The Similars

by Rebecca Hanover

  “Hand over the key,” Maude says.

  I do, relinquishing it to Maude’s confident grip. I feel a slight pang at letting it go, like I’m letting Oliver go too.

  Maude takes out her plum and sets it on the rug. She places Oliver’s key next to it.

  “You’re the expert,” I say, “but I’m guessing we need to get on the server. Does the key have an internal tracker that runs on Wi-Fi?”

  “Hopefully,” Maude answers. She fiddles with some commands on her plum until she finds a screen that looks promising. “Okay. I found the right setting. Now we need the code that connects it to our keys,” she says, concentrating as she hits a few buttons on the plum.

  “Is it working?” I press.

  “Give me a second.” She pauses. “I’m entering the Darkwood transmitter codes—done,” Maude says as the key begins to glow orange.

  “That’s it? You did it?” I stare at the key and at the plum.

  “Almost,” she says. “Now I need his passcode.” She holds up the plum to show me the screen. It says OLIVER WARD. Underneath is his birth date and four blank spaces for a four-digit passcode.

  “Right,” I mutter. I knew this was coming. “How many tries do we get?”

  “Not sure. It could shut us out if we miss too many times, so…let’s not. Figure you’ve got three at the most.”

  I begin to pace. What would Oliver have used as his passcode? It must be something I’d know. Otherwise, he would have left me a clue. Did he? I take out his note.

  Emma,

  I’m sorry. The key is for you. It will explain everything. Especially about him.

  Love always,

  O

  There aren’t any hints in here, are there? Only one four-letter word stands out…

  “Can the digits be letters? Or only numbers?” I ask Maude tightly.

  “Either,” she says. “It’s an alphanumeric system.”

  I sigh. “What about ‘love’? L-o-v-e?”

  She types in the letters. “Error message. Any other ideas?”

  I rack my brain. What on earth would Oliver use as his passcode? I read the note again. There’s nothing. “W-i-l-l? Try that.”

  Maude keys it in. “Nope.”

  I think a moment. “‘Emma,’” I say quietly. “It’s four letters. It’s the first word in the note he left me. I didn’t think of it at first because it seemed, well, like nothing…”

  Maude is already punching it in. “Bingo,” she says, a smile spreading over her face. “We’re in.” Maude presses a few buttons on her plum, and the key glows again, turning from orange to dark purple. A figure materializes over the key. It’s Oliver—his hologram, anyway.

  Oliver’s hologram looks just like the one we met in the research lab. Same familiar face. Jovial, but strangely inhuman.

  “Um,” I mutter, staring at him. “Hi?”

  Maude rolls her eyes. “Hold on. I have to key in a few more commands. There,” she says finally. “Go,” she tells the hologram.

  Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes. “He can’t hear you. What makes you think he’s going to talk, anyway?”

  But just like that, he does. “Hi, Emma.”

  Underwood

  I know this isn’t the real Oliver. It’s a hologram, a figment. And yet, hearing him say my name like that, like he used to—it’s disarming. Oliver’s body doesn’t move as he talks, only his mouth. I shake off the strangeness of it all. His message is what matters. Oliver, the real Oliver, recorded it, knowing, or hoping, that I’d hear it.

  “Sorry to be so cryptic,” Oliver’s hologram continues. “But if you are listening to this, it means I’m not there to tell you what I have to say in person. I’m sorry about that.”

  I look over at Maude. Is she as entranced as I am? Yes. My eyes flit back to Oliver’s, staring into them like they hold all the answers to my many questions. I hope they do.

  “Back in the spring, I fell into one of my filmmaking wormholes,” Oliver explains. “I’d decided to make a documentary about all of Darkwood’s hidden gems. The places on campus most students know little about. Did you know that the Tower Room was once the hiding place of a wanted criminal? It was decades ago, but I digress.”

  I exhale. This hologram—this flimsy version of Oliver—sounds like he did when he was narrating one of his films.

  “That’s what brought me to the old science building by the lake. It’s been vacant for years. It took some digging to learn about what had happened there. Nearly twenty years ago, when the lab was a fully functioning research center, a couple of students set some laboratory animals loose, and the media got wind of the incident, stirring up negative press for the school. Darkwood’s students were painted as irresponsible and its administrators lax.”

  Underwood, I think. He’s talking about his expulsion.

  “The research center was brought under scrutiny for many years and, eventually, was closed to students and mostly shut down. I was determined to film inside and thought I’d have to break in, but my key opened the door. Which is how I discovered our holograms. A room full of stored holograms, accessible via each student’s key? Talk about an exposé! I wanted to uncover everything about how the keys worked and expose the Darkwood administration for keeping this from us. For tracking us—our GPS, our medical stats, our pasts—without our explicit permission.”

  It takes me a moment to process what I’m hearing. Oliver was in the hologram room. Oliver saw what Maude and I saw. GPS data. Medical stats. Last year. Before the new keys were issued. Which means that wasn’t a new feature of the new keys. Our old keys must have had all that tracking too. We just didn’t know about it. And neither did our parents, if they only recently signed waivers permitting the school to keep tabs on our whereabouts. The administration was spying on us without anyone’s knowledge. I look at Maude, and we both raise our eyebrows.

