What, you think they got the Flock right on the first try? Meet the ones who didn't quite make the cut.
My name is - was - Wish. I died when I was twelve. They wanted me to lead a Flock and save the world. I wanted to die.
You don't know what it's like, you can't even imagine it. Being created to save them from their sins, like some sick Jesus, like they are their own God. And knowing it. Knowing. If I had been ignorant... maybe things would've gone different.
I grew up in the School. First in a dog crate, like the others, and then I got my own room. I thought I was so special. I thought I was Jesus or God himself. I was so arrogant and so wrong. I looked down on the other experiments, I thought myself better than my brothers and sisters.
You can't blame me, really. The whitecoats spent most of the day telling me that I was, and scientifically, factually, I really was better. No defects. No death date. No unwinding DNA. And I was allowed to fly.
Then I met Starr.
He spelled his name out on paper for me once - actually it was more than once, because he wrote it three dozen times, covering the sheet of paper with thick lines, front and back. He spelled it with two 'R's and he had a sort of obsession with names, especially his own. He thought that names gave us power, power over the whitecoats and over ourselves.
He named me Wish.
Starr insulted me the first time we met, passing in the hall. He was escorted by three Erasers and a whitecoat; I was alone. All the other experiments knew about me, the girl who got to be free. (Only later will I realize that I have never been free. Starr showed me that.)
He called me names and told me I was weak, stupid, a coward and a liar and a fool. No one had ever said anything like that to me. I was surprised, and more than a little confused. I went back to my room and looked up all these new words.
I thought then that I should hate this boy for what he said about me. I didn't hate him.
The next time I met Starr, he was only half-conscious. He'd picked a fight with the Erasers; he was lucky to be alive at all.
"You're an idiot." I observed.
"Yeah," He agreed and then rolled over to spit more blood out onto the floor. "But at least I'm not a liar."
He had a thing about lies, too.
"What do you mean?" I asked, because I couldn't help it. He fascinated me.
"You're a liar and a fool. I hate you. You're not in a cage because they don't need one to keep you. You're not wearing a collar because you're tame and they're not afraid of you."
"You don't make any sense." But he made too much sense and that's why I turned and walked away.
"Think about it." He called to my back. "What's your name?"
I had to go look that word up, too, and realized I didn't really have one.
I did think about it. When the whitecoats smiled at me, for the first time I looked at their eyes. The corners didn't crinkle up, their foreheads stayed smooth. Their smiles were a simple movement of the muscles in the cheeks. On the television a smile was supposed to portray happiness, joy - emotion. Their smiles said nothing but "You are not human" and I hated it.
Once I saw that, I started noticing everything else. I got my own room but I was still experimented on. I never had an Eraser guard and on the few occasions I did it was the runt of the litter. I was allowed to wander but I'd never seen the sun - just the inside of a wind tunnel.
And I watched the experiments in their cages and I saw something that made a part of me burn.
They cried. They raged. They died. These children, who lived in hate and were neatly boxed up and stored for later, they were just like me. I saw myself in every one of them, the dead ones and the ones who would live forever if only to spite the world that hated them right back.
The next time I saw Starr, he said "You're getting smarter." and then he died.
I made several plans - to escape, to free the others, to stop all of this. But none of them could've worked, and I would only have one chance. I wanted them to hurt in their hearts, I wanted to tear open their heads and poke around inside until I found something like the humanity they were supposed to have and then I wanted to take that and twist it.
It took me a while to figure out that these whitecoats were as dead as their experiments.
They had no heart and no feelings left. They might pretend to themselves and to the world that they were full of life but I knew they were hollow. And I thought for a long time that all humans were like that. Hollow, heartless creatures, just taking and hurting and taking some more.
My rage turned to pity. I decided to end their miserable existence, and mine along with theirs.
I know now what Starr was trying to tell me. That I was never free, not until the end. Actions speak louder than words, after all, and I had always allowed myself to be controlled by them. I didn't know any better but that's no excuse. No one had to tell Starr that resistance was the only option - and even as it killed him, Starr never stopped fighting them. I think I fell in love with him.
So my first and last act of freedom was to build a bio-weapon of the like that humans had never seen. It killed everyone in the School but didn't quite manage to escape the walls.
