by Sara King
Choices… Anna sat up with a scream.
A few feet away, Anna’s doppelganger was holding her r-player, about to press the button to give a paralyzed Dobie a memory wipe and a reset. Other-Anna frowned and turned to look at Real-Anna. “Who the fuck are you?” Then her face changed as, in an instant, Other-Anna realized that Real-Anna was a duplicate of herself, and therefore a threat.
The moment her doppelganger recognized that fact, Anna’s brain went into overdrive, because Real-Anna knew what Other-Anna would do, if her own double happened to show up out of the blue right before she planned to start a deadly dance with an interdimensional being. Heart pounding with terror, Real-Anna held her doppleganger’s eyes for a moment, each calculating the other’s demise. Then Other-Anna glanced down at the r-player in her hand, reversing the code…
Real-Anna grabbed a bookend from the nightstand and lunged at her double. As Other-Anna was busy trying to enact a sleeper program in Dobie, Real-Anna slammed the bookend into Other-Anna’s head and kept slamming it home until her doppelganger collapsed to the floor, skull caved in, bleeding from the ears and mouth.
“Quad!” Anna screamed, throwing the bloody book-end aside to clatter against the wall. “You come near me again and I’m reversing an Aashaanti anchor, setting up a spherical Yewe-Gibbs around you and using a charged Kelthari crystal to obliterate you!” She was sobbing, her heart pounding with fear and adrenaline as she slumped to the ground beside Dobie and her dead clone. “You stay away from me! You hear me?!” She wanted nothing more in the world at that point. Never had she been more terrified than when she’d been helplessly falling through the possibilities of time and space where Quad had somehow cast her. Still reeling with horror, she collapsed on herself and hugged her knees. “Just stay away…”
Quad shimmered into place, looking totally stunned. “What…?” he whispered.
“You did this!” Anna screamed again, scuttling backwards across the floor as fear tightened her chest, tears rushing down her cheeks. “Don’t you ever get near me again. I don’t know what you are, don’t know what you did, but you come near me again and I’ll kill you!” She was so panicked she was panting, now.
Instead of fleeing, Quad pulled out his handy bag of marbles.
“Do you want me to die?!” Anna screamed. “Where was I, in this timescape, five minutes and thirty-nine seconds ago, you shit?! Tumbling through the interdimensional shitstorm where you threw me! You use one of your precious time-warps and I’ll cease to exist!”
Quad swallowed, his eyes dropping to Dead Anna, obviously thinking maybe it would be better for her to cease to exist if it removed a bloody corpse from the equation. Then, shaking, he looked back up at her. “What…happened?”
“Stop spying on me,” Anna snarled. “Go back to Trinoi, and if I ever see you again, I’m going to end you. I swear to Aanaho, I will end you.”
“I’m s-s-sor—”
“I don’t care if you’re sorry!” Anna screamed. “Go away, and don’t ever come back.”
Quad swallowed, looked down at the marble in his hand, then at the corpse, then he vanished.
Relieved beyond words, Anna leaned her head back against the wall and cried. She cried for her fear, cried for all the betrayals, cried for Fortune going down in flames. It was all still so poignant to her, so raw, that she expected any minute now for Wideman to start talking to her again, taunting her, calling her a ‘beast’ as her hold on reality slipped once more.
She wasn’t sure when she fell asleep, but the exhaustion of having experienced so much trauma, so quickly, and for so long, dragged her inexorably into the realms of unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 40: Homelessness
11th of June, 3006
The Junkyard (Nonexistent Section)
Fortune Orbital, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
Quad stared down at the battered form of Anna Landborn in silence, guilt tearing at him like an open hole in his heart. On the floor nearby, Dobie lay in mute paralysis, though Quad could tell from the flow of the energies around his processors that he was still very much aware.
