by Mike Essex
Tentatively I lowered myself to the floor and angled the tip of the knife slightly out from the corner. Looking in its reflection I couldn’t see who was holding the light.
I asked Tobias if there was another way and he told me it was unlikely. Knowing a fight was my only option I ran round the corner, ready to use the knife on my attackers.
There was nothing there except the flicker of light, shining brightly through a gaping hole in the wall ahead. I walked towards the wall and looked out into the city that lay beyond. Four towers spiralled high up to the sky, surrounded by the twisting tracks of an elevated railway system.
I knew those towers well. On one side of the city was the main TethTech building, now abandoned since Tobias ‘went missing’ (aka got trapped in my mind). In the next tower Glenn King had once lived, the man who funded the Separationists and whose communications network had almost allowed Tobias to kill everyone.
The Joneses tower, contained a pharmaceutical conglomerate that supplied many of the UK’s medical goods. The final tower was owned by the McDougals and most notably Catherine McDougal. She was hopefully now rotting in a jail cell for attempting to use my brother to destroy cities and then build new ones on top of them. She had almost succeeded in London but was stopped with the help of Jacobi and the inhabitants of Q-Whitehall.
“Welcome back to Birmingham,” Tobias emphasised the last word in a brummy accent.
“Do you miss it?” I asked him.
“Miss what?”
“This city. The people here used to adore you. You had real power here.”
“Power is subjective. Right now I’m nothing but a disembodied voice in your mind. I couldn’t have any less power and yet there’s a sense of peace that comes with that.”
“How so?”
“At the risk of sounding like a bad pop song, you are my world. You are my everything,” he said.
“You’re right, that is cheesy,” I replied.
“Hear me out. All I care about now is keeping you alive. If you die, I’m gone forever. You could say I’ve grown quite protective of you, Ms Keyes.”
“Sorry I asked,” I didn’t want to tell him but I’d grown quite fond of Tobias as well.
“This building once gave me power and yet it was used by someone else to take power from me. Funny how that works isn’t it?” said Tobias.
“Someone else, but…” as the words left my mouth I knew what he’d been trying to help me see. I dashed past the hole in the wall and down three sets of stairs to the lowest level of the building. Down there lay the room exactly as I had remembered it.
Large overhead lights flooded the room with a stark white light, illuminating the exposed bricks on the walls and the metal bed in the centre. They’d cleaned it up nicely in the time that had passed but I could still see exactly where I’d been laid down when they’d carved into my stomach.
Flashes of imagery ran through my mind as I remembered the agony I’d felt when I awoke to find two clamps prying open my flesh. That was nothing compared to the horror I’d experienced when I looked down at the hole in my belly all those years ago. I ran the snatcher’s finger across his abs, where a scar sat on my own body and wondered I could have been so stupid not to see the truth with my own eyes back then.
A long time ago I’d watched a man, that I’d thought was Tobias, operate on me and fill my stomach with an orange core. What I thought I’d seen what not the truth. In the years that followed I’d learnt that it had been March that operated on me and thanks to a mask known as Skin 2.0, he’d been able to hide his true face.
That operation had given me the power to take control of Tethers and force their owners to do whatever I wanted. Outside of the machine I’d never been able to control those abilities; destroying the minds of those I’d tried to control within minutes.
Yet, within the machine the core had made me more powerful than ever. It had helped me stop Tobias and tear his mind free from his body. Sadly it wasn’t enough to stop Eli. He was always one step ahead of me.
“Was this your first lab?” I asked.
“No, that will always be the prison under the Houses of Parliament where they operated on me,” said Tobias. “This was more of a public face that Glenn King gave me to try and make the business seem more legitimate.”
One of the rooms was adorned with a painted mural. A lot of the paint had fallen away over time but one part was still clear. Two beams of light were coming down from a single cloud, intersecting with each other and forming a DNA helix. Upon each beam of light was written the letters “Frey..” with the last few letters scrawled out.
“What is this?” I asked.
“When TethTech was starting out Glenn thought it would be a good idea to try and tap into the religious market. So he read every bit of religious literature he could find about twins and drew up a sales strategy about how our research into Tethers would be carrying out the will of the Gods.”
“That seems manipulative,” I replied.
“Oh it was. Yet, sometimes I think Glenn believed it. He kept pushing for us to look into all sorts of weird stuff but in the end I made him commit to marketing us around the idea of saving the lives of soldiers. It had more mass market appeal.”
“So who used this place if you didn’t?”
“Well, I hired a bunch of students for the week whenever investors came to look around, whilst I worked in my real lab. Once a deal was signed the students were let go and the building was locked down again. After a while I stopped needing to use this place so just abandoned it.”
“So that’s why The Deck chose here to operate on me? They knew you’d given up on this place but that I’d believe it was owned by you whenever I looked into it.”
