipient of what she was saying.

Bell said, “I was out in Buffalo. I assassinated the leader of the Buffalo gang. I invaded their ranks as a low-level grunt, and slowly shifted my way up. Killing and replacing members of their gang as I went. Learning about my superiors and all of their habits. Every inch of their lives so I could become them. And then—well, I got stuck. This stays between us, okay?”

I would not tell a soul. “Yes.”

“I had to be the leader of the Buffalo gang for a while. That’s why I can’t tell Benji what exactly I was doing. I ordered the attack on you guys.”

“Oh,” I said.

I had my guesses about what Bell was up to, and why she couldn’t say, but none of them were that.

“I didn’t feel like I was ever in any real danger,” I said. “From that attack. But I…um…I wasn’t myself, that day.”

That wasn’t entirely true. What I was that day was a part of me just like any other. Just because I chose not to think about it didn’t mean it wasn’t there—it existed in silent tandem with every one of my living minutes, just like my breath or my heartbeat.

Bell grimaced. “I’m aware. I read the damage report.” She paused for a second, looked away. When she picked up her train of thought again, her voice was lower. “Sometimes, it’s just something I have to do. It would’ve blown my cover if I didn’t. Rumors of an intruder were swirling. That attack was on the schedule already, and if I cancelled it, it would’ve been suspicious. Apparently Marie was playing both sides of the table—she’d been talking to folks in Buffalo too. So I went through with it. Didn’t really have much of a choice.”

She shrugged. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “They didn’t matter.”

“One of them had become a relatively close friend of mine,” she said. “Or at least, was supposed to be. When I was one of the mid-level people. I had to send him to his death. He didn’t know that his best friend in the whole world had been replaced by me, and that same person, his boss now, was ordering him to die. It was…”

She shrugged, again. “I don’t know. Surreal? Nothing that happened in those six months feels real to me. I’ve been other people for so long. I’m lucky I don’t have much of a personality, otherwise it'd be a real struggle to remember how to be myself again.”

I wanted to defend her comment about not having a personality, to refute it in some way, but I found I didn’t really know what to say.

The same was true for me. If I was in her place.

I’d struggle with the same thing.

Bell looked up and down the hall. Nobody was coming. Frankly, I wasn’t sure anyone ever walked down this hall. I certainly had no idea where we were, and I doubted anyone else knew, either.

When Bell spoke again, her voice was even lower. “Erika, I’m going to let you in on a secret.”

I went cold.

Finally—after all these years—truth! Something I could cherish forever and ever.

Someone who trusted me enough to reveal their darkest secrets.

I braced myself for what she was about to say. It was going to be a real doozy. I was certain of it. I’d been burned before, but this time would be different. I could feel it. She was really gearing up to let me in on a slice of her life nobody had ever seen. So buried deep within her heart that it was seeing the light of day for the first time here and now.

I said, “I’m ready.”

Bell checked both sides of the hall again.

Then she spoke.

“I know the reason they hate me,” she said. “It’s justified. I’d hate me too, in their position.”

“Don’t say that,” I said. That was what I was supposed to say there, wasn’t it? I was supposed to defend her, try and make her feel good.

Bell was having none of it. “I get that I’m not a normal person,” she said, waving away my concern. “I get it. The things people say...well, you’ve seen me. You know they’re true.”

“They’re not,” I replied, limply.

“But they are,” Bell pushed on. “It used to bother me. Quietly, and only when nobody was looking, and over time I shoved that so far down that it disappeared, but I used to worry about what people thought of me all the time. Being so many different people so often made me feel vulnerable whenever I was someone I considered “myself.” Now, though...” She shrugged. “I’ve spent so long in so many different bodies. As so many different people from so many different places, and...people are just not as special as they think they are. When you’ve seen as many perspectives as I have, you—you get numb to them. You stop really seeing them as people, and instead as just...fact sheets. Lists to memorize. Because if you memorize the list well enough, people won’t really get suspicious.”

She paused for a moment, and when she picked up her train of thought again, it was stronger—the slight distance out of her voice. “Would you notice if a co-worker was replaced with a ninety-five percent perfect fake?” she said, directly to me instead of arbitrarily to the space I was near.

“I...maybe?” I asked.

“Would you notice if Yoru was replaced? By someone who looked just like him, acted almost exactly like him? You don’t talk to him all that much.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

As much as I didn’t want to, I nodded. But I added, “I think I’d notice if you replaced Cygnus.”

Bell shook her head. Looked me dead-center with her stupid impenetrable dead-fish eyes. “I could replace Cygnus in my sleep. Out of everyone here, he’d be the easiest. I could get him ninety-eight percent down. Maybe ninety-nine. Only Prochazka would notice, and even then—it would take him months. Maybe a year.”

I wanted to doubt her, but I could not touch her confidence.

