POV

by Chris Brosnahan

  And the police weren’t listening to me. Didn’t believe me. Wouldn’t even protect my family.

  I didn’t want to do it, but I was going to have to escape.

  I could use the transmission from my IDRoPS to overwrite my appearance in the guards’ eyes, so they would see me differently. Specifically, I’d trick their displays into filling in the information from the room behind me, so they wouldn’t see me at all.

  It wasn’t perfect, as there just wasn’t enough space. As an illusion, it would work fine (as long as I didn’t make any wild and sudden movements), but that wouldn’t do me any good if they actually walked into the cell.

  I didn’t have another option, though. There were two guards on, and even if I tried to impersonate one of them, I’d be running too high a chance of picking the wrong one and giving away that I had this ability.

  I was going to have to be fast and I was going to have to be lucky. Without laces, my shoes would be a hindrance rather than a help and speed would be of the essence. I left them in the middle of the room, clearly within view.

  When I heard one of the guards coming near, I stood very still at the least obvious part of the cell. He looked in and I could hear him react.

  If he walked into the cell, I would be okay. If he called someone else first, I was in real trouble.

  I held my breath.

  After long seconds, I heard the guard putting the key into the lock and turning it. I tensed.

  He walked in, muttering to himself in a confused way and looking down at the shoes. He could see under the bed from the door, so there was basically nowhere I could hide other than in front of the door he’d just opened. He headed straight for the partition near the toilet, which meant that he had his back to me.

  I shoulder barged him hard from behind, sending him sprawling into the wall. I knew it wasn’t his fault that this was the situation but I had to hit him hard and hit him fast. I slammed his head into the wall twice, doing my best not to kill him. But at the same time, I had to keep him unconscious for long enough to take his keys and get as far away as possible.

  Movies tend to make it look easy to knock a man out. A single well-placed punch usually does it, along with a custom quip to fit the moment.

  That wasn’t the case. It was hard and it was brutal. I winced as I felt his head hit the wall and felt the reverberations travelling up my arm to my shoulder, but I could only hold back so much.

  He went down eventually and he was still breathing. It was far from something that I’d wanted to do, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I needed to get to Rachel and Natalie.

  I took his keys. There was no point stripping him of his uniform. There was no time for any attempt at a stealthy exit. I had to move.

  I had a rough idea which direction I’d been brought in when I was escorted to the cell in the first place, although as I ran down the corridor, I wished I’d paid more attention. I managed to remember it well enough to not take any wrong turns through doors – plenty through corridors, though, but I didn’t go too far wrong.

  Within a not-too-long time, I was close to the front desk. The station was still manned and here I had issues.

  I’d recognised that the guards both used IDRoPS. You could tell by the way that they carried themselves – nothing obvious but just the way they’d catch their own reflection, or the way their clothes hung on them. The obvious distinction between reality and fantasy.

  However, there were seven people between me and the exit, including staff members, members of the general public and one young woman who had evidently just been arrested.

  If they all had the software installed, I was fine. If any of them didn’t and noticed me … And I had to make my decision quickly before the guard woke up. If I tried too hard to be sneaky, I was bound to draw more attention to myself.

  I needed to be bold. Just smoothly open the door and walk straight through to the exit.

  The panic was rising again. I took a moment to try and calm down.

  Round and round the mulberry bush …

  The monkey chased the —

  No, no time. If I left it any longer, I’d second guess myself and change my mind and then I’d be stuck.

  I smoothly unlocked the door and strode towards the exit, being careful to walk rather than run. If I acted like I was supposed to be there I was less likely to draw attention to myself. I tried to control the limp as much as possible.

  My heart was pounding to the point that I could feel my temples throbbing as I did it and I felt sure that they could all hear it, but I got to the front door of the station.

  Just as Detective Byrne walked into it.

  He looked at me and his eyes widened.

  ‘What the fu’— he began to say, when I lunged forward and head-butted him as hard as I could.

  I hadn’t head-butted anyone for over eleven years. I remembered it hurting a lot more than it did, but evidently I still had the knack for it.

  Byrne went down hard and I stepped over him and ran away from the commotion I could hear behind me.

  Chapter Twelve

  By now, they would have checked security footage, although privacy concerns meant that the cell itself wouldn’t have been recorded, which was some mercy.

  My feet were sore and my ankle was aching but I needed to move. Everything would be going insane soon. I only had minutes before the police started searching for me in earnest.

  If I’d had some way of contacting Rachel discreetly, I’d have tried to find out more before I made my way towards the meeting place, but it would have involved me manually manipulating the IDRoPS again and that would have taken too much time. Plus, she might have no way of checking her own messages now.

  I made my way towards the meeting place. A car park, which was subterranean and would be isolated at this time of night. I needed to see them. I could be there within fifteen minutes if I ran at a decent pace, even without shoes. I thought I could trust my ankle would hold out. I hoped so, anyway.

