Chapter 10: Escape

They were free.

That was the only important thing, that her friends were free. They would find a way to stop Bastion's mad plans for mutantkind.

And then they'd come back for her.

Jubilee stubbornly pushed away to the back of her mind the nagging thought that maybe by the time they came back she'd be a pile of warm ashes in the incinerator they'd tried to put Wolvie in. She could survive. She would survive. She wouldn't give in to the numbing, crushing despair, the ever-present, increasing hunger pangs, the thirst that tormented her dry mouth. How long could someone go without food or water? She thought it was something like three to five days, but she wasn't sure. And how long was three days, anyway? My time sense is so screwed I've lost track of the days. How long have I been here, she thought dazedly, lying on the floor of the cell and staring blindly up at the shadowed ceiling. How long? A week? A month? Naw, can't be a month, she told herself. Then that nagging voice popped back up and said, Maybe. Maybe it has been.

People always say that before you die your entire life flashes in front of your eyes. Hmm. So I guess I oughtta start with my earlier memories; livin' with Mom and Dad, watchin' TV…what was that show I always liked? 'Magnum P.I.'? Who was that dude in it? Tom…Tom something. Yeah, Tom Selleck. Man, he was cool. Yeah, he wasn't cool in everything he did, but he was cool as Magnum. And oh, in 'Quigley Down Under'. Yeah. That was neat-o, too. Geez, has it been a month? Could it have been so long?

She stared into the darkness for a long time, thinking. Wondering. Remembering. It wasn't as if there was anything else she could do, after all…

In the control room, Daria saw Jubilee's wide-eyed, unblinking, glassy stare, and her heart twisted. Poor child. Poor, poor child. If she'd been able to arrange it without Bastion noticing, she would have freed Jubilee to go with her friends, with the big hairy guy with the claws. Jubilee had seemed to be particularly shaken up when she saw him on the screen. He was obviously someone she cared about a great deal. If only they'd stayed a little longer, just a few days, before they'd broken out; she would have found some way to tell them Jubilee and Professor Xavier were here. She wasn't worried about Xavier as much as she was worried about Jubilee; Bastion had been concentrating his efforts on the child, not the man.

One of Bastion's other assistants looked over her shoulder back at Daria. "What are you doing, Daria? Haven't you got work to do? You spend all your time staring at that freak." Without waiting for a reply, the other girl went back to what she was doing.

Daria raised a hand to the screen. There wasn't anything she could do about it now. Bastion had given his orders, and she had had obedience to Bastion's orders trained into her so that it was pretty damn near instinctive. She couldn't disobey him. Not without something terrible happening to her. Still, she thought as her finger traced the dusky discoloration of a bruise on Jubilee's cheek on the monitor, I have to do something. I can't just stand by and do nothing. If Jubilee's a freak—after what happened to me when she used her powers on me—then what am I? Am I a mutant, like she thinks, or am I…something else?

Daria sat down at her workstation and settled in to work, mechanically carrying out the tasks Bastion had set for her. Her body moved through its customary routine, doing this, doing that, while her mind whirled with thoughts, suppositions, possibilities. When the other assistant got off duty and headed down to the mess hall, Daria stayed behind…and for the first time since she'd gotten there, she called up her own file in Bastion's private database.

It came up sealed. Frowning, she tried again. Still the same result. She closed it down, typed in the password that Bastion had given her once to access his personal files, then tried to open her file again. This time, it opened without hesitation.

She stared at the screen, feeling her face grow paler. For there, spread out on the screen in front of her, was the truth about who—and what—she was. He had stored everything. Some of her was biological; most was not. Gradually, through a series of operations, he had grafted human-seeming flesh to a metal skeleton, added red-colored lubricating fluid just under the synthetic skin to simulate blood, then had Daria's positronic brain wired for obedience to Bastion and Bastion's directives, and wired to provide false memories. He had wired Daria to act, think, and look human.

But she wasn't. She wasn't. And Daria sat there, shocked into stillness, as her mind—my positronic brain, she corrected herself—worked to process these shocking new revelations. Finally shaking off her shocked stupor, she pulled up Bastion's file and opened it. And what she found was even more of a shock.

He was the same as she was. A mechanical being, an android. Except that he knew what he was. The memory she had seen on the monitors…that had been his own. He was an android, created by humans to defeat and subjugate mutantkind for mankind's salvation. It all made sense now.

Except that she no longer believed it.

