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Kyle Klim was not Sigma’s son. Perhaps Sigma would have thought of him as such back when he still bothered with other people, but Kyle was nothing more than a spare, despite what he looked like. A mirror image, except instead of glass and silver, it was opaque plexiglass that separated them.
Sigma knew he would doom this boy to death many times over. It was nothing to lament. After all, it wasn’t as though Sigma wasn’t doing the same thing to himself. Kyle was Sigma, a clone created to be a necessary sacrifice, just like the original. And it was easy to justify all of this when he reminded himself of that.
—
There was a light on where there hadn’t been a light before. Sigma felt a sudden wave of inexplicable, nauseating dread as it stared at him.
The machine was in arm’s reach now. He stretched his hand out towards it, slowly…
An elderly man with messy gray hair and a monocle sneered at him. Really, he was just a hologram, so he wasn’t staring at anything in this room. But the technicality didn’t make Sigma feel any better.
“ So, you’ve finally made it, ” the old man said, his voice filling the room.
“N-No…You’re…” Sigma stammered in disbelief at the same time that he heard Phi let out a quiet gasp and take a step back.
“ I am Zero ,” the old man continued. “ I was the one who brought you here. ”
“What the fuck , Sigma?!” Phi dropped all pretense of indifference. Her hands were now hovering over the keyboard, as if she were ready to pick it up and smash it over Sigma’s head at any moment.
“That’s what I want to know!” Nothing made sense to Sigma. All he knew was that panic was the only appropriate response to his current situation.
“Don’t play dumb with me!” Phi sounded equal parts panicked and quizzical. “You and I both just heard what that said. Don’t pretend it’s not true. That was you, old man. Right there. Admitting you’re Zero.”
“ You undoubtedly have as many questions for me as there are stars in the sky. ”
“Can it, grandpa!” Phi snapped at the hologram, before turning back to Sigma.
The hologram, as if ignoring her, continued. “As you can see, however, this is only a recording. I will therefore be unable to directly answer any questions.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Sigma raised his hands defensively. “I look nothing like that guy, I’m only twenty-two!”
Phi scoffed, “Twenty-two centuries, maybe! For fuck’s sake, I’m not stupid, Sigma! Just drop the act!”
“What act?! I’m telling you, Phi, that isn’t me!”
All Phi could do was stare at him, undoubtedly trying to rationalize something completely irrational.
“Ask if you wish, but I cannot respond.”
“Sigma.” Phi’s voice was even again, but her eyes narrowed. “Hold still for me.”
Phi stepped closer to Sigma, bringing a hand up towards his face. Instinctively, he turned his head away from her, but she grabbed him by the chin and yanked his head the other way.
“Hold still,” Phi reiterated, more firmly this time. “And keep your eyes wide open.”
She reached for his right eye, and…
Sigma’s mind short-circuited when he realized that he felt nothing as she jabbed his eye with her finger.
“That doesn’t hurt,” Phi said. It was a statement, not a question.
She grabbed his hand, and Sigma decided that it wasn’t a very smart idea to try and resist when her other hand was too close to his eyes for comfort.
Phi guided Sigma’s hand to his right eye, and he almost instantly recoiled the moment his fingers brushed against metal instead of eyeball.
“What the hell?!” Sigma’s hand clumsily felt around at the contours of his face. Everything else felt like flesh, but whatever was in his eye-socket was obviously not an actual eye, even if his vision was perfectly fine.
“How do you expect me to believe that you somehow didn’t notice that you have a literal cyborg eye?” Phi’s tone was accusatory, but her gaze looked almost uncertain.
“Because I–” Don’t. But he did. “I don’t know. But I look and sound nothing like that guy!”
“If you’re going to lie to me, you should say something more believable. Like maybe that the old man in the hologram is your clone or something.”
Phi scoffed, shaking her head. “Why am I giving advice to Zero anyway? Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“Now… where to begin? There are many things I wish to tell you.”
Ah, maybe things would finally start to make sense. Maybe Sigma would finally wake up from this strange, unsettling dream he seemed to be trapped in. Seriously. Even one of those dreams about showing up to school naked would be less mortifying and horrifying than this.
“But unfortunately, our time is limited. As such, the information I can provide is also limited.”
Sigma groaned. “You’ve gotta be kidding me…”
Phi reached for Sigma’s head, taking hold of a couple of strands of his hair. Wait. It wasn’t supposed to be that long. He didn’t remember ever deciding to grow it out, nor did he have any reason to.