  I felt like I knew too little and hoped too much. I hadn’t had time to plan something better, so I had to go with first instincts and follow them through.

  I stayed away from the main roads and kept as clear a view of what was around me as I could. It wasn’t possible to get there without anyone seeing me, or without passing security cameras, so I had to rely on moving quickly while drawing as little attention to myself as possible. I also had to hope that the police would be heading to where they thought I would go, rather than knowing which way I’d actually gone.’

  I considered contacting them but I was scared for two reasons. The first was that he would hurt or even kill Rachel or Natalie. The second was that I would be mistaken for him. At this point, the police wouldn’t hesitate to shoot, or do whatever they had to do in order to drop me if they thought I was him. They could be killed or I could be killed.

  As I walked down the ramp, I could see him holding them. Rachel was kneeling with her hands behind her back, and Natalie was sitting holding her knees with her head buried down. He wasn’t holding a knife anymore.

  He had a gun in his hand.

  ‘John!’ He said with a large, maniacal grin across his face. ‘The family is all here! How exciting!’ The voice was mine but harsher and quieter. It was obviously an effort for him to speak too loudly.

  Rachel was shaking her head at me, trying to warn me back. ‘Jo’— she began to say, but she was cut off by him swinging back toward her and pointing the gun directly at her head.

  ‘Don’t!’ he said it quietly but with authority.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked them and then corrected myself and addressed him. ‘Are they okay?’

  ‘They are for now. I just wanted to see you, John. See this nice little life you’ve built for yourself.’

  ‘Do I call you John?’ I asked. ‘This is all strange, but we haven’t met before.’

  ‘I don’t know if you do, John,’ he said to me, walking towards me and stopping a few metres away,
facing me. ‘After all, who I am … that all seems to be unimportant to you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘And here I am. And here you are.’

  ‘Your argument isn’t with me,’ I said. ‘It’s with the testing facility. I was a victim in this as much as you were. We were used.’

  He reacted with surprise, followed by cold fury.

  ‘You were a victim as much as I was?’ he said, and then shouted. ‘As much as I was?’

  ‘Even if your argument is with me for whatever reason, let my family go. Please.’

  ‘Your family, John? This should be my family. This should be my life.’

  ‘This isn’t my fault. It isn’t your fault,’ I said. ‘It just is what it is. Please, let them go. You can keep me here if you need to, but please. Let them go.’

  ‘You’re not getting what this is, John,’ he said. ‘It is what it is? You have no idea. You took my life.’

  ‘I didn’t take your life …’ I said. ‘I’m just … they cloned me while I was ill. I didn’t fully understand what they were doing.’

  ‘They cloned you?’ he repeated angrily, his voice cracking and becoming shrill. ‘They cloned YOU?’

  He pulled the trigger and everything flashed white in front of me. I saw the bullet coming straight for me. It reminded me of the needle going into my eye as it flew towards my head.

  The last thing I thought was frantically going back to my programming.

  The last thing to flash through my mind before the bullet hit was garbled but almost complete.

  roundandroundthemulberrybushthemonkeychasedtheweaselthemonkeypausedto

  Everything went black.

  And a little while later, I woke up, still lying on the ground in the car park.

  There was a crowd around me. Everything was noisy and loud. Everything. But Natalie, Rachel and ‘John’ were gone.

  I raised my hand to my forehead, and I could feel the bullet buried in the front of my skull. My face was covered in blood, and it was scalding hot, but it hadn’t penetrated.

  It hadn’t killed me.

  My skull had been able to withstand it.

  I didn’t understand. How was I alive?

  And then I realised.

  Dense bone structure.

  popgoestheweasel

  Chapter Thirteen

  My name is John MacFarlane. I was born forty-seven years ago. I have been living off the radar for the last eleven years. For a long time, I was homeless and ignored. I have never been married. I have never had any children.

  And its all his fault.

  I spent a long time trying to deal with my anger and my internal emotions, and I’ve regretted more in my life than I could ever list. There’s too much, to the point where I don’t know where to begin.

  Beaten. Used. Humiliated. Ignored. Feared. Embarrassed. Hated. Scarred. Broken. Shattered. But I’ve been responsible for a lot of it. I knew that. I accepted that. I didn’t run away from it. Eventually, I embraced it.

  I tried. God, I tried so hard. I took every medication that I could to attempt to begin to make sense of the demons in my head. Twelve years ago, I tried to kill myself. It was not the first time, but I’d never actually been able to go through with it. I was too scared. Too cowardly.

  I took a mixture of drugs and ended up walking out in front of a train. It bore down on me, and I could see the face of the driver before I drove out of the way.

  I realised that I had no way out. There was to be no mercy in my life, and I needed help.

  I looked for it. I prayed for it, back when I believed in God. I cried for it and I screamed for it. But it didn’t come.

  I wandered the streets, and I stole and fought for every coin, every scrap of food, every night of shelter that I could find.

