by Paris Singer
She looked up at the endless space outside. The pain in her words were reflected in her sorrowful face. She sighed, and began, “The Morex came to your planet to reap it bare of all they considered essential or useful to them, killing and destroying at will anything they deemed ‘useless’ like many planets before. On yours, however, they found a resistance they hadn’t expected. A terrible war ensued with both sides sustaining great losses.
“One cold night, while foraging through the rubble and smoke of what had been a house, a troop of Morex came across a Simian female cowering in a corner, and for some reason, decided to take her. This female was pregnant.”
As she continued recounting the events, every word she spoke felt like a dream. A story made up to entertain. I found it hard to understand or believe that what she told me were the true facts of how I came to be. In my mind, the lie was still my reality, and the truth only fiction.
“When she was brought back, she was hysterical and wouldn’t be pacified. Shortly after her arrival, her pregnancy was discovered and a decision was made. The offspring would be extracted and the female, deemed too hostile and of minimal use, would be put down.”
To my surprise, a sudden rush of anger gripped my heart. I felt the urgent need to shout, scream, beat my fists—anything to satisfy the building rage inside me. Before my instincts took over, however, the mysterious girl continued.
“There was a complication. The ship’s medical equipment aboard the warship wasn’t designed for other species, so the medical crew had failed to detect that the female had not been pregnant with one offspring…but two.”
I quickly turned my head to look at her again as though the action itself would help me escape the words she’d just spoken. Breath caught in my throat and my eyes widened as far as they could; finally I had the answer to a mystery that had plagued me. As though floating to the surface of my mind and out through my lips, I could not help but whisper a single name, “One.”
“Yes,” replied the mysterious girl solemnly. “I’m sorry.”
Hot tears rolled down my face in a constant stream. The immense anguish I felt was almost too great to bear, my heart hurting like never before. I couldn’t breathe or think as I stared into the sparkling, inky canvas outside, the rest of my body completely numb.
I didn’t want to hear any more. I couldn’t take any more sorrow, but I found myself unable to move or speak as she continued.
“An idea was put forth to introduce the offspring in special containment with the aim of studying their habits and behaviour, the idea being that if the Morex understood their enemy, they’d find a way to destroy them. Orders were dispatched to build an area specifically designed to create a habitable environment for the offspring to occupy.” She paused for a moment, then said, “The technology for constructing what would become the Sky Drifter came from my race. It was one of the two things the Morex took when they came. That…And me.”
Her voice seemed very distant and barely audible through the turbulent storm that raged in my mind. As if by instinct, I tightened my hand around hers as the sound of crying echoed inside my mind. I blinked my blurry eyes, and heard myself say, “It’s…S’ okay…S’ okay…”
“No, Seven, you don’t understand,” said the mysterious girl as she wept. “The Sky Drifter, the technology—everything—it…it came from me! The ship, the town, the academy—even Pi, Iris, and Ava—all of them! They came from my own memories, my own experiences there!”
“S’ okay,” I heard myself repeating under my breath, “S’ okay…”
“Seven,” she snapped sharply. “It was all my idea! I made it happen to save my own life. I was in charge of it all!”
“S’…” My grip on her hand suddenly loosened as I whispered, “Every…thing?”
“Yes.”
“One?” Slowly, like an ominous, distant storm, anger built inside my chest as I waited to hear her response to why I’d been denied knowledge that One had been my twin brother. Of why they’d watched as day by day as we grew to hate each other. When none but her quiet weeping came, I repeated, “One?”
“Everything, Seven—”
My memory of what happened next is blurry and changes slightly every time I think about it. I remember flailing violently in the tight space of the capsule, letting all the anger, fear, and pain that had built up let loose all at once. I was blind with fury.
She’d known all along. She’d watched as my brother and I grew to hate and fight each other, as I formed friendships with illusions—memories of beings she’d known in her life as ours were being stolen from us. I hated her for that.
“Seven!” Her voice echoed in the depth of my tempestuous mind. “Stop it. Listen to me!”
Once I regained my sight, I saw the mysterious girl on top me, her hands pinning mine down to my sides. “I had no choice! I’m so sorry. I had no choice!”
“Shut up!” I screamed in her face. “You stole everything from me!”
“You’re wrong. They did! They took everything from both of us! If I hadn’t suggested how useful you could be to them, you’d both most likely have been killed. It was all I could do…I’m so sorry, Seven. I’m so sorry.”
“Why? Why turn us against each other?” I cried.
