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She ran the comb through a section of her hair, trying to keep it oriented just the right way as she pulled it and tried to wrap it around the bun she’d started on the top of her head. Carefully, carefully, she picked up a bobby pin with her free hand and tried to fasten the section, but her fingers were sore from trying so hard, and she dropped it to the floor.
She let out a slow, dejected exhale, and wondered why she’d even been trying at all.
She was just reaching down to pick up the pin when the door opened.
“You can tell her I’ll be down for dinner in a few minutes, I won’t be late-” she started, but froze when she saw who had just walked in, his head equally still as he took in the scene he saw before him. “Oh my God,” she said.
It was Otto.
“Lucy?” he asked, a stupid question. He looked out into the hallway, and then back into the room.
She motioned for him to come in, and he did,the door clicking quietly, respectfully behind him. He stood stock-still with his back to it, not saying a word.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, even as she was piecing it together.
He just gulped, and looked her steadily in the eye.
“You’re older than me,” she said with a dull kind of surprise. “But… but not that much older than me.”
He shook his head. “Two and a half years.”
She turned to put the comb and pin down on the vanity, and while she could still make it look like a fluid movement, closed her eyes and took a shaky breath.
“I’m sorry.”
She stood up, smoothing her skirt and turned to look back at him. “Hmm?”
The eye contact seemed too much for him. “Is this… is this where you’ve been?” He gestured to the room, the ornate walls, the solid wood four-poster bed, the bedspread that had probably cost more than the orphanage he’d been raised in.
She nodded. “Back to tutoring, being a proper lady, training my voice, singing.” She gestured at the hair supplies she’d just put down. “I’m trying to do my hair like my grandmother did. I…” she stopped, but decided to bring the elephant in the room back out. “I thought I could make myself look older.”
Otto looked spooked for a moment, but hid his expression quickly. “Do you…get to leave? This room?”
Lucy stared, confused for a moment. “Yeah. I can leave, walk around the castle, explore the gardens. I haven’t tried to go any farther outside. I think, probably, you could think about how you’d get to somewhere you wanted to go and you’d make it there.”
Otto just stood, thinking for a moment. He glanced back towards the door, as if there was somewhere he wanted to go, but dropped the idea when he thought through the ramifications of their situation.
“We died,” he finally said. “All that stuff outside isn’t real.”
He looked so hopeless, but Lucy couldn’t stop looking at the fresh scars on his face. The way his hair fell a bit differently with added length, and the fact that he’d easily grown six inches since the last time she’d seen him.
He’d been through so much, grown up without her. And where before she’d known exactly what to say to him, she faltered now. Did she know this person? What did he think of her?
“How did it happen?” She finally asked.
“You’re sure you want to know?”
Lucy nodded, and went to go sit down on the bed. She motioned for him to join her.
He froze for a second, and then sat down on the chaise opposite her, pretending he hadn’t seen.
“Laura,” she said.
“I… yeah,” he said. For the first time since he’d come into the room, a bit of a smile crossed his face. “How’d you know?”
“I have eyes,” she said.
“Ah. You and everybody else, as I found out later.”
“How is she?”
“She’s good. She made it off the island, I made sure.”
It took Lucy a moment to process that statement. “The volcano blew? Thermal regulation failed?” Franz had mentioned the thermal control room that kept them all from dying. Perhaps building a school in a volcano wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“No, we blew it on purpose. Well, HIVEmind did it. There was an evacuation system built in, apparently, and everyone made it out okay. Mostly.”
“Do you happen to know whether Sveta made it?” she asked.
“Sveta?” Otto tilted his head a moment, recalling the name.
“My old roommate.”
“She-”
“Otto,” Lucy snapped, when she saw his face slide just a bit too far in the ‘dumb’ direction.
“What?”
“Tell me the truth. Don’t lie to me.”
Otto sighed, and bowed his head. “All right. I’m sorry. She died, almost two years ago. Completely unrelated incident. On the Hunt, if you heard about that.”
God, this was heavy.
She turned away from him for a moment, and looked down at the embroidered bedspread, at nothing in particular.
“Shelby?” she asked. She thought about crossing her fingers, but she didn’t want to be childish.
