Memento Mori

by Gingell, W. R.

  “All right,” said Marx. “We don’t need to go back there, anyway. It’s you we want to talk to. You’d better come into the Upsydaisy and get dry before you catch a cold.”

  Tuan said, “I don’t get sick,” but he followed Marx and Kez across the sand anyway.

  “Okay to leave her there?” asked Kez, jerking a thumb behind them at Aunt Myra’s body.

  “I suppose so,” said Tuan. “It’s no use bringing her with us.”

  “Reckon not,” Kez said, and grinned a particularly odd grin at him.

  Tuan said, “Your eyes are black.” It wasn’t quite what he meant, but it was the closest thing he could find to put in words.

  “Yeah, well,” said Kez. “They sez eyes is the windows of the soul, eh?”

  “Not in this century,” objected Tuan. He was surprised that someone who sounded as rough and ready as Kez knew such an old saying.

  Marx said briefly to Kez, “Don’t tease him.”

  That was interesting. Was that what teasing was? Tuan had expected more of an overtly threatening edge to it. He was aware that he didn’t respond well to other people, and now that he was preparing to go away to work in a prestigious research facility, he would have to learn more about how to deal with other people.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You can tease me. I don’t mind.”

  Kez gave him another one of her unreadable looks and said, “Ain’t no fun that way.”

  “Where are we going, if we’re not going back home?” asked Tuan, since there was no answer to that.

  “The Upsydaisy,” said Marx. He had a slight limp in his left leg that Tuan had noticed before; if this was an attempted kidnapping, he could always kick that leg.

  “You said that before. What’s an Upsydaisy?”

  Marx grinned. “It’s our craft.”

  Tuan remembered the momentary darkness that had passed overhead as he was held beneath the sea by Aunt Myra. “I don’t see a craft.”

  “Yeah, well, we got a friend ’oo knows about hidin’ stuff by—by—integratin’ wiv the environment. He fixed us up wiv summink.”

  “Shut up, kid,” Marx said. He said it amiably, but Kez did close her mouth.

  Tuan, wondering, looked at the beach ahead of him again; and as he did so, it seemed to him that he could see something of a difference to the sand and shoreline. Something a little more…shapey…than just flat beach. Something gently rounded on the top and pinched toward the front; flat beneath, with another something swaying from its underside. Beneath that shapey something, the sand dried and stirred gently.

  “That’s—that’s impossible,” he said. “I haven’t finished inventing that yet.”

  Kez shot him an almost feral grin and said, “’Aven’t you? Interestin’, ain’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Tuan, and straightened his shoulders. “I want to come aboard.”

  “Fort you might,” nodded Kez. “It’ll get clearer the more you look at it. There’s an ’awser line you can climb when you can see it enough.”

  She went ahead of him, leaping for that dangling something and climbing it like a monkey, hand over hand. Beside Tuan, Marx jerked a thumb at the slowly solidifying hawser line, a clear indication to go next. Tuan obeyed. He climbed until Kez was hauling at his shoulders to bring him in the hull hatch, and cleared that hatch just before Marx hefted himself inside. Marx wasn’t so much as breathing hard, and Tuan realised belatedly that if it should come to a struggle, he would have much preferred to face Marx on the beach.

  It was too late to correct that now, however. Kez was dragging him further up and into to the craft by his sleeve. It was a small craft, and it wasn’t long before she hove him through one of a confusing number of doors, and Tuan found himself in a small recreation cabin. He looked around, mechanically noting the workbench to one side of the cabin that had some very familiar—and other very interesting—tools set out in precise order. He would have gone over to it, but Kez grabbed him by the sleeve again and shoved him at one of the two chairs the cabin boasted.

  “Ain’t nuffink for you over there,” she said warningly. That black, pebbly look was back in her eyes, and even if Tuan didn’t know what it meant, it made him wary. He sat down.

  “Why did you want to talk to me?” he asked, turning the chair so that he could face Marx, who was filling the doorway, but still see Kez. He wasn’t sure which one of them was the more dangerous to have behind him. That lack of knowledge made him sit up straight with his feet flat on the floor.