She no longer believed that mutants were the greatest threat to mankind. Jubilee had made her see the error in that particular line of logic. Mutants were men; men were mankind. They were all the same—or as Jubilee had put it, "Same difference." If anything, Daria and Bastion were the freaks; they were the ones that didn't belong. Not Jubilee.

She called up her own schematics again…and it was no less disturbing this time than it had been the last time. Maybe even more so, knowing what she did now that the memories of her 'life' were false, planted there by the same hand that had created her, created the 'mutants are evil' programming, imprisoned and tortured Jubilee. And there were more like her, a lot more. The clinic Dr. Prospero was running on the surface that was giving crippled people another chance at being whole again—that was just another cover for what they were really doing; replacing crippled human organs and limbs with cybernetic and nanotech parts that would turn them into androids like her, and whose defensive systems would be triggered by the presence of a mutant close to them and cause them to lash out and destroy its target.

It was terrible. It was horrifying. And she didn't want to be a part of it. According to the directives programmed into her brain, she wasn't even supposed to be doing this; digging into Bastion's files, questioning her 'programming' was forbidden. But suddenly all she had was questions, questions she couldn't ask, was slightly afraid to ask because she knew she wasn't going to like the answer. There were control programs in place to keep this from happening. But in the process of attacking her, Jubilee's firecrackers had somehow damaged Daria's positronic brain, deleting the programming and leaving the way open for Daria to begin to ask 'why?'

She was the freak, not Jubilee. Jubilee was innocent. And with that realization, the last bit of Daria's programming went out the window and she suddenly, finally, felt free to follow the dictates of her own conscience.

Wait. If I'm an android, do I even have a conscience? The thought made Daria pause in midstep, then she dismissed it. It doesn't matter. What matters is making all the wrong things right. And the worst wrong—the one I had a hand in—was imprisoning and torturing Jubilee. It stops now.

She headed out of the control room.

Alone in her cell, Jubilee sighed and sat up. She'd gone through her entire life at least twice, and sitting there staring at the ceiling waiting to die wasn't helping her get there any faster. As she looked down at her folded legs, she saw a tiny gray mouse no bigger than her hand, sitting there nibbling at some of the spilled food left on the floor. "Hey," she said carefully, hoping not to startle it. She was getting lonely down here; in the darkness and the silence it was so easy to believe that everyone else in the world had been beamed up onto some big alien craft and she was the only one left. Seeing the small mouse brought some things into perspective for her.

The mouse jumped a little, but didn't scamper away; apparently the pickings were too good here. Jubilee smiled sadly at it as it cocked a beady little black eye at her. Cute. Maybe Emma would let her have one as a pet…if she ever got out of here. Which was seeming less and less likely with each passing moment. "So…" she said conversationally, "Any word from the governor?"

The hissing of the door opening caught her attention, and that of her little visitor. Jubilee flinched at the sudden brightness after so long in the dark, and squinted as her mousy friend scampered away. Bare head, short skirt… "…Daria!"

Daria stood in the doorway. "I'm a freak too."

She strode into the cell, her eyes full of determination. "If you're a freak, then so am I. At least you know where you came from. I'm not sure about any of that…and I'm afraid to find out the truth."

Jubilee rose to her feet by bracing her back against the wall. "But you may have been made that way by Bastion or someone else. Me, I was born like this. That's the difference…at least, that's the way Bastion sees it. That's why Zero Tolerance aren't hunting down Giant Man or Spider Man, I guess. Though they're next, I'm sure!"

Daria came to a stop in front of Jubilee. "That may be how Bastion sees things. But I don't." Not anymore, her mind amended, but she didn't say it aloud. "It isn't right that I'm free and you're not." She stepped behind Jubilee and started tugging at the straps. Confused, Jubilee twisted her head as best she could. "What are you doing?"

"Unhooking your restraints."

"I don't understand." Jubilee felt the straps loosen, and her arms suddenly felt a lot less cramped.

"We're getting out of here," Daria said firmly.

Jubilee rubbed the circulation back in her arms, trying not to grimace from the pain of the cramps as Daria checked the corridor. "All clear. Let's go."

Jubilee wasn't in the ultra-secure containment level, and there were very few people around, which only helped. They were able to get up to the surface before they were spotted. "Hey!" said another of Bastion's assistants, one who looked almost exactly like Daria (a fact that Daria had been 'programmed' not to notice) "Daria, where…what are—" And then she leaped for the wall communications unit and hit the intercom button as well as the alarm button. Alarms blared, but no one seemed to be able to get their wits together in time to stop Jubilee and Daria from reaching the surface level. And then they were outside, and Jubilee felt sunlight on her face for the first time in a very, very long time. And when she looked around, she finally knew where she was. She'd seen the Hulkbuster base several times in Xavier's files. So they were in New Mexico…

Daria stopped. "Get behind me. Wrap your arms around my neck. And hang on." Jubilee did so, and yelped in surprise as she felt her feet leave the ground. "Daria…!"

