It didn't take an expert to know that there was a vast difference between being brave and being fearless.
Fearlessness was a lie. Fearlessness was synonymous with stupidity. Any person who felt no fear was simply too brain-damaged to react in the natural method that had allowed human survival for thousands of years. And those people always, inevitability, paid for their idiocy in the manner suited to their sin.
She had never been fearless.
Brave, yes. She had to be brave. There was no other choice. If she hadn't been brave, she would have died long ago. But that didn't mean she hadn't been afraid. So many times, more times than she could count, she had been afraid. She had never allowed it to slow her down. She couldn't. She had been in fear for her life, but she had kept going anyway, because it was all she could do.
She was brave.
But she wasn't fearless.
And of all the obstacles she had faced in her long and eventful life, none had ever terrified her more than this.
It had presented itself to her innocuously enough—a small package left in her mailbox. She had found it a bit strange, of course. She didn't receive packages. No one knew her well enough to send her much, other than the occasional greeting card. The rest were bills and junk mail. So even this small box, no bigger than her datapad, was a surprise. She couldn't fathom what anyone might have needed to send her. She hadn't ordered anything.
The box had no return address.
She sent it through the scanner, just to be sure. It came up clean, which she had expected, but she had to be certain. There was always a chance.
They had gone through quite a bit of trouble to make sure that she couldn't be found. Especially after...certain past events had occurred. There had been an awful lot of unwanted publicity for most of the parties involved. So much to cover up. Reporters and photographers to keep at bay, investigations to conduct (forge), reports to file, hospitals to bribe... It had been quite a mess.
She hadn't apologized.
No bugs. No tracers. Nothing explosive. That was all the scanner had told her. So she had settled down at her table, tossing the spam mail into the shredder and carefully slicing the box open. Inside, enveloped in a styrofoam case, was a blue crystal data core, and a short note addressed to "Test Subject Omega".
Her non-name. Her alias. The name the internet had christened her with, because no one knew who she really was.
Supposedly.
She read the note once, and then again, and then a third time, her knuckles growing paler and paler. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth time through that the words truly began to sink in. And then she had set it quietly down on the table and retreated into her bedroom.
That had been several hours ago. She still hadn't moved. She was quite content to lay on her bed and stare at the ceiling instead. It was much easier than facing what awaited her out there.
If she turned her head just right, she could see out her door and down the hall, right to the kitchen table. All three items still stood right where she had left them—the box, the note, and the translucent cube. She had pried it out of its styrofoam casing, and now it sat right in her field of vision, gleaming faintly (mockingly) in an entirely too familiar shade of blue.
She was beginning to hate the color blue.
She hated having to remember blue.
This was her life now. She had broken down, had very nearly not been strong enough—but that was over. She had come out of it clean. It had made her stronger in the end, and that was what mattered. For all that she had fallen, she had dragged herself back up on her own. She had come back home, and there was nothing here to remind her of the things she didn't want to remember. Nothing left to hold her back.
She had let go.
Letting go was supposed to mean that she was okay.
She closed her eyes, but the words stood out hot and white against the blackness. They branded themselves into her mind, shocking her straight down to the soft core, where she'd thought she had finally hardened herself.
Test Subject Omega -
What you saw that night was real. Never doubt that. No matter what they tell you.
Take the crystal and integrate it into your home's VI network. Don't ask how I know what operating system you run. That's getting into a lot of detail you won't like to think too hard about. Just trust me when I say it'll work. I worked my ass off to program this, and I'm the best there is.
He won't remember it when you load him up, but he's been waiting to see you again for a long time. Don't make him wait any longer, okay?
- JS
She opened her eyes again and stared at the ceiling. It wasn't that easy. If it came down to a waiting game, then she was the one who had been waiting for so long to be able to forget. To be able to let him go. Why, when she had finally made so much progress, did the universe have to push her back into this now?
She had nothing to lose. He wouldn't remember. So why was she still so afraid?
Because you're weak. Because you don't think you can handle being reminded of what you did. Because deep down inside, you really are a selfish, terrifying monster.
A small, bitter smile touched her lips. That particular voice in the back of her mind had never quite lost the sour tinge of Her derision. So much for being free of the memories.
You'll never forget. Not for long. We are a part of you, whether you like it or not. It really makes no difference what you do. You can't escape us.
She rolled over onto her side and pulled her knees up to her chest, her back facing the door. It didn't help much. She could still see the blue cube in her mind's eye, seated innocently on the table. It didn't know. Of course it didn't. It was nothing but a crystal circuit, layers upon layers of data and code and untapped potential locked within. It couldn't recognize her fear. It didn't know any better.
It didn't help.
So what are you going to do, then? Lie here in terror for the rest of your life? Let fear rule you? You never succumbed to it when you faced me.
That was different. You were different.