  “There are a few questions we need answered,” Marx said, shrugging. “Nothing you should have trouble with.”

  “Is it about my admission to the Cerberus Research Facility?”

  “No.”

  “Kinda is,” muttered Kez, moving just out of his eye line. He could hear her somewhere behind him. He would have liked to turn his head to see where she was, but the sound of tools being disturbed on the workbench behind him set that discomfort to rest. So that’s where she was.

  “I’m making your chair wet,” he said to Marx.

  Marx pushed himself away easily from the doorway, shrugging, and stepped into the cabin. “Doesn’t matter. It’ll dry.”

  “Salt water—”

  “I know. Doesn’t matter.”

  “What does matter?” asked Tuan. He could still hear the clattered sound of tools being moved on the bench behind him. “Today, you were on the beach just for me, weren’t you?”

  “Is that how it looks?”

  “Yes,” said Tuan. He was quite sure.

  “Then I have a question.”

  “All right.”

  “There’s blood on your clothes,” Marx said conversationally.

  Tuan blinked at him then looked down at the watered-down stains on his shirt. “Yes. That’s not a question.”

  “Why is there blood on your shirt?”

  “My aunt tried to kill me.”

  “I remember. She tried to drown you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then where,” said Marx, very quietly and gently, “did all that blood come from?”

  “Oh yes,” Tuan said, remembering. “It belongs to my parents. I killed them this morning. It was silly of me to come out without changing my shirt.”

  “Very,” said Marx, and his eyes were as hard as flint. “How are things back there, kid?”

  “Got it!” said Kez’s gleeful voice, from far too close to Tuan’s ear. How had she gotten so close without him realising it?

  Were those fingers on his neck, up at the hairline, or a tool of some kind? Tuan wasn’t sure, because his body had stopped functioning. He couldn’t move, couldn’t react; couldn’t even feel the back of the chair as he fell into it with a body that was as stiff as a board. What was happening? He couldn’t blink or close his eyes, and his mouth wouldn’t move when he tried to speak.

  “Got it!” Kez said again, and there was a darkness to that glee Tuan still heard in her voice. “That’ll teach it!”

  Tuan knew she had hit him because the world tilted briefly sideways, but he couldn’t catch himself or even close his eyes by reflex.

  “Don’t hit it,” said Marx. “It’s worth a lot of money.”

  “I don’t care! It shouldn’t ’ave messed wiv TuanTuan!”

  “I saw you punching TuanTuan before we came in to land.”

  “I’m allowed to punch him.”

  Tuan could see a sideways version of Marx that grinned. “Just no one else, eh? All right.” To Tuan, he said, “You’re probably a bit confused right now. Don’t try to nod or speak: it won’t work. We’ve turned you off.”

  “Not off,” said Tuan’s voice; but it wasn’t coming from Tuan’s throat. Behind Marx, in the doorway, there was another Tuan. He was taller, his face perhaps a little firmer—as if he was older than Tuan knew himself to be—but everything else was identical. That other Tuan said, “You’ve just stopped his outward reactions. He can still understand you. He can still reason and think and see.”
<
br />   “Can he feel?” Kez sounded disgruntled.

  “No,” said the other Tuan, crossing the room until he was behind Tuan as well. “That’s turned off, too. If you mean his physical feelings, I mean. He never had any emotional feelings to start with.”

  That was true, thought Tuan. It had bothered Aunt Myra, his lack of emotion; perhaps that was why she had tried to kill him. He should have tried to do something about that, but mimicking emotions had seemed like such an expenditure of effort without the reward to justify it. Now, if he had realised before this moment that he wasn’t human— If he’d known, if he’d tried harder to mimic the right kind of behaviour, perhaps—perhaps—

  But perhaps was no good. Right now, he needed to find a way to get himself out of this stiff limbo.

  “Look at him,” the other Tuan said, his fingers busy at the back of Tuan’s neck. “He’s thinking about it. He’s trying to calculate, If I had been able to pretend to have emotions, would I have survived longer? He doesn’t even know what he is, but he’s still thinking of a way to survive and go on with his plans.”

