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Chapter 169: Interlude — No Copies
🕑 Added 2024-09-06 16:24:50 +0000 UTCI woke up at the hospital two days later. Invent One was already there, sitting next to my bed, staring at the wall again.
It had placed a phone next to my pillow, playing quiet music. There were other patients there, all asleep; it was deep at night. When it saw me awake, it nodded, handed my phone to me so I could check in on my friends, then gave a curt account, like a report. Traversing the storm had been difficult; it needed to read the currents and wait in specific spots, to not be blown away. It had noticed the fire already burning ablaze as it left, but had no means to end it.
Listening to IO kind of broke my heart. There was this gigantic entity, used to the idea of being able to do anything, failing at this task due to the weak body this reality afforded it. These thoughts were hidden under the surface, apparently only in uncharacteristic gazes and little trembles of its fingers.
If I hadn’t kicked it out eventually, it would have probably stayed forever. Somehow, the hospital staff did not release it; I wouldn’t be surprised if it had done some fuckery, like when it covered up the investigation into the death of its body. ‘Read-only access’, my ass. Sure, that was mostly true, but I at least figured it could manipulate some electrical circuits and digital data.
I told Invent One it needed to eat and rest, and hesitantly, it agreed to take a break. Thank fuck. I liked having it there with me and was looking forward to its return, but sometimes it needs to be told obvious things.
When I texted Theora about me waking up, she was torn to come over immediately too. Wise as I am, I asked her what she was doing, and it turns out she would have to abandon rescue efforts to visit me, so I told her I’m fine until she’s got time.
Meanwhile, my roommates said our house was gone.
Gone, as in, gone. There were no ruins to speak of.
I was asleep when Theora came over, and woke up to her sitting beside my bed, squeezing my hand. She didn’t wake me, she was far too gentle for that. It was just what she always did when she took care of me while sick.
“Good morning,” she whispered, low enough not to disturb anyone.
I swallowed, and gently squeezed back. “Morning.” I teared up. “Dema…”
Theora nodded. “I have her retained.”
I needed a moment to process those words. She had her retained? “As in, with your Skill?”
Theora nodded again, and pulled her chair closer to the bed to whisper to me under her breath. The other patients were awake, but I gather she doesn’t want everyone under the sun to hear about this stuff. “Invent One notified me, and I hurried to your place. When I arrived, the house was almost completely burnt down. The basement was about to flash over. Dema had already—” Her voice broke. It took her a while to get the words out — but apparently, Dema had been lying higher up than me, and…
I stared at Theora, biting at my lips.
She ended with, “Essentially, I pulled you out, then retained the entire building to make sure I got all of her remains.”
So that’s why the house was gone. “You can just do that?”
Theora shook her head. “I crammed it all in. If I do it again, the Skill might break. But I couldn’t—”
“You needed to get all of her,” I summarised, and she nodded. “So now, you have an entire building inside of you?”
She gave a weak shrug.
“I’m sorry I kept it secret from you,” I whispered hoarsely.
Her eyebrows knitted together in that cute little confused stare she gives sometimes. “Kept what secret?”
“Dema was sick. Something about her blood. No cure. She was going to die soon, even if that hadn’t happened.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
I looked at her carefully, gauging her expression. “What, uhm. What else do you know?”
She tilted her head with a curious expression, like a wounded animal. Eyes puffed up from crying, but she kept herself controlled.
I said, “It’s just — she was still working on stuff. Concerning you. Dunno if you already know?”
“She was working on something?”
I smiled. “Remember when you were off to sleep or off to work, and she was alone? Well, she used that time to work on — a present of sorts, I think? For you. I haven’t seen it and I’m not sure if she finished it. It’s probably in her apartment somewhere.”
She was quiet at my words, her eyebrows still knit together. Her mind was trying to work things out behind those grey eyes.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She didn’t reply; she rarely did, to such questions. But she squeezed my hand, and that was response enough.
“She tricked me, by the way,” I croaked out. “Made me think she had a warm flask of your brew too.”
Theora looked like she was about to fall into my lap. She caught herself, but still seemed upset. “I’ll never make cold brew again. Wish I’d made two bottles with hot tea.”
I gave her a wry smile. “I’m pretty sure if you’d made two, I would have ended up with both of them.”
Theora sighed. “Of course you would have. She always does this. She once fed herself to hungry wolves.”
I stared at her, horrified. “She did what?”
Theora waved off. “Don’t worry, that wasn’t here.”
I have to say, I was still worried. The fact that I was remembering the stuff Dema said about their ‘return’ wasn’t helping. “What are you going to do now? With…”
Theora looked away; at another bed, at the door, at the window, while breathing out unsteadily. “I’m not sure. I’m wrapped up in the aftermath of the storm.” Her lips thinned. “I have some obligations.”