“She made it off the island with Laura and Wing, too. They’re still together, by the way.”
She tilted her head at him. “Really? I suppose that makes sense. I’m glad they figured that out.”
“Oh, you didn’t know. Oops.”
“I mean, Shelby told me she was planning on making a move on him at some point. Thanked me for the… never mind.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the air heavy.
“Is this weird?” Otto finally asked. “For you?”
“A little,” she admitted.
“That’s understandable,” he said. He suddenly sat up straighter, shifting his feet and squaring his shoulders. “Either way, there’s something I should have said when I walked in here. I never got to thank you for what you did. Because of you, we were able to take out Overlord, which saved the lives of what might have been everybody on the planet. I was one of them. The next two and a half years I got to have weren’t always happy, but I’m glad I got to have them.”
What did you even say to that?
“I always assumed, I think, that I was going to die,” she said, not looking him in the eye. “My great-grandmother is probably not going to live much longer, and since I had no children, the voice will die with her. That’s a good thing. I’m glad you got to do something with my time, even if it wasn’t as much as I’d hoped.”
She turned back to look at Otto, and was surprised by how… sad he looked.
“What?”
He breathed in and out, uncomfortably. “Well, you wanted to know what happened. There was this… girl. She was created by one of Overlord’s disciples. A female clone of me, with some extra DNA added from somewhere else.”
“What? Whose DNA?”
“Either yours or your mom’s, I’m thinking,” he said. “Not sure, but I think they just took the voice gene and spliced that in.”
Lucy gulped uncomfortably. “So, me, effectively, but with the computer thing?”
Otto shook his head. “No.”
“Worse?”
“Yeah. She could use the voice through telepathy, and she could use telepathy through the internet. She remotely took out HIVEmind, enslaved the staff, and had the staff lock down the students. Took her all of an hour. A few of us were able to escape, we actually got help from your great-grandmother the Queen, and we tried to take back the island. In the end, we were able to evacuate, but I had to hold her down while we nuked it. There were a bunch of other clones being grown, but I shut them down. Now there’s no one like you or me left. Well, except for the Queen. I’m not sure whether she made it out or not, actually.”
Lucy just stared, taking that in.
“So I guess I get what you’re saying,” Otto continued. “I’m… glad that there’s no one like me left.”
Lucy frowned.
“Do you really think that?” she asked, standing and beginning to pace the room.
Otto blinked up at her. “I mean, yeah. So many horrible things happened because of me. You died. I feel a lot better knowing there isn’t anyone else like Anna left out there who can go after the people I care about who are left. Maybe someone else will invent something like this in several decades, but for a while, I think humanity is better off not having to deal with people like me.”
Lucy stopped in front of him, nostrils flared. “Maybe this is the pot calling the kettle black, but what a load.”
Otto shrunk a little at the intensity on her face. “What do you mean?”
“I died for you. And now you’re here, telling me how great it is that you didn’t make it either? How the world is such a better place since you’re not in it? You’re an ass, Malpense.”
Otto opened his mouth to say something, but closed it.
“What?” Lucy asked. “Are you about to tell me I was wrong to do what I did? Because it was my decision to make. A decision I’ve got some complicated feelings about at the moment, to be honest. I thought it would be great if you could go on to live a nice, long, and happy life, for example, but now you’re here and you’re barely an adult.”
Otto set his jaw and looked up at her calmly. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Hey!” She snapped, stepping away from him. “I told you to stop doing that. You don’t mean what you say. You’re avoiding conflict, telling me the things you think I want to hear. Well, guess what? You can’t hurt me, Malpense. Look where we are.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” Otto asked, bewildered.
“Not ‘you’re right, I’m sorry’ when you don’t think so! I gave you a second chance to try to make being like us work in the world and you threw it away, after turning around and dating my best friend, no less, but now that you’re here you won’t even tell me the truth about what you’re thinking.” She paused, for emphasis. “Do you not respect me?”
“That’s not it,” Otto said. “But you weren’t there. You were the one that just said you hope no one else has the voice. I thought you’d get it.”
“Get it?” she asked, incredulous. “I loved you. Or at least, I was very, very lonely, and you were the only person who could possibly understand what I was going through. Either way, I guess I’m just not seeing how your mere existence could be such a massive ordeal.”