“To push you! To challenge you, Seven! They wanted you to strive to be the best—to beat him—so you’d give them better strategies. The Morex who accompanied One influenced him to want to hate you, too.”
“Was it your idea?” I asked after a moment, feeling my anger subsiding slightly.
“No! It wasn’t, Seven. I swear it wasn’t! You have to believe me! You have to…” Cold tears fell on my face as I looked into her shimmering eyes.
All at once, the anger and hatred I’d felt, along with my remaining strength, ebbed away. As her grip loosened, I raised my hand and pressed it gently against her cheek. Watching her expression change to embarrassed surprise, I uttered, “Why did you help us?”
The mysterious girl looked away, and as she sat next to me, she sighed deeply. “I couldn’t go on watching as you lived your entire lives as experiments while you helped destroy your own race.”
My heart ached with every word she spoke, but I needed to hear them. I needed to know the truth One never would. To know the reasons for his death—for our mother’s death.
“I couldn’t just help you escape. I had to be careful. If the Morex realized what I was doing, they would have immediately killed me. I decided to try to open your eyes to the illusion in which you lived. My first attempt was on the trip to Brattea.”
“That monster thing? That was you?”
As though she hadn’t heard me, the mysterious girl continued, “I made the Morex believe a virus had corrupted the system, causing some abnormalities to emerge within the program.”
“Why the monster, though? I thought that thing was going to kill me.”
“I wouldn’t have let it. It was a means to an end. Your classmates and teacher, none had been programmed to react in any other way than had originally been written. The system couldn’t be updated in time to compensate for such a sudden, unexpected change. I wanted you to see their total failure to react, Seven. I wanted to plant the seed that would make you question it all.”
What she revealed seemed so strange, so far beyond anything I could have accepted as reality. Yet, there we were, and her words did, incredibly, make sense to me.
“There came a point where the Morex were inevitably going to find out what was happening,” she continued. “An investigation was launched to find out where the virus had come from. They would eventually have found out there was no virus, and that it was me who was secretly altering the program. My only leverage was that I, as its inventor, was assigned to direct the project.”
“You mean One and me?” I instinctively said in a dry tone.
“Yes. That’s when I finally thought of causing a hole in the program fabric. I needed then to find a way for you to see it.”
“So, you ju
st pointed it out?”
“Exactly.”
“Clever.”
“Thank you, but it had to be quick, lasting long enough for you to see it, and no one else. I wanted to give you one final sign that everything was an illusion to prepare you without alerting the Morex faster than was needed.”
“And the tilting ship? That was you, too?”
A dark look fell across the mysterious girl’s eyes. “No, that was real.”
“Real? Where? In whose reality?” I found myself spitting those words with unexpected bitterness. As much as I wanted to accept what was, and had happened, it was a harder thing to do than I’d thought.
“The real ship,” she replied, suddenly very serious. “The Morex warship, on which we were aboard, was attacked.”
“Attacked? By who?”
“Your kind, Seven.” She looked at me with a mix of gravity and regret. “The last strategies you’d been giving the Morex during your advanced classes failed to defeat your planet’s own defences.”
“That’s why Ms. Photuris was so angry,” I uttered quietly, realizing I spoke about her as though she was a real being.
The mysterious girl looked at me gravely as though to remind me of the seriousness of our situation, then said, “In fact, the idea of using you as a means to get into the enemy’s mind was wearing thin with the Morex. The last class you had was your last chance to show your worth. If you failed again…”
“So, you felt you had to act quickly.”
“Yes. If I’d waited any longer…”
I looked away for a moment, then said, “Iris and Pi…It was all fake. Just part of the program.”
After a brief pause, the mysterious girl uttered, “I’m sorry, Seven, yes. They were designed to spur you and support you in everything you did so you’d be happy and content in your life and wouldn’t seek to change it.”
I scoffed slightly, and said, “Even the flirting, huh?”
“I’m so—”
“Don’t. It’s okay.”
Another brief silence passed before she said, “They’d both, in fact, been real students I’d once known. I used their likenesses and personalities because they’d been good friends to me.”
I looked at her, her yellow face filled with solemnity and regret. She’d not only helped us escape, but had been helping One and me our entire lives. An overwhelming sense of affection washed over me as the role she’d played in our survival became clear, and I knew I’d forever be grateful to her.
Now, as we hurtled through endless space toward the planet of my mother’s birth, to the place I belonged but had never known, silence fell inside the vessel as we contemplated an uncertain future and a new beginning.
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