“Wait, what are you–OW!”
Phi abruptly yanked, pulling out some strands of hair to show him. The hair was way too long and way too gray to be Sigma’s. But nonetheless, that hair had come directly from Sigma’s scalp.
“I have chosen two things of great importance to tell you.”
“Please,” Sigma said with a tone of strained desperation. “Please make everything make sense.”
“First, I will tell you about termites.”
Sigma groaned. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding.”
Phi sighed sharply. “Prick.”
“Hm. In retrospect, I suppose that’s a rather odd thing to say. I imagine you look rather bewildered right now.”
“No shit, Sherlock!” Phi snapped, though at Sigma himself rather than the hologram.
“H-Hey! Don’t look at me like that. I’m nothing like that guy! I’m not that pretentious!”
Phi rolled her eyes. “Right. Of course not. You’re way too stupid to use big words like that guy.”
“Hey!”
“Perfectly understandable. The person who kidnapped you and threatened you with death is lecturing you about insects. I suspect it hardly seems fair.”
“That’s one way of putting it, I guess ,” Sigma muttered.
“Nonetheless, this is very important. In a way, it will determine your fate. So I ask that you listen carefully…”
Phi was right. This guy was pretentious as hell. Sigma didn’t really see why he should care about whatever allegory the old man was taking forever to compose. Not when there were more pressing matters at hand, like the fact that this old man had made Sigma look just like him for some reason, or the bombs in the facility—
“Wait, what the hell?! There’s bombs in here?!”
“You really don’t remember planting them?”
“Of fucking course not!” Sigma retorted. “Because I didn’t!”
…was he supposed to remember?
As he asked himself that question, an image flashed into his head.
His fingers were clutching a gun. Phi was asking him something. In this…memory? Sigma could only make out his own response. “Honestly? Didn’t even cross my mind…”
And then Sigma saw himself ripping off K’s mask, and…
“You cannot tell any of your companions what you heard or saw here. If you do, you will be penalized. Immediately.”
Sigma was snapped back to reality.
Honestly. Even if he wanted to say anything to the others, he could hardly even understand what he’d be telling them. Not only did nothing make sense, but it all made even less sense than before this hologram started talking.
“Unbelievable…” Phi muttered. “Maybe you aren’t lying after all. Maybe you’ve actually just gone senile.”
“For the last time,” Sigma said, “I’m twenty-two!”
Because nothing else made sense. He wasn’t in denial. There was something missing, a piece of the puzzle that would make everything Sigma had been trying to take in less nonsensical, or so he hoped.
Phi had proven to Sigma that he looked just like the old man in the hologram. But that shouldn’t have been possible, nor should it have been possible that what he saw in his vision—not a memory—was true either. It created a contradiction that couldn’t be explained away.
How could Sigma look just like the old man while also staring at his mirror image that resided beneath K’s mask?
“Dementia, split personality,” Phi counted out all of the possible explanations on her fingers, “Amnesia, as cliché as that would be…delusions…or a simple identity crisis. People have those all the time, whether they’re actually in college or they’re old enough to have grandchildren who are college age. Well, those are all the explanations I can think of off the top of my head that aren’t just ‘I’m a big fat liar and Phi is tooootally stupid enough to believe me’. Thoughts?”
“I’m not even old enough for demen—” Sigma cut himself off, shaking his head. Dementia would still be a step up from deception. “Nevermind.”
“That’s what I thought,” Phi replied. “So. Bombs. We need to look for them sooner rather than later. We’ll warn the others, but your identity crisis will be our dirty little secret for now. Too many people hassling you about something you don’t even understand might be grounds for you to sue for elder abuse.”
Sigma gave up on retorting that twenty-two hardly counted as elderly. Frankly, he did feel like he had just aged about fifty years since entering this room.
—
It was in the lounge that K remembered his father, and confessed as much to Sigma.
Until he was older, his father had been the only person K saw in the facility where he was raised, and he never had the chance to go near him. Thus, he never had any communication outside of the education software he had been given.
It wouldn’t be long before K realized that his situation wasn’t normal. In the books he learned to read, many of them mentioned a “mother” as part of a family. It was then that K felt the mother-shaped hole in his chest that had apparently been there all along.
