2163
Gentle rocking, stacks of crates anchored to steel walls and floors with nylon webbing; a ship, X thought. Doctor Cain was propped against the same wall as him, fast asleep. Doctor Doppler and Preston lay across from him on one large, dirty cot, backs to each other. To his right, a softness colored with worry, curiosity.
"Good morning," said Marty. "Well, night, really."
"Good morning." X smiled.
"How are you feeling? Seems like the port was rough on you."
"A bit, but every day it's getting easier. In a week or so I should be back to—" What, normal? You don't have any notion what that is.
Marty's head tilted slightly, a lock of hair falling across her face. "You all right in there?"
"Yeah, sorry." Not to mention that she gave up normal to pull you out of the ground. "And I'm sorry about your legs."
"You're not the one who dropped bombs on us, you've got nothing to apologize for."
"But you were only there—"
"Because I chose to be there," Marty said. The smile she forced bent after just a second. She set her hands on her thighs just above where her knees. "I went in gambling my life—all four of us did. This isn't great, but I'll live. The Tanganyika folks are supposed to give me new legs, anyway."
"You don't sound happy about that part."
"I'm not. Their record on environmental issues is nasty. Spent most of my life fighting people like that." She shook her head.
"You feel like accepting something from them would be a betrayal."
"Isn't it?"
X shrugged. "I'm the wrong person to ask." No sooner had the words left his mouth than she drew inward and he felt a touch of self-loathing. Twenty awkward seconds.
"So, this wasn't the first time you woke up, but you stayed down there all this time," Marty said. "Why?"
Such a simple question, it stunned X to realize he hadn't been asked it yet. That's really your own fault, you kept peppering everyone with questions when you were awake, you never let them ask them you much of anything.
"I haven't been all there between the shock and all the painkillers I just got off but ever since you—I don't know, woke up?—you've looked troubled." She looked embarrassed. "I'm sorry, is that weird to say?"
"No, you're right," X said. He looked around once more—only the five of them, and only Marty was awake.
"I had another life, before. A simulation. That's why I was in that capsule in the first place. The whole lab was built to run a high-resolution simulated world for me to live in."
"Why?"
"My creator, Doctor Hikari, thought it would give a chance to learn ethics and reason with low stakes before it was time for me to face . . ." X circled his hands out at the dimly-lit cargo hold. "The real world."
"So, it was a bunch of training exercises?"
"No, I lived a whole life. I was—well, I thought I was this man named Xavier. I had a childhood, grew into a man, fell in love, had a career, fought in wars."
"For how long?"
"I thought it was about thirty-two years, but even the flow of time was different. Then one day, this man I'd been friends with for a long time, Otto, he finds me at a conference and tells me the truth. He was the AI in charge of the simulation and it was ending ahead of schedule."
"Because the Cataclysm damaged the lab?" Doctor Cain had woken, stretching his arms over his head, then propping himself more upright. X nodded.
"I lost everything in a blink."
"You're wondering if you can trust all this to be any more real, right?" Doctor Cain said. "That's a tough nut, certainly."
"You must miss it," Marty said.
X couldn't help but laugh; as a college-aged Xavier, he'd conversed with a friend about the idea of missing something that was never real. There had been more than a little weed involved, and they'd been referring chiefly to frivolous romances, but still.
"I have these memories that still feel resonant, but knowing that whole time I was being fooled . . . I could never go back to that."
Marty reached out, laid her hand on his shoulder. The instant the comfort settled on him, he heard the doubts in the back of his mind again. Reality. Irreality. No way to tell. Both Marty and Doctor Cain looked to be working themselves up to saying something. It was not that X was annoyed, he just knew that they could not offer real understanding. Better to spare everyone the frustration.
"So we're headed for Alexandria, if I remember?" X asked.
The sparkle in Doctor Cain's eyes dimmed for a moment, and Marty withdrew her hand with a half-smile.
"Yes. We've got two more days at sea. I'd suggest you get some more rest. Once we land, things are going to happen very fast."
When events move quickly, X thought, it's that much harder to right them when they go off course.