“Precisely. Your father is a master manipulator. He looks for the cracks in the system that he can exploit and then he targets them with every resource he has. He’s been doing it to you and your brother your whole lives.”
Tobias and I knew far too much about each other. Living inside of each other’s minds for so many years had caused our memories to start to fuse together. There were things in Tobias’ past that I remembered clearer than my own. We had started to become one single person.
“There’s one thing I need to know,” I said.
“Ok,” he replied.
“The orange cores they inserted into us, did you ever figure out what they were for?”
“Why do you think I devoted my entire life to Tethers?”
“Because you wanted to kill those responsible for hurting you.”
“Well yes, and because I wanted to know what they’d done to me.”
“And did you figure it out?”
“In a way yes. It’s best to think of people like little radio antennas each transmitting their own signals out into the world. These are what we know as Tethers. People gather together the information provided to them by their senses and portray that out into the world in a signal that can be received and absorbed by their twins. That’s happening to every person, every second of every day.”
“Sure, everyone knows that.”
“Humour me. Tether events occur when this stimuli is too much, such as in moments of very heavy emotion, which is what causes one of the twins to lose control of their own senses and experience everything their twin experiences.”
“And…”
“As far as I can tell the ‘orange core’ as you call it, allows us to drastically increase the Tether signal that we project into the world. When you did this in Q-Whitehall you essentially gave out too much signal and destroyed the senses of those you took over, killing them in the process.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“My machine worked with the core in two ways. First of all it masked the Tether I sent out into the world so that when people received it they believed it was their own body telling them what to do. That’s what gave me control. Secondly it amplified my signal even further, allowing me to kill anyone I wanted.”
“And tha
t’s precisely why I call you the monster in my mind.”
“How kind of you.”
“But when Eli originally gave you a core all those years ago, there was no machine, so why do it?”
“And that’s the right question! You remember those pillars around London, that destroyed the signal of the 20 Day Siege?”
“How could I forget?”
“Those towers cancelled out the signal because they created a fake Tether event with it until it lost its power. Before the towers were made it was my body that carried out that function. I took the signal’s energy into myself and then the orange core reacted and cancelled it out.”
He had described the horrors Eli put him through many times and it always felt like there was another layer of hidden horror that he’d been holding back on. I wondered if this was it.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
“Because it looks like you have a chance of freedom and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be stuck inside your head.”
“Where would you go?”
“Who knows?” he replied. “All that matters is that when I’m gone you remember that the core inside of you is the key to everything.”
FOUR
I removed the leather straps from the table and worked my way back to Cleon, keeping the knife in my hand just in case of any trouble. Remarkably the base was an unguarded as he’d said. He was either very brave or very stupid.
When I reached the door I rested my head against it to try and hear if he had woken up. I had assumed that when he woke and the Tether event with his sister had ended that she’d speak to me over the tannoy. As that hadn’t happened it seemed like a fair, but potentially risky guess, that Cleon was still unconscious.
The new code I’d stored on the access panel allowed us entry and I found Cleon lying on the floor as he’d been left. I propped him up and dragged him to the bed, tying his hands and legs down with the straps from the other room. They seemed like they’d hold him, they’d once done a very good job of holding me down.
I thought about trying to wake Cleon up but for the moment I was enjoying having a body again and wanted to saviour it for just a minute more before getting plunged into his world.
“What are you doing?” asked Tobias, eager for answers.
“We could leave him here right now and walk out of this building. We won’t have answers but we’ll be free again,” I replied.
“Eli will just drag you back to your old body. You’ll be helpless again,”
“This is different. He doesn’t know about this Tether, so he can’t shut it down,”
“Maybe but how long do you give it before Cleon wakes up? He put you into this body, surely he can take you out of it again?”
The monster had a point. Cleon had some understanding of Tethers that maybe even Tobias couldn’t surpass. He was a threat to our newfound freedom and we couldn’t have that.
“You know what you have to do,” said the monster.
“If I kill him we’ll never find out why he bought me here,” I replied.
“Do you need to know? Whatever task he had lined up for you, do you even want it?”
I’d spent years doing tasks for other people and where had it gotten me? Trapped in a machine, a slave to Eli’s every command. He was right, the time for taking orders had long gone.
Of the handful of people I’d killed they’d all been in self-defence and it took me a long time to come to terms with what I’d done. Stuck with just my thoughts for company in the machine, I’d worked through their deaths. Ultimately it had given me the perspective to see that their deaths had been necessary and that if I hadn’t fought back I wouldn’t be alive and nor would countless others.
Killing didn’t scare me anymore. Sure, thoughtless killing, or killing for some godforsaken cause was never right but preserving one’s self, that felt necessary, somehow it even felt right. I’d seen my share of death in the machine and I knew our world was full of killers. One more set of twins wouldn’t tip the scales in any way.
“You’re doing it again,” said Tobias.
“Doing what?”
“Justifying it. You’ll never be a killer.”
