Different And The Same
Chapter 4: My Own Path
"No. You are not me, 493."
"Ben," he corrected."
"You'll always be 493 to me," I snapped. "Don't bother trying to change what I'm used to calling you."
"You're an X5," he countered. "You're part of the most adaptable X-series ever created. So learn. Alec."
"What're you doing here?"
"Wanted to see you," he shrugged, stepping closer to me.
I took a step back, then remembered that the piano was still behind me. When I turned to look though, it was gone. The bench too.
"You wanted to see me?" I asked. "Right. This coming from the person who decided to leave me in that hellhole when we were nine."
"I would've taken you with me if we'd had the time to get to your block!"
I glared at him.
"Bullshit, 493."
"Why won't you believe me?"
"You try it!! First you left me back there, then you died and left me even more alone than you already had, and then you got me into Psy Obs! Do you know that?! Half a year with those goddamned scientists! All you've ever done with your damned life is-"
"Leave you behind," he cut me off. "I know. I'm sorry."
I was breathing hard after that outburst. I sat down, drew up my knees and folded my arms across them.
493 sat down in front of me, crossing his legs beneath him.
"494?" I looked up when he said my designation again. "When did you learn to do that?"
"Play the piano?"
"No. You're crying."
Then I felt the cold streak on my left cheek. I brushed it away and stared at the wetness on my fingers.
'Crying is a sign of weakness! Emotion is weakness! Get to your feet, 494!'
"I didn't learn," I answered. That was true. The first time, it had just…happened. "The first time I remember doing it was-"
' "Where's 493?" I asked.
'He hit me.
'I started crying.'
"Was when I was three," I finished.
"Really? I missed you then too."
I looked at his face. He was leaning slightly forward, his elbows resting on the sides of his bent knees, and his hands dangling about an inch above the ground.
I don't know why I did it, but I suddenly wanted to touch him.
I needed to know that he was really here.
Maybe what I really wanted to know was that he wouldn't leave me again.
I reached out one hand. 493 watched me curiously, not understanding what I was trying to do. When it became clear that I was reaching in his direction though, he extended one hand to me.
Our hands met in the middle.
But they didn't touch.
My hand just went through his.
And I felt…nothing.
"No…" I whispered. "No…"
This wasn't fair.
493 was sitting right in front of me, but we couldn't even touch.
This. Wasn't. Fair!
"I can't touch you," I babbled, lowering my hand. "I can't-"
"Don't cry, 494."
"I can't touch you!! Don't you understand?!"
" 'Course I do. I understand my little brother better than anyone else, after all."
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.
"It's a bit symbolic, isn't it?" 493 suddenly said.
"What is?"
"The number 493 comes before 494…I was born first. I'm older than you. But the 'A' in Alec comes before the 'B' in Ben. Maybe 'cause you'll live to be older than me."
I looked up and blinked.
493 had always had a funny way of looking at things.
"Play a game with me, 494?" he asked in a whisper.
He lifted his hand, two fingers raised.
I stared at his hand. It was trembling very slightly. His eyes were shining.
Just like when we were two years old.
'Let's play a game, 494.'
"I remember this game," I said softly, still watching his two fingers.
" 'Course you do. We played it all the time in the nursery, remember?"
I remembered. I never forgot anything.
I remembered the first time that we played the game.
'493 and I sat on his cot again, playing what he'd taught me two days ago. 493 was good at thinking of new things.
One of the ladies who taught us things came up to us.
"What're you doing?" she asked, smiling.
"Playing," we answered.
"What game is it?" she asked.
493 and I stopped playing.
"What's a game?" 493 asked.
"Well, it's what you were playing just now." '
"Two fingers. You're feeling two things," I stated.
He nodded, happy that I still knew how to play his game.
"You're happy."
One of his fingers curled out of sight.
One finger left. I still had to guess the other feeling.
I stared at him.
"Love?" I asked.
The other finger curled out of sight and he lowered his hand.
"That night, when you got back from Psy Obs, I heard your question, 494. I did love you. Still do."
