Work Text:
Sadness was not the word he would have used. Sadness was an incorrect and quite frankly insulting diagnosis. Confusion even more so.
The Segment forever bound to the age of twenty five understood the mechanisms perfectly well, and it was hardly a unique experience for any of them. Three mornings earlier, he had been approached regarding a conversation the version of him ten years his senior had previously held. Of course, he knew of it. If one of them did, they all did.
He’d answered the question without issue, and with even less thought. The answer remained the same regardless of which iteration of Dottore answered it. And he assumed that would be the end of it, until the man had attempted to return a notebook, and Feofan – who had inexplicably materialised at some point during the conversation – had intercepted it with the words: you may leave it with me, I am on my way to his laboratory now.
The man stood in place as he watched Feofan leave, before his gaze slowly returned to the Segment before him, pure mortification spread across his face. But the younger Dottore had no time for such profuse apologies, and excused himself shortly after. Why did it matter so much? Why did it always matter? It was irrelevant.
So why had he spent the last 73 hours recalling the event in increasingly irritating detail. The man’s embarrassment, the way Pantalone had corrected him without even realising it, why wouldn’t it leave him alone‽
Of course, Feofan had known which one of them he was going to meet with, and where he would be found, and that logic would state that the Dottore in the middle of the corridor and the Dottore arms-deep in a project in his laboratory would not be the same people.
An adequate explanation, and one he had arrived at before even reaching the end of the corridor. Then again while preparing the afternoon’s specimens. And that was starting to concern him, because it was one thing to be needlessly distracted, but to have his mind taken up by something as trivial as this was entirely unacceptable.
The forceps struck the tray harder than he intended. Enough of this! He seized a clean notebook from a metal drawer he pulled open so forcefully that he almost spilled its entire contents. The previous one contained work of actual consequence, and this absurdity had intruded upon quite enough already.
DISCREPANCY BETWEEN APPRAISAL AND RESPONSE
OBSERVATION PERIOD: 73 hours
PRECIPITATING EVENT: Misidentification by a third party
SUBJECT:
His pen stopped. Ink pooled and spread around the lower dot, to the point that the paper had begun to tear beneath the pen’s nib.
The whole ordeal made no sense, and try as he might, he just could not force it to. The mistake had caused no practical inconvenience, it did not come at the expense of knowledge or authority or anything at all any one of them would have deemed important. Yet, he could still see the man looking again, searching the same face for a difference that had abruptly become significant. What had the man believed was there before, and what did he believe he could find afterwards? Still, neither appraisal ought to have concerned the person beneath the examination – but regardless, the space after SUBJECT remained infuriatingly empty.
The Segment designated Twenty-Five.
He struck that out, and tried again.
Dottore.
Another line.
The twenty-five-year-old iteration of Zandik.
Better. For a few seconds. Oh, but it was factually imprecise, wasn’t it? He may have technically possessed the form of Zandik at the age of twenty-five, but he had never been twenty-five in any chronological sense – beyond, he could argue, twenty-five years after the physical creation of his body. But while he had entered existence already containing memories of his childhood and teenage years, he also possessed years he had not lived, and knowledge acquired by versions of himself older than the body in which he had awakened. He was twenty-five, and yet he never became twenty-five, and yet he would never be anything other than twenty-five.
He obliterated that designation so thoroughly that he carved a messy scribble onto the desk.
Then, what was left?
Perhaps simply: Zandik.
The name was not exclusive to him. It never was, never would be, and never needed to be. But he was running out of options, and for the purposes of completing the paperwork, it would suffice.
Then, for the sake of avoiding another incident of misidentification, and for the sake of appropriate filing, he added a quick ‘25’ in brackets beside it.
Staring at that name conjured up something in his memory files. A road. Coarse grains of sand in his shoes. But he had never travelled that road. He had never stepped foot in the village that haunted him. He had never felt the sand in his shoes. Then why could he remember the heat of the flames, the burning in his legs when he’d continued to force one foot in front of the other long after there was anywhere left to go, when he’d walked and walked until every grain inside his shoes seemed to have worked its way beneath his skin?
There were records for this. Dates of departure, admission, expulsion. But none had described the Akademiya’s corridors in excruciating detail. None had outlined the damaged tile he had habitually stepped over, nor how uncomfortable the chairs in the House of Daena had been. No information about the paper he’d revised that he’d felt ever so proud of, before that pride had been stripped away by those who were simply too afraid of learning the boundaries of their own knowledge.
He looked down at his hand as it began to shake, gripping hold of the pen far too tightly. His attention settled upon it. Beneath the glove lay joints whose specifications he knew intimately. He remembered selecting the materials when materials were scarce. He remembered how frustrating the issue with coordination had been at first, a complication that of course had been solved, yet had never arisen with any other Segment before. He remembered that the power outage halfway through his construction might have had something to do with it. He could remember the sequence in which sensation had first been introduced, and he could remember looking down upon this hand before it had ever moved, attached to a body that had not yet opened its eyes. He remembered building it. But he had built none of it.