“You mean like you? Trying to bring on a mass genocide just to fix your conscience?” I knew that would hurt him but I didn’t care.
“That was a long time ago,” he chuckled. “All I’ve ever tried to do was complete what the Seperationists started.”
In Tobias’ view the world should have ended during the 20 Day Siege. It wasn’t hard to see why he felt that way, Eli’s torture of him in order to stop the Siege hadn’t been easy and it had left a mark that never seemed to fade.
A part of me wondered what he would do if he ever got control of the machine again. Would he try to bring about another Siege or would he use it for good? Whatever his decision it was a place I wanted to keep him well away from. Tobias couldn’t be trusted with Tethers; that was clear.
“I know it needs to be done, ok,” I told Tobais. “Now just give me a minute.”
I ran my thumb along the dull side of the knife as I held it over Cleon. In the machine I’d seen hundreds of people killed by stabbings and it was always one of the bloodiest and most drawn out ways to die.
However I killed Cleon, I wanted to keep the amount of blood to a minimum. Despite all the blood I’d seen shed I never grew desensitised to it. I hated the sight of it and the death it represented.
“The ulnar artery is a good one,” said the monster. “Or the femoral artery. Both great choices.”
“You spent too long controlling Vlad,” I replied. “It’s gone to your head.”
“And now your head.”
I could see the veins running along his arm. Faint green and purple lines, all of which seemed far too exposed for something that could end someone’s life so easily. I pushed the knife gently against the ulnar artery and saw the skin start to move around the blade.
Cleon let out a sudden gasp and shot upright. Instinctively he pulled his arm away from the blade. I reacted quickly and held a hand against his throat, squeezing tightly.
He struggled to breathe, his arms flailing as he tried to reach out and stop me. His eyes darted back and forth in a panicked state as he desperately tried to survive.
“It’s now or never,” said the monster. “Kill him!”
I couldn’t think straight with the monster’s thoughts clouding my own. Was Cleon’s death something I really wanted, or something the monster wanted me to do?
Looking at the snatcher’s hands it felt like I wasn’t the one killing Cleon. I was merely a passenger watching it happen. Had I just become a powerless voyeur in other people’s bodies?
I decided to take back control.
Cleon gasped for air as I released his throat, taking deep drawn out breaths to bring his body back from the brink. Tobias shouted out in my mind for me to finish the job. I wished I had an off switch for him. I tried my best to silence his voice for the time being.
“What do you want from me?” I asked Cleon.
I couldn’t make out his words in between his laboured breathing.
“What do you want from me?” I repeated, angrier this time.
“What … you … want,” he replied as his breathing steadied. “Your father.”
“What do you want with him?”
“We want him dead.”
It seemed we had a common purpose.
“We need to restore order,” he explained, his breathing returning to normal. “The world isn’t right anymore. You know it’s true.”
“How do you know this?”
“The snatcher told us what you can do and who you are. When your father took power and we saw the miraculous changes he made to the world it all seemed too convenient.”
It wasn’t a stretch for such a thing to be possible. I had tied the snatcher’s mind to my own so perhaps he’d even seen visions of me connected to the machine and the things Eli had made me do. I kept that inf
ormation to myself, not wanting to tell Cleon anything he didn’t already know.
“Even so,” I replied, “many people see him as a hero. Don’t you think he made the world better?”
“What use is a better world if it wasn’t earned? Even if a prisoner is happy in prison they’re still a prisoner. They still had to give something up to get that happiness. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I’m the one asking the questions,” I lightly shook the knife to remind him.
“I can tell you agree. All that time spent obeying his every command? Your body and mind getting more damaged every day. You want to get revenge and we can help you do that.”
Cleon’s real objective seemed clear to me. His perfect smile, tanned skin and the extravagant ring he wore told me all I needed to know about his past. Some of the “haves” hated seeing the “have-nots” enjoy any improvement in living standards. I suspected this was the real reason he wanted to restore order.
“So we kill him and then what? The world descends back to the way it was before? Sounds like everyone but the two of us get the raw end of the deal.”
“That would be somewhat unfair, I don’t deny it. After he dies I promise you the world will be better for every person on this planet.”
“You’re asking me to take a lot on trust. Remember Cleon, I’m the one with the knife. What’s to stop me from killing you, killing Eli and letting everyone solve their own problems? Why do I need you?”
“That’s a fair question,” he nodded his head. “All I’d say in response to that is: the body you’re in? It has a shelf life and if I or my sister die you’ll be back in your own body before you know it,”
“You’re bluffing,” I replied.
“We dragged you from your own body into this one. We saved you from your father’s machine. We know all about you Emmie Keyes. Do you really think it’s outside of the realm of possibility that we’d have a back-up plan?”
I didn’t like Cleon’s tone or that I’d gone from being one person’s pawn to another but I knew I had very little choice.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“You drop the knife,” he replied.