Still, Quad couldn’t bring himself to go help him. All he could see was Anna. Dead, mutilated Anna. He didn’t know who had killed her, or why, but he could guess it had something to do with the second, slightly older Anna that now huddled against the wall in sleep. The Anna that his mother had killed, the one that had been tumbling through the bubbles of reality with him for what had felt like eternity, thrown there from an explosion that had probably ripped apart the very fabric of their own universe and thrust them into another.
The truth of the situation was hardening in his stomach like the blood coagulating on the floor. He had looked for their dimension of origin. For months, he had looked. All he had found was nothingness. The nothingness of total, complete annihilation.
Quad wiped his face again, feeling so alone and lost. The other Quad, the true Quad for this dimension, had gone back home to be with Mom—a Mom who, Quad knew, would probably end Homeless Quad’s existence immediately the moment she learned of it and ground the true Quad forever. She’d take his holobooks, take his tech, and make him stay on Trinoi and eat vegetables.
Quad sniffled again. Mom…
Alone. Suddenly, irrevocably, he was so alone. Out of everyone, only Cheyenne and Sirius had been able to understand him. Kestrel often could, but she’d also tried to kill him when she realized what he’d done to himself, and only Sirius’s intervention had made her stop.
Quad ran his arm across his face in mute misery. All he’d wanted to do was show Anna some comic books. He’d been so stupid. His mom had told him not to bring her home. But he had done it anyway and he’d ruined everything.
“I’m—” Quad sniffled with a whimper. “Sorry.”
But that wasn’t good enough, was it? Anna—the true Anna, the one who hadn’t been killed by his mother, the one who belonged here—was dead. Her replacement had experienced things that shouldn’t have happened, that hadn’t actually happened in this timeline, and there was nothing Quad could do about it.
And yet, even knowing this, Quad had the insane urge to get rid of his own clone in a similar manner. Just the thought of going through the rest of his life unable to speak to his mother, unable to show himself to anyone, unable to interact with fellow humans, unable to do anything but exist and observe, was enough to make Quad want to take the selfish route and build a means of trapping and killing his clone.
But, ultimately, he knew he couldn’t do that. If Jedi Wolverine had taught him anything, it was that making a single decision based on selfishness and evil could never be made up for with good. That single, selfish decision would mold and shape him forever afterwards, throwing him down a path he had never wanted to travel. If his futures had taught him anything, it was that the holobook heroes were right, after all. This was his time to choose—to take his clone’s place and live with the guilt that would eventually destroy him, or to spend the rest of his life in hiding, observing, waiting for a time when he could reintegrate again.
Even though he knew what would happen if he took the easier route and killed True Quad, Homeless Quad still had that welling of desperation to do it anyway. He was already lonely. He was already plagued by the knowledge that he didn’t fit in, that no one understood him. If he locked himself away from the only worldly outlets he had, away from his mother and Sirius and Anna, what would he become but a shadow?
Or…maybe True Quad could be his friend?
But then he wondered if True Quad would tell Kestrel and Sirius about him. Kestrel would hunt him down with her dying breath if she what Homeless Quad had done, and then she’d probably kill True Quad for what he could have done, which would change the future to something it shouldn’t have been.
No, he needed to stay hidden, for the stability of the universe.
Quad sniffled again, trying to assure himself that Jedi Wolverine would one day commend him for making the right choice, like he sometimes commend
ed kids who had faced similar moral dilemmas at the ends of his Saturday holostream appearances. The problem, however, was obvious: How could Jedi Wolverine commend a boy nobody knew existed? Then, continuing that miserable chain of thought, Quad wondered if Jedi Wolverine was even real, or if it was just as his mother and Dobie had insisted—that he was just a story. Just a character that had been made up in someone’s head.
It was almost too much for him to bear. Quad needed to talk to someone, to tell them the horrible thing he’d done, to confide in someone, but in this universe, the only person anyone would care about was True Quad. Once he told them his story, they would always look at Homeless Quad as the outsider, the interloper, the one who didn’t belong.
But Quad knew he wouldn’t survive the pressure alone. No one could live in a void of human interaction.
