Chapter 9
After what Princess had described earlier, level 3 didn't turn out to be what Jason had expected. There were no dank, damp corridors, no machinery, no sense of abandonment. Instead, what they discovered was an empty, sterile corridor, lined with a handful of non-descript doors. There were no signs of anyone about, and the area was dark, illuminated only by the soft blue of emergency lighting.
"This definitely isn't a ballast tank." Princess stated the obvious, her head swiveling as she tried to determine which way to go.
"There it is." Jason pointed as his eyes fell on the number he had been half-hoping they wouldn't find.
"326." Princess whispered, running her fingertips lightly across the numbers painted on the wall. Not surprisingly, the door to the laboratory was locked, but it was only a matter of seconds before Princess was able to convince it to open. Apparently, the hidden location of this room was assumed to be sufficient security, as no handprint or eye scan was required for entrance.
The chamber they entered was set up in a hub-and-spoke pattern, with the center of the hub occupied by a series of control panels and monitors, all of them blinking and humming with the air of equipment that saw constant operation. As with the outside corridor, the room was dark, with only the blue emergency lighting. There were 6 evenly-spaced alcoves jutting off of the main hub, one of them containing the small entrance area in which Jason and Princess were standing.
They stood still for a moment, their eyes taking in the array of unknown technology in front of them, before Jason's natural impatience snapped him out of it. He stepped out into the hub, ignoring the machinery there and moving over to the small alcove on the left.
"Tiny!" he gasped, upon seeing what lay within.
"What happened to him?" Princess asked, placing her hands on the luminous glass tank in front of them. The pilot was floating naked within a container filled with liquid, identical to the one they had seen in Keyop's room at the medical center a couple of weeks before. Since the return of the youngest G-Force member to the team, Jason had almost forgotten how creepy the entire thing had been, but now those nightmares came back to him in a cold rush.
"He looks fine." Jason noted shakily, his eyes scanning Tiny's body for any sign of injury.
"He's lost weight." Princess observed. " And he's not breathing. Just like Keyop." Her hands trembled, and Jason could see that she was starting to lose it.
"It's okay." he reassured her, taking her hand in his, squeezing it gently and encouraging it to be still. He felt her relax slightly, and she looked at him with a questioning gaze.
"Whatever's wrong with him, they'll fix it." He said the first thing that came to his mind. "Just like they did with Keyop."
"Sure." Princess nodded, yet there was little confidence in her response. They backed away quietly from the tank, moving into the next alcove. But when they saw what was in there, Princess cried out, clutching at Jason for support.
"No!" she sobbed. "Not again!"
But it was. Keyop was in this tank, looking exactly as he had in the medical center. Unfortunately, this included missing the lower portion of his right leg.
"Did his body reject the new leg?" Jason wondered aloud, attempting to keep a firm rein on his fears. "Maybe they're replacing it?"
"I thought it had been regenerated onto his body." Princess sobbed. "I've been avoiding him and Tiny, not wanting to speak to anyone, and now, to know that they've both been going through this, all alone! They must feel so abandoned!"
"They're not awake." Jason pointed out. "They're not feeling anything." Yet he could understand what Princess was saying. To know that the friends he had eschewed these past few days had been down here all along, fighting for their lives, made him feel like a louse.
"Oh, Keyop." Princess sighed, tears running down her face. "I'm so sorry! I didn't know."
"I don't think they would have let you down here, even if you had known." Jason reminded her. "It's not like we were invited to be in this place."
"We can't just leave them!" Princess insisted.
"What else can we do?" Jason asked her. "If they're injured, here they're receiving help. What we can do is confront the Chief, and ensure that we get to visit them, to help them through their recoveries." Jason sagged with relief as Princess nodded, understanding the truth in his words.
"Come on, let's get out of here." he suggested. Something inside of him whispered that he really didn't want to see what else was in this disturbing laboratory, and he was all too willing to follow that instinct.
"No." Princess shook her head. "It took a lot for us to come down here, and I want to know what's in here. I need to know."
"Okay." he reluctantly agreed, taking her hand in his once more. Outwardly, he projected his usual confidence, but inside, he was just as glad for the human contact as she.