So he did something he had never done before. He spoke to his father and asked him for a mother.
“Okay,” was his father’s response..
A few months later, K was called into his father’s laboratory. A young woman stood next to his father, but the moment K learned her name—or rather, her ID number—his hopes plummeted.
He hadn’t been given a mother, just a machine that played the role of one. K surprised his father for the first time by complaining, before being admonished for “whining”. As convincing as she was, K refused to have anything to do with it. The robot didn’t have feelings, no matter how good it was at emulating them. It wasn’t sad that K ignored it as it tried to take care of him, even though its facade of sadness was near perfect.
Soon, it wasn’t the only thing that K would ignore. He began to live life as though his father didn’t even exist, as though K was the only person in the facility.
Then one day, he saw another human being. A real woman standing outside of his room, the first human he’d seen other than his father. He didn’t allow himself to hope. She was probably just another robot his father had created. But when he said that, shen laughed and explained that she had come to help his father.
K couldn’t read this woman. She didn’t act her age, despite being much, much older than him. He could never quite tell if she was telling the truth with the stories she would tell him of the outside world. K loved them nonetheless. Especially the ones of how his father had been in love as a younger man. She had known the man when he was young, so it was only natural to wonder if perhaps she was the woman his father had loved. And if that were true…
The three of them then shared a meal together for the first time in K’s life. The woman scolded both K and his father for their lack of table manners and for reading during dinner. K had gotten the family he had longed for ever since he was a child. The next four years passed in the blink of an eye as K began to help his father with his research.
And then, he learned that the woman (his mother?) would give up her life, and both she and his father were okay with it.
K searched for a way to keep her alive. What he found, instead, was that the ultimate success of his father’s research would require a lot of sacrifice.
What he found, instead, was that even his own existence was just another part of his father’s project. He wasn’t even a person, just a clone, a spare in the event that his father died.
There was only one thing K could think to do in his rage: destroy it all. But before he could destroy the facility, his father locked him in his room until the research was complete.
As much as K wanted to believe the woman’s (his mother’s?) reassurances that everything would be fine, he could still remember how she had conspired with his father to mold him into a replacement. Even so, he couldn’t hate her. She had given him a reason to live. She had made him feel as though he had a family.
But now all of that would end. The woman would persist for the sake of someone special, a man who had once saved her life. She would repay him with her death.
To hell with a future where no one would have to die. K had what he wanted now. He wanted to say anything that might get her to change her mind. But K would never be as important to her as she was to him.
—
There was a woman Sigma loved, once.
Not the woman trapped in this shelter with him, who was delighted when the room’s color changed to green, just like Luna would have been.
Not the woman who asked him to promise that he wouldn’t disappear like the bluebird in the story he had ruined for her.
Not the woman whose life he knew far too much about for barely having known her.
Not the woman who would have preferred to die by his hand than to slowly waste away.
Not the woman he was terrified to get close to, for fear that something would shatter.
Like what?
Like Luna. Like the original Diana who came with him to the moon.
But that was just the excuse of a coward and a wimp. Even in a different timeline, she was still Diana.
A pair of fraternal twins later, Sigma realized that unconditional love wasn’t a lie after all. He would let himself rot if his children could have a better future than this bomb shelter. Not for gratitude, praise, or God. Just them.
—
To ally or to betray? In this history, you choose to press “ally”. But somewhere across space and time, you choose, instead, to hit “betray”.
Someone who can SHIFT can access both timelines. But for those who can’t, their present reality is the only one they’ll ever know. How can you know everything about every other history? You can’t, not at first. You’ll get flashes of insight, though that’s being generous. Your memories might be disjointed, and you won’t know how you’ll know things, but you’ll know things.
Sigma didn’t know how, but he knew he had a family once in the future, and he knew he wasn’t good to them at any point in time.
Quark was sleeping in his treatment pod. Dio was dead. That much Sigma knew, and he knew how he knew it even if he didn’t know who killed him. But that didn’t matter, because what he also knew was that Phi and K— Kyle —would die. Without Dio’s bracelet, they wouldn’t be able to open their secondary door.
“If anyone is left outside after they close, they’ll… They’ll be penalized,” Zero had said, as though the euphemism had any point to it.
Phi and K both agreed that whoever killed Dio wanted to use the game to kill them. If they were scared or sad or upset, they didn’t show it.
