Chapter 29: Things Have Changed

74 wanted to see the sky.

He eyed the bottles lined up above the sink. Should he? He’d been rinsing doses down the drain. Not all the time. They checked his blood whenever he went to Medical, and failure would be the end of him.

He could skip red and yellow but he had to keep taking blue. He didn’t know how he knew that.

Today he skipped all three. The edges of things were less defined. His reflexes were diminished. He found it hard to focus. His body hurt, he was exhausted, and he wanted to see the sky.

“What do you think,” he said. “What should I do.”

She didn’t answer. She wasn’t there.

63 wasn’t waiting in the hall. This was the third day in a row he’d been late.

He hesitated. Not an Operative-like quality, but then again he was an imposter. A piece of malfunctioning equipment.

63’s quarters weren’t far. He could almost see the door. He should go and collect him, as 63 had done for him when he was recovering from…from what.

The back of 74’s neck itched. He found that he was psychologically incapable of lifting his hand to scratch it.

While he was considering this, 63 strolled nonchalantly around the corner. His uniform looked slept-in. Faint blonde stubble textured his face.

“You’re not in compliance.” A note of reproach slipped into 74’s voice.

“I don’t care.” The last word stretched and dragged as 63 scratched his jaw absently. “You can tell them that. Tell them I remember what they did.”

He turned, then, shoving his hands into his pockets as he sauntered away.

“I’m going home,” he called over his shoulder, without breaking step. “You should come with me.”

74 didn’t move. Indecision paralyzed him. He should file a report, shift the attention from himself. Get help for his partner…his friend? No, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t what 63 was.

He worried at the problem like a dog with a bone all through the long patrol, which he completed alone, fighting the urge to look up.

There was a riot in the factory district. 74 ended it. Eleven dead, two dozen arrested, a handful of those wounded.

There shouldn’t have been any arrests. He had not followed protocol. He had shown incredible restraint.

He waited for her to appear and torment him as the Regulars lined up the bodies, searching them for rebel paraphernalia, but the only voice his mind spoke in was his own.

He’d upset her, he decided. Maybe if he went back to the sublevels like she’d asked him to, she would forgive him.

74 passed a hand down his face. It shook. But he was alone, completely alone, and no one saw.

He hadn’t reported 63. No one had noticed yet, three days on.

A grey rain fell as the survivors were rounded up for questioning. 74 considered turning himself in with them, or just using his service pistol. It would be faster that way. Cleaner.

There was something wrong with him that couldn’t be fixed, a critical fault in his programming. If he found the missing pieces and reassembled himself, what shape would he take? Would it be a relief, or a new horror? Did it even matter?

Above him, the spring sky was vast and iron-grey.

Regulars had the draft-dodgers on their knees in a barn. Four men, three women. They smelled like fear and human waste. They were crying, but they weren’t begging yet.

74 remembered how close he’d come to deserting. He was starting to remember a lot of things. The cold cut through his coat, crystalizing in his chest. The rifle in his hands might as well have been ice.

“Do it, 74,” 86 commanded.

He looked again at the kneeling figures, and every single one of them was a young woman in a red dress, her face bloody and scared—

74 woke gasping, reaching out for…something. Her. His hands came up empty and he pulled the flat pillow over his face.

It hadn’t happened that way. She hadn’t been there. 86 gave the order and he’d refused, throwing his rifle down. They all died anyway and he’d run until he couldn’t anymore, and when he woke—

Slowly, he pulled the pillow away.

Blood on the snow. Wet hair plastered to her face as she lay on the riverbank, his knees sinking in the mud as he broke her ribs. A sky burning with stars. Trees, a forest, her fingers intertwined with his. Her hair spread dark across the pillow as she slept.

For an instant he had her name on his tongue and everything was stretched out in front of him…

It disappeared back into the fog before he could grasp it.

63’s absence was finally noted.

Alpha Base went into lockdown. Three Operatives were mobilized to find him, but 74 slipped away too and ducked into a maintenance tunnel. Somehow he knew exactly where to go. He kept hoping that she would appear and walk with him, but he went alone.

The rooms he found in the sublevels smelled of ozone. Frost tinged the doors of server rooms. Wires like capillary veins trailed off to an unseen heart.