  Tuan found that he could feel again from the neck upward, and somewhere deep in his chest. Used to arriving at conclusions based upon comparisons, he said, “You. You’re like me.”

  “No,” the other Tuan said, turning the chair around so that Tuan was facing him. “You’re like me. But not quite me.”

  “Oi,” said Kez, shuffling closer and nudging the other Tuan none-too-gently with her sharp elbow. “Sorry we couldn’t get in earlier.”

  “It’s all right,” the boy said. “I knew it was a Fixed Point, going in. I don’t remember them; I just thought I should try to save them if I could.”

  Marx, who was still watching Tuan, said, “What are we going to do about it?”

  “I can use the parts,” said the other boy.

  That was a pity, thought Tuan, looking at all of those tools on the workbench behind the other Tuan. He’d made such an effort to get himself into the best research facility; it would be a waste just to be pulled apart. His thoughts whirred very quickly, because now it seemed to him that he understood quite a lot, and what he understood made it very clear exactly what he was. He had always known he wasn’t like Mum and Dad. Knowing that he wasn’t human was…interesting.

  “Just break it apart?” the frown was back between Marx’s brows. “Is that all right?”

  “We can’t keep him together; it’s not safe. I’ll show you. It’s why I let him talk again.” To Tuan, his double said, “What will you do if we let you go?”

  “I’ll go to the best Biotech research facility in the Twelve Worlds–”

  “—thirteen—” said a mutter from Kez, but Tuan ignored it.

  “I’ll go to the best Biotech research facility in the Twelve Worlds and do work that the universe has never seen before.”

  “What if they won’t let you in?”

  “I’ll make them let me in.”

  “How?”

  Tuan considered dissembling, but he knew the look in the other Tuan’s eyes. It was the look his father got when he already knew the answer to a question. “Any means necessary.”

  “What if your supervisor stops you from advancing?”

  “I will dispose of my supervisor.”

  “What if one of your discoveries is halted because there’s too much potential for loss of life in its development?”

  “If the benefits outweighed the loss of life, I will hide that fact. Development won’t be halted.”

  “What if—”

  “Any means necessary,” said Tuan again. “If the technology is sound, loss of life is no object. More people are born every second; they’re inherently replaceable. I—my research—we are not replaceable.”

  “Why did you kill my parents?”

  “I killed our parents—”

  “My parents.”

  “They were my parents, too.”

  “In a cuckoo kind of way,” Marx agreed, limping around the chair until Tuan could see him again. “But instead of just kicking out the other siblings, you kicked out the parents as well.”

  “I didn’t kick anyone out,” said Tuan, addressing himself to Marx. It was easier to address Marx: his emotions didn’t make his face behave erratically, and Tuan could more easily discern his reactions. “Until a few minutes ago, I thought I was Tuan. My parents…well, it’s a shame, but Cerberus only accepts five interns every turn cycle. Four of those go to the highest paying families with promising children; the fifth is awarded as a scholarship to a disadvantaged child who shows the best aptitude. The system has only been in place for ten turn cycles, and every one of those ten scholarships have been given to orphans. The odds were calculated. My parents didn’t have a fraction of the money needed to send me where I should be. I simply let them pay for it in another way.”

  “Do it,” Marx said, and Tuan recognised the emotionless command in his voice. Then he really was destined to be torn apart for scrap. What a shame—what a waste. “Take it apart.”

  “It’ll take a while,” the other Tuan said. “I want to make sure I don’t waste anything. We won’t find components as high-quality as this without robbing a biotech facility. There are other things I’d like to build.”

  Marx nodded. “All right. I’ll go bur—I’ll go and take care of the people left behind.”

  Tuan saw his double’s hands stop moving, then curl up into his chest. The double said, “Should I do that?”

  “You an idiot?” asked Kez, shoving him violently. “Oi, are you gonna be at this all day? ’Ow are you s’posed to make me dinner if you’re muckin’ about wiv this robot?”