She sat back down on the bed, to try to show that she was willing to listen.
“So you want to know what happened while you were gone,” he said.
Lucy nodded.
"So there was another clone of me, about a year ago. He could read minds and control bodies. He looked similar enough to me that most people couldn't tell the difference. Anastasia Furan, the woman who replaced Overlord, was using him to run missions and get information out of our people."
"I remember how afraid Nero and the other teachers were when it looked like we might have to fight you, after you were infected with the Animus."
"Yeah, but I only killed a handful of people then. Zero took out the Megalodon. More than 150 people died."
"Oh," Lucy said. "Wow."
"And after that he read the minds of a few of our people, one of whom was Laura. He got some information out of her about… somewhere we were going to be, and made her believe the rest of us were going to die because of it. It messed her up for a while, even though we were able to get almost everybody out safely."
"That's awful," Lucy said. "Mind control is terrible, but mind reading might be worse. Especially when the information can have such disastrous consequences."
"So after that," Otto continued, "I just kept thinking… it's not just that people like Furan and Overlord want me. They want people like me because of the things we can do. And I didn't have to worry about the Animus anymore, because there were other people like me being made who would be asked to do these things by choice. No one would force me to do anything like that again, at least long term. But those other clones are incredibly dangerous. Were."
"They definitely sound incredibly dangerous," Lucy said. "But I don't see what they have to do with you."
"Um. What?" Otto said. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, it sucks that there's people who are like you who do terrible things, but that doesn't reflect on you, or it doesn't have to."
"I mean, sure, but… Look, I didn't want to die. It was just something that ended up having to happen."
"Really?" Lucy asked, accusitorally.
"Really," Otto said. "Life was really hard after you were gone. Like, really bad. A bunch of our classmates died, the ones that didn't got captured and kept in this camp for several months, I got expelled, but eventually everything worked out. We were able to get the other students back, and Nero let me finish the time I had left at school. I had Wing and Shelby and Laura and we were all about to graduate."
"All right, then tell me this,” Lucy said, reaching over to grab a tin with candies in it off of the vanity. She took one, and offered him one too. “What were you going to do with your life? After you graduated.”
Otto stared at her blankly, holding the candy unwrapped.
"I hadn't decided," he finally said. "There were a ton of options, I hadn't picked one."
"Hmm," Lucy said, popping another candy in her mouth. "What about Laura? How was that going?"
"Really, really well, actually," he said, with even less awkwardness than Lucy expected from such a question. He seemed confident in the answer.
"Okay, great. Were you going to marry her?"
"Um," he said, and suddenly the awkwardness was back in full force. "I don't know. At some point we probably would have talked about it."
"Any plans on whether you were going to try to go to the same college, anything like that?"
"I mean, I guess it was assumed."
Lucy stared at him. "So let me get this straight. You were two weeks before graduation, you had no career plans, no plans on whether you were going to stay with this girlfriend you apparently had an amazing relationship with."
"Well, when you put it that way."
"Otto, you wanted to die."
"What? No, I didn't."
"You had no plans for your future and you bravely sacrificed yourself after several months of thinking about how people like you don't deserve to live on this planet. Maybe that isn't 'wanting to die'," she said, with air quotes for emphasis, "but it's so close you might as well not even try to tell the difference."
Otto sighed, and there was a bit of irritation there. "Okay, fine. I didn't want to die, but I expected that I would. I didn't bother planning for my future because I figured I'd try my best to enjoy what time I had left. I didn’t bring up long-term plans with Laura because I didn’t want her to get stuck in some situation designed for both of us that I wouldn’t get to participate in."
Lucy sighed, and rubbed her forehead with her fingers.
"Don't you think planning for your own death made it more likely to happen?”
Otto squinted at her. “I mean, it was an incredibly long shot that I even got access to the radioactive Animus residue. If I hadn’t gotten my hands on it, I have no idea what I would have done.”
“Figured something out, probably,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, maybe, but what would it have been? Blowing up the island and hoping she didn’t escape as an AI? That wouldn’t have been good enough.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Lucy said, her shoulders tense. “I don’t want to get off topic. You know that thing Laura said about remaining optimistic so we can see the opportunities when they come? Because if we don’t believe that there’s a possibility that things will work out, we won’t recognize the signs of a solution?”