So all I did was shrug. Passively say, “Maybe.”

Bell took a breath, looked around some more. We were still perfectly alone. Not a chance in the world anyone would find us.

She went on: “This is the kind of thing that makes everyone nauseous, when they think about flesh-keys and telepaths. We don’t...thanks to our keys, it’s really hard to see people the way you did before. When you look at someone as an elemental key, you see their humanity, you know? You see them, and you don’t know their hopes and dreams. You meet a stranger and all you’ve got to go on are your own kindness and stereotypes. First impressions are everything. They’re a complete package—completely opaque. You have to learn about them the same way they have to learn about you. But to a telepath—there's no person there. There’s a brain, and the brain has some amount of defense—and some things are well-guarded, and others aren’t. And everything below the brain is just a flesh-robot the brain operates. Nothing else matters unless it makes you hard or wet. Flesh keys are the same way.”

She pursed her lips for a moment. “Everything can be replaced, Erika. Every part of a body can be swapped out if the flesh-key is strong enough. People often say that telepaths are generically the strongest key, but garnets of sufficient strength can expel their own cancer. We’re immortal. Actually immortal. And we get to choose if other keys live or die. Telepaths get to control the computer, but garnets get to control the robot. And we get to service the robot. And we get to upgrade the robot. And we get to take apart the robot if we want to. Better hands, better legs, better eyes, better lungs—so much of humanity is based on the fact that bodies don’t work all the time. That bodies can fail. Old age. Sickness. Injury. All of those things—when none of them matter, you find that...that not a whole lot else does, either. It’s life without consequence. The same thing telepaths complain about. We just get to ignore the rules. You...one day, you’re still going to get cancer and die, unless you go out on your own terms. I won’t. I’m immortal. I’m going to live as long as I choose. And I don’t have biological rules to play by. Garnets and telepaths live in a sandbox, but the sandbox is reality. And it’s unhinging, Erika. It makes us inhuman.”

She took a few steps toward one end of the hall. “I’m not sure it’s possible to be a garnet or a telepath and still see people the way you did when you were young. I’m not really sure I could go back to seeing people as more than the sum of their parts if I tried. All I see are the parts, and how they fit together. I understand what having a broken part does to someone, but...that’s more through experience than intuition. Humans are modular to me.”

Suddenly, she broke into a snicker. “This is probably the most vulnerable I’ll ever be. Never confessed anything like that to anyone before.”

I was still hung up on the idea that every body part could be replaced.

“Everything is replaceable,” I echoed.

Bell nodded. “Even brains, I would assume. To a sufficiently powerful garnet.”

“Like you.”

Bell broke into a tiny smile.

“Like me.”

The next thought struck me too hard and fast to evaluate before I said it. “What about love?”

“What about it?” she asked.

“When you have to be someone who’s in love,” I said. “Can you still be sure they won’t catch you?"

Bell pursed her lips for a second. Thin red lines across her borderline emaciated face.

“It depends,” she said. “Young love is usually easy. I spent four weeks as some poor soul’s girlfriend for a while, and he never found out. It was almost comically simple. I think if I had to replace Yoru or Ava, for whatever reason, the other would notice. That’s young love, sure, but they’re never going to be with anyone else. There’s just no chance they don’t spend the rest of their lives together, I think. I’d get maybe a few days on either one before they’d notice. For couples that are just trapped with each other, I get free reign to do basically whatever I want. The only time…hmm.”

She trailed off for a second. “Story time, Erika.”

I jolted to attention. “Okay.”

“I had to replace some old man a while ago to get some secrets out of his wife about an organization she was a part of. This was, ah, maybe two years back. I thought I was hot shit, you know? Untouchable. Undiscoverable. I could be anyone I wanted for however long I chose and nobody would ever find out. I walk into this old couple’s house in the shape of her husband, and she calls me out in fifteen minutes.”

I blinked. I had never heard a story of Bell failing to complete something.

“She didn’t say much of anything the whole time I was there. I came in after a “walk to the pond” as the old man did on Sunday mornings, and I went to go cook some brunch, and as I was serving us the omelets, the woman looked at me across the table and said, all calm like it was any old thing, “You’re not my husband.”

“For a moment I was taken aback; I thought I’d been doing a perfect job. So I tried to talk her down, change the subject, but she just kept shaking her head and saying, “You’re not Ron. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not Ron. So I did something I’d never done before.”

I looked up at her. The person I needed most in the whole wide world.

I asked: “What?”

Bell shrugged. “I gave up. I told the truth.”

Bell had been doing a lot of shrugging that day. I guess it’s all you can really do when your life doesn’t make any sense. I shrugged a lot, too. Some days it felt like all I had.

