Chapter Text
April 5th--April 7th, he reminds himself--comes to a close with Morgan still as human as can be expected. No alarms. No more resets. He finishes the translations, reads them a second time, and then flushes them down the toilet. He stands under the shower for a few minutes without undressing, just letting the water flow over his suit. He used to get his best ideas in the shower, though they were never the ones people expected them to be.
Morgan waits for an epiphany until the water runs cold. It never comes. Every time he squeezes his eyes shut, he sees the Other Morgan. Every drop of water that hits his suit reverberates into his marrow. He’d swear on his life that he could feel the water run down his skin, even though there was no way for it to get through the suit.
Almost like you’re not wearing anything at all, right?
“Do you ever shut up?” Morgan screams. The shower walls amplify his question until it’s deafening. The water stops falling. Purple light flows around him. In his peripheral, threads writhe inside the light, coalescing into a web. He reaches out to touch it without thinking.
It isn’t Coral, but it’s close. He feels energy inside it, like all of the desperate thoughts rattling inside his head finally broke free. It feels like anger. Like Entropy. Like a million things he can’t quite name. It feels like fire and heat as the nullwave transmitter goes off and every Typhon mod he forced into himself to stay alive is burned out.
His knees hit the floor with a crack.
Claustrophobia sets in.
The Panic. The Darkness whispers. Somewhere outside of himself, there are other voices. But only this one is clear. You should’ve died when the Nullwave went off. Don’t you think?”
“No.”
Because you’re not a Typhon? The voice pulses through him in waves, agonizing and somehow comforting. How sure are you about that?
Morgan staggers to his feet through the pain. The walls get closer with every second he’s standing. An invisible set of hands tries to pull him back down. He crashes into the sink and grips it like a lifeline.
Morgan Yu stares into the tiny bathroom mirror. The steam obscures most of his face, but it’s still his. Same patchy beard. Same golden skin. Same sparking white eyes. He drags his fingers across the glass and watches his features change.
Morgan Yu stares into the Darkness. And the Darkness stares back.
--
The alarm doesn’t go off. Morgan wakes up 10 A.M. to the sound of an airlock opening and launches himself out of bed. His legs don’t hold his weight. When he tries to stand back up there’s only numbness. Everything feels like static. He screams and white noise crackles out of his mouth.
The first edge of the Panic starts to creep in when suddenly he’s restrained. He doesn’t see the attacker. There are no alarms going off. None of the screaming he’d expect in the event of a containment breach. There’s no fighting it. His body couldn’t be less his. He’s pulled back against something soft and solid. Definitely not a Typhon.
“Morgan,” a familiar voice snaps. “C’mon, Morgan. Get it together.”
It’s the first time in a long time that the sight of his older brother brought such a rush of relief. Words well up in his throat only to die on his lips. He says nothing, but doesn’t move away. The Morgan who came up here in a medical shuttle would have shoved Alex out the false window for trying to hug him after everything that happened, but he isn’t that Morgan. He isn’t sure which Morgan he is, though.
“Am I even Morgan?” he whispers to no one, and no one answers. Alex is silent as he shifts his arms and moves to sit beside him.
“Why do you think you’re not Morgan?” The question is cautious, each word pulled out of his mouth like pulling teeth. Alex meets his gaze and holds eye contact just a little too long. He could reach into Alex’s mind, excise the thoughts he’s hiding down beneath that permanently calm exterior, and figure out the answer himself. But he doesn’t. Morgan, the Morgan Alex knows, probably would have.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “I’m Morgan. I have to be. I can feel it.”
Morgan’s hands move in a familiar rhythm on his legs; his body aches to move to relieve some of the tension coiled inside him. The answer Alex is forming twists into the not-quite-coral and dies there.
“The problem isn’t that I’m not Morgan.” He barely believes what he’s saying, but just saying it is reassuring. It’s familiar in the kind of way that makes his stomach sink. “The problem is that I am Morgan, but I may or may not be the right Morgan.”
“What’s your criteria for the ‘right Morgan’ then?”
“Dr. Morgan Yu is supposed to be a handsome, genius, human scientist. The first two are a given, but the last one isn’t. I know I’m part Typhon.” He takes a breath and lets it out, slowly. Lets the hard edges of his shape soften until flecks of gold appear in his peripheral. “But I think the Other Morgan is part Typhon too.”
“What other Morgan are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the Dr. Yu that you’ve been emailing. The one that’s in charge of the simulation. That one.”
Alex says nothing, but the sudden rigidity to his posture leaves little to discuss.
“That one’s a Typhon, too. That’s not the problem. The problem is more objective than the nature of humanity or something. Which one of us was always Morgan and which one is the new one?” The relief melts away into anger and there’s nothing he can do to force it down. In the gold threads, he sees the Other Morgan standing over his bed, tearing out pages of his journal. “Why does everyone keep calling me Subject Alpha? Why do the records show that Project Cobalt is nearly finished when I barely got started on it before being sent to Earth? Why can’t I leave the simulation?”
“Morgan, I can answer everything, but I need you to calm down first.”
“I’m in a simulation against my will. I may or may not have an alien clone doing my job. And every so often I see the world through vibrations that just so happen to take the form of gold thread.” Morgan puts a hand to his face and laughs. The sound couldn’t be less human if he tried. “Alex, I don’t think calm is going to happen.”