  I turn my attention back to Oliver.

  “I had a coconspirator. A teacher who knew what the administration was doing and agreed that it was wrong, who would have been pleased to see Darkwood’s underbelly exposed.”

  A teacher? I wonder to myself. Was it Mr. Park?

  “This teacher gave me the technical help I needed to get started, as well as a pass to access the hologram room that couldn’t be traced to my key. I went there nearly every night, after everyone else had gone to bed. I spent hours there, trying to break into the system. It took me weeks to crack the code. I’m not a programmer. Sure, I took computer science as an elective and could dabble in JavaScript, Rust, and Julia. But the hologram system was complex. It took me some time to get in and unlock my key, and, subsequently, all the others.”

  I don’t have to wonder why Oliver never told me he was doing any of this. For the last few months of school, we were barely speaking. After his confession, after he told me he wanted to be more than friends, I shut him down.

  “Imagine my surprise, when—after gaining full access to the system—I saw my birth certificate and discovered that my father was John Underwood. I recognized the name instantly. I knew he had been in the Ten with my mother and stepfather. I also knew he was Albert Seymour’s half brother. What I didn’t know before was that Underwood and my mother had had a relationship. My mother had never spoken about it, nor had my stepfather. I grew up thinking of Booker Ward as my father, and I never really questioned who my biological father was. It had never mattered. Maybe I was afraid to ask questions that could hurt my mother or Booker. I don’t know. But that changed the moment I saw the name on my birth certificate.

  “So I tried to access Underwood’s hologram. I hadn’t tried calling up the hologram of a former student, but I could tell that the data was in the system. That every student, past and present, who ever had a key, had a hologram stored there.

  “It took another week before I could gain access to other people’s profiles
. But my assumptions were correct: Underwood had a hologram in the system, even though he hadn’t attended Darkwood in more than two decades. I was nervous to call up my biological father’s hologram. He wasn’t pictured in the Ten portrait, so I had no idea what he looked like. My searches online had been futile, almost as though someone had erased all evidence of him. And then, when the data appeared—there was no image. No ‘John Underwood’ hologram, only words and numbers streaming across my view space.

  “I assumed it was a limitation of the old system and didn’t give it any more thought. The data was what I needed. I dove into my father’s medical statistics and his test scores, which were top-notch. All that digging, and I learned something about the man, but not nearly enough. Test scores didn’t tell me who he was. Why was there so little information about him, and no photographs? That’s when I made the discovery that changed everything.”

  I stiffen. Is this when he will reveal the secrets behind his note? Behind why he left us? He’s so in control, so alive in this recording. What happened?

  “I was scrolling through the reams of Underwood’s data when I came across a stat I hadn’t noticed before. Vital signs. Current vital signs. Blood pressure, resting heart rate… These weren’t stats from Underwood’s childhood or even his early adulthood. They were current. They were from the present.”

  I tense. Current vital signs? How could that be?

  I turn to Maude, flabbergasted. “Underwood is alive? If what he’s saying is true, the keys keep recording our information even after we leave Darkwood. How?”

  Maude considers this. “It could be a signal transmitted from an implanted chip in our bodies. One that continues to send data back to its base…”

  “Even decades later?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It became abundantly clear,” Oliver goes on, and I focus my attention back on him, “that my father was—is—still alive. And yet, every article I could find reported that he had died in a car accident. That was the story my mother had told me. But these vital signs could only mean one of two things. They were either fake, or the man had never died.

  “I had what felt like a million questions, from how this technology worked to the people it kept tabs on. I decided not to go to my mother, for a whole host of reasons. Instead, I decided to confront the one person who might actually know the truth about Underwood’s story—his half brother, Albert Seymour. My uncle.”

  “After some sleuthing, I discovered that Seymour lived in Cambridge by his old stomping grounds at Harvard. So, I found a summer film conservatory I could attend in Boston for three weeks. It took some real work to find a program that had a last-minute open slot, but when I did, it was the perfect cover, and it even included housing. My parents were thrilled for me to go.

  “Seymour was an odd fellow—reserved, brilliant, socially awkward. He was surprised when I arrived on his doorstep, but he didn’t turn me away. We quickly formed a bond. Seymour liked me. Or maybe just felt guilty about the many years we’d lost. I suppose I was using my uncle, forging a friendship, taking advantage of our familial ties to gather information. I did attend the film program, but during my breaks, my uncle and I met for lunches. I got to ask many questions, but never let on that I thought my father might still be alive.

  “I began to feel the pressure of time as my film program was supposed to end, and I was due back home. I arrived early for one of our lunches, which was when I overheard a phone conversation that stopped me in my tracks. I was waiting in my uncle’s living room, studying the stacks of scientific tomes, the strange objects on his shelves. He had various skeletons, glass jars with small preserved creatures inside, and other pickled, unidentified remains. Seymour was in the other room getting his keys and wallet when the phone rang. Among his artifacts, he had a landline. He must have assumed I couldn’t hear him.