“Yeah, of course,” Otto said.
“That’s you, except with the sacrifice thing. You were looking for a solution, except you were also looking for something that would kill you in the process. Maybe not consciously, but if you were always thinking about dying, you were primed for it.”
Otto folded his arms, looking like he was trying to come up with a rebuttal. He stayed silent.
"After you found the Animus, what did you do?" Lucy asked pointedly.
"I told everybody I had a solution, and we headed back. I spent a few days with the others, tried to enjoy what time I had left, but it was hard to focus. I tried to talk Anna down, she wouldn't listen. I used the Animus to kill her."
"Did you ask everyone else if they had any alternatives?"
"No. I didn't want them to try to talk me out of my solution. More people would have died."
"Do you know that?"
"No, but it was what was most likely."
“You thought the benefits outweighed the risks.”
“If it wasn’t me doing the sacrifice, it would have ended up being someone else, somehow. I decided that it would be me.”
"Otto, you didn't deserve to die."
“I didn’t think I did,” Otto said. He turned to face her more directly. "But you certainly didn’t. Why are you so calm, in all of this? You’ve been stuck here for all this time, and you’re weirdly at peace with it. I mean, I never thought there was an afterlife, but now that we’re here, it’s a loop of your childhood bedroom and habits. What’s even the point? But you’re fine! And I don’t understand why.”
“Because I’ve come to terms with it!” Lucy snapped. “It was you or me, and we were in an emergency situation, and there was nothing I could do but it was possible there was something you could do. I traded my life for yours because it was the right move to make at the time. I didn’t deserve to die, but life isn’t fair. If you’d been shot, the nanites would have taken over the planet.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t’ve,” Otto said. “Maybe Nero would have thought of nuking the site. I’m sure there would have been a way we could blow it up. You came to terms with your own death before that final confrontation with Overlord, but you saw the opportunity that would kill you, just like I did.”
“Maybe I did!” Lucy said. “But I had no idea what to do with myself. My mom died because of her voice, my grandmother wasted her life because of it, and my great grandmother the Queen does nothing with it at all. I tried to hide who I was and ended up outing myself days after I arrived at HIVE, and everyone we encountered after that knew who I was and was immune to me. I couldn’t live a normal life, but I didn’t agree with the idea of being someone who takes away people’s choices. Maybe there was a way forward for me, but I didn’t see it.”
“That’s exactly how I felt,” Otto said. “I got better with my abilities, but all I ended up being able to do with them was chase down monsters. And that’s good for the world, sure, but it was only something I was doing because I had to. If I hadn’t had this thing in my head, things would have been different.”
“Really?” Lucy asked. “How would they have been different?”
Otto considered for a moment. “I don’t even know. Everything about my life revolved around it - maybe I would have been a normal orphan. Maybe I would have gone to public school. There’s too many variables, I don’t know.”
“Okay, fine. Let me narrow it down. If you’d lost the implant after graduating, what would you have done?”
Otto sighed exasperatedly. “Lucy, what’s the point of this? That’s not what happened.”
“Humor me. Please.”
Otto stared at her for a moment. “I don’t know. Probably figure out something I could do with my knowledge that actually helps people. Maybe I’d start a tech company that uses only clean energy, or only does surveillance on people who are a real threat. Laura told me a few days ago that Nero actually wants us to prevent the existence of people who are worse than us, wants us to occupy spaces that prevent a power vacuum from being filled by a real monster, and I think she’s right. That makes sense. I was thinking I could use my abilities to game the system in banking, but I don’t think I have it in me anymore.”
“Would you be happy?”
“Doing something that takes the spot of a worse supervillain? Probably not, no. I’m not like Darkdoom, I’m not like Nero. I like a nice office but a volcano wouldn’t make me happy.”
“So you’d need friends, a family.”
“Yeah, although it’s kinda weird to think about. I don’t even know what they’re going to do now. Shelby wants to keep stealing stuff, which, good for her for knowing what she wants, I guess.”
“Would you try to stay with Laura?”