They left Keyop's alcove, then turned the corner to look into the next one. What they saw there made Jason's blood run cold, and he gripped Princess' hand tightly, to convince himself that she was really there, standing next to him.
That she was standing next to him, and not floating in the tank in front of him.
"But I'm not -!" Princess' strangled cry tore at Jason's heart, yet all he could do was swivel his head, staring both at her, and at the woman floating in the tank: a woman who looked exactly like Princess.
"It's not me." Princess stated what should have been obvious, yet in this case clearly wasn't. She kept at least a meter's distance between herself and the tank, refusing to touch it, as she had the other two.
"That's not you," Jason repeated slowly, his mind working furiously to come up with an explanation for this nightmare, "so does that mean that the people we just saw weren't Tiny and Keyop?"
"Maybe." Princess replied, her face taking on a modicum of color for the first time since they had entered the room. "Do you think that this could be the 326 plan?"
"Us?" Jason asked, thinking it over. "We're the 326 plan? But not us."
"You said, 'us'." Princess realized. "That means that you would also -"
Before she had finished speaking, they had dashed out of the alcove and into the next one, discovering what they both knew had to be there, but what Jason had desperately hoped did not exist.
He was floating in a clear tank, just like the others: naked and not breathing, but encased in a viscous liquid.
"That's not me." He unconsciously repeated Princess' words of a moment before. He whispered them again to himself, using them as a link to his identity, to his individuality. There was only one Jason Anderson. There could only be one Jason Anderson. And it was he.
Not that thing in there.
This time it was Princess squeezing his hand, bringing him back to reality. He grabbed at the lifeline she offered, desperate to believe that he was alive, that he existed, and that there was no other in his place.
"Is there another G-Force Team?" Princess asked him. "One who could fight Spectra if we were gone? Or one who could present themselves at the end of Zoltar's 30 days?"
For a moment he grabbed wildly at the idea, elated by the thought that they could somehow get out of this mess alive, with the time to prepare a counter-plan to Zoltar's demand for surrender. But then reality crashed in on him, and he realized that it would never work.
"That Keyop has no leg." He hooked his thumb back at the second alcove they had entered. "Zoltar wouldn't buy it." It took him a moment to realize that he had already disassociated the things they were seeing in these laboratory tanks with the people he knew.
"He knows Keyop was hit in the leg, but he doesn't know that the scientists here were able to regrow it." Princess argued. "It could work."
"Maybe." A flicker of hope began to grow inside of Jason. It was slim, and he did his best to squelch it, yet it stubbornly remained.
"Can these things even walk?" Jason asked. "Can they talk? Those robot doubles the Chief had made before weren't able to fool anyone if they opened their mouths."
"I don't know." Princess stepped closer to the tank, peering closely at the Jason-thing. "He looks like you. I mean, if I didn't know better, I'd say he was you." She glanced back at Jason, and he fought to keep himself from shaking.
"Don't do that." he whispered, the words slipping involuntarily from his lips.
"Do what?" she asked, looking back at the doppelganger.
"Compare us." he answered, unable to look at the tank. "Look at us like we're the same. That's not me."
"I know it's not you, Jason." Princess began, but Jason interrupted her.
"Why don't we go look at her, then?" he asked, pointing at the alcove to their left, where the Princess-thing lay. "Compare her to you. See how much you two are alike."
"I get your point." Princess muttered, after a brief moment of shock at his suggestion. "Okay, why don't you go look at her, and I'll look at him?" She pointed at the Jason-thing.
"Uh, okay." Jason didn't like that idea either, but it was better than looking at his own double. He backed away slowly, Princess watching him the entire time. She turned back to the Jason-thing just as he moved out of sight of her.
Swallowing nervously, Jason forced himself to stare at the Princess-thing. He discovered that it didn't bother him nearly so much as looking at the Jason-thing. At least, not as long as he didn't think about what Princess was doing in the alcove next to him.
Carefully, he examined the woman's face, examining its every angle and curve. Surprisingly, he found that he was easily able to picture the real Princess in his mind, such that he was able to compare every feature in minute detail. He didn't realize how much time he had spent unconsciously memorizing Princess' face. From what he could tell, there was no difference between the two.