I said nothing, and held up three fingers.
"Love. Happiness," he said confidently. I lowered two fingers.
He stared at my remaining one finger for a while.
"You're sad?" he asked.
I let my hand fall.
"Why?" he persisted, sounding confused.
"I can't touch you anymore. I can't call you and know that you'll answer. I can't see you-"
"Yes you can. We look exactly the same, 494. Have you tried a mirror? I'm in there somewhere."
" I mean you, 493! I don't want to look in a mirror and try to see you in me; I want to see you! I've wanted to see you ever since they separated us. That's 16 years, 493. And now that I can see you, I can't touch you. It's just not fair." I held my head in my hands. "We've always been on different sides, right from the night when you and the others ran. We're almost like the same person…but we've always been on different sides of the fence."
"That's Manticore's fault," he snapped. "They separated us in the first place." He sighed. "I thought about it sometimes…maybe, if I'd taken you with us, taken you away with me, maybe I wouldn't have needed the Blue Lady."
"What Blue Lady?"
"She watched over us. Or she tried to, I think. My group of X5s believed that she'd protect us if we had enough faith in her. But now, I think the kind of protection that we were wanted was different from the protection that she had to offer. She could provide a sense of comfort, she could make you feel protected, but we wanted physical protection. We wanted someone who would stop the officers from hitting us; we wanted someone who would stop the officers from taking us away; we wanted someone who would keep us safe."
"So…why did you need her after you left, then?"
He looked down, away from my gaze.
"When we were in the world Outside, I found that I didn't have any…purpose." He smiled wryly. "Sadly, Manticore gave me a purpose when I was back there. At least I knew what I was. I knew that I was a soldier. But in the world Outside, nobody seemed to understand what Manticore had taught us. So I just clung on to the only identity that I knew I had."
"You were lost."
"Yeah." Another rueful smile. "Just like how you felt when you were watching Manticore burn. If I'd brought you out of Manticore with me, maybe I would've had someone to turn to when the world made no sense."
Silence.
"The Good Place," I said, and he looked up. "Are you there now?"
"I'm…not sure. But it's better than Manticore."
Did you…really believe everything that you said about the Good Place?"
He nodded slowly.
"I did. I believed that there was somewhere that we could be, where we'd be happy. It started on the night when Sen came back. She'd been away for three days, and we were all worried; Zack and Tinga especially. She was detained for disciplinary action," he explained. "That night, the officers just opened the door of our barracks and pushed her in. she sprawled out on the floor, and none of us dared to move from our beds until we could no longer hear the officers' boots out in the corridor. After that, all of us swarmed around her. She was a lot thinner than I remembered, and she had bruises all over her.
"Tinga held her, and Zack looked angry and…resigned at the same time. I guess he was mad that they beat her up, but he knew that she had it coming when she disobeyed orders. Sen slept in the bed next to mine…when we escaped back in '09, she was one of those that were killed. That night, when all of us got back into bed, she wanted me to sit with her until she fell asleep."
'What did they do to you, Sen?'
'Hurt. They put me in a very bad place. I could hear the Nomlies screaming, Ben. They were in that bad place too.'
'You shouldn't disobey orders.'
'I know. I'll be a good soldier now, Ben, I will.'
"We were quiet for a while. Then she asked the question that started it all."
'Ben? If bad soldiers go to that bad place, then do good soldiers go to a good place?'
'I don't know…but there should be. A good place…for the best soldiers.'
'Do they punish soldiers there?'
'No. The best soldiers never get punished. No one ever gets punished there.'
'Then no one yells at you?'
'No, Max. No one yells.'
'So no one disappears?'
'No one disappears, Jondy.'
"All of us were sitting up, helping to build a fantasy that we could hold on to; building a place that had everything that we wanted, but Manticore couldn't give. That's how the Good Place began," he finished.
"You all had names," I observed.
"Yeah. We gave them to each other."
I shifted a little and lay down on the floor. The cold, familiar floor of Manticore's nursery.