“Of course,” he said. He winced as he continued. “I missed you a ton, after you were gone, but I just didn’t feel the same way. I couldn’t imagine being with anybody else.”
“But you lied to her.”
“Yeah, I mean, I knew she’d try to keep me from doing what I did, and I didn’t want her to worry.”
“No, I mean you lied to her about everything. You never told her about Overlord, or the other clones, or the fact that you expected to die. You enjoyed what time you could have with her without telling her how you thought it would end.”
Otto looked at Lucy like she’d just slapped him in the face.
“Your ‘one true love’ and you insisted on keeping her at arms’ length,” Lucy finished. “And that’s not even counting Wing, who knew even less about you.”
Otto sat with that for a while.
“What was I supposed to do? Put all that on them? They had their own problems, but you were the only person who knew what it was like to be different.”
“But you didn’t even try ,” Lucy said. “How long would Laura have put up with being locked out of what you were thinking? All the time, she’d say ‘penny for your thoughts?’ and you’d pretend you weren’t thinking anything. You were afraid to get too close.”
“Of course I was!” Otto snapped. “She was the closest thing we had to a normal person on the whole island, a nice person, and I was supposed to whine at her about not having what she had?”
“Yes!” Lucy returned. “That’s the deal. You listened when Wing’s dad supposedly died, you listened when Laura was nervous before missions. Of course they would have returned the favor. Just admit that you didn’t want people to think you were weak. You wanted them to see you as stronger than you felt.”
“All right, maybe,” Otto said. “But Laura was used to that kind of support because she had a different upbringing than I did. She talks to people when she feels nervous because she’s always had someone to talk to. I don’t because I didn’t. We’re just different.”
“Bull,” Lucy said. “More excuses. You talk about Laura’s family as if they’re her own unique ability, rather than real people who would have accepted you and treated you as one of their own, the same way she did, the same way Wing and I did.”
“Lucy, why are you doing this?” Otto asked, gesturing frustratedly. “It doesn’t matter. Maybe I could have been a healthier, stronger, more perfect person, maybe I could have gone on to contribute meaningfully to the environment and had a happy family with two and a half normal human children and maybe I could have had a dog but all of the things you’re asking about are in the past and I can’t do anything about the future. We’re here now. We’re dead. Why are you asking me all this?”
It was at that moment that Lucy realized she didn’t know.
She looked down at her hands in confusion. “I’m… I’m not sure,” she said.
“What do you mean you’re not sure?”
Lucy looked around the room, and thought back to the conversation they’d just had.
“Otto, have you been here?”
“To the castle? Just the one time, a few days ago. We asked the Queen for help dealing with Anna. She made us wait around a bit, we ate a meal with her, and then we were attacked. Part of the castle was destroyed, I’m not sure how much made it.”
“Did you see this room while you were there?”
Otto just looked confused, and Lucy’s heart sank.
“Otto, look at me. Was there a room like this?”
He nodded.
“Did you see my bedroom while you were at the castle? Did someone show you a bedroom and tell you that it was mine?”
Otto started speaking again, trancelike. “No, I stayed in a guest room for a few hours. I tried to take a nap, but I was anxious.”
“What was the guest room like?”
Otto was staring into the distance, counting on his fingers. “It had a four-poster bed set in the middle of the room, a vanity, a chaise to sit on, a wooden dresser that was empty except for a drawer of spare blankets, a-”
“Okay, you can stop. Thank you, Otto.”
Lucy looked back at the vanity where she’d been trying to tie her hair. How long had she been trying to do that? What was she doing before?
When she put it together, she was horrified and relieved.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked, just to verify.
“Pain,” he said, and he was back to his normal self . “I was sitting with HIVEmind, and we were talking, and I felt weak and tired from the Animus. I think my organs were starting to fall apart. HIVEmind was going to trigger the school’s self-destruct, and then my head felt like it was splitting open. That’s it.”
“I guess it’s nice to know that you missed me,” she said, working to keep her voice steady. “You wished you could talk to me.”
“All the time.”
They sat like that for a little while, in peace and silence. Lucy knew what would happen when they stood.
The version of her that he’d known had been born with many expectations. He’d been created as a tool, and now she was of the same kind. Someone he needed. It was disturbing, and somehow expected.
