Arcanum:
Almost a Memory
by
Kel
Disclaimer: I don't presume to own Dark Angel or any of it's characters. I gain no profit from this fiction, other than pride and joy and hopefully reviews. Oh yeah, X5-213 is mine.
Chapter 4: Numbers
He was empty. Hollow.
He had once thought that there was more to himself, but that was not the case now. If it had ever been.
Once upon a time, he had had this idea. It had occurred to him as he lay awake in bed one night. People were three-dimensional.
He had never voiced this thought to the other soldiers in his barracks, because he knew they wouldn't understand. Of course people were three-dimensional, they would think. We have height, length, depth, weight. We have layers; bones, muscles, veins, skin.
The other soldiers couldn't understand. To them, people were warm bodies. They were numbers. All a person was to them was something that could be observed in a lab. A person was a thing that reacted to stimuli. It was a variable, a target, or a soldier. No more, no less.
But they were wrong, he had thought. People had more layers than those soldiers knew. They had thought, they had voice, they had feeling. Sensation. They could act logically while thinking illogically. This he knew, because this he did everyday.
People marched in lines while dreaming of doing back flips.
That was how he had thought of it.
But now . . . he didn't dream anymore. He would just march.
He was a soldier. He was a number.
Because the only other person who had ever thought otherwise had changed her mind. Maybe she had actually had it changed for her, but that made no difference.
He had seen it in her eyes; he was flat. He was nothing. He wasn't her unit. He was a nameless face on the other side of a window. He was a statistic. A fact that was not important enough to even note.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed since they had taken her away, and he didn't care. Eventually they came for him as well.
They took him in the direction they had first taken her. Where were they going? Who cared.
He did everything they wanted him to. He sat obediently their giant metal chair. He allowed them to strap him down. He watched the screen in front of him while they drilled their lazer through his eye, into his mind.
No struggle, no trouble.
He became aware that he was losing the details. The shape of her face, the sound of her voice. Their blows in the observation room. It all began to fade.
Emotions are a weakness, they told him. He felt like rolling his eyes. Emotions were nothing.
A soldier shows no emotion. A number had no emotion to show.
DUTY
DISCIPLINE
MISSION
What else was there?
That evening, Doctor Marlowe stood in Colonel Lydecker's office, explaining his findings.
Lydecker's jaw was clenched tightly as he was informed of the X5 groups tendency to forge emotional attachments. He thought he had trained them better - he had trained them better.
"I believe it's necessary to separate the units and put emphasis on- "
The alarms sounded, cutting him off abruptly.
"Colonel Lydecker!" a voice crackled through the walkie talkie attached to Lydecker's belt.
He quickly unclipped it and raised it to his mouth. "What the hell's going on?" he barked back.
"It's the X5's, sir! They're trying to escape!"
End.
Well folks, there you have it. Hopefully you enjoyed this fic as much as I did. Do. Whatever. :) This story is one of the best pieces in the Arcanum series... well, I think maybe so far it is the best. I've never written a fic that was so much into Manticore, and I'd like to think that I've done pretty well.
The main point of this story was to show the readers what the characters themselves don't even know, the depth of the link between Max (452) and Rizzo (213). I originally envisioned and wrote this fic to precede the next story in the series and make that story seem more real and logical, but I think the fic I connected to the most was Catalyst.
In Catalyst, we get a glimpse into Rizzo's head in which we learn how hard it is for him to cope with living on the outside. Almost a Memory pretty much explains exactly why this is. Rizzo was always human, but when Max forgot this, so did he. The only person who had ever believed in him no longer did, so he lost sight of his own humanity, believing it had never existed. He was a number; always had been, always would be. Just after he came to 'realize' this, he underwent a mess of programming that clad the thought in iron.
When Max returned to Manticore in Interloper/AJBAC, she brought with her the almost-memory of Rizzo's true identity. She induced a reaction within him, in which his humanity resurfaced. However, from '09 through to the rest of his life, Rizzo has not believed that this humanity even existed. So the part of him that came to be when Max stopped believing him couldn't possibly do anything but reject this new/old information.
As is seen in Catalyst, there is a war going on inside Rizzo. And it is tearing him apart.
Thanks again to Sorrow, who made this fic possible, and two all my reviewers of the entire series as of so far -- you guys are the best. :)