"Hang on." Daria sounded a little distracted, and Jubilee figured it would be better for her to shut up. She resolved to do that…and broke the resolution as she saw, below them, a group of figure burst from the facility entrance, preceded by Bastion. She could also hear a snatch of conversation.

Bastion: "What's going on?"

Another voice, female this time: "Jubilation Lee's escaped, sir."

Bastion: "How did she bypass her programming--? Never mind. Get them!"

Jubilee risked a quick glance behind her. Three Sentinels, gaining fast. "I don't want to rain on your parade, Daria, but they're gaining on us. Maybe we should surrender…it's a long drop from up here!" Although, considering what she had escaped from, she wasn't sure she was all that keen on going back…maybe death would be preferable…

Daria took the dilemma out of her hands. "No. I said I'd get you out of this and I will!"

Now both of them could hear the whirr of the Sentinels' anti-gravity mechanisms as they gained on the fleeing pair. "Target sighted," Jubilee heard one of them report.

"Sure you won't reconsider?" Jubilee asked Daria.

Daria made a decision. There was no way Jubilee's friends would accept her, the one who'd had a hand in imprisoning Jubilee. They'd use her against Bastion and Zero Tolerance. And Daria had had it with being used. There was no way she was going back to Bastion, either. So the only option left… "No! I have an idea!" she said to Jubilee. Best not to tell the girl what she planned; Jubilee might not let Daria continue.

"Well, whatever it is, you better do it fast!" Daria took that as her cue and banked sharply around an upward-projecting sandstone outcropping, and then dropped into a deep canyon once she was certain the Sentinels couldn't see them. She touched down lightly, and Jubilee slid from her back. "I'll fly off, draw them off your track. Head down to the bottom of this small canyon; if I remember correctly there should be a road down there somewhere. You can hitch a ride into town." Without waiting to hear Jubilee's whispered thanks, she launched herself in the air again.

The pursuing Sentinels had paused in the air above where they'd last seen Jubilee and Daria. "Target has vanished from Sensor Range. Downloading amplified scanner matrix to re-scan for—" The Sentinel broke off as it spotted Daria emerging from the canyon. "No need! There they are! Move it!" As they picked up the pursuit, one of them commented, "No, it's just the Daria unit…where's the mutant designate: Jubilee?"

The first Sentinel frowned. "We secure this one, Bastion can deprogram her…learn where the mutant is."

If Daria had had any doubts about her future after this, they were just dispelled. So, since her intended path and any other future she could possibly have all ended in the same inevitable conclusion, she chose to end it all on her own terms. She aimed for a hard sandstone outcropping and accelerated. Just before the impact with the stone blotted out her consciousness, a last thought flitted through her mind. I'm sorry, Jubilee. This doesn't make up for what happened, but at least you'll be free now…

And then there was nothing but darkness.

Down in the canyon, Jubilee saw the bright orange flower of fire that blossomed on the side of that sandstone outcropping, and her heart skipped a beat. The three sentinels, unable to change course in time, had died along with Daria. "I'll never be able to repay you, Daria. You're the bravest human/Sentinel/freak girl I've ever met. Thank you." She turned away from the sandstone outcropping with one last backward look, then made her plans. "So. Daria told me to work my way to the bottom of the gorge.She said that the gorge's high walls should protect me from the Sentinel's scanners. She said there's a road at the bottom where I could get a ride into town. Hmm. Sounds simple enough. Maybe I'll even see Wolvie there!" Her natural optimism started to yank her out of her depression, and as she started to trot off down the canyon, "I wonder how everyone at the school's been? I wonder what's been happening? Probably same old, same old. Let's face it, they can't get into trouble without me!" and yet, at the back of her mind despite her hopeful words, she had to wonder why no one had found her yet, why no one was even looking for her. Had things gone that badly back at the Academy?

End notes:

Thank to the creative team on Generation X issues 30 and 31 for the material in this chapter. The scene with Jubilee in the cell and some of Daria watching her is actually from #30; Daria's finding out who and what she is, is my creation. The escape scenes are from #31, credit for which has to go to Robinson/Bachalo/Vey. Thanks for the story, guys!

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