She decided not to tell him. Let him have this moment of peace.
“Are you hungry?” she finally said. “Family dinner’s bound to be ready by now.”
“I’m starved,” he said, and followed her to the door.
She opened it for him, and led him through it.
When the door to the tank opened, Otto was struck first by the cold, and then by the stench.
He blinked, and the light on his new eyes was painful. He coughed, and spit thick, vile liquid into the floor of the tank.
I’m alive. The thought came to him as suddenly as the memory of the dream. The conversation that had taken a moment and an eternity, and had hammered in painfully the ways in which he’d failed last time around.
But, unbelievably, he had a second chance now. He checked his senses - the lights were bright, the flourescents buzzing. He stretched his fingers and toes. There was an awful, awful odor. Someone had died here.
He poked his head out of the tank, and listened carefully. He heard nothing.
Nothing at all.
He closed his eyes and concentrated, but it was like the room was solid concrete. Quieter than the Faraday cage he’d been in a few days ago.
He stepped out of the tank and looked over to a computer monitor that was showing some kind of an output in a language he didn’t recognize. He squinted at it, until he saw a set of symbols that looked familiar.
He stared at it until he understood.
Four small characters in sequence. ‘0110’.
Immediately, he dropped to the floor, shaking.
He was human.
He reached up and plucked a hair from his head so he could hold it to the light. Pure white, still. But the evidence otherwise was unmistakeable.
He’d learned to read as a child with the help of the computer in his head. He’d learned almost everything that way. All of that knowledge was gone.
He decided to try speaking. “I have to start over,” he said, and his voice was raspy, but it still formed words.
He wasn’t sure if he’d ever felt such a mix of emotions before. There was a relief, to be certain, that the device was gone. But it also made him feel empty in an odd, deep way. He’d lost a sense he’d relied on for so long.
Most of all, he was overwhelmed.
Where to go from here? How long had he been out? What had happened to the others while he’d been gone? Where was HIVEmind? How long would it take him to learn everything all over again? If he had to start from scratch, did he even want to relearn technology at all? Where was this place, and how could he leave? Did he even remember how to fly a helicopter?
“One thing at a time,” he whispered to himself. What was most important?
He heard a noise, and a moment after panicking at the possibility that he wasn’t alone, realized that it was his stomach grumbling. He’d been fed nutrients through the tube, but no real food. He'd be fine for another day at most, which was good because whatever food was lying around here almost certainly shouldn't be eaten.
He had one more chance, no more backup bodies, to try to do things right.
That’s what he had been dreaming about. All of the things he’d learned, the things that really mattered, and the ways to do better.
Family dinner, she’d said.
He stumbled through trying to use the terminal until he could get to a date. Fortunately, the interface was graphical, and the OS hadn’t been updated while he’d been gone. He stared at the date in the bottom corner until he could make sense of it.
Almost a year. Anything could have happened in that time.
The idea of facing the others at this point was actually worse than the fear that he’d felt after they’d left him in the data room. At least all he’d had left at that point was knowns.
But if he was going to take this second life and put it to good use, he’d better not be a coward.
He found the source of the stench. A pile of dead scientists. Wearing their clothes would be inviting infection, especially to this fresh body, but he found a pair of gloves, put on a mask, and picked through their pockets until he found access cards and keys. He looked through lockers and desk drawers, pocketing money and cards until he thought he had enough to get out of there. He cobbled together a change of clothes from the ill-fitting garments that had been left behind.
There was a helicopter outside, and a fuel storage nearby. He mentally thanked Colonel Francisco for the fact that he’d had to rehearse this over and over. He’d lost his understanding of the internal workings of a helicopter, but he remembered how to fly one.
He found a small airport outside of St. Petersburg and bribed someone to fly him out of the country. When he reached the Highlands, it was fairly easy to ask where the American Air Force base was, and take a taxi to the village nearby.
A street vendor gave him directions to the home of the family who had left for a few years, but had finally been able to return not long ago. They had two children with red hair, a toddler and a quiet young woman whom he said seemed sad, but kind.
Before heading to the house, on a whim, Otto decided to buy a dozen daisies. He thought she’d like those.