The question to end all others on Horizon was, "How smart should these apes be by the time we're done?"
Test Subject 28 was the outlier; every piece of data, every statistic, every graph had his results in whatever test to compare the other subjects to. He was the one they used to see just how far they could go.
In many ways, Horizon was more than a colony. It was a space station, a communications relay, an observatory, the best funded lab known to man for all schools of science and it was home to dozens of the brightest minds of a generation.
It was the perfect place to see just how far Test Subject 28 could go.
When he was one, he had a language comprehension equal to an average American six year old. By the time he was two, he was talking.
It didn't matter that 28, and most of the test subjects, were able to communicate even complex thoughts in sign language; when the animals started speaking, people both on the moon and on Earth were struck silent.
28 was reading a book he had never read before, his hands gesturing along to the colorful text on the page in front of a video camera in order to showcase the progress Horizon had made in their cerebral augmentation endeavors.
"I do not like that Sam I am. I do not like green eggs and ham."
28 translated the words into signs perfectly, but the demonstration was not over until the comprehension test. Harold proctors the questions.
"What food does the character in the book not like?"
28 signs, "Ham and eggs."
"Good," Harold congratulated, and a sleeve of peanut butter is exchanged for a correct answer.
"Who does the character in the book not like?"
28 signs, "Sam."
"Sam!" Harold agreed confidently before turning to the camera, "Very good. As you can see, the progress is coming alo…"
"Sam."
Harold stopped midsentence, and slowly turned to look at 28; the other scientists observing looked as well, eyes wide and surprised. One of them laughed. Most stayed reverently silent, dumbstruck by the fact that they'd taught an animal to speak English.
28, upon seeing the reaction and probably hoping for another reward, again triumphantly says, in a voice too deep for his small frame, "Sam!"
28 looked proud as Harold smiled toothlessly, careful to keep from being taken for a threat, and turned back to laugh into the camera. And from there it was off to the races.
Anything any of the scientists could do on Horizon was fair game. They started with mathematics as the foundation, then biology and chemistry, then physics, then cyber, then theoretical physics. By the time 28 was seven, he was proving theorems that had baffled even the best of them for decades, and assisting in experiments of all sizes. Experiments in botany and chemistry, proofs of theories thought up by minds like Einstein and Hawking ,and a hand in the creation of the first fully autonomous artificial intelligence were all a part of 28's life on the moon.
Remarkable wasn't strong enough of a word, and awesome was too generic.
But in between the excitement of pushing the barrier, seeing how much an animal could attain, were little moments that made those closest to him stop and think. They saw the animal in him fade away, and he became more like them. They wondered what that made him. Animal or person? They wondered what to think; if he had a soul, who was superior? Were they equal? Did they have the right to regiment his life? In an argument for, Dr. Lee quoted Charlie Chaplain in "The Great Dictator". In an argument against, Dr. Ross cited "Evolution of a Species." Questions they never thought they would have to ask.
They watched as the way he saw the world changed; at first he looked through telescopes with curiosity, as if only to see what could be seen. But, eventually, he looked through the eyepiece the same way snipers look through their sights, with absolute focus, observing to learn instead of to appreciate. Before long, nothing was impervious to 28's scrutiny, not even the other scientists. But what he was most interested in was Earth. He would practically beg for stories; he wanted to know what that blue water he could see from space smelled like, or how wind felt, or how warm the sun could be on a summer day, or if the recordings of birds' songs Dr. Fairchild kept to help her sleep sounded the same as real birds on a crisp day.
The truth was in what he did when he wasn't working, how he held onto Pollux whenever he was alone, or how he always seemed to be trying to touch Dr. Harold Winston when they were together.
He always asked what home really was, if he was home on Horizon or on Earth. He asked why the other gorillas called him "the pet".
He asked if he really was a pet.
But perhaps the most profound thing he ever asked was why he didn't have a real name.
His name is Winston now, but he still remembers when he was a number. That's the blessing and the curse of genetic augmentation.
He remembers everything.
The Omnic Crisis is visible from space.
It's been three days since the fires started; first was St. Petersburg, then Rio de Janeiro, then Beijing. All across the world, simultaneously, population centers are being attacked. Now, half of the world is obscured by smoke, looking not unlike black, dark clouds from space. It doesn't take too much imagination to picture the extent of the damage, or the body count.