I remembered 493's and my quiet feet padding across this floor when we were three.
"49-…Ben, could you tell me about your Good Place?"
I caught his smile as he lay down next to me and put his hands behind his head.
"Sure. I've always wanted to tell you."
***
I woke up. From the look of the sky, it seemed like it was almost evening.
Alec was still asleep. Funny how a seizure makes a genetically enhanced human just as vulnerable as any normal human.
Ouch. I'd been sitting in the same position for too long. Had to stretch.
I shifted Alec's head to the pillow and stood up, arching my spine backwards and letting loose a yawn.
My mouth snapped shut in mid-yawn when I saw it.
There was a small card in Alec's hand.
One that I recognised far too well.
A picture of the Blue Lady.
For some reason, it scared me.
Psy Obs might have cleared Alec, but he hadn't known about the Blue Lady then…what if Alec became a repeat of Ben?
I removed the card from his hand and walked to the far end of the room.
Standing with my back towards him, I stared at the card.
I remembered the janitor who'd given Jack the card.
Jack had believed Ben…he'd believed that the Blue Lady had saved him.
We'd all believed that the Blue Lady would protect us.
And when the officers took Jack away…Ben had taken it the hardest.
I remembered the searchlights scanning past the window that I was looking out of.
I was waiting for Ben to come back with an answer. To tell us why the Blue Lady had let Jack be taken away. Ben always had answers.
I heard his angry shout from the rooftop.
"Why?! What did we do wrong?! We believe in you!!"
We believed…we did…we had.
After that, we gave up on her. The officers dismantled our altar to her, anyway.
We stopped believing in her, and took things into our own hands.
We escaped.
But now…maybe the rest of us had stopped believing, but Ben had still believed; we just hadn't known it.
We hadn't known…until it was too late.
We couldn't save Ben from himself.
"Max."
I turned and saw Alec standing a little way behind me.
"What're you doing out of bed?" I asked, frowning.
He smiled, and stepped to one side. And behind him, I saw…Alec. Still asleep.
"Look, I don't know how exactly to say this, but…I'm not Alec."
I stared.
What the hell…
"Ben?"
He smiled again.
All right, it had to be Ben. Alec never smiled. He always grinned or smirked, but never-…very seldom did he smile.
I felt the sharp edges of the card in my hand.
"You gave Alec the picture of the Blue Lady?"
He nodded.
"Are you nuts? You want him to turn out like you?"
"I just wanted to give him something! Other than that picture, the only other things that I owned were weapons, Maxie; would you rather I gave him a gun?!"
To tell the truth, a gun sounded hell of a lot better to me.
"Why're you back here, anyway?" I asked.
He turned to look at Alec.
"I needed to say sorry," he said quietly, so softly that I almost didn't hear it.
"Sorry for what?" I asked as I stepped nearer to him.
"I had to say sorry…all I ever did was leave him behind."
I followed his gaze.
"Alec?"
Ben nodded again.
"When we escaped in '09, I left him at Manticore. I landed him in Psy Obs."
"Not your fault, Ben."
He smiled wryly and turned to me.
"Y'know, he's lucky to have you around, Maxie. At least he has someone to help him understand this world."
I shrugged.
"He's a big boy. He can take care of himself."
"Just don't take his smart-ass remarks to heart, 'kay? I mean, he's a smart-ass on purpose, Max. My little brother is a walking emotional time bomb. He thinks that he can push aside everything bad that's ever happened in his life and lock it up in some, deep, dark place where neither he nor anyone else ever has to see it. He thinks that he'll be fine that way. He won't. That deep, dark place can only hold so much, and when it bursts, he'll collapse. He'll implode. Just like I did."
Silence.
"Maybe you don't understand, but Alec's had a lot of people run out on him in his life. I left him when we were nine. Much later on, he got slapped with re-indoctrination; it had to do with one of his missions. Emotional entanglement with his primary contact. He was eighteen then. Then I got him into Psy Obs, and just before that, X5-621 called him inferior to his face. And the worst thing about 621 calling him that was because he and 621 had always been close. He and 621 were like you and Jondy."