“I told the woman to look away for a moment, and she told me she’d watch because she suspected I was some kind of devil and she didn’t want to be deceived. So I turned back into myself while she watched. It took, ah, maybe a minute. Forty-five seconds if I’m being generous. And the whole time, she just quietly watched me do my thing, and when I was done I told her who I was. I said my name was Bell, and that I was sent by the Radiant to find out what you did for a living, because we needed to determine if the company you worked for was dangerous or not. And she just laughed and told me that she hated all of her fucking coworkers—exact quote—and that she’d rat out every last one of them for shits and giggles.”

Bell shrugged, again. “She asked me where her husband was, and I said he was out fishing, because that was the truth, and I knew they rarely told each other where they were going because they simply knew that they’d be home by six-thirty for dinner every night regardless. And if they didn’t know what the other was up to, they’d have better stories to tell over the table.

“Before she spilled the beans, I asked her how she knew I wasn’t her husband, and she said the number of steps I took from the door to the kitchen was wrong. How’s that?

Bell smiled a tiny bit, inside the memory. “And, well, she told me everything I wanted to know, and when I went to go she said to me that all I really had to do was ask, and all of this trickery was worthless, because at the end of the day it wouldn’t have worked no matter how hard I would’ve studied. I don’t think I ever would have thought to memorize the number of steps her husband took to get from the door to the kitchen. I always thought height and age was enough to extrapolate gait, but…well, he took really long steps for a seventy-four-year-old. He walked like an upright bullfrog, she said. I asked her if she was at all scared that this happened, that I was there, and she said no because, quite frankly, you did a terrible job. Although it’s not your fault because you never would have been able to fool me in the first place.

“So the next day, Ava, Yoru, Rachel and I went down to the campus her old employer operated out of, and we slaughtered everyone in there. Normally I wouldn’t have gone for something like that, but I volunteered to be on the kill squad. The old woman told me that she wanted me to strangle the head of that company with my own two hands, wearing her face. She wanted me to take her shape and kill the CEO as her. And, well, I was down for that, that sounded like a nice bit of vengeance. She gave me some reference photos for what she looked like when she was a few years younger, just before she retired, and she told me to come back to her and let her know when it was done. So I kept my word.”

Bell paused. “After that, I swore off old love. Couples happily married for forty-plus years are beyond me. Beyond any flesh-key, I think. It’s just not something you can ever fake.”

By that time, though, I was thinking about other things.

I was wondering if Cygnus would notice if Bell replaced me.

0 0 0

I had my feelings about Cygnus fairly squared up. I knew the ins and outs of them. They were neatly compartmentalized in a part of my brain I tried to rarely visit so I wouldn’t get distracted by him whenever we had real things to do.

But I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that the odds of him feeling the same way about me were slim to none. For one, I was three years younger than him, and if we were older that wouldn’t be a big deal, but he was seventeen and I was fourteen, so that didn’t fly.

And for another, he was whole, and I was not. He deserved better than me.

The truth is that I could never be quite sure that what I felt for Cygnus wasn’t just a desperate craving for his attention. I didn’t know the difference between that and love. I couldn’t begin to say what love was that my feeling for Cygnus wasn’t; but at the same time, I couldn’t describe exactly what it was that made me think it was love in the first place.

The difference between love and friendship was too much for me when all I’d ever wanted was for people to not be disgusted by my existence. I was perfectly happy to just have friends, I thought.

I figured.

0 0 0

Yoru said to me, when I checked up on him, that he was going to go out of the factory to find Ava since he had a decent idea of where she went if she wasn’t here. I asked him how long his list of places to check was, in total—between the factory and outside—and he said he had around fifteen different locations he figured she could be.

I couldn’t imagine knowing someone so well that I could rattle off fifteen likely locations for them to go when they were having a rough go of it. I couldn’t do that for Cygnus, for certain.

So maybe I didn’t love him.

It was something along the lines of eleven o’clock when Yoru came back home with Ava in tow, and I saw them come in since I was heading down to the bar at the time. I watched them from the doorway to the basement, walking silently through the dimmed and still foyer to the staircase in the back, disappearing upstairs to do whatever it was lovers did.

I didn’t have that.

And I didn’t have what the old couple Bell told me about had. I couldn’t say where Cygnus would go if he left in anger. I couldn’t say what I would do to calm him down. I couldn’t say what I would do to bring him back. I couldn’t count the steps he took to get from the staircase to the bar, couldn’t say for sure what he’d order from the look in his eyes, couldn’t say how long he’d stay, couldn’t say how much he wanted to see me.

I didn’t have that, either.

When I was ten or eleven, all I ever wanted was a couple of friends. Now I had them, and I was wishing I had even more.

Selfish, selfish. I had everything I wanted. What more could I possibly ask for?

How much further was I willing to tempt fate with pointless questions?

So that night, lying alone in my bed, I did what Bell did when she was discovered. I gave up. I told myself the truth.

It was all in my head, nothing more.