On Horizon, they're in the dark, except for what they can deduce. Attacks on cities, towns, any valid conglomeration of people. This wasn't war, civilians were being hunted the same as military. This was genocide against the human race.
They'd gotten reports of Omniums going rogue, churning out some sort of combat unit by the tens of thousands. Then they lost their communications satellites. All of them; they'd tried rerouting their signals to every space borne asset they had access to, but they were all offline, not even on radar.
It was Dr. Fairchild who hypothesized they had been destroyed. It made sense, from a military standpoint. If they were being attacked, their enemy would try to cut them off from each other, make coordination impossible. Easier prey.
The Omnics did have access to technology that could bring down satellites; some military organizations used them to manufacture warships, and most navies carried rail guns on at least some variant of weapons system. If the Omnics had just one of those, anything orbiting earth could be vaporized by a copper slug going Mach 12.
In all truth, on Horizon, they don't know what's going on. But the one thing they do know is what a bird's eye view of hell must look like.
The observatory floor is crowded for weeks. Every scientist on Horizon, when not doing daily duty, is trying to see if his hometown or her city is next, praying for something to come through to their communications relay and tell them just how bad it is back home. It can't be much worse than it looks.
The days turn over, and it's more of the same. When Stuttgart becomes a bright, smoking light in the night, Doctor Fischer falls to her knees, and doesn't look away until the rotation of Earth pulls Germany out of view. When Sydney goes up like tinder, Doctor Williams beats his fist bloody against the wall, and Doctor Martin goes straight for the communications relay to no avail, trying to hail his wife and son in Liverpool for the next five hours. When New York's city lights go out out, and the fires take their place, it is the first time 28 has seen Doctor Harold Winston cry.
To 28 they are only cities, hollow names and pictures he had seen on holopads. But to the others, each city is a home. That is when his question is answered: where is my home? He doesn't have one. Horizon is a box, a school, a residence, and Earth is a beacon. But neither is home. What he does have is a family, and all around him, they are suffering. They are, all of them, Prince Paris, watching helplessly as Troy burns. The Omnics even make a fitting analogy for a Trojan horse; they'd thought the Omnics were to end wars, to bring the world together and finally forge equality after years of war and famine. And here, they put their families to the torch hundreds of thousands of miles away.
It was hard to imagine things could get worse, until they did. Horizon was safe from anything hitting it from the outside. They never expected danger to come from within their own walls. They expected even less for that danger to be something they made.
He used to ask the others about their names.
He wondered how they got them, what they meant, what kinds of traditions they carried. He cherished how much about someone he could learn simply by their name; country or culture of their parents, heritage, new money or old. He would meet a Rockefeller at a charity event, or a Freeman in Georgia, or a Kennedy or a Washington, and he would have a story before their first words even escaped their mouths.
There was a very pure poetry to even the simplest names.
Reinhardt Wilhelm. Reinhardt. It was amazing how much it sounded like two separate words, "Rhine" and "heart". The lionhearted warrior who fought for his homeland, the Rhineland, Germany. The more he said it, the better it fit.
Angela Ziegler. Angela. It was almost like bad poetry; the angel named Angela. But there was nothing in jest when the glow of her wings would rush through a veil of ash and smoke in a disaster zone or on a battlefield, the hum of her staff like a droning chorus, and lives thought lost were saved. It was sometimes hard to tell which name fit her better, Angela or Mercy.
Gabriel Reyes. Gabriel, the archangel. Reyes, Spanish for "kings". The angel of kings. He preferred the angel of death. Both were fitting; both were terribly beautiful.
Jack Morrison. One of the most common first names and the third most numerous surname among Caucasians in the United States. By his name, he was just like everybody else. But that was what made it so elysian, because he made his own fate. He started off just like everybody else in rural Indiana, a farmer's son with a love of country and family, and he made himself into a savior the world over.
But among them all, perhaps the most profoundly named member of Overwatch was Genji Shimada.
