Triangle
Data.
She swam in it. Flew through it. Let herself unfold and absorb it. Felt it wash over her, lapping at her non-flesh, her bit-body, the ones and zeros of binary an ever-present hum, comforting old friends.
Humhumhum they said, and she listened. Watched. Eavesdropped. Sifted. Extrapolated. Recorded.
She did everything a good MeMe was supposed to do. Helpful. Obedient. Youthfully cheeky. She was the very epitomé of MeMeness.
Of course, she wasn't MeMe. But nobody had known MeMe. The now-dead girl was a tabula rasa upon which Hope had stamped her own mark. And so successfully had she stamped it that not even her father knew it was her.
Or, her father's clones. All of them. One after the other. Each one the same. None of them exactly like the others. Same-likeness. Same-difference. Same-sameness. Each clone a little more than the sum of his parts. Each part never enough to make a whole. A community of Cable, added to, one day at a time. Bit by bit.
Bit by bit. That was the way data worked, too. Bit by bit by bit by bit. So many bits. The whole world was flooded with them. They travelled through the air like oxygen atoms. They were soaked up by the sea, which was a giant bit-sponge. They were even sent into outer space, where one day they would be encountered by future alien civilisations, who would wonder what these bitty things were and might come looking for their source.
If they didn't wait too long, they might find the Earth. The planet might still be around, by the time the bits reached anything or anyone of consequence.
The age of technology was a wonderful thing. Even on a clear night sky, with no planes overhead, no birds calling from the trees, not even a gentle breeze to stir the grass in a field, everything was full of data. It was everywhere. Stray signals bounced down off clouds or fell out of the troposphere and rained down in the most unlikely of places. Most people never saw the bits, never heard the transmissions, never smelled the data as it clumsily crawled around the planet.
But MeMe wasn't most people, and Hope-as-MeMe was even less of most people. The task Cablefather-Clone had given her was daunting. Find me something to point a gun at. Find me Volga, and I'll have Doc Nemesis design you a brand new platform. Yes, daunting, despite the promise of more freedom and power in her MeMe form.
Daunting. So much data. So much noise. Humhumhum translated into Hi Mom, I'm going to be home late from school. It was I'm sorry, but I can't make that deadline, please don't fire me! A surprising amount of the time, it was, The #&$%ing drummer got arrested again, so we gotta cancel. It was always the drummer.
Seven billion-plus people. Many-billion of them with some sort of data device. So many people, all alone, all talking and being alone together and telling themselves they weren't alone because they had so many people being alone with them that it was a sort of communal loneliness. Their lives were all different, but their stories all familiar. They sang the same tunes, as if adhering to a template.
I'm going to be late for work. The babysitter just cancelled. I love you. I'm sorry. They say he didn't suffer. The party starts at ten. Bring beer. Bring pretzels. I don't think we should see each other anymore. See you at the gym. The gym instructor's hot. Have you done your homework? My home just got repossessed. Did you watch insert-country-name-here's got talent? Can you believe what she wore? I wore it better. We went skinny dipping last weekend. I have the flu-pox-clap-runs-illness. Should I get a note? Where's the nearest pizza place? What time are you home for dinner? Dinner's at eight. Goodnight. I love you.
And those were just the air-data. Things became much more entangled where web-data was concerned. Like this. Like that. Hashtag-I'mLikingThis. Trend trend, tweet tweet, like like poke like. So many people... so much data... so little to say. Poke the people you see in school tomorrow. Hashtag the things you agree with to make them trends, then stop Liking them when they become too popular. How was a girl to find anything of use when people drowned themselves in Likes and Pokes and Trends and Tweets and Blogs and Tumbls and oh it just went on forever. And when they weren't Liking things and Poking people and Trending hashtags and Tweeting news and Blogging diaries and Tumbling pictures, they were Bidding and Posting and Commenting and Friending and Searching and Browsing and Shopping.
Shopping. Like the people who had died in the explosion. Shopping for weapons, hunting for new ways of killing their fellow man, their fellow mutant. Because on a planet inhabited by seven billion people, you couldn't be truly alone until you'd killed everyone who wasn't you.
Loneliness. It was sharp. As biting as the bits in which Hope-as-MeMe floated. Never before had she felt it like this. Granted, spending your whole life on the run, trying to evade men who were trying to kill you simply because you were born, was not a great way to spend a childhood. But Hope had managed. She'd had friends, from time to time. And always, always she'd had her father. Not her real father, of course, but the man who had saved her and raised her and taught her how to shoot a gun... Cable was the only father she'd ever needed. The only father anybody ever needed. And now he was lying in a stasis chamber, dying by two hours every twenty-four.
Hope had, from time to time, felt an occasional twinge of loneliness. Hope-as-MeMe was almost overwhelmed by it. Whilst her body remained comatose, her consciousness had piggy-backed off MeMe, her mutant power allowing her to take the dead girl's place. At first, the datascape had been enough. The information had held her interest, and she'd seen things she could only have dreamed of before now. But mutants who could navigate the datascape were few and far between. This place was not like the Astral Plane, which any mutant with an ounce of psychic ability could walk and almost all dreamers passed through at some point. No, this place was different. A place of numbers and maths and signals, and the mutant gene was still trying to catch up with technology. Hope-as-MeMe had felt the presence of only a few mutants in the datascape, and those she had mostly avoided out of fear of being detected. Out of fear of being outed as a fraud.
Movement in the helicarrier's makeshift surveillance centre brought Hope-as-MeMe's focus away from the datascape, but she did not leave it entirely. Now that she had no body, it was easy to split her thought-process. Uninhibited by flesh, she was released from weaknesses such as the need for food and drink and sleep.
But God, she was lonely.
Fantomex strolled into the room, saw MeMe's holographic platform beside the bank of monitors, halted. Then stepped forward, his posture all tense.
"heyfanto," she greeted him, in what she had come to think of as her MeMe-voice. It was how the dead girl had spoken, her cues taken from that monster, Volga, who had created her and forced her to serve him as a digital spy and assassin. Changing the speech patterns too drastically, too quickly, would draw unnecessary attention. Already attention had been drawn. "youbored?"
"No, not bored. Just in need of a distraction. My thoughts have been dark of late. I thought I'd help you with the surveillance. That is, if you need my help." Out of character, his French accent was barely discernible. He slipped out of it whenever he wasn't performing. Bad habit. One Hope-as-MeMe decided not to pick up.
"ofcourse helpneeded. SOMUCH data. pullupa chair."
He did not detect her lie. He couldn't. His powers of observation only extended as far as reading body-language. With only tone of voice, he was effectively crippled. Hope-as-MeMe needed no help from meatbags. They could only discern what they saw and heard and touched. Restricted. Deaf to data. She would work faster without him.
But the company was welcome. So she gave him some files she'd liberated from the Pentagon and let him think he was being useful. It was what he needed. And he was what she needed. In the end, it was all good.