Doppelganger
By Karen Hart
Disclaimer: The Xenosaga series is the property of Monolith Software, Inc. and Namco Bandai. I write these fanfictions for love of the game(s) and make no profit off of them.
Roth Mantel.
Oh god, it was starting again. Shion clutched the handrail on the public transport and hoped no one was looking her way.
He looked like Kevin. Roth Mantel looked like Kevin. Kevin was dead. The man Shion loved was dead.
Three years dead.
For weeks—months—after his death she'd seen him everywhere. She'd called out to strangers and stopped passersby on the street, begging them to tell her they remembered her.
Shion'd cried when they all said they'd never seen her before. She'd cried because she knew it was true.
She was better now. It'd taken more months of therapy, and a few emotional stabilizers, but she no longer saw Kevin in every man's face.
Now it was happening all over again.
Her skull ached. She clutched the rail until her knuckles turned white and she rested her forehead against the cool metal. It didn't help; instead of relieving the burning in her head, all it did was make her shiver uncomfortably. She sank down onto the padded seat, and watched the white bulk of the Consolidated Advanced Technology Testing Ground dwindle to cloudlike insubstantiality as the transport took her farther away.
The CAT Testing Ground was where Shion'd seen Kevin—Roth. It was where she'd seen Allen, Juli Mizrahi, KOS-MOS—but she never questioned their reality. Just Roth's.
Except Allen had pointed Roth Mantel out to her, so he wasn't a figment of her imagination. That was good. She should try to hang on to that.
Shion wished Roth Mantel really was Kevin Winnicot. She could accept that the grave that bore his name was empty of his body. It wasn't, but she could accept it, if only it were true.
Why now?
She considered that it might have been guilt. She thought about Kevin less these days, so that when she finally dragged herself to bed in the predawn hours she would be appalled to realize she hadn't thought of him at all.
After that she'd spent what little dark was left remembering everything she could about him. The way his hair fell into his eyes. The way his fingers would curl around her waist when he'd slip past her in the lab, the goosebumps his touch would bring. The way he'd touch her in the rain.
Shion had always hated storms but there was something about a heavy rain that made her pulse quicken. She recalled the last downpour on the Dammerung, that Kevin had checked the supercolony's weather cycle and scheduled their off-time to coincide with it. He'd insisted they walk in it back to his quarters, when they might have simply taken one of the lifts to the personnel level.
They hadn't made it that far.
The two of them had slipped into a closed park, bypassing the simple security gate and finding an imitation wood bench beneath a copse of trees that shed what seemed like buckets of water on their already soaked bodies. They hadn't minded. Now Shion wondered if they'd appeared covered in clouds, the heat from their flesh mingling with the cooler rain. She'd been too busy to wonder about it at the time.
There was a shift in the light, someone getting up to disembark the transport. Shion blinked, needing a moment to remember where she was. On a public transit line back to her hotel, fleeing a ghost. Please let him catch her.
She didn't want to run from him.
She couldn't see the CAT Testing Ground anymore. She tried to feel relieved, then gave it up for a lie in the next second. She wanted to scream at the autopilot to go back, take her back to Roth and the face she wanted most to see again.
It was a stupid impulse, and might even end with her receiving a citation for public disturbance.
Shion knew she had to get control of herself somehow. She'd made progress, especially in the last year. She'd even agreed to having dinner with Allen the following night. Not dwelling on Kevin for every hour of every day was not cause for shame (except the thought made her heart twist).
A chime began to ring above her seat. Shion ignored it, too caught up in her thoughts to notice much of anything around her. It became a buzz and finally an obnoxious squawking. Shion looked up.
Oh. She'd reached the hotel. Numbly she paid for a second loop on the transport. She wasn't ready to go up to her room just yet. She wanted to think about Kevin some more.
Except her brain was a fickle organ and her thoughts were turning to the data she'd collected at the Testing Ground.
Captured Gnosis. Even caged they were horrifying to contemplate. There was a time when Vector and even the Federation government wouldn't have been that reckless. At least she thought there had been.
The things (no one knew what the Gnosis really were, beyond hostile) weren't held just by bars, but by a Hilbert Effect field that rendered them helpless in the face of conventional weapons. Outside of the cages they'd have no such limitations.
Oh, sure, there were failsafes and backup systems in place, a whole network of Hilbert generators in every populated area. Shion didn't put much faith in them. Didn't anyone else remember the Gnosis Terrorism? Or the Kukai Foundation's second siege? Or the Woglinde disaster? She remembered.
She remembered the things drifting through the walls in their dreadful incorporeality. Incorporeal, except where they converged with humans. Then they were all too solid, all too real. She still had nightmares about the time she'd seen a man transformed into a pile of salt after a Gnosis had touched him. She had nightmares about the time the same thing had almost happened to her.
And now there was a government-run weapons testing facility, on the outskirts of the largest city on the Federation capital planet, that was holding the damned things for research. They had simulators for a reason.
Kevin wouldn't have been this stupid.
Kevin had known a lot about Hilbert theory. He'd even designed some of the later-model generators—but he'd never placed total confidence in them. They were a tool, not a solution. It looked like some people were forgetting that.
Shion needed to turn this information over to Doctus and Scientia. They might have been branded terrorists by the Federation, but Scientia was the only group that could stand up to Vector Industries these days.
Heaven hope they had better sense.
Her legs were beginning to feel numb. She'd been sitting too long. She turned to look out the window and was disappointed to see that she'd already passed the CAT Testing Ground. She'd wanted another go at wallowing in misery.
She missed him so much. Would he be upset with her for letting her thoughts drift away from him? Had he been so jealous? She couldn't recall. She thought not.
There was a lot about Kevin she hadn't wondered about in the days he'd still been alive. She'd assumed she'd have plenty of time to learn. Now she wondered all the time.
She thought he'd want her to uncover Vector's secrets. The company had betrayed them both after all—Shion had learned as much when she discovered the man who'd orchestrated the Gnosis Terrorism had been in Vector's keeping at the time.
The information had come as a blow to Shion, who'd believed wholeheartedly in Vector's methods. At least Kevin was someplace beyond the moral shock and heartache.
He'd told her once that his research was an attempt to find the truth behind the appearance of the Gnosis. She was certain he hadn't meant the place where the Gnosis had first been observed, but something more. Something to do with self and identity. What made the Gnosis so hostile?
The hotel was a growing smudge in the distance, slowly gaining form as the transport drew nearer. Shion didn't think she'd need another trip after this.
Her blood raced. It was as if he'd given her a mission, a purpose, where before she'd felt lost. Before now she'd been investigating Vector's crimes because her moral compass had demanded it. Now she wanted to expose them for Kevin's sake.
Emotional spiral or not, meeting Roth Mantel might have been a good thing. It'd been so long since Shion had been energized like this. Even close combat in virtual space hadn't been able to get her blood pumping so hard.
Her head felt clearer than it had in a long time. The headache from earlier had been driven away by thoughts of Kevin.
What to do when she got up to her room? She'd taken video of a captured Gnosis swarm, and of a new-model combat android. The data on both needed to be sent to Scientia as soon as possible. Shion had already wasted too much time pitying herself.
Maybe there was another way she could connect with Kevin, beyond continuing his research. Maybe she could answer the questions he'd never had the opportunity to ask.
Maybe she could continue to forget that he was still dead, and that the man who wore Kevin's face—wasn't Kevin.