Their hair was similar as well, the same color and heaviness, although this Princess' hair was slightly longer. In the liquid it was difficult to tell, but it also seemed to have the waves and slight curl of the real Princess' hair.
Jason had a little more difficulty when it came to the rest of Princess' body, as he wasn't used to seeing certain parts of her exposed. While he saw her arms and legs bared plenty in her G-Force uniform, her chest, her torso, and other parts - Jason flushed when his eyes came to those other parts - were entirely new to him. Something inside of him stirred. He knew this wasn't Princess, but he couldn't help recalling all of those times when he had been younger, fantasizing about what Princess looked like underneath her clothes. And this woman, as far as he could tell, was her exact double. His eyes roamed guiltily, yet he found he was unable to stop himself from committing the sight to memory.
"Uh, Jason?" Princess called over to him.
"Yeah?" he croaked, hoping that she didn't realize what he was doing.
"Um, do you have a mole?" she asked shyly, causing his head to jerk up. He did have a mole, but it was located -
"Let me see." He moved swiftly over to the other alcove, only to find Princess turning bright red the moment she saw him. Forcing himself not to look at the Jason-thing's face, he glanced at the upper thighs.
"Yeah." he confirmed. "It looks like mine."
"So you have a mole there." Princess' eyes involuntarily swung to the fly of his jeans, then back toward the Jason-thing.
"Were you checking me out?" he teased, intending the question as a joke. Yet he felt his throat clench as her deepening blush gave him an answer he hadn't been expecting.
"That's what we're supposed to be doing, right?" she stammered.
"So did you find anything else?" he asked, taking pity on her and attempting to change the subject.
"He doesn't have your scars." Princess said in a rush.
"My scars?"
"The one on your jaw, and the little one on your left hand." she explained. Jason stared at his hand, then lifted it up to touch his face. The scars Princess mentioned were leftovers of the violent attack that had killed his parents when he had been just a boy. They had faded to such a pale color that often he didn't notice them anymore. Or perhaps that was just because he tried not to be aware of them, not wanting to recall their origin. Yet he never realized that Princess had noticed them.
"Did you see anything different about her?" Princess was asking.
"Uh, her hair is longer." Jason replied hastily. "That's about it."
"I guess they're pretty similar, then." she summarized. "But there's one other thing."
"What?" He didn't like the ominous tone her voice had taken.
"Down there." she pointed at the underside of the Jason-thing's head. Not quite understanding what she was talking about Jason walked over, doing his best to avoid looking at the doppelganger's face. Carefully, he crouched down, angling his view so that he could look at the back of the Jason-thing's head.
Or what should have been the back of his head. A gaping wound exposed a hole in his skull, the brain tissue beneath clearly visible. Yet even so, it didn't look quite right.
"Part of the skull and some of the brain tissue is missing." Princess whispered. "And I got to thinking. What happened last year when you had those dizzy spells and headaches?"
"It was an implant malfunction." Jason backed away from the tank, keeping his eyes away from its occupant. "They had to open up my head and adjust some things, but after that everything was okay. I recovered."
"What if that wasn't everything they did?" Princess asked. "What if they had to replace something?"
"Something?" Jason frowned. "Like brain tissue?"
Princess nodded slowly.
"The doctors did say something about permanent brain damage." he recalled. "But I was half under at the time; I think they thought I was completely out of it. At the time I thought they were talking about the risks of the surgery, of opening up my head." He looked down at the Jason-thing, for the first time staring it full in the face.
"Did you donate some brain tissue to me?" he asked the floating body. Naturally, it didn't respond.
"Just like the Keyop in the tank back there donated a leg to our Keyop." Princess finished the thought. "Maybe that's what these things are, Jason."
"Spare body parts?" Jason frowned. "To be brought out when needed?"
"Is it really that far-fetched an idea?" Princess asked him. "Being a member of G-Force is a dangerous job."
"I suppose you're right." Jason admitted. "But still, the idea of these things here, just waiting for one of us to get injured-"
His head snapped up, staring at Princess in shock. His thoughts were mirrored across her face, and she whispered almost imperceptibly.
"Mark."
Jason rose to a stand, moving forward, Princess accompanying him at his side. Together they walked quickly to the last alcove: the only one they had not yet examined.
It was empty.