I winced inwardly.
I guess that it would've cut really deep if Jondy called me something like that. If Alec had been pumped full of Manticore's brainwashing back then, then being called inferior would have been the ultimate insult.
"So, you're saying…" I began.
"I'm saying that he knows that his attitude pisses people off. And if it keeps people away from him, he's happy with that."
"No more emotional entanglements." I finally understood. " 'Cause if he doesn't get involved, he doesn't get hurt."
Ben nodded.
"We're all pretty screwed up," he said with another wry smile.
"Not our fault."
"Thanks, Maxie."
"For what?"
"Fr giving him what I couldn't. Thanks for getting him out of Manticore, for giving him a name, for giving him a real life."
I turned to him to answer, but he was gone.
***
"That's why he needed her?!"
"I wouldn't say 'needed'," Max replied.
Later that evening, when I woke up, I realised that 493 hadn't really answered my question, as to why he needed his Blue Lady.
I figured that Max might know, so I asked.
And after she freaked for about twenty minutes, asking me how the hell I knew about the Blue Lady, she finally calmed down and told me.
And frankly, the answer freaked me out a little.
'He was…an anomaly. He was…unstable.'
"Lydecker told me that he was unstable," I said.
"Lydecker was also full of bullshit," Max snapped back. "Manticore did that to him."
"He was lost." I remembered what I'd said in the dream.
"I guess."
There was a short silence.
"So he was killing people," I summarised.
"Yeah. Final total was 11, across four different states."
"And I thought that I was going nuts," I shook my head.
She was sitting next to me on the bed, one leg stretched out in front of her, and her other leg drawn up with her arm resting on the knee. She turned to look at me when I said that.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I used to have nightmares back at Manticore; started when I was about 16, I think. They'd always be about running. I could always hear someone running. And very seldom…there'd be a voice too. And whenever the voice did make an 'appearance' in the dream, it always said the same thing. 'Apprehend and terminate the target. I know what my mission is.' And most of the time, at the end of the nightmare, there'd be a snapping sound."
I noticed Max stiffen when I mentioned that.
"I'd wake up after the nightmare ended, and there would always be blood all over my hands or all over me. The first time it happened, I was covered in so much blood that I thought I was bleeding from somewhere. But everytime it happened though, once I blinked, all the blood would be gone. I never told anyone, of course. We may have been seriously brainwashed and blindly obedient, but we weren't stupid. To tell the officers that I was having dreams about waking up covered in blood would be suicide. I'd probably have got myself into Psy Obs earlier or locked up in the basement with the X2s."
Max was staring at me.
"What?" I asked.
"I think…somehow…Ben's emotions got through to you."
"Huh?"
"Well, when Ben was killing people, he'd snap their necks."
Oh. The snapping sound.
"Hang on; are you trying to tell that it was Ben that I was hearing in those nightmares?"
"Maybe."
A longer silence.
"Max? Tell me about Ben. What was he like?"
A sad smile graced her features.
"Ben…" she seemed to be enjoying the sound or the feel of his name on her lips. "I think he was the first of us to break out of the rigidity of Manticore's environment. He revolted against it, but…he did it quietly. He used to make shadows, in the shapes of all kinds of different animals, on the walls of our barracks to entertain us. His imagination went against everything that Manticore stood for, but his conscious mind kept it in check. His conscious mind reminded him that he was a soldier.
"But we all knew that Ben was different. Everything that Ben told us was beautiful, and strange, coloured with colours that we'd never seen before but could somehow imagine, and in some way, more real than the life that we led inside Manticore. All his animal shadows on the walls, his stories of the Good and Bad Places and the Nomlies…even the Blue Lady… I don't know how he did it, but while Manticore was drilling childhood out of us, Ben was there, telling his stories, making us laugh and smile… Keeping us in the regions of childhood that Manticore was trying to haul us out of. He was silently going against Manticore. "
"What happened to him, then?"
"I don't know. Maybe he really was lost. Maybe he just couldn't understand everything."