My stomach clenched, and I squeezed her hand again. Four people had died that night in total. Grasped by the winds when outside, or suffering complications from the lack of energy and medical attention. “None of this was your fault. Dema didn’t even want you to return that day.”
“It’s almost like we forced the hands of this world,” she murmured. “Well, the storms have been getting stronger either way. But Dema needed to be…”
“Needed to go, yeah.” I sighed. “She said she had all her memories back.”
Theora nodded. “I have too.”
“Does that give you any insight on what you should do?” That gave me a thought. “You know how I’ve been watching physics documentaries since we met IO? Well, turns out there’s theories of parallel universes and stuff. That there is a quantum multiverse. And with all the talk about other worlds… I don’t know, got me thinking. Maybe there are other worlds where Dema is still alive? Where that storm didn’t get her.” And maybe there were other worlds where the previous attempts at her life didn’t fail.
Theora looked at me in mild surprise, maybe bedazzlement, until her expression turned a little sad again. “Don’t think that’s quite how it works. I’d know.”
“You’d know? You mean you’d know if Dema was still alive somewhere?”
Theora raised her hand, showing off her bracelet. “I’d know that if I tried to break this. I know better than to attempt it now, though. But that’s not what I mean. I was talking about myself.”
“About yourself?”
She nodded. “I’m reasonably certain that I knew if there were other versions of me, somewhere out there, even in other worlds.” Her lips thin into a weary smile. “But I’m the only one. If such a multiverse exists, Dema would probably be in those other worlds without me. In that case, we must be sitting in the one world I happened to enter. But I think it’s unlikely. I think this is just the only version of this world there is.”
I swear, this girl said the most ridiculous things sometimes. People had put lots of work into that theory, and here she was, saying, ‘nah’, and here I was, just believing her, because she’s fucking Theora. “How would you know that?” I still ask, because well, I’m curious. And it was puzzling; Theora very rarely spoke in such certain terms — about anything, really. She’s the kind of person who would go, ‘I imagine there might be some soy milk in the fridge,’ after just putting it there.
She looked like she was fighting with herself, on whether she should answer. Fair. I was overstaying my welcome a little. I knew she didn’t like to talk much, and I’d been making her explain so many things. I was willing to be selfish every now and then, though, and technically, she could refuse.
Eventually, she decided to respond. “Just that when I was young, the scholars raising me were worried.”
I narrowed my eyes. Okay, so this had to do with her being grown into a weapon, like IO said?
“Worried I wouldn’t do what they wanted me to do,” she added after a pause to collect her thoughts. “Once it became clear how powerful I was, or might become, they tried to use elaborate techniques and Skills to make other versions of me.”
What the hell.
“So,” she went on, “they were hoping to make someone like me who was perhaps more obedient, maybe more to their tastes. Or a back-up, of sorts, if things didn’t work out with original me. Or perhaps a Theora who’s a little stronger, who could put me in my place if I got any strange ideas.”
“Did they succeed?” I asked, mouth dry.
“They didn’t tell me why they were doing it — or rather, were offering nice-sounding justifications — so I didn’t mind the experiments themselves, but it felt weird. So, I was against it.”
“You were against it? And they… listened to you?”
She shook her head. “No, but I just didn’t let them. Whenever they tried to split or copy me, I refused.”
I grimace at the imagery her wording conjured up in my mind. “That’s horrifying, because I know you well enough to be worried you could mean that literally.”
Theora nodded. “Made quite the mess, not just once. But either way, over time, I must have built up resistance against that type of interference. Now, at the very least, if there was another me, I think I’d be aware. I was subconsciously aware of there being a kind of ‘larger me’ while I was here — though it turns out it was more of me just trying not to remember some things — and I am somewhat aware of my Head in the Clouds. If there were other worlds full of iterations of me, I’d likely have noticed.”
She frowned a little, leaning back and combing her fingers through her curls. “Or, I suppose, one of them might have noticed, and called me back to her.” Then, she chuckled, let her hand fall back into her lap, and said, “No, actually, I’m fairly sure the one who would have noticed first would have been me. Other Theoras would probably be cute, but I imagine they can be slow sometimes.”
I let my head sink into the pillow. “Well, there goes my hope of stealing a Dema from another dimension.” Not that I was seriously considering it.
“Sorry,” Theora let out as she saw me. “I know I should probably make arrangements for her burial but I— I just can’t. I need to figure some things out first. It’s selfish of me to hold on to her remains like that, when others care about her too.”
“No, I think—” My voice broke a little. “I think it’s alright to wait. Take a look at whatever she has left for you first, okay?”
Theora nodded, and that time, she really let herself down onto my belly, hugging close to me as I grazed through her hair.
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