“How can you be so calm?!” Sigma shouted. “In five minutes, you’re going to be…”
Dead. But if Sigma didn’t say it out loud, then it wouldn’t come true, right?
“You have those two bracelets K gave you, right?” Phi’s question lacked any sentiment. “You should be able to get through the secondary door with those.”
“Fuck that! You know I can’t just ditch you guys like that!”
“But if you stay here,” K said, “you’ll—”
Sigma interjected, “You don’t think I know that?! But what kind of a monster am I if I just leave you here to die?!”
A cold, heartless monster. A lonely, desperate monster. A monster who knew his role and knew he had to give up everything for even the chance that he might succeed. A monster in any timeline he did succeed in.
A monster who would still try to save them, even if he didn’t know how.
Sigma bolted out of the warehouse, towards the treatment room. Sweat poured down his face as he frantically dug through Dio’s coat. Sigma pulled it out, only for his sweat to turn cold as the realization dawned on him.
The injection gun used the whole bottle at once, and there was only one of them to be found. That meant that Sigma couldn’t save both of them.
“One minute remains until chromatic doors close.” the cold voice of the announcer said.
One minute remained until Phi or K died. His daughter or his son.
Sigma spun around and shot out of the treatment center.
“Three…two…one…” the announcer remained apathetic to his plight. “Chromatic Doors closing.”
Then there was a sharp, quick pain in Sigma’s wrist, barely even noticeable. First would be the anesthetic Soporil…
He blinked, and his vision began to blur. He felt as though his mind had been stuffed with cotton. His legs began to wobble before giving out entirely as he crumpled to the floor.
No. He couldn’t fall asleep. Not now. Sigma forced his eyes back open. K and Phi lay limp on the floor in front of him. He could only pull the trigger once.
Who would he choose? Phi, or K? The daughter he’d sent away towards the hope for a better life? Or the son he had regarded as nothing more than a spare, a clone, a necessary sacrifice?
…of course, there was only one choice. K’s entire body was cloaked with impenetrable metal. Sigma couldn’t hope to remove it in time.
I’m sorry, K.
Sigma knew that wouldn’t be enough, what with all he had to answer for. It would never be enough, no matter how many times he said or thought it. But even still, Sigma summoned as much energy as he could, and dragged himself towards Phi. He pressed the gun to her arm and pulled the trigger.
“S…Sigma…” Phi’s voice was weak. “What the hell…did you…”
“I injected you with neostigmine,” Sigma replied. “It’s a type of cholinesterase inhibitor. It’s the antidote to the muscle relaxant.”
“Why did you…pick…me?”
“‘Cause I can’t use the injection gun on K. It’d never get through the metal.”
“Then…why didn’t you…inject…yourself?”
If Sigma were able to, he would’ve shrugged. “Honestly? Didn’t even cross my mind. Maybe I have gone senile after all.”
“You…stupid old man. You are…” Phi said. “...the biggest idiot…on the planet.”
“C’mon, is that any kind of thing to say to someone who’s about to die?”
“...screw this…I don’t want to live if…it means being in debt…to you…”
I wouldn’t want to be in debt to me either.
Phi’s words slowed and slurred, and her eyes fluttered closed.
Sigma looked over in K’s direction. Sigma’s thoughts raced, painted with regret and anger and despair, but he couldn’t grasp a single one to process. His body seemed to move on its own towards K, grabbing his shoulder and shaking it.
K finally shifted and spoke. “Sigma…”
He couldn’t hear anything else K might have said. Sigma didn’t care if K had killed Dio or not. That didn’t feel so important now. He was almost out of time.
“...sorry.”
That was the last word Sigma could force out as his hand reached towards K’s mask and tore it off.
His own face stared back at him, except K’s eyes were closed and this wasn’t really Sigma’s face. Sigma was 22 and 67 and he didn’t remember ever looking this young.
You hate me, Sigma thought. I’m sure you do, and you wouldn’t be wrong to hate me forever. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve thrown away, it’s always been for the greater good, except I don’t even know what that looks like anymore.
The world faded away as Sigma felt himself slip down into the cold, dark waters of nothingness. His last thoughts were of his face. K’s face. Kyle’s face.
Maybe thinking of him as a clone was disingenuous. Maybe he could’ve been better. Maybe Kyle could’ve existed in a world where nobody had to die.
But it was as Sigma had said earlier. It had never once crossed his mind to save himself.