***
"Maybe he just couldn't understand everything," I said.
'We never should've left. Everything made sense there.'
Maybe Ben was right. Everything was much simpler back at Manticore.
'Is that why you give her your victims' teeth? To make her heart stronger? To fight the Nomlies?'
'Shut up.'
I'd seen him swallow hard when I mentioned the Nomlies.
'You're the Nomlie.'
He'd swallowed hard. Again.
'No,' he'd choked out. As if he didn't want it to be true.
'The genetic mistake.'
'No!'
It was almost like…he knew. I think Ben knew that he was a Nomlie.
But he didn't want it to be true. Then I came along and said it to his face, justifying all his fears and his worst nightmare.
That broke him.
I glanced over to my left.
Alec was quiet, looking down at his hands in his lap, his thumbs tapping against each other.
It's funny…I never noticed it before now, but both twins are pretty extreme.
To start with, their personalities are at the far reaches off both sides of the scale; Ben was dark and intense, very serious, but Alec is the absolute opposite. He laughs everything off; it's like he blatantly refuses to take anything in life seriously. The disturbing thing though is, if you looked deeper, you'd see that whatever it is that Alec's laughing about, it isn't really funny.
It's more like he's mocking the nature of this broken world…mocking himself too.
Both twins also have a thing for walking on the edge.
Ben had done that, treading the fine line between sanity and insanity, but he'd lost his balance; he'd slipped off into the deep end. Part of Alec's attitude also specialised in testing the limits of people's patience; something along the lines of "if it doesn't piss someone off, where's the fun in it?"
But I guess a more obvious example of Alec's liking for risk-taking comes from his cage-fighting days. He'd used a pretty obvious alias back then.
He'd also probably known that it was dangerous, but he hadn't bothered, hadn't cared.
All he cared about was that he was getting a laugh out of it.
He was mocking Manticore.
Mocking those that created him.
Mocking his origins, mocking himself.
I guess Ben and Alec are alike in more ways than looks.
***
There was silence for a while.
I looked at my watch. We were a few hours into the evening.
"Hey," Max suddenly said, and I turned to look at her.
"I've gotta go now. Gotta get home, and explain to Cindy why I had to hightail it out of work today."
"Okay."
The bed rose a little as she stood up.
"Um…Max?"
She turned back.
"I…really appreciate what you did. I mean, for coming through for me."
"You mean, thank you."
"Yeah, uh…thanks."
I felt my cheeks flush.
I looked down at my hands again.
"Anytime."
I could almost feel the smile in her words as she said that.
I looked up. She was smiling. Laughing at my awkwardness, I guess.
I smiled back as I got off the bed.
"Thanks anyway," I repeated as I hugged her.
"Alec, if you want your fingers to remain intact, you'll move your hands higher."
I just laughed and stepped away, hiding my hands behind my back.
"Don't you have to be going?" I grinned at her.
She rolled her eyes and walked towards the door.
"See you at work tomorrow," I heard her say as the door shut.
I brought my hands out from behind my back.
And stared at the white card that I'd removed from the back pocket of Max's jeans.
A picture of a lady in a blue dress.
'Is this your Blue Lady, 493?'
I recalled a snatch of the conversation that 493 and I had had in the dream.
"Is this your Blue Lady, 493?" I asked, staring at the card that I was holding.
"Yes." He sounded…almost proud.
"She's…very pretty."
"I know."
I walked back to my bed and tucked the card into my jacket pocket.
'She could provide a sense of comfort, she could make you feel protected…'
"But she can't give physical protection," I whispered, finishing the sentence.
In the dream, he had handed the card to me, saying, "Just something for you to remember me by."
"Don't follow in my footsteps. Don't do what I did," he also said.
I walked into the bathroom, and was met by my reflection staring back at me from the mirror.
'Have you tried a mirror? I'm in there somewhere.'
I tried a smile.
A proper smile.
Not a grin or a smirk, but a real smile.
I liked the image looking back at me.
"Hi Ben."
End