It was a cruel paradox to be trapped in.
Well, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he supposed it was relevant to his study. So he wrote it out as quickly as he could, with a note reading acquired before construction, and brushed off the humiliation that followed.
Ah, but if hypothetically he was to remove those memories, he didn’t suppose it would resolve the matter. What would remain of him, then? His preferences, his contempt for the academic institution, even the form of this very objection depended upon circumstances he, unfortunately, could not exclude. He would have to cut away the grounds on which he objected to being cut away.
I cannot discover my ‘real self’ by deleting the memories I inherited, because those memories helped create the self who wants an answer. Removing them would remove my reasons for caring that they were removed. He stopped writing before he could fall into the trap of circling.
Construction, then. The moment at which the present body had first become available ought to provide a boundary no account of childhood could contest. He could recall the height of the table he had yet to stand by, the instruments arranged beside it in an order he had inherited yet never made the conscious choice to develop. He could recall with ease the final adjustments made before activation. They were the same finishing touches made before the Segment ten years his senior first opened his eyes, years before his own body awakened.
His own face lay beneath him, motionless. A thumb pressed against his jaw to turn it towards the light. The dark glass of the instrument cabinet opposite him captured movement in its reflection. His own. Eyes fixed on his mirrored image, he raised one hand, and placed his thumb against that same point he remembered. He could feel the artificial bone beneath the pad of his thumb, skin yielding beneath its touch. No creator stood above him. There was only Zandik, twenty five years old, holding his own face.
He slammed the notebook shut.
“Must you pick at your own existence like an animal at an open wound?” The version of himself ten years older closed the door he’d just slammed open behind him. “I am trying to establish whether a nervous system can retain learned aversion independently of its original body, and I can barely hear myself think over your interminable quarrel. If you must unravel, might you have the decency to do it quieter?”
The Segment designated, for administrative purposes, as simply ‘25’ studied his half-obscured face staring back at him. “What happened to us in the years between my age and yours to make cruelty come so easily?”
The 35 year old simply folded his arms. “An interesting inference. Whatever the years between us may have altered, they hardly introduced cruelty into an otherwise blameless disposition. At most, they afforded us more exacting uses for a quality already abundantly present.”
“Perhaps. Yet had the disturbance been yours, I would at least have granted you the dignity of suffering unwitnessed. I certainly would not have abandoned my work merely to ensure that you received my contempt in person.”
“No doubt you would have kept your distance. Whether that proves you kinder or merely more willing to let another of us come apart without interference remains to be established. But I assure you, as you well know, there has not been a thought in this room that the rest of us were permitted not to endure – as would be the case regardless of which one of us was having an existential crisis.”
“Your insistence that none of us are truly you has done remarkably little to diminish the intimacy of your contempt. What did you find so intolerable in yourself that every version of us must be punished for resembling it?”
The 35 year old him regarded him for a moment. “An entirely plausible accusation, and not one I see any immediate reason to investigate. But contempt has never compelled me to tolerate preventable waste.” He held out his hand. “The notebook.”
“No.”
Thirty-Five did not retreat his hand at first. Then, he sighed, and curled his fingers, and his arm fell back to his side.
“Fine. Keep it, if the illusion of privacy comforts you.” He turned away, and instead approached the abandoned specimen strapped to the table, and the discarded forceps. He then adjusted the flow through one narrow tube. Twenty-Five made no attempt to stop him, holding the notebook tight against his chest.
“The clerk saw a familiar face and supplied whichever explanation required the least thought,” Thirty-Five continued. “A perfectly ordinary failure of perception. I do not recall possessing so fragile a sense of self at twenty-five that an interchangeable little functionary’s error could occupy me for three days.”
His attention dropped back to the notebook.
“It is unnecessary to waste so much of your attention on an error that lasted several seconds.” He sighed. “I suppose even cowardice can acquire an impressive resemblance to rigour once furnished with headings.”
Somewhere at the edge of Twenty-Five’s awareness, another mind recoiled from the phrasing. Elsewhere, one found it sufficiently apt.
Twenty-Five shook his head slowly. “The ease with which you abandoned the same question as soon as you found an answer sufficiently bleak to satisfy you does not give you the right to diagnose cowardice in anyone else. Some of us cannot treat our own existence as an irritation to be silenced.”
“My conclusion remains coherent regardless of whether either of us finds it satisfying. But I will not permit an arbitrary point in Zandik’s life to determine the limits of mine.”
The perpetually twenty-five year old raised his head. He couldn’t say he didn’t understand. Sometimes, a treacherous region of his mind considered the Segment project an act of cruelty. Each of them carries the memories of Zandik growing through time while their own bodies, their own minds, their own mentalities, remained fixed at whichever moment had been selected to preserve, yet every advancement risked being counted as deviation.
The version of him ten years later straightened, smoothing one cuff, and turned towards the door. “Do what you wish, but do stop burdening us all with your incessant existential crisis. I have an experiment to salvage.”