I don't regret my death at all. I died free, like Starr, and I'm happier now.
After Wish, they tried something else. That was me. Wish, they decided, was too obedient to be the one. She didn't have the kind of strength needed for the job. She broke.
I came next.
My name was... well, it was a lot of things. I changed it often. I never let them pin me down; and maybe I was created to be like that, so in a way they won after all. They wanted more rebellion, less docility. They wanted the perfect measure of strength and tempering. They wanted a sword that didn't need a sheath.
I wanted them to die.
My programming went horribly right. I destroyed everything I touched; it was a special sort of power I evolved all on my own. Wish thought they had no hearts, but she was wrong. They left their hearts at home, with their families, or kept them locked up tight in steel and scalpels. With just a touch - not even skin-to-skin - I knew where they kept their greatest fears, desires, shame and hatred. I knew all the buttons to push to drive a man into a rage, to make him melt like putty in my hands, to make him fall in love and to destroy him utterly.
I destroyed them all.
They thought, maybe, I could still be salvaged. They cut my voice out, took away my only weapon.
It did not work.
I never stopped fighting them, not for one second. I did the opposite of whatever they wanted. I was supposed to go through an electrified maze and find the end - I stood there, at the entrance, felt the electricity slowly killing me and I laughed at them. They wanted me to run, prodded me with their shock sticks when I didn't, and when I was down on the floor, muscles convulsing, my face was still split in half with mad, silent laughter. They wanted me to live - I did everything I could to die.
I fought to the bitter end and I have no regrets.
My name was Fire, and I came third. My time was short, as they tried to find the perfect balance. I lived for only a year, and six months of that was spent in an accelerated growth chamber. Physically I was in my teens. Mentally I was an old woman.
They didn't tell me my purpose - they learned from Wish's disaster. I was treated just like all the others, and I died like them too.
Too many experiments. My DNA unwound itself, unexpectedly. They were surprised; I wasn't. All natural creatures have this thing, call it survival instinct or the will to live. It is encoded into their very being, into every cell, into the smallest, most integral part of them. And I didn't have it. I didn't see a point to life - you're born, you live in sorrow and misery and captivity, you die.
I didn't want to die, but then, I didn't want anything. Not food, not freedom, not life. I had no will to live and so I died. I didn't care then and I don't now.
After Fire, they got smarter.
Instead of a blade that didn't need a sheath to not be dangerous - instead of the perfect being - they tried to create a blade with a sheath that worked in it's favor. We were the first Flock.
Our sword, our leader, was Sun, and we loved her. Our world revolved around her; she was perfect in our eyes. She was strong, stubborn, she never gave up and she never backed down. We held her up and waited for the times when she would gift us with a small smile and a praising hand.
Like Icarus, she flew too high.
We can see now that Sun was not perfect. We didn't ground her, like the whitecoats had hoped for. She loved us, in her own way, but it was not enough. She didn't love us enough to stop when we needed her to, and she didn't love us enough to stop her from risking our lives for the mission. It took them a while to realize she wasn't perfect, that she was always a live blade and we couldn't hold her down.
We were terminated. Scrapped. We were pushed aside to make room for version 2.1.
The second Flock - that's us - was better. We held together like a family. We helped each other but we also fought amongst ourselves, not like Sun's. They were too perfect, too docile. They weren't real enough for Sun to form an attachment to. She was too high, they were too low.
Pandora and us, we were on the same level. We treated each other like brothers and sisters, like another part of ourselves, and, eventually, like lovers.
Maybe we were too human; we fell in love with each other. There were four of us, but it turns out that you can love three people at the same time and with the same intensity. We were as close as you can get without being one person.
Of course the whitecoats found out.
They were angry, but they didn't even try to force us apart. Even they could see that this sort of thing couldn't be broken. We were terminated. And they decided something:
Version 2.2, already named MAXIMUM RIDE on her file, had to be untouchable. She had to hover the middle ground. The Flock would pull her down when she slew too high, and lift her up when the weight of her responsibility dragged her down. They would keep her human enough to sympathize and human enough to love, but not so much that she could break. They would be her shackle and her key.
Here's hoping they finally, finally got it right.