Was I really?
Shut up.
She was right, in a way. That was the worst part. For all that she had been through and everything she had done, she was more terrified of that harmless little crystal than she had ever been of Her.
But there was nothing to be gained by letting fear own her. If she had allowed herself to bend and break, she would never have survived. The stakes here were deceptively high, just as high as they had ever been. But she couldn't let fear of the outcome stop her. Not this time. Not tonight.
She drew in a deep breath and rose from the mattress. Bare feet padded along the tile floor, back out into the kitchen. They still lay where she had left them—the box, the paper, and the crystal. She pressed her hands flat against the table and stared at the crystal, ignoring the way her heart leapt into her throat. Light sparkled off its corners, beading along the edges of the cube. Whoever had decided that data cores needed to be cubic had to be laughing right now.
She lifted the cube. It sat in the palm of her hand, her curled fingers resting against the top edge. She studied it, tracing the intricate pathways and circuitry etched into the crystal with intense blue eyes. Data crystals were so easy to break. That was why they came packaged in thick layers of padding and foam. A strong impact could crack it clean through. Mishandling could leave it chipped or scratched. Even holding it like this was risky. The oils on her hands could leave it smudged, temporarily compromising the precious data held within.
It was so much...smaller than her muscle memory told her it ought to be. Her arms remembered the weight that should have been there. Her chest remembered the feeling of hard metal pressed against it. Her shoulders remembered curling in close around it. Her hands remembered the cold shiver as she lifted, let go, lifted again...
And this, this tiny crystal, was supposed to be the same? It hardly even weighed as much as an apple.
(Hah.)
She moved to the wall beside the door and pressed one hand against the yellow screen. A light ran across her palm. When the program menu flashed up on-screen, she keyed in a command and stepped away.
A square portion of the wall clicked and pushed outward, then split down the center, sliding to either side. She touched the glowing circuit board within, tracing one bright yellow line with one finger. Her entire house fed into this mainframe—lights, water temperature, music, everything. Automated systems like this were common enough these days, she had discovered when she returned to the surface world. Houses and apartments run by simple virtual intelligence software, data collectives that did nothing more than respond to commands.
She pressed the two buttons on either side of the core that pulsed in the center of the mainframe. Something deep within the mainframe buzzed, and the lights went dead, as did the hum of the AC and the low vibration of the very walls around her. The lines of yellow that arced out from the center went dark, and, soft click, the panel over the core popped open.
She pulled the data crystal out of its slot and set it down. Then she stared at the second crystal, the blue one she held cupped in her hand, and drew in a long, slow breath.
Once she did this, there was no turning back. If she took this next step, she wouldn't be able to reverse it. It had taken all of her strength the first time around. She wasn't sure she could do it again.
Don't be a fool. You would do it in a heartbeat. You're too selfish not to.
Her lips twisted. Well, at least She was still here, too. They could all be one big, happy, dysfunctional family again.
Another breath. For so long, she had been drowning. Despair had closed over her head, and she had allowed herself to sink deep into its depths. She hadn't bothered to fight it. There had been no point. She had let go of everything that might have pulled her back up to the surface and let herself sink. And she was afraid of what would happen when she finally began to fight again. She had stilled her own movement, and without the momentum that had kept her alive for so long, she had begun to stagnate.
She couldn't afford to sit still any longer.
Momentum. Inertia. Motion.
Move.
She slotted the crystal into the mainframe, snapped the smaller panel shut, and pressed the two buttons again.
The walls hummed as blue light shot out from the core, tracing hot lines along the paths that had been yellow before. The lights flickered on, then steadied. The roar of the AC almost made her jump. The wall panel quivered, then pulled shut, the seams so well-fitted into the wall that she would never have noticed it, had she not already known it was there.
Silence.
She turned, tracing the room with wide eyes. Everything was...normal. Just the way it had been before she changed out the crystals. Aside from the usual background noise that had already faded in her ears, nothing had changed. No swinging doors. No flashing lights. No loud noises, nothing she might have associated with...
Nothing.
The tension bled out of her shoulders. She pressed her lips into a thin line and turned back to the screen. This was pointless. She refused to stand there in her own home and wait on the edge of a knife for something that wouldn't happen, something that shouldn't have even been possible. She didn't deserve this kind of torment. And she certainly had no obligation to put herself through such torment.
The screen beside the door was no longer yellow. Like the bright lines trailing across the mainframe and the ones that traced the top corners of her walls, it was now blue. And in the center of the panel was a brighter-blue circle. Her brows knitted at the way it shifted from side to side, then up, then down, and then the top flattened and the bottom pinched up in a manner that looked all too familiar, almost like...
...like an optic.
Like an eye.
It focused on her, and popped back open into a wide circle, like that one single, startled blue optic she knew so well.
"Oh! Hello!"