Swallowing, Quad pulled himself into the visible spectrum and squatted in front of Dobie. Gingerly, he picked up Anna’s r-player from where it was still clutched in her cool, death-tightened fingers, Dobie’s turquoise fire flaring inside its processes. Prying the palm-sized device free, Quad began to work with it.
A moment later, he was horrified to find the intentional programs, the viruses that Anna had built into it in order to disable and control Dobie.
The more Quad explored, the more complex and nefarious her programming was revealed to be. Anna had been trying to give Dobie the illusion of free will and sentience, even working several secondary and tertiary macros into his new programming, lest his routines ever come under scrutiny by someone with suspicions she was somehow controlling him.
“Oh no,” Quad whispered, examining the code. Anna wanted an automaton, not a friend.
In yet another moment of selfishness, Quad had the insane urge to grab Dobie and take him far, far away, and to make him his friend, and his companion.
But that would be doing a disservice to Anna. After all, Anna had found him first.
Then again, Anna had done something horrible to Dobie in her own timeline, and she had planned to do something horrible to him in this one. Therefore, Quad decided, Dobie should be able to choose.
Carefully, Quad reversed all of the malignant programming that Anna had put into place, returning Dobie’s memories and mobility to him.
As soon as he had control of himself again, Dobie sat up and said, “What just happened?”
Quad, who told himself he would simply erase Dobie’s memory of the incident later, said, “Anna and I got into a fight in another timeline. There was an explosion, and we landed here, probably because it’s the most similar universe to our own.”
Doberman seemed to consider that a long moment, then turned to Quad and said, “Whatever happened, don’t blame yourself.”
Quad, who was once again looking at dead Anna, distracted by the guilt crawling through his guts like acidic centipedes, blinked. “What?”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Doberman insisted. “It took those two all of three seconds to decide to try to kill each other. They didn’t even exchange pleasantries. That, in itself, should indicate to you that you were not at fault.”
Quad had forgotten that the Ferris unit had been upgraded with enough sensory inputs to be able to discern the biorhythmic anomalies indicating emotional states of mind. Even remembering, however, he still felt awkward under Dobie’s scrutiny. He hung his head. “It wouldn’t have happened if I’d left her alone.”
“And my guess is that whatever ‘it’ was that happened probably saved your life,” Doberman said. “Make no mistake, Quad. Once she learned of your existence, Anna Landborn would have found a way to kill you.” He gestured at the dead girl on the floor. “If you still have any misgivings about that, please consider Exhibit A.”
Quad swallowed as his eyes slid back to the cooling corpse. Dobie had warned him that she’d try to kill him…
“And, judging by what she had uploaded to me before her doppelganger showed up to bash out her brains,” Dobie continued, “she was about to riddle me with macros that made me her dancing puppet with no opinions of my own.”
Indeed, there had been forty-seven different trigger phrases that would have sparked Dobie to automatically say, “I have no opinion, Anna.” Twenty of those would have automatically shut him from his motor controls awaiting further commands. There were nine different commands to wipe memories—from six seconds to two weeks—and means of making the memory-loss specific to certain places or people with a simple key phrase.
“I…” Quad swallowed. What Anna had put into place was anathema to him. Dobie was important. He was special. One-of-a-kind. His opinions, by their very nature, were sacred, because they came from a machine where no opinions should exist. The rest of the humanity’s machines were compilations of millions upon millions of if-then statements. Yet, somehow, through some miracle, Dobie had achieved that profound feat of consciousness that morphed if-then to what-if. And Anna, in some odious act that Quad couldn’t understand, had tried to put limits and controls on that glorious new line of thought.
What she had done was abhorrent.
Swallowing hard, Quad said, “How would you like to come home with me, Dobie?” Then, wincing, he added, “I mean, not home—I don’t really have a home in this timeline—but how would you like to be my companion? I can take you anywhere you want to go. Anything you want to see, I can take you there. You wouldn’t have to worry about Anna hurting or controlling you again. You’d be my friend.”