A vault door waited for him on the lowest level of Alpha Base, and it was cracked open. As he knew it would be.

He’d had this dream before. He’d walked this corridor, bypassed this security checkpoint, opened these swinging double doors.

74 hesitated, hand outstretched.

Someone had been with him the last time he came here, a steady presence at his side. Not her; someone taller. Someone like him. It was less a memory than a suggestion.

Now, completely and entirely alone, he felt a cold, heavy, sinking sensation in his stomach as he walked and wondered if it was fear.

He pushed through the doors.

In the warm, dark room beyond stood the tanks, ten perfect rows of ten, labeled 00-99. Cylinders of glass. Inside them, one hundred human forms were suspended in thick yellow liquid. Not fully grown, not yet.

Readout screens blinked. Vital signs spiked and dipped.

This was fear. He was afraid.

74 laid his trembling palm against the warm, curved glass of tank 23. That number was somehow important. The little dreaming thing inside opened and closed its mouth.

There was something wrong with his eyes — everything was wet and blurry. But he wasn’t surprised, which meant he truly had seen it before.

A deliberate footstep broke the silence. 63 stepped out from behind the tank bearing his number, hands raised in surrender.

“We’re not real,” he said hoarsely. “How many of us are there? How many of me?”

“Ten,” 74 said quietly, remembering his file in Medical. “At least ten.”

63’s pupils were massively dilated, his eyes red-rimmed. He pointed at the readout. “2263. Twenty-two of her, of you, of us…”

“How long have you been down here,” 74 asked, remembering his duty.

“Days. Nights.” Slowly, 63 came to stand beside him. His face glistened with perspiration. “I remember things that never happened. I remember a desert. Mountains. A forest. You were there too.”

“A dream,” 74 insisted. “Come with me to Medical.”

“No!” 63 jerked away. “They’ll wipe us again.”

Understanding hit like a bolt of lightning. Memory stirred just below the surface of his consciousness like some horrible, nameless predator, and 74 recoiled.

63 tilted his head as the half-formed creature inside tank 23 rolled slowly, gently.

“The white room. The chair. And if that doesn’t work…” He slammed his fist against the side of the tank. A faint alarm began to sound. “Maybe they’ll just decant another one.”

She appeared behind 63, holding out her hand. She hadn’t deserted him, she’d come. The blood on her dress was fresh and terrible.

“You have to run,” she urged. “Michael, go!”

63 threw his head back and howled with laughter, and 74 ran.

Summer rain washed the streets clean. For a week 74 patrolled with 91, and it took all of his willpower to remain calm and controlled as a tornado ripped through his insides.

On the eighth day 74 opened his door to find 63 waiting. His uniform was crisp, his face clean-shaven. The back of his neck was bandaged discretely. His boots were polished black mirrors and his eyes were a void.

The word Reconditioning screamed through 74’s head as they walked to the lift, perfectly in step. As they rushed toward the surface, he waited for 63 to speak.

Nothing was forthcoming.

“Where were you,” he asked, keeping his voice neutral. The fear helped.

“Medical,” 63 said, and nothing more.

For the rest of the day 74 followed all directives to the letter. He kept his eyes forward. He pretended he didn’t see 63’s hand grasping his sidearm like a life preserver.

He touched the back of his neck and found a little scar there, and he pretended to not be afraid.

That night he counted out six pills and cupped them in his hand, holding them over the sink.

She was a blurry shape in the corner of his eye. A mirage in the desert. “Coward.”

They’d had a life together somehow, before the Coalition found them and dragged him back. They’d made him forget, just as they made 63 forget.

63 had been there. He had been there, in the forest. Holding a gun. Had he—

“He wasn’t the one who shot me.”

“You’re not real!” 74 snapped, breaking the panicked spiral. Too harsh. His chest hurt. He didn’t want her to be afraid of him.

“I used to be real,” she said, without flinching. Her voice was gentler now. “So did you.”

She was right. Now there was nothing left of him; just a useless right arm and the ghost of her memory. It was this, or something more final.

“Don’t,” she said.

74 swallowed the pills dry. In time, he no longer had to pretend that he felt nothing.