  “It’s not a robot,” the other Tuan said, and if it looked like he said it mechanically—as if he’d said the same thing to her many times over—his face also looked a little less pale than it had looked a moment ago. “It’s a first class example of biotech that thinks it’s a human. I’d like to know how Marcus made it; it’s years ahead of what anyone has done so far.”

  Kez gave a small crack of laughter. “Wot, so it thought it was gonna make the future, but it is the future?”

  “Something like that,” murmured the other Tuan.

  It was peaceful, being taken apart. They could have put him on an operation bed in the sick bay, but they put him on the workbench instead. That was oddly fitting, Tuan thought. While his double prepared a small, maxi-plex-topped dolly with the tools he needed, Tuan gazed up at the ceiling, his vision restricted to a small semi-circle around the workbench and the ceiling above. Looking at that patch of ceiling, he asked, “How did you perfect the organic camouflage for this craft so quickly? It was you, wasn’t it? Is it biotech?”

  “You had a lot of trouble with it, I suppose,” the other Tuan said.

  “My intelligence wasn’t lacking.” He was very sure of that.

  “It’s not about intelligence,” said his double, setting out his tools very precisely. He was playing out the time, Tuan was sure. He was glad of that. If he’d had emotions, he might have found it exciting to talk to his other, entirely biological, self. As it was, it gave him the kind of satisfaction he got from eating a meal: it wasn’t necessary, but something about it made sense to the biological part of his body.

  “It’s not about intelligence; it’s about how you look at the world.”

  “That conclusion has no basis in fact,” said Tuan. “If it did, I’d have the greater advantage, wouldn’t I? I’m not human, so I see the world more differently than you do.”

  “You do know you’re not human, then?”

  “I knew it as soon as I saw you,” Tuan said. “I didn’t know it before. I knew I was different, and Aunt Myra must have known, too. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that I wasn’t human. I bleed, I eat; I feel pain.”

  “You didn’t notice that you don’t have to eat?”

  “I was fed three times a day; I ate three times a day,” said Tuan. He would have shrugged, but that part of him was still turned off. “Th
is year, I discovered that I didn’t strictly have to do it, but it bothered our parents if I didn’t.”

  “Do you know that you don’t strictly have to breathe, either?”

  “I discovered that this morning.”

  Kez gave a rude crack of laughter from her side of the room. “’S’pect you did!” she said. “Oi. Can I ’ave some of the bits when you’re done wiv ’em?”

  “What bits?” asked Tuan’s double, with a suspicion Tuan found entirely justified.

  “Just the teeth,” Kez said.

  Tuan’s double, looking slightly harassed, asked plaintively, “Can we talk about it after I’ve finished?”

  “Orright,” agreed Kez reluctantly. “Want me to ’elp?”

  “No,” said Tuan and Tuan’s double, at the same time. Tuan’s double added, “I’m finished getting ready, anyway.”

  Tuan turned his attention away from the blurry semi-circle that managed to hold the energy of Kez without containing an actual sight of her, and focused on the other Tuan instead. It was only fitting that he paid close attention to the process of his undoing, even if the knowledge he gained from it didn’t outlast the process itself.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt,” said the other Tuan. His fingers were quick and sure, and while Tuan gazed up at him, it occurred to him that he could have turned out like this if he hadn’t been caught. His knowledge increased, his mental processes streamlined, and his body capable of following that inbuilt knowledge without faltering. No, he would have been better: more sure, more steady, less distracted by the little things in life—more focused.

  He said, “I’m not afraid. It’s a shame, that’s all.”

  “I’ll do all the things you were going to do,” said the other Tuan. “If that helps.”

  There was a coldness at the base of Tuan’s throat—probably the magnetic screwdriver. There must be a panel there. Funny that he’d never noticed it before.

  “I’ll make all the discoveries you were going to make—I’ll probably even make more.”

  “The brass cheek of it!” scoffed Kez.

  The other Tuan didn’t regard that interruption, and Tuan recognised the certainty he saw in his entirely organic counterpart. Just as Tuan knew himself to be the best, the other Tuan knew himself to be the best. “But I’ll do them better, and I won’t hurt anyone. That’s all I can promise.”