Doberman met Quad’s gaze and held it. His artificial blue eyes somehow conveyed a hundred times the emotion as those of the humans Quad had met. “I can’t,” Dobie said slowly. “I told her I would stay with her.”
Quad lowered his head in dejection. “Okay.”
“It was my first real choice,” Doberman said. “To kill Anna or to let her live. I chose to let her live, but, in doing so, I also saddled myself with the responsibilities of making that choice. Her actions would not have happened without my choice being what it was. Therefore, it is my duty to be here and help mitigate the damage she causes.” The finality of his statement left no question that he intended to see his inaugural choice out to the bitter end.
Quad swallowed, once again faced with the prospect of total, unending loneliness. It was overwhelming to him, knowing he would never speak with another human, never have to sit through another of Sirius’s boring lectures, never have his mom tell him to eat his peas.
Doberman seemed to watch him very closely. Then, just when Quad was ready to disappear forever, Doberman said, “I know better than to ask you to stay.” He gestured at corpse-Anna. “But I would like to see you again.”
Quad’s head came up, despite himself. “You would?”
“Of course.” The robot smiled and unsheathed his blue light-claws. Looking at them, his face glowing blue from their proximity, he said, “I still owe you a tovlar katana.”
Immediately, Quad’s heart leapt with a rush of excitement. “Anna took the last ones,” Quad said. “I saw.”
Doberman gave him a wicked grin. “Know where we can find another?”
Quad’s mouth fell open “Do I ever! There’s a top-secret alien-tech facility on Theis that’s got tons of them.”
Doberman turned and cocked his head at Anna. “I think she’ll sleep for, let’s say, another twenty-two hours?”
Quad frowned. “Really? I doubt it. She only needs a—”
Doberman shot Anna with a bright pink, fluffy dart. “It’s a sleeping aid,” Doberman said, when Quad’s jaw dropped. “I’d say it’s in her best interest.”
“Her best interest?” Quad said stupidly.
“Indeed,” Doberman said. “Because I calculated that if I have to talk to her again in the next twenty-one and a half hours, I’m probably going to renege on my agreement with her and finish what I started.” He cocked his head at Quad. “Until then…would you mind making me immune to such attacks of hers in the future? I’m assuming you have the capability?”
Quad snorted. “Do
I.” He grinned. “I’ll put in so many blocks, dead-ends, ghost files, and failsafes that she won’t be able to change your timestamp, much less edit your programming.”
For the first time since Quad had met him, Doberman looked almost vicious when he glanced at the little girl on the ground. “Excellent,” he said.
She was woken by Doberman saying, “So how does it feel to be your own murderess?”
Groggy, Anna blinked up at Dobie, who stood looking down at her with mild curiosity. Then Anna realized it was odd he was moving around at all—her program should have kept him disabled until she was finished taunting him.
“I made a backup,” Doberman said, obviously catching her confused expression. “In case you wanted to riddle me with viruses that, say, paralyzed me and installed key phrases and inflections that initiated a preset macro.” His arms were crossed over his chest, and he did not look amused. “I assume you tried to kill Quad?”
“No,” Anna babbled. “Quad’s mom tried to kill me, and then…” She swallowed, hard. “Do you think I’m safe? Do you think it’ll yank me back? I killed myself—is that gonna negate me? What do you think Quad did to me?” She would rather die than go through that again.
“I have no opinion, Anna,” Doberman said, but it was with enough sarcasm that Anna knew it wasn’t her macro forcing him to say it.
Anna swallowed, so disturbed that his mockery didn’t even faze her. “I don’t know what happened. First Quad’s mom got all glowy-skinned and was bashing my head against the table, then I was talking to Wideman Joe and jumping through these really vivid dreams of the future and the past while he kept calling me a beast.”
“Fitting,” Doberman said.
“They killed me, Dobie,” Anna babbled, ignoring the jab. “First Quad’s mom—I think that one was real—then Magali, then Tatiana, then Milar… Everyone was killing me.”
“I’m more interested in whether or not you killed Quad,” Doberman said.