  “‘I’ve tried to send him home. He isn’t taking my hints,’ Seymour whispered urgently. He went on to tell this person on the other end that I was ‘tough to get rid of.’ That’s how he put it. He wanted me gone, which made me more determined to find out everything he was hiding. I was done not knowing.

  “I watched Seymour carefully, how he locked his brownstone by key code. How he enabled and disabled the alarm. I sneaked into his house two days later. I was used to exploring, when you look for things you don’t know you’re trying to find.

  “I poked around and discovered a locked box, which used the same code as the alarm, and in it, a binder of documents that held every answer I could have ever needed. It was simple, really, once I saw the fake death certificate. There was even a handwritten receipt tallying what cash had been paid for the forgery, the notary to sign it. I have no idea why my uncle saved all this—maybe to use as blackmail against his brother? Who knows. But whatever the reason, it was clear that John Underwood—my father—had faked his own death and reinvented himself as a new man. Augustus Gravelle.”

  Oliver’s hologram pauses. His words linger in the air—that name lingers in the air. Augustus Gravelle. The Similars’ guardian. The man who raised them on Castor Island.

  “It was all in that locked box. I had no doubts about the truth of it. It all made perfect sense. Gravelle’s wards—the six Similars he’d been raising from birth—were created using Seymour’s technology. After all, Underwood, I mean, Gravelle, and Seymour are brothers.

  “I left town without saying goodbye. I had to go home so my mom wouldn’t get suspicious, but then I knew what I had to do. Travel to my father’s private island. Talk to him. Learn the truth about him, and, ultimately, about me. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  The hologram flickers and disappears.

  “Come back,” I protest feebly, but I know there’s no point. That’s all Ollie recorded.

  I think I’m in shock. I turn to Maude, who must be as stunned as I am. Her guardian is Oliver’s father?

  “He died only a few weeks after he recorded this,” I tell her, my voice sounding disconnected, cold. “Oliver, I mean.”

  “I know,” Maude says.

  “Do you think—”

  “He went to see him? To confront Gravelle? Like he said he was planning to?”

  I nod.

  “Maybe.”

  “What did Gravelle do to him?” I whisper. “Hurt him? Threaten him or his family? What?”

  “I don’t know, Emma,” Maude says. “We can’t know…”

  “Tell me,” I say resolutely. “Is your guardian a good man? Is he evil?”

  “I don’t know. Emma, you have to understand—he never let us in. Never let us know him. He is distant. Aloof. He’s intimidating. He has burns across his face…”

  My stomach drops. “Burns? What kind of burns?”

  “There was a car crash when he was younger. It ended in a blaze. He said as much. That’s probably how he faked his death. Everyone must have assumed he burned along with the car.”

  “Did you know who he was? Or suspect?”

  “That he and Underwood were one and the same? Of course not. I had no idea before tonight.”

  I’m flooded with conflicting thoughts and emotions; I can barely get ahold of them. Oliver, his suicide, his note, the hologram. The fact that he knew Gravelle was his biological father.

  “He must have killed himself after he met Gravelle. Which means something that man said or did to him must have been so traumatic, it messed with his head.” I look at my hands. They’re trembling. I feel sick. And yet, I’m so relieved there is some clue to help make sense of Oliver’s death.

  “We don’t know that, Emma,” Maude says, fixing her plum around her wrist. “I wish we did, but…”

  “We have to tell Levi,” I say. “He needs to know that your guardian is his father, that he shares DNA with that man.”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?” I’m sure I’ve misheard her.
/>   “It’s a bad idea,” she says. “One that will only hurt him.”

  “It’s the truth,” I sputter. “Doesn’t he deserve to know where his DNA came from?”

  “That’s arguable. Isn’t it enough he knows that Underwood was his father?”

  “So you’re planning to keep this massive secret from him forever? Let him live his life never realizing that Gravelle is his flesh and blood?”

  “You don’t know what our childhood was like for us,” she responds. “You can’t. I helped you, Emma. Please trust me when I say this is not what Levi needs right now. I will tell him when the time is right.”

  Experiment

  I spend the next week replaying the hologram message over and over in my head. Underwood didn’t die. He reinvented himself as Gravelle—the secretive, self-made billionaire who only made the headlines when the Similars arrived at Darkwood. I think of Oliver’s note. Especially about him. He meant Underwood; he meant Gravelle. I see that now. Beyond that—what it meant for Oliver, how it’s tied to his death—is still a mystery, one I’m compelled to solve.

  I think of the keys, and what the administration—Ransom himself?—has been hiding from Darkwood’s students. They’ve tracked students’ whereabouts for decades. They have our medical records, our current vital signs. It’s a gross invasion of privacy. And they don’t stop taking our data when we graduate.

  Classes pass by in a haze, and I’m eager for spring break. It’s not like my dad will be around, so I’m staying on campus for the week. I figure it will be the perfect opportunity to get back in the research lab, to figure out the building’s security and break in to study the holograms of the past Ten members who knew Seymour and Underwood. My father, Pru’s dad, Ezekiel Choate…all of them. I corner Maude in the dining hall after the last day of midterm exams.