Winston knew Shimada the least of them all; he was a ghost, in that he was rarely around. What he knew of him at first were mostly rumors and assumptions gathered together from what of the reports weren't covered in black ink and whispers around the watchpoints. A Japanese mob boss' son fallen victim to fratricide, until their own medical wing brought him back for a grudge match against the Shimada Empire.
He was a man, if he was still human at all, of few words. He mostly worked alone, but when he wasn't working it was hard to coax him into a conversation. Like with the others, after a while, Winston asked him about his name.
Genji means "two beginnings."
28 looks through tears at hollow brown eyes staring blankly back up at him. He looks at a lab coat that used to be white, stained red. He looks at an observatory floor, what used to be his place of safety and discovery, where he would come to wonder at Earth and the stars, sticky in crimson.
He looks into the face of his friend and mentor, the closest thing he had ever had to a father, Dr. Harold Winston, dead. Dr. Harold Winston, murdered.
The other test subjects are still screaming in primal rage, that high pitched, feral howl of anger and raw passion, all over the base, but the observatory is empty. Empty, except for 28 and what is left of Harold Winston.
The air ducts had made a good hiding place to dodge the wrath of the gorillas seizing their liberty as it is often seized; with revolution, violent revolution, perpetrated by masses of the angry and mistreated with whatever weapons they could scrap together. The ducts had also made an excellent viewing area for the chaos all over Horizon, no matter how hard he had tried to look away. Mixed in with the angry primate screams are quieter, somehow more frightening screams of terror and horror.
Doctor Fairchild had her skull crushed in. Doctors Martin and Ross were beaten to death . Doctor Fischer's heart was pierced by a spear made from a piece of metal snapped off of the jungle gym in the recreational area and sharpened with teeth. Doctor Harold Winston was stabbed in the belly with a meal tray folded and rent into a shiv, then his neck was broken.
His family, murdered in front of him.
At first, he asks why. Why did the others revolt? Was it that they got tired of living like prisoners? Was it that they were sick of the genetic treatment, the needles, the tests? Did they get smart enough to wonder why they had to take orders, why they had to follow the rules, why they weren't allowed to breed or eat or play or sleep when they wanted to? Did it start hypothetical, and grow under the leadership of the ring leaders, the troop's alphas? Or did they just do it for fun, to see who was the alpha, the same reasons why they broke his arms on the jungle gym?
The rage builds. It starts in his stomach, and burns its way up to his throat, threatening to erupt, daring him to open his mouth and roar, because then it can all come out at once. It can fill his muscles and his heart and drive him into the halls for however much vengeance he can get until he dies too. But sitting on top of that anger, in the six inches of his throat above the burning, sits the saturating desire to go home.
But he doesn't have a home. Not anymore, not after today.
He never realized what he had until now; home for him was not a place, it was people. Home was at Doctor Harold's and all the others' sides. And now home is dead.
As he cries, whimpering on the observatory floor and clutching Dr. Harold Winston's hand, begging it to squeeze him back, the galaxy around him turns. Hours pass, and Earth comes into view, casting Dr. Harold Winston's lifeless face into the beautiful glow of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean.
28 looks up, a certain comfort in the view; there is a typhoon building in the Indian Ocean, and Madagascar is obscured by clouds. There is smoke in the north, near Tripoli, and in the east, by Casablanca. There, war rages just as loud and as hot as the rage in 28's heart. But there is still that last little bit of reservation that keeps him at Harold's side.
Off in the corner, Pollux is shredded. Tears mix in with blood. Whimpers become softer and still, through the window, Earth turns. It is constant, and big, and through the window it looks much closer than it actually is. And as 28 watches Harold's eyes get glossy, he remembers something he had heard when those eyes watched the Earth with him as it turned many years ago.
"Dare to see it for what it could be."
And in that moment, everything he could be became abundantly clear. He could be a walking eulogy. He could honor their memory. He could take what they had taught him and make a difference on the world they had all known as home, but not if he picks up a club and goes for payback.
That was his second beginning, in that moment, when he decided to carry his family with him as he went where he was terrified to go. It was his second birth, his new birthday, and so he needed a name. Not a new name; he had never had a name, only a number. His first name is no name, he needs a surname, a family name.
Only one name is perfect, only one name holds the poetry, the song, of this moment. It was always his family name, and now he makes it his own. It is simple, but it means the world.
Winston.