  My life wasn’t just out of control. I didn’t have any concept of control. I had no chance. None.

  He got all the chances. This fake version of me.

  I chose to go to the testing facility. I thought I was at rock bottom, which I would later look back at and scorn as an idea. I thought that it was as bad as it could get, and that was when I had no idea.

  Every day since then has been worse. Every day of my life has been the worst day of my life.

  The idea that I would be split into different versions, and that testing would be done until a way was found to fix me appealed. I submitted totally to them at first.

  I thought …

  I was a fool. I thought that they would use their findings to fix me. I thought that they were doing all of this testing to help me, not to just try and test new methods.

  I gave up my rights as a person and I became a test subject. And I did it because I thought that, at the end of it, I would be whole and I would be right and my life could begin again.

  But it didn’t. I got thrown away and discarded when the facility was raided.

  He had been fixed. He’d been created as a new version of me, a better version of me. A version of me with less history and less anger. A version of me with fewer issues. A version of me that could control myself. A version of me that could hope. That could believe.

  And instead of using that creation to fix me, they just ignored me, and declared that the procedure had been a success.

  He became me. I walked into the facility and he walked out of it as me, and with my background and with my name and face and personality and he became me.

  When I realised what they were doing, I reacted angrily and violently and I was sedated and I was beaten. I was treated as a criminal because I didn’t want my life taken away from me and given to someone else. Given to a stranger with my face and name.

  I remember the police closing the building down. They switched everything off. The electricity, the lights, the heating, everything. The building was abandoned.

  And I was still left in a ward, restrained.

  Two days, I lay there, unable to move. Two days before looters found me and freed me. And that was all they did. They just removed the restraints.

  I ate and drank what I could find for days. It took a long time to regain my strength and any faculties at all. I lived as an animal for a while before I even began to remember how to be a man.

  When I re-learned how to be more than an animal, I started existing outside of civilisation. In the gutters, in the alleys, in the cities, in the country, living off scraps and rubbish and what I could find. The first day I thought to look for a knife, I began mugging people for money or for food. I broke into houses and shops for warmth. I cooked where and when I could.

  The headaches and the dreams were the worst. Whether they were a natural progression of my own illness, or whether they were a sideeffect of the medications they had trialed me on, I don’t know. But the headaches were constant, and I never slept without waking up in panic and fright. I was constantly exhausted.

  I had no access to anything other than cash money. I couldn’t get a bank card. I couldn’t get a bank account. I was locked out of it. I couldn’t get identification. I couldn’t get anything.

  I started, slowly, to live again. I fell in with groups and with gangs in order to survive, but I always left them and always moved on. I wandered for years.

  I found peace for a little while in a remote village. They still relied on old cash there, and someone strong who could work was useful. I lived with a family for a little bit and I worked on their land. They fed me and they sheltered me in return.

  For the first time since I had been committed, I had access to information, and I gorged myself on it. I was ravenous for it, and I started looking into how I could rebuild my life.

  And I found out about him.

  I found out about his work on IDRoPS. I found out about his career. About his intelligence and his skill, and I saw his pictures and I saw his smile and I saw his happiness.

  I’d never been given those things. I’d never been given skill and support. He got all of that after the time in the facility with the nic
e, comfortable settlement that I should have received because it was my life that was destroyed.

  And I watched him develop from afar, and I watched him marry and start a family, and I resolved to destroy him.

  To destroy it.

  To tear his world apart.

  I worked to gain as much money as I could, and one night, I just left the family who had taken me in and started to wander across the country again, with a reader they gifted me. The first portal that I could actually use to gain information on my own.

  I started following him in life, hiding behind the cracks in civilisation. Always at a distance, always separate.

  I started finding out who he was treating, and then I found out that he was going to start his own practice, and the plan became clear.

  I wanted to destroy everything he’d created, piece by piece. Take away his freedom and control like he had taken away mine.

  The first one I killed was the most difficult. I hesitated. I kept letting him off. I kept deciding to do it, and then walking away.

  Once I attacked him, I knew I had to go through with it, otherwise everything would just fall apart again. The police would arrest me, and I would be exposed, and I wouldn’t be able to do what I had set out to do.

  As much as the idea of killing him scared me, the idea of not killing him scared me more. So once I had resolved to do it, and once I committed myself to do it, it became easy.

  Anger and fury were my weapons every bit as much as the knife I used.

  I meant to make it quick, but it wasn’t. I meant to wait until he was dead to remove his eyes, but once I started I needed to make him suffer.

  I stabbed him again and again to stop him moving, and then I started on the eyes. I started to destroy his work.

  I pulled them out, and I needed it to hurt him, and since he wasn’t here, the person lying in front of me had to do.

  Each of his screams fed me and sustained me and told me that what I was doing was right. His work had led to this. His life had led to this. I was doing the right thing.

  I was sick afterwards. I hated myself for it, but I knew I was doing the right thing. I could feel it in every fibre, every muscle, every sinew.